…was, arguably, Doogie Howser, M.D.
He was blogging before there was the word "blog".
His "personal journal entries" from 1989-1993 are archived here.
Reasonable vs Unreasonable Voices
I’ve written recently about the inflammatory rhetoric of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, etc., and how it can lead to events like the murder of Dr. George Tiller this weekend.
Some people get it. This is a thoughtful post from Rod Dreher, a conservative, at Belief.net:
Unsurprisingly, on this blog’s comboxes and elsewhere, some are blaming the entire pro-life movement for Tiller’s murder, and blaming specifically pro-life rhetoric for supposedly inciting the abortion doc’s murderer. There’s not much point in objecting to this at this point; the people who say such things are looking for an excuse to despise the pro-life cause, and this lawless vigilante has now given them one.
It is worth reflecting on, though, to what extent our words are seeds for violent deeds. It cannot be true, however much some pro-choicers may want it to be, that pro-lifers are obliged to shut up and go away because one violent kook killed an abortion doctor. Think about the harsh criticism of the US torture policy under Bush. If, God forbid, someone infuriated by that committed murder against one of the Bush officials who devised the policy, it would be a heinous crime, but most people would understand that torture critics could not be blamed for it. Nor would the severity of their moral indictment of torture be at issue. If torture — or abortion, or war, or discrimination, or any other morally consequential issue — is wrong, then we are obliged to speak out against it, no matter what. George Tiller was a violent man, and the fact that he died violently, at the hands of a criminal, does not change who he was and what he did for a living.
But we can’t let ourselves off that easily. Our words are not spoken in a vacuum. In our media today, they are amplified to a degree previously unimaginable. It seems to me that this puts a special obligation on all of us, whatever our cause or political stance, to choose carefully what we say, and how we say it. I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules here, but the virtue of prudence in speech really is important to observe. We live in a time when red-hot rhetoric, on both the right and the left, sells; I saw a TV producer friend over the weekend here, a guy who used to work for cable news back in the US, and told him how frustrated I was that there is no place on broadcast media for nuanced or moderate voices. They don’t want light, they want heat, and the only way to get heat is to have intense friction. So our media culture valorizes intense emotion, and we are acculturated to embracing our passions, especially our anger, as a matter of justice and authenticity.
This will not end well for us. It never has.
And what of O’Reilly, who has over the last few years launched aabout 29 rants against Dr. Tiller? What did he have to say last night? Media critic Howard Kurtz:
O’Reilly is entitled to defend himself, and he in no way condoned what happened. But the man was murdered in church. I was surprised that, along with his reminder that Tiller had been called a baby killer, O’Reilly didn’t issue a ringing denunciation of the shooting and anyone who thought it was justified. The occasion, in my view, called for it; he chose a different approach.
O’Reilly’s approach was to condemn Tiller’s murder (in passing), and then use the event to not only defend himself but, notably, reiterate his attacks on Tiller. Nice.
By the way, Media Matters uncovered an O’Reilly radio show where he discussed “getting his hands on Tiller”.
Dick Cheney Blames Richard Clarke For Failing To Warn Of 9/11
Former Bush National Security Council’s counter-terrorism director wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post this past weekend, saying that "trauma of 9/11" was a piss-poor excuse for the response of Cheney and the Bush Administration in the weeks and months that followed (Iraq invasion, Gitmo detention, illegal wiretapping, etc.):
Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques — but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.
Speaking at the National Press Club today, Cheney struck back at Clarke. When asked about Clarke’s argument, Cheney — once again — invoked the “burning ashes” of 9/11 and the victims who leaped to their deaths from the World Trade Center. Then, quite succinctly, Cheney pinned the entire blame for 9/11 on Clarke:
CHENEY: You know, Dick Clarke. Dick Clarke, who was the head of the counterrorism program in the run-up to 9/11. He obviously missed it. The fact is that we did what we felt we had to do, and if I had to do it all over again, I would do exactly the same thing.
Oh, really?
Emails from the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the presidential and senior briefings [all dates are 2001]
"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3)
"Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23)
"Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (May 26)
"Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent" (June 23)
"Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (June 25)
"Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks" (June 30),
"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2)
All that before the infamous August 6 2001 PDB.
And did Rice heed Clarke's warnings?
When he finally got his security clearance and was allowed into the reading room, [9/11 Commission investigator historian Warren] Bass discovered he could make quick work of Rice's emails and internal memos on the al-Qaeda threat in the spring and summer of 2001. That was because there was almost nothing to read, at least nothing that Rice had written herself.
