One of the men pictured does not have his mouth open

What passes for Republican leadership these days is hurt and angry that Sen. Arlen Specter (D – Penn.) got out alive.

Michael Steele: “I hope Arlen Specter’s party change outrages you. …He told us all to go jump in the lake today,” Steele wrote in a fundraising e-mail sent to Republicans Tuesday. Facing the prospect of a primary loss because of “his left-wing voting record,” said Steele, Specter had “peddled his services–and his vote–to the leftist Obama Democrats who aim to remake America with their leftist plan.”

Rush Limbaugh: “A lot of people say, ‘Well, Specter, take [Sen. John] McCain with you. And his daughter [Meghan]. Take McCain and his daughter with you if you’re gonna…” he told listeners, dissolving in laughter. “…..It’s ultimately good. You’re weeding out people who aren’t really Republicans,” he said.

Newt Gingrich: Arlen Specter’s decision to leave the Republican Party in name as he left it in spirit over the stimulus vote is further proof that high taxes, big spending and big government are unacceptable to Republican voters.

Arlen Specter: “I don’t have to say anything to them. They’ve said it to me,” Specter said, when asked in a Capitol corridor about abandoning the Republicans…”I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

I signed up for updates about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s political action committee — SarahPAC — when it was formed a few months ago. From time to time they’ve come begging for money, but today’s e-mail from info@sarahpac.com was just whack:

Greetings to our friends and supporters!

As you may know, Governor Palin has been facing continuous frivolous and petty attacks from her opponents. These baseless attacks have led to more than half million dollars in legal debt for the Governor and her family.

The governor has become a target for local partisans, national professional political operatives, and defenders of the status quo.

This is the official site for the Governor Sarah Palin legal expense fund: www.thealaskafundtrust.com

Thank you for your continued interest and support.

SarahPAC

If one visits the site, one is confronted by a photo of the First Lady of Alaska alongside the First Dude, her husband Todd. Followed by this load of moose hockey:

Welcome to The Alaska Fund Trust
The Alaska Fund Trust is the official legal fund created to defend the integrity of the Alaska Governor’s Office from an onslaught of political attacks launched against current Governor Sarah Palin, the First Family, and state-employed colleagues. These baseless accusations have cost Alaska more than $1 million in public monies to defend, and Governor Palin has incurred more than half a million dollars in personal debt defending her official actions as Governor. You can help by donating to the Alaska Fund Trust today!

[…]

Harry, what’s John up to? It sounds crazy.

— Then-candidate Barack Obama, quoted in a new epilogue to Sen. Harry Reid’s autobiography, about Sen. John McCain’s decision to “suspend” his presidential campaign.

It’s getting a little frenzied out there, what with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Department making noises about travel bans to Mexico. Not that there isn’t cause for concern, but so far, this looks like a good practice run for early detection and intervention in an epidemic — practice countries will no doubt need on a grand scale in the future.

As always, when I want to get the true skinny on what’s happening with infectious diseases, I check with the moderators at ProMed, a service of the International Society of Infectious Diseases. They tend to A) stay calm and B) offer perspective in detached medical-ese:

The media feeding frenzy is very reminiscent of the early days of SARS — an apparently highly contagious novel viral febrile respiratory infection cropping up in multiple locations, with many unknowns as to the origin of the virus and what will happen next.

To summarize the status of confirmed cases and suspected cases as best as one can (given the exponential growth of press releases and press interviews leading to thousands of newswires): There are presently 20 confirmed cases in the United States involving 5 States — California (7), Kansas (2), New York City (8), Ohio (1) and Texas (2). Of these, only one has been hospitalized and all have been relatively mild and self-limited infections. There have been no fatalities attributable to this novel H1N1 virus infection in the USA reported as of today (26 Apr 2009).

In Mexico there have been over 1400 reported cases in 19 of 32 States, with 81 (or 86 depending upon the source) reported fatalities. There have been 6 cases confirmed in Canada, 4 in Nova Scotia, 2 in British Columbia — all 6 cases have been mild with self-limited illnesses.

Any individual with a history of travel to a location with known confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus who develops an influenza-like illness is considered a suspected case

In addition to the confirmed cases in North America, there are suspected cases reported from New Zealand, Spain, France, Israel — all involving travelers returning from Mexico. At this point in time, any individual with a history of travel to a location with known confirmed cases of the novel H1N1 virus who develops an influenza like illness (ILI) is considered a suspected case until results from laboratory testing are available. One would expect the volume of reports of suspected cases to grow, as more and more travelers return to their countries of origin, with a proportion of them having ILIs — a well-observed illness following airline flights.

