Commentary By Ron Beasley
Probaly the smartest thing the British have done since WWII is not joining the Eurozone. Yesterday I posted a rant by the crazy Nigel Farage. But he's not alone. Here is a more reasonable MEP Daniel Hannan saying the same thing:
Yes it's time for the Greek people to say no to the bankster tehcnocrats.
Commentary By Ron Beasley
There is a lot not to like about MEP Nigel Farage but when he is right he's right:
For the actual people of Greece there is only one solution - default and leaving the Eurozone. The attempts at "bailout" are designed to bail out the big banks and give Germany an economic occupation of Greece. The austerity being forced on the Greeks only guarantees that the country will officially slip into depression followed by civil war and the debts will never be re-payed. Make no mistake - this is war. Unlike WWII it's economic rather than military. But the goal is the same - German domination.
This is not meant to be an excuse for the Greek economic irresponsibilty, this is what happens when you spend money but don't collect taxes, but it's not the Greek people who should suffer.
By BJ Bjornson
Look, as my name might indicate, I’m rather partial to stories that put the Nordic countries and their people in a good light, but I still have to shake my head at this article from Alternet about how the Swedes and Norwegians paved the way for a more equitable society, referencing events in the 1920’s and 30’s to make its point.
Why am I bemused? Well, for starters, because you hardly have to go overseas for examples of how to build a better and more equitable society. The 20’s and 30’s were the home of massive general strikes and violent suppression of the same here in North America, as well as the period when the first major advances towards a more progressive modern state took place under Roosevelt’s New Deal. What happened in Sweden and Norway were reverberations of the same movement that was wreaking havoc worldwide in the industrialized West, not some unique unfolding that had never been seen before or since.
Second, there is the not-really-small matter of the Second World War, a discontinuity event even on this side of the Atlantic, but very much more so in Europe, and particularly for the conquered and occupied Norway. That’s not to say that the events of the pre-war period were unimportant, but it might behoove the author to note just how those countries were able to pick themselves back up after the war and return to a peacetime economy that still carried on the earlier tradition.
And again, there is no need to look to Scandinavia for examples, since the post-WWII boom in the U.S. and the rise of a true middle class is practically the textbook example of how these things get done, absent a few tweaks such as a universal health care system that your northern neighbours managed to pull off during the same period.
While I don’t pretend to be professional historian, what I have read and seen is that the single most important factor in ensuring an economically fair society is a strong labour movement, something the Republicans, for all their other craziness, have maintained a laser-like focus on for decades, and work to destroy, disrupt, or outright dismantle at every turn whenever they get the chance, as can be seen most recently in Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.
It may just be me, but I rarely see this kind of focus from the left on this point, and this article from Alternet is little different. It’s not that I don’t think the struggles of the Scandinavian labour movement isn’t inspirational to some degree, but it isn’t quantitatively different from the same struggle in North America or elsewhere. The real questions that needs to be asked is how the Swedes and Norwegians, and other European nations, maintained their strong labour movements while the U.S. saw its labour unions being sidelined and crumble away as a political force, and how and what it will take to bring a real labour movement back.
The article doesn’t say, and in that, it doesn’t strike me as too much different from a lot of progressive blogging these days. They know what they want to see as an end result, but seem incapable of charting or even exploring a tried and true path towards achieving it. Inspiration isn’t enough. Give working people the information they need to really organize themselves.
I have a feeling I'll be coming back to this.
By BJ Bjornson
Seems to me that I’ve read about this kind of thing happening in North America in decades past, or at least the precursor of what made this a story, a plant manager calling in the police to beat and kill a union leader. The counterattack doesn’t seem to be quite as common.
Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in the India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with led pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.
The workers were enraged enough to kill president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday. The labor violence occurred in Yanam, a small city in Andra Pradesh state on India’s east coast.Police were called to the factory by management to quell a labor dispute. The workers had been calling for higher pay and reinstatement of previously laid off workers since October. Murali was fired a few hours later. The next morning, at 06:00 on Friday, Murali went to the factory along with some workers and tried to obstruct the morning shift, local media reported. Long batons, known as lathis in India, were used by police who charged the workers, injuring at least 20 of them, including Murali. He died on the way to hospital, according to The Times of India. Hundreds of workers gathered outside the police station and demanded that officers be charged with homicide.
