Magpie

Saturday, November 19

The 'Rendon Group'?

Not exactly a household name, is it?

But the Rendon Group is the PR firm that turned the pathetic Iraqi National Congress and convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi into important actors in the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and almost got Chalabi the Iraqi presidency. And it was the firm that engineered a PR campaign on behalf of the Kuwaiti government that helped convince the US public that the first Gulf War was necessary. And it did the PR work to create a political climate in which the US could invade Panama and depose then-president Manuel Noriega.

And, not least of all, the Rendon Group is the PR firm that has helped Dubya's administration to manipulate news coverage in the US and world press.

Rolling Stone [of all places] has an excellent report by James Bamford that outlines the history of this behind-the-scenes player that's been so important in the last 15 years or so of US political history.

Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began ... in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad....

Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through an organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.

To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.

Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.

When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."

You can find more info on the the Rendon Group here at Wikipedia and at here at Source Watch.

In These Times had an excellent story in 2003 on the Rendon Group's role in selling Dubya's invasion of Iraq. You can read it here.

More: Bamford's story obviously hit where it hurt. The Rendon Group has sent a letter to Rolling Stone, complaining about 'the many mistakes' in the Bamford article. You might want to go read it yourself and decide who you think is telling the truth.

Still more: Over at War and Piece, Laura Rozen has some interesting comments on Rendon's letter to Rolling Stone.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:52 PM | Get permalink

That's not all, folks!

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald says that he will be calling another federal grand jury to hear evidence in the Plamegate investigation.

While Fitzgerald has not given a reason for calling a new grand jury, it's likely that this move is connected to Washington Post assistant editor Bob Woodward's revelation earlier this week that a White House official other than Lewis Libby told him that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative in June of 2003. Libby, you'll recall, was indicted on perjury charges by Fitzgerald's last grand jury.

Via Washington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:39 AM | Get permalink

Spreading through the press like a toxic plume.

If you wanted a quick course in what's currently wrong with 'mainstream' US journalism, you'd have a hard time beating this article by Tim Rutten. He convincingly shows the connections between Plamegate, the Dubya administration's manipulation of the news media, and the death throes of the investigative journalism tradition that started with Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate reporting in the 1970s. It's a must-read.

Two things have distinguished this Bush administration's efforts at press manipulation from those that have gone before.

One is their sweep and consistency. There has been bribery — as in the egregious case of the wretched Williams. There has been deception — as in the planting of phony news videos. There have been alleged violations of federal laws and regulations — as in Tomlinson's and Rove's efforts to subvert public television. There has been stealth — as in the whispering campaign to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

And, of course, there has been good old-fashioned bullying, as in the president's and vice-president's assertions that raising questions about their push to war or the torture of U.S. captives is somehow "reprehensible" and unpatriotic. It's a melancholy comment on the state of the American press that it takes a former director of Central Intelligence, Adm. Stansfield Turner, to identify Dick Cheney for what he has become — "vice president for torture" — and that he had to do it in a foreign forum, on Britain's ITV news, as he did Thursday.

The other reason all this has more or less succeeded and gone all but unremarked upon is that the administration has adroitly availed itself of the cultural complicity that prevails in a fin de siècle Washington press corps living out the decadence of an increasingly discredited reporting style. As the Valerie Plame scandal and its spreading taint have made all too clear, the trade in confidentiality and access that has made stars of reporters like Bob Woodward and Judy Miller now is utterly bankrupt.

It still may call itself investigative journalism — and so it once was — but now it's really just a glittering and carefully choreographed waltz in which all the dancers share the unspoken agreement that the one unpardonable faux pas is to ask who's calling the tune.

Via LA Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

Look out Florida!

It looks like Tropical Storm Gamma is coming your way.

Tropical Storm Gamma????

[Map: NOAA/NWS]
According to the latest discussion by National Weather Service meterorologists, Tropical Storm Gamma is expected to hit southern Florida sometime on Monday. At this point, it's not certain whether it will strengthen into a hurricane.

And yes, this is the first time since they've been keeping count that there have been so many tropical storms and hurricanes in one season.

Via National Hurricane Center.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Friday, November 18

Paul Krugman's latest column.

We don't have the bootleg, but they do.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:58 AM | Get permalink

UN human rights investigators won't be going to Guantánamo.

