A local Planned Parenthood clinic was targeted Sunday night in Grand Chute, Wis. No motive was immediately known, and though Wisconsin hasn’t played a central role in the debate over women’s access to contraception, the approaching GOP primary and the heated recall fight in the state have elevated tensions there.
Also appalling:
State Rep. Michelle Litjens (R), who represents Grand Chute in the state legislature, is a member of Wisconsin Right To Life and a strong critic of Planned Parenthood. She cautioned against associating the bombing with her fellow anti-abortion advocates and complained that the bomber, whatever his or her motivation, may tar the opposition to Planned Parenthood with the crime.
Can this and the murder of Dr. George Tiller really be separated from the violent rhetoric?
Abortion opponents have a long history of using violent rhetoric to attempt to justify their crimes and incite others to violence. They regularly refer to abortion providers as “murderers” in interviews and articles and utilize imagery associated with murder such as “wanted” posters and “hit lists” in their campaigns to end legal abortion. Unfortunately, instead of marginalizing these extremists, other opponents of abortion have picked up on this dangerous rhetoric to advance their political agenda.
The devastation this rhetoric can cause has been keenly experienced by the abortion provider community. In late 1992, Michael Griffin, who had no history in the anti-abortion movement, became involved with a local anti-abortion leader who took him under his wing and mentored him by showing him graphic anti-abortion videos and involving him in efforts to target a local clinic where Dr. David Gunn worked. Earlier that year abortion opponents had distributed western-style "wanted" posters featuring a picture of Dr. Gunn, his home phone number, and other identifying information. In 1993, Dr. Gunn became the first abortion provider to be murdered; shot to death by Griffin in Pensacola, Florida.
Following the murder of Dr. Gunn, anti-abortion extremists publicly advanced the idea that the murder of abortion providers was “justifiable.” Paul Hill appeared in media outlets, including the nationally televised Donahue show, calling for the execution of abortion providers. In fact, he was so well-known for making such inflammatory statements that reporters often asked him, “If you believe so strongly in killing doctors, why don’t you do it yourself?” One year later, Hill acted on the violent words he had been preaching when he shot and killed Dr. John Bayard Britton and volunteer escort Lt. Col. James Barrett, and injured June Barrett, in the driveway of a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic. Hill’s ideas were carried forward by others including James Kopp, who unsuccessfully attempted to use a “justifiable homicide” defense during his trial for the 1998 murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo, New York.
Scott Roeder, convicted last year for the murder of Dr. Tiller, also testified in court that his actions were justified and made repeated unsuccessful attempts to use a so-called “necessity defense.” Prior to murdering Dr. Tiller, Roeder had been in contact with others who advocated using violence against abortion providers, and was influenced by the media and what he watched on TV. He testified in court that he converted to Christianity as an adult after watching conservative programs like “The 700 Club.” Roeder stated that he believed Dr. Tiller was a murderer, a belief advanced by Bill O’Reilly, who repeatedly referred to Dr. Tiller on national TV as “Tiller the Killer.”
I'm all for free speech, but take responsibility for it. Right?
If you're strongly anti-abortion and believe the government should regulate that female choice, then by all means vote GOP. However, if you're on the fence at all regarding the Republican agenda and are only along for fiscal or military reasons, this should give you yet another reason never to pull the lever for a Republican again:
The House voted 251-175 on Wednesday to pass the GOP's controversial anti-abortion measure H.R. 3, "The No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act." Sixteen Democrats joined 235 Republicans in approving it. ... The legislation would eliminate tax deductions for employer-provided health insurance plans that cover abortion, effectively raising costs for businesses that offer abortion-inclusive health care to employees. It could also deny Medicaid-based abortion care to women even if their health may be harmed by carrying the pregnancy to term. ...
"This bill goes far beyond prohibiting federal funding [for abortion]," said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY). "The real purpose and effect of this bill is to eliminate private health care choices for women by imposing significant tax penalties on families and small businesses when they use their own money to pay for health insurance or medical care.
The measure maintains exemptions for cases of rape, incest and when the mother's life is in danger. But a committee report left open the possibility that the legislation could deny federally-subsidized abortion in instances of statutory rape.
...
