At a recent appearance in San Francisco, Air America host Randi Rhodes went after Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton, calling them "whores" to a generally mixed reception by the audience.

"Hillary is a big f**king whore, too. You know why she's a big f**king whore? Because her deal is always, 'Read the fine print, a**hole!'"

Huffington Post:

Rhodes has been now been suspended from the network. Air America released the following statement:

Air America has suspended on-air host Randi Rhodes for making inappropriate statements about prominent figures, including Senator Hillary Clinton, at a recent public appearance on behalf of Air America in San Francisco which was sponsored by an Air America affiliate station.
"Air America encourages strong opinions about public affairs but does not condone such abusive, ad hominem language by our Hosts," said chair Charlie Kireker.

I'm a fan of Randi, but this is completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that happens in the heat of a long, drawn out primary season.

A medical librarian, who ran a typical search on POPLINE, (the world's largest database on reproductive health) found something very disturbing. The term "abortion" had been pretty much blocked from its database for normal searches . Go here and try the search. I did and got "No records found by latest query."

What is POPLINE?

the world's largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues. POPLINE is maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development. (USAID).

I was contacted yesterday by someone and given this email thread. Here's what he/she said in the email:

The e-mail exchange below is fairly straight-forward: a governmental database on Population, POPLINE (POPulation OnLINE) has been changed so that one can no longer search the term "abortion." As the representative from POPLINE states, "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

I suspect pressure was placed from on high to do this. Why would the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, where POPLINE is hosted, decide on its own to eliminate searching for information on abortion? I hope you can publicize this outrageous maneuver.

Here's the email conversation that was posted here. It's quite troubling. Names were edited for confidentiality!

To: Debra L. Dickson
POPLINE Database Manager/Administrator
INFO Project
111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, MD 21202
ddickson@jhuccp.org
Tel: 410-659-6300 / Fax: 410-659-6266

Hi Debbie –

Thank you for your quick response to my e-mail. I have forwarded your e-mail to researchers with whom I am working; I suspect they will be as puzzled as I about the decision to make “all abortion terms stop words” in the government funded, publically available “POPLINE” database. Even more troubling is the implications for the average user – eliminating this term essentially blocks access to the reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. “Unwanted w2 pregnancy” is not a synonym for abortion.

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The Nation:

It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. "Right then my whole life was turned upside down," she says. [..NSFW description of Smith's rape]

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. "Because then, all of a sudden, if you've done exactly what you've been instructed not to do--tell somebody--then you're in danger," Smith says.

As a brand-new arrival at Camp Harper, she had not yet forged many connections and was working in a red zone under regular rocket fire alongside the very men who had participated in the attack. (At one point, as the sole medical provider, she was even forced to treat one of her alleged assailants for a minor injury.) She waited two and a half weeks, until she returned to a much larger facility, to report the incident. "It's very easy for bad things to happen down there and not have it be even slightly suspicious."

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OK, I really can't comment on this right now. I'm just speechless. Remember all the talk from the administration about Saddam and al-Qaeda and 9//11 to scare us into a war with Iraq and Feith leading the way? Scroll down the page for some of his distortions. Take it away good readers.

Feith on 60 Minutes:

The first Pentagon insider to give his account of the run-up to war says the attack on Iraq was more a defensive move against possible future threats from Saddam Hussein than a retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, also tells Steve Kroft that the Pentagon failed to foresee the insurgency or the need for more troops to prevent the post-war chaos that included looting..

What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States would come," says Feith, the No. 3 person in the Pentagon’s hierarchy from 2001 to 2005. "Our main goal was not merely retaliation for the 9/11 attack, it was preventing the next attack," he says. Pressed by Kroft on the importance of getting the 9/11 plotters, Feith responds that getting them was important, but "it was also important to go after the broader network … and prevent whatever plans there were for following attacks," Feith tells Kroft...read on

Democrats seem to have found the one criticism that gets John McCain angrier than anything else — bring up his comments about keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for “100 years.” Every time a high profile Dem (Clinton, Obama, Dean, et al) mentions this, he becomes enraged and insists his comments have been mischaracterized.

It’s true that McCain did not, as a point of fact, indicate that he wants to see the ongoing war continue until 2108, but rather, he envisions thousands of American troops “maintaining a presence” in the country for 100 years, after some semblance of stability has been established. They’re not, to be fair, the same thing.

As far as the McCain campaign is concerned, this realization should effectively end the controversy. Joe Klein argues that McCain’s confused about this, too.

The problem with John McCain’s 100 years in Iraq formulation isn’t that he’s calling for 95 more years of combat — he isn’t — but that he thinks you can have a long-term basing arrangement in Iraq similar to those we have in Germany or Korea. That betrays a fairly acute lack of knowledge about both Iraq and Islam. It may well be possible to station U.S. troops in small, peripheral kingdoms like Dubai or Kuwait, but Iraq is — and has always been — volatile, tenuous, centrally-located and nearly as sensitive to the presence of infidels as Saudi Arabia. It is a terrible candidate for a long-term basing agreement.

Quite right. I’d just add, however, that McCain already knows this. In fact, he’s admitted as much.

The point seems to have been largely forgotten, but back in November, after months of insisting that Korea could be a model for a long-term troop presence in Iraq, McCain abandoned this position, saying he doesn’t want to use Korea as a model, and adding that the “nature of the society in Iraq” and the “religious aspects” of the country make withdrawal inevitable.

