The Tally Ho

Listen to me, NPR!

2007-04-24T17:56:00.000-04:00

Did anyone else catch Dr. Ruth's interview on NPR's Morning Edition today? It was priceless. The first time I heard it I cried, and the second time it made me chuckle--particularly the bit where she addresses "NPR" as if it were a singular person, as in, "Can you hear me, NPR?" Yes, Dr. Ruth, we can hear you.

At one point I would tell you that I want to be her, except for the sharpshooter training.

news around Chi-town

2007-04-19T19:12:00.000-04:00

The giant snake died.
I didn't know much about the man or his politics, and mean that "giant snake" thing affectionately; Stephens was the only mayor that Rosemont has ever had, and he reminded of us of Mayor Wilkins on Buffy, who ruled the town for a century and change before turning into a giant snake monster and eating a bunch of students at graduation. As it turns out, this guy was mortal after all. I'm disappointed.

I'm also disappointed with the Cubs, who once again managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on Wednesday. But Buehrle threw a no-hitter and proved that Chicago really CAN support good pitchers, and keep them healthy, despite what my boys claim.

Also, transit chief Frank Kruesi is out, which everyone is thrilled about because anger at him ran so deeply. However, I predict that this will not make the Red Line run any faster or get me a bus back home from knitting if my car is again stolen.

Finally, and most exciting for the two of you who may still have this blog on your RSS feed, I got cleared to fly to DC for Tony's wedding next month, barring any unexpected medical events. Yay! Perhaps the news in your town looks much like the news in mine, but it's nice to have a little variety.

SCOTUS roundup

2007-04-19T18:55:00.000-04:00

After a long period of dragging my feet, I succumbed to the New Blogger. I think I'm the last person. Let's see how it goes.

On the SCOTUS' upholding of the federal abortion ban, my panic is outweighing my anger at the moment. So I'll quote folks.

Bitch Ph.D catalogues some of the consequences of banning intact D&X, if that is indeed what this "partial-birth abortion ban" is banning. She also delivers stories on late-term problems that make me shudder a little this month, so I'll leave 'em alone.

Ema (quoting ACOG and The Blog That Ate Manhattan) also quotes nicely.

Adri says:

Even more frightening [than endless talk of this week's shooter] is today's Supreme Court ruling about late-stage abortions. Even more chilling is the language of sanctimonious pro-lifers, politicians and Bible-thumpers. It sends a very real chill down my spine to read their words about protecting the life inside the woman and other such bullshit. What about protecting the *woman* and her rights? The idea of politicians controlling women's bodies is so much more frightening to me. What was Sandra thinking when she retired?

I think the reason it got upheld is because this issue isn't about well-written law. It's about politics and exerting control over women. And to think that the same crazy people who support this law probably also think it's a great idea for anyone and everyone to buy as many guns as they want. Today's ruling frightens me so much because in this case, it's clear that these men are in control of our country. I can only hope and pray that there will be physicians and other medical practitioners who will stand up to this.

And while I wish I could quote some medical practitioners of my own on this, that's pretty firmly against my personal blog rules. And they're all out actually practicing medicine, anyway.

I heart NY

2007-02-15T09:46:00.000-05:00

I think this story, from "The Blog That Ate Manhattan" (smart lady), is a hoot.

Only in New York.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

2007-02-14T23:01:00.000-05:00

a sad week

2007-02-06T23:53:00.000-05:00

Yes, besides the Bears' loss, there were lots of things to mourn. There was Molly Ivins, for one. Our friend Carl, for another, who passed away last week at 93, was a thoughtful and funny man who ground and polished his own lenses for telescopes. A Stage III trial for an HIV microbicide was closed due to safety concerns, which is baffling since it showed no adverse affects in Stage I or II (safety) trials. This leaves just three microbicides which have made it to the final stage, and while I have high hopes that one of them may prove effective, I'm unencumbered by any actual science knowledge or a full depth of understanding on how rarely these drugs work out. All these things leave us set a little farther back than we were last week.

