RIP

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Arwen

Arlen Specter, a gruff, independent-minded moderate who spent three decades in the U.S. Senate but was spurned by Pennsylvania voters after switching in 2009 from Republican to Democrat, died on Sunday of cancer, his family said. He was 82.

Specter rose to prominence in the 1960s as an aggressive Philadelphia prosecutor and as an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, developing the single-bullet theory that posited just one bullet struck both President Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally - an assumption critical to the argument that presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The theory remains contro versial and was the focus of Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK."

In 1987, Specter helped thwart the Supreme Court nomination of former federal appeals Judge Robert H. Bork - earning him conservative enemies who still bitterly refer to such rejections as being "borked."

But four years later, Specter was criticized by liberals for his tough questioning of Anita Hill at Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination hearings and for accusing her of committing "flat-out perjury." The nationally televised interrogation incensed women's groups and nearly cost him his seat in 1992.

He took credit for helping to defeat President Clinton's national health care plan - the complexities of which he highlighted in a gigantic chart that hung on his office wall for years afterward - and helped lead the investigation into Gulf War syndrome. Following the Iran-Contra scandal, he pushed legislation that created the inspectors general of the CIA.

As a senior member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Specter pushed for increased funding for stem-cell research, breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease, and supported several labor-backed initiatives in a GOP-led Congress. He also doggedly sought federal funds for local projects in his home state.



Specter was a colorful and interesting pita. I will never forget how he and Orrin Hatch bullied and belittled Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings in a disgusting display of male arrogance.