Essential Estrogen

Domestic wire tapping. Abu Ghraib. Phone calls claiming John McCain provided half the DNA for an illegitmate brown child. Equal pay. Elimination of the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach. Guantanamo. Pat Tillman. The "Patriot" Act. Rush to war. Falsehoods to make rush to war more efficient. Reclassifying the previously declassified. Katrina. Valerie Plame. Halliburton and no-bid contracts. Blackwater. Brushing off the International Court of Justice. Fallujah. Osama bin Laden. Citizens arrested for t-shirts. Diebold. Jack Abramoff. Voter purging. "Healthy" forests. "Clean" skies. My Pet Goat. Reclassifying government whistleblowers as "leakers." Extraordinary Rendition. Delaying reports showing students in Charter Schools performed less proficient than those in public schools. Re-Calculating the Charter School assessments when they looked bad. Ban on military women and dependents from obtaining abortions at military hospitals, even if they pay with their own funds, even if they were raped in the line of duty. Tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent. Nonexistent WMDs. Canning health care for our most needy. "Mission Accomplished." Jose Padilla. Loyalty Oaths at political events. Classifying fast food jobs as manufacturing jobs. Tainted Barbies. The Military Commissions Act of 2006. Redesigned OSHA workplace safety posters with small hotline numbers and no regional contact information. Enron. Terry Schiavo. Intelligent Design. Mike Brown. The Downing Street Memo. TALON. Coal Executive Richard Stickler and his troubling mine safety record given a recess appointment to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Jerry Thacker. "Bring it on." Ken Lay. Scooter Libby. "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S." Former Wal-Mart attorney Paul DeCamp and his record of urging restrictions to the Fair Labor Standard Act's overtime pay given a recess appointment to head up the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. Harriet Myers. Samuel Alito. Jeff Gannon. Revoking rule to reduce acceptable levels of arsenic in drinking water. Armstrong Williams. A fake turkey dinner. Karen Ryan reporting. Secrecy. Signing Statements. Mark Foley. Altered Health and Human Services reports on racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Global gag rule. Habeas Corpus.The Axis of Evil. Extended deployments. Repealing the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax. Walter Reed Medical Center. Crumbling infrastructure. Alberto Gonzalez. Abortion Non-Discrimination Act. Signing statements. K Street. Tom Delay. Revisions to Title IX interpretation. Faith-Based Initiatives. Ricin. The International Mother and Child HIV Prevention Initiative. Anthrax. The Department of Health and Human Services illegally paying the salary of former Medicare chief Thomas Scully, who threatened to fire veteran Medicare actuary Richard Foster if he told Congress that the administration's Medicare prescription drug legislation would cost $100 billion more than the White House said. Abstinence-Only Sex Education. Elimination of the annual Equal Opportunity Survey by the Labor Department. The proposed Sunset Commission. No Child Left Behind. No School Left Funded. RNC email addresses for White House employees. RNC email servers purged. The so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban. Habitual audits of Advocates for Youth, STOP AIDS and SIECUS.

Americans, true to our historical indifference and patience, sit at a slow simmer while the rest of the world boils over. Pundits, activists and even administration supporters are wondering what will it take. What will be last straw to strike the camel's back and spark Americans to action?

While we all sit back -- in between peeling open our bags of chips, slurping our sodas, playing with our tainted Chinese-manufactured toys, and watching the latest reality show, of course -- here are a couple more to add to the outrage list.

Been Advocating for Peace? Canada Border Patrol Might Refuse Passage

Retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat Ann Wright was denied entry to Canada. Why? She and Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, were refused at the border because their names have been added to the FBI's National Crime Information Center database.

The two have taken part in several non-violent protests of the war -- Wright even quit her diplomat gig in opposition to the Iraq war -- but neither woman has ever been convicted of anything more serious than a misdemeanor. Both have previously visited Canada for anti-war meetings, often at the invitation of Canadian activist groups or political parties.

Further, the two activists met yesterday with a diplomat at the Canadian embassy in Washington. Tristan Landry, a spokesman for the embassy, said the two were given "no apology and no invitation to Canada."

Wright said they were told that they were "not even eligible for rehabilitation," a process that takes five years and requires fines to be paid.

The Strong Winds in Iowa? That's the White House Spinning.

It seems the Bush Administration was for torture both before and after they said they were against it. Hop over to the N.Y. Times to read about the latest Justice Department memo on "severe interrogations."

And, if this was actually a joke, the punch line would be the the Bush Administration's spinning. In December 2004, the Justice Department publicly declared torture as "abhorrent." Roughly two months later, a new opinion was issued -- but only on a need-to-know basis. The new document, according to the Times and the officials they interviewed, offered an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Later that same year, even as Congress moved to outlaw torture, the Justice Department put forth another secret document. The Times staff notes that most lawmakers did not know this document existed. (Wonder which ones did.)

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

...

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

But what really makes the White House spin the punchline of this sick joke is the public statements of "we do not torture" combined with Bush's own signing statements. He issued one of those in conjunction with the torture bill, indicating from the get-go that he wouldn't be bound by that law.

I guess the word torture has gone the way of sexual intercourse. That is, it all depends on your definition.

To date, I've only heard two candidates speak out against this latest outrage. Illinois Sen. Barack Obama gave it a one sentence allusion during his appearance in Waterloo yesterday. Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, to my knowledge, has been the only of the presidential hopefuls to issue a formal statement:

"The law is crystal clear - torture is illegal. It is 'abhorrent' that the Bush Administration would publicly disavow torture, while its Office of Legal Counsel is secretly interpreting settled law to reach the opposite conclusion. It is imperative we understand the extent of this deception. The Office of Legal Counsel must release how many other secret opinions they have produced during the Bush Administration that justified violations of the Constitution, federal statutes, the laws of war, and international human rights.

"Congress's Constitutional authority is the power of the purse. And should the Justice Department not comply, I intend to use that authority by drafting legislation defunding the Office of Legal Counsel."

Senator, since we are in fact discussing my wallet, may I be one of the first to give you permission to slam it shut at will.

~~~Update - 4:09 pm~~~

I just received the following statement from Delaware Sen. Joe Biden:

“This is an outrage and an embarrassment to the nation and is further proof that you cannot trust this Administration. Before these memos were drafted, the Administration publicly denied their use of torture and now it is clear to all that they were not telling the truth.

”These abhorrent policies have made us less safe in the world. The shirking of responsibility by this White House, from blaming Abu Ghraib on lower-level officers and firing others for their own incompetent Iraq policies, is a disturbing pattern of behavior that must come to an end.

”We need a change of direction in America. The American people need a White House they can be proud of here at home and one that commands respect abroad. As President, I will make that change my first priority.”