Either she committed nothing to paper or email on the subject, which was possible since so much of her work was conducted face-to-face with Bush, or terrorist threats were simply not an issue that had interested her before September 11. Her speeches and public appearances in the months before the attacks suggested the latter.
So Clarke didn't miss it; in fact, he was warning about an impending attack repeatedly.
Similarly, Time Magazine reported in 2002 that Clarke had an extensive plan to “roll back” al Qaeda — a plan that languished for months, ignored by senior Bush officials:
Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. … In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, “Response to al Qaeda: Roll back.” … The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush.
Cheney don't know Dick.
Dick Cheney Weighs In On Gay Marriage
"As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. … But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."
That's support.
But still, I wish Cheney would avoid phrases like "get a shot at that".
Gallup States The Obvious
Republican Base Heavily White, Conservative, Religious
Democrats are more likely to be moderate or liberal, Hispanic, or black or other races
But there is a nice revealing chart:
I'm sure the opposition to Sotomayor's going to help with the GOP's appalling appeal to minorities.
Kudos To Brittani McCalister
She's a Terre Haute student and she is graduating from high school this year, which is nice enough, but in addition….
Brittani McCalister has never missed a day of school in 13 years, kindergarten through grade 12.
In fact, she has not missed one minute of school in all those years. The 2009 West Vigo High School graduate has never been tardy for school or even missed a class for an appointment.
“She has come to school feeling under the weather. She has driven through snowstorms and rainstorms. Every day, she has made it to school and stayed the entire day,” Principal Tom Balitewicz said during commencement Sunday. “For those of you counting, that is 2,340 days of school without a miss.”
It started out as a bet with her brother, but he only made it part-way through elementary school when he was felled by a cold one day. Brittani decided to keep going (even when she had colds). Full story here.
Goldstein’s Sotomayor Analysis Complete
I referenced this before:
Over at SCOTUSblog, Tom Goldstein notes all proverbial ink being spilled over Sotomayor's race, along with the implicit and explicit statements that her supposed bias will prevent her from judicating equally and fairly.
So he decided to do something novel… read her decisions.
Goldstein is done with his analysis, and the results should put to rest any claim that Sotomayor has a race-based approach to the law:
In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.
The Pappas case, in which Sotomayor favored the white "bigot" is illuminating:
The plaintiff was a white employee of the New York City Police Department — working in a clerical position in information management — when he was fired for having sent blatantly racist and anti-Semitic replies in response to charity requests he received in the mail. Pappas admitted doing it, and said he did it to protest the charity requests. The NYPD fired him for having sent the replies on the ground that it did not want racist employees. He sued the NYPD, alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated by the firing, because he was clearly fired due to the content of the political views he expressed.
The district court judge dismissed Pappas' case, finding that the NYPD had a legitimate need to exclude racists from its employ, a need which outweighed Pappas' First Amendment rights. On appeal, two of the three judges on the Second Circuit panel agreed with that ruling and dismissed Pappas' case. But not Sotomayor. She wrote a dissent emphasizing the strong First Amendment interests of Pappas' that were being violated — however contemptible it was, it was pure political expression — and she argued that it he was entitled to a jury trial to decide if the NYPD, under Supeme Court precedent, had any right to fire him for it.
This is what Sotomayor wrote:
"In the typical public employee speech case where negative publicity is at issue, the government has reacted to speech — which others have publicized — in an effort to diffuse some potential disruption. In this case, whatever disruption occurred was the result of the police department's decision to publicize the results of its investigation, which revealed the source of the anonymous mailings. It was, apparently, the NYPD itself that disclosed this information to the media and the public. Thus it is not empty rhetoric when Pappas argues that he was terminated because of his opinions. Ante, at 147-48. The majority's decision allows a government employer to launch an investigation, ferret out an employee's views anonymously expressed away from the workplace and unrelated to the employee's job, bring the speech to the attention of the media and the community, hold a public disciplinary hearing, and then terminate the employee because, at that point, the government "reasonably believed that the speech would potentially… disrupt the government's activities." Heil v. Santoro, 147 F.3d 103, 109 (2d Cir.1998). This is a perversion of our "reasonable belief" standard, and does not give due respect to the First Amendment interests at stake."
That's Sonia Sotomayor, one of only four judges supporting the right of a white bigot to speak and not be fired.
Cop From “The Village People” Comes Out Of The Closet: “I’m Heterosexual”
Not a parody.
His name is Victor Willis. He was the cop of The Village People.
Not only does he say he is straight, but he adds that the lyrics to Village People song, YMCA, "were not meant to be innuendo about gay cruising but about hanging out with your straight buddies."
I have to admit… when the song came out (as well as Macho Man and In the Navy), I wasn't aware of any homosexual theme. But I was in high school at the time. Obviously, the gay community latched on to something about that song.
