Politics

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former federal judge and a guest on Fox News host Glenn Beck’s broadcast, advocates repealing the 16th Amendment, something he has done previously on Beck’s show (see April 28, 2009). Beck asks about “this solution that you and I have talked about on a constitutional amendment, or a threat of a constitutional amendment.” Napolitano replies: “If two-thirds of the states ask the Congress to call a constitutional convention to consider the adoption of this amendment, which I’ll describe in a moment, as it gets closer and closer to the two-thirds necessary and Congress would be required to call the convention, you’ll see some reaction on the part of Congress to attempt to placate the states that want to call this. Now, the constitutional amendment is a simple one. It simply abolishes the 16th Amendment and states affirmatively that Congress shall have no power to tax the personal incomes of individual persons. If that were enacted, it would starve the federal government back into the original footprint that the founders intended for it. But as it gets closer to enactment, Congress will have to do something for fear that it might be enacted.” [Glenn Beck, 5/6/2009; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] The 16th Amendment allows Congress to collect income taxes. It was passed by Congress and submitted to the states in 1909 and ratified in 1913, both under President William Howard Taft. Recently, far-right Republicans (see 1951-1967, 1970-1972, 1976-1978, Early 1980s, and 1985) and tea party activists have begun calling for its repeal, joined by some members of Congress (see April 28, 1999). [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; Legal Information Institute, 2011]

A photo from Glenn Beck’s ‘The Civilest War’ broadcast on Fox News. Beck is at far left. [Source: Fox News]Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck writes an article for Fox News promoting his upcoming special program The Civilest War, which he says is an expose of the “tyranny” of the Federal Reserve over the American economy. Beck compares the program to the popular science fiction movie The Matrix, explaining that in the movie: “Nothing was real, the world people lived in was a fabrication—a computer program. Our lives have been like that movie and it is not about Barack Obama. It’s about Obama and [George W.] Bush and [Bill] Clinton and [George H. W.] Bush. It has been going on for years, it is just a play and it goes back to the progressive movement—on both sides of the aisle. In the movie the hero is offered two pills: red to learn the truth about the Matrix; blue to go on living blissfully ignorant to what is really going on. The way to take our country back will short-circuit the Matrix we are living in. And it has to do with gun rights, state’s rights, and what I call the civilest war. It is too much to get into now—but next week take the ‘red pill’ and get the truth.” The hour-long program begins with an adaptation of the famous poem by Martin Niemoller, rewritten by Beck as follows: “I think this is the problem. First they came for the banks. I wasn’t a banker, I didn’t really care. I didn’t stand up and say anything. Then they came for the AIG executives. Then they came for the car companies. Until it gets down to you. Most people don’t see—they are coming for you at some point! You’re on the list! Everybody’s on the list. You may not be rich—as currently defined.” The show features a Utah Republican legislator accusing the federal government of imposing “tyranny” on the citizenry, neo-Confederate historian Kevin Gutzman who gives a very different explanation of the meaning of “constitutional” liberties that would abolish suffrage for women and rights for minorities, and a Montana militia member, Gary Marbut, who concludes that the most sacred rights of the US citizen are to keep and bear arms. [Fox News, 5/2009; Fox News, 5/8/2009; Crooks and Liars, 5/15/2009] Author David Neiwert, an expert on right-wing extremism, notes that the ideas Beck is promoting in The Civilest War are identical to those promulgated by far-right “Patriot” and militia movements in the 1990s, including the idea of absolute “state sovereignty” (see 1983-1995). The ultimate idea behind Beck’s proposals, Neiwert writes, is the dissolution of the federal government and the transformation of the United States into 50 independent and disparate national entities. One of the earliest proponents of Beck’s ideas, Neiwert writes, was former Colorado state legislator Charles Duke (R-CO—see May 15-21, 1996), who still has deep ties to militia and anti-government organizations in the Western states. [Crooks and Liars, 5/15/2009; Crooks and Liars, 5/15/2009]

Former Vice President Dick Cheney praises President Obama’s choice of Stanley McChrystal to replace General David McKiernan as the top commander in Afghanistan. In an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto, Cheney says that the Obama administration’s decision to assign Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal the top job in Afghanistan is a good one. “I think the choice is excellent.… Stan is an absolutely outstanding officer,” Cheney tells Cavuto. “I think you would be hard put to find anybody better than Stan McChrystal to take on that assignment.” [Your World with Neil Cavuto, Fox News, 5/13/2009] In a 2006 profile of McChrystal, Newsweek noted that the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which McChrystal then headed, was likely part of what Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to “work the dark side” after 9/11 (see September 16, 2001). [Newsweek, 6/26/2006]

Ted Kennedy, shortly before his death. [Source: Mother Talkers (.com)]Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who has just learned he has terminal and inoperable brain cancer, sends a letter to President Obama about his hope for health care reform. Obama will reveal some of the contents of the letter during a September address to Congress (see September 9, 2009). The letter reads in part: “I felt confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the president who at long last signs into law the health care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society. For me, this cause stretched across decades; it has been disappointed, but never finally defeated. It was the cause of my life. And in the past year, the prospect of victory sustained me—and the work of achieving it summoned my energy and determination. There will be struggles—there always have been—and they are already underway again. But as we moved forward in these months, I learned that you will not yield to calls to retreat—that you will stay with the cause until it is won. I saw your conviction that the time is now and witnessed your unwavering commitment and understanding that health care is a decisive issue for our future prosperity. But you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country. And so because of your vision and resolve, I came to believe that soon, very soon, affordable health coverage will be available to all, in an America where the state of a family’s health will never again depend on the amount of a family’s wealth. And while I will not see the victory, I was able to look forward and know that we will—yes, we will—fulfill the promise of health care in America as a right and not a privilege.” Senator Kennedy compares Obama with his brother, former President John F. Kennedy, “who inspired a generation and the world,” and says he has “great hope[s] that as I leave, another young president inspires another generation and once more on America’s behalf inspires the entire world.” [White House, 5/12/2009; Salon, 9/9/2009]

On his radio show, conservative host Glenn Beck warns that the Democrats’ “socialistic” health care reform proposal will lead to “eugenics” as envisioned by leaders of the Nazi Third Reich. Beck tells his listeners that the reform package will not only result in senior citizens being forced to die before their time in order to save on medical costs (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, and February 18, 2009), but also says: “This is Nazi Germany stuff. This is the kind of stuff that is progressive in its nature. It is eugenics. It is survival of the fittest. It is the reason why the abortion argument makes so much difference. You can’t devalue life at either end because these people are waiting to swoop in and say it’s just not worth doing these things. Don’t waste the money on old people. They’re not going to live long anyway. Spend it on someone who meets the requirements of our cost-benefit analysis. So old people, thanks for all the contributions you made to society during your better years but now we’re sorry to say it’s time to send you to a better place, heaven.” [Glenn Beck, 5/13/2009]

Fox News’s Web site, Fox Nation, features a banner advertisement for May 14’s ‘Tea Party 2.0’ events. [Source: Media Matters]As it did with the April 15 “tea parties” (see April 15, 2009), Fox News actively promotes the May 14 anti-tax “tea party” protests scheduled to take place at venues around the country. The protests, dubbed “Tea Party 2.0,” are a major portion of Fox’s coverage before and during the May 14 events. On May 13, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren hosts one of the events’ highest-profile organizers, Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC), speaking on behalf of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), one of the hosts of the events. “If you wanted to go to a tea party on April 15 but could not make it or there was none in your hometown, tomorrow’s your big chance,” she says. She also asks Sanford if viewers can log on to a Web site for more information, and asks for a phone number for more information. During the interview, Fox News shows an on-screen text crawl that reads, “To sign up for Tea Party 2.0 go to: www.thegopcomeback.com” (see October 13, 2009). [Media Matters, 5/14/2009; Media Matters, 5/15/2009]

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), widely considered a likely candidate for the presidency in 2012, lambasts current Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her recent complaints about the CIA never briefing her about the Bush administration’s use of torture. “I think she has lied to the House, and I think that the House has an absolute obligation to open an inquiry, and I hope there will be a resolution to investigate her. And I think this is a big deal. I don’t think the speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters,” Gingrich says. Gingrich then launches a personal attack (see September 20, 1990) on Pelosi, saying: “I think this is the most despicable, dishonest, and vicious political effort I’ve seen in my lifetime. She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowist of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior.… Speaker Pelosi’s the big loser, because she either comes across as incompetent or dishonest. Those are the only two defenses. The fact is she either didn’t do her job, or she did do her job and she’s now afraid to tell the truth.” [ABC News, 5/15/2009] Former Senator Bob Graham (D-FL), who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, also says the CIA lied to him about the Bush administration’s use of torture. He says that the CIA’s records about its briefings of Graham and Pelosi conflict with his own records of his briefings by intelligence officials, and he has no recollection of ever being briefed about “any of the sensitive programs such as the waterboarding or other forms of excessive interrogation.” [Huffington Post, 5/14/2009]

Malalai Joya. [Source: Getty]In a series of editorials and interviews, Afghan MP Malalai Joya declares that the upcoming presidential election polls in Afghanistan are illegitimate and have been determined in advance in favor of current Afghan President Hamid Karzai by the United States in cooperation with a group of powerful allied warlords and former Mujaheddin. “Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption, and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House,” Joya writes in a Guardian editorial. [Guardian, 7/25/2009] She echoes this in a later interview in London with the Arab daily, Asharq Al-Awsat: “Even the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan will not change anything because the next president will be chosen behind the closed doors of the Pentagon.” [Asharq Al-Awsat, 8/3/2009]
Karzai a 'Shameless Puppet' of Afghan Warlords, Coalition Occupiers - In an interview with Johann Hari in The Independent, Joya rails against the current government of Hamid Karzai, the US and NATO occupation, and the mafia-ridden warlordism that dominates Afghan social and political life. She asserts that Karzai keeps power only as “a shameless puppet” of both the Afghan warlords and the occupying powers, thus guaranteeing him victory in the August elections due to his fealty to these powers. “He hasn’t yet stopped working for his masters, the US and the warlords.… At this point in our history, the only people who get to serve as president are those selected by the US government and the mafia that holds power in our country,” she says. “Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. [That is] what your soldiers are dying for.” [Independent, 7/28/2009] Joya also slams the recent western troop surge as a farce masquerading as support for democratic elections. In the progressive Internet magazine ZNet, she writes: “We are told that additional US and NATO troops are coming to Afghanistan to help secure the upcoming presidential election. But frankly the Afghan people have no hope in this election—we know that there can be no true democracy under the guns of warlords, the drug trafficking mafia, and occupation.” [ZNet, 5/16/2009]
Suspended from Assembly, in Hiding from Assassins - Joya was elected to the 249-seat National Assembly, or Wolesi Jirga, in September 2005 as a representative of Farah province, but was suspended from the parliament in 2007 for publicly denouncing fellow members as drug smugglers, warlords, and war criminals. Her suspension sparked international condemnation and is currently under appeal. Joya, a champion of women’s rights and democracy in Afghanistan, lives in hiding and has survived at least four assassination attempts. [Human Rights Watch, 5/23/2007; Democracy Now!, 6/19/2007]

One of the billboards erected by WorldNetDaily. [Source: WorldNetDaily]The conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND), which has been at the forefront of the “birther” movement challenging President Obama’s citizenship (see August 1, 2008 and After, October 21, 2008, October 24, 2008, November 12, 2008 and After, and December 5, 2008), begins erecting billboards asking “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND, calls the billboard initiative “the truth and transparency campaign.” The first, a digital electronic billboard, is displayed along Highway 165 in Ball, Louisiana, and two more standard billboards are being prepared for display in Los Angeles and Pennsylvania. Farah says the “national [billboard] campaign is going to be big and long-lasting,” and uses WND to solicit donations for more billboards. Farah says he and the WND staff deliberately chose not to name Obama in the billboards: “There are several reasons we chose the message, ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’ There is only one birth certificate controversy in this country today—despite the near-total absence of this issue from coverage in the non-WND media. This is a grass-roots issue that resonates around the country, as our own online petition with nearly 400,000 signers suggests. In addition, I like the simplicity of the message. I like the fact that the message will cause some people to ask themselves or others about the meaning of the message. It will stir curiosity. It will create a buzz. I’m assuming when these billboards are springing up all over the country, it might even make some in the news media curious. And there’s one more factor that persuaded me this was the way to go. Come 2012, campaign laws will pose restrictions on political advertising mentioning the names of presidential candidates. This one clearly doesn’t. I would like to see the federal government make the case that this is somehow a political ad.” Farah blames “timid elected officials in Washington, corrupt judges around the country, and a news media that show a stunning lack of curiosity about the most basic facts of Obama’s background—especially how it relates to constitutional eligibility for the highest office in the land” for failing to investigate the “birther” controversy. Obama released his birth certificate in 2008 (see June 13, 2008), and since then it has been validated by multiple governmental and independent sources (see June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008). Farah, however, is not convinced, and believes the birth certificate “controversy” is part of a larger, sinister scheme by the Obama administration: “As Obama transforms this country from self-governing constitutional republic to one governed by a central ruling elite, the simple fact remains that no controlling legal authority has established that he is indeed a ‘natural born citizen’ as the Constitution requires,” he says. “Obama’s promises of transparency have become a bad joke as he continues to hide simple, innocuous documents like his birth certificate and his student records.” Farah says WND is operating as an “independent watchdog on government” by launching the billboard campaign, and not acting as a partisan organization. “I wish such a campaign were not absolutely necessary,” he says. “I wish there were checks and balances in our political and electoral systems to ensure that constitutional eligibility of presidential candidates was established before politicians could assume the highest office in the land. I wish my colleagues in the news media believed the Constitution really means what it says and pressed this issue as hard as we have pressed it at WND. I wish radio talk show hosts were bold enough to ask this question. But wishing is not enough. It’s time to raise the visibility of this issue vital to the rule of law in America. I ask everyone to pitch in and help WND make a simple yet profound statement: The Constitution still matters.” [WorldNetDaily, 5/20/2009] In November 2010, WND will erect a “birth certificate” billboard along Highway 93 near Kingman, Arizona, the small town in which Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh planned the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Other billboards will be erected in Pennsylvania, Texas, Alabama, and Delaware. [WorldNetDaily, 11/8/2010]

Conservative groups run attack ads and public relations campaigns against three of President Obama’s prospective nominees to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, even though Obama has not yet named a replacement. The three being targeted for attack are Judge Diane Wood of the Seventh Court of Appeals, US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Court of Appeals, who will eventually get the nod (see May 26, 2009). Progressive groups counter the attacks with their own ads and blog campaigns. Wood is targeted as too pro-abortion, Kagan has come under fire for not being supportive enough of the military, and in Sotomayor’s court, one ad says, “the content of your character is not as important as the color of your skin.” Tom Goldstein, who runs the influential SCOTUSblog, a non-partisan website focusing on Supreme Court issues, says: “I think that the Internet and blogs have been great in terms of being able to distribute information easily. The downside is that there is an equal leveling effect in which totally idiotic wing nuts can go off—that’s true on both the far left and far right.… So it contributes to good people being torn apart for no reason.” Gary Marx of the Judicial Confirmation Network, a conservative group that assembled the attack ads, says the spots are an attempt to properly “frame the issue.” Law professor Jonathan Adler says the ads are more about fundraising than any real attempt to derail whichever nominee Obama selects. “If you are a conservative group and you want more Republicans in the Senate, then you really harp on this issue.” Adler says the nomination process for Supreme Court choices has been locked in a “downward spiral” for more than 20 years. “I think we’re talking about the wrong things,” he says. “It can have negative effects on the judiciary. And it could steer people away from the court who are easy to demonize.” The ultimate result, he says, “is a worse judiciary and a tainted confirmation process.” Former Bush administration lawyer Bradford Berenson blames the Obama administration for the preemptive attacks, citing the White House’s choice to conduct what he calls a “lengthy, semipublic deliberation” over the nomination. That “virtually guarantees that the interest groups will mount attacks and exert both public and private pressure in an effort to influence the selection,” he says. “In some ways, that is the point of proceeding in this way—to get a feel for the strength and type of opposition particular candidates will face.” [Los Angeles Times, 5/21/2009]

Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor during the nomination announcement. [Source: Associated Press]President Obama nominates Second Circuit Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his candidate to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter (see May 1, 2009). Sotomayor is a Hispanic woman from an underprivileged background with a stellar academic record and an extensive legal background, having served as a prosecutor, a corporate lawyer, and a judge for 17 years, having been first appointed to the bench by former President George H. W. Bush. She is expected to receive heavy support from Democrats. Republicans say they are waiting for more information to decide whether to mount organized opposition. Political observers say such a move would be chancy for Republicans, who need to attract more support from Hispanic and female voters. Obama calls Sotomayor a judge with an impressive intellect and a great capacity for empathy, and a jurist who renders judgments with “an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.” He notes that Sotomayor has more legal experience than any currently sitting justice had when they ascended to the high court. Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic and the third woman to serve on the Court. Sotomayor is considered more or less ideologically consistent with the moderate-to-liberal Souter, and thus would not change the court’s ideological makeup. The Obama administration says it wants Sotomayor approved in time for the Court’s October session. In her acceptance speech, Sotomayor says of herself, “I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.” Of her position as a jurist, she says she is driven first and foremost by the rule of law and the principles laid down in the Constitution. “Those principles,” she says, “are as meaningful and relevant in each generation as the generation before.” Sotomayor was chosen over three other short-listed finalists: fellow appellate court judge Diane Wood, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. It is likely that one or more of the people on the list may become nominated to the court as well: Justice John Paul Stevens is 89 years old, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 76, suffers from pancreatic cancer. [Associated Press, 5/26/2009; CNN, 5/26/2009] In response to the nomination, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele says: “Republicans look forward to learning more about… Sotomayor’s thoughts on the importance of the Supreme Court’s fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law. Supreme Court vacancies are rare, which makes Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination a perfect opportunity for America to have a thoughtful discussion about the role of the Supreme Court in our daily lives. Republicans will reserve judgment on Sonia Sotomayor until there has been a thorough and thoughtful examination of her legal views.” [Think Progress, 5/26/2009]