"This bill is so extreme that it manipulates the tax code to advance anti-choice policies and could spur the IRS to audit rape and incest survivors who choose abortion care," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
...
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, said she was "outraged" that the measure passed. "H.R. 3 is a dangerous bill that goes far beyond any other proposal ever introduced in Congress to take comprehensive health care coverage away from women," she said.
This is a tax increase on women and small businesses -- not exactly a fiscally conservative policy. And so much for the myth the GOP perpetuated that they are somehow concerned about jobs. While the President is likely to veto the GOP legislation, which is also unlikely to pass the U.S. Senate, states like Texas are already making it hard and harder on women:
Yesterday, the Texas Legislature passed legislation requiring doctors to perform a sonogram at least 24 hours before an abortion and to describe what the sonogram shows. Only in cases of rape, incest, or fetal abnormality is a woman allowed to bypass that requirement. Texas is facing it’s worst budget crisis since World War II. But apparently, with the nation racing to restrict women’s rights as much as humanly possible, Gov. Texas Perry (R) dubbed this anti-abortion bill as an “emergency priority” to fast-track its passage.
And who's supposed to pay for that sonogram?
The only good side of all this GOP overreach seems to be fundraising for Dems off the threat to a woman's right to control her own body. Like you can do here.
Dr. Carhart has also begun performing some abortions “past 24 weeks,” he said in an interview, and is prepared to perform them still later if they meet legal requirements and if he considers them medically necessary.
“There is a need, and I feel deeply about it,” said Dr. Carhart, visibly weary after a day when eight patients had appointments at his clinic here.
Another brave doctor clearly putting his life on the line not long after the brutal assassination of Dr. George R. Tiller.
Let's see if Bill O'Reilly points the crazy and homicidal towards this man as well.
Sarah is one, John is the other. If McCain can still say with a straight face that, "I know she would make an excellent President," he's doing more than just being loyal to the woman he put in the spotlight, he's doing the CYA of all time -- covering his own ass for having made the disastrous choice of her as his running mate.
If I ever thought Sen. McCain might be relevant again, or ever felt those who questioned his past performance were churlish, this interview puts those notions to rest, while turning my stomach:
Make me vomit, John. The truth about Palin is that she's never going to be qualified to be President because she couldn't handle the job of governing a state of just 627,000 people and enough oil production tax revenue to give each of those citizens a dividend of $3,200 this year. In Internet terms: MASSIVE FAIL:
In late March, a senior official from the Republican Governors Association headed for Alaska on a secret mission. Sarah Palin was beset by such political and personal turmoil that some powerful supporters determined an intervention was needed to pull her governorship, and her national future, back from the brink.
The official, the association’s executive director, Nick Ayers, arrived with a memorandum containing firm counsel, according to several people who know its details: Make a long-term schedule and stick to it, have staff members set aside ample and inviolable family time to replenish your spirits, and build a coherent home-state agenda that creates jobs and ensures re-election.
Like so much of the advice sent Ms. Palin’s way by influential supporters, it appeared to be happily received and then largely discarded, barely slowing what was, in retrospect, an inexorable march toward the resignation she announced 10 days ago.
As the time between her quitting (emulating, perhaps, rightwing idol Richard Nixon) and the next vote of any import increases, she will become more and more of an embarrassment to "legitimate" Republican politicans. I believe that even a book deal or Fox show will fail to wipe the stain of FAIL and she might even have difficulties sustaining a television engagement anywhere other than a religious channel due to her implosion, which is surely deeper than the mainstream media lets on. Her future is with the hardcore anti-abortion right. She should become (figure)head of Operation Rescue and reap those bucks. After all:
Hope for the intervention’s success soon faded. Despite advice to stick close to home and focus on an Alaska agenda, the governor accepted an invitation to attend an anti-abortion dinner in Indiana in April, even though the state budget was hanging in the balance in the Legislature.
When Tom Wright, chief of staff for the speaker of the Alaska House, suggested that the governor would catch heat for leaving, Ms. Palin stormed into his office and, according to a person familiar with the conversation, “proceeded to ream him out.”
I guess chief of staff Wright won't have Sarah Palin to kick him around anymore.
