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State of Florida Hates Crippled Kids

Buck Banks


Bah, humbug: In this season of giving, it’s interesting to know that an agency of the Florida state government is spending thousands of dollars in litigation to avoid spending $360 for thermal blankets for a severely disabled kid. And this was the state that went to bat to keep Terri Schiavo in a permanent vegetative state. Well, here’s a kid who responds to the voices of his mother and sisters, but that’s about it. And he needs some thermal blankets to regulate his temperature. Oh yeah, and some surgical masks for his caregivers because of his compromised immune system.

Give the kid a blanket. His life is hard enough.

The state won’t pay for the masks, either. Read the rest of the story here:

Kevin Estinfil is a badly disabled kid. He has severe cerebral palsy, is blind, has a shunt in his brain to drain excess fluid and has daily seizures. And his body can’t control its own temperature.

Kevin, who is 12, can get as cold as 93 or 94 degrees, and he can’t communicate when he feels pain or discomfort.

What would help keep Kevin warm, his doctors say, are special thermal blankets, which cost $10 each. He needs about three a month, for a cost of about $360 a year.

But for more than a year, the state Agency for Persons with Disabilities has refused to pay for them. The blankets, they say, “have not been determined to be medically necessary.”

To make its case, the state has racked up thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting Kevin, who lost an appeal before a state hearing officer and is now appealing to the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami-Dade.

‘I keep thinking, `It’s a blanket. It’s not like he’s asking for a car,’ ” said Lizel Gonzalez, Kevin’s lawyer at Legal Services of Greater Miami. “Give the kid a blanket. His life is hard enough.”
[…]

Mary Cheney Is Pregnant

Jon Ponder

Just what the world needs — more Cheneys:

Mary Cheney, the vice president’s openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are “ecstatic” about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple.

It’s a baby boom for grandparents Dick and Lynne Cheney: Their older daughter, Elizabeth, went on leave as deputy assistant secretary of state before having her fifth child in July. “The vice president and Mrs. Cheney are looking forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of their sixth grandchild,” spokesman Lea Anne McBride said last night.

Mary is 37 years old, and works for AOL. (Which speaks volumes.) She and Poe live in Virginia, a state where members of her party successfully voted in a constitutional ban on same sex marriages last month.

On This Date – December 6

Jon Ponder
  • 2002 – President George W. Bush pushed Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and economic adviser Larry Lindsey from their jobs in a Cabinet shake-up. [NYT]
  • 1994 – Republican-controlled Orange County, Calif., filed for bankruptcy protection due to investment losses of about $2 billion. [NYT]
  • 1998 – The Los Angeles Times published an editorial by Robert Scheer on conservative Michael Huffington‘s recent decision to come out of the closet, saying it should come as no surprise that Republicans, even conservative members of the party, are gay. [365Gay]
  • 1973 – Gerald Ford was sworn in as vice president under Pres. Richard Nixon, following the resignation of Spiro Agnew who pled no contest to a charge of income tax evasion. [Music of Your Life]
  • 1889 – Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, died in New Orleans at age 81. [NYT]

Rightwing Smear Machine Goes After Pres. Carter – Again

Jon Ponder

In Pres. Carter’s new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” he takes on the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians with a frankness that American politicians usually avoid. His criticisms have provoked some harsh blowback:

[Just] this week, an anonymous caller called into a C-SPAN interview and ranted at Jimmy Carter, calling him “a bigot, and a racist and an anti-Semite.” The caller continued, accusing Carter of “cozying up with every dictator, thug, Islamic terrorist there is.”

The rantings of a lunatic who made it through the pre-call screening somehow right? Time to check the systems and make sure it never happens again? No. This was the result of a coordinated smear where the charges of Jimmy Carter being an “anti-Semite” echoed through the right wing blogs and straight to Drudge Report.

This attack was amplified by numerous current right-wing online attacks on Carter at sites such as www.frontpagemag.com. From the right came a wave of attacks, Carter’s been “trying to (expletive) the Jews.” He’s friends with terrorists…

Bush Knew Webb’s Son Had Almost Been Killed

Jon Ponder

When Pres. Bush got snippy last month with Sen.-Elect Jim Webb in an exchange about Webb’s son, who is serving in Iraq, it turns out that Bush had been briefed that Webb’s son had recently escaped a fatal attack, and was warned to treat the subject sensitively:

Not only did Bush know about it, he was specifically briefed on the incident before meeting with Webb, and was cautioned to be extra sensitive in speaking with Webb about his son.