UN human rights investigators have rejected an invitation to visit the US prison at Guantánamo, saying that US authorities wouldn't accept 'standard terms' for a 'credible, objective and fair assessment of the situation of the detainees.'

The US holds more than 500 people at Guantánamo, only 9 of whom have been charged with any crime. UN investigators have been trying to visit the prison for four years; the US had only agreed to a visit this past October. After that invitation, UN investigators warned US authorities that they would need to talk to prisoners as well as to officials and prison staff — and that they would turn down the invitation unless this standard requirement was met. Despite the warning, the US said it would not allow prisoner visits.

US authorities are justifying this refusal by pointing to prisoner visits carried out by representatives of the International Red Cross. Since one international organization is already talking to prisoners, said US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 'we're not inclined to add [to] the number of people that would be given that extensive access.' As Rumsfeld well knows, however, the Red Cross does not make its reports on prisoner conditions public. And, as Rumsfeld also knows, Red Cross access to Guantánamo prisoners is useless for the purpose of public monitoring of those prisoners' conditions.

It's important to note the US was putting other conditions on a UN visit to Guantánamo. Of the UN's five human rights envoys, for example, the US has already refused to allow two of them to visit:

Washington invited ... Austria's Manfred Nowak, special investigator on torture; Pakistan's Asma Jahangir, who focuses on religious freedom; and Algeria's Leila Zerrougui, who looks into arbitrary detention.

It did not accept Argentina's Leandro Despouy, special investigator on the independence of judges and lawyers, and New Zealand's Paul Hunt, special rapporteur on mental and physical health, who were included in the envoys' request.

Despite this restriction, the remaining three investigators were still willing to visit Guantánamo — until the refusal to allow them to speak with prisoners, that is.

We have to wonder whether the US invitation for UN investigators to come to Guantánamo was anything other than a PR exercise, given that the restrictions that the US was trying to place on that visit would have rendered any visit pointless. What's most likely, we think, is that Dubya's administration deliberately set things up so that the UN would have no alternative but to refuse to visit the prison. After the refusal, US authorities could then say that they were willing to allow investigators to look around, but that the UN wasn't willing to come. Basically, Washington would get the political benefits of allowing an inspection without having to worry about an actual inspection finding any 'messy' facts at Guantánamo.

Given that Dubya's administration has been willing to play politics with the lives of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're sure that Washington would have no problems playing politics with the lives of its Guantánamo prisoners.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:49 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, November 17

Playing politics with the nation's health.

US preparations for an avian flu pandemic took a hit today as conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives forced the GOP House leadership to cut out emergency money for pandemic preparations from a major health bill. Amazingly, these right-wingers thought that approving the US$ 8 billion for stockpiling flu vaccines and antiviral drugs was less important than making sure that this emergency spending was paid for by taking the axe to other federal programs.

We'll just note that these same right-wing House members seem to have no trouble voting for Dubya's budget-busting approprations for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:18 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, November 16

Mission un-accomplished.

Another example of how the White House changing its message of the day to suit the administation's current political needs.

What's that message, again?

<May 1, 2003 [AFP] and November 11, 2005 [Eric Draper/White House]
Dubya and his handlers certainly do think we all have short memories, don't they?

Via Blog for America and Wonkette.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:32 AM | Get permalink

Carnival of Feminists 3.

It's up here.

This time, the Carnival is hosted by Sour Duck, and has she ever put together a gigantic third edition. If you haven't caught the Carnival before, it's a semi-monthly roundup of the best feminist posts from around the web, appearing on the first and third Wednesday of each month.

The current Carnival has two parts: the first one looks back at 1970s feminism, and the second longer part is Sour Duck's own 'feminist cafeteria.' Since part of our still unfinished master's thesis deals with 1970s feminism — especially the lesbian-feminist thread — we're going to indulge ourself and excerpt the 1970s stuff.

But don't worry, there's still plenty more hot feminist links for you to follow after you arrive at Sour Duck.

Pen-Elayne on the Web balks at my "no nostalgia" directive and reminisces about consciousness raising groups at Rutgers University. I'm glad she did, as she concludes with a bloggy solution to avoid reinventing the feminist wheel

Did you know in 1979 some college bookstores refused to stock "Our Bodies, Ourselves"? I See Invisible People divulges this tidbit and others as she reflects on a '79 Women's Consciousness course. She contrasts that positive experience with today's marketing of "designer vaginas."