Oddly enough in 2009, we have only one woman on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. While that is likely to change within the next few months as Judge Sonia Sotomayor moves through the Senate confirmation process, it's still completely odd that 51% of the U.S. population has only 11% representation on our nation's highest court.
There's a nice interview with Justice Ginsburg in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, including this exchange regarding historical barriers to entry for women:
Q: Do you think if there were more women on the court with you that other dynamics would change?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: I think back to the days when — I don’t know who it was — when I think Truman suggested the possibility of a woman as a justice. Someone said we have these conferences and men are talking to men and sometimes we loosen our ties, sometimes even take off our shoes. The notion was that they would be inhibited from doing that if women were around. I don’t know how many times I’ve kicked off my shoes. Including the time some reporter said something like, it took me a long time to get up from the bench. They worried, was I frail? To be truthful I had kicked off my shoes, and I couldn’t find my right shoe; it traveled way underneath.
There's some good stuff on Sandra Day O'Connor as well as Ginsburg's warm feelings towards deceased Chief Justice Renquist. Towards the end she lays out her very clear views on a woman's right to control her own body over the state's right to make decisions for her. She sure doesn't seem like an old lady.
Here's to her having Sonia on the bench with her as well.
There's more crucial political activity going on that just the citizen's protest in Iran, although that's the doozy on the world stage. So while this isn't an entire break from that history-in-the-making (see below), I wanted to bring attention back to the fight for a public health option in the U.S., being fought tooth-and-nail by Republicans and the health insurance companies that love them.
This is assuming that single payer national healthcare -- the kind where you walk into any hospital without an insurance card, where there's no cash register let alone huge computerized bill to go with it, as in Canada, France, England, Germany, Sweden, and every other industrialized Western country -- is not going to happen here. And a basic public option, a check against the rapacity of the private insurance companies, won't happen if powerful people like this guy have their way:
The South Carolina Republican, appearing on ABC's "This Week," set a firm line in the sand when discussing the creation of a public option for insurance, insisting that such a proposal would not pass the United States Senate.
"The reason you are not going to have a government-run health care pass the Senate is because it will be devastating for this country," he said. "The last thing in the world I think that Democrats and Republicans will do at the end of the day is create a government-run health care system."
And later, in favor in a supposed "compromise" that would still provide no public option and still leave your health insurance fate and choices in the hands of the for profit industry that has been denying coverage and dictating both doctors and treatments for over thirty years:
"I think this idea needs to go away," Graham said of a public plan, "and replace it with something maybe like [Senator] Kent Conrad's proposal."
The audicity of nope: "I think this idea needs to go away." You can't ban an idea, Senator, and you can't ban it as a major policy consideration if nearly 3/4 of all Americans favor it:
The national telephone survey, which was conducted from June 12 to 16, found that 72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65 — that would compete for customers with private insurers. Twenty percent said they were opposed.
Republicans in Congress have fiercely criticized the proposal as an unneeded expansion of government that might evolve into a system of nationalized health coverage and lead to the rationing of care.
But in the poll, the proposal received broad bipartisan backing, with half of those who call themselves Republicans saying they would support a public plan, along with nearly three-fourths of independents and almost nine in 10 Democrats.
Meanwhile, in extremist news, Operation Rescue has the gall (beyond chuzpah) to hold a memorial service for unborn children at the site of Dr. George Tiller's closed clinic, closed because of the assassination of Dr. Tiller that they at least indirectly encouraged in their rhetoric, and in some sort of communication with the killer.
And in lethal fascist extremism on the other side of the globe, the situation in Iran is anybody's guess, with rounds of arrests, dozens if not more killings of civilians, and a suddenly empowered population that may not be stoppable. Like in this movie-like clip from a standoff Saturday, the only tonic after watching Neda die the same day -- definitely play to the end:
Scott Roeder was insane precisely because of how completely his whole existence became being against a woman's right to choose. As the guy who believed all of the Bill O'Reilly and Randall Terry hate speech, he was by definition insane:
Roeder's family life began unraveling more than a decade ago when he got involved with anti-government groups, and then became "very religious in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way," his former wife, Lindsey Roeder, told The Associated Press.
"The anti-tax stuff came first, and then it grew and grew. He became very anti-abortion," said Lindsey Roeder, who was married to Scott Roeder for 10 years but "strongly disagrees with his beliefs.