Conservative activist Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, attacks Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) as an “intellectual lightweight,” and compares her to the Bush administration’s failed nomination of White House lawyer Harriet Miers for the Court (see October 3-27, 2005). “I would point you to the Harriet Miers nomination under the second President Bush,” he tells radio listeners on WTOP. “She was also, many people felt, an intellectual lightweight, picked because she was a woman, people felt. And even though Republicans controlled the Senate, she ultimately had to withdraw. And that could happen here. This is someone who clearly was picked because she’s a woman and Hispanic, not because she was the best qualified. I could certainly see red and purple state Democrats gawking at it and she may very well have to withdraw her nomination.” [Think Progress, 5/26/2009] At the Washington Post and National Review, conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnaru attacks Sotomayor as “Obama’s Harriet Miers.” He continues to slam the nominee for asserting that judges sometimes make policy, claims—without naming names—that some Democrats believe she lacks “the intellect to be on the high court,” falsely claims that President Obama chose her because she passed “a pro-abortion litmus test,” criticizes her for having “empathy, at least for some groups” (a veiled reference to her Hispanic heritage and her gender), and claims that she has a “high reversal rate” before the Court. He calls her “the crassest of political picks.” [National Review, 5/26/2009; Washington Post, 5/26/2009]

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh attacks Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), a Hispanic woman, and President Barack Obama, a half-African-American male, over their race, accusing them of racism. Limbaugh tells his listeners: “So, here you have a racist. You might want to soften that and you might wanna say a reverse racist. And the libs [liberals] of course say that minorities cannot be racists because they don’t have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone because reverse racists certainly do have the power to implement their power. Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist and now he’s appointed one.” Limbaugh goes on to call Sotomayor a “party hack.” [Real Clear Politics, 5/26/2009; Politico, 5/27/2009; CNN, 5/27/2009]

New Republic columnist Jeffrey Rosen, stung by criticism of his recent article using anonymous sources questioning the character and reputation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 4, 2009, May 5, 2009, and May 26, 2009), attempts to backtrack from his original assertions. He writes, “Of course, Judge Sotomayor should be confirmed to the Supreme Court,” and continues: “In my view the strongest case to be made for Sotomayor is not her inspiring life story: [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas overcame similar personal obstacles, but far from giving him a sense of empathy, his background has created a sense of anger and ideological rigidity. Instead, the strongest case to be made for Sotomayor is the idea that the range of her experience—as a trial judge, appellate judge, and commercial litigator—might give her the humility to recognize that courts participate in a dialogue with the political branches when it comes to defining constitutional rights, rather than having the last word.… Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court—not that she didn’t have the potential to be a fine justice. Questions of temperament are often overlooked, but history suggests that they are the most relevant in predicting judicial success. (Justice [Antonin] Scalia may be a brilliant bomb-thrower, but has failed in his attempts to build coalitions and bipartisan majorities.) Now is the time to think more broadly about the role Justice Sotomayor is likely to play on the Supreme Court, and I look forward to doing that in the weeks ahead.” [New Republic, 5/26/2009]

Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who authored numerous legally untenable memos authorizing torture and the preeminence of the executive branch (see September 21, 2001, September 25, 2001, September 25, 2001, October 23, 2001, November 6-10, 2001, and January 9, 2002), writes that in the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court (see May 26, 2009), “empathy has won out over excellence in the White House.” Yoo, who calls the Justice she is replacing, David Souter, an equally “weak force on the high court,” writes that President Obama “chose a judge distinguished from the other members of [his list of potential nominees] only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.” Sotomayor’s record is “undistinguished,” Yoo writes, and “will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for.” She will not be the intellectual and legal equal of conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, he says. “Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.” Conservatives should challenge her nomination, Yoo writes, because the Court is “a place where cases are decided by a faithful application of the Constitution, not personal politics, backgrounds, and feelings. Republican senators will have to conduct thorough questioning in the confirmation hearings to make sure that she will not be a results-oriented voter, voting her emotions and politics rather than the law.” [American Enterprise Institute, 5/26/2009]

Continuing the conservative lambasting of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), columnist Michael Goldfarb attacks her as an advocate of “affirmative action” for Hispanics and writes, “[P]erhaps what’s most striking is that on the issue of diversity, Obama seems to have the views of a 21-year-old Hispanic girl—that is, only by having a black president, an Hispanic justice, a female secretary of state, and Bozo the Clown as vice president will the United States become a true ‘vanguard of societal ideas and changes.’” [Weekly Standard, 5/26/2009]

The conservative National Review lambasts Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) for being a “liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.” The Review’s Wendy Long writes: “She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one’s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench (see October 26, 2001). She reads racial preferences and quotas into the Constitution, even to the point of dishonoring those who preserve our public safety. On September 11, America saw firsthand the vital role of America’s firefighters in protecting our citizens. They put their lives on the line for her and the other citizens of New York and the nation. But Judge Sotomayor would sacrifice their claims to fair treatment in employment promotions to racial preferences and quotas. The Supreme Court is now reviewing that decision. She has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court.” [National Review, 5/26/2009]

Echoing and repeating his calls for President Obama to “fail” (see January 16, 2009), conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, in a diatribe against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), says he wants her to fail as well. “Do I want her to fail? Yeah,” he says. “Do I want her to fail to get on the court? Yes! She’d be a disaster on the court. Do I still want Obama to fail as president? Yeah. AP [Associated Press], you getting this? He’s going to fail anyway, but the sooner the better.” [Think Progress, 5/26/2009]

Former Bush White House political director Karl Rove attacks Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) on the grounds that she is less than intelligent. During a debate with former Clinton political director James Carville, moderator Charlie Rose notes, “She is very smart.” Rove responds, “Not necessarily.” Rose notes that Sotomayor “went to Princeton where she graduat[ed] with honors and then went on to Yale Law School,” to which Rove replies, “I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools.” Rose points out that Rove himself never graduated from college, and Rove says, “Message to the kids out there—don’t do what I did—I am the last of a generation.” [Huffington Post, 5/26/2009] In an appearance on Fox News, Rove continues denigrating Sotomayor’s intellect, saying that according to former colleagues, she was more like a “schoolmarm” than an intellectual force. Rove says: “What she would do is she would mark them up [legal opinions] like she was your English school teacher and—with your typos and misspellings and other words that she wanted to have changed and send it back to her colleagues. Not exactly the best way to ingratiate yourself with your colleagues. Rather than say, ‘Oh, I thought you had an interesting legal argument here and I’d like to talk to you more about this here,’ she was acting like sort of a schoolmarm.” [Think Progress, 5/27/2009]

Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) attacks Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) for what he calls “personal bias based on ethnicity and gender.” Smith says, “Judge Sotomayor will need to reassure the country that she will set aside her biases, uphold the rule of law, and interpret the Constitution as written, not as she believes it should have been written.” Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who will vote to confirm or deny Sotomayor’s nomination as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says Sotomayor has shown disrespect for the law in her time on the bench. Eleven years ago, Sessions voted against allowing her to become an appeals court judge. Sotomayor was confirmed despite Sessions’s vote. Now, Sessions says she will get a “fair and respectful hearing” before the committee, but says he and other conservatives worry about her “history of activism.” Legal analysts say Sotomayor has a history of complying with the law, and far from being a judicial activist, has usually shown judicial restraint and a deference to existing case law and judicial precedent. [Fox News, 5/26/2009] In a statement, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) questions “her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender, or political preferences.” [Senator James Inhofe, 5/26/2009] Liberal columnist Dana Goldstein retorts that the same question could be asked of the seven white males already on the bench, and asks sardonically, “White men are raceless and genderless, haven’t you heard?” [American Prospect, 5/26/2009]

Tom Goldstein, a veteran lawyer who maintains the Supreme Court-focused, nonpartisan “SCOTUSblog,” writes that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) will be the focus of caricatures and character attacks from the right, just as Justices Samuel Alito (see October 31, 2005 - February 1, 2006) and John Roberts (see September 29, 2005) were from the left. Goldstein’s assessment is echoed by ABC’s “The Note,” an influential daily political newsletter. Goldstein, who has argued cases before the Court over 20 times, writes that barring some serious revelation of ethical violations, Sotomayor is almost guaranteed to be confirmed by the Senate, but before that, she will be subjected to attacks from what he calls “committed ideologues.” Few “mainstream Republican politicians will vocally join the criticism,” he predicts. In a political sense, it would be disastrous for Republicans to mount serious opposition to a Hispanic woman, or Latina. “To Hispanics, the nomination would be an absolutely historic landmark,” Goldstein writes. “It really is impossible to overstate its significance. The achievement of a lifetime appointment at the absolute highest levels of the government is a profound event for that community, which in turn is a vital electoral group now and in the future.” Such attacks would comprise “a strategy that risks exacting a very significant political cost among Hispanics and independent voters generally, assuming that the attacks aren’t backed up with considerable substance.” The attacks will come from any of four major areas, Goldstein predicts. [Tom Goldstein, 5/26/2009]
Attacks Led by Conservatives outside Congress - ABC’s Jonathan Karl agrees. He writes: “At the start, Senate Republicans will likely make innocuous statements about the need to thoroughly review her record, but make no mistake, GOP leaders, with a big assist from outside conservative groups, will wage a vigorous campaign against this nomination.… Senate Republicans don’t expect to defeat the Sotomayor nomination. But they hope to raise enough questions about the nomination to make it a tough vote for Democratic senators in more conservative states. They will also use the confirmation battle as an opportunity to motivate a demoralized Republican base” (see May 1, 2009). [ABC News, 5/26/2009]
Attacks on Sotomayor's Intellect - The first series of attacks, Goldstein writes, will focus on the claim that she “is not smart enough for the job.” He writes that this is a powerful line of argument with an equally strong potential for backlash, so it will be handled carefully and obliquely. Unfortunately for this position, he writes, “Sotomayor is in fact extremely intelligent.” She graduated at the top of her class at Princeton, and her judicial opinions “are thorough, well-reasoned, and clearly written. Nothing suggests she isn’t the match of the other Justices.” Goldstein’s predictions are reflected in a number of public columns and commentaries (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 29, 2009, and May 31, 2009).
'Liberal Ideologue and Judicial Activist' - The second line of attack will be purely ideological, focusing on the claim that she is a “liberal ideologue” and a “judicial activist.” While Sotomayor would be on the left of the Court, Goldstein writes, she is hardly a radical liberal. She is very similar to the man she is slated to replace, Justice David Souter, as a moderate, centrist liberal. Her appellate opinions as reviewed by the Court put her squarely with the left-center wing of the current Court. Karl writes, “They will call her an ‘activist’ judge intent on making law from the bench, not interpreting law.” Their predictions are reflected in a number of public columns and commentaries (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 29, 2009, May 29, 2009, and June 3, 2009).
Intolerant of Positions Contrary to Her Own - The third wave of attack will claim, Goldstein writes, that she is intolerant of positions with which she disagrees. Proponents of this line of attack will focus on a decision she wrote that upheld affirmative action laws to the detriment of white firefighters, on a panel appearance in which she acknowledged that appellate judges sometimes make public policy, and a speech where she talked about the role her gender and ethnicity played in her decision-making. They will also focus, Karl notes, on a 2002 speech where she said the sex and ethnic origin of a judge can affect their decisions. Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” (see October 26, 2001). “These reeds are too thin for that characterization to take hold,” Goldstein writes. The public “is easily able to accept a judge’s recognition of the lawmaking effects of her decisions and the influences of her background. There just isn’t any remotely persuasive evidence that Judge Sotomayor acts lawlessly or anything of the sort.” Goldstein’s predictions are reflected in a number of public columns and commentaries (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 29, 2009, and June 3, 2009). [ABC News, 5/26/2009; Tom Goldstein, 5/26/2009]
Personality Characteristics - The fourth wave of attacks will characterize her as, Goldstein writes, “gruff and impersonable,” based on some excerpts from oral arguments and a few anonymous criticisms voiced in the “Almanac of the Federal Judiciary.” Sotomayor can easily quash these attacks with a few well-turned statements in the public eye. From his own experiences arguing cases before the Court, Goldstein believes Sotomayor is similar in demeanor and temperment to Justices Roberts, Souter, and Antonin Scalia. Goldstein’s predictions are reflected in a number of public columns and commentaries (see May 27, 2009. May 29, 2009, and June 3, 2009).
Missed Line of Attack - Neither Goldstein nor Karl write about the direct attacks on Sotomayor’s race and gender that some conservatives will launch (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009. May 29, 2009, June 2, 2009, June 3, 2009, and June 5, 2009). Goldstein’s own analysis of Sotomayor’s rulings will thoroughly disprove the allegations of racial bias (see May 29, 2009).
Conclusion - Goldstein concludes, “All in all… her easy confirmation seems assured.” [Tom Goldstein, 5/26/2009]

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and ABC News correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg misrepresent a remark by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see October 26, 2001 and May 26, 2009) that Kelly tells viewers said “Latina judges are obviously better than white male judges.” Kelly calls Sotomayor’s remarks “reverse racism,” and adds it is “[l]ike she’s saying that Latina judges are obviously better than white male judges.” Kelly goes on to claim, “I’ve looked at the entire speech that she was offering to see if that was taken out of context, and I have to tell you… it wasn’t” (see October 13, 2009). On ABC’s Good Morning America, Greenburg claims that Sotomayor “suggest[ed] that a wise Latino may actually be a better judge than a white man, and that white men have had some attitude adjustments and reached moments of great enlightenment, but there’s a long way to go.” [Media Matters, 5/26/2009]

Tom Tancredo (R-CA), a former House member and 2008 presidential candidate known for his radical isolationism and anti-immigrant views (see September 9, 2006), tells MSNBC host Ed Schultz that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) is a racist. Tancredo uses a statement from 2001 that seems to suggest Sotomayor believes Latinas (Hispanic women) make better rulings than white males (see October 26, 2001) to launch his attack. “I’m telling you she appears to be a racist,” Tancredo says. “She said things that are racist in any other context. That’s exactly how we would portray it and there’s no one who would get on the Supreme Court saying a thing like that except for a Hispanic woman and you’re going to say it doesn’t matter. Well, man. Where are you coming from? How can you possibly say that? There’s plenty of stuff.” Another guest, liberal columnist Bill Press, says that Sotomayor will get no “special protection” because of her race and gender, to which Tancredo scoffs, “Oh, jeez.” Responding to Press’s reiteration of Sotomayor’s extensive judicial background, Tancredo says: “You can still be a racist and have all of those things in your background. You can be a racist and have all of that stuff in your background. One does not preclude the other.” Schultz asks his third guest, reporter Mike Allen, if he would “check out to see if she had some racist comments?” Allen responds, “No,” to which Tancredo says: “You won’t do it? You won’t check it out? There you go.… They won’t even check it out.” Tancredo also calls Sotomayor a “radical” and in the same sentence admits he knows nothing of her judicial record. Allen says of Tancredo’s remarks, “Ed, we’re getting a preview here of a lot of phony outrage, theatrics, posturing.” [MSNBC, 5/26/2009]

Fox News pundit Sean Hannity attacks the character of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), using carefully selected quotes from former colleagues who remain anonymous. Hannity tells his listeners: “[W]hat do the lawyers who have appeared in her courtroom think of her judicial temperament? Well, not much. The Almanac of the Federal Judiciary solicits commentary from practicing attorneys about our federal judges. Now here’s what some lawyers who have argued before Judge Sotomayor had to say about her. Quote, ‘She is a terror on the bench. She is overly aggressive, not very judicial. She behaves in an out-of-control manner. She is nasty to lawyers.’” Hannity does not tell his listeners of some of the other comments about Sotomayor in the Almanac: “very smart,” “very intelligent,” “stern,” “an exceptional judge overall,” and “has a very good commonsense approach to the law.” One commentator wrote: “She can be tough as nails, but, in truth, I think some lawyers give her a hard time or are threatened by her. She’s very accomplished and clearly smart, and, in truth, I think they’re intimidated. She has always been decent enough to me.” Another wrote: “She’s very smart and well prepared, and she expects lawyers to rise to her level. She has very little tolerance for lawyers who can’t match her intellectually.” [Think Progress, 5/28/2009]

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) says that because Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) is what he calls a “Latina woman racist,” she should immediately withdraw her nomination. Gingrich bases his remark on a 2001 comment by Sotomayor in which she said she “hopes that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” (see October 26, 2001). Sending a text message on Twitter, Gingrich writes: “Imagine a judicial nominee said, ‘My experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.’ New racism is no better than old racism.” He follows with another message: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.” Republican National Committee (RNC) media chairman Todd Herman quickly “retweets” Gingrich’s message, which usually signifies agreement with the message, but the RNC will refuse to say whether or not it officially endorses Gingrich’s comment. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs replies that Gingrich is probably not the best source of information or guidance on the issue, and warns against excessive rhetoric: “I think it is probably important for any involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way in which they’ve decided to describe different aspects of the impending confirmation. I think we’re satisfied that when the people of America and the people of the Senate get a chance to look at more than just the blog of a former lawmaker that they’ll come to the same conclusion that the president did.” [Think Progress, 5/27/2009; Plum Line, 5/27/2009; Washington Times, 5/28/2009] Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, refuses to align himself with Gingrich’s characterization. Asked about Gingrich’s remark, Hatch says, “No, I don’t agree with that.” [Think Progress, 5/27/2009] Days later, Gingrich will appear to withdraw the “racist” characterization, although he will go on to accuse Sotomayor of “betray[ing]” the “American system” of law (see June 3, 2009).