The Happy Feminist reviews her personal history with the '70s feminist text, "The First Sex," by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Although today she finds some of Davis' ideas "laughable," in the end she embraces the text, recognizing that its importance lies not in its historical accurancy but in its symbolic meaning.

Philobiblon gauges progress in Australia by revisiting the 1974 publication "Media She" in "How far have we come?" (Don't assume too much progress has been made. She concludes, "what has really not changed is in the nature and use of the visual images of women.")

Carrying on with the booky theme, midlife mama cites "The Second Sex" in a piece about teaching second wave feminism to 18 year olds. Her astute analysis of how cultural environments limit students' awareness of the need for equality is adroitly handled. (More, please, midlife mama!) Read her piece, titled "Second Wave Feminism, Beauvoir, and me."

Moving to the politics of advertisements, Culture Cat conducts a side-by-side study of magazine ads for deoderant. She compares a 1973 Mademoiselle ad and a more recent ad. The differences are startling. She solicits your thoughts for the comments section—you are all invited!

Finally, Lingual Tremors focuses on fashion in an essay that contrasts the 1970s to the present-day political/cultural climate that demands women dress as sophisticated sex-bots while remaining sexually ignorant. Her piece is creatively called "Wear Your Red Pumps, but Don't Use Them!"

That's only a fraction of the good stuff in the current Carnival, so get yourself over there and discover the rest!

The next Carnival, by the way, will be hosted by The Happy Feminist and it'll be unveiled on Wednesday, December 7. If you want to recommend a post for consideration — it can even be one of your own — send it to veryhappyfeminist AT yahoo DOT com and put 'Feminist Carnival' in the subject line. And if you want to keep posted on what's up with the Carnival, bookmark the home page.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:53 AM | Get permalink

Getting US some privacy.

Although the right to privacy is part of some states' constitutions [such as Alaska and California], there is no such right in the US Constitution. While the right of a woman to choose an abortion, for example, does rest on the right to privacy, that right exists only because of the Supreme Court's 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut. In that ruling, the justices held that Connecticut's ban on birth control violated the right to privacy of married couples. Even though a right to privacy wasn't spelled out in the Constitution, said the Court majority, the various protections granted to individuals under the Bill of Rights created 'penumbras' [zones] that have the effect of a constitutional right to privacy. Despite the Court's coninuing use of this implied right to privacy in deciding cases scuh as Roe v. Wade, that right has a precarious existence that depends on the continuing willingness of the Supremes to uphold it.

As columnist/writer Dan Savage points out, the question of whether the right to privacy exists and, if so, where in the Constitution it can be found comes back to vex the country every time that a Supreme Court seat needs to be filled. The new chief justice, John Roberts, expressed some doubts about how extensive that right is during his confirmation, and Samuel Alito is sure to be asked about it when his confirmation hearings begin in the new year. Savage suggests that it's time to turn the right to privacy into something beside a political [and judicial] football:

Well, if the right to privacy is so difficult for some people to locate in the Constitution, why don't we just stick it in there? Wouldn't that make it easier to find?

If the Republicans can propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, why can't the Democrats propose a right to privacy amendment? Making this implicit right explicit would forever end the debate about whether there is a right to privacy. And the debate over the bill would force Republicans who opposed it to explain why they don't think Americans deserve a right to privacy — which would alienate not only moderates, but also those libertarian, small-government conservatives who survive only in isolated pockets on the Eastern Seaboard and the American West.

Of course, passing a right to privacy amendment wouldn't end the debate over abortion — that argument would shift to the question of whether abortion fell under the amendment. But given the precedent of Roe, abortion rights would be on firmer ground than they are now.

This magpie thinks that Savage's solution is dead-on. How about it, Democrats?

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:07 AM | Get permalink

Iraq uncensored.

Part of the way that Dubya's administration has fought the war in Iraq is by controlling the images of that war that the US public sees. Remembering how uncensored photos and video from Vietnam helped erode support for that bloody and unnecessary war, the Pentagon and Defense Department have tried to channel as many photojournalists as possible into its 'embedded journalist' program, in which journalists are offered getting access to the front lines with US units in return for giving up a certain amount of control over what they're able to write about or photograph.