"That's all he cared about is anti-abortion," she said.
Doctor killer Roeder had been building towards this for awhile, using the casual epithets of those enjoying the rapture of their totalitarian hatred:
Arriving for an early shift around sunrise, a nurse at the Kansas City clinic, Aid for Women, noticed the man trying to pour super glue into a lock on the back door, another clinic worker said. Spooked, the man fled, but not before the nurse noted his license plate number, which the authorities later linked to Mr. Roeder.
The man seemed strident, the clinic worker said, and repeated phrases like “baby killer.”
Baby killer. By his standards. Repeated, like the simpleminded. The desired endpoint of the repetition of that phrase by Terry and O'Reilly, which in the media always means deliberate branding. The brand worked, they got some action finally, sated for a moment, their message reached and filled up a murder vessel for Bill O'Reilly, with Terry's Operation Rescue in touch with Roeder on the ground.
Premeditated:
In the days before Dr. Tiller’s death, Mr. Roeder’s behavior seemed erratic in other ways. He invited his 22-year-old son to dinner and a movie on Friday night, something unusual for Mr. Roeder, according to his former wife, Lindsey Roeder. Ms. Roeder said he usually rested on the Sabbath beginning Friday at dusk, and that he rarely made outings of any sort with his son, with whom he saw “Star Trek.”
“He really wanted to prolong the evening with dinner and ice cream,” said Ms. Roeder, who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park. “Looking back, I think it was a way of saying goodbye to his son.”
Sorry Dr. Tiller didn't get that opportunity with his family.
It turns out the number belongs to Operation Rescue senior policy advisor Cheryl Sullenger, who was convicted of conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic in 1988. Justin Kendall of The Pitch has the details:
The phone number is written on an envelope with the name "Cheryl" and "Op Rescue." Cheryl is Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue's senior policy adviser, who in 1988 was convicted of conspiring to bomb a California abortion clinic. She served two years in prison.
Kendall spoke with Sullenger, who says she hasn't spoken with Roeder "recently."
"No, he hasn't called me recently," Sullenger said. "No."
"You know, he's somebody who's been around. My name is on the Internet. It's on every press release. My phone number is on every press release it. It's all over the internet. I don't know. He probably has lots of people's phone numbers. You know? So I don't know. I don't have any more comment other than that."
Yet another connection between Pres. Obama and late-term abortionist George Tiller. Gold Star Mother Betty Pulliam, who lost a son in Viet Nam, now works to take the lives of other women's sons and daughters at George Tiller late-term abortion mill in Wichita, Kansas. Yesterday, she breakfasted with President Obama and was honored in our nation's capital as part of a Memorial Day observance.
Pulliam, at 83, volunteers her time at Tiller's clinic on busy abortion days. She told the Wichita Eagle of her role as a Gold Star Mother, "You really don't want to belong to this club because in order to belong to this club, you have to lose a child. So nobody wants to belong to it."
"How ironic that Pulliam could make such a statement when she has dedicated a large portion of her life to insuring that other women lose their children to abortion. It is hypocrisy at best, and perhaps stems from some sick need to make sure that other women suffer as she has," said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.
Operation Rescue Chairman Randall Terry on Monday to assembled press:
"The point that must be emphasized over, and over, and over again: pro-life leaders and the pro-life movement are not responsible for George Tiller's death. George Tiller was a mass-murderer and, horrifically, he reaped what he sowed."
After that decree:
"Thank you for coming, unless there's any other questions. And I truly am sorry that we had to meet under these circumstances. I like Guinness for those of you who want to have a beer somewhere. I prefer my chicken wings really hot and a little crispy."
O'Reilly spent most of the segment accusing the "far-left media" of exploiting the murder of Tiller and refused to apologize for his previous comments, proclaiming to his critics: "No back-pedaling here."
At the outset, O'Reilly stated, "Clear-thinking Americans should condemn the murder of late-term abortionist Tiller even though the man terminated thousands of pregnancies. What he did is within Kansas law."
But then he quickly launched into his argument, saying "When I heard about Tiller's murder, I knew pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters would attempt to blame us for the crime and that is exactly what has happened."
I love how these tough-talking pussies act so victimized at the drop of a doctor. The most irresponsible Americans. Not my fault, stabbed in the back.