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald notes that in 2006, conservative Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito (see October 31, 2005 - February 1, 2006) made remarks about his ethnic identity influencing his decisions from the bench that are strikingly similar to those made in 2001 by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see October 26, 2001 and May 26, 2009). Sotomayor is being called a “racist” by conservatives based on her remarks (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27, 2009, and May 28, 2009). In 2006, as Greenwald notes, Alito told the Senate Judiciary Committee: “[W]hen a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant—and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases—I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position. And so it’s my job to apply the law. It’s not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result. But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, ‘You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.‘… When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.” Greenwald writes, “Anyone who is objecting now to Sotomayor’s alleged ‘empathy’ problem but who supported Sam Alito and never objected to this sort of thing ought to have their motives questioned (and the same is true for someone who claims that a person who overcame great odds to graduate at the top of their class at Princeton, graduate Yale Law School, and then spent time as a prosecutor, corporate lawyer, district court judge, and appellate court judge must have been chosen due to ‘identity politics’).” [Washington Post, 1/11/2006; Salon, 5/27/2009]

National Review columnist Mark Krikorian complains that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) should not insist on her name being pronounced properly—with the emphasis on the last syllable. “Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English,” he writes, “and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.” Krikorian continues: “This may seem like carping, but it’s not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options—the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.” [National Review, 5/27/2009] Two days later, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann derides Krikorian’s argument, noting: “I don’t know when your ancestors arrived in this country, Mr. Krikorian, but there was a time in which immigrants with tough-to-pronounce names were encouraged to change them, or sometimes had them changed for them at Ellis Island and elsewhere. Unless Sitting Bull is one of your ancestors, they either got here afterwards, or, like mine, they resisted this racist wall-papering pap that you are now spouting. If they hadn’t, today, your name, by your own logic, would be Mark Krik.” [MSNBC, 5/29/2009]

National Review columnist Mark Krikorian complains that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) should not insist on her name being pronounced properly—with the emphasis on the last syllable. “Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English,” he writes, “and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.” Krikorian continues: “This may seem like carping, but it’s not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options—the newcomer adapts to us or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.” [National Review, 5/27/2009] Two days later, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann derides Krikorian’s argument, noting: “I don’t know when your ancestors arrived in this country, Mr. Krikorian, but there was a time in which immigrants with tough-to-pronounce names were encouraged to change them, or sometimes had them changed for them at Ellis Island and elsewhere. Unless Sitting Bull is one of your ancestors, they either got here afterwards, or, like mine, they resisted this racist wall papering pap that you are now spouting. If they hadn’t, today, your name, by your own logic, would be Mark Krik.” [MSNBC, 5/29/2009]

Fox News host Glenn Beck, speaking on his morning radio show, tells listeners that the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court (see May 26, 2009) is more evidence of a Marxist “hostile takeover” of the United States. The conflict between Republicans and Democrats over the nomination is nothing more than a “game,” Beck says. “Marxism,” he says. “It is Marxism. She is a Marxist.” As proof, he notes that Sotomayor quoted Socialist philosopher Norman Thomas in her yearbook at Princeton (he does not cite the quote: “I am not a champion of lost causes, but of causes not yet won”), a “socialist… whose quote leads her life.… It has influenced her.” He concludes by asking: “How many Marxists do we have to turn up before we say our country is being taken over? This is a hostile takeover.” [Politico, 5/27/2009; Media Matters, 5/28/2009]

Right-wing radio host and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy (see January 30, 1973) denigrates Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009)‘s race and gender in comments on his show. Liddy refers to the Spanish language as “illegal alien,” and speculates that Sotomayor’s rulings may be influenced by her menstrual cycle. Liddy says: “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race’ (see May 28, 2009). And that should not surprise anyone because she’s already on record with a number of racist comments.… Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.” After making these attacks, Liddy then states his belief that the Supreme Court should not represent a diversity of Americans: “And everybody is cheering because Hispanics and females have been, quote, underrepresented, unquote. [T]he Supreme Court is not designed to be and should not be a representative body.” [Think Progress, 5/29/2009]

Pat Buchanan on MSNBC. [Source: Vosizneias (.com)]Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan calls Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) an “affirmative action candidate” for the Court. “I don’t say it’s an outrage, I say it’s affirmative action,” Buchanan says. “They were picked because she’s a woman and a Hispanic and you know it as well as I do.” His sole evidence for his claim is the fact that President Obama apparently had no males on his short list of potential nominees. When host Norah O’Donnell points out that in past nominations the list of nominees had been exclusively white males, and perhaps “there weren’t any white men who were qualified” this time around, Buchanan calls her a bigot. When guest Lawrence O’Donnell, a former Democratic Senate staffer (and no relation to the host), asks if he would have raised similar objections if the list had contained no women, Buchanan refuses to answer. Think Progress correspondent Amanda Terkel notes that Buchanan has, in the past, avowed that slavery was good for African-Americans, wished for an America that was 90 percent white, and accused Hispanics of not wanting to “assimilate.” Lawrence O’Donnell says of Buchanan’s argument: “It’s like watching a dead fish flop around on the deck. You’re dead on this one, Pat. It’s all over.” [Think Progress, 5/27/2009] The next day, Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes follows Buchanan’s lead, saying that Sotomayor is “one of those who has benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously.” Radio host William Bennett, featuring Barnes as his guest, replies, “Did she get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders,” to which Barnes repeats, “One wonders.” [Think Progress, 5/28/2009]

Former White House political director Karl Rove continues his attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009). In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Rove echoes former Justice Department official John Yoo in claiming that the Obama administration chose “empathy” over capability in Sotomayor’s selection (see May 26, 2009). Rove goes one step further than Yoo in equating Sotomayor’s “empathy” with “liberal judicial activism.” “‘Empathy’ is the latest code word for liberal activism,” Rove writes, “for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn’t pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.” He accuses Sotomayor, and indirectly President Obama, of a “readiness to discard the rule of law whenever emotion moves them.” He also accuses Obama of attempting to “placate Hispanic groups who’d complained of his failure to appoint more high profile Latinos to his administration.… Mr. Obama also hopes to score political points as GOP senators oppose a Latina. Being able to jam opponents is a favorite Chicago political pastime.” Rove advises Republicans to use Sotomayor’s nomination as an opportunity to “stress their support for judges who strictly interpret the Constitution and apply the law as written.” He notes: “A majority of the public is with the GOP on opposing liberal activist judges. There is something in our political DNA that wants impartial umpires who apply the rules, regardless of who thereby wins or loses.” [Wall Street Journal, 5/28/2009] Hours after his attack column is printed, Rove tells a Fox News audience that Republicans need to treat Sotomayor with “respect” and criticize her over her “philosophy,” not her background. [Think Progress, 5/29/2009]

Lester Kinsolving, in a photo taken during a 2007 Christmas celebration at the White House. [Source: Houston Chronicle]Journalist Lester Kinsolving, representing the conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND), asks White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about President Obama’s birth certificate. Obama has been hounded for well over a year with questions concerning his heritage and his citizenship. Kinsolving begins by asking: “One question concerning what the president said in his speech on Thursday, and I quote: ‘I ran for president promising transparency, and I meant what I said. This is why, whenever possible, we will make information available to the American people so they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable.’ End of quote. Do you remember that statement?” Gibbs responds, “I can confirm he said that.” Kinsolving says: “Good. In consideration of this very good promise of transparency, why can’t the president respond to the petitioned requests of 400,000 American citizens by releasing a certified copy of his long form birth certificate listing hospital and physician?” Kinsolving is referring to an online petition hosted by WND that, the site claims, has over 400,000 signatures asking for Obama’s “true” birth certificate. Gibbs tells Kinsolving that the certificate “is on the Internet, Lester” (see June 13, 2008). Kinsolving responds, “No, no, no—the long form listing his hospital and physician” (see July 1, 2009). Kinsolving is referring to the “long form” birth certificate that is by Hawaiian law kept in state vaults; only “short form” certificates are given to individuals and/or family members. Gibbs replies: “Lester.… This question in many ways continues to astound me. The state of Hawaii provided a copy, with a seal, of the president’s birth (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008). I know there are apparently at least 400,000 people that continue to doubt the existence of and the certification by the state of Hawaii of the president’s birth there, but it’s on the Internet because we put it on the Internet for each of those 400,000 to download. I certainly hope by the fourth year of our administration that we’ll have dealt with this burgeoning birth controversy.” WND will respond to Gibbs’s statement by taking out an ad in the conservative publication Human Events calling Gibbs “arrogant… factually incorrect,” and a liar, and accuses other journalists in the White House press corp, “members of the liberal elitist media,” of “openly laugh[ing]” at Kinsolving’s line of inquiry. PolitiFact researcher Robert Fairley will confirm that journalists could indeed be heard “chuckling” at Kinsolving’s questions. [St. Petersburg Times, 6/17/2009; St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009]

National Council of La Raza logo. [Source: National Council of La Raza]Former House member Tom Tancredo (R-CO—see September 9, 2006) continues his attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009). As in his earlier commentary, Tancredo vilifies Sotomayor over her supposed racism. On CNN, Tancredo says that her affiliation with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), a Hispanic civil rights group, is the equivalent of a white person belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. “If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino—it’s a counterpart—a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses,” he says. “If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’ What does that tell you?” When host Rick Sanchez attempts to redirect Tancredo from his statements about the civil rights group, Tancredo shouts: “She’s a member! She’s a member of La Raza!” [Think Progress, 5/28/2009; NewsMax, 5/28/2009] Liberal news website Think Progress notes that La Raza has been targeted by conservative critics since the 2006 immigration rallies, with some making the false claim that La Raza advocates the secession of the Western United States “as a Hispanic-only homeland,” and right-wing blogs calling the organization “an anti-white extremist group.” In reality, La Raza is the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy group, focusing primarily on “civil rights/immigration, education, employment and economic status, and health.” The name “La Raza” translates to “the people,” not “the race,” as Tancredo insists. And the group’s motto is not “All for the race, nothing for the rest,” as Tancredo says, it is actually “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” La Raza, or NCLR as it is officially known, points to its recognition by the Office of the Surgeon General and the Leadership Council for Civil Rights for its efforts on behalf of underprivileged Hispanic-Americans, and its work alongside Habitat for Humanity and the Heritage Foundation as a nonprofit organization working for positive social change. [National Council of La Raza, 2009; Think Progress, 5/28/2009]

John Cornyn (R-TX), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he is “troubled” by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) in light of her supposed “judicial activism” (see May 26, 2009) and supposed willingness to put her personal background above her dedication to the rule of law (see October 26, 2001). However, Cornyn repudiates some of the more vicious attacks on Sotomayor from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former House Republican Tom Tancredo, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, and others who have termed her “racist” (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27-29, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, and May 28, 2009). “I think it’s terrible. This is not the kind of tone that any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advice and consent,” Cornyn says. Of Gingrich and Limbaugh, Cornyn adds: “Neither one of these men are elected Republican officials. I just don’t think it’s appropriate and I certainly don’t endorse it. I think it’s wrong.” [National Public Radio, 5/28/2009; Politico, 5/28/2009] The next day, Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the committee, says the inflammatory rhetoric from right-wingers such as Limbaugh, Tancredo, and Gingrich makes him “uneasy,” and he advises Republicans to limit their criticisms of Sotomayor to her judicial record. “I don’t think that’s good rhetoric,” says Sessions. “The question is, has the judge gone too far or not, given the established law of the land?” The Washington Post notes that in 1986, Sessions was denied a federal judgeship because of his record of racial insensitivity (see June 5, 2009). Neither Sessions nor the Post mentions Sessions’s recent attack on Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009). [Washington Post, 5/29/2009] On May 31, Sessions tells an NBC audience that his Republican colleagues should refrain from calling Sotomayor a racist, and he would prefer that they not continue to attack her over her 2001 remarks. [Associated Press, 5/31/2009]

David Duke. [Source: Hip Hop Republican (.com)]Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, continuing the attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), says that Sotomayor “brings a form of bigotry and racism to the court” similar to views espoused by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Within hours, Duke counters on his own Web site, disparaging Limbaugh’s comparison and claiming that while he believes Sotomayor is a racist, he himself has never embraced racist views. “Limbaugh, a recent addict to illegal drugs, has no business making personal attacks against me for my past,” Duke writes. “I have consistently supported true equal rights, stating again and again that I support the best-qualified person regardless of race in hiring and promotions.” Duke goes on to write that Sotomayor’s racism is “proven” by remarks she made during a 2001 speech in which she said a “wise Latina” judge would often make better decisions than a white male (see October 26, 2001), and calls her “an activist for radical-Left Mexican organizations and an enthusiastic proponent of racial discrimination against White people called affirmative action” (see May 28, 2009). He then claims that her nomination is part of an overarching Jewish conspiracy to control “any person who is influential or who may at some point in the future become influential.” [Think Progress, 6/1/2009]

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, guest-hosting William Bennett’s radio show, says that Republicans should not attack Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) over her race (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, and May 28, 2009). Doing so risks damaging the Republican Party’s image, he says. Steele, who is an African-American, warns that the “liberal media,” and particularly MSNBC, will use the racially motivated attacks to paint Republicans as bigots. “MSNBC will rip everything we have to say up into shreds,” he says. “I’m excited that a Hispanic woman is in this position,” he says. Republicans should stop “slammin’ and rammin’” on Sotomayor, and instead “acknowledge” the “historic aspect” of the pick and make a “cogent, articulate argument” against her for purely substantive reasons. Steele says the party doesn’t want to “get painted as a party that’s against the first Hispanic woman” picked for the Supreme Court. Democrats have made similar attacks on conservative candidates in the past, Steele avers, and says that the “liberal media” gave Democrats an unfair advantage in such controversies. Steele does not mention two of the loudest voices in the racially-based attacks against Sotomayor, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent writes: “It’s a reminder of Steele’s predicament: He knows how badly these attacks are damaging the party and how neatly they play into the hands of Dems, but he can’t call out the leading figures launching those attacks, because that risks infuriating the base and feeding the meme that the GOP is hopelessly divided.” [Plum Line, 5/29/2009] Two weeks before, while hosting Bennett’s show, Steele had attacked Sotomayor’s intellect and personality, calling her “not a bell ringer” and “abrasive.” [Think Progress, 5/29/2009] A week later, while hosting Bennett’s show, Steele will say, “God help you if you’re a white male coming before her bench” (see June 5, 2009).

Neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer advises fellow Republicans not to use racial or gender-based attacks against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009). Noting that barring an unforeseen incident, she will be confirmed to the high court, Krauthammer writes: “What should a principled conservative do? Use the upcoming hearings not to deny her the seat, but to illuminate her views. No magazine gossip from anonymous court clerks (see May 4, 2009). No ‘temperament’ insinuations (see May 27, 2009). Nothing ad hominem (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27-29, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009. May 29, 2009, June 2, 2009, and June 3, 2009). The argument should be elevated, respectful, and entirely about judicial philosophy.” The debate should focus “on her statements about the inherent differences between groups, and the superior wisdom she believes her Latina physiology, culture, and background grant her over a white male judge (see October 26, 2001). They perfectly reflect the Democrats’ enthrallment with identity politics, which assigns free citizens to ethnic and racial groups possessing a hierarchy of wisdom and entitled to a hierarchy of claims upon society.… Vote Democratic and you get mainstream liberalism: a judicially mandated racial spoils system and a jurisprudence of empathy that hinges on which litigant is less ‘advantaged.’” [Washington Post, 5/29/2009]

President Barack Obama lambasts critics of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) for their attacks on her (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27-29, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, and May 29, 2009). Obama says that Sotomayor regrets her choice of words in a 2001 speech in which she said a “wise Latina” judge would often make better decisions than a white male (see October 26, 2001), but goes on to condemn “all this nonsense that is being spewed out” by critics who have accused her of racism and belonging to racist groups. Of her speech, Obama says: “I’m sure she would have restated it. But if you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote, what’s clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through. That will make her a good judge.” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says of the racial accusations: “It’s sort of hard to completely quantify the outrage I think almost anybody would feel at the notion that you’re being compared to somebody who used to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s amazing.” Republican strategist John Ullyot, who worked on judicial nominations as a Congressional staffer, says that “any comments politically on race or gender are fraught with peril for Republicans.” He continues: “A few conservatives from outside of the Senate, in their zeal to pick a fight over Obama’s nominee, decided to get very ugly very quickly. No one in the Senate has followed along, and that’s the loudest condemnation you can have.” Ullyot fails to mention attacks from Republican Senators James Inhofe (R-OK) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL—see May 26, 2009). [Washington Post, 5/29/2009]

Tom Goldstein, the veteran lawyer who maintains the nonpartisan Supreme Court watchdog Web site “SCOTUSblog” (see May 26, 2009), completes an analysis of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s (see May 26, 2009) rulings on race-related court cases. Sotomayor has come under intense fire for supposedly being a “racist” and allowing her “personal bias”—her Hispanic heritage—to influence her decisions from the bench (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27-29, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, and May 28, 2009). As a member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Sotomayor has ruled on 96 race-related cases. One of those is still on appeal to the Supreme Court. Of those 96 cases, Sotomayor and the entire panel rejected the claim of discrimination 78 times, and agreed with the claim 10 times. The remaining eight involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 favorable rulings, nine of those were unanimous. Seven of those nine rulings involved at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided ruling, the dissent involved a technical question of whether the criminal defendent had forfeited his right to challenge the jury selection in his case. Goldstein concludes: “So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.… [I]n sum, in an 11-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of four times.… Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.” [SCOTUSblog, 5/29/2009]

The conservative Judicial Confirmation Network releases a television and Internet advertisement that attacks Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) for being “personally biased” in her rulings. The ad, which claims Sotomayor’s ascension to the high court will place “equal justice… under attack,” is based largely on comments Sotomayor made in a 2001 speech (see October 26, 2001). [Think Progress, 5/29/2009] White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says that Sotomayor made a “poor word choice” in her 2001 comments (see May 29, 2009) [Associated Press, 5/29/2009] , but both President Obama and liberal news and analysis Web site Think Progress note that in that same 2001 speech, Sotomayor was firm in reiterating her belief that judges must base their decisions on the rule of law, not on personal bias or preference. And an analysis of her record shows that she has ruled against plaintiffs in discrimination lawsuits a large majority of the time (see May 29, 2009). [Think Progress, 5/29/2009] After the ad draws fire from across the political spectrum, Judicial Confirmation Network spokeswoman Wendy Long (see May 26, 2009) backs away from the controversy, writing that the debate over Sotomayor “is turning into an argument about race and identity politics.” She adds, “Many of us in the conservative movement believe that Judge Sotomayor is intelligent, and that, at least on paper, she has professional qualifications that are certainly sufficient for occupying a seat on the US Supreme Court.” Long continues to call Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy “very troubling.” [MSNBC, 5/29/2009]

