IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY, go read AP writer Jennifer Loven's piece about Pres. Bush's reliance on straw-man arguments in his speeches and other public statements.

"Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."

"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" -- conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

Finally, someone in the MSM is pointing this out. Bush is a master at "strongly disagreeing" with arguments against his policies that no one has made. Or he "disagrees" with an argument that he has completely misrepresented or distorted.

Of course, people do this when they don't really have a defensible policy or a strong, coherent argument on their side. He can't engage his opponents by directly addressing what they have actually said, so he addresses something they haven't said, or omits important context in a way that misrepresents what they have said. And by constantly using the phrase "Some say..." or variants thereof, instead of naming specific people or groups, he can avoid taking responsibility for lying.

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters.

Not long after taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.

The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.

Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security Department against Democrats.

He told at least two audiences that some senators opposing him were "not interested in the security of the American people." In reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Bush himself first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service protections.

It's a total lack of honesty or integrity, and finally the press is starting to take notice.

IT'S BEEN ABOUT THREE WEEKS since the last new report of Americans torturing terror suspects; time for another one. This latest involved an "elite Special Operations unit" known as Task Force 6-26, which subjected Iraqi detainees to horrific torture at one of Saddam Hussein's old military bases, in a room that Hussein's regime used as -- what else? -- a torture chamber. The Special Ops soldiers called it the "Black Room."

The torture started before the Abu Ghraib story broke, and continued afterward. That, and the fact that it was Special Ops soldiers, not lowly grunts, who tortured the prisoners, completely demolishes the Bush administration's "bad apples" explanation for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

In the Black Room, prisoners were beaten with rifle butts, punched in the head and the kidneys, used as targets in paintball games. They were forced to stand naked while soldiers poured cold water over them to make them feel they were drowning. One of the detainees was the son of Saddam Hussein's bodyguard in Tikrit; he told Army investigators that he was stripped naked, kicked and punched in the spine to the point of losing consciousness, kicked in the stomach until he vomited, and forced to stand in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured over him. Prisoners were subjected to music played over loudspeakers at eardrum-shattering volumes. They were put in plywood shacks "that reeked of urine and excrement" and so small that prisoners couldn't stand; they were forced to crouch or squat. The American soldiers gave these accommodations breezy nicknames like "Motel 6" and "Hotel California."

All of this was done in the name of getting information that could be used to prevent terrorist attacks and save lives, but critics of Task Force 6-26 say very little, if any, usable intelligence came out of the brutal interrogations.

I don't find that terribly surprising. I never have understood the mind-set of people who think kicking and punching a man in his vital organs until he faints or pouring buckets of frigid water over his naked body in front of an air-conditioner is the way to get accurate or significant information about the time of day, much less the planning of terrorist attacks.

Andrew Sullivan has his usual strong commentary on this latest example of the Bush administration's embrace of torture. He includes a photograph of what looks like a corpse covered by a large garbage bag, under the headline, "Does This Count As 'Torture'"?

GLENN GREENWALD'S POST on the so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006" (pdf file here) is a must-read:

[The bill] expressly empowers the President, in Section 2(a), to "authorize a program of electronic surveillance without a court order for periods of up to 45 days." The President can simply renew the program every 45 days by certifying that renewal of the program is appropriate (Section 4(b)(2)). Contrary to initial press reports and to this morning's article in The Washington Post, the newly created Intelligence Subcommittee ... has no power to approve or reject any warrantless eavesdropping programs. Its only purpose is to be briefed periodically on the eavesdropping activities undertaken as part of the program.

In sum, the bill authorizes and makes legal precisely the illegal conduct in which the Administration has been continuously engaging since September or October of 2001. The Administration claims that it reviews its warrantless eavesdropping every 45 days, so that's precisely what the bill authorizes. Or, as Richard Nixon says: "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

Glenn examines the bill's provisions in detail -- too long to quote all of it here, but his analysis is superb.

Here are the main points:

1. There is no meaningful oversight: A handful of Congress members on an intelligence subcommittee would be "briefed" on surveillance targets, but as a courtesy only; they would have no authority to forbid or stop the activity and could not share what they learned with anyone outside the subcommittee.

