Arianna has a new report on the Dick Cheney's visit Friday to the Vail Medical Center. She says after seeing Dr. Stedman for his knee, he saw Dr. Jack Eck and had an EKG done. No one in MSM is reporting this.

....sources close to Dr. Jack Eck, whom the vice president saw in the cardiac unit, were acknowledging yesterday in Vail that he had been to the cardiac unit (the AP has still not updated its story to include this) but AFTER he had seen Dr. Steadman, and that he had had a prophylactic EKG while he was there.

Jack Eck, by the way, "started the ICU, the cardio-pulmonary unit and ... the hospice program ...at the Vail Valley Medical Center."

Arianna's first report is here.

by TChris

The FBI claims that environmental and animal rights activists are "the nation's top domestic terrorism threat" -- a position that plays well with lobbyists for the timber and fur industries, but puzzles those who wonder why the FBI doesn't have greater concern about extremists like Eric Rudolph who blow up abortion clinics and gay bars. Rudolph's "manifesto," casting his bombing spree as a protest against abortion, has been posted to the internet by one of his supporters.

The Webmaster of the site, Donald Spitz, a minister whose site also includes photographs of aborted fetuses, said Friday that he had been writing to Mr. Rudolph in jail for months, and that Mr. Rudolph had mailed him the 21-page handwritten account. Mr. Spitz said he posted the account at [his Army of God website] with Mr. Rudolph's approval.

Terrorism is the use of violence against civilians for a political purpose. The FBI has redefined terrorism to encompass those who cause only economic damage. Why doesn't the FBI believe Rudolph's supporters are a greater terrorist threat than activists who (without killing people) pursue causes that are contrary to the interests of businesses that the administration favors?

It's impossible not to know that tonight is evangelist Billy Graham's last sermon. I've never seen or read a Billy Graham sermon. I don't even know why they are called "crusades." But considering this description of his medical condition, it's impressive he's speaking in public at all these days.

Graham, 86, is suffering from fluid on the brain, prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease. He uses a walker due to a pelvic fracture and is largely confined to his home in Montreat, N.C.

Click through these pictures from the LA Times. Then go read the cover story, Dying on Our Dime. [Via Sentencing Law and Policy.]

Count me among those that think Sen. Dick Durbin owed no one an apology for his remarks (pdf) about our treatment of the detainees and that the frenzy over them was just an attempt by Republicans to distract the public from the real issue. Nonetheless, he apologized again yesterday, this time to troops:

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin apologized to war veterans Saturday for his remarks earlier this month comparing interrogators at an American-run prison camp in Cuba to Nazis and other historically infamous regimes.

"I think when you've done something hurtful to people you have to stand up and say I'm sorry," Durbin said at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Peoria, five days after he apologized for the comments on the Senate floor.

Durbin was correct in his remarks. The techniques used by the U.S. on prisoners are torture. He never blamed U.S. servicepeople to begin with. He was blaming the top brass who approved the techniques.

We need to keep the discussion going and raise the heat level on the Administration. They shouldn't get a pass on this issue.

Last week Dick Cheney said the Iraq insurgents are in their "last throes." Today on Meet the Press, Donald Rumsfeld said it will take 12 years to beat them, and U.S forces won't win. He claims the "win" will come after U.S. forces have left.

Rumsfeld, addressing a question about whether U.S. troops levels are adequate to vanquish the increasingly violent resistance, said, "We're not going to win against the insurgency. The Iraqi people are going to win against the insurgency. That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years.

"Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency," the Pentagon chief told "Fox News Sunday." "We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency," he said.

Dream on.

Bush may be fighting a losing battle. According to the latest poll numbers:

Some 53 percent of people surveyed say the United States made a mistake going to war in Iraq in March 2003, according to an AP-Ipsos poll released Friday. That is the highest number in AP-Ipsos polling who have said the war was a mistake.

In December 2003, almost two-thirds of those questioned said the United States made the right decision in waging war.

How many more vets are we going to see come home without limbs?