Progressive news and advocacy Web site Think Progress profiles Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the conservative Washington lobbying organization that is planning to coordinate anti-tax “tea party” protests (see April 8, 2009 and April 15, 2009) with a summer push against the White House’s health care reform proposals. AFP is largely funded by Koch Industries, the largest private oil corporation in the US; AFP has long advocated positions favorable to the energy and health care industries. AFP also uses the technique of “astroturfing,” the creation of ostensibly citizen-driven “grassroots” advocacy groups that are actually funded and driven by corporate and lobbying interests. AFP’s most recent creation is a “front group” called “Patients United Now” (PUN), a group explicitly designed to thwart health care reform. PUN’s Web site declares, “We are people just like you,” and actively solicits participation and donations from ordinary Americans without revealing its corporate roots. AFP employs close to 70 Republican operatives and former oil industry officials.
Other 'Astroturf' Campaigns - Think Progress notes that other AFP “Astroturf” groups have organized events such as the “Hot Air Tour” attacking environmental regulation, the “Free Our Energy” movement to promote domestic oil drilling, the “Save My Ballot Tour” which sent conservative activist “Joe the Plumber” (see October 10, 2008) around the country attacking the Employee Free Choice Act, the “No Climate Tax” group aimed at defeating the Clean Energy Economy legislation, and the “No Stimulus” organization, which opposes the Obama administration’s economic policies.
Headed by Former Abramoff Colleague - AFP’s president is Tim Phillips, a veteran conservative lobbyist and “astroturfer.” In 1997, Phillips, then a Republican campaign strategist, joined Christian conservative activists in a new lobbying firm, Century Strategies. The firm promised to mount “grassroots lobbying drives” and explained its strategy as “it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard—and by whom.” Century Strategies was given a boost by Texas GOP political operative Karl Rove, and began its career representing the Texas oil giant Enron. The firm was paid $380,000 to mobilize “religious leaders and pro-family groups” to push energy deregulation on the federal and state level, an effort which helped lead, says Think Progress, “to the energy crisis and economic meltdown of 2001.” As part of their efforts, Phillips and his partner, former Christian Coalition official Ralph Reed, used their congressional connections and “placed” purported “news” articles in the New York Times and other prominent newspapers. Phillips managed the firm’s direct mail subsidiary, Millennium Marketing, which was hired by then-GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff to pressure members of Congress to oppose federal wage and worker safety legislation. Phillips and Reed also worked with Abramoff in the lobbyists’ efforts to fraudulently charge Native American tribes millions of dollars in lobbying fees over their efforts to build casinos on tribal lands. And they helped Abramoff launder gambling money. Phillips and Reed are responsible for the ads that helped Republicans win election victories by comparing Democratic candidates to Osama bin Laden, and helped George W. Bush (R-TX) defeat Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in 2000 by accusing McCain of fathering an illegitimate black child. They were unsuccessful in preventing the 2000 election of Republican Eric Cantor (R-VA) to the House by attacking his Jewish heritage. [Think Progress, 5/29/2009]
Headed by Oil Billionaire, Republican Party Funder - MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow will later note that AFP’s director is Art Pope, a multi-millionaire who has given so much money to the North Carolina Republican Party that it named its headquarters after him. The national chairman of AFP is David Koch, who with his brother runs Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in the US and a longtime supporter of right-wing causes. Koch is the 19th richest man in the world. [MSNBC, 8/6/2009]

US President Barack Obama issues a terse condemnation of the murder of late-term-abortion-provider Dr. George Tiller (see May 31, 2009) in a statement issued on the same day as the shooting. The president writes: “I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.” [White House Press Office, 5/31/2009]

Right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan continues to attack Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), this time during an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. Buchanan continues his allegations that Sotomayor is an “affirmative action nominee” (see May 28, 2009), and mocks her recent discussion of her difficulties with the English language: Sotomayor told a New York Times reporter that during her first years in college, she honed her English skills by reading children’s books, practiced with lower-level grammar books, and worked with a professor who provided her tutoring in the language. Buchanan says in reference to the article: “Well I, again in that Saturday piece, she went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work.” The article did not characterize her outside, self-directed remedial work with English as “college work.” Amanda Terkel, a reporter for left-leaning Think Progress, will note: “Buchanan has long claimed that Hispanic immigrants are resistant to learning English and has said that it would be easier for them to ‘assimilate’ if they did so.… So basically, Buchanan yells when Hispanics are allegedly unwilling to learn English. However, when they make an attempt to do so, he mocks them as being dumb.” [New York Times, 5/30/2009; Think Progress, 6/1/2009]

Police arrest 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kansas, on the afternoon of May 31 in connection with the shooting of late-term-abortion-provider Dr. George Tiller in his church that morning (see May 31, 2009). Roeder is arrested about 30 miles southwest of Kansas City after eyewitnesses to the murder provide police with the license number of the killer’s getaway car. [CNN News, 5/31/2009] In 1996, Roeder, then a member of the anti-government militia group known as the Freemen, was arrested on charges of possessing explosives (see April 16, 1996). Police say they found no weapon in his possession. Roeder’s uncle Clarence Roeder issues a statement this evening: “This is a tragedy for the Tiller family and we feel so badly about that, that Scott would murder the doctor in the Lutheran church. We are also Lutherans, and that adds a double touch of sadness and irony.” Family members say they haven’t seen Scott Roeder since 2000, and he was in and out of trouble in the 1990s. [KMBC.com, 5/31/2009] In video recorded by local TV station KMBC-TV, neighbors say Roeder was not a friendly person; a landlord says he was “trouble from the start,” and was “radical” and “strange.” His ex-wife Lindsay Roeder says: “He didn’t think of the consequences this would have for anybody. There were children in that church, children that will remember that for the rest of their lives.” [KMBC-TV, 5/31/2009] In 2010, Roeder will be convicted of murdering Tiller (see January 29, 2010).

TV station KMBC reports on the arrest of Scott Roeder in connection with the murder of late-abortion-providing OB/GYN Dr. George Tiller (see May 31, 2009), and mentions an envelope found in the getaway car with the words “Op Rescue” and “Cheryl” and a phone number on it. [KMBC-TV, 6/3/2009] Kansas news blogger Justin Kendall finds out that the number is a direct line to Cheryl Sullenger, a senior policy advisor with Operation Rescue, a hardline anti-abortion activism group. Sullenger served two years imprisonment after bombing an abortion clinic in 1988. She tells Kendall she hasn’t spoken to Roeder recently and says: “You know, he’s somebody who’s been around. My name is on the Internet. It’s on every press release. My phone number is on every press release it. It’s all over the Internet. I don’t know. He probably has lots of people’s phone numbers.” [The Pitch, 6/1/2009] Sullenger says she kept Roeder up to date on court hearings involving Tiller, who was acquitted of failing to properly justify late-term abortions in January 2009: “He would call and say, ‘When does court start? When’s the next hearing?’ I was polite enough to give him the information. I had no reason not to. Who knew? Who knew, you know what I mean?” [Kansas City Star, 6/3/2009] Kendall also reveals that in a May 2007 comment on an Operation Rescue forum, a “Scott Roeder” advocated attending Tiller’s church—the eventual scene of his murder—with “as many people as possible” to ask questions of church leaders and members and bring attention to Tiller. [Scott Roeder, 5/19/2007] In 1996, Roeder, then a member of the anti-government militia group known as the Freemen, was arrested on charges of possessing explosives (see April 16, 1996). In 2010, Roeder will be convicted of murdering Tiller (see January 29, 2010).

Fellow anti-abortionists say that Scott Roeder, arrested in connection with the murder of late-term-abortion-providing OB/GYN Dr. George Tiller (see May 31, 2009), has long been a hard-line opponent of abortion. Kansas anti-abortion activist Regina Dinwittie, who was ordered by a judge to cease using a bullhorn within 500 feet of an abortion clinic in 1995, says: “I know that he believed in justifiable homicide. He very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn.” Dinwittie recounts Roeder confronting Dr. Robert Crist, who worked at the Kansas City Planned Parenthood clinic in 1996: “He stared at him for approximately 45 seconds. Then he [Roeder] said, ‘I’ve seen you now.’ Then he turned his back and walked away, and they were scared to death.” [Kansas City Star, 5/31/2009] Dinwittie says she herself is “glad” of Tiller’s death, saying, “I wouldn’t cry for him no more than I would if somebody dropped a rat and killed it.” [Associated Press, 6/1/2009] After attending Tiller’s trial, Roeder told fellow Kansas anti-abortion activist Eugene Frye that the whole process was “a sham.” Frye says, “He felt justice had not been served.” [Kansas City Star, 6/2/2009] “In this situation, Scott viewed Tiller as the violent person,” Frye said. “Scott didn’t see himself as that. He saw this man as perpetrating murder on these innocent babies.… Scott had that conviction.” [Kansas City Star, 6/5/2009] Dave Leach, publisher of the Iowa magazine Prayer and Action News, which has said “justifiable homicide” against abortion providers can be supported, and to which Roeder subscribed, says: “Scott is not my hero in that sense; he has not inspired me to shoot an abortionist. But definitely, he will be the hero to thousands of babies who will not be slain because Scott sacrificed everything for them.” [Associated Press, 6/1/2009] In signing a petition against Tiller in September 2007, someone giving the name Scott Roeder wrote, “Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.” [Scott Roeder, 9/3/2009] In 1996, Roeder, then a member of the anti-government militia group known as the Freemen, was arrested on charges of possessing explosives (see April 16, 1996).

A 2002 photo of Dr. George Tiller. [Source: Abortion Essay (.com)]Dr. George Tiller, one of the handful of doctors in the USA willing to perform late-term abortions, is shot to death while attending services at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The 67-year-old doctor is slain in front of several witnesses by a single assailant in the foyer of his church while serving as an usher at about 10 a.m. Law enforcement officials say they believe the murder is “the act of an isolated individual,” but add that they are also looking into the suspected assailant’s “history, his family, his associates.” [CNN News, 5/31/2009; New York Times, 5/31/2009] Tiller’s murderer is eventually identified as anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder (see May 31, 2009).
Murder Caps Off Years of Violence, Harassment - Tiller’s murder comes after repeated harassment and violence against him, his clinic, and his patients. In 1986, the clinic was bombed, causing serious damage. In 1991, 2,000 protesters outside the clinic were arrested over the course of the summer. In 1993, Tiller was shot in both arms outside the clinic (see August 19, 1993). During a trial for performing illegal abortions, in which he was acquitted (see March 27, 2009), Tiller testified that he had spent years under the protection of federal agents after the FBI learned in 1994 that he was a top target on an anti-abortionist assassination list. [Agence France-Presse, 5/31/2009] In recent months, Tiller had been targeted by Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly, who repeatedly referred to him as “Tiller the Killer.” Tiller’s clinic was defaced with a poster titled “Auschwichita,” that claimed Tiller was like Hitler because he espoused Christianity just as Hitler did. The poster also used the term “Tiller the Killer,” and called Tiller an “equal opportunity executioner.” [Sarah Jones, 10/20/2010]
Responses from Family, President, Activists - Responding to Tiller’s murder, President Obama tells the nation, “However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence” (see May 31, 2009). Troy Newman, the president of the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue (OR—see 1986), says his organization has always sought “nonviolent” measures to challenge Tiller, including efforts in recent years to have him prosecuted for crimes or investigated by state health authorities. “Operation Rescue has worked tirelessly on peaceful, nonviolent measures to bring him to justice through the legal system, the legislative system,” Newman says. “We are pro-life, and this act was antithetical to what we believe.” Newman says that Roeder may have posted on OR-hosted Web sites, but says of the suspect, “He is not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer.” The media will quickly unearth deeper ties between OR and Roeder than Newman initially acknowledges (see May 31, 2009). In a statement, the Tiller family says: “George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality health care despite frequent threats and violence. We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father, and grandfather, and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.” [New York Times, 5/31/2009]

Author and pro-choice advocate Cristina Page writes that the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller (see May 31, 2009) is anything but an isolated incident, and warns that more anti-abortion violence may well be forthcoming. “The pattern is clear and frightening,” she writes. Page notes that the tenure of President Clinton, who supported abortion rights, was marred by a large and ever-escalating number of violent protests and attacks on abortion providers, beginning with the murder of Dr. David Gunn in 1993 (see March 10, 1993); Gunn’s murder, Page writes, “was the beginning of what would become a five-fold increase in violence against abortion providers throughout the Clinton years.” During Clinton’s two terms, six abortion providers and clinical staff members were murdered, and 17 other attempted murders took place. There were 12 bombings or arsons during Clinton’s tenure. From 2001 through 2008, no abortion-related murders, nor attempted murders, occurred, while George W. Bush, an anti-abortion president, was in office. A single clinic bombing took place during Bush’s two terms. Since the election of President Obama, another pro-choice president, a steady escalation of anti-abortion violence has occurred (see February-May, 2009), culminating in the murder of Tiller. Page notes that in the eight years of the Bush administration, abortion and women’s health clinics registered 396 harassing phone calls. In the five months of the Obama administration, that number is at 1401 and rising. Page writes: “Battered women are at greatest danger of being killed by their abusers when they are most strong—that is, when they muster the courage to leave. The same phenomenon may be true in the abusive political abortion debate. The pro-choice movement, specifically our abortion providers, are in the greatest danger of violence when we take power. When the anti-abortion movement loses power, their most extreme elements appear to move to the fore and take control. The murder of Dr. Tiller suggests that violence against abortion providers may be far more linked to the power, or lack thereof, anti-abortion groups have politically than to laws designed to increase penalties against such acts.” She notes the violent rhetoric of numerous anti-abortion organization leaders since Obama’s election, many targeting Obama himself, with one official calling Obama a “radical pro-abortion president” and another saying that Obama will “force Americans to pay for the killing of innocents.” Elizabeth Barnes, executive director of the Philadelphia Women’s Center, says: “When the pendulum swung in the direction of protecting women’s rights, we expected something. The way the antis are reacting has changed, they’re taking more liberties, pressing the boundaries of legal, civil protest.” Page concludes: “Anti-abortion groups will put out carefully worded press statements condemning the murder of Dr. Tiller, as became routine for them during the Clinton years. But unless the rhetoric they choose from now on becomes careful too—they may be the enablers of murder and terror.” [Huffington Post, 5/31/2009]

Former George H. W. Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan joins the ranks of Republicans (see May 28-31, 2009, May 29, 2009, and May 29, 2009) asking for a more moderate and less inflammatory tone in recent criticisms of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009 and May 26, 2009). Republicans should “play grown-up,” she advises, in opposing the Sotomayor nomination, and notes that her background—disadvantaged, Hispanic, female—makes her dangerous to oppose too vehemently: “Politically she’s like a beautiful doll containing a canister of poison gas: Break her and you die.” Noonan continues: “New York is proud of her; I’m proud of our country and grateful at its insistence, in a time when some say the American dream is dead, that it most certainly is not. The dream is: You can come from any place or condition, any walk of life, and rise to the top, taking your people with you, in your heart and theirs. Maybe that’s what they mean by empathy: Where you come from enters you, and you bring it with you as you rise. But if that’s what they mean, then we’re all empathetic. We’re the most fluid society in human history, but no one ever leaves their zip code in America, we all take it with us. It’s part of our pride. And it’s not bad, it’s good.” Noonan calls Republicans who launch virulent attacks on her racial heritage or gender “idiots,” and writes that instead of “exciting the base,” as one Republican strategist has said the attacks will do, “How about excit[ing] a moderate, or interest[ing] an independent? How about gain[ing] the attention of people who aren’t already on your side? The base is plenty excited already, as you know if you’ve ever read a comment thread on a conservative blog.… They don’t need to be revved, they’re already revved. Newt Gingrich twitters that Judge Sotomayor is a racist (see May 27, 2009). Does anyone believe that? He should rest his dancing thumbs, stop trying to position himself as the choice and voice of the base in 2012, and think.… The choice for Republicans isn’t between ‘attack’ and ‘roll over.’ It’s broader than that, and more interesting. There’s a new and fresh opportunity here for Republicans in the Senate to be serious, and, in their seriousness, to be seen and understood in a new light.” [Wall Street Journal, 6/1/2009]

Former anti-abortion activist Frank Schaeffer, author of the book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, says publicly that the religious right anti-abortion movement shares the blame for the murder of late-term-abortion-provider George Tiller (see May 31, 2009). In a column on the “Huffington Post” website, Schaeffer writes that, in books they wrote that were bestsellers on the religious right, both he and his father, Francis Schaeffer, advocated using force to stop abortion if legal avenues failed. His father, he writes, “compared America and its legalized abortion to Hitler’s Germany and said that whatever tactics would have been morally justified in removing Hitler would be justified in trying to stop abortion.” He points out that Paul Hill, who was executed in 2003 for murdering abortion provider Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts in 1994, was “an avid follower of my father’s.” Schaeffer, who left the religious right in the mid 1980s, writes that he is “very sorry” for his own part. [Huffington Post, 6/1/2009] In an interview on the “Rachel Maddow Show,” Schaeffer apologizes again for the anti-abortion campaign he helped found and build, and says, “[T]his is what helps unhinge a society.” [MSNBC, 6/1/2009]