But let's give Willis his due and revisit the YMCA lyrics:
No man does it all by himself.
I said, young man, put your pride on the shelf,
And just go there, to the Y.M.C.A.
I'm sure they can help you today.
It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A.
It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A.
They have everything that you need to enjoy,
You can hang out with all the boys …
It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A.
It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A.
Uh, I'm going to have to go with "What is tres gay, Alex". Sorry. Especially when those lyrics are sung by the guys pictured above, it's gay.
Remember That DHS Report?
Michelle Malkin apparently doesn't think the killer of Dr. Tiller is a "terrorist". He's an "extremist". She adds:
Interesting how the t-word has been rediscovered.
She has the memory of a moth. It was only back in April when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report equating right-wing extremism as a possible breeding ground for terrorist acts. The right wing reacted to the report with manufactured outrage, and even called for the resignation of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Michelle was on the forefront of the outrage. Here's what she wrote:
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has turned her attention away from acts of Islamic jihad on American soil (which she now refers to as “man-caused disasters”). Instead, her department is sounding the alarm over an un-quantified “resurgence” in “rightwing extremism activity.” On April 7, DHS sent a nine-page warning memo to law enforcement offices across the country titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”
The report includes a sweeping definition of the threat:
“Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”
Hmmmm. In retrospect, it certainly appears like the DHS was on to something….
Michelle went on:
The report offers zero data, but states with an almost resentful attitude toward protected free speech: “Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.”
The same, naturally, goes for anti-abortion fervor.
“Potential to turn violent?” So did the hysterical fervor whipped up by Capitol Hill over the AIG bonuses, which prompted ugly death threats from across the country. No mention here, though. Not “rightwing” enough. Nor will you see Obama DHS warnings to police and sheriff’s departments about self-proclaimed bank terrorists such as Bruce Marks of the aggressive Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America or the mob activists of ACORN who have committed burglary, stormed corporate executives’ homes, and vowed to conduct “civil disobedience” by “any means necessary” in response to the “current economic and political climate.”
Michelle, I think your attempts at obfuscation failed. Epic fail. The left wing — even the fringe — typically does not react to political frustration with acts of violence. There's no evidence of that (not, at least, since the 60's).
But just in case you really believed all the garbage you wrote, Michelle, I hope you found yesterday's events educational (although, this isn't the first time something like this has happened).
[UPDATE: The New York Times is reporting that Tiller's killer subscribed to a newsletter called "Prayer and Action News", which advocates justifiable homicide for abortion doctors]
Mark Kleiman reminds us of the DHS report's relevance.
Remember how Republicans in Congress were all in a dither about the DHS report on right-wing extremist organizations as potential terrorist threats? The Tiller gunman was affiliated with at least two of those organizations. In addition to his connection with Operation Rescue, he was a tax protester, a "sovereign citizen," and a member of the Freemen. Maybe someone should ask Rep. Peter King of New York (ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee) and John Hinderaker of PowerLine whether they still consider the threat of right-wing terrorism to be mere Obama Administration fantasy. (That's beside the fact that the report was ordered up during the Bush Administration.)
Greg Sargent added this morning, "[T]he general intent of the report, which was chock full of warnings about 'lone wolf extremists' capable of violence, now looks perfectly defensible, even reasonable."
This really should have been apparent to the administration's detractors in the midst of the "controversy." There are some Americans on the fringes of society who are both radical and potentially dangerous. It only makes sense for the Department of Homeland Security to be cognizant of these threats, and communicate with state and local law enforcement agencies about the possibility of violence.
Yesterday was a painful reminder of this.
Will Malkin connect the dots between the DHS report and Scott Roeder (the murderer)? Don't hold your breath.
But violent right wing extremists are out there. Llike the Tiller killer, another member of the "sovereign citizen" movement was arrested yesterday, in a little-publicized story:
Federal authorities in Seattle have filed gun and drug charges against an alleged member of a secessionist movement after agents seized a weapons cache that included four silencers, body armor and a fully automatic rifle.
Filings in the case, currently before the U.S. District Court in Seattle, offer glimpses into the "sovereign citizen" movement and, prosecutors contend, militia groups loosely affiliated with it.
But Malkin and others on the right didn't get it. Here's the Christian Broadcast Network's David Brody, April 15, 2009:
Abortion Groups Labeled as Right Wing Extremists by Department of Homeland Security
Watch out! The pro-life right wing nuts are on the loose! Be very careful….They could be lurking around any corner!
Oy-vey.
Hey, that’s basically the message coming from the Department of Homeland Security. In a new report, here’s how DHS defines right wing extremism in America:
Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups, and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.
