Month: October 2005

from Our Word

Governor Mel Blunt signed an omnibus bill to restrict access to abortion in Missouri only weeks ago, but the sole abortion providing facility in Springfield, Missouri has already been forced to close its doors–leaving women in that region 160 miles away from the nearest doctor who is willing to provide abortion care.

The new law requires that doctors who perform abortions must hold professional privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of any location where an abortion is performed.  But abortion providing physicians now have become such a rare breed that many must travel considerable distances, so that the nearest hospital where a doctor has admitting privileges can lie much farther than 30 miles away from the clinic where she or he provides abortion care.

Like all TRAP laws, its provisions might apply to doctors, but women are the ones who get trapped.

I’m usually one for cold calculation over impassioned rhetoric.

Usually.  

So fucking sue me.

One of my biggest problems with our society right now is that we live in an atmosphere of fear (an atmosfear?  Maybe.)

And while we like to blame the Republicans for all of it, I’m here to say that fear is alive and well on the left too.

President Bush was elected (?) based on fear.  Fear of terrorist attacks.  Mushroom clouds, foreign crowds, mass destruction, reconstruction.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.  And I feel fine.

</R.E.M.>

In this season of Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and Alpha, America is forced to air its dirty laundry.  There were earlier attempts to clean house; however, America was entrenched in self-righteousness.  In August 2005, three reports discussing racial disparity in health care were released.  Nonetheless, the myth lingered.

People claimed, “The United States is a melting pot.”  It is not.  They said, “People are created and treated equally.”  The truth is they are not.  When we consider what these studies revealed of health care practices, we know this.  Discrimination is prevalent.

When the research was first reported numerous persons ignored the truth and they could easily.  Then the storms came. Facts surfaced.  They were visible on our television screens.  We read of them in our newspapers and heard them on the radio.  A society that thought itself color-blind realized it was not.

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note uses his government sources tonite to weave together the details revealed in the latest NYT article (via Truthout) about what Cheney knew and when he knew it.

Clemons warns that it is speculation, but it ties together angles and players in a way that we’ve all suspected.

This is where things get interesting. Although Fitzgerald may not need to establish this connection, it seems increasingly plausible to TWN that Tenet and Cheney had some kind of exchange regarding Joe and Valerie Wilson. Cheney then passed off the information to Libby along with a few expletives about Wilson, implying that the @#$%@%er should be done in.

The question is how did Libby then churn up more info on Wilson without other parts of the “untrusted” bureaucracy spitting in his face or reporting his sins?

My hunch is that he went to trusted spear-carriers for Vice President Cheney — the office and staff of Under Secretary of State John Bolton. Fred Fleitz, Bolton’s chief of staff, maintained his CIA WINPAC portfolio and access as an active duty CIA staff member while he operated as Bolton’s “acting” chief of staff. We know that Fleitz was a key part of the intelligence cherry-picking/stove-piping operation when it came to both the intel and policy response to various global WMD concerns — in North Korea, Libya, Iran, and Iraq.

We also know that David Wurmser and John Hannah, who have both apparently cooperated after threats of legal action (i.e., time behind bars) with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald worked both for John Bolton’s operation and the Vice President’s office.

I recently consulted with a number of senior State Department officials about the level of interaction between Vice President Cheney’s office and John Bolton’s office — and was informed that there was “intense” exchange between them, constant. One said that “Bolton and his team were operatives of Vice President Cheney inside the State Department establishment — there to subvert Armitage and Powell wherever they could, and if not subvert, then there to spy on the them and report back.

TWN knows nothing more than what it speculates to be a plausible scenario. Tonight, I consulted with three senior State Department officials, one currently at the State Department and two who are now outside the Department. All three of them agreed that the scenario I have described about Fleitz being the source of information about Plame’s covert WINPAC role — and this information then passing from Fleitz and/or Bolton to Scooter Libby “is not unbelievable.”