Many journalists have turned down this devil's bargain and have decided to go it alone in Iraq. Despite the problems and obvious dangers, staying independent is the only way they feel that the real story of the Iraq war can be told. A new book, Unembedded, showcases the work of four photojournalists who've chosen this path: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson and Rita Leistner. What we've seen of their work is powerful and heart-wrenching. At the risk of repeating a cliché, everyone who cares about what happens in Iraq should read this book.

Psychiatric patient in Baghdad

RASHAD PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, BAGHDAD, APRIL 17, 2004: A young patient, newly arrived from the southern Shiite town of Karbala, pleads to go home: "I don't belong here. Please don't make me spend the rest of my life here." [Photo © 2005 Rita Leistner]
From the foreward by veteran war photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths:

Photographers bearing irrefutable images pose difficulties for those in Washington who work on the principal that you can indeed fool most of the people most of the time. An eloquently captured view of the war in Iraq was feared by Washington insiders, who predicted that the truth could become a major problem. The entire Iraq misadventure, based on lies and deception, required a compliant media for support, and so a deal was struck.

Even loyal handmaidens can feel slighted, as did the major news media when they were prevented from covering Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf War in depth. The hollow excuse was that the press was to blame for the United States losing the Vietnam War. This lie eventually led to the currently accepted restrictions. So, for the American war on Iraq, a compromise was reached in which some seven hundred newsmen (and a few women) would be "embedded" with military units. For most of the media, the chance to get close to the action overrode professional judgement and the truth: a provision of the contract that journalists had to sign gave the military control over the output of an embedded newsman. Then there came the rugged training: reporters and photographers climbed ropes, lifted weights, crawled on their bellies, and trekked for miles.

Once in Iraq, these "trained" reporters became pawns of the military machine. Soldiers were armed with plastic cards printed with a list of answers to be parroted out if the media questioned them. "We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all" was one answer that must have confused the relatives of those people held in Abu Ghraib! Pentagon officials had already spelled out what "embedding for life" meant: "living, eating, moving in combat with the unit that you're attached to. If you decide to make the decision that you're no longer interested in the unit that you're with or you've covered them sufficiently, of course you can say, 'I want to try to retrograde back and leave the unit that I'm with.' But once you do that, there are no guarantees that you'll get another opportunity with that unit or necessarily even with another unit. . . . That's what I am talking about when I say a newsman 'embeds for life.'"

A photojournalist assigned to a unit that had seen little action noticed a firefight nearby. He asked the officer in charge if he could wander over to take pictures. He was told, "When you leave us you can never come back." The photographer decided to stay....

The fearless photographers in this book chose to retain their independence and objectivity rather than drag the second oldest profession down to the level of the oldest one. This choice led to a problem for the authors: how to get their photographs published in magazines that mainly run pictures reminiscent of Army recruiting posters. The one hundred thousand or so dead Iraqis are the invisible "others" whose corpses are never allowed to sully the pages of magazines dedicated to the trivial pursuit of gossip and celebrity chitchat....

This book is an antidote to the pap served to the American public, and it will increase in importance over time, because the hired revisionist historians will spread their lies for years to come.

Your grandchildren will appreciate this book, as will their grandchildren.

You can see more photos from the book here.

You can purchase Unembedded from the publisher here or from Powell's Books here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

Going down.

This year's polls have been a world of pain for the prez, as the chart below shows. It was compiled by Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin whose specialties include the statistical analysis of polls.

Dubya's popularity in 2005

[Chart: Charles Franklin]

Approval ratings of President Bush in 2005. The linear trend includes "step" changes following Hurricane Katrina and after the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The green local regression line smoothly changes to estimate the trend. Points are for all public polls from all polling organizations.

Franklin looks at Dubya's popularity from other angles here and here.

Via Political Arithmetik.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, November 15

Forget about that earlier denial, okay?

White phosphorus shells exploding over Fallujah

A week ago, we posted about an Italian television documentary that included video of the use of white phosphorus munitions by US forces during last year's attack on Fallujah. That documentary included graphic images of bodies burnt to the bone by some chemical agent, and interviews with former US servicemembers who fought in the Fallujah attack and confirmed the use of white phosphorus.

The US embassy in Italy immediately denied that the US uses 'white phosphorus as chemical weapons or as a surrogate.' [Original in Italian is here.]

