I have to wonder whether Judge Katherine Curtis routinely issues gag orders for every criminal investigation in Flathead County, especially without the attorney for the investigative target asking for one:
Monday, Corrigan told KCFW-TV that he could no longer discuss the investigation. The District Court administrator says all information in the case is sealed by order of Judge Katherine Curtis unless or until any charges are filed against Barkus.
Barkus’ attorney, Todd Glazier, says he doesn’t know anything about the order.
In an excellent piece, Hendrik Hertzberg explains what is driving the right wing’s lunacy about President Obama and healthcare reform:
Lies and fantasies about health-care reform swirled together with lies and fantasies about the chief executive himself. Obama is plotting to set up “death panels,” government tribunals authorized to euthanize the old and sick. Obama was born in Kenya and therefore his very Presidency is unconstitutional. Obama will cut Medicare benefits to provide coverage to illegal aliens. Obama seeks to indoctrinate children in Marxist ideology and put teenagers in “reëducation camps.” Obama is a Communist. Obama is a Fascist.
This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint.
A week after the rest of the state’s newspapers reported AYP results, the Helena Independent Record finally got around to notifying the community about our test scores. Once again, based on the criteria established by the NCLB Act, the results don’t look very good: 11 out of 15 Helena schools failed to meet the proficiency standards.
I’ve written on more than one occasion about the law and Montana schools, so I’ll focus my observations on the response offered by the new President of the Helena Education Association, Tammy Pilcher. Whether her remarks are more disingenuous or tone deaf is hard to say, but it’s easy to see why so many conservatives blame teachers unions for the problems when our leadership responds like this.
What did Pilcher have to say about the results?
Tammy Pilcher, president of the teacher’s union in Helena, says the goals set forth by the federal government about standardized testing can’t feasibly be met, and with no federal support, failure is inevitable.
That should motivate teachers and students to do their level best in pursuit of education. It’s inevitable that we’ll fail, after all. It’s hard to understand how the schools that do pass manage to, given the inevitability of failure, and it might come as a surprise to the federal government to learn that it does not support education in Helena, despite millions of dollars in funding, but hey, you can’t blame us for the problem.
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Far better sources have already written about the incredibly weak and cynical proposal that Senator Baucus is floating on healthcare (on the slowest news day imaginable), and my position about the Senator has been clear for quite some time. [quote]
What I haven’t written about, though, is Senator Tester, largely because he has been either very quiet or very non-specific about healthcare reform. Looking back on his campaign web page, I am reminded that Senator Tester took a strong stand about the corporate interests who are blocking reform. His issues page notes:
In the U.S. Senate, Jon Tester will stand up to big insurance companies and support a health care plan that makes health care affordable for all Montanans.
While that’s just rhetoric, it’s a promise to fight for something more than Senator Baucus’s proposal, which can best be described as making health care “marginally more affordable for some Montanans and less affordable for others, all at the discretion of your friends in the insurance industry, pending more input from Doctors Grassley and Enzi.”
I’ve been impressed with Senator Tester’s work in Washington. I trust the man, and I admire him. It’s certainly got to be a challenge to be the junior senator under someone with the amount of clout Senator Baucus wields, but Tester has been independent and right more often than not.
It’s time, though, for Senator Tester to demand more from Senator Baucus and the Senate Democrats. It’s time for a definite commitment for a strong public option, for meaningful reform that will bring us closer to affordable care for all Americans.
Now that the right wing has worked itself up into another frenzy about yet another non-issue, this time the President of the United States encouraging schoolchildren to try harder in school and to work to improve their communities, one has to wonder why people like Senator Baucus feel the need to negotiate with people who equate national service with National Socialism. Bipartisanship may be a noble goal at Youth Government conferences and may have been a workable goal when the Republican Party held more than seven moderates nationwide, but to believe that Democrats should work with a party that is driven by its lunatic fringe is worse than naive. It’s insane.
I can’t help but to be struck by a sense of wonder. National figures in the Republican Party are actually musing about the possibility of authoritarian government because of President Obama’s decision to give a speech or his decision to appoint czars, a rhetorical gimmick first popularized by their own party. Speech to children? Creeping fascism, to the same Republicans who had no worries about authoritarian government when their President and Vice President were detaining people without trials, authorizing torture, and wiretapping the American public.
It’s long been a trick of the Republican Party and its mouthpieces to present the Democratic Party as some fringe movement, taking an isolated examples of someone on the far left of the party and holding her up as a representative of the Party as a whole. When one person suggests that “Under God” be taken from the Pledge of Allegiance, Rush Limbaugh and his minions (in the Congress) demonize the totality of Democrats as unpatriotic socialists. Always socialists.
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