I didn’t bother commenting on the recent NYT article on conditions at Apple’s supplier factories in China a couple of days ago since that story was more than well-covered already, but it does an excellent job of showing the costs of pushing the costs of manufacturing ever downward.
Per the Forbes story above, India is the poorest of the BRIC countries and its factory workers are paid the least, so maybe it isn’t too much of a surprise that disputes between management and labour are far nastier there than elsewhere, but I do wonder sometimes if the continued “flattening” of wages worldwide might bring such scenes back to these shores one day.
By BJ Bjornson
It has been bandied about for some time that the banksters who caused the crash of 2008, hoovered the taxpayers dry in bailouts, and continued to lavish themselves with massive bonuses and perks while the rest of the economy struggled are little better than psychopaths. The scary part is that it is no accident.
In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.
"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.
And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."
Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."
Little wonder the financial world is so screwed up, isn’t it?
By BJ Bjornson
While it may be difficult to determine just why Obama himself would want to face another four years of the rather thankless task of running a country that rarely seems to appreciate any of his efforts, it isn’t so hard to find reasons why everyone else should like to see him be successful in November. In that vein, The Washington Monthly has a series out on the consequences of a GOP victory, all of which is well worth the read.
The first of the series is a good reminder that, despite conventional wisdom, we should be paying attention to the promises made by GOP candidates during the primaries, since they actually do indicate what kind of agenda the candidate will try to implement once elected.
I suspect that many Americans would be quite skeptical of the idea that elected officials, presidents included, try to keep the promises they made on the campaign trail. The presumption is that politicians are liars who say what voters want to hear to get elected and then behave very differently once in office. The press is especially prone to discount the more extreme positions candidates take in primaries on the expectation that they will “move to the center” in the general election. Certainly everyone can recall specific examples of broken promises, from Barack Obama not closing Gitmo to George W. Bush and “nation building” . . .
Political scientists, however, have been studying this question for some time, and what they’ve found is that out-and-out high-profile broken pledges like George H. W. Bush’s are the exception, not the rule. That’s what two book-length studies from the 1980s found. Michael Krukones in Promises and Performance: Presidential Campaigns as Policy Predictors (1984) established that about 75 percent of the promises made by presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Jimmy Carter were kept. In Presidents and Promises: From Campaign Pledge to Presidential Performance (1985), Jeff Fishel looked at campaigns from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan. What he found was that presidents invariably attempt to carry out their promises; the main reason some pledges are not redeemed is congressional opposition, not presidential flip-flopping. Similarly, Gerald Pomper studied party platforms, and discovered that the promises parties made were consistent with their postelection agendas. More recent and smaller-scale papers have confirmed the main point: presidents’ agendas are clearly telegraphed in their campaigns.
It is a lot easier to get upset at promises broken than those kept, particularly if your support of the candidate was based on some of those promises, which does explain a lot of the disappointment with Obama. Although in Obama’s case, the increase in attention and troops to the Afghan campaign has been treated like a promise broken by a lot of progressives even though it actually is a promise kept. Even there, paying attention to what he was saying as a candidate would have been helpful.
And it is not like anyone should be surprised by what the Republican’s agenda will be once they are elected. Not only have they been trumpeting their priorities for quite some time, they have been carrying them out on smaller scales wherever they control the government at the state level. Bernstein’s piece is about paying attention to what they are saying now, but Charles Pierce made the same point back last November when voters went to the polls to reverse some of the more egregious legislation pushed through by their Republican state governments.