A screenshot of Bill O’Reilly, taken during one of his segments featuring his criticism of Dr. George Tiller. [Source: Drive-By Times]Progressive author and blogger David Neiwert compiles three years of video evidence that he says proves Fox News host Bill O’Reilly helped target murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller (see May 31, 2009). Since 2006, Neiwert writes, O’Reilly has targeted the man he called “Tiller the Killer” in recurrent episodes of his Fox television show, The O’Reilly Factor, and on his radio show, accusing Tiller of “executing babies” and recommending that “something” be done to stop Tiller from continuing his practice. In November 2006, O’Reilly told his audience: “If we as a society allow an undefined mental health exception in late-term abortions, then babies can be killed for almost any reason.… This is the kind of stuff that happened in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.… If we allow this, America will no longer be a noble nation.… If we allow Dr. George Tiller and his acolytes to continue, we can no longer pass judgment on any behavior by anybody. What Tiller is doing is that bad.” In the same broadcast, he said: “I don’t care what you think. We have incontrovertible evidence that this man is executing babies about to be born because the woman is depressed… if you don’t believe me, I don’t care.… You are okay with Dr. Tiller executing babies about to be born because the mother says she’s depressed.” O’Reilly claimed that Tiller was a criminal and told his audience, “George Tiller will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed.” O’Reilly has urged “massive” protests at Tiller’s clinic, once in January 2006, when he said, “There should be thousands of people protesting outside Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita.” According to Neiwert, the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue (see 1986), which regularly prints O’Reilly’s articles in its newsletter, answered O’Reilly’s call, and O’Reilly used information from Operation Rescue to further lambast Tiller on his shows. In May 2007, O’Reilly described Tiller with the following diatribe: “killer, murder, murderer, barbarian, barbaric procedure, disgrace.” Neiwert writes that O’Reilly is not legally culpable for Tiller’s murder, but he is “morally and ethically culpable.” [Crooks and Liars, 6/1/2009; Salon, 6/1/2009]

A doctored photo of Sotomayor issued by the Council of Conservative Citizens. The robe and hood have been added to the photo, as has the ‘raised-fist’ logo. [Source: Council of Conservative Citizens / Think Progress]The Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), a pro-segregation group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “brazenly racist,” posts a doctored photograph of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) on its Web site. The altered photograph depicts Sotomayor wearing what appears to be a robe and hood similar to those worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The robe has a raised fist and the words “La Raza.” Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), a Hispanic civil rights organization which some conservatives have falsely claimed is a racist organization (see May 28, 2009 and May 29, 2009). An NCLR spokesman confirms that the logo in the photograph is not used on any basis by the organization. [Think Progress, 6/2/2009]

Gun rights advocates’ attempts to portray Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) as “anti-gun” hit a snag when a panel of conservative judges upholds her ruling in favor of restricting gun ownership. Sotomayor has been called an “anti-gun radical” by some activists for joining an opinion, cited in Maloney v. Cuomo, that found the Second Amendment does not prevent state and local governments from restricting arms ownership. That ruling, rejecting a challenge to Chicago’s tough gun laws, was unanimously upheld by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which is made up largely of conservative judges. The ruling could, according to the Washington Post, “complicate efforts to portray Sotomayor as a judicial activist trying to undermine the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year holding that the amendment protects the right to own a gun for self-defense.” The Seventh Circuit’s opinion was written by chief judge Frank Easterbrook, described by the Post as “one of the nation’s leading conservative judges,” and joined by two Republican-appointed judges, including “conservative favorite Richard A. Posner.” Walter Dellinger, who argued a related case and supports Sotomayor’s nomination, says, “When two of the most highly regarded, conservative judges agree that courts of appeal should not reach out and make new law on this issue, it renders Judge Sotomayor’s opinion on this subject beyond criticism.” But some continue their opposition. David Kopel, a lawyer who has criticized Sotomayor’s stance on gun ownership, says the ruling will not change the views of gun activists that she is “anti-gun” and the Maloney opinion was intellectually “dishonest.” [Washington Post, 6/3/2009]

US President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy review French troops during Obama’s 2009 visit to Strasburg. [Source: Shawn Thew / EPA]Jon Scott and Jane Skinner, hosts of Fox News’s “straight news” program Happening Now (see October 13, 2009), air selectively edited clips of President Obama to give the false impression that he has singled out the US for criticism during a trip to France. The segment hinges on an upcoming trip by Obama to Europe and the Middle East. Scott asks if “the president’s upcoming trip [will] be what conservatives might call another apology tour”; in teasing Scott’s segment, Skinner raises the same point. Both Scott and Skinner then air cropped clips from Obama’s April 2009 visit to France. During his April speech, Obama both praised and criticized actions taken by the US, and criticized anti-American sentiment in Europe. However, Scott and Skinner air carefully selected portions of the speech to give impetus to their contention that Obama only criticized the US during his time in France. Fellow Fox News host Sean Hannity has suggested that Obama embarked on a “blame America first” visit and “apology tour.” On-air text and graphics illustrate the “apology tour” contention. Neither Scott nor Skinner inform their audience that in the same speech, Obama criticized Europe and praised the US. Guest Elliott Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra conspirator (see October 7, 1991), advises Obama “to stop apologizing for our country,” and adds that Obama is making a mistake in spending time talking to Muslims during the trip. [Media Matters, 6/2/2009]

Scott Roeder [Source: Kansas City Star]After his arrest in connection with the murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas (see May 31, 2009), Scott Roeder is charged with one count of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault. The latter charges are for pointing a gun at two men who were eyewitnesses to the murder. Roeder requests that the court appoint counsel for him and is referred to the public defender’s office. [Wichita Eagle, 6/2/2009] District Attorney Nola Foulston explains that the state will not seek the death penalty, as Kansas law sets out seven required criteria for a capital charge, none of which fit the Tiller murder. The maximum sentence for first-degree murder in Kansas is life imprisonment. [Wichita Eagle, 6/4/2009] In 1996, Roeder, then a member of the anti-government militia group known as the Freemen, was arrested on charges of possessing explosives (see April 16, 1996). In 2010, Roeder will be convicted of murdering Tiller (see January 29, 2010).

Jeffery Pederson, office manager of the Central Family Medicine/Aid for Women Clinic in Kansas City, says that he reported to both the FBI and local police that a man whose description and license plate matched those of Scott Roeder, the man charged with murdering late-abortion-provider Dr. George Tiller (see May 31, 2009), had glued the locks of the clinic doors. One of the reports was made the day before the killing. “I was just sick,” Pederson says. “That was the plate I gave the FBI Saturday [May 30]. I called the FBI back and said, ‘It’s the same car. It’s the same guy.’” FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton says, “When we are notified when vandalism occurs at a clinic, we look into the matter, but we’re not going to comment on anything regarding that incident.” Kansas City police spokesman Michael Golden says the police report resulting from Pederson’s complaint contained “no suspect information.” [Kansas City Star, 6/2/2009] In an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Pederson says that he told the FBI the vandal’s first name, Scott, which his staff knew from anti-abortion protests at the clinic, as well as giving them his license plate number and security camera videos. He also notes that complaints to the FBI of the same man committing similar vandalism in 2000 resulted in no action other than “talking to” Roeder. [Democracy Now!, 6/4/2009] A New York Times editorial will later criticize the FBI for not being more vigilant. [New York Times, 6/7/2009]

Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) tells his House colleagues that he does not want to be responsible for eliminating the seasons. In a speech opposing pending legislation to reduce carbon emissions, Akin calls the transition from winter to spring “good climate change,” and repeatedly conflates “climate” with “weather.” Global warming is a “comedy,” Akin says, and he asks who would “want to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways[?]” His fellow Republicans are more knowledgeable than Democrats on the subject, he implies, because they have “passed high school science.” Akin tells the House: “This whole thing strikes me, if it weren’t so serious, as being a comedy, you know. I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change, you know. Who in the world want[s] to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways? What a dumb idea.… Some of the models said that we’re going to have surf at the front steps of the Capitol pretty soon. I was really looking forward to that.… We’ve been joined by another doctor, a medical doctor but also a guy who graduated from high school science as well, from Georgia, my good friend, Congressman [Phil] Gingrey.… So to have actually a guy who’s passed high school science is tremendously helpful.” The liberal news and analysis website Think Progress notes that in Akin’s home state of Missouri, “climate change has already caused growing conditions to shift and several species of birds common to the state have migrated northward. If global warming persists, climatologists have predicted that Missouri can expect ‘warmer temperatures, shorter winters, and an overall increase in rain and flooding.’” [Think Progress, 6/3/2009]

After meeting with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he has fundamental questions about her judicial philosophy and temperament, and adds he will likely not vote to confirm her to the high court. “I was very direct,” he tells reporters of his conversation with Sotomayor. “I have to decide how to play this game, quite frankly. If I use the same standard that Senator [Barack] Obama used, then I would not vote for you, quite frankly.” Graham is referring to votes cast by then-Senator Obama against Justices John Roberts (see September 29, 2005) and Samuel Alito (see October 31, 2005 - February 1, 2006) in which Graham asserts that Obama voted against them on ideological grounds. “He used a standard, I think, that makes it nearly impossible for a person from the opposite party to vote for the nominee,” Graham says. Many political observers feel that Graham is something of a bellwether of Republican sentiment; a former judge advocate general officer, Graham is considered one of the better legal minds in the party, and his opinion carries great weight with his colleagues. Other Republicans may follow his lead in coming out in public opposition to the nominee. Graham says he asked Sotomayor about her “wise Latina” comment (see October 26, 2001), but refuses to say how she responded. Graham also says he has questions about her temperament, saying that while she was friendly in the meeting, he cannot ignore other lawyers’ negative assessments of her personality (see May 4, 2009). “I think she does have the intellectual capacity to do the job,” Graham says. “But there’s a character problem. There’s a temperament problem that they—during the time they’ve had to be a judge, that they were more of an advocate than an impartial decider of the law. And I’ve got to find out, in my own mind” about her temperament. [Politico, 6/3/2009] On Fox News, Graham contradicts his earlier assessment, saying that Sotomayor has “sterling character.” [Think Progress, 6/3/2009]

Max Baucus (D-MT), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, meets with advocates of “single-payer,” or government-run health insurance. Baucus recently chaired hearings on health care reform which excluded single-payer advocates (see April 21-May 12, 2009). He meets with representatives of the advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program (PHNP), two Harvard University medical professors, a medical school dean, and representatives of the California Nurses Association. One of the participants, Dr. David Himmelstein of PHNP, says: “Bowing to mounting pressure from single-payer advocates around the nation, Senator Baucus has asked to meet with some representatives of the single-payer movement.… We have no illusions that our discussions alone will persuade Senator Baucus to back a single-payer bill. But the meeting is a clear indication that demonstrations and activism can move even our money-corrupted political culture.” Some polls show that a majority of Americans back single-payer insurance, as do doctors and health economists. [Single Payer Action, 5/31/2009]

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) writes what appears to be a retraction or withdrawal of his previous accusations that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) is a racist (see May 27, 2009). He writes that he was reacting to the news of remarks she made during a 2001 speech in which she said a “wise Latina” judge would often make better decisions than a white male (see October 26, 2001), and calls his “initial reaction… perhaps too strong and too direct.” Others have criticized his “word choice” in his vilification of Sotomayor, and Gingrich writes, “The word ‘racist’ should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable (a fact which both President Obama and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, have since admitted)” (see May 29, 2009). Gingrich then launches an attack on Sotomayor’s “judicial impartiality” and accuses her of “a betrayal of a fundamental principle of the American system—that everyone is equal before the law.” Gingrich is either unaware of, or ignoring, a recent analysis which disproves the thesis that Sotomayor has systematically exhibited racial bias in her rulings (see May 29, 2009). He calls her a “radical liberal activist” masquerading as a “convention[al] liberal,” and lambasts Obama for believing that “judicial impartiality” is “no longer a quality we can and should demand from our Supreme Court justices.” [Think Progress, 4/3/2007; Human Events, 6/3/2009] Liberal news and analysis Web site Think Progress notes that Gingrich may not be the most impartial person to weigh in on this issue, having called Spanish “the language of living in the ghetto” and warned of “gay and secular fascism” as an imminent threat to American society. [Think Progress, 4/3/2007; Think Progress, 11/17/2008]

Republican lawmakers have moved to tone down the incendiary rhetoric surrounding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court (see May 26, 2009). Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he is happy that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA—see June 3, 2009) and others (see May 28-31, 2009, May 29, 2009, May 29, 2009, and June 1, 2009) are backing away from the accusations of racism and liberal activism that have marked conservative responses to Sotomayor’s nomination (see May 26, 2009). “I think she deserves to be challenged,” Graham says. “It is fair to make her address that question and prove it. It is not fair to say that she’s a racist.” Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) says his fellow Republicans “shouldn’t jump to conclusions, particularly with, you know, overheated rhetoric.” Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler says Gingrich made his own decision to tone down his rhetoric, and was not asked by other Republicans to do so. Gingrich hopes to “reset the argument,” Tyler says, but notes that “nothing has changed in the structure of his argument, he is just retracting the word racist.” Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh says that the attacks on Sotomayor should continue, and says he doesn’t know why Gingrich is backing off. “I didn’t know why he had retracted it, and I still don’t,” he says. “I have my own theory about what Newt’s doing, but since I’m not doing it, I’m not going to comment.” Curt Levey of the conservative legal group Committee for Justice says: “The fact that the most extreme voices have softened I think is good. It’s good. We have to keep the debate civil. Republican senators should be keeping an open mind.… Calling her a racist was a racially insensitive remark. Frankly all we can do at this point is raise questions about her.” Levey has called Sotomayor an intellectual “lightweight” (see May 26, 2009). [Politico, 6/4/2009] Concurrently with the Republican lawmakers’ public statements towards moderating the attacks on Sotomayor, an aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Lanier Swann, advises conservative activists to keep up their pressure on Sotomayor. The aide gives the advice during a weekly meeting of influential conservative activists, radio hosts, and others hosted by veteran Washington activist Grover Norquist. “Swann told us she wanted to encourage all of us in our talking points and that we’re having traction among Republicans and unnerving Democrats,” says one attendee. “The point was we should keep it up. She told us at this meeting to put our foot on the pedal.” A second attendee confirms the account. A spokesman for McConnell says he is sure Swann did not call for further attacks. [The Hill, 6/3/2009]

Pam Farnsworth, the marketing director for Tea Party Nation, asks on Twitter, “Where’s the birth certificate?” referring to President Obama’s supposed lack of a valid birth certificate (see June 13, 2008) and accusations that he is ineligible to be president because of his lack of American citizenship. Farnsworth also writes: “New bill would make Obama a US natural-born citizen. Doesn’t the Constitution mandate he already be one to hold office?” [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 10/19/2010]

Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he intends to be fair to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) when she appears before the committee for confirmation to the bench. Sessions says he knows how it feels to be accused of racism (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27-29, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 29, 2009, June 2, 2009, June 3, 2009, and June 5, 2009) because he weathered such accusations when he was turned down for a federal judgeship in 1986. As a US attorney in Alabama, Sessions had demonstrably shown bias during his prosecution of civil rights activists for voting fraud, called the NAACP an “un-American” and “Communist” organization, called a black attorney “boy” and warned him to “be careful what you say to white folks,” and expressed his admiration for the Ku Klux Klan. None of those assertions were true, Sessions now says, claiming he was “caricatured,” even though at the time, multiple witnesses made the claims. Then, Sessions says, he couldn’t counter “the message” that he was a racist. While he does not directly repudiate the accusations of racism leveled against Sotomayor, he recently told her, “You will get a fair hearing before this committee.” [New Republic, 12/30/2002; CNN, 6/5/2009]

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele implies that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) has racist tendencies, a week after urging fellow Republicans to stop “slammin’ and rammin’” Sotomayor over the issue of race and deal with her nomination on the issues (see May 29, 2009). While guest-hosting William Bennett’s radio show, Steele discusses criticisms that have been made of Sotomayor. “[T]he comments that she made that have been played up about, you know, the Latina woman being a better judge than the white male is something that she has said on numerous occasions,” Steele tells a caller (see October 26, 2001). “So this was not just the one and only time it was said. They’ve now found other evidences and other speeches… that she has made mention of this, this fact that her ethnicity, that her cultural background puts her in a different position as a judge to judge your case.… And God help you if you’re a white male coming before her bench.” A recent analysis of Sotomayor’s decisions as a judge in race-based cases proves that she does not discriminate against white plaintiffs (see May 29, 2009). [Think Progress, 6/5/2009] Four days later, Steele will defend his remarks. “Well, that’s not inflammatory,” he tells a CNN audience. “It’s based off of what—the inference that she left and what she said. You know, if you have a judge, where you have a situation where you have—you’re going before a trier of fact, and the trier of fact is on record as saying that this individual’s background experience is better positioned to make a decision than someone else, that gives one pause. And so my view of it was, in looking at it, you’re now segregating out white men by your comments. So, God help you if you’re a white male. If you’re seeking justice, this may not be the bench you want to go before.” [Think Progress, 6/10/2009]

In a phone interview from jail with the Associated Press, Scott Roeder, who is charged with first degree murder in the shooting death of late-term abortion provider George Tiller (see May 31, 2009), complains, “I haven’t been convicted of anything, and I am being treated as a criminal.” Roeder objects to the media attention received by his family, and says, “I appreciate your prayers.” [Life Site News, 6/5/2009] He also complains about “deplorable conditions in solitary,” saying he is worried about contracting pneumonia because his cell is cold and he needs a CPAP machine for his sleep apnea. [New York Daily News, 6/7/2009]

Wesley Pruden, the editor emeritus of the conservative Washington Times, accuses President Obama of being “our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture… whence America sprang.” Pruden accuses Obama of going to Germany to apologize for America’s role in defeating that nation during World War II, says that Obama portrays himself as a Muslim while overseas, implies that Obama supports Islamic “sharia” law, claims that Obama routinely “grovels” to foreign leaders, and concludes: “Mr. Obama’s revelation of his ‘inner Muslim’ in Cairo reveals much about who he is. He is our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture, history, tradition, common law, and literature whence America sprang. The genetic imprint writ large in his 43 predecessors is missing from the Obama DNA. He no doubt meant no offense in returning that bust of Churchill (‘Who he?’) (see June 29, 2009).… The great Cairo grovel accomplished nothing beyond the humiliation of the president and the embarrassment of his constituents, few of whom share his need to put America on its knees before its enemies. No president before him has ever shamed us so. We must never forget it.” [Washington Times, 6/5/2009]

