Friday, October 5, 2007

The Daily Digest


1. Ruth Marcus comes to Anita Hill's defense against Clarence Thomas:

First, Hill did not wait 10 years to complain about his behavior. Susan Hoerchner, a Yale Law School classmate of Hill's, described how she complained of sexual harassment while working for Thomas, saying the EEOC chairman had "repeatedly asked her out . . . but wouldn't seem to take 'no' for an answer." Ellen Wells, a friend, said Hill had come to her, "deeply troubled and very depressed," with complaints about Thomas's inappropriate behavior. John Carr, a lawyer, said that Hill, in tears, confided that "her boss was making sexual advances toward her." American University law professor Joel Paul said Hill had told him in 1987 that she had left the EEOC because she had been sexually harassed by her supervisor.

Second, Hill was not the only former subordinate of Thomas's with complaints. Former EEOC employee Angela Wright described how Thomas pressured her to date him, showed up uninvited at her apartment and asked her breast size. "Clarence Thomas would say to me, 'You know you need to be dating me. . . . You're one of the finest women I have on my staff," Wright told Senate investigators.



2. John Dickerson highlights the incurious mind of George W. Bush:

In his new book, former Mexican President Vicente Fox calls Bush "the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life." A recently released recorded conversation with former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar confirms that. "I'm an optimist because I believe that I'm right," Bush says about going to war with Iraq. "I'm a person at peace with myself." Self-confidence is now a warning sign for myopia, insulation, and the inability to accurately assess the world around you.


3. Harold Meyerson rails against Bush's veto of S-CHIP:

Bush fears that expanding health care for children from uninsured families who can't afford to buy insurance on their own . . . would enable some families, as he put it at a news conference last month, collectively to "move millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care". . . .

By the same logic, no more public schools should be built in well-off communities.

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