Maybe he was drunk.

Here’s a transcript, via Trish’s post on Nov. 29, from the exchange at a White House reception for new members of Congress, on November 29:

BUSH: How’s your boy?

WEBB: I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.

BUSH: That’s not what I asked you. How’s your boy?

WEBB: That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President.

Bolton Bolts, Viguerie Laments — I’d Say That’s Two Good Things

Buck Banks

Conservative condolences: John Bolton’s tenure as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was over with the Democrat’s ascendency at the midterm elections, but to hear our favorite ultra-right winger tell it, this is just another sign that the country is going to hell in a hippie’s handbasket.

Here’s the statement Richard A. Viguerie, author of “Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause, ” issued today via e-mail about Bolton’ s resignation:

It looks like the next two years will be painful for conservatives and possibly fatal for the Republican Party.

There are only a mere handful of conservatives in significant policy-making positions in the Bush administration. The withdrawal of Ambassador Bolton means there is one less. This is very discouraging to conservatives. Instead of fighting for Ambassador Bolton’s confirmation, the Bush Administration has once again thrown in the towel.

Come on, Dick, Bush has to pick his fights carefully now, and going to the mat for the moustachioed one would have been a sure loss.

Since the election, President Bush has sent strong signals that he will move left and seek accommodation with the Democrats who will be running the House and Senate. The President is following in the footsteps of his father, George H. W. Bush, who also abandoned the conservative base of the GOP.

Whoa, I must have missed the speech where Bush vowed to “move left and seek accommodation” with the Dems. All I’ve heard was, “Rummie, you’re fired” and “we’re stayin’ the course.” If only George had followed in his father’s footsteps ….

In addition to surrendering on the Bolton nomination, another danger signal for conservatives was the President’s comments at his Nov. 8 news conference that he will work with the liberals to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. Still another was Treasury Secretary Paulson’s statement that the Bush Administration had ‘no preconditions’ on Social Security reform, which is code for a willingness to accept higher payroll taxes and cuts in benefits.

Obviously, Viguerie is tuned in to a whole different wavelength, sucking his conservative news direct from aliens who enhabit the Van Allen Belt. Bush isn’t going to grant “amnesty” for illegals, and he’s going to leave SocSec to the next administration to try to fix.

It looks like the next two years will be painful for conservatives and possibly fatal for the Republican Party.

Would that it could only be the other way around, Richard.

Will Gov. Schwarzenegger Play Ball with Liberal Legislature – Or Veer Back to the Right and Risk Alienating Voters?

Jon Ponder

The leadership of the California Assembly is Rush Limbaugh’s living nightmare: It does not include a single straight anglo male.

California Kumbaya: The new legislative session convened in Sacramento yesterday and in an unusual move Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) invited the GOP governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to attend the swearing-in ceremonies. Nunez, along with Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland), pledged to work with the governor to replicate the successes they had at the end of the last session, including raising the minimum wage, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, regulating greenhouse gas emissions and borrowing $37 billion to upgrade the state’s schools and roads.

Since 1966, there have only been three years in which Republicans have controlled either house of the California Legislature, but during the same period they have controlled the governor’s office for 27 years.

Republicans had hoped that the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger was the beginning of the end of liberal entrenchment in Sacramento. But Gov. Schwarzenegger bungled his first year or so in office, so much so that by November 2005 his approval rating was in the low 30s. After the “thumpin”’ he received from voters in the special election last year, in which all the ballot measures he’d floated lost big, Schwarzenegger did an abrupt 180. After spending more than a year treating the Democrats like enemy combatants, suddenly he was their new BFF.

It was purely enlightened self-interest on the governor’s part but the course change resulted both in the legislative successes Nunez touted yesterday and the landslide reelection victory the governor celebrated last month.

But even by California standards, the current team in Sacramento is unusually liberal. In fact, the Assembly leaders are so diverse that they are surely Rush Limbaugh’s living nightmare:

[Speaker Nunez] took the stage at a Capitol press conference surrounded by a dozen members of his Democratic leadership team. There wasn’t a single straight white male to be found…

The Assembly leadership team onstage included five men and seven women. There is the first African American woman elected as majority floor leader, Karen Bass from Los Angeles. Three of the women are entering their first terms in the Legislature — Laura Richardson from Long Beach, Fiona Ma from San Francisco, and Mary Hayashi from Hayward. Two gay men will control all the money — [Mark Leno of San Francisco] is chairman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee, and John Laird of Santa Cruz is chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee.