In an earlier posting, this moderator pointed out that the reported cases in Mexico were hospitalized pneumonia cases, with surveillance data coming from inpatient facilities. In contrast, the information on the reported cases in the USA involved surveillance data coming from outpatient facilities. This difference in sentinel reporting sites biases reported cases in Mexico to be more severe cases as they are cases that were severe enough to merit hospitalization.

In turn, the use of outpatient sentinel surveillance sites in the USA leads to a bias selecting milder cases — those that do not require hospitalization. One suspects that once the countries heighten ILI surveillance to include both inpatient as well as outpatient facilities, these disparities will lessen. One also suspects that the true number of cases in Mexico is significantly higher than the currently reported approximately 1,500 cases, which would further lower the calculated case fatality rate (CFR).

Based on the currently available information, the novel H1N1 virus involved in these outbreaks has genetic material from human viruses (permitting human to human transmission), avian influenza viruses, and swine influenza viruses. For years the scientific community has been speculating that new influenza strains might arise when an avian influenza virus infects swine that are also coinfected with human influenza viruses. This coinfection in the same host, along with a possible 3rd coinfection of a swine influenza virus, has been felt to offer the potential for reassortment of the genetic material of the viruses, that might ultimately produce a virus that is novel to humans, and can infect humans and be transmitted between them.

Now for the conspiracy theories ….

[…]

The which Gators?

You’d have to live in Florida to appreciate how truly awful this error on the Washington Post’s part is. To say that calling the University of Florida Gators the “Florida State Gators” (can you say “Seminoles”?) is like calling a team the Dallas Dolphins or the New England Packers, doesn’t do it justice.

Florida State and the University of Florida are bitter rivals, as you would expect two such good teams sharing the same state to be. Mixing up one with the other is just…real bad. I am now questioning all the Post’s reporting. Oh yeah, I already did.

The unforgivable part is that this error remains, as of my nearly 4 p.m. Friday, April 24 press time, still uncorrected. That means it’s been up for nearly 24 hours and counting. Hello Washington Post, is anybody paying attention?

Update: I guess somebody at WaPo got the message. The story has finally been corrected.

This may sound like a joke — like high-level Republican officials indulging in typical frat boy hazing-ish “humor” — alas, however, it is a serious story, albeit one that provides yet another indication that the GOP-in-exile is lost in the wilderness.

There is an official proposal circulating at the top of the Republican National Committee to pass a resolution in which the RNC that would unilaterally rename the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party”:

In an e-mail sent Wednesday to the 168 voting members of the committee, RNC member James Bopp, Jr. accused President Obama of wanting “to restructure American society along socialist ideals.”

“The proposed resolution acknowledges that and calls upon the Democrats to be truthful and honest with the American people by renaming themselves the Democrat Socialist Party,” wrote Bopp, the Republican committeeman from Indiana. “Just as President Reagan’s identification of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ galvanized opposition to communism, we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism.”

The resolution, proposed by a committeeman from Washington state, was agreed upon by 16 RNC members from 16 different states and is part of a petition asking RNC Chairman Michael Steele to set a special committee meeting next month when the state chairs meet in Washington, D.C.

An RNC member said that Bopp, one of the most conservative and outspoken individuals on the committee, had pulled together a group of his fellow conservatives to agree to the resolution.

In an interview, Bopp said he thought Steele would set the special meeting.

“He has always told us that he was supportive of and agreed with the substance of these resolutions,” said Bopp, a lawyer known for his advocacy against campaign finance reform.

Responding to the RNC’s proposal, Hari Sevugan, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, had this amusing reaction:

“I’m going to pass on marketing advice from folks who hadn’t fully thought out the implications of using tea bags as a brand,” said [Sevugan]. “But what’s clear is that when you’re devoid of leadership, devoid of ideas and your only answer is to say ‘no’ to change, it’s not surprising that angry, fringe elements take center stage at the Republican Party.”

The origin of the use of “Democrat Party,” instead of the actual name, “Democratic Party,” is attributed to Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Republican who disgraced himself by leading the communist witch hunts of the 1950s. The probably apocryphal story is that McCarthy used it because it sounded like “bureaucrat,” a French word with a vaguely socialist ring.

In the current era, “Democrat Party” is used to by Republicans as a dig to their opponents. Conversely, when Democrats hear a Republican use the formulation, it sends an immediate signal that the speaker is an asshole.

On April 2, 2001, just three months after the Supreme Court appointed him president, George Bush became the first president to use the phrase, when he said, This is an issue that is going to require close cooperation between members of the Republican Party and the Democrat Party.”

Over at Salon.com, commenters have been suggesting ideas for renaming the Republican Party, including:

• Confederate Douchenozzle Party
• Republican National Crooks
• Lying Poo-Poo Head Fartface Party

As a part of Pensito Review’s ongoing campaign to help the GOP find acceptance of its new minority status, we’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on this issue too. Please take a minute and leave your suggestions for renaming the GOP on the comments board.