I have become impatient over the past few years with the concept of "buyer's remorse." This notion pops up anywhere a freely elected Republican legislative majority and a freely elected Republican governor get together and put in place policies of the sort they were freely elected to enact. Suddenly, vast numbers of people see Republicans behaving like Republicans and profess themselves shocked — SHOCKED! — to find that there is wingnuttery going on in here. We've seen this with Walker in Wisconsin, Kasich in Ohio, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and Rick Scott in Florida. And, "But they didn't say they were going to do this when they ran!" is a vain and witless excuse. Republicans do what Republicans do.
Look, folks. Everybody knew who was behind Walker in Wisconsin, and why they were behind them. The same is true of Kasich and Snyder and all the rest of them. Hell, Rick Scott was a convicted felon. Anyone who didn't know any of this either wasn't paying attention, or didn't give enough of a damn for it to matter and voted for these guys anyway. Which, come to think of it, fairly well sums up what happened in the 2010 midterms. The country handed itself over to ignorance and apathy and let those two scamps run amok in the process of self-government. The country doesn't get to wake up, blinking, in 2011 and wonder how all this happened.
It all happened because you let talk-radio drive the narrative in your tiny little minds. It all happened because you let yourself be convinced by grifters and charlatans that an insurance-industry-friendly health-care bill was the first in a series of Nuremberg Rallies. You people went to the market. You came home with the bag of magic beans. You all set the throttle to Full, cut all the brake-lines, and sent your elected governments careering down the slopes of Nutball Mountain. It's a little late now to decide that you don't have the stomach for the trip.
This is a case of not only being warned, but having recent examples to demonstrate how things will go should the warnings not be heeded, and there are longer term consequences to a Republican victory, which Dahlia Lithwick covers in her piece, The Courts:
If a Republican successor of Obama gets to replace both Kennedy and Ginsburg, it’s fair to predict that the Roberts Court may include five or even six of the most conservative jurists since the FDR era. Following the ideological disappointment that was David Souter, Republicans have been spectacularly successful in selecting and confirming justices who consistently vote for conservative outcomes. Indeed, the replacement of moderate Sandra Day O’Connor with Samuel Alito may have produced the most consequential shift at the Court in our lifetimes; in a few short years O’Connor’s pragmatic legal doctrine in areas ranging from abortion to affirmative action to campaign finance reform has been displaced by rulings that would make Edwin Meese’s heart sing.
But it’s not just the Supreme Court that would tilt further right. The high court only hears seventy-some cases each year. The vast majority of disputes are resolved by the federal appellate courts, which are the last stop for almost every federal litigant in the country. And the one legacy of which George W. Bush can be most proud is his fundamental transformation of the lower federal judiciary—a change that happened almost completely undetected by the left. At a Federalist Society meeting in 2008, Bush boasted that he had seated more than a third of the federal judges expected to be serving when he left office, most of them younger and more conservative than their colleagues, all tenured for life and in control of the majority of the federal circuit courts of appeals. The consequences of that change at the appeals court level were as profound as they were unnoticed. As Charlie Savage of the New York Times put it at the time, the Bush judges “have been more likely than their colleagues to favor corporations over regulators and people alleging discrimination, and to favor government over people who claim rights violations. They have also been more likely to throw out cases on technical grounds, like rejecting plaintiffs’ standing to sue.” In short, they have copied and amplified the larger trends at the Roberts Court: a jurisprudence that skews pro-business, pro-life, anti-environment, and toward entangling the church with the state. Under the rhetorical banners of “modesty” and “humility” and “strict construction,” the rightward shift has done more to restore a pre-New Deal legal landscape than any legislative or policy change might have done.
The courts issue is one that more people should be paying attention to. From the Citizens United decision that is starting to get attention thanks to its likely effects on this election season, to the Supreme Court giving a hand to anyone who wants to avoid equal pay litigation, other decisions narrowing of the scope of class-action lawsuits to the benefit of big corporations, to more recently, a judge giving the state GOP in Wisconsin sole access to the court in their challenge to the Dems petition to recall the GOP governor.
A judge in Wisconsin has ruled that Democratic recall organizers cannot challenge a lawsuit brought by the state GOP against election officials — a suit that claims Gov. Scott Walker’s constitutional rights are being violated by the state’s petition review process.
