Lucy Van Pelt Gets Her Bone

The irrepressible Condoleeza Rice has been nominated to be the next Secretary Of State. Not much of a surprise, really. Colin Powell utterly debased himself by acting as the lying lapdog for this president, and now Shrub's favorite neocon queen takes his place. Rice is being handed the job of stateswoman/mouthpiece after the most aggressive display of childish pique during the interval between Richard Clarke's testimony to the 9/11 commission and her own. One may recall she ran from TV talk show to TV talk show to decry how unfairly Clarke's version of events treated her role in the run up to 9/11.

Then she took the stand and tried to lie and bully her way out of giving any sort of usable testimony. To add to her lofty statesmanship, Rice proceeded to go out on the campaign trail to aggressively stump for her boss, an activity the National Security Advisor does not usually partake in. I guess she really needed a job. I dislike Dr. Rice because she has proven herself barely competent to the task of understanding the forces at play in the world, and for her willful lying about events in Iraq and the period during which she vociferously, and falsely, made the case to attack.

Her nomination falls perfectly in line with the overall cabinet shift underway. Close Shrub advisers are being shunted into major cabinet positions, for which most of them are not even qualified. Any voice of even the mildest dissent (please don't over-estimate Powell's unwillingness to go along with the Iraq war) is being pushed aside, so the entire administration will lock step the rest of us to our national doom and disgrace.

Bastards Unleashed

The Republican leadership in the House are moving to make a rule change that would allow Rep. Tom Delay to keep his position as Majority Leader. Delay is best known for aggressive and shady fundraising, and a bald-faced power grab in his home state of Texas, where redistricting eliminated five democratic seats. They used to call it gerrymandering, but oh how times have changed.

More from the Washington Post:

GOP Pushes Rule Change To Protect DeLay's Post

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 17, 2004; Page A01

House Republicans proposed changing their rules last night to allow members indicted by state grand juries to remain in a leadership post, a move that would benefit Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in case he is charged by a Texas grand jury that has indicted three of his political associates, according to GOP leaders.

The proposed rule change, which several leaders predicted would win approval at a closed meeting today, comes as House Republicans return to Washington feeling indebted to DeLay for the slightly enhanced majority they won in this month's elections. DeLay led an aggressive redistricting effort in Texas last year that resulted in five Democratic House members retiring or losing reelection. It also triggered a grand jury inquiry into fundraising efforts related to the state legislature's redistricting actions.

House GOP leaders and aides said many rank-and-file Republicans are eager to change the rule to help DeLay, and will do so if given a chance at today's closed meeting. A handful of them have proposed language for changing the rule, and they will be free to offer amendments, officials said. Some aides said it was conceivable that DeLay and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) ultimately could decide the move would be politically damaging and ask their caucus not to do it. But Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), another member of the GOP leadership, said he did not think Hastert and DeLay would intervene.

House Republicans adopted the indictment rule in 1993, when they were trying to end four decades of Democratic control of the House, in part by highlighting Democrats' ethical lapses. They said at the time that they held themselves to higher standards than prominent Democrats such as then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (Ill.), who eventually pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to prison.

The GOP rule drew little notice until this fall, when DeLay's associates were indicted and Republican lawmakers began to worry that their majority leader might be forced to step aside if the grand jury targeted him next. Democrats and watchdog groups blasted the Republicans' proposal last night.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last night: "If they make this rules change, Republicans will confirm yet again that they simply do not care if their leaders are ethical. If Republicans believe that an indicted member should be allowed to hold a top leadership position in the House of Representatives, their arrogance is astonishing."

House Republicans recognize that DeLay fought fiercely to widen their majority, and they are eager to protect him from an Austin-based investigation they view as baseless and partisan, said Rep. Eric I. Cantor (Va.), the GOP's chief deputy whip.

"That's why this [proposed rule change] is going to pass, assuming it's submitted, because there is a tremendous recognition that Tom DeLay led on the issue to produce five more seats" for the Republicans, Cantor said after emerging from a meeting in which the Republican Conference welcomed new members and reelected Hastert and DeLay as its top leaders.

Other Republicans agreed the conference is likely to change the rule if given the chance. An indictment is simply an unproven allegation that should not require a party leader to step aside, said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.), a former trial judge, said it makes sense to differentiate between federal and state indictments in shaping party rules because state grand juries often are led by partisan, elected prosecutors who may carry political grudges against lawmakers.

Republicans last night were tweaking the language of several proposals for changing the rule. The one drawing the most comment, by Rep. Henry Bonilla (Tex.), would allow leaders indicted by a state grand jury to stay on. However, a leader indicted by a federal court would have to step down at least temporarily.

"Congressman Bonilla's rule change is designed to prevent political manipulation of the process while preserving the original ethical principles of the rule," Bonilla spokeswoman Taryn Fritz Walpole said.

Hastert and DeLay, meanwhile, are publicly taking a hands-off posture. Hastert told reporters the decision was up to the conference, adding, "we'll see what happens." DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy said his boss "believes we should allow members of the conference to come to their own conclusions and let the conference work its will without him exerting undue influence one way or the other."

A Texas grand jury in September indicted three of DeLay's political associates on charges of using a political action committee to illegally collect corporate donations and funnel them to Texas legislative races. The group, Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, is closely associated with DeLay. DeLay says he has not acted improperly and has no reason to believe he is a target of the grand jury, which continues to look into the TRMPAC matter.

The House ethics committee on Oct. 6 admonished DeLay for asking federal aviation officials to track an airplane involved in the highly contentious 2003 redistricting battle, and for conduct that suggested political donations might influence legislative action. The ethics panel deferred action on a complaint related to TRMPAC, noting that the grand jury has not finished its work.

The Texas investigation is headed by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, an elected Democrat who has been bitterly criticized by DeLay supporters. Yesterday, Cantor called Earle's efforts "a witch hunt."

"It's a totally a partisan exercise," Cantor said. "It's coincidental with what's going on up here [in the Capitol], where they are trying every avenue to go after Tom DeLay because they can't beat him" on the House floor or in congressional elections. Changing the rule is not a sign that lawmakers think DeLay will be indicted, Cantor said, but rather a public rebuke of an investigation they feel is wholly unwarranted.

In the event Shrub really did win the election, this column by Arianna Huffington explains why the Democrats failed utterly in their quest for not only the presidency, but both houses of Congress.

Anatomy of a Crushing Political Defeat

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet
Posted on November 4, 2004, Printed on November 4, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20412/

This election was not stolen. It was lost by the Kerry campaign. The reason it's so important to make this crystal clear – even as Kerry's concession speech is still ringing in our ears – is that to the victors go not only the spoils but the explanations. And the Republicans are framing their victory as the triumph of conservative moral values and the wedge cultural issues they exploited throughout the campaign.

But it wasn't gay marriage that did the Democrats in; it was the fatal decision to make the pursuit of undecided voters the overarching strategy of the Kerry campaign.

This meant that at every turn the campaign chose caution over boldness so as not to offend the undecideds who, as a group, long to be soothed and reassured rather than challenged and inspired.

The fixation on undecided voters turned a campaign that should have been about big ideas, big decisions, and the very, very big differences between the worldviews of John Kerry and George Bush – both on national security and domestic priorities – into a narrow trench war fought over ludicrous non-issues like whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant a Purple Heart. This timid, spineless, walking-on-eggshells strategy – with no central theme or moral vision – played right into the hands of the Bush-Cheney team's portrayal of Kerry as an unprincipled, equivocating flip-flopper who, in a time of war and national unease, stood for nothing other than his desire to become president.

The Republicans spent a hundred million dollars selling this image of Kerry to the public. But the public would not have bought it if the Kerry campaign had run a bold, visionary race that at every moment and every corner contradicted the caricature.