H/t: Rachel Maddow Show

A Justice Dept. report released earlier this week revealed that terror suspect Khalid Sheik Muhammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, the month that Bush invaded Iraq — and that another suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times seven months earlier, in August 2002.

The motive for the intense regimen applied to Khalid Sheik Muhammed was revealed yesterday in a report (PDF) from the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. According the Levin report, Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the torture of Muhammed in an attempt to extract confirmation from him that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime…

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

…”There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Despite the intense torture regimen, Muhammed refused to admit that Saddam was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In 2002, when Dick Cheney was putting together plans for another round of tax cuts for the wealthy, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill tried to dissuade him, noting that in less than a year the administration had already turned the $400 billion Clinton surplus into a $158 billion deficit.

Cheney’s reply would become infamous. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to O’Neill’s account of the exchange.

The second round of tax breaks sailed through the GOP Congress, of course. And while the cuts did increase the wealth of the super-rich, once again they failed to “trickle down” on the middle class.

Five years later, in January 2007, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz predicted with uncanny accuracy that Bush’s economic policies had placed the country on a road to ruin:

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

The economy did collapse, of course — in late 2008, just months before Cheney and George Bush left office. Writing in January 2009, Joseph Lazzaro, editor of Bloggingstocks.com, laid the blame at the Bush administration’s feet, citing tax policies that favored the rich, along with Bush’s failure to build on Pres. Clinton’s earned income tax credit program for lower income workers; low job growth (Bush created fewer jobs than any president since Herbert Hoover); the refusal of Bush and Cheney, who had ties to the oil industry, to develop an energy policy; and, of course, not least because of the massive budget deficits:

At the end of President Clinton’s presidency, the federal government was running a yearly budget surplus, and the national debt was about $6 trillion. At the end of President Bush’s presidency, the federal government will run a record budget deficit of more than $1 trillion this year, fiscal 2009, and the national debt has grown to $10.6 trillion.

In short, Bush’s tax cut massively benefited upper income citizens at the expense of both squandering the budget surplus achieved during the Clinton presidency and jeopardizing the nation’s financial health.

Now, in his latest semi-regular appearance on Fox News, Cheney says he’s worried about the economy, particularly — get this — deficit spending:

CHENEY: [In] the course here of trying to fix the downturn in the economy, that admittedly a lot of people are concerned about, we need to address — although we have had downturns before — I worry that we’re seeing a situation or this administration not only committing us the huge deficits for the future, but is also redefining that relationship between government, on the one hand, and the private sector on the other.

And I think we have to be very, very cautious. I think we’ve gone beyond what reasonably we could expect by way of intrusion into the private sector.

Of course, what went unsaid in this bit of chicanery is that it was the policies of Cheney’s administration that put the country into its current dire predicament.

[…]

Public schools in St. Johns County, Florida have been infiltrated by Christianist radicals from the top of the organization down, leaving the community in an uproar and the school district in federal court.

The trouble started when several teachers at Webster Elementary School in St. Augustine decided this little ditty, “In God We Still Trust” by the country music group Diamond Rio, should be sung by third graders in their annual assembly at the end of the year.

Parents of several children objected to the song, which calls for an end to separation of church and state through a Christian uprising.

Now there are those among us
Who want to push him out
And erase his name from everything
This country’s all about
From the schoolhouse to the courthouse
They’re silencing his word
Now it’s time for all believers
To make our voices heard

The parents were told their children didn’t have to sing this song. There’s just one little catch. If they chose to abstain they would be barred from participation in the entire program. Cue up the first lawsuit.

Only upon being informed the suit was filed did the school district pull the song from the program. But not without whining in a press release first.

“This is obviously someone again using the school system (as well as taxpayers’ money to defend the lawsuit) for their own personal agenda,” [said Superintendent Joseph Joyner]. “Unfortunately, this is not unusual and distracts us from our mission.”

The nature of Joyner’s “mission” is the issue. The superintendent and other county notables, including the sheriff, tax collector, and members of the state’s attorneys office, belong to the steering committee of a group called “The Marketplace,” whose flagrant goal is to bring Jesus into the office.

The purpose of The Marketplace is to help men and women fulfill their call right in their own place of work. To realize that their workplace IS their ministry…

Where do the majority of people spend the majority of time interacting with the majority of unsaved people? …it is where most people spend 60-70% of their waking hours – the workplace. If we are going to see our society changed for Jesus Christ we will have to change the way we equip believers to live out their faith where they spend a majority of their time.

If you thought there was a “wait, there’s more” coming, you’re right.

[…]

If you didn’t see the ridiculous, annoying original, I guess you should. Then you can appreciate this spoof, one of scores available, as much as it deserves.

h/t KQ