More Nixon tapes released, and buried in them is Nixon discussing his views on abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade:
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white…. or a rape.”
Nice, Dick.
Probably nothing, but still…
The whereabouts of Gov. Mark Sanford have been unknown to state officials since Thursday, and some state leaders are questioning who is in charge of the executive office.
Neither the governor's office nor the State Law Enforcement Division, which provides security for governors, has been able to reach Sanford after he left the mansion in a black SLED Suburban SUV, said Sen. Jake Knotts and three others familiar with the situation but who declined to be identified.
Sanford's last known whereabouts were near Atlanta, where a mobile telephone tower picked up a signal from his phone, authorities said.
First lady Jenny Sanford told The Associated Press today her husband has been gone for several days and she doesn't know where he is.
His wife doesn't know where he is? Neither do the state officials responsible for his security? And weirdly, both the governor's personal and professional phones have been turned off, and messages have gone unreturned since Thursday.
The governor's wife said the governor needed some time away "to write something." Sanford's office issued a statement today saying that Sanford decided to "recharge" after the legislative session, and has decided to "work on a couple of projects that have fallen by the wayside."
South Carolina's lieutenant governor said he also didn't know where Sanford is, but added that he has not been given any temporary power.
Wonder what's up…. peculiar behavior for a 2012 presidential candidate.
I smell Republican sex scandal.
NEXT DAY: Mystery solved. He's on the Appalachian Trail. Although, it's still a little odd…
(1) Staff and wife didn't know where he was
(2) Wife said governor needed time away "to write something". Really? On the Appalachian Trail?
(3) Saying that you're at "the Appalachian trail" is odd. The dame thing runs from Maine to Georgia. Most people go to a part of the Appalachian Trail, like "Mt Washington", or Great Smoky National Park.
(4) When this issue was raised, SC spokesmen said that his cell phone suggested that he was in the vicinity of Georgia. That suggests that somebody had already inquired about the governor and had conducted some sort of cell phone trace.
Then read this. Here, I'll start it for you:
Pixar grants girl's dying wish to see 'Up'
HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie.
From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up
, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film. After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.
The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie.
The animated movie begins with scenes showing the evolution of a relationship between a husband and wife. After losing his wife in old age, the now grumpy man deals with his loss by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, flying into the sky, and going on an adventure with a little boy.
Colby died about seven hours after seeing the film.
Yeah, and keep reading the article. The details will rip you up….
That title is an inside joke that only a handful of people will get. It's from a play I'm in which opens tonight (see right column).
One of our castmates was unable to make final dress rehearsal last night — tremendous stomach problems, apparently.
So you know where my mind went when I read this:
Nestle recalls cookie dough products for E. coli
66 reports of illness across 28 states since March; 28 people hospitalized
Food maker Nestle USA on Friday voluntarily recalled its Toll House refrigerated cookie dough products after a number of illnesses were reported by those who ate the dough raw.
The company said the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control are investigating reported E. coli illnesses that might be related to the ingestion of raw cookie dough.
In a statement, the FDA said there have been 66 reports of illness across 28 states since March. About 25 people have been hospitalized, but no one has died.
Raw cookie dough? Yeah. You've done it. Don't lie.
But don't, okay?
And Paul, I hope you didn't. You better be there tonight, bubba.
Some brief quotes from U.S. Senator John Ensign (R-NV), GOP leader of the Republican Policy Committee and a man hinting at a 2012 presidential bid, on the subject of marriage:
1998: While running for Nevada’s Senate seat against Harry Reid, Ensign called on President Clinton to resign in light of his admitted affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky:
“I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it’s because of what he put his whole Cabinet through and what he has put the country through,” Ensign said Thursday, becoming the first member of the Nevada delegation to call for Clinton to quit. “He has no credibility left.”
Feb. 2004: Ensign announces his support for an amendment to the Constitution that would have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Ensign said the amendment, which ultimately failed, was necessary to protect “the institution of marriage“:
“Sadly, the effort to redefine marriage against the wishes of a majority of the people is, with help from activist judges, succeeding,” Ensign said. “In order to defend the institution of marriage, uphold the rights of individual states, and maintain the will of the people, I believe we are compelled to amend our country’s constitution.”