Kerry's advisors were so obsessed with not upsetting America's fence-sitting voters they ended up driving the Kerry bandwagon straight over the edge of the Grand Canyon, where the candidate proclaimed that even if he knew then what we all know now – that there were no WMDs in Iraq – he still would have voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

This equivocation was not an accidental slip. It was the result of a strategic decision – once again geared to undecided voters – not to take a decisive, contrary position on Iraq. In doing so, the Kerry camp failed to recognize that this election was a referendum on the president's leadership on the war on terror. (Jamie Rubin, who had been hired by the campaign as a foreign-policy advisor, went so far as to tell the Washington Post that Kerry, too, would likely have invaded Iraq.)

It was only after the polls started going south for Kerry, with the president opening a double-digit lead according to some surveys, that his campaign began to rethink this disastrous approach. The conventional wisdom had it that it was the Swift Boat attacks that were responsible for Kerry's late-summer drop in the polls but, in fact, it was the vacuum left by the lack of a powerful opposing narrative to the president's message on the war on terror – and whether Iraq was central to it – that allowed the attacks on Kerry's leadership and war record to take root.

We got a hint of what might have been when Kerry temporarily put aside the obsession with undecideds and gave a bold, unequivocal speech at New York University on Sept. 20 eviscerating the president's position on Iraq. This speech set the scene for Kerry's triumph in the first debate.

Once Kerry belatedly began taking on the president on the war on terror and the war on Iraq – "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" – he started to prevail on what the president considered his unassailable turf.

You would have thought that keeping up this line of attack day in and day out would have clearly emerged as the winning strategy – especially since the morning papers and the nightly news were filled with stories on the tragic events in Iraq, the CIA's no al Qaeda/Saddam link report, and the Duelfer no-WMDs report.

Instead, those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them that domestic issues like jobs and health care were the way to win.

The Clintonistas who were having a greater and greater sway over the campaign – including Joe Lockhart, James Carville and the former president himself – were convinced it was "the economy, stupid" all over again, which dovetailed perfectly with the beliefs of chief strategist Bob Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

But what worked for Clinton in the '90s completely failed Kerry in 2004, at a time of war, fear and anxiety about more terrorist attacks. And even when it came to domestic issues, the message was tailored to the undecideds. Bolder, more passionate language that Kerry had used during the primary – like calling companies hiding their profits in tax shelters "the Benedict Arnolds of corporate America" – was dropped for fear of scaring off undecideds and Wall Street. Or was it Wall Street undecideds? ("This was very unfortunate language," Roger Altman, Clinton's Deputy Treasury Secretary told me during the campaign. "We've buried it." And indeed, the phrase was quickly and quietly deleted from the Kerry Web site.) Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq until the end (how could he not?), but the majority of the speeches, press releases and ads coming out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address to the nation 10 days before the election, were on domestic issues.

The fact that Kerry lost in Ohio, which had seen 232,000 jobs evaporate and 114,000 people lose their health insurance during the Bush years, shows how wrong was the polling data the campaign based its decisions on.

With Iraq burning, WMDs missing, jobs at Herbert Hoover-levels, flu shots nowhere to be found, gas prices through the roof, and Osama bin Laden back on the scene looking tanned, rested, and ready to rumble, this should have been a can't-lose election for the Democrats. Especially since they were more unified than ever before, had raised as much money as the Republicans, and were appealing to a country where 55 percent of voters believed we were headed in the wrong direction.

But lose it they did.

So the question inevitably becomes: What now?

Already there are those in the party convinced that, in the interest of expediency, Democrats need to put forth more "centrist" candidates – i.e. Republican-lite candidates – who can make inroads in the all-red middle of the country.

I'm sorry to pour salt on raw wounds, but isn't that what Tom Daschle did? He even ran ads showing himself hugging the president! But South Dakotans refused to embrace this lily-livered tactic. Because, ultimately, copycat candidates fail in the way "me-too" brands do.

Unless the Democratic Party wants to become a permanent minority party, there is no alternative but to return to the idealism, boldness and generosity of spirit that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK and the short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy.

Otherwise, the Republicans will continue their winning ways, convincing tens of millions of hard working Americans to vote for them even as they cut their services and send their children off to die in an unjust war.

Democrats have a winning message. They just have to trust it enough to deliver it. This time they clearly didn't.

Numbers Game

Journalist Greg Palast writes that the vote totals from Ohio are wrong. So wrong that Kerry is the winner. Not sure I completely agree, but his reasoning does make the case for a recount.

Kerry Won.
Here are the Facts.
excerpted from TomPaine.com
Thursday, November 4, 2004
by Greg Palast

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

Whose Votes Are Discarded?

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here.)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.
CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.

Concentrate The Mind

When asked by Salon.com to comment on the election result and where we go from here, Mark Crispin Miller responded thusly:

[Mark Crispin Miller is a media critic, professor of communications at New York University, and author, most recently, of "Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order."]


First of all, this election was definitely rigged. I have no doubt about it. It's a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time. In 2000, he got 15 million votes from right-wing Christians, and there are approximately 19 million of them in the country. They were eager to get the other 4 million. That was pretty much Karl Rove's strategy to get Bush elected.

But given Bush's low popularity ratings and the enormous number of new voters -- who skewed Democratic -- there is no way in the world that Bush got 8 million more votes this time. I think it had a lot to do with the electronic voting machines. Those machines are completely untrustworthy, and that's why the Republicans use them. Then there's the fact that the immediate claim of Ohio was not contested by the news media -- when Andrew Card came out and claimed the state, not only were the votes in Ohio not counted, they weren't even all cast.

I would have to hear a much stronger argument for the authenticity, or I should say the veracity, of this popular vote for Bush before I'm willing to believe it. If someone can prove to me that it happened, that Bush somehow pulled 8 million magic votes out of a hat, OK, I'll accept it. I'm an independent, not a Democrat, and I'm not living in denial.

And that's not even talking about Florida, which is about as Democratic a state as Guatemala used to be. The news media is obliged to make the Republicans account for all these votes, and account for the way they were counted. Simply to embrace this result as definitive is irrational. But there is every reason to question it ... I find it beyond belief that the press in this formerly democratic country would not have made the integrity of the electoral system a front page, top-of-the-line story for the last three years. I worked and worked and worked to get that story into the media, and no one touched it until your guy did.

I actually got invited to a Kerry fundraiser so I could talk to him about it. I raised the issue directly with him and with Teresa. Teresa was really indignant and really concerned, but Kerry just looked down at me -- he's about 9 feet tall -- and I could tell it just didn't register. It set off all his conspiracy-theory alarms and he just wasn't listening.

Talk to anyone from a real democracy -- from Canada or any European country or India. They are staggered to discover that 80 percent of our touch-screen electronic voting machines have no paper trail and are manufactured by companies owned by Bush Republicans. But there is very little sense of outrage here. Americans for a host of reasons have become alienated from the spirit of the Bill of Rights and that should not be tolerated.

------------

Nice bit of eye-opener to counter the election hangover still plaguing my brain.

From Across The Pond

Brief exchange I had with an English friend of mine:

I wrote:

Oh, woe is we.

Woe is us.

And he replied:

Astonishing--not to mention depressing as fuck--turn of
events. With such a high turnout I was sure Kerry had it. Everyone was.

How wrong we all were. :-(

To which I replied:

Never underestimate the stupidity of the American people.

25 years of unrelenting propaganda - liberals are fag loving effete snobs. 25 years of unrelenting anti-intellectualism - liberals are all pointy headed academics who attend those northeastern elite universities (Shrub went to *both* Yale and Harvard) and teach your children to be lilly liverred,
you guessed it, fags. 25 years of defining government as the largest, most dangerous enemy known to the "average" American citizen.