2. The 45-day limit on warrantless surveillance is a sham: At the end of the 45 days, the president can renew the warrantless surveillance for another 45 days, ad infinitum.

3. The bill's "probable cause" provision is a sham:

... It does not require case-by-case probable cause, merely that there be probable cause that some (but not all) of the intercepted communications under the program involve individuals affiliated with (or "working in support of") terrorist groups. Thus, a program which intercepts the communications of totally innocent people with no connection to terrorism is perfectly fine as long as the program also intercepts communications of someone who does have such connections.

Plus, there is no outside mechanism to define probable cause or determine whether it exists. If the president says there is probable cause, there is probable cause. As a legal term, therefore, it has no real meaning at all.

4. The proposed legislation is really not law at all in any real sense: It's only rubber-stamping what the Bush administration is already doing; and since the nominal limits on the president's power to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans lack any enforcement mechanism, there really are no limits. Glenn again:

... As permissive as it is, this bill still purports to impose minimal limits on the power of the President to eavesdrop, but the whole crux of the NSA scandal is that the President believes that Congress has no power to limit what he can do. Thus, what conceivable rationale is there for Congress to enact laws purporting to impose limits on what the President can do when the President has made clear he will break those laws if he decides he wants to? This bill merely amends FISA ( by significantly loosening its requirements), but the President still says he has the right to violate FISA, so what is the point of amending a law which the President will violate when he wants to?

This is a completely fruitless and absurd exercise to engage in without resolving the question of the President's claimed law-breaking powers. In reality, this is the only point worth making. Laws passed by Congress which are designed to place limits on the President's actions are worthless because the President has claimed the power to ignore those laws. And we know this both because he has said so and because he has been ignoring them. All other discussions about this bill or other bills are just academic as long as the President claims, as he does, the power to break the law.

More blogger commentary:

Marty Lederman at Balkinization: He calls the bill "The Reward for Lawbreaking Act of 2006."

The Carpetbagger Report: Republicans are presenting the bill as a "compromise" -- they are addressing Democratic objections to Bush violating the law by making it legal for the president to ignore the law.

Lean Left: "This law destroys the Fourth Amendment. ..."

A FEDERAL APPEALS COURT TODAY slapped down the Bush administration's four-year attempt to make changes to pollution emissions rules that would allow older coal-fired power plants to modernize their facilities without installing the most recent pollution-control equipment.The ruling, which was handed down yesterday, declared:

... that the changes violated the Clean Air Act and that only Congress could authorize such revisions.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with officials from 14 states, including New York, California and Maryland, who contended that the rule changes -- allowing older power plants, refineries and factories to upgrade their facilities without having to install the most advanced pollution controls -- were illegal and could increase the amount of health-threatening pollution in the atmosphere.

In other words, Pres. Bush tried to usurp Congress's role, give the Executive Branch powers that the Constitution does not allow it, and did it all in the name of Americans' safety and the national interest. Sound familiar?

AS ONE OF THE PEOPLE who wrote about Ali Shalal Qaissi, I feel obligated to post about today's NYT article reporting that Qaissi is not the man shown in the famous photograph that has become symbolic of the detainee abuse by Americans at Abu Ghraib.

Having said this, I am going to quote from what I believe is the most relevant part of the Times piece:

Certainly, he was at Abu Ghraib, and appears with a hood over his head in some photographs that Army investigators seized from the computer belonging to Specialist Charles Graner, the soldier later convicted of being the ringleader of the abuse.

However, he now acknowledges he is not the man in the specific photograph he printed and held up in a portrait that accompanied the Times article. But he and his lawyers maintain that he was photographed in a similar position and shocked with wires and that he is the one on his business card. The Army says it believes only one prisoner was treated in that way.

"I know one thing," Mr. Qaissi said yesterday, breaking down in tears when reached by telephone. "I wore that blanket, I stood on that box, and I was wired up and electrocuted."

Susan Burke, a lawyer in Philadelphia who is representing Mr. Qaissi and other former prisoners in a lawsuit against civilian interrogators and translators at Abu Ghraib, said that Mr. Qaissi had been abused in the same way as the man in the photo. "The sad fact is that there is not only one man on the box," she said.