A press investigation reveals that corporate interests are behind a supposedly grassroots effort to block Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) from ascending to the high court. Raw Story reporters Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane have learned that the Committee for Justice (CFJ), an organization they call “an astroturf group established by big business in July 2002 to create an appearance of popular support for President Bush’s judicial nominees,” is taking the lead in the effort to oppose the Sotomayor nomination. The head of the CFJ, Curt Levey, lambasted Sotomayor as an “intellectual lightweight” the day of her nomination (see May 26, 2009), and has made regular media appearances since then attacking her as racist and biased. CFJ was created in 2002 by Senator Trent Lott (R-MS), who recruited Washington lawyer C. Boyden Gray to “create a fake grassroots organization” to support conservative, pro-business jurists such as Charles Pickering and Chief Justice John Roberts. Gray, a former White House counsel, received the support of former President George H. W. Bush, Republican political adviser Karl Rove, and former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour. Gray has a strong history of creating “astroturf” organizations, which are lobbying and activist groups supposedly founded and led by ordinary citizens but that in fact are created and funded by large political and corporate interests. CFJ is one of the most successful of these creations, and has often been successful in placing pro-business judges on the bench. CFJ and other astroturf organizations founded or assisted by Gray have been funded by, among other firms, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, insurance giant AIG, and the Ameriquest Capital Corporation, receiving over $100 million since 1998. CFJ’s board includes Stan Anderson, the legal advisor to the Chamber of Commerce; John Engler, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers; former Republican governor Frank Keating, now president of the American Council of Life Insurers; and former Republican Senator Connie Mack. [Raw Story, 6/5/2009]

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who recently seemed to retract his characterization of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a “racist” (see May 27, 2009 and June 3, 2009), now calls Sotomayor a “racialist.” On CBS News’s Face the Nation, Gingrich says: “When I did a Twitter about her, having read what she said, I said that was racist—but I applied it to her as a person. And the truth is I don’t know her as a person. It’s clear that what she said was racist, and it’s clear—or as somebody wrote recently, ‘racialist’ if you prefer.” [Think Progress, 6/7/2009]

Phoning the Associated Press from his jail cell, Scott Roeder, the suspect in the murder of late-term abortion provider George Tiller (see May 31, 2009), says, “I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.” He refuses to elaborate. A Justice Department spokesperson says the threat is being taken seriously, but Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue, dismisses it, saying, “This guy is a lunatic.” [Associated Press, 6/7/2009] In response, Judge Warren Wilbert raises Roeder’s bond amount from $5 million to $20 million, citing concerns that Roeder could “perpetuate, participate or enact any more violence on his own or in concert with others.” The judge explains that his decision is influenced in part by police having discovered weapons and explosives in his possession in 1996, which he said he planned to use on an abortion clinic (see April 16, 1996). [Associated Press, 6/14/2009]

Former First Lady Laura Bush says some positive things about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009). On ABC’s Good Morning America, Bush says: “I think she sounds like a very interesting and good nominee.… As a woman, I’m proud there might be another woman on the Court. So we’ll see what happens, but I wish her well.” [Think Progress, 6/8/2009] Bush’s comments stand in contrast to some conservatives’ gender-based attacks on Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009, May 28, 2009, and June 5, 2009).

After meeting one-on-one with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) predicts that she will be confirmed “with pretty good numbers” and will “fit in” well on the Court. Martinez, like Sotomayor a Hispanic, says he is not concerned about her “wise Latina” comments from 2001 (see October 26, 2001). He knows of no evidence that shows she has ever let her heritage or personal feelings influence her judicial decisions (see May 29, 2009). “For someone who is of Latin background, personally, I understand what she is trying to say,” Martinez comments. “Which is, the richness of her experience forms who she is. It forms who I am.” [CNN, 6/9/2009]

Flowers adorn the sidewalk outside George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, Kansas, laid in his memory. [Source: AP: Charlie Riedel]The family of George Tiller, a doctor who provided late-term abortions as part of his practice before being murdered (see May 31, 2009), decides that his Wichita, Kansas, clinic will be closed permanently. Nebraska doctor LeRoy Carhart, who worked at the clinic, said he was willing to continue, but the decision is the family’s. Warren Hern, one of the few remaining doctors in the US who performs late-term abortions, says: “This is what they want, they’ve been wanting this for 35 years. The anti-abortion fanatics have to shut up and go home. They have to back off and they have to respect other people’s point of view. This is a national outrage.” Randall Terry, original founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, says, “Good riddance,” and predicts that Tiller’s clinic will be remembered similarly to Nazi death camps. In a statement, the Tiller family says, “We are proud of the service and courage shown by our husband and father and know that women’s health care needs have been met because of his dedication and service.” [Associated Press, 6/9/2009]

Stormfront logo. [Source: Stormfront (.org)]Journalist and media observer Greg Mitchell reports on the reaction on an extreme-right Web site to the museum shooting by white supremacist James von Brunn (see June 10, 2009 and After). Mitchell pays a visit to the Web site of the neo-Nazi organization Stormfront, and finds that an apparently lively discussion thread about the shooting has already been shut down; one poster says that the thread was closed because commentators were overly supportive of the shooting. Other threads, including what Mitchell calls “years-old tributes” to von Brunn, are still active. Many of the comments are critical of the shooting because of the negative publicity sure to ensue from it. Other comments are neutral. Some posters call von Brunn a “victim of Jewish extremism,” setting off a number of anti-Semitic responses. One poster writes that “von Brunn was trying to send a powerful and courageous message,” and someone else writes: “Heroes refuse to go out with a whimper. An example to all of us.” One poster writes: “I am watching the media try to pull to heart strings of white Americans who are watching. Remember if you ever question whats going around you you’ll eventually be led to psychotic acts of violence.” And other posters predict that the shooting, and the subsequent publicity, “will do some recruiting for us.” [Editor & Publisher, 6/10/2009]

James von Brunn. [Source: UPI / TPM Muckraker]James von Brunn, an 88-year-old man with a long history of violence and anti-Semitism, opens fire inside Washington’s Holocaust Museum. Von Brunn kills a security guard, Stephen T. Johns, before being brought down by fire from other security guards. Von Brunn is hospitalized in critical condition. Von Brunn brought a .22 rifle into the museum and began shooting almost immediately upon entering the building. [WJLA-TV, 6/10/2009; New York Daily News, 6/11/2009] The New York Daily News identifies von Brunn as a “neo-Nazi.” [New York Daily News, 6/11/2009]
Targeting Jewish White House Official - Von Brunn has a list of nine locations in his car, including the White House, the US Capitol, and media outlets such as Fox News and the Washington Post. [WJLA-TV, 6/10/2009] A note in a notebook found in the car reads: “You want my weapons, this is how you’ll get them. The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.” In September 2010, the press will learn that von Brunn intended to kill President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod, a Jew. Von Brunn did not believe he could get to Obama, authorities will later confirm, but he had the “motive, means, and intent” to kill Axelrod, one of Obama’s closest aides. Axelrod will be given special Secret Service protection. [Guardian, 6/11/2009; Time, 9/30/2010; TPM Muckraker, 9/30/2010]
Shock, Sadness Mark Reactions - Within hours, President Obama and a number of political and cultural organizations will express their shock and sorrow over the shooting (see June 10-11, 2009).
Long History of Violence, White Supremacist Ties, and Anti-Semitism - Von Brunn maintains a Web site, “holywesternempire.org,” described by reporters as “racist [and] anti-Semitic,” and is the author of a book, Kill the Best Gentiles, which alleges a Jewish “conspiracy to destroy the white gene pool.” Von Brunn served six years in prison for a 1981 attempt to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board. (On his Web site, he complained of being convicted by a “Jew/Negro” conspiracy of lawyers and judicial officials.) His Web site alleges that the Holocaust is a hoax, and calls Nazi Germany the “cultural gem of the West.” The FBI is investigating the shooting as a possible hate crime or a case of domestic terrorism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists von Brunn’s Web site as a hate site. [WJLA-TV, 6/10/2009; NBC New York, 6/11/2009; USA Today, 6/11/2009] “We’ve been tracking this guy for decades,” says SPLC official Heidi Beirich. “He thinks the Jews control the Federal Reserve, the banking system, that basically all Jews are evil.” [Associated Press, 6/10/2009] Von Brunn’s son, Erik von Brunn, says his father’s virulent racism and anti-Semitism has blighted their family for years. In a statement, he writes: “For the extremists who believe my father is a hero: it is imperative you understand what he did was an act of cowardice. His actions have undermined your ‘movement,’ and strengthened the resistance against your cause. He should not be remembered as a brave man or a hero, but a coward unable to come to grips with the fact he threw his and his families lives away for an ideology that fostered sadness and anguish.” [Washington Post, 6/14/2009] Further investigation turns up evidence that Von Brunn has connections to white supremacist organizations and anti-government groups. In 2004, von Brunn stayed for four days in Hayden, Idaho, with Stan Hess, then the representative for white supremacist David Duke’s European rights group. Hess recalls von Brunn as being “very angry about society and the Jewish influence at the Federal Reserve.” Von Brunn, Hess says, alluded to violence but never spoke specifically about a target. [NBC New York, 6/11/2009; USA Today, 6/11/2009] FBI investigators find a painting of Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ standing together in von Brunn’s home. They also find more firearms, and child pornography on his computer. [MyFoxDC, 6/17/2009; Washington Post, 6/19/2009] Von Brunn also has ties to the far-right, white supremacist British National Party, and had attended meetings of the American Friends of the British National Party. [Guardian, 6/11/2009]
Eradicating Evidence of Support - Within hours of the murder, Web sites featuring von Brunn’s work begin removing his material from their pages; some of those sites are operated by organizations whose members had praised and supported von Brunn’s white supremacist and anti-Obama statements (see June 10-11, 2009).
Connections to Anti-Obama 'Birther' Movement - Von Brunn has also written about his belief that Obama is at the heart of a conspiracy to cover up his Kenyan citizenship (see October 8-10, 2008). Reporter Ben Smith writes, “The penetration of the birther mythology into the violent fringe has to be a worry for the Secret Service, because at it’s heart, it’s about denying Obama’s legitimacy to hold the office of president.” [Politico, 6/10/2009; USA Today, 6/11/2009]
Indicted for Murder, Dies before Trial - Von Brunn will be indicted for first-degree murder in the death of Johns. [Washington Post, 7/29/2009] However, he will die in prison before his trial can commence. [BBC, 1/6/2010]

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen calls Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev) to press for Stanley McChrystal’s speedy confirmation as the new top commander in Afghanistan. Mullen stresses that it is a matter of urgency that McChrystal be able to depart for Afghanistan this very night. According to Reid, Admiral Mullen says that “McChrystal is literally waiting by an airplane” to leave. Later on the Senate floor during the confirmation proceedings, Reid will tell of the call from Mullen in an impassioned plea for McChrystal’s speedy confirmation (see June 10, 2009). [New York Times, 6/10/2009]

The US Senate unanimously approves Stanley McChrystal’s appointment as the next commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan. The Senate also approves his promotion to four-star general. [Associated Press, 6/10/2009] The New York Times reports that in order to prevent any delay in McChrystal’s confirmation, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev) makes an impassioned plea for a swift yes vote on the Senate floor, telling of a phone call he received from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen in which Mullen told him that it was urgent that McChrystal be able to go to Afghanistan that very night (see Early June 10, 2009). McChrystal and senior members of his command team are reportedly scheduled to fly from Washington within hours of the Senate vote confirming his appointment, with two stops planned in Europe to confer with allies before landing in Kabul. [New York Times, 6/10/2009]

Within hours of the murder of a security guard by white supremacist James von Brunn (see June 10, 2009 and After), Web sites that had praised von Brunn’s cultural and political stances begin removing his material. Wikipedia had already eradicated his user page and changes because, according to a spokesman, von Brunn violated the site’s policy on hate speech. An art site removes posts from von Brunn, including an image of a painting he created. [New York Times, 6/10/2009] The progressive Internet news site Talking Points Memo finds a cached copy of a December 2008 anti-Obama post by Von Brunn on the far-right Free Republic news and commentary site; Free Republic had removed it from its listings soon after the shooting became known. Von Brunn’s post garnered over 200 responses, almost all positive and supportive. [TPM Muckraker, 6/10/2009]

Hours after a white supremacist kills a security guard in the Washington, DC, Holocaust Museum (see June 10, 2009 and After), White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says that President Obama is “obviously saddened by what has happened.” The next day, Obama says: “We have lost a courageous security guard who stood watch at this place of solemn remembrance. This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice. No American institution is more important to this effort than the Holocaust museum.” A week before, on a visit to the site of a Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany, Obama said: “There are those who insist the Holocaust never happened.… This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.” Israeli government official Yuli Edelstein says the shooting is “further proof that anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial have not passed from the world.” And the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a prominent American Muslim organization, says in a statement, “We condemn this apparent bias-motivated attack and stand with the Jewish community and with Americans of all faiths in repudiating the kind of hatred and intolerance that can lead to such disturbing incidents.” [WJLA-TV, 6/10/2009; NBC New York, 6/11/2009; USA Today, 6/11/2009]

Conservative author and pundit Pat Buchanan continues the argument that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) is a product of “affirmative action” (see May 28, 2009, May 29, 2009, and May 31, 2009). “By her own admission, Sotomayor is an ‘affirmative action baby,’” Buchanan writes, referring to a panel discussion from the early 1990s where she called herself a “product of affirmative action.” Buchanan writes that her stellar academic record, including graduating at the top of her class at both Princeton and Yale, is “a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.… Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review—all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender, or ethnicity. This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries. One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated ‘with the base alloy of hypocrisy.’” [Human Events, 6/12/2009; Media Matters, 6/14/2009]

Former President George H. W. Bush condemns the right-wing attacks against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009), speaking out specifically against the charges that she has racist tendencies (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 27-29, 2009, May 27, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 29, 2009, May 29, 2009, June 2, 2009, June 5, 2009, and June 7, 2009). “I don’t know her that well but I think she’s had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings,” he says. “Not—[it’s] like the senator John Cornyn said it (see May 28-31, 2009). He may vote for it, he may not. But he’s been backing away from these… backing off from those radical statements to describe her, to attribute things to her that may or may not be true.… And she was called by somebody a racist once. That’s not right. I mean that’s not fair. It doesn’t help the process. You’re out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it.” [Think Progress, 6/12/2009]

Journalist Daphne Eviatar writes that during the eight years of the Bush presidency, prosecutions and enforcement of the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE—see May 1994) “cratered,” with Justice Department officials refusing to prosecute or sometimes even investigate complaints of vandalism, harassment, and assault. After the recent murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller (see May 31, 2009), Eviatar and the Washington Independent obtained government data showing that enforcement of the FACE law, and other federal laws designed to protect abortion providers and clinics, declined by 75 percent during the Bush presidency. Between 1994 and 1999, when President Clinton was in office, the Justice Department filed 17 complaints under the FACE Act. Between 2001 and 2009, when President Bush was in office, the Justice Department only filed a single case. Tiller’s own clinic was vandalized numerous times, but complaints against the actions were ignored by the department. Statistics provided by the National Abortion Federation (NAF) show that over 3,200 acts of violence against abortion providers in the US and Canada were committed between 2000 and 2008, and the organization says the number of actual incidents was probably “much higher.” The number does not include threats, vandalism, and harassment. NAF statistics show that at least 17 cases of “extreme” violence against abortion providers in the US were reported, including arson, stabbings, bombings, and fake anthrax mailings. But the Bush Justice Department only prosecuted 11 individuals for these attacks. The two highest-profile anti-abortion prosecutions were those of anthrax mailer Clayton Waagner (see 1997-December 2001) and bomber Eric Rudolph (see April 14, 2005). However, none of Waagner’s or Rudolph’s associates in the extremist organization Army of God (see 1982) were ever prosecuted as accessories to the two activists’ crimes. Neither was the Army of God ever investigated as a potential domestic terrorist organization (see Early 1980s). [Washington Independent, 6/12/2009]

Dan Monnat, who acted as George Tiller’s attorney until the late-term abortion provider was murdered (see May 31, 2009), discusses his relationship with Tiller, and the fears and threats leading up to the murder, in a lengthy interview with the Wichita Eagle. One observation he makes is that, since Barack Obama came into office, federal authorities have been more attentive to complaints of vandalism against abortion clinics. “I think there had been other requests during the previous administration for Dr. Tiller’s clinic to be protected under the FACE [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances] Act and nobody had done anything,” he says. However, when clinic staff reported vandalism on May 1 that showed “a little more cloak and dagger planning and sophistication” than most acts of vandalism, according to Monnat, the FBI opened an investigation (see June 2, 2009). Federal authorities say they will investigate a possible conspiracy in the Tiller murder. [Wichita Eagle, 6/13/2009]

English-only advocates Pat Buchanan and white nationalist Peter Brimelow standing under misspelled banner. [Source: Think Progress (.org)]Right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan and his organization The American Cause host a conference to discuss how Republicans can regain a political majority. The conference is co-sponsored by a number of white nationalist and white advocacy groups. The conference features a panel discussion supporting English-only initiatives as a way to attract “working-class white Democrats” to the Republican Party, and in the process ridicules Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) for her use of children’s books to study English while she was in college (see May 31, 2009). The panelists also suggest that, without English as the official language of the US, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish. The conference’s English-only advocates apparently do not notice that the banner hanging over the festivities prominently misspells the word “conference” as “conferenece.” [Media Matters, 6/11/2009; Think Progress, 6/22/2009]

After announcing plans to commemorate the death and clinic closing of murdered late-term-abortion-providing OB/GYN George Tiller (see May 31, 2009) by laying flowers at the clinic building, hardline anti-abortion group Operation Rescue changes the location of the event to its Wichita headquarters due to an announced counter-protest by abortion rights supporters. However, about ten abortion opponents return to the clinic in the evening to lay hundreds of flowers, after the abortion rights supporters have left. [Operation Rescue, 6/20/2009] Marla Patrick, state co-ordinator for the National Organization for Women, which organized the counter-protest, says: “Our original intent was to prevent them from doing their proverbial dance on a murdered man’s grave. The fact they changed plans tells me we were successful.” [Associated Press, 6/20/2009] Suspicions persist of murder suspect Scott Roeder’s connection with Operation Rescue (see May 31, 2009).