“The effort to pass a constitutional amendment reaffirming marriage as being between a man and a woman only is being undertaken strictly as a defense of marriage against the attempt to redefine it and, in the process, weaken it,” Ensign said. “Marriage is an extremely important institution in this country and protecting it is, in my mind, worth the extraordinary step of amending our constitution.”
October 18, 2007: "There's too many people that paint with a broad brush that we're all corrupt, we're all amoral. … And having these kinds of things happen, whether it's a Republican or Democratic senator — we certainly have had plenty of Democratic scandals in the past — we need people who are in office who will hold themselves to a little higher standard." – John Ensign (R-NV)
April 19, 2009: “I believe that marriage should be defined as that between one man and one woman. You want to do what is ideal for children and all of the studies show that the ideal for children is to be in a household with a father and a mother.” – John Ensign (R-NV)
TODAY (the predictable punchline): "I came home to Nevada to come forward and explain to the citizens of our state something that I was involved in about a year ago. Last year I had an affair. I violated the vows of my marriage. It is the worst thing I have ever done in my life. If there was ever anything in my life that I could take back, this would be it…. I take full responsibility for my actions." – John Ensign (R-NV)
UPDATE: Oh, and Ensign is a longtime member of the Promise Keepers, a conservative evangelical group that promotes strong families and marriages.
This subject is waaaay above my pay grade, but — shooting from the hip here — I think Obama needs to do at least these things:
(1) Get rid of the alphabet soup of federal regulators. Just as our national defense and security was merged under the new Department of Homeland Security, many financial regulation departments can be merged/eliminated with one board overseeing every aspect of the financial community.
(2) For God's sake, don't allow financial institutions to pick which oversight department gets to regulate them. That was bone-headed from the start. If financial institutions get to pick which regulatory body oversees them, then they will do exactly what they did — pick the most lax regulator (in recent years, it was the Office of Thrift Supervision, which was too overworked to actually do any oversight). In fact, what happened was that regulatory bodies competed to get business by effectively saying to financial institution that they were lax in oversight. How dumb is that?
(3) Allow the Fed to limit the amount that large financial institutions can leverage. That's pretty straightforward and self-explanatory.
(4) Set clear rules. The markets like certainty; business likes certainty. If you establish regulations, make them airtight… without loopholes.
(5) Include oversight of ratings agencies. It is staggering that all those agencies gave those toxic assets AAA ratings, when they were clearly junk. Of course, the financial institutions are the ones who pick the ratings agencies, so there is a conflict of interest. At the very least, those ratings agencies should be audited to make sure they "did the work", rather than just act as a rubber stamp to various financial packages.
(6) End unregulated financial products. Every consumer good — from soup to nuts — is overseen by at least one federal agency (like the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the FDA, etc.). The same should be true for financial products. Nothing should be traded on any market — either the public one or the private one — without someone in government looking at the nature of the commodity to see if it has the potential to create economic turmoil. This obviously applies to the credit swaps of the recent past, but all future financial products.
(7) Executive compensation reform. Bonus compensation should be tied to merit and success, not an automatic "gimme".
Today Obama rolls out his plan for overhauling the financial regulatory system. We'll see what the details are….
Michael Dorf has an excellent thoughful column explaining the DOJ's mostly (but not entirely) weak defense of the Defense of Marriage Act in the Smelt case. DOMA prohibits the federal government from granting same-sex couples benefits that, by law, flow from "marriage" or are granted to a "spouse" — health benefits, for example.
Why did the Obama Justice Department take such a firmly pro-DOMA position in Smelt? Here is the answer that John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, gave for the Administration:
"This president took a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and he does not get to decide and choose which laws he enforces. He has to enforce the laws that have been enacted appropriately and that he has inherited."