Read the DHS report here.
The American Center for Law and Justice is outraged to say the least. Read a statement below from the group:
This is an outrageous characterization that raises serious questions about the leadership and direction of the agency charged with protecting Americans in the ongoing battle against terrorism,” said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ. “Why would the Department of Homeland Security single out groups like pro-life supporters when they should be focusing on identifying and apprehending the real terrorists – like al-Qaeda – groups that have vowed to destroy America? This characterization is not only offensive to millions of Americans who hold constitutionally-protected views opposing abortion – but also raises serious concerns about the political agenda of an agency with a mandate to protect America.”
Now let me just say there are plenty of “nuts” out there to be sure…on both sides. It’s not JUST on the right. Racism of any kind is just plain wrong and hatred with accompanying violence is unacceptable. But to invoke “abortion” into the language of the document can definitely come across as a disservice to all the law abiding pro-life groups out there. Abortion clinic violence is wrong. Don’t get my wrong but why not be more specific about that rather than generically lump it all together under the abortion umbrella?
P.S. By the way, it is "terrorism". Terrorism is defined as politically-motivated violence, against a law-abiding American on American soil, intended to scare, intimidate, and change U.S. policy. Certainly one of the tacit sub-motives of Tiller's killing was not only to stop Tiller, but to discourage others from doing the kind of late-term abortion work (rare as it is) that Tiller did.
Finally, returning to Malkin's post today, she writes:
Unfortunately, some are not content to leave it at that for now. They fail to respect that there is a proper time and place to indulge in political battle.
You can go here, here, and here for all that. Another round-up here.
Tiller’s family is grieving. Those who have jumped to score political points before Tiller is even buried are no better than the Phelps family thugs of the “Westboro Baptist Church” who respect no bounds of civility.
Unfortunately, it’s too much to ask the cable news networks and hyper-partisan snipers on the Internet to have the decency to restrain themselves.
Prepare for a wall-to-wall onslaught of gleeful finger-pointing on the Left and heated responses on the Right.
Prepare for whitewashed hagiographies of Tiller’s career as an abortionist.
Prepare for DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s defenders to gloat about vindication.
Prepare for collective demonization of pro-lifers and Christians — and more gratuitous attempts to tar talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party movement as responsible for the heinous crime.
Prepare for the continuing redefinition of any and all sharp political disagreement as “hate” — a ruinous trend that inevitably comes back to haunt the hysterical accusers decrying “hate” the loudest.
How unhinged has the discourse gotten already? Here’s the left-wing Daily Kos going after the left-wing John Aravosis for going after Barack Obama because he didn’t go after “right-wing extremism” hard enough.
Cognitive dissonance much. Michelle? I'm surprised the part of your brain that calls for no political sniping doesn't throttle the other part of your brain that can't help but engage in political sniping.
Sadly, No responds to Malkin's time-and-a-place-for-thee-but-not-for-me:
We concur. This is not the time for partisan sniping and name-calling. Also, Michelle Malkin is a manipulative sack of shit.
Whiny Les Miz Singing Lady Has Nervous Breakdown
Obviously, I'm being sarcastic. The whole thing is rather sad.
But not entirely unpredictable. Fame is a hardship, and instantaneous worldwide fame destroys. Going from a quiet anonymous life to life-under-the-fishbowl must be extremely straining.
Here's hoping she gets well. In fact, I hope Susan Boyle makes the decision to retire, thumbing her nose at the lucrative money she was sure to receive (even by coming in second place) from tours, records, etc. It would be a long overdue slap in the face to our celebrity culture.
The Hate Rhetoric
At some point, the right wing media has to be called out.
Oh sure. As Slate's Gabriel Winant points out, Bill O'Reilly will be on television tonight tut-tutting the murder of Dr. George Tiller. But this come about after O'Reilly has made Tiller the subject of 28 "Factor" news stories, starting in 2005.
Almost invariably, Tiller is described as "Tiller the Baby Killer."
Tiller, O'Reilly likes to say, "destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000." He's guilty of "Nazi stuff," said O'Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. "This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union," said O'Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.
O'Reilly has also frequently linked Tiller to his longtime obsession, child molestation and rape. Because a young teenager who received an abortion from Tiller could, by definition, have been a victim of statutory rape, O'Reilly frequently suggested that the clinic was covering up for child rapists (rather than teenage boyfriends) by refusing to release records on the abortions performed.
Here's a compilation:
Over the past few years, Bill O’Reilly has made the following comments about Dr. Tiller:
– He “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.”