Decades of ignorance and fear, prompting people to vote, time and again, in direct contradiction to their own self-interest. The Empire is in full throat. This national arrogance and foolishness will have to run it's course -
longer than another presidential election cycle - until something catastrophic happens, or the long dull crumbling of empires all through history takes hold.

Woe is we indeed.

-----------

My English friend had told me in advance of the election that British TV news would be carrying the results live, a la American television. Extraordinary, when you think of it. American TV has never run live programming coverage of an election anywhere in the world, yet the British feel the outcome of ours is so crucial to the entire world they broadcast the process of tallying the votes.

Fog Of Gore

In the midst of a nasty election campaign against the backdrop of a foolish and deadly war, film maker Errol Morris, who crafted a brilliant, devastating film about Robert McNamara ( Fog Of War ), has put on his website a series of fascinating commercials. Originally created as campaign ads featuring real Republicans who voted for Bush in 2000 but refuse to do so again in 2004, most of them did not air. Morris has made them available for free.

Gestapo goes to the polls

Voter fraud is an issue every campaign, regardless of the location and office up for grabs.

Going into the polls this year both sides have been howling about fraudulent voter registrations, the trashing of registration forms, and other illegal dirty tactics. So far, the Republicans seem to be winning the battle to disenfranchise voters, as their efforts have been exposed in the press more often. That, or they simply suck at not getting caught.

I don't think this is what Malcolm X meant when he said "by any means necessary:"

The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A25

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own.

Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was all but drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black ministers to keep their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey election came to light.

For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however, universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm.

In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned them disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland, where Democratic "527" groups have registered many tens of thousands of new voters. "The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters -- I call them ringers -- have created these problems" of potential massive vote fraud, Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman James P. Trakas recently told the New York Times.

Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a liberal group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word "ringers."

Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate that roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this year. Who does Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of African Americans been sneaking over the state lines from Pittsburgh and Detroit to vote in Cleveland -- thus putting their own battleground states more at risk of a Republican victory? Is Shaker Heights suddenly filled with Parisians affecting American argot? Or are the Republicans simply terrified that a record number of minority voters will go to the polls next Tuesday? Have they decided to do anything to stop them -- up to and including threatening to criminalize Voting While Black in a Battleground State?

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America, there's a war on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we can ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set still believe in voting rights.

For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism. From the first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the right, to fan the flames of cultural resentment, to divide the American house against itself in the hope that cultural conservatism would create a stable Republican majority. The Sept. 11 attacks unified us, but Bush exploited those attacks to relentlessly partisan ends. As his foreign and domestic policies abjectly failed, Bush's reliance on identity politics only grew stronger. He anointed himself the standard-bearer for provincials and portrayed Kerry and his backers as arrogant cosmopolitans.

And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a latter-day version of the election of 1928, when the Catholicism of Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith bitterly divided the nation along Protestant-Catholic and nativist-immigrant lines. To his credit, Smith's opponent (and eventual victor), Herbert Hoover, did not exploit this rift himself. Bush, by contrast, has not merely exploited the modernist-traditionalist tensions in America but helped create new ones and summoned old ones we could be forgiven for thinking were permanently interred. (Kerry will ban the Bible?)

Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more deliberately divisive than the current one. I can come up with only one other president who sought so assiduously to undermine the basic arrangements of American policy (as Bush has undermined the New Deal at home and the systems of post-World War II alliances abroad) with so little concern for the effect this would have on the comity and viability of the nation. And Jefferson Davis wasn't really a president of the United States.

After four years in the White House, George W. Bush's most significant contribution to American life is this pervasive bitterness, this division of the house into raging, feuding halves. We are two nations now, each with a culture that attacks the other. And politics, as the Republicans are openly playing it, need no longer concern itself with the most fundamental democratic norm: the universal right to vote.

As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and Kerry to the center.

That foretells the course of the administrations that each would head. The essential difference between them is simply that, as a matter of strategy and temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry to narrow them. That, finally, is the choice before us next Tuesday: between one candidate who wants to pry this nation apart to his own advantage, and another who seeks to make it whole.

Slight delay

Apologies for the slight delay in our regularly scheduled programming. I've been busy rolling around on the carpet and drooling on myself, but time for such fanciful interludes has evaporated.

Truth be told, I've been avoiding election coverage as much as possible, peeking from between my chubby fingers once in a while to reaffirm that the deathmatch is still in progress.

I'll try to catch up - with a lot of smaller posts so you can skip right over the ones that bore you to an early grave.

Swiss Cheese

Where to begin? Against the backdrop of the VP debate where once again Dick Cheney repeated those false assertions that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working in concert, that weapons of mass destruction existed and were ready to be deployed, that the invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terror (I refuse to capitalize that any more), reality is rudely intruding.

A couple of reports blow enormous holes in those fraudulent statements:

U.S. Inspector at Odds with Bush on Iraq Weapons
Wed Oct 6, 2004 11:58 AM ET

By Vicki Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons before last year's U.S.-led invasion and its nuclear program had decayed since the 1991 Gulf War, a weapons inspector appointed by the Bush administration said on Wednesday.

The assessment contrasted with statements by President Bush before the invasion, when he cited a growing threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the reason for overthrowing President Saddam Hussein.

"I still do not expect that militarily significant WMD stocks are cached in Iraq," Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said in testimony prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee obtained by Reuters.

He said Iraq's nuclear weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War, but he said Saddam did not abandon his nuclear ambitions.

The issue has figured prominently in the campaign for the Nov. 2 U.S. presidential election, with Bush's Democratic opponent John Kerry saying Bush rushed to war without allowing U.N. inspections enough time to check out Iraq's armaments.

Bush, who has given varying justifications for the war, said in a speech in Pennsylvania on Wednesday that the concern was that terrorists would get banned weapons from Saddam.

"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said.

"In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take," he said, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States attributed to al Qaeda.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Duelfer said a risk that has emerged since he last briefed Congress on the status of the WMD hunt was a connection between chemical weapons experts from Saddam's former regime with insurgents fighting the U.S.-led forces now in Iraq.

"I believe we got ahead of this problem through a series of raids throughout the spring and summer. I am convinced we successfully contained a problem before it matured into a major threat," Duelfer said.

"Nevertheless, it points to the problem that the dangerous expertise developed by the previous regime could be transferred to other hands," he said.

Duelfer said that by the time of the war in 2003, Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agent in months and nerve agent in less than a year.

"We have not come across explicit guidance from Saddam on this point, yet it was an inherent consequence of his decision to develop a domestic chemical production capacity," Duelfer said.

Duelfer said that "despite Saddam's expressed desire to retain the knowledge of his nuclear team, and his attempts to retain some key parts of the program (after 1991), during the course of the following 12 years Iraq's ability to produce a weapon decayed."

Duelfer briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors about his report in the morning and was to testify later at an open Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

"While it is clear that Saddam wanted a long-range missile, there was little work done on warheads. It is apparent that he drew the line at that point ... so long as sanctions remained," Duelfer said.

One of Saddam's priorities was to escape U.N. sanctions, he said.

"Over time, sanctions had steadily weakened to the point where Iraq, in 2000-2001 was confidently designing missiles around components that could only be obtained outside sanctions," Duelfer said.

Duelfer's key conclusion tallied with that of his predecessor, David Kay, who said when he stepped down in January that no large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons existed in Iraq when the United States went to war.

------------------

A New C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on a Key Terrorist's Tie to Iraq
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - A reassessment by the Central Intelligence Agency has cast doubt on a central piece of evidence used by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq to draw links between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda's terrorist network, government officials said Tuesday.

The C.I.A. report, sent to policy makers in August, says it is now not clear whether Mr. Hussein's government harbored members of a group led by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the officials said. The assertion that Iraq provided refuge to Mr. Zarqawi was the primary basis for the administration's prewar assertions connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda.