I understand a personal moral choice to be against abortion. I may not agree, but I can accept that it might be a principle for you.
What I think is different for the ardent is the pornographic aspect to the language and the visuals, the wallowing in moral superiority turned moral indignation, the living with the heightened depersonalization of the doctor or the woman in question, to the point where the only release is blocking access to a clinic or firing a slug into a doctor in church like Satan himself.
Here's the facts behind our homegrown fascism:
They can't handle being our of power so they turn to the gun. Executioners and their enablers.
My late father and I share the blame (with many others) for the murder of Dr. George Tiller the abortion doctor gunned down on Sunday. Until I got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of my former hate-filled rhetoric I was both a leader of the so-called pro-life movement and a part of a Republican Party hate machine masquerading as the moral conscience of America...
...The same hate machine I was part of is still attacking all abortionists as "murderers." And today once again the "pro-life" leaders are busy ducking their personal responsibility for people acting on their words. The people who stir up the fringe never take responsibility. But I'd like to say on this day after a man was murdered in cold blood for preforming abortions that I -- and the people I worked with in the religious right, the Republican Party, the pro-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church, all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words.
I am very sorry.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. He is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and also author of the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism)
My father was an OB-GYN and on quite a number of occasions performed abortions for women who were anti-choice...except when it came to themselves. He would ask how they voted on the issue and the incidence of hypocrisy was high. They had legitimate reasons. Like not being able to financially handle a sixth child. Being too old to have to go back to dealing with a baby. For their emotional health.
I write this because the rightwing voices calling the assassinated Dr. George Tiller so many names are at fault in his death for the very use of the word, "abortionist." Obstetricians who perform abortions are doctors, plain and simple, with patients who come to them with private, often agonizing decisions. The American terrorist who murdered Dr. Tiller in his place of worship today, where he was a church usher, in front of his wife who sang in the choir, could just as easily killed my father.
My father acted under the law, which in New York State limited abortion to the first trimester except in certain cases threatening the life of the mother. But what if he did perform a third trimester operation and he had vicious enabler Bill O'Reilly either purposely or irresponsibly goading the violent-minded by branding him a "baby killer" over 28 episodes of his show?
I look forward to the negligence lawsuit again O'Reilly.
Dr. Tiller wasn't bloodlusting for abortions; he actually refused to perform them when spurious, and then there are many women who are forever grateful that he helped them late in their pregnancies when the so-called "pro-life" alternative was actually greater horror.
"George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder."
After President Obama's wise bridge-building statement about coming together to reduce abortions in his Notre Dame speech, one can only hope that he brings the hammer down, since Terry and the group he leads are equally if not more guilty than O'Reilly in inciting this act of violence against Dr. Tiller:
The following words are used to describe George Tiller in the Operation Rescue video posted here: "corrupt, alcoholic, drug addict, blasphemer, liar, defiler, butcher, perverse, foul, evil, unethical, murderer, malicious." It concludes: "You may be the difference between life and death for a child."
The video, full of grotesque superimpositions, is foul and disturbing to watch -- far from holy, if that's what supposedly drives these people. What we know about he suspect under arrest, Scott P. Roeder, is that he mimicked this violent hate speech in his own web postings:
Scott Roeder Mon September 03, 2007, 09:49:40
It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the “lawlessness” which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the concentration camp “Mengele” of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation.
"I know that he believed in justifiable homicide," said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who made headlines in 1995 when she was ordered by a federal judge to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of any abortion clinic. "I know he very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn."
Dinwiddie said she met Roeder while picketing outside the Kansas City Planned Parenthood clinic in 1996. Roeder walked into the clinic and asked to see the doctor, Robert Crist, she said.
"Robert Crist came out and he stared at him for approximately 45 seconds," she said. "Then he (Roeder) said, 'I've seen you now.' Then he turned his back and walked away, and they were scared to death. On the way out, he gave me a great big hug and he said, 'I've seen you in the newspaper. I just love what you're doing.'^"
Roeder also was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines, Iowa.
And is also a member of the "Freemen", which is where it gets even scarier:
Roeder, who in the 1990s was a manufacturing assemblyman, also was involved in the "Freemen" movement.
