I went looking for this AssKraft quote and found just what I was looking for on Lush Limbaugh’s website. mjh

From Rush’s Sack of Shit™: NPR on Rush: Shades of OK City

ASHCROFT: Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memoranda is a member of the commission.

TOTENBERG: That member, of course, was Jamie Gorelick. Within 48 hours House GOP leader Tom DeLay and House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner were calling for Gorelick’s resignation and conservative talk shows were taking up the battle cry.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Who are the Clinton people? Who were they, Jamie Gorelick, Clinton, Gore, all these people, they are sixties relics. These are people who grew up hating the FBI. These are the people who gave law enforcement the name ”pigs.” And they now are in charge of it when Clinton assumes office? And what’s the first thing they do? Handcuff the FBI.

GORELICK: After John Ashcroft testified, there was an escalation. … Someone called the house and threatened to blow it up and blow me up.

TOTENBERG: FBI agents were soon swarming over Gorelick’s house and office. She had received hate mail at the office, she says, as have other commissioners but it had suddenly intensified.

Notice how Lush explicitly blames Clinton for 9/11 but takes no responsibility for his role in rabble-rousing. Of course, you don’t need to take responsibility for anything when you are doing god’s work — ask Bush or Bin Laden. mjh

Here’s another example of the peaceful rhetoric of the Radical Right:

”Other than assassination, all we can do is censure her,” committee chairman Richard Gibbs said before the vote. The resolution of censure says the clerk ”has brought disgrace to the party as a whole.” The Albuquerque Journal Online [What did Sandoval County NM Clerk Victoria Dunlap do — lie to the country?]

MEDICAL PRIVACY: Abortion politics has Ashcroft trampling more rights (Detroit Free Press Editorial)

The staunch anti-abortion position of the Bush administration, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, is well established. But attempts by Ashcroft’s Department of Justice to subpoena medical records involving a controversial abortion procedure reveal an even more frightening ideology.

This administration, it seems, doesn’t believe that matters between doctors and patients can be kept confidential.

Your government’s attorneys are trying to make the case that nothing — from common law to the Constitution — protects the privacy of medical records. It will be up to the nation’s judges to uphold this long and well-accepted practice, which actually is written into law in some places. A federal district judge in Chicago has already done so, saying that the medical privacy laws of Illinois protect such records. A New York judge sees it differently. A Philadelphia jurist is still weighing the case.

Ashcroft says the government needs medical records to defend the late-term abortion ban passed by Congress last fall. Doctors who have blocked the ban say it is rarely used and only when medically necessary. Ashcroft intends to disprove their claim by reviewing their records.

But the files he seeks, including some from the University of Michigan Health Systems, go back three years, predating the ban. Those abortions were legal; neither the doctors who performed them nor the women who underwent them broke any law. Even if they had, the government should have to prove a compelling reason to trump the patients’ privacy rights; since they had not, there is no just cause.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a shock that an administration that doesn’t recognize a woman’s dominion over her own body doesn’t respect the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. But this effort could have a chilling effect on what patients are willing to tell their doctors and hamper medical research. It’s government overreach for political ends. If Ashcroft won’t stop it, the courts ought to make him.