The new C.I.A. assessment, based largely on information gathered after the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, is the latest to revise a prewar intelligence report used by the administration as a central rationale for war.

Other reports have cast doubt on the idea that Iraq provided chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda, and the report of the Sept. 11 commission found no "collaborative relationship" between the former Iraqi government and Al Qaeda.

In the months before the war, George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell were among administration officials who asserted without qualification that Iraq had harbored Mr. Zarqawi and members of his terror group.

In June of this year, President Bush described Mr. Zarqawi as "the best evidence of connection to Al Qaeda affiliates and Al Qaeda." But while Mr. Zarqawi was once thought to be closely linked to Al Qaeda, his affiliations are now less certain.

Some American and European officials have said there is no clear coordination between Mr. Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, though their aims are similar. In the meantime, Mr. Zarqawi has emerged as an architect of repeated car bomb attacks and as the most active and deadly foreign terrorist operating in Iraq as part of the anti-American insurgency.

The C.I.A.'s new assessment states that it could not be conclusive even about his relationship with Mr. Hussein's government. The C.I.A. review, first reported by Knight Ridder newspapers, did not say on what basis the earlier assessment was being softened, and government officials declined to explain on Tuesday.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared to back away from earlier claims about the close relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"I just read an intelligence report recently about one person who's connected to Al Qaeda who was in and out of Iraq, and there's the most tortured description of why he might have had a relationship and why he might not have had a relationship," Mr. Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Mr. Rumsfeld later issued a statement saying that he continued to believe that there had been "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members" before the 2003 war and that "we have what we believe to be credible information that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq."

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about any new intelligence assessment. The government officials who outlined its findings represented several different agencies, but all were guarded in discussing it, saying they did not want to add to tensions between the C.I.A. and the White House.

One government official said the new report "doesn't make clear-cut assertions one way or another" about whether Iraq harbored Mr. Zarqawi. But officials said that it had established beyond doubt that Mr. Zarqawi spent time in Baghdad in 2002, that from there he ordered the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan and that he was in contact with members of the insurgent group Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq.

----------------------------

Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels
Ex-Overseer of Iraq Says U.S. Effort Was Hampered Early On

By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A01

The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

Bremer's comments were striking because they echoed contentions of many administration critics, including Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who argue that the U.S. government failed to plan adequately to maintain security in Iraq after the invasion. Bremer has generally defended the U.S. approach in Iraq but in recent weeks has begun to criticize the administration for tactical and policy shortfalls.

In a Sept. 17 speech at DePauw University, Bremer said he frequently raised the issue within the administration and "should have been even more insistent" when his advice was spurned because the situation in Iraq might be different today. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation, Bremer said, according to the Banner-Graphic in Greencastle, Ind.

A Bremer aide said that his speeches were intended for private audiences and were supposed to have been off the record. Yesterday, however, excerpts of his remarks -- given at the Greenbrier resort at an annual meeting sponsored by the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers -- were distributed in a news release by the conference organizers.

In a statement late last night, Bremer stressed that he fully supports the administration's plan for training Iraqi security forces as well as its overall strategy for Iraq.

"I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in an e-mailed statement. He said all references in recent speeches to troop levels related to the situation when he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 -- "and when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."

He said that, to address the problem, the occupation government developed a plan that is still in place under the new interim Iraqi government.

Bremer also said he believes winning the war in Iraq is an "integral part of fighting this war on terror." He added that he "strongly supports" President Bush's reelection.

The argument over whether the United States committed enough troops to the mission in Iraq began even before the March 2003 invasion.

Prior to the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said publicly that he thought the invasion plan lacked sufficient manpower, and he was slapped down by the Pentagon's civilian leadership for saying so. During the war, concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals also provoked angry denunciations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In April 2003, for example, Rumsfeld commented, "People were saying that the plan was terrible and there weren't enough people and . . . there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever." After Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld dismissed reports of widespread looting and chaos as "untidy" signs of newfound freedom that were exaggerated by the media. Rumsfeld and Bush resisted calls for more troops, saying that what was going on in Iraq was not a war but simply the desperate actions of Baathist loyalists.

In yesterday's speech, Bremer told the insurance agents that U.S. plans for the postwar period erred in projecting what would happen after Hussein's demise, focusing on preparing for humanitarian relief and widespread refugee problems rather than a bloody insurgency now being waged by at least four well-armed factions.

"There was planning, but planning for a situation that didn't arise," he said.

A senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said yesterday that Bremer never asked for more troops when he was the administrator in Iraq -- except for two weeks before he left, when he requested forces to help secure Iraq's borders.

Bremer said in his speech that the administration was clearly right to invade Iraq. Though no weapons of mass destruction have been found, he said, the United States faced "the real possibility" that Hussein would someday give such weapons to terrorists.

"The status quo was simply untenable," he said. "I am more than ever convinced that regime change was the right thing to do."

Fox News Impeding Voter Registration

Katha Pollitt has an illuminating column in The Nation about an incident at the University Of Arizona involving a voter registration drive run by students. Apparently, a local Fox affiliate showed up and began harassing the women conducting the drive. Of course, those women happened to belong to the Network of Feminist Student Activists chapter on campus, a fact certain to outrage Roger Ailes and his coterie of wingnut Faux Newsers.

The most important aspect of the story is not the sensational stuff about a local news program intimidating a legal voter resgistration activity, but the larger issue of students attending schools in other states and the rights they have when it comes to exercising their vote.

subject to debate by Katha Pollitt
Fox Hunts Student Voters

[from the October 11, 2004 issue]

Juliana Zuccaro and Kelly Kraus thought they were exercising their civic rights and responsibilities on August 31 when, as officers of the Network of Feminist Student Activists at the University of Arizona in Tucson, they helped set up a voter-registration drive on the UA mall. Imagine their astonishment when the local Fox affiliate news team showed up and lit into the young women. "The reporter asked if we knew that we were potentially signing students up to commit felonies," Juliana told me--by registering out-of-state students to vote in Arizona. When Kelly then asserted that Arizona law requires only that those registering be resident in the state twenty-nine days before the election, Natalie Tejeda, the Fox reporter, insisted it was illegal to register students. On the news that night, student voter registration was the crime du jour:

Tejeda: What many don't realize is that legally, students from out of state aren't eligible to vote in Arizona because they're considered temporary residents.

Chris Roads [Pima County Registrar's office]: If they are only here to attend school and their intention is to immediately return to where they came from when school is over then they are not residents of the state of Arizona for voting purposes and they cannot register to vote here.

Tejeda: ...Those caught misrepresenting their residency can face a severe punishment.

Roads: The form in Arizona is an affidavit; it is a felony offense if you are lying on that form.

Tejeda: So how easy is it to get caught? Well, starting this past January all voter applications are cross-checked with the Motor Vehicles Department and Social Security Administration. If they find that you are falsifying your residency you could be prosecuted. At this time we don't know if anybody has yet been indicted, but Roads says one of the easiest things you can do to avoid all that is simply go online or pick up the phone, call your home state's elections office and ask for an absentee ballot.

Anchor: Better to be safe on that one. Thanks, Natalie.

Misguided youth or hardened criminals? They report, you decide.

When an urgent e-mail from UA professor Laura Briggs about the Fox broadcast flashed across my screen a few days later, I assumed that such an egregious example of voter intimidation by proxy--with GOP TV standing in for, well, the GOP--would be all over the media by the time my next column deadline rolled around, so I passed on it. Silly me. As I write three weeks later, almost nothing has appeared outside the local press. The silence persisted even after the Feminist Majority--which had spearheaded the students' drive as part of its Get Out Her Vote campaign--held a press conference to publicize the incident. In those three weeks, how many stories have you read bemoaning the apathy of youth, and in particular the fecklessness of young women too "busy" shoe shopping and barhopping to focus on the election?