This means that barring a hypothetical appeal, any continuing litigation in this matter will be conducted exclusively between the state GOP and the election board’s attorney, without the Dems themselves being able to participate and present legal arguments.
“I was a little surprised,” said Jeremy Levinson, the attorney for the recall committee, in an interview with TPM. “It’s the first time I can recall — let me rephrase — it’s the first time I’m aware of a recall-related lawsuit where only the official who is being targeted for recall gets to be a party, and the folks who are working to recall that official are shut out of the process.”
The appointed judge was a Republican state Senator for 20 years, and was nominated by Bush for a federal circuit position. Welcome to the future. Not too surprisingly under the circumstances, the GOP subsequently won the case.
Despite these rather real differences between the parties, there remains a quite vocal group on the left stating they’d rather sit things out and allow Obama to go down to defeat since he’s disappointed them on too many issues. Or even worse, those that figure things are going to get worse anyway, so they might as well just get there sooner than later. The latter reminds me of one of the tracks used by climate change denialists, who point out that since they can’t stop climate change from happening, we shouldn’t bother doing anything to mitigate it either, even though mitigating a problem when you have the chance is probably the only way to give yourself enough time to build the movement you need to truly deal with it.
By BJ Bjornson
Today’s scary reading comes from McClatchy:
Drug research, even from clinical trials sponsored by the federal government, routinely is suppressed, harming patients and increasing health care costs, according to new data highlighting an ethical controversy that continues to plague the field of medicine.
. . .
From diabetes drugs to spine surgery products, scandals involving concealed data have mounted. Consider the cases of two heart drugs that were the subject of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories:
For two years, Schering-Plough, the maker of the popular cholesterol drug Vytorin, sat on the results of a clinical trial showing the drug provided no benefit in improving artery health. During that time the drug was heavily marketed to consumers in TV ads. The situation came to light in 2008 after a congressional investigation was launched.
In 2003, a clinical trial of Multaq, a drug that treated irregular heartbeat, was stopped because more patients who were getting the drug were dying than those who were getting a placebo. However, the study was not published until five years later.
In 2007, an independent analysis of the diabetes drug Avandia found that the drug increased heart attacks and cardiovascular deaths.
Steve Nissen, the lead author of the analysis, said 35 of the 42 studies he looked at were unpublished and were obtained only because a court case required the drug's maker, GlaxoSmithKline, to turn over the data.
Drug companies may have been the focus of most of the criticism, medical device makers also come in for their share of suppressing data, particularly Medtronic, where a paper written by several surgeons receiving millions in royalties from the company failed to publish a the results of a clinical trial showing problems with a bone-growth stimulating product.
And lest it be said that it is only the companies themselves keeping vital data out of the light, government-funded research isn’t faring much better.
A surprising finding in the BMJ analysis was that serious lapses occurred even in clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health.
That research showed that less than half of NIH-funded clinical trials were published in a medical journal within 30 months of the completion of the trial and after 51 months, one-third of trials remained unpublished.
. . .
A second BMJ paper looked at clinical trials of drugs that already had received at least one Food and Drug Administration approval. In such cases a law requires the reporting within one year of the completion of the trial.
Despite the law, only 163 of 738 such trials, or 22 percent, had reported the results within a year, the paper found.
Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it?
By BJ Bjornson
Why, oh why does this story sound so familiar?
An old N.W.T. gold mine that was recently cleaned up by the federal government is set to become a mine once again.
Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) took control of the heavily contaminated Colomac Mine site in 1999 after its owner, Royal Oak Mines, went bankrupt. Cleanup work was completed this year.
Now, mineral company Merc International Minerals Inc. announced it is acquiring the mineral rights to the property.
. . .
Tlicho elder Joseph Judas said he doesn't understand why the federal government would let another company mine at Colomac after it took them nearly 10 years and millions of dollars to clean it up.