The Chicago climate, ever innovative, found a way to make it snow even at 2 or 3 degrees F, causing much snarling of people and traffic and running me right into a fender bender. (Me, the the spawn, and the bumper-car opponent all are fine.) If there was ever a week when I needed some chocolate, this might be it.

delicate sensibilities

2007-01-15T22:15:00.000-05:00

Last night, Elwood got the TV to himself and was watching some hideous-looking movie called "Monster Man" on the SciFi channel. I walked past it to find a screaming zombie creature on screen, writhing on the floor with the bottom half of its torso chopped off and a very fuzzy looking hand.

"You won't want to watch this," says Elwood, referring to the bloodified zombie torso which was continuing to scream.
"What's the matter with his hand?" I asked.

After peering at the screen for entirely too long, I figured out that the zombie torso was holding his hand up towards the camera to flick off his attacker. (Despite the obvious blood loss and wandering intestines, Zombie Man was still not dead. I guess sometimes it's good to be a monster man.) The film cut away to the attacker a couple times, then back to the zombie, who (as indicated by the censored and blurred-out hand) continued to give us all the finger while wailing incoherently. The SciFi channel has no problems with showing us monsters chopped messily in half, but shies away from an upraised middle finger. We can't be teaching the kids bad habits, you know.

In other news, this morning I heard on NPR clips of a "60 Minutes" interview with President Bush. It was a short, well-cut little report, with the president saying in his own words (and without the speechwriters) that he wasn't going to follow Congress' advice on the war, and he was disturbed by the video he saw of Hussein's execution. When the interviewer pressed him, he admitted he hadn't watched the whole tape because he hadn't wanted to see Hussein go through the trap door. I guess he has delicate sensibilities too.

The long dark teatime of the soul.

2006-10-09T22:29:00.000-04:00

(This is a guest post by the lovely and talented janeorben.)

I'm sick. As sick as I've been since I lived in Korea! That's what I get for teaching. :-) But who cares about such small things as my personal health - North Korea just tested a nuke!

Yup, NK finally did it. And now they're offering nukes to any nutjob with enough money to buy one. If this problem isn't nipped in the bud soon, I'm pretty much resigned to having a nuclear attack on some Western, probably American, city in the next 10 years. And as the analysts keep shouting, and our administration keeps plugging its ears, military force only increases terrorism.

And, yes, I do put part of the blame on President George W. Bush's shoulders. Clinton had worked hard to diplomatically deal with North Korea (not an easy thing to do), and in those negotiations had promised them a powerplant to help with their energy crisis. But then Bush got into office, refused to fullfill Clinton's offer, and then started shooting his mouth off about an "axis of evil". Then he launched a pre-emptive war with Iraq.

So of course North Korea pulled out of the nonproliferation nuclear treaty. Of course North Korea got fast and furious about finishing up their nukes. Of course North Korea has been beating its chest and talking smack about America. They will do everything in their power to avoid being next on the USA's hit list, and also to keep their own economy afloat so their government doesn't collapse. Now that they have nukes, nobody will risk attacking them. And now that the legit powers in the world won't aid them, they will turn back to selling arms to less scrupulous powers. Why should they care where they get the money?

Gee, Mr. Bush, now on top of a healthcare crisis, skyrocketing college tuition prices, an insane amount of national debt, and fear of corporations taking over the Internet and thereby limiting the ability of grassroots organization and independent media circulation, I get to feel a lot less safe from foreign attack too - thanks!

Now step in the other regional powers, and they perhaps say; the enemy of my enemy is my friend? http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/HJ10Dg03.html

This grand idiocy on the part of NK seems to be inspiring China (NK's longtime friend), South Korea (who has been working at reconcilliation with NK for 10 years) and Japan (longtime enemy of both China and both Koreas) to work together against NK. This could be a good or bad thing, the question is will the three use sanctions against NK (it's not like the aid ever reaches the starving people anyway) or whether this will start an arms race in the region where Japan and possibly even SK attempt to develop their own nukes.

*sigh* I'm going back to bed now.

(read janeorben's other posts here: http://janeorben.livejournal.com/ Thanks for letting me re-post!)

On Foley

2006-10-08T09:51:00.000-04:00

The best things I've read on the Foley scandal are Bitch PhD's analysis of the conservatives' attempt to invert the public and private spheres, and Hanne Blank's social critique putting Foley's bad behavior into perspective as a stinkpot being led by his dick, while recognizing our society's penchant for panic around anything which smacks of Teh Gay or Teh Teen Sex.