That is not entirely wrong. After all, many critics of President George W. Bush objected that he frequently used "signing statements" and other techniques to ignore, gut, or severely under-enforce those laws with which he disagreed, often citing a tendentious constitutional objection under the rubric of the "unitary Executive." If Bush was wrong to rely on his idiosyncratic constitutional views to evade the law, then isn't Obama right when he authorizes his Justice Department to mount a vigorous defense of a law with which he disagrees, namely DOMA?
Maybe not. In rejecting the Bush Administration's exalted view of the President's role in interpreting the Constitution, the Obama Administration may be going too far in the opposite direction. If a law were blatantly unconstitutional, then even though it had been signed by one of his predecessors, President Obama would have not only the right, but the duty, not to enforce or defend that law.
To be sure, under existing precedent, DOMA is not blatantly unconstitutional. Most of the arguments made in the government brief in Smelt are at least colorable.
Yet even that may be too low a standard. The Justice Department, when defending a federal statute, is not in the same position as a lawyer representing a criminal defendant. The criminal defense attorney has a professional duty to make whatever legal arguments she can to win her client's freedom. By contrast, the executive branch's defense of a federal statute invariably has a substantial policy element to it.
For example, the government says in its Smelt brief that DOMA Section 3 is justified by a Congressional decision not "to obligate federal taxpayers in [non-same-sex marriage] States to subsidize a form of marriage their own States do not recognize." That is not merely some position taken by any old litigant in the hope that it will be adopted by a court. It is an official declaration by the federal government that requiring all same-sex couples in the nation to subsidize marriage benefits for heterosexual couples only is what the brief terms "a cautious policy of federal neutrality," but that equality for same-sex couples would unfairly burden opponents of same-sex marriage. Such doublespeak is inconsistent in tone and spirit with the Administration's commitment to repealing DOMA.
In the end, Mr. Berry lets the Administration off the hook too easily because he does not seem to appreciate the real objection to the Smelt brief. The problem was not so much that the government defended DOMA, as it was the way in which the government did so. A president may well consider that his oath of office obligates him to mount a legal defense of laws that he dislikes. But he has a choice about how to mount that defense. In Smelt, the Obama Administration chose poorly.
On the heels of increasing pressure from gay rights groups, Obama signed a memorandum today that ostensibly will provide more benefits to gay-married federal employees. But not really. All the memorandum does is direct all agencies to report back to the Office of Personnel Management on the things they can do within the constraints of the Defense of Marriage Act and, presumably, implement those changes at the end of the review period. There are some benefits that law provides to "families" or "children" — leave to care for a sick family member under the Family Medical Leave Act or long-term-care insurance. It's the second set that the president is moving today to grant. So he's still sticking to the letter of DOMA.
Man, it was bad:
The difficulty of distinguishing between e-mail messages involving foreigners from those involving Americans was “one of the main things that drove” the Bush administration to push for a more flexible law in 2008, said Kenneth L. Wainstein, the homeland security adviser under President George W. Bush. That measure, which also resolved the long controversy over N.S.A.’s program of wiretapping without warrants by offering immunity to telecommunications companies, tacitly acknowledged that some amount of Americans’ e-mail would inevitably be captured by the N.S.A.
But even before that, the agency appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants, according to the former analyst, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.
The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.
The real story is that this is still going on under the Obama Administration.
Shawna Forde is part of the rightwing anti-immigration crusade.
Via Crook and Liars, we can see her in this local TV panel show discussing her views on illegal immigration:
The clip concludes with this:
Forde: I'd like to see two things on there. Not just about the people who came here legally, and are here legally, but how about the Americans who have been affected and died because of the illegal invasion in our country? How about our sovereignty?
And securing our borders and protecting our nation is extremely important. And I know the Minutemen and many organizations will not stop — we will start at the local level and work our way up — we will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.
Now, there is little about her appearance which suggests that she is a mental case. She just believes strongly in what she believes. Yet….
The accused ringleader and triggerman in the May 30 double murder in Arivaca are linked to white supremacist groups, police and family members said.Accused ringleader Shawna Forde told her family in recent months that she had begun recruiting members of the Aryan Nations and that she planned to begin robbing drug-cartel leaders, her brother Merrill Metzger said Monday in a telephone interview from Redding, Calif."She was talking about starting a revolution against the United States government," he said.