Well Joseph, near as I can tell, the reason is likely that this federal government is made up of “business friendly” Conservatives, which means that they are happy to help out their business friends by spending taxpayer dollars to clean up the mess one of those friendly businesses left behind once the mine stopped being profitable enough, and then once the costly mess has been dealt with, they are more than happy to let another one of those friendly businesses move in to make even more money off of the property without all that nasty toxic clean-up to worry about anymore.
Being “business friendly” also likely means that the Conservatives will not be pushing too hard for the mining company to put up a bond against the eventual clean-up costs for this new project. After all, it wouldn’t be “friendly” to note that mining companies have a notorious history for spinning off failing mines that then declare bankruptcy and stick the clean-up bill to the taxpayers.
After all, friendship is all about trust, and if you can’t trust a mining company to clean up after itself, who can you trust really?
By BJ Bjornson
On the bright yellow tundra outside this oil town near the Arctic Circle, a pitch-black pool of crude stretches toward the horizon. The source: a decommissioned well whose rusty screws ooze with oil.
This is the face of Russia's oil country, a sprawling, inhospitable zone that experts say represents the world's worst ecological oil catastrophe.
The above is mostly the legacy of old wells and poor management from the Soviet days, but with the Arctic ice cover melting away, the rush to exploit the area for resources is picking up steam, and Russia is first off the mark, though they hardly alone.
Fifteen years in the building, the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform is 126 square metres, weighs 117,000 tons without ballast, and sits on a gigantic box of heavy steel designed to withstand the intense pressure of constantly shifting Arctic ice.
It took an icebreaker and three tugs to tow it from Murmansk to the drill site, a 10-day journey that ended Aug. 28. The voyage marked the beginning of a new, some say dangerous, era in the Arctic.
As Russia moves farther offshore to uncover the Arctic’s long-hidden treasures, its polar neighbours are following suit, and pressure is likely to build on Canada to follow suit.
Norway, a pioneer of drilling in harsh, icy conditions offshore, is pressing ahead with a 20-year plan to develop undersea Arctic fields despite public anger after an Icelandic cargo ship spilled an unknown amount of oil into a marine park in February.
Greenland approved exploratory oil drilling by a British firm this year in the waters shared by Canada’s eastern Arctic. So far, the $1-billion effort is a bust.
On Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama's administration approved Royal Dutch Shell's request to drill six exploration wells next year in the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska, and is considering proposals for drilling in the nearby Beaufort Sea. The waters border Canada's Arctic.
The biggest issue regarding drilling in the Arctic is the nearly complete lack of any ability to deal with an oil spill or blowout thanks to a dearth of in-place infrastructure and ships capable of operating in the Arctic waters.
The BP Deepwater Horizon blowout last year in the Gulf of Mexico is the stuff of nightmares for opponents of offshore Arctic drilling.
While the well gushed for three months, some 40,000 people, working on more than 4,000 vessels, deployed thousands of kilometres of containment booms to fight the spill, said Alexander Shestakov at the World Wildlife Fund.
There aren’t enough ice-class vessels to match that armada in the event of a large Arctic spill, and booms are useless in waters thick with ice, he added.
Worse, should the spill happen during the long winter months, there won’t even be any ships or equipment likely able to reach it for months, little or no daylight to work in, and the oil will spread out under the ice to turn up all across the Arctic when the sea ice starts melting and moves along with the currents.
That however, is not the end of the problems the environment in the North is facing, more just a beginning.
A warming Arctic climate presents problems as well as opportunities. The Yamal peninsula, where Russia gets most of its natural gas for export to Europe, is laced with a network of pipes resting on permafrost.
If the ground melts, the pipelines could start to burst, causing untold damage to Russia’s economy as well as its environment.
At least 60 per cent of Russia, the world’s biggest country, is permafrost, or soil that’s at or below 0 deg C. Vast swaths of melting Siberian peat bogs would release massive amounts of methane, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says is more than 20 times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period.
Siberia isn’t the only place in the world with permafrost and pipelines running across it, and if oil and gas starts to be produced off the northern shore of Alaska and Canada, there will be a lot more pipelines joining the ones already there.