– He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,”
– a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida
– “This is the kind of stuff that happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union”
– “operating a death mill”
– “has blood on his hands”
– “executing babies about to be born"….
Asked to comment on O'Reilly's characterizations, CNN's Tucker Carlson says this:
"Every one of those descriptions of Tiller is objectively true. I sincerely think it’s appalling that he was murdered. But Tiller was a monster, no doubt."
No, Tucker. Every one of those description is not "objectively true". It's over-the-top rhetoric. And if you don't know the difference, you have no business in journalism. Just because you agree with the rhetoric doesn't make it objectively true.
No, O'Reilly didn't put the gun in anyone's hands. And yes, the First Amendment gives O'Reilly the right to say whatever he wants, no matter how inaccurate or incindiary it might be.
But O'Reilly and his ilk have been on notice: there exists in America a small violent paranoid fringe element that actually takes what is projected on their screens, and goes into action. We saw this last year with the deadly Unitarian Church shooting in Knoxville (Headline: "Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity on accused shooter's reading list: 4-page letter outlines frustration, hatred of 'liberal movement'")
So I'm beginning to tire of the use of The First Amendment as some sort of excuse. The First Amendment gives O'Reilly the right to say whatever he wants, but it is silent on what is the right thing to do. Going over the top, as O'Reilly, Coulter, Savage, and others do, is what leads to events like yesterday.
O'Reilly didn't tell anyone to do anything violent, but he did put Tiller in the public eye, and help make him the focus of a movement with a history of violence against exactly these kinds of targets (including Tiller himself, who had already been shot). In those circumstances, flinging around words like "blood on their hands," "pardon," "country club" and "judgment day" was sensationally irresponsible.
Irresponsible, yes.
Somehow, I think this will all be lost on O'Reilly, who is always the victim. Here he is only last week complaining about how his civil rights were violated because he was the object of criticism.
One wonders whether O'Reilly thinks Tilller's civil rights were violated when he was shot down in a church yesterday morning.
UPDATE: Blaming the victim has begun. Guess who was responsible for the Tiller murder. Answer: Tiller, because he couldn't "take a hint".
Reagan Did It
Wasn't it Rush Limbaugh who once said of Ronald Reagan: "We as a nation owe Reagan a debt that can never be repaid" or something like that?
Well, Nobel Prize in Economics award winner Paul Krugman points out the ironic truth of that tribute:
“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.
He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.
Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.
To be sure, the current economic crisis has many fathers, and Democrats are among them, if only because they acquiesced in bad fiscal legislation. As Krugman writes:
There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.
For the entire history of our nation, up until the Reagan presidency of the early 1980's, we were not a debtor nation. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent. Our great wealth as a country rested on debt, rather than labor. That's Reagan's legacy.
And yet, one wonders why Republicans still have the image of being the fiscally responsible party. Maybe no longer….
The Dr. Tiller I Knew
From a Daily Kos diarist:
Like many in this community, my heart is heavy today. There have been many great diaries that talk about Dr. Tiller's years of service to women, and the threats he has endured throughout the last years of his life. My story is a bit more personal and I want to share it with all of you to give you more insight into the man.
In 1975 my Mom noticed an indention in her left breast. She called and made an appointment with her OB/GYN, Dr. George Tiller. After his initial examination, he ordered a biopsy. While performing the biopsy he immediately knew that the lump was cancerous. Instead of just closing and scheduling surgery, he “grabbed a handful”, his words not mine. Her cancer Dr. credited this quick thinking by Dr. Tiller with saving her life, and due to this she didn’t even have to undergo chemotherapy.
Several years later my Mother and I were driving by his clinic in Wichita. Mom started complaining of chest pains, so I drove into his parking lot and ran in to get help. Dr. Tiller was by Mom’s side immediately, and stabilized her, before the heart attack could cause severe damage.
In 1980 I was pregnant with my first child. I had no insurance and couldn't afford a doctors appointment until I was approved for a medical card.. Mom told Dr. Tiller and he brought me into his office where he examined me, free of charge. I can credit him with the very first picture taken of my son.
The last story I have to share is about my friends who could not have children. Dr. Tiller’s office worked with several attorneys in the Wichita area to provide adoption services for his patients who wanted this option. My friends have a 10 yr. old boy now, who is loved and adored.
I’m not a great writer, so I apologize that this isn’t nearly as eloquent as some of the diaries on Daily Kos. I just wanted to get this story out to you, so you could hear how this man wasn’t just a tremendous fighter for women's rights. He was a brilliant physician, and a kind and compassionate human being. RIP Dr. Tiller and thank you for all you did for my friends and my family.
at Balloon Juice, on his experiences with Dr. George Tiller:
In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.
We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world.