Using a name that Mr. Qaissi is often called, she said, "Haj Ali is but one of many victims of the torture by Graner and the others."

I don't know if Ali knew he was not the man in that photo, or if he genuinely believed he was -- having stood on similar boxes in similar positions and having experienced the same torture. I'm not happy that it turns out the person in that particular photo was someone else. That said, I would be much more unhappy (from the standpoint of truth) if Ali had never been in Abu Ghraib at all and had never been attached to electrical wires and told he would be electrocuted and (in his testimony) actually was subjected to electric shocks.

BLOGGER HAS BEEN GLITCHY for the past couple of days: the Publish function has been working only sporadically. That's why a post that I wrote Thursday evening did not appear on the blog until this morning; and it's also why no further posts appeared all day until now. Hopefully these problems have been resolved by now.

THE NEXUS OF EVIL IN THE WHITE HOUSE has launched the "largest air assault" in Iraq since the original invasion in March 2003. The nominal reason is to "clear 'a suspected insurgent operating area' "; but clearly the real reason is to shift public attention away from the increasingly bloody and violent civil war in Iraq; to change the public perception that the war is a colossal failure; and to boost Pres. Bush's record-low approval rating (33%).

Of course, the White House insisted there was no connection between the new offensive and growing opposition to Bush's policies at home; but Scott McClellan's denial was laughably transparent -- even more so because, as Knight-Ridder's Tom Lasseter writes, the air war in Iraq has been heating up for months now; and Seymour Hersh told us back in November that ramped-up bombing was the Bush administration's next step for managing public opposition to the war. (Lasseter and Hersh links both via Hullabaloo.)

So, clearly, the wicked warlocks in the White House have had a showy, spectacular air assault in the wings for a good while now, but were waiting for just the right combination of skyrocketing violence in Iraq and plummeting ratings at home to press the On button for what we will be assured are "targeted, surgical strikes," but are nothing of the sort:

This was the step they talked about last year -- blanket bombing, basically. Anything to give them political cover for a troop withdrawal, no matter how many civilians die.

And we can be sure that thousands of Iraqi civilians will die, as a combined result of the American bombings themselves and the vastly increased insurgent and terrorist violence to which our bombings will lead. This, of course, is on top of the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis who have already died since the U.S. first invaded Iraq three years ago.

And that's why I felt such horror and such anger when I read this morning that the Bush administration had launched this assault. That's actually why it took me until now ["now" was Thursday evening; but this post did not get published until Friday morning because of Blogger's server problems] to write this piece -- because I felt nothing I could write would adequately express the depravity, spiritual and moral corruption, and vileness of the people who would plan, authorize, and carry out such evil acts. I still don't feel I can do justice in words to the level of callousness and heartlessness this administration has sunk to.

But Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe did it admirably in this op-ed piece from November, 2003. Given that this latest bombing campaign is being billed as the most major bombing campaign since Shock and Awe, it seems like a good idea to be reminded of what our airstrikes actually accomplish.

THE WHITE HOUSE always said it would never count how many Iraqi parents we killed to liberate their children. We would never count how many toddlers we blew to pieces to free their elders. We would never count how many nuclear families we vaporized. We would never know if we razed a village to save a child.

This is the most disgusting and least discussed aspect of President Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the early days of his war Bush said, "The citizens of Iraq are coming to know what kind of people we have sent to liberate them. American forces and our allies are treating innocent civilians with kindness."

No one could possibly know the truth or lie of that statement, since the mantra of the military from Tommy Franks down to his spokespeople was, "We don't do body counts." The most bald-faced expansion on that policy was given in April by Brigadier General Vincent Brooks of Central Command. "In all cases, we inflict a considerable amount of destruction on whatever force comes into contact with us," Brooks said. "It just is not worth trying to characterize by numbers. Frankly, if we are going to be honorable by the warfare, we are not out there trying to count up bodies."

You cannot be any more frank than that. The very people we claim to liberate are not worth the honor of counting.

It is obvious why. In an unprovoked war based on unproven threats, it was not enough to vilify Saddam Hussein's soldiers to gain the invasion's acceptance among the American people. Bush also had to dehumanize innocent civilians to the point where if we slaughtered some of them, they were not worth our time, either. Bush clearly figured, if you do not count, you cannot lie.