And for anyone thinking that we will do a better job in regulating the oil and gas industry in the Arctic than we have elsewhere, I can only offer this quote from a radio broadcast from last week.
Industry says it can monitor itself. Travis Davies (sp) works with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
"That's bigger than just wearing your protective equipment. That's training. That's understanding your assets. That's the kind of materials you use. Those things will all be considered as well. And I think appropriately so."
Drill ships will be far away from the nearest regulator. Industry analyst Doug Matthews wonders who's going to be making sure the companies follow the rules. The Canadian Labour Congress has complained that federal inspectors are poorly paid, don't have the experience, and often don't meet their quotas for inspections even on projects that are easy to access on land.
Industry can monitor itself? Sure, because that has always worked out so well in the past. The Arctic is soon going to find out, because our drive for oil and gas is going to override any and all other concerns.
Commentary By Ron Beasley
As the Republican primary is about to begin Mitt Romney has not gotten any traction and Republicans have bounced from one buffoonish not-Romney to another. I few weeks ago the talk of a brokered convention made an appearence. Initially I discounted such like most of the "serious people". Now I'm not so sure.
As Charles Pierce points out none other that Jeb Bush had an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal this weekend that could have been written by Ayn Rand herself - some real conservative red meat.
Charles Pierce:
Make no mistake. You don't write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal at this point in the Republican primary process unless somebody, somewhere wants to make people think you're an legitimate option. You certainly don't write one as stuffed full of free-market banana-oil as this one unless somebody, somewhere wants to raise enough money to make the world think you're a legitimate option. There was enough Jeb (!) buzz over the weekend that it's becoming plain that some very important someone's have looked over the current Republican field and decided that, by god, it's just bad enough that there's room in there to bring back the most discredited surname in American politics. The slogan writes itself:
"Jeb! This time, let's try the smart one."
I think it's too late for anyone not already in to win the primary race. But what if nobody wins? Brokered convention? So why not get some names out there - like Jeb.
Of course there is a little problem. Jeb may be the smart one but is the country really ready for another Bush only 4 years after the moronic one destroyed this country and a few others? Better than Romney, better than Bachmann, better than Gingrich, better than Perry. Probably, but is the country really ready for another Bush?
Especially when people are reminded of this:
And he's the smart one. Remember that.
But the part that's truly hilarious, especially if you remember Governor Jeb (!), is this part,
As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed.
I remember one time you "succumbed," foof. Two words.
Terri Schiavo.
Jeb (!) played right along when wingnut fanatics took a personal family issue and turned it into an international media circus. He brought unconscionable pressure down on people at a hospice who'd never done anything to him. He put an unforgivable amount of pressure on a great, brave woman named Annie Santa Maria, whom I would like to lock in a room with him one day and see who comes out alive. (My money's on Annie, by the way.) He came dangerously close to initiating hostilities between the local authorities in Pinellas Park and the Florida state patrol. On October 21, 2003, he issued an order for Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, which had been disconnected by order of a court six days earlier. He did this by ramming an ad hoc bill through his pet legislature that allowed him to "overrule" a court's decision in this regard. (And people think Newt Gingrich is the only authoriarian yahoo in the race. He may yet have some competition there.) He made life a living hell for Michael Schiavo, and for the judges who ultimately had to deal with this mess. He allied himself with the worst elements of the lunatic Right, some of whom were threatening Michael and some of whom were threatening the judges.
And when the cruel hash he helped make out of events finally came to an end, and when an autopsy showed that Terri Schiavo had been every bit as actually dead as her husband had been saying all along, Jeb (!) still wasn't satisfied. He demanded — and got — a state investigation into possible "crimes" committed in the case of this poor woman — including, most foully, whether or not Michael had been responsible for her condition in the first place — and that didn't end until the Florida attorney general finally told him to shut up about it.
That's our Jeb (!) Bankers should be free to steal your pension, but husbands should not be free to decide end-of-life care for their wives.
Good luck with that one! Even a majority of evangelicals were opposed to the Schiavo intervention and it was one of the things that caused George W’s popularity to tumble.
Update: Rush is on-board.
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