In fact, despite a 1979 Supreme Court ruling affirming their right to vote where they attend school, students often encounter difficulties when they try to exercise that right. A recent Harvard survey of 249 colleges and universities found that more than one-third weren't complying with the law requiring them to help students register and vote. What's more, local and state officials have tried to prevent students from registering or voting at William and Mary, the University of New Hampshire, Skidmore, Hamilton and Henderson State University in Arkansas, among others. Students at predominantly African-American Prairie View A&M in Waller County, Texas, were threatened with prosecution if they voted without "a legal voting address" by the District Attorney in a series of letters to the local paper. Strangely enough, it was earlier attempts to suppress the vote of Prairie View students that prompted the Supreme Court's 1979 ruling.

When I spoke to Chris Roads, the official quoted in Tejeda's story--yes, he's a Republican--he claimed that Fox had quoted him out of context. His mention of "felony" was originally addressed to a "hypothetical" posed by Tejeda: What would he say to someone who planned to flat-out lie--who said, "I don't live here, can I fill out the form?" Roads says he was "shocked when it blossomed into a story about prosecuting people" for registering--in fact, he told me, no one has ever been prosecuted in Arizona over residency requirements. What is residency, exactly? "Residency means you intend to remain," he went on.

"So it's a subjective thing?" I asked. "You look into your heart?"

"That's right," he said. "You look into your heart."

Roads is a genial man and I enjoyed our chat. Like "intend," "remain" turns out to be a verb as flexible in meaning for registrars as "is" was for Bill Clinton, and don't get him started on "resident"! But despite demands from the students and from Feminist Majority, he did not publicly clarify his comments on Fox News. That was left to his boss, F. Ann Rodriguez, a Democrat, who finally stated on September 9 that out-of-state students may vote. Fox has not only failed to correct its original report; it has continued to suggest on the air that out-of-state students who register in Arizona are breaking the law and could end up in big trouble. And the state bureaucracy is still providing misleading or confusing information: When Nation intern Raina Lipsitz called the Arizona Secretary of State's office to ask if an out-of-state student may vote, she was repeatedly told that she couldn't register in two states at once and, finally, that she should read the statute herself.

The young feminists have done a wonderful job of publicizing the right of students to register and vote. They've held a press conference and reached out to the community, Democratic lawmakers and other student groups. Even the young Republicans--whose registration efforts down the mall from the young feminists were ignored by Fox--have supported them. Juliana and Kelly are now hard at work planning their next registration drive. They're calling it STILL Getting Out Her Vote.

News Flash In Slow Motion

The Washington Post is catching up with reality. Heading an article to appear in today's paper:

"Growing Pessimism on Iraq
Doubts Increase Within U.S. Security Agencies"

Holy Shit!

The war on Iraq is turning into a mess. Any fool who can read past the third grade level has already reached that conclusion. Whether they choose to admit it in public, as the present administration will not, is entirely a different matter.

Perhaps the CableSpews industry will catch up...NOT!

From the article:

By Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page A01

A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.

While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.

People at the CIA "are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper," said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials. "There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."

"Things are definitely not improving," said one U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq.

"It is getting worse," agreed an Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail. "It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."

Portrait Of An Election

Concise and to the point.

Peace Train Wreck

A funny but not so funny column from the Indianapolis Star.

Dan Carpenter
Followed by a goon shadow


September 26, 2004


They can't find Osama bin Laden, but they've saved us from Cat Stevens.

They can appoint Daniel Pipes, the notorious Muslim basher, to the U.S. Institute of Peace; but they won't let Tariq Ramadan, a renowned Muslim scholar, teach at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Is this the world's mightiest force for liberty going about its noble work, or is this Colonel Klink of Stalag 13 with computers and opinion polls?

Cat Stevens? The erstwhile poet of the pop charts, now Yusuf Islam, Muslim teacher and peace advocate? Tied to terrorists? Well, "ties" can be about anything when the government doesn't have to spell them out.

Little explanation was given by the Department of Homeland Security for intercepting a transatlantic flight last week and deporting the "Peace Train" guy. "Activities that could be potentially related to terrorism," the feds said. The best intelligence, if you will, is that some of the many charities he has supported since embracing Islam in the 1970s may channel money to groups the U.S. deems non grata.

Something like those American movers and shakers who do business with Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 killers came from? Not exactly. Those people work directly, get lots of money in return, and do not get their flights interrupted.

Nor do the industrialists -- likewise tied, really tied, to the Bush administration -- who sold so much hardware to Saddam Hussein over the years. Compared to a fellow with controversial opinions who wants to visit the United States, what kind of threat could a mere supplier of a dictator pose to us?

Such questions might have been fodder for lively classroom discussions, had Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss professor and author who has lectured frequently in the U.S. and around the world, not had his visa revoked within weeks of starting this semester at Notre Dame.

Last week, a university spokesman said Ramadan was reapplying for a visa "because various officials of the State Department, publicly and privately, have issued the opinion that he should." The spokesman said he'd been told no more, and the State Department declined to comment to me about this hopeful sign, so the Kafkaesque mystery remains.

All the department would say to outraged Notre Damers and Muslim Americans back in July was that the USA Patriot Act was invoked. It allows for visas to be pulled for a wide range of reasons, including the perception one's political activities foster terrorism. Some would argue that treating eminent Muslims as criminals is a political activity that could catalyze terrorism.

Pipes and his influential band of anti-Palestinian brothers have tried to link Ramadan to terror, but his large body of writing establishes him as a critic of American-Israeli policies and Islamic extremism alike. He does stand guilty as charged of having a grandfather who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a radical group that espoused but ultimately renounced violence as a means of self-determination.

Ramadan would urge that the United States renounce violence as a means of determination for others. Like Yusuf Islam, he voices views that draw criticism. This used to be OK in the enlightened West. Now we are supposed to be afraid to let these views fly into South Bend, where some of the world's keenest liberal and conservative minds are waiting to engage them.

Ooo, baby, baby, it's a wild post-9/11 world. And no one to defend us from Jessica Simpson.

More Sterilizations

Ultra-conservative Senatorial candidate from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, has now admitted to performing "lots" of sterilizations on underage women.

From an article in Salon.com:

Okla. GOP Senate hopeful did sterilizations

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Ron Jenkins

Sept. 24, 2004 | OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Coburn, a physician accused of sterilizing a young woman without her permission 14 years ago, now says he has performed similar procedures on "lots'' of underage women at their request.

In an interview this week on the Tulsa radio station KRMG, Coburn was asked: "To your knowledge, could this situation have happened, or has happened with any other women?''

Coburn replied: "I've done this lots to women who have come in with emergency things who have asked me to sterilize them, underage. When they've already had three babies.''

Jay Parmley, state Democratic chairman, called Thursday on Coburn to detail "how many underage women he has sterilized.''

Coburn spokesman John Hart said the candidate would not answer specific questions about how many medical procedures he has performed. "It's a deliberate effort on the behalf of Brad Carson to avoid talking about his liberal voting record,'' Hart said.

Coburn and Carson, a Democrat, are locked in a tight Senate race for the post Republican Don Nickles is leaving after 24 years. The race could be pivotal in the battle for control of the Senate.

The campaign became even more divisive with the emergence of details about the sterilization 14 years ago.

Coburn performed the procedure on the woman during an operation to remove an ectopic pregnancy, a dangerous condition in which an embryo was growing in her fallopian tube. He surgically removed the tube and tied off her other fallopian tube, leaving her sterile.

The woman says she never consented to the procedure. He said he got oral permission for the sterilization, but a nurse failed to get written consent.

Coburn has said he intentionally did not report the sterilization on a Medicaid reimbursement to ensure the woman would not have to pay for the procedure. Coburn said his political foes are pushing the issue to hurt his campaign even though the women's 1991 lawsuit over the matter was dropped.

