BUSH AND SCHIAVO

via Kevin Drum

From Sunday Morning Talk:

As Dubya starts to see his numbers slide, This Week reported that the Bush administration are starting to distance themselves from Republicans on Capitol Hill, leaking that Bush didn't even want to return to Washington to sign the Schiavo bill last Sunday.

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Did anyone see the show? How well sourced was this leak?

If it's true, it's about as galactically craven and poll driven a rowback as I've ever heard. Did one of Bush's minions really say something this cowardly and gutless?

What's creepy about it is that George Will agrees with this assertion, and thinks it was a mistake by President Bush. He says there is a crack in the republican party because of this.

(Update)-Sunday Morning Talk thinks this is all a red herrimg.:

However, before you all get too excited and think Bush really didn't want to fly back and sign the bill, stop and think. It's likely a red herring. This sounds more like the Rove spin machine, kicking in to high gear and distancing themselves from Capitol Hill Republicans as they see Bush's numbers slide and public sentiment turn against the Republican political workings of last weekend.

AND now for one more example of ultra-conservative oppression creeping into modern life:

Druggists refuse to give out pill
For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe in birth control.

"I was shocked," says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.

Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in procedures that go against their conscience. South Dakota and Arkansas already had laws that protect a pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense medicines. Ten other states considered similar bills this year.

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills. Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist to fill.

In Madison, Wis., a pharmacist faces possible disciplinary action by the state pharmacy board for refusing to transfer a woman's prescription for birth-control pills to another druggist or to give the slip back to her. He would not refill it because of his religious views.Some advocates for women's reproductive rights are worried that such actions by pharmacists and legislatures are gaining momentum.

Watch What You Say

Via Avedon Carol, here's a creepy story of a blogger who got turned into the FBI by a reader and was visited by the Secret Service.

A WRITER on popular blog-site LiveJournal has posted of her nightmare ordeal with the US Secret Service, an event spurred by a posting she made to her blog criticising George Bush prior to the Presidential Election earlier this week.
Whilst the offending post has been removed - to spare other users further Federal interference, according to author 'anniesj' - you can see her account of events in full, which has been left as a word to the wise.

The post in question is gone, so I have no way of evaluating what it said. However, this combined with the fun story we heard the other day about the romance novelist who got her computer and books confiscated because she was researching terrorism in Cambodia, I think it's safe to say that four more years with a Justice Department that considers torture justified is not exactly comforting to those of us who write mean things about Republicans or use red flagged research terms on the internet.

The Seminal: Demint's Sedition: Flying off to fight against the U.S.

unbossed: Beef processors' dirty secrets exposed

Steve Benen: Marine General Jones pushes back against McCain

market folly: The next financial mania

The Cunning Realist: Get a life

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Good journalism...Change?...Beck boycott goes international...Peep Creep Arrested...Branch tells the truth...Letterman, Polanski, Palin and Beck...The Sure Thing...Are search engines killing newspapers?...Ratwang-Dango...Journamalism...Conventional wisdom...Iraq Today...How can these two things both be true?...Iran fail...Is Moonie Times a real newspaper?...For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally...George Will still fulla sh*t..

Creep

A Tiny Revolution: Americans are the reasonable sort: they love their dead bodies but just not too many, OK?

Rox Populi: Typhoid Alberto

Faithful Progressive: I'll tell you what's elitist, John McCain!

To The Point News: Rocking Russkies. Prepare yourself for this one - maybe a Stoli martini or two.

The Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat: One last book from the late Kurt Vonnegut, one last gasp from neocon creep Doug Feith, one last go-round on the reason for the Civil War and, for National Poetry Month, the never-too-lost verse of Lyndon LaRouche! All in the Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat.

HOLY CRAP: Eldorado Texas Polygamist Cult...Representative tries to put the fear of God in an atheist...Left Behind: Waaaah!...Book store honesty...The Christian Nationalism of John McCain...Chris Hedges on Fundamentalist Atheism...James Dobson's hometown newspaper freaks out!...The FundamentaList...Wright stuff, in context...A Bible in every Ford, porn at the Marriott, & a new Top Ten...

In his State of the Union address last night, Bush boasted, “We are grateful that there has not been another attack on our soil since 9/11.”

Except, of course, that’s wrong. I’m not trying to play a cute semantics game; I know what conservatives mean when they talk about “terrorist attacks.” They’re describing devastating, cataclysmic events that kill a lot of people at once. I get it.

But about a month after 9/11, someone sent weaponized anthrax to two Democratic senators and several news outlets. Five Americans were killed and 17 more suffered serious illnesses. For reasons that I’ve never been able to explain, the incident — it’s entirely reasonable to call it an “attack” — is hardly ever mentioned. No one knows where the anthrax came from, who sent it, or why. It was a horrifying incident, immediately on the heels of another horrifying incident, but more than six years later, it’s almost as if the episode never happened.

After Yglesias noted that it seems as if the “whole episode has been officially erased from the historical record or something,” Atrios added:

And anthrax was what made things like “mobile chemical weapons labs” sound so scary. Not everyone agrees, but I think more than 9/11 the anthrax freaked the country out. 9/11 was horrible, but the anthrax made it seem like we’d reached a new era where some horrible creepy shit was going to happen every day.

And then it was all forgotten.

Quite right. Every time I hear someone talk about the absence of 9/11 attacks, I twitch, wondering why the anthrax incident has somehow been downgraded in the national memory.

Download (2190) | Play (4261) Download (1104) | Play (2395) (h/t billw audio amplified)

OK, this response by MSNBC's VP for Communications Jeremy Gaines does nothing to clear this up and actually raises more doubts about that ghostly whisper.

"We had some audio issues and Gov. Romney's mike wasn't working momentarily. Simple as that," MSNBC VP for Communications Jeremy Gaines said in a one-line e-mail response to questions about overheard whisper.

So how did a malfunctioning mic whisper a little help to Romney? Wonkette has a theory...

What exactly was that weird, whispery voice we heard between last night’s question to Mitt about Reagan and Social Security and Romney’s answer? Either Ronald Reagan is giving help from beyond the grave or Mitt was wearing a wire.

AmericaBlog: Romney's creepy earpiece

During Gov. Romney's speech, one of his handlers mentioned to one of our staff people that any time Gov. Romney needed to wrap things up, he would be happy to let Gov. Romney know through the ear-piece that he wore.

Bob Geiger has the slightly creepy story of Nebraska's DINO.  Talk about not following the polls.

Incarcerex: The Treatment for Chronic Re-Election Paranoia (CREEP)