In an 8-1 decision, the US Supreme Court refuses to rule against one of the main components of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA—see August 6, 1965 and June 29, 1989). Many conservatives had seen the case as an opportunity for the Court conservatives to either drastically narrow or entirely gut the VRA, and were hopeful of that outcome in light of a recent Court decision narrowing the VRA’s effect on districting (see March 9, 2009). Instead, the Court chooses not to rule on the central tenet of the case of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, which is that the VRA is largely unconstitutional. The case was brought by a Texas utility district that claimed in arguments that the VRA was unconstitutional and unnecessary in a time when the nation has elected a black president. The plaintiff argued that districts and other governmental entities should be allowed to “bail out” from being covered by the VRA. [New York Times, 6/22/2009; New York Times, 6/22/2009] Many observers were concerned that the conservative wing of the Court would use the case to overturn large portions of the VRA, especially in earlier questioning, when Justice Anthony Kennedy said: “Congress has made a finding that the sovereignty of Georgia is less than the sovereign dignity of Ohio. The sovereignty of Alabama is less than the sovereign dignity of Michigan. And the governments in one are to be trusted less than the governments in the other.… No one questions the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act. The question is whether or not it should be continued with this differentiation between the states. And that is for Congress to show.” [New York Times, 4/29/2009] Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion, says that the Court should avoid tackling large constitutional questions when it can. “We are now a very different nation” than the one that first passed the Voting Rights Act, he writes. “Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.” Roberts’s opinion says that “a broader reading” of the VRA’s bailout provision should be implemented. Moreover, he writes, the federal oversight of states and areas with a history of discrimination may have served its purpose and may need to be phased out, a position supported by the lone dissenter, Justice Clarence Thomas, who writes that the oversight provision of Section 5 of the VRA should be overturned entirely. It is possible that others will take advantage of the Court’s hesitation to file other “opt out” or “bailout” challenges to the VRA. Some legal experts found the basis of the case to be lacking. Ellen Katz, a law professor at the University of Michigan, calls the Court’s ruling “improbable,” and Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School says “virtually no lawyer” sees the Court’s interpretation as reasonable. NAACP lawyer Debo P. Adegbile says that regardless of questions surrounding the Court’s verdict, the ruling is one to celebrate: “This case was brought to tear the heart out of the Voting Rights Act, and today that effort failed.” [New York Times, 6/22/2009]

L.E. Ikenga, a Nigerian-American woman who has published numerous essays and articles in conservative publications, writes in the conservative blog American Thinker that President Obama holds the African-centric views of his Kenyan father, and has “adopt[ed]… a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.” Ikenga writes: “[D]espite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself—those of us who know our history—have seen this movie before.” She accuses Obama of conducting a “masquerade” as an American who believes in democracy, when he really identifies with his Kenyan heritage and is “intrinsically undemocratic.” His true intentions are those of any “African colonial politician,” she writes: “a complete power grab whereby the ‘will of the people’ becomes completely irrelevant.” Ikenga writes that Obama is using the United States to play out his African colonial dreams of power. She bases her assertion on material drawn from his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, which she calls “an eloquent piece of political propaganda.” In Ikenga’s reading of the book, Obama “clearly sees himself as an African, not as a black American,” which she says he proved by actually going to Kenya to visit the homeland of his father. This visit, she says, “provides the main clue for understanding Barack Obama.” She concludes by warning that “the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot.” [Fresh Conservative, 2009; L.E. Ikenga, 6/25/2009] The next day, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh will read extensively from Ikenga’s article, which he calls “a special piece.” He concludes that Obama is “more African in his roots than he is American,” and declares: “[Obama] wants to turn this into a third world country.… The only way to try to do this is to just attack the private sector and deplete it of its resources, of its money, of its capital, which is exactly what he is doing.… We’ve elected somebody who is more African in his roots than he is American, loves his father who is a Marxist, and is behaving like an African colonial despot.” [Media Matters, 6/26/2009]

The bust of Winston Churchill, loaned to the White House by the British government. [Source: WorldMeets (.us)]Conservative radio host Glenn Beck tells his listeners that President Obama recently returned a bust of Winston Churchill to Great Britain because of his secret hatred of the British. Britain gave President Bush a bust of Churchill to display in the Oval Office during his term of office. In February 2009, Obama returned the bust and replaced it with a bust of President Abraham Lincoln; he added a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the display. At the time, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that the bust had only been lent to the White House: according to the British Embassy, it had been “uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W. Bush,” not given in perpetuity to the US government. A British Embassy spokesman told the Telegraph: “The bust of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein was uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W. Bush, from the Government Art Collection in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship. It was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the president was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009. The new president has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned. It is on display at the ambassador’s residence.” The White House curator, William Allman, said at the time, “It was already scheduled to go back.” However, Beck explains that Obama returned the bust because he harbors a secret hatred for the British. Beck tells his listeners that Obama’s paternal grandfather, a Kenyan, was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau Uprising in the 1950s, and that is the source of Obama’s supposed hatred. Beck presents no other evidence that Obama holds any sort of grudge or negative feelings towards the British, and ignores the fact that the Churchill bust had been slated to be returned to Britain at the end of Bush’s second term. Beck also fails to inform his listeners that Obama keeps a British treasure on his desk: a wooden penholder made from wood taken from a British sailing ship and given to him by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Instead, Beck tells his listeners: “Why does Obama harbor animosity towards the British?… A listener called me this morning. Said he had found information about Barack Obama’s grandfather in an old Irish newspaper but couldn’t verify it. I said okay, what is it? We looked into it. The information, took us about 20 minutes to find. It was out there, but until today I never heard about this information, and I’m kind of in the Barack Obama business, you know what I mean? I don’t think you have. Maybe you have. What puts you in a position to act unexplainably in weird ways toward the ally? Something must have happened in your life and maybe this is a part of it.” The news report apparently carried an account from Obama’s Kenyan step-grandmother, who told of her husband being tortured by British soldiers during the 1950s. In light of this information, Beck says it “sure makes sense” that Obama would hate the British, and adds that if it had been his grandfather who was mistreated, “I certainly wouldn’t want someone like me dealing with longtime allies.” [Daily Telegraph, 2/14/2009; Associated Press, 1/5/2010; Media Matters, 6/29/2010] Beck is echoing themes advanced by a Nigerian-American conservative in a recent Internet publication, who claimed that Obama is secretly an “African colonial” (see June 25, 2009).

The US Supreme Court says it will schedule a hearing on the controversial “Citizens United” case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (see March 15, 2009), for September 2009, in an unusual second presentation before the Court (see September 9, 2009). According to the justices, the lawyers for both Citizens United (CU) and the federal government should argue whether previous Court rulings upholding federal election law should be overturned based on First Amendment grounds. Both sides are asked to argue whether the Court should overrule the 1990 Austin decision (see March 27, 1990), which upheld restrictions on corporate spending on political campaigns, and/or the 2003 McConnell decision (see December 10, 2003), which upheld the bulk of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA—see March 27, 2002). Law professor Nathaniel Persily says of the directive: “The Court is poised to reverse longstanding precedents concerning the rights of corporations to participate in politics. The only reason to ask for reargument on this is if they’re going to overturn Austin and McConnell.” The New York Times observes, “The Roberts court [referring to the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts] has struck down every campaign finance regulation to reach it, and it seems to have a majority prepared to do more.” Previous lower court rulings have found that CU’s attempt to air a film attacking presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D-NY) was an attempt to engage in “electioneering,” and thus came under the restrictions of the McCain-Feingold campaign law (see March 27, 2002). The film was financed in part by donations from corporations and individuals whom CU has refused to identify. [United Press International, 6/29/2009; New York Times, 6/29/2009] CU previously attempted to have its case heard by the Court, but the Court sent the case back to a federal appeals court, which ruled in favor of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and against CU (see March 24, 2008). Law professor Richard Hasen agrees with Persily and the Times that the decision to reargue the case a second time indicates that the Court’s conservative majority is prepared to overturn both Austin and McConnell, and allow essentially unlimited corporate spending in federal elections. Hasen writes that if the Court does indeed rule in favor of unlimited corporate spending, it will be in response to the fundraising advantage currently enjoyed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) over his Republican counterpart, John McCain (R-AZ). [Slate, 6/29/2009] The decision will indeed overturn both Austin and McConnell, and gut most of the BCRA (see January 21, 2010).

Moderate Republican House member Mike Castle (R-DE) faces a raucous band of angry conservative protesters at one of his “health care listening tour” meetings. Castle, who is one of eight Republicans to join the Democratic majority in voting for the American Clean Energy and Security Act, is challenged by a full range of accusations and conspiracy theories, some ranging far afield from health care reform and energy policy.
'Socialized Medicine' Worse than 9/11 - Some audience members accuse Castle of supporting “socialized medicine.” One member shouts, “I don’t have the answers for how to fix the broken pieces of our health care system, but I know darn well if we let the government bring in socialized medicine, it will destroy this thing faster than the twin towers came down.”
'Cap and Trade' Tax Will Destroy Economy - One audience member shouts that the proposed “cap and trade” tax on pollutants will destroy the US economy. “Do you have any idea what that cap and trade tax thing, bill that you passed is going to do to the Suffolk County poultry industry?” the member says. “That’s how chicken houses are heated, with propane. It outputs CO². I mean, I’m outputting CO² right now as I speak. Trees need CO² to make oxygen! You can’t tax that!”
Global Warming a 'Hoax' - Many audience members respond with cheers and chants to expressions that global warming is a hoax. “I’m actually hopeful that this vote that you made was a vote to put you out of office,” one says to a barrage of applause and cheers. “You know, on this energy thing, I showed you, I had in my email to you numerous times there are petitions signed by 31,000 scientists that that know and have facts that CO² emissions have nothing to do and the greenhouse effect has nothing to do with global warming. It’s all a hoax! [Applause.] First of all, I cannot for the life of me understand how you could have been one of the eight Republican traitors!” Another audience member says that global warming is “still a theory, so is Darwin’s theory of evolution! And yet we have the audacity to say global warming is accurate, it’s more than a theory? How about how cold it’s been this spring. Personal data, data shows that since 1998 average temperatures have been cooling!”
'Dead Baby Juice' Used to Create AIDS, Swine Flu - Some audience members believe that AIDS and the H1N1 “swine flu” epidemic are part of a conspiracy to kill Americans, using “dead baby juice.” “The virus was built and created in Fort Dix, a small bioweapons plant outside of Fort Dix,” one audience member asserts. “This was engineered. This thing didn’t just crop up in a cave or a swine farm. This thing was engineered, the virus. Pasteur International, one of the big vaccine companies in Chicago, has been caught sending AIDS-infected vaccines to Africa. Do you think I trust—I don’t trust you with anything. You think I’m going to trust you to put a needle full of dead baby juice and monkey kidneys? Cause that’s what this stuff is grown on, dead babies!”
Obama a Kenyan - One audience members wins a round of applause by asserting that President Obama is not an American citizen. “Congressman Castle, I want to know,” she shouts. “I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I’m an American citizen, with a seal on it. Signed by a doctor, with a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, the date of birth, the time, the date. I want to go back to January 20th and I want to know why are you people ignoring his birth certificate? He is not an American citizen! He is a citizen of Kenya!”
Protests Organized by Conservative Lobbying Organizations - According to liberal news and advocacy site Think Progress, Castle and other moderate Republicans are facing orchestrated attacks on their energy and health care policies by conservative lobbying firms and right-wing talk show hosts. Lobbying organizations such as Americans for Prosperity (AFP—see May 29, 2009) have tarred Castle and other moderate Republicans as “cap and traitors,” joined by members of Fox News host Glenn Beck’s “9-12” organization (see March 13, 2009 and After) and exhorted by pronouncements from Beck, fellow talk show host Rush Limbaugh, the Web site Prison Planet, and others. [Think Progress, 7/21/2009]

Senator-elect Al Franken (D-MN) acknowledges his victory in front of his Minneapolis home. His wife Franni Franken looks on. [Source: Jeffrey Thompson / Getty Images / Zimbio]The Minnesota Supreme Court rejects Senate candidate Norm Coleman’s motion to reconsider the vote recount that found his opponent, Al Franken (D-MN), the winner of the November 2008 Senate race (see January 5, 2009). Coleman, a Republican and the incumbent, concedes the election in a brief appearance after the ruling. Hours later, Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) signs the election certificate for Franken, clearing the way for Franken to take his seat in the US Senate. “I can’t wait to get started,” Franken says. “I won by 312 votes, so I really have to earn the trust of the people who didn’t vote for me.” Coleman says he chose not to appeal to federal courts given the likelihood that the results would not have gone his way, and says he respects the high court’s decision. The court rejects Coleman’s contention that hundreds of absentee ballots ruled invalid should be counted, ruling that voters have the expectation of filling out the ballots properly and should understand that improperly completed ballots will be rejected. Franken’s seating gives Democrats a 60-vote majority in the Senate, theoretically giving them a “filibuster-proof majority” that would overcome Republican efforts to block legislation by refusing to allow cloture votes. However, Democrats rarely vote in unified “blocs” as Republicans often do, and two Senate Democrats, Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Robert Byrd (D-WV), are hospitalized and unable to cast votes. Franken will be seated after Congress’s July 4 recess. [Associated Press, 6/30/2009; Commercial Appeal (Memphis), 7/1/2009] Politico describes the ruling as “remarkably decisive, picking apart and rejecting one Coleman legal claim after another.” Law professor Larry Jacobs says, “Norm Coleman has gotten shellacked in the court room—by judges who were appointed by Pawlenty.” The Minnesota Republican Party protests the ruling, claiming that it “wrongly disenfranchised thousands of Minnesotans who deserve to have their votes counted,” but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says he accepts the decision, stating: “While I am very disappointed in the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision today, I respect Norm’s decision not to pursue his case any further. After having more votes on Election Day, he made a great personal sacrifice to pursue an accurate account of the vote for Minnesotans. For that, and his dedicated service on behalf of Minnesota, he should be commended.” [Politico, 6/30/2009]

Paul Topete of Poker Face. [Source: AmericanFreePress (.net)]A thousand people attend a “tea party” rally in Washington, DC. Speakers include members from a number of anti-tax “reform” groups, the lobbying organization and tea party sponsor FreedomWorks (see April 8, 2009 and April 14, 2009), and a number of radio talk show hosts. A rock band, Poker Face, provides entertainment and technical support. Poker Face’s lead singer, Paul Topete, has publicly called the Holocaust a “hoax” and has written for Holocaust-denial publications. Poker Face was refused permission to play at a Rutgers University event in 2006 and a Ron Paul (R-TX) campaign event in 2007 because of the band’s open bigotry and anti-Semitism. However, as the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights’s Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind will later note, “they made it to the stage of the tea party without any questions asked.” [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 10/19/2010]

The non-partisan PolitiFact, an organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, again delves into the ever-widening controversy surrounding President Obama’s supposed lack of US citizenship. A year ago, the organization attempted to debunk the wildly varying claims that Obama is not a US citizen (see June 27, 2008). Since then, the number and nature of the various claims against Obama’s heritage and citizenship have continued to swell. PolitiFact examines one aspect of the controversy, the question about “long form” vs. “short form” birth certificates. According to PolitiFact researcher Robert Fairley, so-called “birthers” claim that Obama has never produced a valid “long form” birth certificate, only an easily faked “short form” certificate that is generated via a computer database in Honolulu, the city of Obama’s birth. In August 2008, researchers from FactCheck stated that they had verified the authenticity of a physical and true copy of the birth certificate, though the verification did little to stem the tide of claims and conspiracy theories. The “long form”—kept in state vaults by Hawaiian law—is the actual “birth certificate,” birthers claim; the “short form” is merely a “certification of live birth,” and, they say, useless for proving anyone’s actual status as a citizen. Many “birthers” believe that the “hidden” long form would prove Obama’s foreign birth, and claim that Hawaii’s refusal to release it (a violation of state law) is proof of Obama’s hidden heritage. Some claim that Hawaii does not accept a “certification of live birth” as proof that an individual was physically born in Hawaii, and point to a statement on the Web site of the Hawaii Department of Home Lands, which reads in part: “In order to process your application, DHHL utilizes information that is found only on the original certificate of live birth, which is either black or green. This is a more complete record of your birth than the certification of live birth (a computer-generated printout). Submitting the original certificate of live birth will save you time and money since the computer-generated certification requires additional verification by DHHL.” DHHL spokesman Lloyd Yonenaka says the statement is somewhat misleading. In order to be eligible for Hawaii’s Home Lands program, an applicant must be able to prove that his ancestry is 50 percent native Hawaiian or indigeneous. Obama has never asserted that his ancestry is native Hawaiian. The DHHL Web site now states: “The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands accepts both certificates of live birth (original birth certificate) and certifications of live birth because they are official government records documenting an individual’s birth. The certificate of live birth generally has more information which is useful for genealogical purposes as compared to the certification of live birth which is a computer-generated printout that provides specific details of a person’s birth. Although original birth certificates (certificates of live birth) are preferred for their greater detail, the State Department of Health (DOH) no longer issues certificates of live birth. When a request is made for a copy of a birth certificate, the DOH issues a certification of live birth.” Janice Okubo of the Hawaii Department of Health says there is no real difference between the “long form” and “short form” for any useful purposes. The terms are “just words,” she says. Obama’s birth certificate as posted on the Internet (see June 13, 2008) “is considered a birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. There’s only one form of birth certificate.” Hawaii has followed the same practice of keeping the “long form” on file and issuing copies of the “short form” since the 1960s, she says. The forms have changed somewhat in appearance over the ensuring decades, she notes, and says there are no doubt differences between certificates issued in, say 1961 and those issued now. “When you request a birth certificate, the one you get looks exactly like the one posted on his site,” she says. “That’s the birth certificate.” The so-called “short form” “certification of live birth” would show if Obama had been born in a foreign land, she says. The certificate states that he was born in Honolulu. [St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009]