Parmley said Coburn's remarks about the other sterilizations raise ``serious questions'' about "values and ethics,'' especially if Medicaid funding was involved.

Burning Bush

A quote from Shrub's autobiography, taken from a column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times:

George W. Bush was a supporter of the war in Vietnam. For a while.

As he explained in his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House":

"My inclination was to support the government and the war until proven wrong, and that only came later, as I realized we could not explain the mission, had no exit strategy, and did not seem to be fighting to win."

Extraordinary insight from a president leading us down the golden path to death and humiliation.

FDA's Home County Reaches Out To Canada

This might actually get their attention. The home county in Maryland of the Food And Drug Administration approved a plan for county residents and government to buy prescription medications from pharmacies in Canada.

Montgomery Passes Drug Import Plan
Council in FDA's Home County Votes to Defy Law and Buy From Canada

By Cameron W. Barr and Tim Craig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 22, 2004; Page A01

The Montgomery County Council voted yesterday to begin buying medications in Canada, joining a handful of local governments and nearly 2 million U.S. consumers in defying federal law.

The council's decision will give as many as 85,000 county employees, retirees and their dependents the option of obtaining lower-cost "maintenance" medications from a Canadian vendor as soon as February. Proponents say the county could save as much as $20 million a year if members of its health plans fully embrace the initiative.

Montgomery's action reflects rising frustration with the federal government, which declines to approve Canadian imports but does not bar individuals from ordering or bringing in such drugs or stop local governments from facilitating their efforts.

"What we are seeing all across the country is that the credibility of the Food and Drug Administration is being questioned," said Council President Steven A. Silverman (D-At Large).

In many cases, drugs sold in Canada are produced in the United States under the supervision of the FDA and sold at lower prices in Canada as a result of government regulation. But FDA officials say they cannot guarantee the safety of substances that have left the tightly regulated U.S. pharmaceutical industry. Even reimported drugs, in the FDA's eyes, are illegal.

Because the FDA is based in Rockville, the council's action may resonate more loudly than similar steps taken by other communities. "Clearly the fact that the county in which the majority of FDA employees live and work would ignore the FDA's fundamental statutes is an example of the level of concern about the high cost of drugs," said William K. Hubbard, associate FDA commissioner.

He reiterated warnings that the federal government might go to court to block the program but acknowledged that it has refrained so far from using legal action to challenge local governments that have drug importation options for their health plan members.

Council member Tom Perez (D-Silver Spring), the main sponsor of Montgomery's initiative, acknowledged that the council risks court action. "Are we pushing the envelope? You bet," he said. "But there is a significant basis for pushing the envelope."

That basis includes a track record of satisfaction among other local governments that have turned to Canadian pharmacies to reduce health care costs.

Montgomery, Ala., has been offering employees, retirees and dependents the opportunity to buy drugs from Canadian pharmacies for two years. "We have had absolutely no complaints or problems associated with the program," said John Carnell, the city's risk manager. "There are no safety issues -- not a one."

Carnell said the city cut its pharmaceutical-buying budget by $500,000 in the first year, from $1.8 million to $1.3 million.

Another leader in the municipal caravan to Canada is Springfield, Mass., which launched its program in July 2003. Former mayor Michael J. Albano, who established the city's program and who now acts as a consultant to other communities, also insisted "that there are no safety issues."

"This is a popular program," he said. "It has consumer appeal and voter appeal."

But safety is central to concerns raised by the Maryland Pharmacists Association, which has opposed Montgomery's effort. "We fear the drugs will come from Third World countries," said Howard Schiff, executive director of the association. He said Canadian pharmacies "are importing drugs from other countries to fill prescriptions they have for export to the United States."

Council members said they were convinced that the county could design a safe program that would withstand legal challenge and save the county $15 million to $20 million a year.

There was little suspense about the outcome of the council's deliberations, because a majority of the nine members has been on record for many weeks in support of the initiative. The resolution passed 7 to 2.

Council member Michael L. Subin (D-At Large) voted against the measure. "I do not believe a body that makes laws should encourage others to go and break the law," he said.

The other opponent, council member Michael Knapp (D-Upcounty), stressed safety and the effect that the program might have on the county's biotechnology industry.

Patrick Kelly, vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, expressed worry about the financial implications. "We are concerned that this signifies a growing willingness of government entities to consider imposing price controls on drug companies," he said in a statement.

Though the council in the past has approved resolutions critical of federal policies, Neal Potter, a former Democratic council member and county executive, said he could not remember another instance in which the county acted in apparent contravention of federal law. "It sets a precedent," he said, adding that he supports the council's action.

The current county executive, Douglas M. Duncan (D), on Monday gave his support to another council initiative to reduce drug costs, a discount card that will be available to all residents. Issued by a pharmacy benefits manager, the card lets individuals take advantage of the county's buying power, yielding discounts of as much as 20 percent below retail prices.

Duncan has said he opposes implementing a program that would violate the law and has requested that the state ask the FDA to issue a waiver that would allow Montgomery to go ahead with its plan to import drugs.

Nelson Sabatini, secretary of the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, expressed doubt about the request. "I do not know there is such a thing as a waiver, and I do not know what authority the FDA has" to grant a waiver, he said.

In the case of the Municipal and County Government Employees Organization, a union for county workers, it will fall to Duncan to negotiate language allowing union members to import prescription drugs from Canada. Gino Renne, president of the union local, said that his organization supported the council's action but that it creates a Catch-22 for Duncan.

Wes Girling, director of benefits for Montgomery County public schools, said the school system would move immediately to begin soliciting bids from vendors to import prescription drugs. "This is really a framework for us to go forward," Girling said. "I look at it as the big picture blessing to proceed."

No Dissent Allowed

Given how carefully audiences for Shrub rallies (both his and hers) are screened, it's a true surprise this woman managed to get in.

Laura Bush heckled during campaign speech

HAMILTON, New Jersey (CNN) -- The mother of a soldier killed in Iraq was arrested Thursday after interrupting a campaign speech by first lady Laura Bush. As police hauled her away, she shouted, "Police brutality."

Wearing a T-shirt with the message "President Bush You Killed My Son," Sue Niederer of nearby Hopewell screamed questions at the first lady as the audience tried to drown her out by chanting, "Four more years! Four more years!"

She pressed on, refused to leave and eventually police removed her from the firehouse rally.

The first lady finished her speech, praising the administration's achievements in the war on terror and the economy.

Outside, Niederer said she wanted to ask Laura Bush "Why the senators, the legislators, the congressmen, why aren't their children serving?"

She went on to blame the president for the death of her 24-year-old son, Army First Lieutenant Seth Dvorin. He was killed while trying to defuse a roadside bomb that exploded on him.

"My son was in the Army, and he was killed February third this year," she said.

As the Hamilton police and Secret Service agents surrounded her and reporters pressed her with questions, she held her ground, claiming "I had my ticket" to attend the speech by the first lady.

Police subsequently handcuffed her and she was led away to a nearby van. As she was escorted, she repeatedly shouted "Police brutality" and demanded to know her rights and the charges.

Later, she was charged with defiant trespass and released.

Since her son's death, the bereaved mother has spoken out repeatedly against the ongoing Iraq conflict. She is active in an anti-war protest group, Military Families Speak Out.

The Pittsburgh Independent Media Center reports she recently participated in demonstrations around the Republican National Convention in New York.

In March, The Toronto Star reported that she appeared outside Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. where many of the wounded soldiers are treated; Dover Air Force base where soldier remains arrive; and shouting at Secretary of State Colin Powell's motorcade after a speech at Princeton University.

Neither the Bush campaign nor the Hamilton Police would comment on the incident.