Soon after, McCain went back to his original position again, saying that a Korean model is entirely appropriate. So, for those keeping score at home, McCain 1) endorsed a multi-decade presence in Iraq; 2) denounced a multi-decade presence in Iraq; 3) re-embraced his first point; and 4) blasted those who agreed with his second point as being incompetent.

At the risk of sounding impolite, this guy is starting to make Bush look like he’s engaged and knowledgeable.

As Atrios sez; Who could have predicted?

A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.

The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant.State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.

They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said.It would still require teaching abstinence but students would also learn about condoms and other methods of birth control and disease prevention. Read on...

I've posted this audio many times on C&L to expose the horror of Yoo!

John Yoo should be in handcuffs as I write this post. Froomkin kind of says it all:

Download | Play

The Justice Department memo released yesterday is a key link in the chain of evidence connecting the monstrous abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere straight to the White House.

President Bush has described the torture and murder of prisoners by U.S. military personnel as the work of an aberrant few. But this 2003 memo opened the door to precisely the kinds of abuse so horrifically chronicled in the Abu Ghraib photographs.

And the memo's author -- John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- was a longtime ally and notoriously pliant scribe for the radical legal views of Vice President Cheney and his chief enforcer, David S. Addington. Yoo's memo is a historic document. It is the ultimate expression of Cheney's belief that anything the president or his designates do -- no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American -- is justifiable in the name of national self-defense.

It is also an example of how enabling zealots to disregard the rule of law and the customary boundaries of human conduct leads to madness.

About a year ago, we learned in jaw-dropping detail about the questions asked of those seeking employment at Bush’s Justice Department. Thanks to Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling — remember them? — job applicants for civil service jobs were quizzed with all kind of personal questions that the DoJ couldn’t legally ask.

But what about all of those Justice Department employees who were already on staff when Goodling & Co. got there? It was too late to ask them personal questions during their interviews. How, then, could they ensure that DoJ employees were pure by conservative Republican standards?

Apparently, they found ways. (via Paul Kiel)

The Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating whether a career attorney in the department was dismissed from her job because of rumors that she is a lesbian. The case grew out of a larger inquiry into the firings of U.S. attorneys and politicization at Justice under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Several people interviewed by the inspector general’s staff described the case to NPR and said they came away with the impression that the Attorney General’s office decided not to renew Leslie Hagen’s contract because of the talk about her sexual orientation. Hagen received the highest possible ratings for her work as liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys’ committee on Native American issues. Her final job evaluation lists five categories for supervisors to rank her performance. For each category, a neat X fills the box marked, “Outstanding.” And at the bottom of the page, under “overall rating level,” she also got the top mark: Outstanding.

The form is dated February 1, 2007. Several months before that evaluation, Hagen was told her contract would not be renewed.

After Hagen won awards for her work as a federal prosecutor, former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger recruited her to DC for her job, because, as he put it, she was “the best qualified person in the nation.” Everyone Hagen worked with raved about her amazing work and her supervisors were anxious to renew her contract.

But as we know all too well, in the Bush administration, qualifications and outstanding on-the-job performance hardly matter.

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Man, I can't wait for the PA primary. Now we're stuck with endless debates between Obama and Hillary supporters 24/7 while John McCain goes around and around "Re-Branding" himself as a warrior of some kind. Anyway, Digby catches Tweety doing the usual hatchet job for McCain:

Sure enough, the bowling thing seems to have brought old Chris back to his "thesis:"

MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you about how he -- how's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?...

Remember back in the dark days of 2004, when it was assumed that anyone who didn't live in a small town in Nebraska or Alabama was automatically not a Real American? When we were all told to take our latte sipping, New York Times reading asses back to where we done come from? Yep, here we are again. (African Americans, of course, have never been considered "regular people" by conservatives. Nothing new there.)...read on

WTF is "regular people?" The media wants to pick our candidates for us plain and simple. They can't stay out of the way and let the people vote. And we are voting at record numbers. Endless loops of footage that do not teach us anything. I talked to a network reporter who is covering the Dems and he/she said that they never knew McCain flip flopped on waterboarding. They were shocked. I was shocked too. This person is an honest broker of the facts so I realized that it's up to the network heads to make sure they cover McCain. And obviously they are not.

While it might be used as a Letterman punch line for a second, why does it matter if Obama is a terrible bowler to the press? Yet, over and over again we see it. When has Matthews and the Village elites laced up their shoes and gone bowling when they haven't hired the entire alley---all for themselves? Nuff said.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

Fox & Friends dunce, Steve Doocy, won the bronze on Wednesday's Worst Person in the World segment on Countdown for accusing the librul media of falsely reporting that the U.S. is on the verge of a recession in a plot to get a Democrat into the White House, when a right wing guest who appeared on his own show laughed at him and told him that the idea of a recession wasn't that far-fetched.

Rush Limbaugh garnered the runner up spot for saying Hillary Clinton supporters were feminists who had all had multiple abortions that had been married two or three times -- when he himself has been married three times and has NO children.

Top honors went to former Bush Press Secretary, Tony Snow, for conflating Senator Barack Obama's "present" votes while in the Illinois Senate with his voting record in the U.S. Senate during an interview on Dennis Miller's radio show. When faced with the fact that those present votes didn't actually happen in the U.S. Senate, Snow said he actually did it in both places.

Olbermann: "There you have it, Tony Snow, having retired from being George Bush's Press Secretary, now lying recreationally to strangers and passers by."