In public, everyone wants to talk about this man, from the NPR gurus commenting over and over on how ugly this political race and every other has gotten in the past month* to the knitters recalling their own young-professional ordeals trying to outrun the smarmy lech at the office. I get it, I really do. Foley is a dirty old man. If we're smart, we can examine this national obsession critically to learn something about our own culture. If we're even smarter, we'll stop giving Foley air time and start talking about the Military Commissions Act already.
________________
*I heard this same report three days running on Morning Edition. "Local X race turns to mudslinging!" Is this really still news?

"Birth control or abortion: which one do you support?"

2006-09-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

--one of my colleagues put it that way today, and I thought it was a fairly succinct way to put the current challenge in our culture. (For those of you playing along on the LJ blog, this was the Nemesis. She's actually pretty smart, when she's not fussing over her wardrobe.)

But not everyone has gotten her memo yet. Just this weekend, in the 'burbs of my fair city, we had a fairly major anti-contraception conference. The Chicago Tribune covered it on the front page of the Sunday paper. Please read the article, as it makes the main points pretty accurately. (Bonus points: find the dig against sex education!) It also points out, correctly, that a full-scale assault on contraception isn't feasible at this point, but that activists might begin by stripping government funding for contraceptive services (in progress) or expanding "conscience" clauses to allow pharmacists and doctors to refuse contraceptives to patients (also in progress). The article's only weakness is that it presents both those strategies as hypothetical, when they're actually going on as we speak.

I was really pleased to read lots of quotes from the anti-contraception activists, which seem to make a sturdy case against their own arguments. Let's recap...

* Contraception devalues children? No, but having kids that you don't want and can't feed would definitely do so.
* Contraception harms relationships between men and women and causes divorce? No, the patriarchy and consumer culture do that just fine.
* Contraception promotes sexual promiscuity? If promiscuity wasn't a problem before reliable contraceptives existed, then how did sexually transmitted diseases ever get spread? They're actually speaking here of female promiscuity, since boys will be boys, you know. And saying women should be responsible for curbing men's promiscuity is pretty ludicrous.
* Contraception leads to falling birth rates? Check. But since I'm all about responsible population growth, I fail to see that as a social ill. Again, this argument is somewhat in code; it's not that there are not enough people in the world, but some groups tend to feel that there aren't enough white people in the world.

While "a stunning 98 percent of women 15 to 44 who have had sex report using at least one method of contraception," affluent women are more likely to use birth control successfully. Not surprisingly, we have fewer kids. We're more likely to have the free time to rail against the patriarchy and blog about it. Something really must be done. (/snark)

By the way? When I ask students about birth control without artificial means, I'm hoping to elicit the responses "abstinence" and "natural family planning". However, they generally come up with "oral sex" and "gay relationships" in the same conversation. Contraception foes should be warned: even if they do get their way, middle schoolers can come up with contraception hacks without batting an eye.

Selective product availability at Wal-Mart

2006-09-21T00:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, while still in the bucolic confines of Smalltown, I was compelled to go to Wal-Mart to buy cat food. And a flea collar. And some guppies. (Why guppies? What injured person rises from their bed and says, "Some fish, that's what we need!"? My mother, that's who. She rocks.) I asked around about the Smalltown pet store, and there was none. I could have gone to a real pet store in the bizarre suburbs of Columbus, which was only fifteen or so miles down the road. Or I could go to Wally World, which was only two miles away. I'm weak, I admit it.

But there was an up side; Battlestar Galactica 2.5 was released yesterday, and while I was ambivalent about giving more money to Wal-Mart, I figured I could at least go over to the media section and look at the pretty cover. Except that Wal-Mart wasn't stocking it, on the day of its release. (They carry a big poster with the dates that different titles drop, the better for their flock to plan their consumerist impulses. I'm not mocking; I was all about the consumerist impulse yesterday.)