Oklahoma Senate Race

I'm not native to this state, but I've adopted it. Or it has adopted me, hard to tell. :)

This is what the crucial race to fill retiring Senator Don Nickle's seat looks like.

It ain't pretty.

From Salon.com

Medicine man
The future of GOP control of the Senate depends on Oklahoma Republican candidate Tom Coburn, a former doctor who has covered up a scandal from his past until now.

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By Robert Schlesinger

Sept. 13, 2004 | Tom Coburn may be indispensable to the Republicans' effort to hold on to their majority in the U.S. Senate in November. "He is their best hope for keeping an Oklahoma seat Republican in the closely divided Senate," wrote conservative pundit Robert Novak.

In 2003, President Bush appointed Coburn chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS, giving him a prominent platform as he prepared to run for the Senate. If elected, Coburn would not only help the GOP maintain its power but would surely emerge as one of the most outspoken conservatives in the country. The former three-term congressman, one of Newt Gingrich's "revolutionaries" from the class of 1994, an Okie from Muskogee, thunders for traditional values and crusades for limited government. He packages this political agenda in his image as a kindly family doctor -- an obstetrician.

For Coburn, the imminent danger facing America is apparently not terrorism but the "gay agenda." His thumping about this menace within contributed to the pressure that led to Bush's endorsement of a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. At a Republican meeting this spring, Coburn warned: "The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power ... That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda."

In 1997, Coburn proposed a bill that would have ended anonymous testing for HIV/AIDS and required reporting the names of those who tested positive to public health authorities, among other draconian measures -- including withholding Medicaid funding from states that failed to comply.

But an incident involving Medicaid from Coburn's past as a physician may cloud his current ambition to fill the seat being vacated by Sen. Don Nickles. He is squaring off against Democratic Rep. Brad Carson, who succeeded Coburn in the House in 2000.

According to records obtained by Salon, Coburn filed an apparently fraudulent Medicaid claim in 1990, which he admitted in his own testimony in a civil malpractice suit brought against him 14 years ago by a former female patient. The suit alleged that Coburn had sterilized her without her consent. It eventually was dismissed after the plaintiff failed to appear for the trial. In his sworn testimony, Coburn admitted he sterilized the then 20-year-old woman without securing her written consent as required by law. He blamed the omission on a clerical error, but maintained that he had her oral consent for the procedure. (Salon has been unable to contact the woman and is withholding her name out of respect for her privacy.) Coburn also revealed under oath that he had charged the procedure to Medicaid -- despite knowing that Medicaid, also known as Title 19, does not cover the cost of sterilization for anyone under age 21.

This previously unpublicized episode from his medical practice cuts to the heart of Coburn's political identity. He has built his congressional career on extreme gestures against government programs, exceeded in virulence only by his pronouncements on social issues, including advocating the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions under any circumstances other than those threatening the life of the mother. (And yet, as a doctor, he has performed abortions.)

Local political observers say the likely result of the Oklahoma Senate race is a tossup, with a possible slight advantage to Coburn because of Bush's overwhelming support in the state. The latest poll, conducted Sept. 1 and 2 by the Democratic firm Westhill Partners, had the race within the margin of error, with Carson leading 44 to 42 percent.

Coburn was swept into Congress as a member of the Republican class of 1994 that gained control of the House for the first time in 40 years and installed Newt Gingrich as speaker. "He really drank the Kool-Aid with the class of '94; he was one of the real far-right guys," says Kenneth Hicks, a political science professor at Rogers State University in Claremore, Okla.

"He's a principled, pompous member," said a senior Republican staffer turned lobbyist. "He's one of those '94 guys, and there were a certain percentage of them who were so anti-system that they don't want to play the game. And from a leadership perspective and a lobbyist perspective, we don't like those kind of people ... He's going to be a frickin' nightmare in the Senate [if he wins]."

In Congress, Coburn distinguished himself, even from other conservative Republicans, by actively opposing federal spending for his own state. After unsuccessfully trying to stop disaster relief after a 1999 tornado, Coburn called the measure "malarkey." His dogmatism made him a thorn in the side of GOP members who might rhetorically denounce "big government" but still legislate plenty of pork. In 1996, after voting for provisions of an agriculture bill that aided Oklahoma farmers, Coburn told the Wall Street Journal that it made him sick for days afterward and that Washington was "a dirty place." In 1997, he boasted, "I don't ask for anything from Appropriations." The year after that, he complained to USA Today that he was underpaid as a congressman: "You have to be able to earn more money to attract good people."

As far right as Coburn is on fiscal issues, he is even farther right on social issues. "I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life," he told the Associated Press in July. Last week, he told the Hugo [Okla.] Daily News: "We need someone who will speak morally on the issues and not run from the criticism of the national press ... We need to have moral clarity about our leaders. I have a 100 percent pro-life record. I don't apologize for saying we need to protect the unborn. Do you realize that if all those children had not been aborted, we wouldn't have any trouble with Medicare and Social Security today? That's another 41 million people."

At a House subcommittee meeting on the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, which heard testimony on the danger of the parasite cryptosporidium, which had killed 104 and sickened 400,000 in Milwaukee in 1993 and killed 19 in Las Vegas in 1994, Coburn displayed his expertise as a doctor. The lethal spores, he held forth, "can sometimes ... be very helpful -- for doctors -- because it helps us identify those people who in fact are immuno-compromised."

A year later, Coburn gained a moment of national attention when he condemned NBC for televising the Academy Award-winning movie on the Holocaust "Schindler's List." According to Coburn, the film encouraged "irresponsible sexual behavior," and he called for outrage against the network from "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere." He added, "I cringe when I realize that there were children all across this nation watching this program." Even conservative avatar William Bennett felt compelled to rebuke him: "These are very unfortunate and foolish comments."

In 1999, after the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, Coburn opposed President Clinton's proposal for making adults liable if they allow their children to buy guns and harm others. "If I wanted to buy a bazooka to use in a very restricted way, to do something, I ought to be able to do that," said Coburn.

Medical fraud has been one of Coburn's signature issues. In his freshman term, he introduced the Health Care Anti-Fraud Act of 1995, which focused mainly on Medicare fraud but also touched on Medicaid. Speaking on the House floor on behalf of a Republican Medicare bill that year, Coburn said, "Our goal is to eliminate fraud and abuse. The way we do that is to make sure we change the expectation of those who are defrauding and abusing; that we, in fact, will catch them. If we change that expectation, then we will limit greatly the amount of people, and number of people, who attempt to defraud."

Unsurprisingly, in proposing this legislation Coburn was careful not to raise his own case involving Medicaid fraud.

In the early hours of Nov. 7, 1990, Dr. Coburn was summoned to Muskogee Regional Medical Center to attend to a pregnant patient who had been admitted with severe pains. The patient was a 20-year-old woman in her third pregnancy. After each of her first two pregnancies, she had asked Coburn to perform a tubal ligation to ensure that she would not have any more children, but he had refused, according to his testimony, telling her that Medicaid did not cover elective sterilization for women under 21. "I told her that she was too young, that it was irreversible, that she needed to wait," Coburn recounted telling the patient in December 1989. "I also told her that [Medicaid] wouldn't cover it."

Coburn found that she had an ectopic pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg is implanted somewhere other than the womb. In this case it was in her left fallopian tube. Coburn operated, removing both the left tube and the unaffected right one. The woman subsequently filed a malpractice suit, charging that he had tied her healthy tube without her permission.

In his Feb. 27, 1992, deposition in the case, Coburn insisted that the woman had repeatedly asked him to remove the second tube. In fact, she had signed a written consent form for the operation to deal with the ectopic pregnancy, but had not signed a consent form for the second procedure. Coburn testified that he had asked a nurse to obtain that form and that he did not know why it had not happened.