If you do not count, you can stonewall the press and hit its softballs out of the park. In April, David Frost of the BBC suggested to Secretary of State Colin Powell that an early Iraqi figure of 1,254 civilian deaths was "relatively low." Powell responded, "I would say that's relatively low." In August, Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, said: "If you go back to what we achieved here, which was the liberation of 25 million people in less than three weeks, with fewer civilian casualties and less collateral damage than any war in history . . . the loss of innocent life is a tragedy for anyone involved in it but the numbers are really very low."

This has worked magnificently for eight months [at Jackson's writing; now it's worked for three years] with no widespread complaints from Americans. That raises as many questions about our own humanity as Bush's. Did the Pentagon really do that good a job brainwashing Americans on the notion of sanitized warfare? Amid the demonizing of Saddam, were Iraqi civilians easier to dismiss because they were tan, Muslim, or both? Is the United States still mired in a quagmire of paternalism that goes back to the "saving" of "heathens" by yanking them from Africa and baptizing them into slavery?

Such questions ought to be stonewalled no more. Medact, the British affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, this week published a report that estimates the number of Iraqi civilian deaths during the invasion to range from 5,708 to 7,356. The report estimates that the number of civilian deaths after May 1, when Bush declared an end to major combat operations, ranges from 2,049 to 2,209.

Another study released last month by the Project on Defense Alternatives, based in Cambridge, estimated that the number of Iraqi civilian deaths in the first month of the war to be between 3,200 and 4,300. In June, the Associated Press estimated the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the invasion to be 3,250. The AP report said, "hundreds, possibly thousands of victims in the largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total."

The total of civilian deaths, whether they be 3,200 or 10,000, is low compared with conventional wars a half-century ago. But for a decade the Pentagon promised to end wars as we knew them with laser-guided surgical strikes of only military targets. The military cannot have it both ways, promising unprecedented precision at the same time it downplays mistakes through historical context. The alleged precision makes the casualties look less like an example of Bush's kindness than William Calley's out-of-control forces gunning down up to 500 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968.

Just one Iraqi civilian death is horrible blood on our hands given that the attack on Iraq appears to have been based on a lie. Yes, Saddam Hussein killed thousands of his own people. But an American massacre does not make things right. If Americans have half the humanity they claim, they will no longer accept Bush at face value when his officers say, "We don't do body counts."

If we do not count the bodies, this atrocity will never have a face.

I SEE FROM JANE HAMSHER'S POST TODAY that one of my senators here in New Jersey -- Robert Menendez -- is supporting Russ Feingold's censure resolution. I suppose that's one bright spot in this depressing spectacle of congressional Democrats running like terrified mice from the prospect of angering Republican leaders and losing votes back home by voting to censure a president whose approval rating is now at 33%.

So congratulations, Democrats. You avoided Republicans' anger and got Republicans' contempt instead. And I doubt that not having the guts or the loyalty to support Russ Feingold's resolution to censure Pres. Bush for breaking the law when most of them were more than willing to criticize the NSA spy program is going to do much to endear them to voters in their home states and districts. No one is going to vote for a bunch of cowards.

The Democratic leadership is truly disgusting -- spineless and almost totally lacking in the courage of their supposed convictions. I can't say this latest proof of that truth surprises me, though.

What does surprise me is some of the response among liberal and left-wing bloggers. Both Publius at Legal Fiction and Kevin Drum have come out saying the censure idea was a bad political move.

Publius thinks the "timing" is off -- that Feingold's resolution shifted everybody's attention away from news that was making Bush look bad; and that it left the Democrats "open to counterattack."

Kevin says he has no philosophical objection to censuring Bush, but questions Feingold's motives:

Anytime a congressman introduces a measure that's certain to fail, it's done for reasons of political theater: to make a point, to get some attention for an issue that's being ignored, or to reach out to some constituency or other. So the relevant question is: is this good political theater?

Nope, it isn't, Kevin concludes -- because Bush is already getting lots of bad press, because Feingold "didn't bother telling" his Democratic colleagues that he was preparing the resolution, and because it all just gives the Republicans a chance to laugh at the Democrats and make fun of them.

