Political Roundup

In continuing this series, here, I offer, to you, my faithful readers, what is going on in the political world at the moment.

1) The Repblican-majority U.S. Senate is spoiling to get rid of freshman Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). Sen. Coburn, who is also an obstetrician, was elected last November in a bitter fight involving, if memory serves me correctly, a very personal attack ad in which his opponent accused Coburn of wrongly sterilizing a 20 year old woman. He was accused of malpractice and fraud for removing one of the woman's fallopian tubes, apparently without permission. Medicaid does not cover sterilization of women under 21. He denies malpractice, saying that she wanted the procedure done though he did not receive her written consent. He says he did not commit fraud because he did not file the procedure with Medicaid to get paid. There are many questions that are unanswered about this and this short, five paragraph article doesn't attempt to dig any deeper than the surface. This is all background information in the interest of full-disclosure.

The current issue is utterly ridiculous. Coburn is an avowed hater of Congressional pork. He broke the unwritten rule that freshman senators should be ineffectual for their first full session of Congress (their first two years). Typically freshman senators do not do anything, say anything, don't make eye contact, don't go on TV, all that. He routinely takes the Senate floor to propose legislation and to assail any Senator trying to sneak some pork into a bill. He joins Sen. McCain in the pork revolution. So naturally most Senators cannot stand him.

He has been charged with gross ethics violations. What could he have done, you ask? Steal? Take a trip on a lobbyist's dime? Excavate Nixon's body and steal the corpse? What? He is being vilified for practicing medicine. When he is back in Oklahoma he continues to deliver babies. Que horible! When Coburn was a U.S. Rep in the nineties, he was saddled with similar ethics charges, but was able to sidestep any "punishment." He then said he'd sooner quit the House than medicine. The fact of the matter is that most Senators spend their time in their home states raising money, going to fundraisers, glad-handing local luminaries, anything for a photo-op. Coburn delivers children. The ethics charges stem from the rule that Senators cannot supplement their incomes by another revenue stream. Senators of course are not stopped from

Two things: Is it really a bad thing that he works full time in the Senate and also DELIVERS BABIES?!? And I hear no one yelling ethics charges at Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is also a cardiologist, when he performs medicine. He would grab headlines by saving tourists' lives when they had heart attacks or whatever while touring the Capital. Maybe it's because he wasn't charging them for his services, but getting free publicity, whereas Coburn asks for no publicity but apparently sends a bill. What do you guys think of this strange and complicated development?

2) The John Bolton nomination: The U.N. is in trouble. The World Body is a joke. It's in shambles. Nothing good has come out of Turtle Bay in quite a while. There's the Oil-for-Food fiasco. There's the U.N. Peacekeepers

Bolton was instrumental in getting them to reverse that (unreal) classification. The only other time he interacted with the UN was while he was out of government from 1997-2000 when he served as a volunteer and assistant, pro bono, under former Secy. of State James Baker in his capacity as Kofi Annan's special envoy to Western Sahara. Otherwise, he his work has kept him in circles other than the U.N.'s. However, he has made some comments in the past, not very many and not very often, but when pressed, he obliges. He is blunt and he is honest. He calls a spade a spade. He says the U.N. has problems, and while he may not put it that delicately, that is the message. Clearly his pro bono work with the organization proves he doesn't think it should be dismantled, but he is clear that he thinks that big changes must be done. Interestingly, Kofi Annan has said the same thing. Too bad he is powerless to do anything on his own.

I've got to go, but I will finish this post in a couple hours.

The last topic will include the judicial/filibuster flap.

I'm getting a haircut finally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Bolton#View_of_the_United_Nations