"Freemen" was a term adopted by those who claimed sovereignty from government jurisdiction and operated under their own legal system, which they called common-law courts. Adherents declared themselves exempt from laws, regulations and taxes and often filed liens against judges, prosecutors and others, claiming that money was owed to them as compensation.
In April 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after Shawnee County sheriff's deputies stopped him for not having a proper license plate. In his car, officers said they found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries, with one connected to a switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb.
Jim Jimerson, supervisor of the Kansas City ATF's bomb and arson unit, worked on the case.
"There wasn't enough there to blow up a building,'' Jimerson said at the time, ``but it could make several powerful pipe bombs...There was definitely enough there to kill somebody.''
More and more, anti-abortion extremists, white supremacist groups and the conspiracy-minded "Patriot" movement have come to share the same enemies list. Many in these previously separate movements agree that everything smacking of "one-worldism" — the Olympics, the United Nations and any other global agency — is part of a massive plot to subject Americans to tyranny.
Activists in all three movements describe homosexuals as "sodomites," people who deserve capital punishment. And in the latest development, many of those involved in these groups are bitterly attacking abortion.
"Eric Rudolph is symbolic of this new merger," says Dallas Blanchard, chairman of the University of West Florida's sociology department in Pensacola. "Militia types have shown more and more interest in the abortion issue, while anti-abortionists are becoming more and more militant and allying themselves with the militia movement."
Since the early 1990s, Patriot and white supremacist groups have used mainstream issues like gun control and land and environmental regulation to draw people into their organizations. Now, they are taking up the banner of fighting abortion.
America's Invisible Empire, a Klan group, describes abortion as "America's greatest crime." White Aryan Resistance, another white supremacist group, calls for "future Aryan justice" for abortionists — except in the case of non-white abortions. Leaders of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, a Patriot-linked group, have called for the death penalty for abortion doctors and even their patients.
Sound like logic and exhortation relatively similar to that of an anti-tax television extremist like, say, Glenn Beck?:
Beck literally advises his audience not to worry about the consequences:
"Still, most tax evaders don't end up in jail. [...] Let's just say a million people don't pay - not because they're cheap - but because they believe the principles that we were founded on have been violated. And they think this is wrong and they try to do something that they think is the only thing they can."
Then Beck tells them to...
"Put aside the fact America's federal, state, and local prisons are already overcrowded. They are packed 36% beyond their rated capacity. Overcrowded to the maximum. [...] All in all, it's probably not worth the government's time to toss you in jail."
The main target, of course, is the man of color at the top. And as I've said before, if anything happens to that leader or any member of his family, then it's those like Beck, who incites his viewers with violent imagery like this, who must be held accountable.
I say let's not wait until tragedy strikes to hold them accountable.
Any thought that Barack Obama might be the kind of weak-kneed librul so often caricatured by Republicans (and so often played into by Democrats past) was belied by several events on the Friday of his first week as President.
Suspected U.S. missiles killed 18 people on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border Friday, security officials said, the first attacks on the al-Qaida stronghold since President Barack Obama took office. At least five foreign militants were among those killed in the strikes by unmanned aircraft in two parts of the frontier region, an intelligence official said without naming them. There was no information on the identities of the others.
President Barack Obama on Friday struck down the Bush administration's ban on giving federal money to international groups that perform abortions or provide abortion information -- an inflammatory policy that has bounced in and out of law for the past quarter-century.
Obama's move, the latest in an aggressive first week reversing contentious Bush policies, was warmly welcomed by liberal groups and denounced by abortion rights foes.
But perhaps best of all, during a bipartisan informational session on the economic stimulus bill that the new President wishes to have in place by mid-February:
President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning - but he also left no doubt about who's in charge of these negotiations. "I won," Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
So while the Republican leadership is falsifying talking points based on non-existent Congressional Budget Office reports, Obama is once again reminding them of reality, something they haven't really had to deal with for eight years.
He won, big time. The first completely indisputable (not a plurality, no Supreme Court decision) first-time Presidential candidate victory since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
If the health insurance companies are this scared, eliminating them and finally creating a single-payer national health service must be the right thing to do.
If Fred Thompson worked to help the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association with abortion rights lobbying in 1991, he will almost certainly not be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2008.