Today that denial was, shall we say, 'modified' by the Pentagon, which now admits that US forces did indeed use white phosphorus during the Fallujah attack.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said that while white phosphorus is most frequently used to mark targets or obscure a position, it was used at times in Fallujah as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.

"It was not used against civilians," Venable said.

The spokesman referred reporters to an article in the March-April 2005 edition of the Army's Field Artillery magazine, an official publication, in which veterans of the Fallujah fight spelled out their use of white phosphorus and other weapons. The authors used the shorthand "WP" in referring to white phosphorus.

"WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition," the authors wrote. "We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE (high explosive)" munitions.

"We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

Although the Pentagon made its admission today, we note that the State Department 'officially' noticed this same 'new' information last week, updating the webpage it uses to comment on charges that the US used 'illegal' weapons in Fallujah. You'll note that the info is almost identical to what the Pentagon released today:

We have learned that some of the information we were provided in the above paragraph is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, "The Fight for Fallujah," in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, "as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes ...." The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.

So while both the Pentagon and State Department were denying charges that white phosphorus was used in Fallujah, an official Pentagon publication issued six months ago documenting the use of that type of munition in that specific operation.

That certainly gives us a lot of confidence in today's Pentagon modification of its earlier denial. We wonder how long it will be until the Pentagon is forced to admit they lied about not using white phosphorus on civilians, too.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:29 PM | Get permalink

Does he or doesn't he?

Today US Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito was doing the rounds of Democratic senators on Capitol Hill, trying to explain away his 1985 statement that he didn't believe that the Constitution protects women's right to choose abortion. That statement [below] appeared in his application for a position in the Reagan-era Justice Department.

Alito on abortion, 1985

Excerpt from Alito's 1985 'Personal Qualification's Statement.' [Via Smoking Gun]
Here's how Alito has been explaining himself to senators:

"He said first of all it was different then," [Sen. Diane] Feinstein said. "He said, 'I was an advocate seeking a job, it was a political job and that was 1985. I'm now a judge, I've been on the circuit court for 15 years and it's very different. I'm not an advocate, I don't give heed to my personal views, what I do is interpret the law.'"

Let's just run through this: In 1985, Alito tells a a potential employer [then Attorney General Edwin Meese] that Roe v. Wade should be toast. But, says Alito today, he didn't really mean what he said back in 1985 and, besides, his record since then shows that he respects the Supremes' landmark abortion decision.

Given that, by Alito's admission, there's at least one example of him tailoring his views on abortion to suit the expectations of a prospective employer who can give him that Big Job, isn't it possible — or even likely — that Alito is tailoring what he says about his current views on Roe v. Wade just so he can land that Really Big Job on the Supreme Court?

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:07 PM | Get permalink

That new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Today is the first day that people in the US can enroll in the plan. We could mark the day by reiterating the problems with the plan's 'doughnut hole' — that annual gap between US$ 2250 and US$ 5100 where the plan doesn't cover any drug costs. And how the plan forbids anyone from buying supplemental insurance to cover 'doughnut hole' expenses. Or we could go into how there are 40 different providers that people must choose from, and how each provider offers different benefits.

But the best way to explain the day-to-day impact of the new prescription drug plan is this story from Shark-fu, who overheard the following while standing in line at a pharmacy:

375-year-old woman to beleaguered pharmacy tech..."I need someone to explain this new Medicare program to me!"

Pharmacy tech..."M'am, why don't you take a moment to read this booklet. Then, if you still have questions, you can call this phone number. Or you can go online or you can do both. If you still have questions after that, they will refer you to a town hall meeting. And if you are unable to make up your mind by the need of enrollment Medicare will enroll you in a plan without you consent."

375-year-old woman after a long pause..."I hate you people. I really hate you! There's a special place in HELL for all of you!"

Via AngryBlackBitch.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:45 PM | Get permalink

Monday, November 14

How would Alito rule on abortion rights?

You be the judge:

"I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government argued that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

The quote above comes from Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's 1985 application for a job in the Reagan administration's Justice Department, which was released today as part of 100 pages of documents from the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidential libraries. You can read more about those documents here.

Personally, we give the survival women's reproductive rights about one Court term if Alito's nomination is confirmed by the Senate.