I even asked, and the "associates" looked a little confused and said, "Battlestar what? You mean that old series from the seventies?" One worker had heard there was a new series, but he didn't know that there were new DVDs coming out. I looked around and found season 2 of Desperate Housewives. I found a random set of Charmed discs. (Damn you, Charmed, for living on after Angel got cancelled!) I found Saw II. So why weren't they carrying BSG? From their selection, it looks like it's not the sex, not the violence, not the polytheistic/pagan overtones that Wal-Mart objects to.

Is it, perhaps, the political commentary? The fact that in BSG, the side that talks about "God" also engages in suicide bombings and sneak attacks?

Or perhaps I'm just a niche market, and BSG can't command the wide audience that Saw II does. That network presentation of "The Story So Far" must have been some kind of fluke.

Quick! spot the church-run country

2006-09-14T00:36:00.000-04:00

In this week's news,
Chile has decided to provide contraception--including EC--free of charge to women over 14.
Meanwhile, a Maryland school board has recently forced revisions to its schools' sex education curriculum, to make a video of a condom demonstration "more clinical". From the Kaiser article: "You don't have a cute little blonde and a cucumber," Michelle Turner, president of CRC [Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum], said, adding, "It's not MTV. It's very factual and clinical. There are no frills or fluff." The new version involves a wooden penis model, two hands, and an offscreen narrator. Because heaven knows we wouldn't want the students to PAY ATTENTION to the health video or anything. I know that students are always racing out the door to put on condoms after I've covered that segment of our curriculum. Or not.

In a sad moment, I realize I probably won't be able to show my favorite condom demonstration video for quite some time. Injoy Video makes a Sex Smart for Teens series (one of the few health education videos that's worth the money), and their contraception video includes a clip called "The Condom Hunter", which is a takeoff on Steve Irwin's "Crocodile Hunter" persona. It's accurate and complete, it's hilarious, and it will probably cause lots of classroom tangents about stingrays and the sudden and unfortunate death of Steve Irwin if I try to show it any time in the next six months. And then in a few years, the clip will be meaningless to anyone who watches. I hate noticing one more cultural moment separating me from the students. Perhaps it's time to go do some research.

mother's maiden name

2006-09-13T15:03:00.000-04:00

I'm reading a report on how to assess and evaluate, and it talks about creating a unique identifier: "often some combination of birth date and mother's maiden name or social security number." It's a small note, but it got me thinking about my unique identifiers and how I use them or allow them to get used. All through my youth, my mother used her mother's maiden name as an identifier to financial institutions and the like, and used my father's social security number when working with the government (he was in the Navy, so they didn't care much about her SSN.) Neither are ideal as identifiers; we all know at this point how easy it is to steal an identity with a SSN and a few other pieces of information, so we've gotten much more cautious about who we give it out to. In a large city, your mother's maiden name would be relatively difficult to track down, but in a small town it would be common knowledge. And in a small town bank, stealing someone's identity with their mother's maiden name would be ludicrous, since you would walk and everyone would know that you're not Betty Smith's daughter. But over the internet, or even over the phone, everything changes, and losing control of that information makes it easy for someone else to use it to gain access to your life.

That got me thinking about research in rural areas--if you went to the same high school that your mother did, and people know it, wouldn't that make you more casual about giving out your mother's maiden name in general? Wouldn't it make you suspicious of people who did research under the assumption that that information was private? Wouldn't you be concerned enough about your privacy to decline the study (or worse, lie) because you assumed that the data gatherer was somehow connected to your neighbor, your church, your employer? Many folks are wary of information gatherers anyway; I'm one of them, and do everything I can to thwart those obnoxious grocery-store "value" cards. But asking for a "private" passcode that you know is actually pretty public just undermines your credibility as a researcher.

Us academic types do so much data collection that we lose track of the idea that this information is sometimes quite valuable or damaging, financially or otherwise. And of course, we know all about confidentiality and keeping information private, but we often forget that the participant loses control of the information whether it stays safely stored inside the locked filing cabinet or published on the internet for all to see. It's a scary thing to give away information. We should all be more grateful when we are given the opportunity to collect and use it.

(crossposted to LJ blog)

UPDATE: What about families who retain or hyphenate mother's names? Is the "mother's maiden name" question becoming outdated because of that phenomenon? I haven't set up any accounts that ask for that info in a while, but I mostly use the computer and numeric passcodes to get at my information nowadays. Perhaps I should call my bank.