I'm disappointed in both of them. We don't need bloggers to act like the Democrats, who are such jellyfish that they measure everything by whether it will open them to Republican charges of being "soft on terror." (Do Republicans ever fear leaving themselves open to Democrats' charges of lying to get Americans to support an illegal and unjustified war, of robbing the national treasury to pay for that war, of breaking the law, of spying on Americans, of defying international human rights protocols, and of squandering the good will of the entire world?)

I really look for stronger stuff from my side of the blogosphere. Fortunately, there is still Glenn Greenwald:

Kevin's assurance that Democrats will lose is nice conventional wisdom (and the standard beginning premise for many Democrats), but it's actually completely baseless. If the public became convinced as part of the debate that is finally happening that the President broke the law and that such law-breaking is intolerable, does Kevin actually think that it's impossible to find 6 Republican Senators to vote for the Resolution? Congressional Republicans defied Bush on the port deal for only one reason: because public opinion demanded it.

If public opinion begins to move even more than it already has to the view that Bush broke the law, it is far from certain that the Censure Resolution will fail. As I've noted many times, polls showed for two consecutive years that the public thought Watergate was a meaningless scandal and Nixon's popularity remained sky high throughout those years. The arc of that scandal ended up changing only because tenacious politicians and journalists continued to pursue the story and the public finally became educated and angry about it. If Democrats had followed Kevin's advice in 1972, Richard Nixon would have retired as a popular two-term President.

But even if the Censure Resolution ultimately fails, the rationale for pursuing it is self-evident. Kevin frequently frets about (among other things) the fact that Democrats are perceived as being weak. The reason for that is because Democrats often are weak, precisely when they do things like abandon their own Senators and refuse to take a principled stand against a President who got caught breaking the law.

People like Kevin -- who believe that Democrats must "prove" to the country that they can be strong -- should most understand the value in having Democrats take a stand regardless of whether they ultimately prevail. Strong and resolute people fight. Weak and spineless people run away from fights -- or fight only when their victory is guaranteed in advance. The Democrats have been running away from fights for five years now based on the Kevin Drum theory that fights are only worth fighting if you know in advance that you will win. It is beyond irrational to think that the Democrats are going to look strong by simply crawling away meekly and allowing George Bush to break the law.

Anyone with doubts can just ask themselves: Who appears stronger and more resolute right about now -- Russ Feingold or the Democrats described by the Washington Post and New York Times as literally hiding behind each other to avoid reporters and beating a full "retreat"?

More strong, unequivocating analysis is at Liberal Oasis, Hullabaloo, and The Left Coaster.

FROM TRISTERO, POSTING AT HULLABALOO:

Feingold's censure resolution. As Atrios says, if you don't know how, just Google their names. Call today. Now. Urge them to support it. Now.

The text of the resolution is here. It is reasonable, truthful, and necessary. I just called my senators (Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez); it would be wonderful if everyone reading this blog would do the same. Plug in your nine-digit zip code at Project Vote Smart, and the names and phone numbers of your senators will pop up. If you don't know your nine-digit zip code, there's a link for that too.

After you've called your senators and told them you want their yes vote for censuring Pres. Bush, come back and read Anonymous Liberal (cross-posted at Glenn's blog) on the Democratic leadership's terror of appearing "unreasonable" or "extreme" while the Republican leadership skillfully manipulates the discussion to make "reasonable" fit whatever they want it to. Glenn's update at the end of A.L.'s post gives a very good example in Carl Levin's response to a question about the censure resolution put to him on CNN's Late Edition:

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, urged caution among lawmakers until the program had been reviewed further.

"I think what the president did was wrong," Mr. Levin said. "But even though I think he was wrong, I would rather wait until the investigation is completed, which has now been started by the Intelligence Committee, before I go beyond that."

Glenn comments:

In fairness to Levin, it seems that Feingold told nobody about his Censure Resolution until he announced it with George Stephanopolous, and so Levin wasn't prepared to address it yesterday when he was asked about it. Still, Levin's response, which was both frightened and incoherent, illustrates a serious instinct problem which so many Democrats have (and, just incidentally, someone really ought to tell Sen. Levin that waiting "until the investigation [of the Senate Intelligence Committee] is completed" before deciding what to do is going to be a very long wait, since that Committee voted last week not to investigate).