The storm I've been warning about is coming faster now. To get a sense of just how fast, let's take stock of what's been happening on the right wing since President Obama's inauguration:
Wednesday, January 21 — the day after the inauguration — 22-year-old Keith Luke goes on a rape and killing spree in his Boston neighborhood. He rapes and kills one woman, and kills the sister who tries to help her. He then goes out onto the street and shoots a passing homeless man. Police intercept him on his way to a local synagogue, where he tells them he intended to "kill as many Jews as possible during bingo night." He also tells investigators that he was fighting the extinction of the white race, and had stockpiled 200 round of ammunition to that end.
Tuesday, February 10 — In Belfast, Maine, radioactive "dirty bomb" materials are found in home of James Cummings, who had been killed by his wife after years of domestic violence. Cummings was an admirer of Adolf Hitler; a large collection of Nazi memorabilia and a filled-out application for the National Socialist Movement were found on the scene.
Thursday, February 26 — In Miramar Beach, FL, 60-year-old Dannie Baker walks into a neighboring townhouse where 14 Chilean students — all in the US legally — are gathered. He fires, killing two and wounding five. Those who know Baker describe him as a mentally ill man obsessed with the fear that immigrants are taking over the country.
Sunday, April 5 — Budding white supremacist and recently discharged veteran Richard Popalowski shoots and kills three police officers following a standoff in Pittsburgh. They were responding to a domestic disturbance call. He believed they had been sent by the Obama Adminstration to take away his guns.
Tuesday, April 28 — US Army Reservist Joshua Cartwright shoots and kills two sheriff's deputies in Fort Walton Beach, FL. His wife called police from the emergency room after he beat her. In the incident report, his wife reported that her husband believed the U.S. Government was conspiring against him, and was severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.
Wednesday, May 6 — Stephen P. Morgan of Middletown, CT kills former NYU classmate Johanna Justin-Jinich, whom he had been harassing since at least 2007. A diary found in his belongings included an entry: "I think it's ok to kill Jews and go on a killing spree" and "Kill Johanna. She must Die." Justin-Jinich was Jewish, and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Sunday, May 31 — Dr. George Tiller is shot to death while ushering at his Lutheran church in Wichita, KS. His killer, Scott Roeder, is captured by police within hours. Roeder is found to have ties to several violent right-wing groups, including the Montana Freemen and the Sovereign Citizen movement. He had also been committing acts of vandalism against abortion clinics for years, most recently just days before the assassination.
Wednesday, June 10 — Well-known anti-Semitic blogger James Wenneker von Brunn walks into the national Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and opens fire, killing a security guard. Von Brunn had been prominent in Holocaust denier circles for several decades, and considered Holocaust museums to be a crime against white history.
Was this an isolated incident?It's isolated in the sense that this guy was a lone wolf, certainly in that he acted alone, but he's part of a movement of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. He lists major Holocaust-denier groups on his Web site and how there is going to be a major Holocaust-denial conference on July 25 in Orange County, Calif. He may have acted like a lone wolf, but he is part of a movement.
Are attacks like this simply desperate one-time acts?
Within the white-supremacist movement there is a strong notion of leaderless resistance. The notion is this: look, we can take over the country just by having small cells or lone wolves commit key acts of violence because the rest of the country, at least the whites, will then go along with you. It's called the "propaganda of the deed"—you know who the enemies are, you go out yourself and hopefully people will take notice and act together in resistance.
These ideas were promoted by Louis Beam, a KKK member, and published in The Seditionist, his newsletter, in the early '90s. It came out around 1991, but the idea has been pushed in the white-supremacist movement for a long time since. He has been a big influence on the white-supremacist movement. He's a very scary guy. He was noteworthy because he was also part of the militia movement in the '90s. He's not the inventor of leaderless resistance, but he's remembered for being the most important modern proponent of leaderless resistance in the neo-Nazi world.
DHS/I&A assesses that lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Information from law enforcement and nongovernmental organizations indicates lone wolves and small terrorist cells have shown intent—and, in some cases, the capability—to commit violent acts.