And lest we wish to get back to the good old days

2006-09-11T12:17:00.000-04:00

Folks in my line of work often bemoan the adoption rate nowadays; I believe (though I have no stats in front of me currently) that the number of mothers in the US choosing to place their child for adoption is hovering somewhere around 1% of the total. Meanwhile, we see lots of women, young and old, holding (or not) children that they obviously are not prepared to deal with and we think, "Honey, since you felt so strongly about having the baby, couldn't you find a good parent to raise him?" before we catch ourselves (or each other) with the reminder that it is NOT our decision to make.

So here comes the Happy Feminist to remind us: YES, we HAVE made progress, at least in one arena. She briefly describes an adoption in 1968 from the birth mother's account. (I'll cite Happy because not because she's the original source, but because it's not entirely clear which article she pulled the quote from.) I can't know whether this woman was prepared in 1968 to raise a child, or whether he would have been better off with her or with his adoptive family, since there was no mechanism to provide for both. However, I can guarantee that today's low adoption rate is a direct consequence of all those many years of forced adoption. We should be outraged on these women's behalf. Those folks who would like the adoption rate to rise need to be loud about reminding families that once again, there are open adoptions, so it doesn't have to work like that anymore. And for those of you reading who do wish we could force women into adoption instead of letting them make the choice, I'm glad that we don't live in your world anymore. I'm one of the bad girls who was totally rooting for the baby nappers.

Disaster in Chicago?

2006-09-11T11:18:00.000-04:00

Not really. There was an evacuation drill last Thursday in the Loop, the same day Bush made a speech --AGAIN-- about how prepared our nation is and how we're ready for whatever threat may come, yadda yadda. Our Girl Reporter, who talked to a man on the scene, said it was all fairly tame; there were only three buildings being evacuated, not the entire Loop, and the workers set up comfort areas right outside the evacuation zone, instead of marching the volunteer "incident victims" two miles west from the scene. Conscripted office workers got the job done and still had plenty of time to snark, snack, and slack. But from my office three miles away, the whole thing looked pretty damn impressive: five or six helicopters were hovering amongst the skyscrapers, traffic patterns were bizarre. Yes sir, my city government knows how to cause a stir! I was more impressed several weeks ago by the Blue Line derailment and subsequent evacuation of lots of cranky train riders, which was a slow, painful, and haphazard process, but very safe. Lots of people missed work or missed their planes. No one died of smoke inhalation. All up and down my Blue Line there are service delays and rail improvements now, to avoid such a circumstance happening again. But we didn't get handy blue "ready.gov" backpacks when there was a real evacuation, so what do I know?

In the LA Times, Leo Braudy is asking whether Jack Bauer is replacing James Bond in our national consciousness. Gosh, I hope not. Usually the LA Times is fairly good at calling the government and the media on their shit, but the opinion writer is mostly on board with Jack: "Bauer ... is constantly on the brink of being destroyed, only to rise like a phoenix, coming back from one seeming deadly catastrophe after another, bruised, battered but still going. If he has any pop-cultural predecessors, they are the heroes of 1930s serials, when the hero was always in dire straits at the end of every episode but lived to be heroic again." I don't buy it; I see Jack Bauer as an advertisement for fascism. He's fighting the bad guys! We just have to trust him! because there's no time to hold an election and civilians are gullible sheep anyway! The show is meant to get a viewer's adrenaline up with all its guns and ticking bombs, then while we're still wired they sit us down for the moral lesson that we just have to trust the G-men, and they're just like us only smarter. I'm a product of the Cold War; I'll take a womanizing vodka-swilling bad boy in an Aston Martin any day of the week. If the citizens want to form opinions about reality, they should read the news instead of watching commercial television drama.

That's it; I'm tempted to sit here and watch the RSS feed bloom with everyone's five-year posts (aren't you planning to write one?) but I must get back to that other reality.

Plan B approved OTC; Pluto quits solar system in protest

2006-08-31T23:55:00.000-04:00

"So, what do you think about RU-486?"

This was lobbed my way at the knitting circle this week.