Rather than use the opportunity he had to aggressively condemn the Bush Administration's law-breaking, Sen. Levin did the opposite: he mentioned just in passing -- in the most cursory, reluctant and obligatory manner possible -- that "what the president did was wrong," but then he devoted the bulk of his answer to fearfully warning that we shouldn't do anything about it, that we should wait, that we should think more about it, that we should just impotently and quietly stand by and remain cautious, stagnant, non-committal and unsure.

How is it even possible for a Democratic Senator to conclude that the President broke the law but then -- three full months after the law-breaking is revealed -- counsel that nothing should be done about it? That is the mentality we need to fight against in order to generate as much support as possible for Sen. Feingold's resolution.

In a guest post at Crooks and Liars, Glenn connects the Democrats' fear of appearing "too liberal" to their apparent scorn for liberal and left-wing bloggers:

With very few exceptions, national Democrats in Washington see the blogosphere as composed of uninformed, ranting, dirty masses who need to be kept as far away as possible. While they are willing to take your money, many of the Beltway Democrats see the vibrant activism in the blogosphere as some sort of an embarrassment, while others see it as a threat to their feifdoms. ...

Of course, leave it to the Democrats to be so scared of being labeled "extreme" or "unpatriotic" or "out of the mainstream" or "on the far left fringes of liberalism" that they turn down the best hope they have of getting back the White House and majority status in Congress.

The way in which so many national Democrats run away from the blogosphere and try to pretend that it does not exist -- as though it is some sort of dangerous, poisonous sewer -- is really quite bewildering. Within the last two weeks, I had some extensive communications with a high-ranking staff member in a Democratic Senators' office (whose identity I promised not to reveal before the discussions began) in which I argued that systems should be created to enable Democratic Senators to work cooperatively with the blogosphere in order to prevent the Bush Administration from continuing to suppress investigations into its wrongdoing, including as part of the NSA scandal and other scandals.

I explained that there is a bursting and eager energy among the literally millions of people who write and read blogs to take meaningful action against the Bush Administration. The people in the blogosphere are highly motivated, informed, and politically engaged. Activating that energy and having national Democrats work cooperatively with the blogosphere (rather than ignore it or scorn it) could make an enormous difference in how these stories end up being covered and resolved. It is monumentally dumb not to embrace the one mechanism which has the ability to unleash genuinely impassioned, mass citizen action. And there are obvious and easy -- yet quite potent -- ways for national Democrats to work with bloggers and the blogosphere to maximize the force of these efforts.

This was the response I ultimately received:

I think there is an opportunity for us to figure out a better way to work together. But, you have to understand, my ultimate goal is to help [the] Senator [] achieve his objective of real oversight on national security matters by the Intelligence Committee.

Even with the best of intentions, I'm not convinced that bloggers can help us meet that goal. In fact, I worry about it hurting our efforts given the increasingly partisan environment.

This response is not uncommon. Many -- if not most -- national Democrats really are afraid of working with actual citizens, and are particularly afraid of having any involvement at all with the blogosphere. It's as though they think they need to remain above and separated from the poorly behaved, embarrassing masses. They actually have been scared away from working with the very people who they are supposedly representing and who are on their side.

TODAY'S NEW YORK TIMES has strong words for Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, and for the abortion ban he signed last week.

South Dakota's abortion law is the most restrictive one adopted by any state since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. It does not contain exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or from incest. Nor does it allow abortions that are necessary to preserve the health of the mother. The law is unlikely to go into force anytime soon. If it did, it would simply drive women -- as in the pre-Roe days -- to risk their lives to end their pregnancies with illegal back-alley abortions.

Gov. Mike Rounds, who signed the bill into law, said that the "true test of a civilization" was how it treated "the most vulnerable and helpless," including "unborn children." But his state has hardly been a leader in protecting vulnerable children who have left the womb. The nation's three worst counties for child poverty at the time of the last census were all in South Dakota, according to the Children's Defense Fund. Buffalo County, home to the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, was dead last.

Via CE Petro.