Some drink to escape the pain. Others do drugs. And a number sink into a deep depression that ends in suicide. Life for triple amputees can be rough.....On the lawn outside the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., a mother spoke on her cell phone in between puffs on a cigarette.

"I feel like I'm on a roller coaster," Doris Smith of St. Augustine, Fla., said on the phone to her family. "At night, when I get home, I can't sleep." After hanging up, Smith explained: Her 21-year-old Army son, Chad Smith, was injured by an improvised explosive device while he was in Iraq.

"There is a lot of tragedy up on that floor," she said, gesturing toward the hospital. "So many families have been disrupted because of it, and the public is unaware of it. ... They look at the casualties, but the wounded has been astronomical."

Let's hope that in another three months, the numbers will be as high for those who say bring the troops home now.

by TChris

Drug offenders who pay their societal debt by finishing a prison term return to a society that often continues to punish them by denying them employment. Out of despair or necessity, many return to the world of drugs, and then to prison.

Illinois is experimenting with a program to end that cycle. Its Sheridan Correctional Center will soon be the country's largest drug treatment prison. Unlike many drug treatment prisons, Sheridan focuses on repeat offenders.

Illinois recognized that, with 40,000 inmates coming out of its prisons this year, and with 80 percent likely to return to crime within three years, the simple-minded "lock 'em up" strategy has failed. It also recognized that treatment alone won't prevent recidivism. Inmates at Sheridan participate in educational or job training programs. Critically, support for offenders continues after their release into society.

by TChris

It's fun to watch Sen. Kennedy tell Donald Rumsfeld that he's incompetent, but if he had seen this story, Kennedy might have called Rumsfeld a coward as well. The administration's incompetence leaves soldiers traveling in vehicles that lack adequate armor, while Rumsfeld -- during his rare visits to Iraq -- travels in "a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner."

Whatsamatta Donald? Are you afraid to entrust your life to the same Humvee you provide to the men and women whose lives are entrusted to you?

by TChris

Dick Durbin apologized (unnecessarily) for selecting words that were subject to deliberate misinterpretation by the extreme right. No apology has followed Karl Rove's sleazy attack on liberals. Instead, the hard core right (including the White House) has rallied around Rove, insisting that his slanderous lies are connected to reality.

"That's not slander, that's the truth," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican, told the College Republican National Committee's biennial convention in Arlington yesterday.

"Karl Rove is right," announced the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the chief campaign arm of Senate Republicans, in a fundraising e-mail message yesterday.

The right wing motto: lie or deny, but never apologize.

by TChris

As TalkLeft reported here, a federal judge ordered a new trial for Randy Steidl after concluding that his lawyer's poor representation, combined with new evidence, compelled the conclusion that Steidl was probably innocent of the double murder with which he was charged. Steidl was freed after Illinois decided not to bring him to trial again.

Steidl's co-defendant hasn't been so fortunate.

Herbert Whitlock’s hopes for a second chance were crushed Thursday afternoon when the much anticipated decision by Edgar County Circuit Judge H. Dean Andrews denied the 59-year-old a new trial.

The validity of Whitlock's conviction is called into question by the same unreliable testimony and prosecutorial misconduct that eventually led to Steidl's freedom. Whitlock's lawyers say that "as in Mr. Steidl’s case, it is going to take the federal courts to make the right decision to let an innocent man out of jail."

Former Illinois State Police Lt. Michale Callahan, who believes both Steidl and Whitlock are innocent, is disappointed with the state court's decision.

by TChris

Was former Harvard student Alexander Pring-Wilson using reasonable force to defend himself from an attack, or was he the aggressor? A jury found Pring-Wilson guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but Superior Court Judge Regina Quinlan tossed the conviction yesterday in light of a recent state supreme court ruling permitting the defense to introduce evidence of a victim's history of violence if it supports a self-defense claim.

Unless the prosecution prevails in an appeal of the ruling, Pring-Wilson will have a second chance to persuade a jury that his use of deadly force was justified to repel an attack. Bail will be set for Pring-Wilson on Monday.