The non-partisan PolitiFact, an organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, finds that claims of a bill pending in Congress is intended to “cloak” “proof” about President Obama’s supposed foreign birth are entirely specious. The 2009 Free Flow of Information Act, passed by the House of Representatives in March, is, according to some in the “birther” movement, actually intended to protect Obama from having to produce his long-form birth certificate (see June 13, 2008). Some conservative bloggers are calling it the “Obama Birth Certificate Protection Act.” An email making the rounds of the Internet claims the bill “would guarantee Barack Obama will never be held accountable for producing forged birth documents,” and asks recipients to protest its passage in the Senate. PolitiFact finds that the Free Flow of Information Act is designed to prevent a citizen from providing “testimony or produce any document related to information obtained or created by such covered person as part of engaging in journalism, unless a court determines by a preponderance of the evidence” due to compulsion by federal authorities. It is primarily designed to protect journalists who fear retaliation if they print sensitive or embarrassing information in their publications. However, the “birthers” say the bill would protect federal employees from being compelled to release documents. The bill is clear in stating that “covered persons” are journalists, bloggers, and anybody else “who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.” Sophia Cope of the Newspaper Association of America says: “[A] covered person is simply a journalist. The White House would not fall under that.… The bill’s intent is to protect reporters and their confidential sources from being subpoenaed to testify, or from having to disclose the identity of those sources. I don’t see how it would relate to Obama’s birth certificate.” The bill was introduced in 2006, well before Obama announced his candidacy for president; PolitiFact writes, “The idea that it is a covert attempt to block Obama from producing his birth certificate is absurd.” It is also anything but a partisan bill; it passed the House on a simple voice vote, and passed earlier on a vote of 398-21. It is expected to pass the Senate with little difficulty. PolitiFact concludes: “One could argue that this law has simply been misread by some well-intentioned government watchdogs. But this is just the latest conspiracy theory from the fringe of a conservative group convinced that Obama hasn’t provided sufficient documentation to prove he was born in the United States, and therefore cannot serve as president. Even among these folks, the claim about the Free Flow of Information Act is more than a stretch.” [St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009] The bill will bog down in the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2009. [Review, 2011]

A Syracuse “town hall” meeting hosted by Democratic House member Dan Maffei (D-NY) turns ugly after police are forced to intervene to restore order. During the meeting, held at Lincoln Middle School and focusing on health care reform, conservative anti-reform protesters cause disruption with shouts, curses, and screams that repeatedly drown out both Maffei’s remarks and the questions and comments from the audience, which numbers around 400. Many of the protesters are members of one or another “tea party” groups (see April 8, 2009), which have long opposed the policies of the Obama administration. The worst of the attempts to shout down discussion comes when Maffei or audience members bring up the idea of the “public option,” the idea of a government-run alternative health care plan similar to Medicare or Medicaid. Some pro-reform audience members bicker with the anti-reformists, adding to the cacophany. Maffei will later say he believes many of the loudest and most discourteous anti-reform protesters were not from the district, but had been brought in by special interest groups (see July 23, 2009 and August 4, 2009). “Many of them are not even from the Congressional district,” Maffei says. “But we’re not going to check driver’s licenses and ask people if they live in the district. It’s very, very unfortunate.” After the meeting, Maffei says he is considering other formats for such meetings; he says any such format should allow everyone to speak and discuss ideas in a respectful fashion. “This has been a problem going on a little bit with our public meetings,” he says. “It just makes me think we can do a better job with the format.” [Syracuse Post-Standard, 7/12/2009; TPMDC, 8/3/2009]

For the first time, a top Pakistani leader admits that the Pakistani government has supported radical militants. Speaking to a group of retired senior officials, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari says: “Let us be truthful to ourselves and make a candid admission of the realities. The terrorists of today were the heroes of yesteryears until 9/11 occurred and they began to haunt us as well. They were deliberately created and nurtured as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives.” Zardari pledges to change this policy. “I have taken charge at a difficult time and will come up to the challenges the country is facing,” he says. [Press Trust of India, 7/8/2009]

The cover of Mark Klein’s ‘Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It.’ [Source: BookSurge / aLibris (.com)]Former AT&T technician Mark Klein self-publishes his book, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It. In his acknowledgements, Klein writes that he chose to self-publish (through BookSurge, a pay-to-publish venue) because “[t]he big publishers never called me,” and the single small publishing house that offered to publish his book added “an unacceptable requirement to cut core material.” Klein based his book on his experiences as an AT&T engineer at the telecom giant’s San Francisco facility, where he primarily worked with AT&T’s Internet service. In 2002 and 2003, Klein witnessed the construction of of a “secret room,” a facility within the facility that was used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to gather billions of email, telephone, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), and text messages, most of which were sent by ordinary Americans. The NSA did its electronic surveillance, Klein writes, secretly and without court warrants. Klein describes himself as “wiring up the Big Brother machine,” and was so concerned about the potential illegality and constitutional violations of the NSA’s actions (with AT&T’s active complicity) that he retained a number of non-classified documents proving the extent of the communications “vacuuming” being done. Klein later used those documents to warn a number of reporters, Congressional members, and judges of what he considered a horrific breach of Americans’ right to privacy. [Klein, 2009, pp. 9-11, 21-24, 33, 35, 38, 40] In 2007, Klein described his job with the firm as “basically to keep the systems going. I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going. They were computer systems, network communication systems, Internet equipment, Voice over Internet [Protocol (VoIP)] equipment. I tested circuits long distance across the country. That was my job: to keep the network up.” He explained why he chose to become a “whistleblower:” “Because I remember the last time this happened.… I did my share of anti-war marches when that was an active thing back in the ‘60s, and I remember the violations and traffic transgressions that the government pulled back then for a war that turned out to be wrong, and a lot of innocent people got killed over it. And I’m seeing all this happening again, only worse. When the [NSA] got caught in the ‘70s doing domestic spying, it was a big scandal, and that’s why Congress passed the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] law, as you know, to supposedly take care of that (see 1978). So I remember all that. And the only way any law is worth anything is if there’s a memory so that people can say: ‘Wait a minute. This happened before.’ And you’ve got to step forward and say: ‘I remember this. This is the same bad thing happening again, and there should be a halt to it.’ And I’m a little bit of that institutional memory in the country; that’s all.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]

Lawyer Orly Taitz (left) and Army Reserve Major Stefan Cook, during an interview for a television news crew. [Source: Anna Raccoon (.com)]US Army Reserve Major Stefan Frederick Cook says he should not be deployed to Afghanistan because President Obama is not a US citizen and therefore lacks the constitutional authority to order troops to do anything. Cook’s counsel, “birther” lawyer Orly Taitz (see November 12, 2008 and After and March 13, 2009), files a request in the US District Court for the Middle District of Georgia asking that the court bar Cook from deploying, and seeking conscientious objector status for her client. Taitz says in the filing that Cook believes Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States (see June 13, 2008, August 21, 2008, October 30, 2008, and July 28, 2009) and therefore has no obligation to obey orders from his superior officers that generate from Obama. Moreover, the filing says, Cook “would be acting in violation of international law by engaging in military actions outside the United States under this president’s command.… simultaneously subjecting himself to possible prosecution as a war criminal by the faithful execution of these duties.” Cook is ordered to mobilize for active duty tomorrow. He is to report to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and then report to Fort Benning, Georgia, for overseas deployment. A week later, the Army revokes Cook’s deployment orders, instead ordering Cook to await an upcoming hearing on his court filing. Army Public Affairs Officer Lieutenant Colonel Maria Quan says that reservists such as Cook have the right to ask for revocation of their orders up to the day they are scheduled to report for active duty, but adds that Cook has not asked for such revocation. The Army has learned that Cook volunteered for deployment in May 2009, while simultaneously conferring with Taitz to file the complaint. [Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/14/2009; Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/14/2009] Cook has posted on the Free Republic, a far-right Web site and forum, for six years under the moniker “roaddog727.” As early as March 2010, Cook had exchanged emails with Taitz, suggested that he was one of a number of plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit challenging Obama’s citizenship, and had posted a long discourse on Obama’s lack of citizenship on the Free Republic. Taitz has repeatedly solicited soldiers to take part in her anti-Obama lawsuits. [Washington Independent, 7/14/2009; Mudville Gazette, 7/15/2009] On July 16, the day of the hearing, Cook is joined in the complaint by retired Army Major General Carol Dean Childers and active reserve Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Earl Graeff. The government says that because Cook’s orders have been revoked, the complaint filed by Taitz is “moot”: “The commanding general of SOCCENT (US Special Operations Central Command) has determined that he does not want the services of Major Cook, and has revoked his deployment orders.” Taitz revises the complaint to add Childers and Graeff to the suit, “because it is a matter of unparalleled public interest and importance and because it is clearly a matter arising from issues of a recurring nature that will escape review unless the Court exercises its discretionary jurisdiction.” The lawsuit now says the injunction is necessary to encompass the possibility of Cook receiving future orders for deployment as well as to address and prevent “negative collateral consequences such as retaliation against” Cook. The filing notes that Cook lost his job at defense contractor corporation Simtech because of the lawsuit, and complains that Cook is the target of “gossip” from people who believe he was “manipulating his deployment orders to create a platform for political purposes.” [Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/16/2009] Federal judge Clay Land dismisses the suit, siding with the defense which calls the lawsuit “moot.” Land rules: “Federal court only has authority of actual cases and controversies. The entire action is dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.” Cook says after the ruling: “I love the Army and I want to continue to serve in the Army. If we can establish that [Obama] is in fact president of the United States legally, I’m on the airplane the next day over to Afghanistan… if they cut my deployment orders, so I can do the job that I want to do.… If one cannot establish the validity and legality of the order… we would be following illegal orders and subject to prosecution. I could be prosecuted by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and if captured I would not be privy to protections under the Geneva Convention.” [Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/16/2009] Taitz claims victory. The military has shown its cards “and they have nothing to play with,” she says. “By revoking the orders, it’s clear to anybody. Think reasonably: Why would the military undermine itself by revoking its orders?” She says the Army revoked Cook’s orders because the government could not prove in court that Obama was born in the United States and is therefore the legitimate commander in chief. CENTCOM spokesman Lieutenant Commander Bill Speaks calls Taitz’s claim “ridiculous” and Cook’s position “a bizarre conspiracy theory. Suffice to say [that revoking the orders] is certainly not an acknowledgement or validation in any way of his claims.” [Stars and Stripes, 7/30/2009]

Wendell Potter (r) being interviewed by Bill Moyers (l). [Source: PR Watch (.org)]Former health care executive Wendell Potter, who left the insurance giant Cigna after fifteen years, appears on “Bill Moyers’ Journal.” He was formerly the head of corporate communications before he resigned his position, a post he calls “the ultimate PR job.” He says he was not forced to leave the company, and was extremely well compensated for his duties. He left after realizing that the health care industry is using underhanded and hurtful tactics to undermine the drive towards health care reform. He never went to his bosses with his observations because, he says, “for most of the time I was there, I felt that what we were doing was the right thing. And that I was playing on a team that was honorable. I just didn’t really get it all that much until toward the end of my tenure at Cigna.”
Health Care Expo Changed His Perceptions - In June 2007, Potter recalls, his perceptions were drastically changed by his visit to a health care exposition in Wise, Virginia (see June 2007).
Changing Plans - The industry shifted from selling primarily managed care plans, he says, to what they call “consumer-driven plans.” Despite the name, they are health care plans with high deductibles and limited coverage.
'Highlight Horror Stories' - Moyers shows Potter a copy of an “action plan” devised by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry’s trade association. In large gold letters, the plan tells lobbyists and industry representatives to “Highlight horror stories of government-run systems.” Potter says that AHIP and other industry representatives try to paint government-run health care as socialism, and as inevitable failures. “The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them,” he says, “that if you even consider that, you’re heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.” Moyers also notes that the AHIP plan targets the film Sicko, a 2007 documentary by leftist filmmaker Michael Moore that portrayed America’s health care industry in a dismal light. AHIP’s action plan is to “Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats’ larger agenda.” Potter says that was an effort to discredit the film by using lobbyists and AHIP staffers “to go onto Capitol Hill and say, ‘Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you.’” If they did, AHIP would retaliate by running negative ads against the lawmakers in their home districts or other electoral punishments. AHIP focused strongly on the conservative Democratic Leadership Council. Another tactic, as delineated in the memo: “Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status.” Moyers says that AHIP attempted to “radicalize” Moore and portray him as an extremist who could not be believed. Many politicians used AHIP talking points in discussing Moore and his film. “So your plan worked,” Moyers observes. Potter agrees: “It worked beautifully.” The lesson that was lost from Moore’s film, Potter says, was that Americans “shouldn’t fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it’s been proven in the countries that were in that movie.”
Conservative Counter-Strategy - Moyers then displays a memo from Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who in the spring of 2009 wrote a strategy memo for health care reform opponents. The memo reads in part: “First, you have to pretend to support it. Then use phrases like, ‘government takeover,’ ‘delayed care is denied care,’ ‘consequences of rationing,’ ‘bureaucrats, not doctors prescribing medicine.’” He then shows film clips of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and others using Luntz’s talking points in discussions on the floors of Congress. Potter says that many conservatives—Democrats as well as Republicans—“are ideologically aligned with the industry. They want to believe that the free market system can and should work in this country, like it does in other industries. So they don’t understand from an insider’s perspective like I have, what that actually means, and the consequences of that to Americans. They parrot those comments, without really realizing what the real situation is.” He notes that Representative Zach Wamp (R-TN), who grew up very near Potter’s childhood home in Chattanooga, told reporters that half of America’s uninsured don’t want health care, they would rather “go naked and just take the chance of getting sick. They end up in the emergency room costing you and me a whole lot more money.” Potter notes that the word “naked” is an industry term for people who choose not to buy health insurance. He calls Wamp’s comment “ridiculous” and “an example of a member of Congress buying what the insurance industry is peddling.” Moyers cites conservative Democrat Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, as another politician central to the health care reform process who is heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists—two of whom used to work on his own Senate staff. Potter says: “[I]t does offend me, that the vested special interests, who are so profitable and so powerful, are able to influence public policy in the way that they have, and the way that they’ve done over the years. And the insurance industry has been one of the most successful, in beating back any kinds of legislation that would hinder or affect the profitability of the companies.”
Fierce Opposition to Public Option - The “public option,” the idea that the government would extend a non-profit, government-run health care alternative for citizens, is fiercely opposed by the health care industry. Potter says the reason why is “[t]he industry doesn’t want to have any competitor. In fact, over the course of the last few years, has been shrinking the number of competitors through a lot of acquisitions and mergers. So first of all, they don’t want any more competition period. They certainly don’t want it from a government plan that might be operating more efficiently than they are, that they operate.” Government programs such as Medicare and the Veterans Administration’s medical providers are far more efficient than private, for-profit health care providers, and the industry fears that having to compete with such a program will slash their profits. Medical companies will do whatever it takes to keep their profit margins—and shareholder returns—above a certain threshold. They will deny more claims, kick more people off their rolls, purge employer accounts, whatever it takes. Potter, evidently bemused, says, “You know, I’ve been around a long time. And I have to say, I just don’t get this. I just don’t understand how the corporations can oppose a plan that gives the unhealthy people a chance to be covered. And they don’t want to do it themselves.… I’m a capitalist as well. I think it’s a wonderful thing that companies can make a profit. But when you do it in such a way that you are creating a situation in which these companies are adding to the number of people who are uninsured and creating a problem of the underinsured then that’s when we have a problem with it, or at least I do.” A public option would help “keep [health care corporations] honest,” he says, and they would inevitably lose profits.
Predictions - Right now the industry is primarily involved in what Potter calls a “charm offensive,” where it is attempting to give the perception that it, too, is for health care reform. But once Congress begins putting out specific legislative language, the industry and its flacks will begin attacking specific provisions. Moyers says the upshot is for the industry to either “kill reform” or prevent lawmakers from agreeing on a bill, just like what happened in 1993-94 under the Clinton administration. No matter what they say—favoring the elimination of pre-existing condition restrictions, for example—the industry will adamantly oppose reform of any kind. “They don’t want a public plan,” Potter says. “They want all the uninsured to have to be enrolled in a private insurance plan. They want—they see those 50 million people as potentially 50 million new customers. So they’re in favor of that. They see this as a way to essentially lock them into the system, and ensure their profitability in the future. The strategy is as it was in 1993 and ‘94, to conduct this charm offensive on the surface. But behind the scenes, to use front groups and third-party advocates and ideological allies. And those on Capitol Hill who are aligned with them, philosophically, to do the dirty work. To demean and scare people about a government-run plan, try to make people not even remember that Medicare, their Medicare program, is a government-run plan that has operated a lot more efficiently.… [T]hey want to scare you into thinking that through the anecdotes they tell you, that any government-run system, particularly those in Canada, and UK, and France that the people are very unhappy. And that these people will have to wait in long lines to get care, or wait a long time to get care. I’d like to take them down to Wise County. I’d like the president to come down to Wise County, and see some real lines of Americans, standing in line to get their care. [PBS, 7/10/2009]

House Representative Paul Broun (R-GA—see November 11, 2008) says that the Obama health care reform proposals will kill Americans. On the floor of the House, Broun attacks the idea of a “public option,” described by Congressional Democrats as a government-funded alternative to private health care. Broun says, “[T]his program of ‘government option’ is being touted as being the panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price is gonna kill people.” Broun says that Canada and the United Kingdom, both countries that rely on public health care, “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society.” Progressive news and advocacy site Think Progress notes that both Canada and the UK have both a lower infant mortality rate and longer life expectancy than the US. [Think Progress, 7/10/2009] Liberal media watchdog site Media Matters notes that neither the Canadian nor British health care systems serve as models for President Obama’s health care reform proposals. [Media Matters, 7/10/2009] Broun’s claims are based in part on health insurance advocate Betsy McCaughey’s warnings that the health care reform proposal will encourage senior citizens to die sooner (see February 9, 2009 and July 23-24, 2009), warnings that are debunked by the St. Petersburg Times (see July 23, 2009).