This is Wendy Wright.  She is the president of Concerned Women for America.  She is, as these things go, wingnut royalty. And she is completely insane.

The Obama administration’s actions to respond to the outbreak of swine flu, including its declaration of a public health emergency, smacks of an attempt to cover up this week’s Senate vote on the confirmation of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) as secretary of Health and Human Services, a prominent anti-abortion-rights activist told the Washington Independent.

“Some people think that declaring a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing to push the Sebelius nomination through,” Concerned Women for America President Wendy Wright told the website’s Dave Weigel.

Sociopaths, the homeschooled, and the clinically insane.  It’s all they have left.

Abortion Activist: Obama Actions Are Sebelius Coverup [The Hill]

What the fuck is it with Louisiana politicians? First it was Jindal and volcano monitoring, and now:

Given the recent outbreak of swine flu, Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-ME) push to strip funding for pandemic flu preparedness is looking increasingly shortsighted. But Collins was not the first to campaign against the provision. Indeed, several days prior to Collins’s public push, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) introduced an amendment that would have stripped, among other things, the flu funding provision. In arguing for his amendment on the floor of the senate, Vitter apparently couldn’t fathom how pandemic preparedness could possibly serve to protect the economy, calling it part of a “laundry list of…big government spending items.”

What a fucking idiot.

Stormy warning for after the jump.

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Buchanan v. my torts professor Jonathan Turley. This makes me proud to have been his student. Stick with it until the end.

Rummy may be fucked:

WASHINGTON — A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.

The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.

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You may know George Orwell as the guy who wrote “War is Peace” and “Slavery is Freedom.” Of course, Orwell wasn’t espousing these absurd opinions, he was merely presenting them as examples of the sort of twisted rhetorical devices that authoritarian regimes use to consolidate and maintain their own power. What’s different about the Neoconservatives in the Bush Administration is that when they insisted that “War is Peace” and “Slavery is Freedom,” they actually mean it… or at least they want the rest of us to believe it.

One of the best example of Neocon absurdity was probably the moment our war in Iraq shifted from being directed against Saddam Hussein’s presumed Weapons of Mass Destruction and focused instead on his Weapons of Mass Destruction Related Program Activities. The phrase was so outlandish it made Bill Clinton’s attempt to re-define the word “is” at the height of the Lewinsky scandal seem like a perfectly reasonable philological exercise in comparison.

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Remember last week, when I suggested that impeaching Jay Bybee might be a good idea? Well guess what …

The New York Times:

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him.

No shit.

Rick Warren was supposed to go on the teevee this morning to explain his compulsive lying, but he chickened out:

Instead of explaining contradictory statements over his actions regarding California’s Prop 8 on same-sex marriage, Rick Warren went with Plan B today: he didn’t show up for a planned interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

Earlier, Pastor Rick had gone on Larry King and, when asked about Proposition 8 in California, said he didn’t have nuthin’ to do with it, didn’t advocate it, nuthin’.  But there’s a problem. Pam Spaulding at Pandagon:

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