The suit was initially dismissed in October 1992 because it had been filed beyond the applicable statute of limitations, but was reinstated upon appeal. It was finally dismissed in December 1995 because, according to court records, the woman, for unexplained reasons, failed to show up for the trial.

In his deposition, Coburn also explained how he had gotten around Medicaid's restriction against coverage of the costs of elective sterilization for a woman under 21: He did not report the ligation of the right tube on his discharge summary. "The reason that it was not dictated as both [procedures] is because she was under 21 and was being paid for by Title 19, and to have a tubal ligation under 21, Title 19 would not have covered that," he said. He noted that under the law, sterilization even as an incidental operation accompanying a covered procedure -- i.e., removing the left fallopian tube to deal with an ectopic pregnancy -- would have nullified eligibility for federal reimbursement.

"I did not dictate [the second procedure] because of her Title 19 status," he testified. "If I had dictated both, it would have been a sterilization procedure and she wouldn't have had it covered."

After the operation Coburn admonished both the woman and her mother not to discuss it. "She asked me, since she was under 21, how did I tie her tubes -- since I told her I wouldn't and Title 19 wouldn't pay for it," Coburn said in the deposition. "I said I did it anyway and that she shouldn't talk about it because ... I did a procedure that was not recognized under Title 19 reimbursement." Thus Coburn admitted he had tried to silence his patient because he knew he was billing Medicaid illegally.

D. McCarty Thornton, former chief counsel to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services and a specialist in healthcare fraud, said that anyone claiming Medicaid funding has certain disclosure duties. He told Salon that in claiming funding, "the fundamental legal duty is that [you] must be honest and completely open about the claim and about the circumstances that led to the claim. That being the fundamental starting point, you can break that legal duty down into some pieces ... There is a duty not to file a claim where you know that the services you provided are not reimbursable under the rules of the federal program ... You have a duty to disclose all the facts that you know to be material to the government. You have a duty to accurately compile the underlying documentation, such as the surgical records. If you knowingly fail any of these duties, then that is healthcare fraud."

Salon could not reach Coburn for comment. His campaign manager, Michael Schwartz, said that he was not familiar with the case and that it was "way off the radar screen" because the case happened 12 years ago.

At least, it is Coburn's hope that the scandal passes below the radar in his contest with Carson, who is in almost every respect Coburn's opposite. Unlike Coburn, Carson has fought hard to win federal funding for his district -- for transportation, rural healthcare, education and environmental cleanup. For his efforts, he was reelected by 74 percent in 2002.

Carson is a sixth-generation Oklahoman whose mother's family came to the state on the Cherokee Nation's Trail of Tears. His father worked for the Indian Bureau. Carson attended Baylor University, a conservative Baptist university in Texas, becoming its first graduate to win a Rhodes scholarship in 75 years. After finishing at the top of his class at the University of Oklahoma law school, he joined a major law firm, where he devoted one-third of his time to pro bono work. In 1997, he was a White House Fellow serving as a special assistant to the secretary of defense. A member of the Cherokee Nation, Carson helped establish a Native American Museum in Oklahoma City.

"This is a guy who knows how to wear cowboy boots with his Brooks Brothers suit, and he sounds like he's from here," says Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma. "He's trying to thread the needle that all Democrats have to thread, and that is simultaneously satisfy this very extreme religious and social conservatism of Oklahomans but also make an appeal to the strong populism of the state."

Although the candidates are from the same district in eastern Oklahoma, Coburn may have the advantage in building a statewide majority. "Tom Coburn delivered 4,000 babies over his career in the Second District," one Democrat familiar with state politics said. "It may sound very naive for me to say this, but I really think it's going to help him [there] a bunch."

It remains a persistent problem for the Carson campaign that Coburn's views don't seem too far out of the mainstream to many Oklahomans. "A lot of positions that they're going to try to make out as extremist are kind of semi-mainstream in Oklahoma," says V. Burns Hargis, chairman of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce and a political commentator on television. "It's just a hard sell to try to run to the left of the guy in Oklahoma."

"It's a great challenge," Carson said in an interview with Salon. "We rarely point out the things that are truly wacky ... We point out that [Coburn] treats politics like a game, as if it weren't important, that you can go up to Washington and try to howl into the void and make points that make you feel a little better but never do anything for the people back home who are desperate for your help."

According to Hicks, Carson is running a two-level campaign. "He's on the air right now, and he's trying to prove that he's got Oklahoma values and is a conservative," Hicks said. "Below the radar they're doing a lot of GOTV [get out the vote], and they're spending a lot of time talking about Coburn's radical libertarianism on fiscal issues and his conservatism on social issues. They're trying to say to individual voters, 'This guy is really not in line with Oklahoma values. You may be a conservative, but he's a radical.'"

Coburn, meanwhile, continues to spout off. Last week, he declared Oklahoma lagging in economic development because "you have a bunch of crapheads in Oklahoma City that have killed the vision of anybody wanting to invest in Oklahoma." His spokesperson could not explain who or what Coburn was talking about. What's more, Coburn proclaimed the Senate race a "battle of good vs. evil."

"He's on his own private mission with his own small band of followers," Carson told the Washington Post. "With everything that's going on in the world, using good and evil to describe a Senate race turns off voters."

Whether the voters of Oklahoma regard Coburn as an exemplar of moral purity after learning about his false Medicaid filing may well determine not only the outcome of the contest there but the fate of the Senate.

-----------------

And a follow up story - the woman in question comes forth.

From The Washington Post

Woman Who Sued Coburn Goes Public
She Calls GOP Candidate's Remarks on Case 'Not True'

By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A04

TULSA, Sept. 16 -- A woman who claimed in a lawsuit 13 years ago that the Republican Senate candidate here, a family physician, sterilized her without her consent came forward Thursday to stand by her story, throwing one of the most competitive Senate races in the country into further turmoil.

Her voice shaking at times, Angela Plummer said that while Tom Coburn saved her life during a 1990 surgery to remove a fallopian tube in which a fetus had lodged, she was "stunned" to learn that he had also removed her remaining good tube.

"Dr. Tom Coburn sterilized me without my consent -- verbal or written -- and I know he's stating that he got oral consent. That is not true," Plummer said at a news conference. "I'm not up here to smear him. I'm up here because I wanted to have more children, and he took that away from me."

Coburn is embroiled in a tight race with Rep. Brad Carson (D), and the conservative Muskogee doctor has accused Democrats of leaking the story to "trash" his character. Plummer said Thursday that she had not spoken to anyone with partisan interests but came forward after she had read the initial article about the sterilization on Salon.com earlier in the week.

The race is considered one the most critical in the country as both parties fight for control of the U.S. Senate. A spokesman for Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Thursday that the senator was scheduled to visit Oklahoma to campaign for Coburn on Friday. Vice President Cheney is due here next week on Coburn's behalf. The story has dominated the local news this week, with national Democrats jumping into the fray. Polls show the race is a dead heat.

Plummer's lawsuit was dismissed and reinstated in a statute-of-limitations squabble but never went to trial.

Coburn and Plummer, then 20, agree that she contacted the doctor with an ectopic pregnancy -- when a fetus lodges in a fallopian tube. Both also agree that by the time he operated, she was bleeding to death.

On Wednesday, Coburn said that he removed the other tube because the patient had asked him to do so several times previously and because her mother had also requested that it be done that night. (Plummer confirmed that her mother had done so, in an interview with the Tulsa World.) Coburn's campaign released a statement Thursday from a nurse who stated that Plummer had "begged" him to remove the other tube.

Plummer, now 34 and the mother of two children born before her troubled pregnancy, said that she did not learn what he had done until weeks later when she went for a checkup. "[We] went into a room by ourselves. He said, 'By the way, I tied your tubes. But do not tell anyone, because I will get in trouble.' "