WHAT DOES AN ABORTION BAN with an exception for the life of the mother but not for the health of the mother mean in real life? MB Williams tells us:

Much is made these days about South Dakota's lack of an exception for rape and incest. Not so much, though, for an exception for the physical and/or mental health of the mother. However, it is the latter that terrifies me, the forty-one year-old married mother of five, rather than all the others combined.

Most high-school graduates have at least a passing knowledge of the nineteenth-century authoress, Charlotte Bronte. Married in her late 30s, Bronte is suspected to have died from Hyperemesis Gravidarum during her first pregnancy, a severe form of morning sickness defined by excessive vomiting of four or more times per day.

In each of my pregnancies, I suffered from hyperemesis for the first four months. In my case, however, I vomited no less than six times a day, usually twice that during "peak months". In each subsequent pregnancy, the symptoms got progressively worse, so that during my last pregnancy with Kezzie, even the most expensive anti-nausea drug (Zofran) failed. My OB had a central line placed, and I was put on IV for three months, just to keep me hydrated. Of course, the line closed or became infected a number of times, leading to extended trips to the hospital.

I couldn't work or even care for my other children. I couldn't even prepare food for myself (during the short periods food would stay down), as our bedroom was on the second floor, and my IV was attached to a wicked heavy electronic pump and stand. Eric, who had been laid off six weeks after we saw the two lines on the pee stick, was prohibited from looking for new work, as he couldn't even think to leave me home alone with a recently diagnosed autistic two-year old (the autistic 3.5 old and NT five year old were both in school during much of the day.)

Just about the time the hyperemesis began to die down, the preterm labor would start, although with Kezzie, an early placental abruption at 9 weeks put me on bedrest much earlier than the 18 weeks for Jonah, and 21 weeks for Sam, so it was a good thing I guess that I was already tied to the side of the bed by the IV pump.

All four of Eric['s] and my children were planned, the pregnancies very much wanted. However, the financial and emotional costs were very high, and we lost friends, alienated family and my post-partum mental health and physical health suffered.

. . .

Now imagine this same health crisis, but in a single, 20 year old college student whose partner checks out upon learning of the pregnancy. Parents are far away, she can't even get out of bed, let alone to class. Forced to spend food money to take a cab to the ER when vomiting bile turns to blood. The only health insurance available is Medicaid, and the only OB care a local clinic staffed by residents unwilling to pass out any drugs to "charity cases", even pregnant ones. Friends, also barely adults, don't know how to help and public assistance is rejected due to that proud middle-class upbringing.

I'm also familiar with this scenario, as it describes the pregnancy of my first child.

Now imagine it in a working poor woman dependent upon her two jobs to feed, cloth and house her two other young children. Or a woman whose spouse is deployed to Iraq. Or a teenager already ten pounds underweight from trying to look like the model on the cover of Seventeen.

Imagine trying to function in any way, shape or form while vomiting a minimum of 400 times over 3 to 4 months. Yet, under South Dakota law, a woman seeking relief from this hell is viewed as looking for an abortion out of "convenience". Her life is not in immediate danger (though thousands of women around the world still die from hyperemesis.) Legislators view the clump of cells which are wreaking such havoc with her hormonal and immune system as superior to the woman hosting them.

Hyperemesis (HG) occurs in about 1% of all pregnancies in the US. Thus, approximately 60,000 women last year suffered from this very debilitating condition, mostly in the first trimester of their pregnancy. Many of those women, even some with wanted pregnancies, choose to terminate their pregnancies rather than continue to suffer from HG.

However, if you're on Medicaid or covered under Indian Health Services, the Hyde Amendment prohibits terminating a pregnancy for hyperemesis or any other medical condition which is not an immediate risk to the life of the mother. The Hyde Amendment was a bi-partisan compromise passed soon after Roe v. Wade, which prohibits the use of federal funds for the termination of pregnancy, and at times, has provided no exceptions other than immediate life of mother. Rape and incest were only re-added in 1993, though some states reject those exceptions as well.

So for those who think that today's pro-life Congressmen and women, whether Democrat or Republican, wouldn't think twice about outlawing nearly all abortions, including those for rape, incest and health of the mother, just look to the poor and Indians among us. They live, and suffer, the truth every day.