The question now is whether the governor will continue to lean left to work with Nunez and company — and, who knows, perhaps revive the moribund liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” as “Schwarzenegger Republicans” — or whether he’ll swing back to the dark side as dramatically as he went granola this year.

My bet is on the dark side. Schwarzenegger has socially liberal instincts — he can talk the talk — but the prime factor that guides him is old-school paternalism. He is the sort of conservative who promotes adherence to orthodoxy but feels in no way personally beholden to live by the same rules himself.

All that prevents him from inviting the California Chamber of Commerce back into the governor’s office, as he did early on, to draft the same sort of Big Business-oriented legislation that angered Democrats and independents in 2005 — nothing except the prospect of running for Barbara Boxer’s senate seat in 2010, or the ironic albeit outside chance he’d face the same sort of recall election that brought him to power in 2003.

At the Laugh Factory, the N-Word Is Back

Jon Ponder
“Give yourselves a big round of applause for coming down and supporting ‘[N-word] Night.'”
Damon Wayans

Michael Richards wasn’t being funny when he used the “N-word” on the stage at the Laugh Factory in mid-November. On Sunday night, December 3, 2006, another television star stepped onto the stage and used the same word as part of his routine, and got very different results:

Comedy, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and there was a rather prominent six-letter hole in the air at the Laugh Factory on Sunday night. It was the West Hollywood club’s weekly showcase of mostly African American comedians — the first “Chocolate Sundaes” show since the club banned the N-word after Michael “Kramer” Richards’ now-infamous vocabulary malfunction.

At least there was a hole until comedian-actor Damon Wayans took the stage.

“Give yourselves a big round of applause for coming down and supporting ‘[N-word ]Night,’ ” Wayans said, using the word itself, to gasps and laughs. The producers “tried to prep me backstage — ‘Don’t say the N-word.’ They’re going to fine me.” Wayans sprinkled folded bills across the stage floor, green confetti at his feet. “How much you want?” he asked, looking at club owner Jamie Masada, who sat with his head in his hands at his table in a back corner of the intimate room’s main floor.

Anger bubbled just beneath the surface.

“I’ll be damned if the white man uses that word last,” Wayans said, then he went on to use the word 15 more times during a 20-minute routine that suggested Richards apologize personally to O.J. Simpson — “If I Killed Michael Richards, This Is How I Did It” — envisioned Jesus Christ as ethnic stereotypes, cracked offensive jokes about gays in church, lambasted the Iraq war as another fight by whites against dark-skinned people and mocked white celebrities who adopt black children. If they really want to help, he said, “give the … father some money” to improve the family’s life.

On This Date – December 5

Jon Ponder
  • 2002 – At a 100th birthday celebration for Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-South Carolina, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, praised Thurmond’s pro-segregation 1948 presidential campaign. The ensuing uproar led to Lott’s resignation from the Senate leadership. [NYT]
  • 1933 – Prohibition is repealed by the 21st Amendment. [PBS]
  • 1876 – Pres. Ulysses G. Grant delivered his speech of apology to Congress on December 5, 1876. He claimed mistakes he made while he was president were due to his inexperience. While Grant’s personal integrity was never formally questioned, he was closely associated with many government scandals which became public during his presidency. [Music of Your Life]
  • 1831 – Former President John Quincy Adams took his seat as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. [NYT]
  • 1792 – George Washington was re-elected president and John Adams was re-elected vice president. [NYT]

Sen. Brownback May Carry Rightwing Freak Flag in ’08

Jon Ponder

In the 2000 elections, the ultra-rightwing candidate was Gary Bauer, an ideologue with no elected experience whatsoever. In 2004, of course, the wingnut candidate was the president himself.

Looking ahead to the 2008 campaign, with the losses of prospective candidacies by soon-to-be-former senators Bill Frist of Tennessee, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and George Allen of Virginia, the far rightwing position is open.

Probable candidates include Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and one of the wingnuttiest wingnuts left in the Congress, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. (Imagine Santorum without the killer looks and winning smile.)

Brownback announced today that he is forming an exploratory committee:

[Brownback] announced 20 members of his exploratory advisory committee, an eclectic mix ranging from anti-abortion activists to business executives, including: Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, former Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and the Rev. Frank Pavone, head of the advocacy group Priests for Life.

My candidate for the GOP nomination remains former Speaker Newt Gingrich. I hope every Democrat and independent will support Gingrich as the Republican nominee.