[..] DHS/I&A has concluded that white supremacist lone wolves pose the most significant domestic terrorist threat because of their low profile and autonomy—separate from any formalized group—which hampers warning efforts. [..] Similarly, recent state and municipal law enforcement reporting has warned of the dangers of rightwing extremists embracing the tactics of “leaderless resistance” and of lone wolves carrying out acts of violence.
I can't believe the "Dave Letterman joke" controversy is still a controversy.
I don't know what Palin supporters hope to gain by this. Look, folks, if you believe Saran Palin is made of presidential material, that's fine, but I suggest to you that if a joke gets her panties in this much of a twist, then she doesn't have what it takes to face down real ememies and threats.
Anyway, enjoy these nuts:
UPDATED — James Joyner comments:
A week ago, I wrote a post titled Letterman Palin Jokes Cross the Line, both excoriating Letterman for his remarks but defending him from the ridiculous charge that he was some sort of pervert who liked to joke about 14-year-olds. Since then, Letterman first explained his remarks and subsequently apologized for them profusely. And rightly so.
But I have a hard time believing Palin was legitimately confused days later about the target of the joke and, in light of the previous jokes told about Bristol’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, particularly outraged at this one. Instead, she took advantage of the initial media brouhaha over the Willow/Bristol confusion and made a big spectacle, hoping to both remove the Bristol mess out of the realm of legitimate ridicule and reframe herself as an aggrieved party rather than a rather cartoonish figure.
We’ll see how she does. My guess is that the Letterman experience will in fact remove the Bristol jokes from the late-night comedy circuit, which is just as well. As for Sarah Palin’s own rebranding, she’s going to have to do that on the public policy front, not by garnering sympathy as an aggrieved mother.
Right. The joke was offensive, but it's pretty standard late-night fare. In fact, worse jokes have been made at Palin's expense.
Politics is hardball, Sarah. If you can't play it, go home.
Nice, huh? But that's what House Minority Leader Paul "Skip" Stam (R-Wake) said.
What's more, he said that in open public debate, in front of an audience which included the children of a lesbian congresswoman.
Even more surprising, his comments were made in the course of debating the School Violence Prevention Act (Senate Bill 526). Now, the impetus behind that bill comes primarily from the homosexual community, since it is gay kids that tend to get beaten up and bullied in school nowadays. But the "bully ban" doesn't apply just to gay-bashers — it applies to any student or school employee who "bullies" or harasses another student on the basis of that student's race, national origin, sexual preference, gender, etc.
Hard to fathom why anyone would be opposed to it.
But that's the NC GOP for you…
In case you haven't heard, Broadway is now a pedestrian mall from 47th to 42nd Sts. and from 35th to 33rd Sts.
Which means Times Square looks like this now:
And this:
And this:
Beach chairs are the big thing right now. NYC is going to decide at the end of the year whether to make it permanent. Assuming they do, we'll probably start to see benches, etc.
There's no avoiding it: Obama's record on gay rights is not going to be good. That's unfortunately, especially given the trend in the states to recognize gay marriage. Many on the left have condemned Obama for this; now the Gray Lady takes a shot:
The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction on gay rights.
***
In the presidential campaign, President Obama declared that he would work to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, the administration appears to be defending it out of a sense of obligation to support a validly enacted Congressional law. There is a strong presumption that the Justice Department will defend federal laws, but it is not an inviolable rule.
If the administration does feel compelled to defend the act, it should do so in a less hurtful way. It could have crafted its legal arguments in general terms, as a simple description of where it believes the law now stands. There was no need to resort to specious arguments and inflammatory language to impugn same-sex marriage as an institution.
The best approach of all would have been to make clear, even as it defends the law in court, that it is fighting for gay rights. It should work to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the law that bans gay men and lesbians in the military from being open about their sexuality. It should push hard for a federal law banning employment discrimination. It should also work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress.
Not sure what the thinking is in the White House. Perhaps they have too many other things on their plate (wars, economy, health care) and they don't want to spend political capital (there's only so much of it) on social issues.
Or maybe it's a second term thing. Still, it's disappointing.