Actually, I think it's a nasty kind of drug, I think. I can get that some folks need to abort using pills, or might prefer it for whatever reason. But in that unfortunate circumstance, heaven forbid I should need an abortion, put me on an operating table any day of the week. I didn't say this, because I'm nonjudgemental like that, and these women seem to think I know something about these topics. "You mean Plan B?"

"Yeah, that morning-after-abortion pill. Isn't it over the counter now?" she questioned sunnily.

So I went into my super-basic explanation: RU-486 is a medication that induces abortion in early pregnancy. Plan B is an emergency contraceptive, a high dose of birth control pills, that a woman can take to prevent pregnancy within five days of intercourse. It has just been approved over-the-counter for women 18 and older, although calling the local women's health clinic, I discovered that they can't actually sell OTC until Barr changes its packaging and establishes some procedures. They were happy to offer me a doctor's appointment, but I declined.

Her eyes glazed over when I went into the bit about how emergency contraceptives prevent abortion (ask me how), and so I didn't get to the part about how if she's already pregnant the pills won't work. I guess more people need to read Ema once in a while. I did get to hear another woman's story about getting the runaround when she needed a prescription on a Friday night on vacation. So I'm happy that the FDA finally moved on this. I only wish for my friend's sake that they'd've done it two years ago like they should've, and that they'd made it over the counter for everyone, so that my cousins wouldn't have to worry about getting a prescription in the middle of the night or at an ER should they need it.

As if that weren't enough, more big news on the very same day! Pluto is not a planet. Following up with the planet, though, reveals that it's acually gotten its feelings hurt by Earth:

Let me say I was happy enough without anyone else giving me a name. For millions of years, maybe even billions -- time sort of has no meaning out here -- I liked to think of myself as Lex, except for a very brief period of experimentation and confusion when I thought I was Sophia. But that's a long story, and Uranus promised never to talk about it.

Hee.

WTC Movie

2006-08-21T22:38:00.000-04:00

Posted without much snarky comment so I can get the newspaper off my desk: a quote from a 14-year-old girl who attended a focus group about "World Trade Center".

"I remember back in 2001 when it happened on the news. I kept thinking, 'This isn't real, it's just one of those disaster movies.' This movie made me feel September 11 was real for the first time."

Thanks (or otherwise) to RedEye, August 9th. This is the generation we're raising: they don't trust what they hear on the news, but they believe what they see on the big screen.

Happy comments on LA's single-sex education plan

2006-08-20T18:11:00.000-04:00

The Happy Feminist has interesting highlights and comments on Louisiana's single-sex education plan and the ACLU's proposed class action opposing it. Boys will be taught to be "heroic," while girls will talk about the feelings in the stories they read. Great.

I tend to really enjoy the Happy Feminist in general. She's got good, meaty topics (something y'all may starve for over here) and doesn't allow any bile or shit in her comments lounge. The posts require reader thought, which rules out some of my work-time surfing, but otherwise, when is that a bad thing? Go check her out.

Get on the bus

2006-08-16T10:42:00.000-04:00

Hanne Blank has a great post this morning on public transit and class mobility. Who takes the bus or the train in your town? Where does it go?

Who are you, again?

2006-08-16T00:12:00.000-04:00

And what are you doing with a blog? I know that I've been blogging like it's going out of style (which is to say, never). It's not that there haven't been many blogworthy issues, but the real life I've been having gets seriously in the way of the online life. I got to converge the two this evening with Bitch. Ph.D and a few Chicago bloggers when I went out for a drink at that hallowed institution of academic drunkery: Jimmy's. We had another academic in BitchPhD area studies, and someone working professionally in reproductive issues, so there was interesting meandering conversation. There were even a couple of poly folks, so we had a plurality of blog topics covered, but sadly we didn't get to talk much about that. And I'm not sure about how much of the Bitch Area Studies talk should go up on the blog. So I'll just say: hey! We had fun!

In the women's/reproductive news: Plan B limps towards accessibility, with lots of political posturing along the way. Ema does a good job of untangling the truth from some of the misinformation that clouds most of this debate. In Chicago, we're more interested in what's happening with the Blue Line and its most recent derailment than about women's health issues. That might change in the next couple weeks, or it might not. We'll see.

I've been looking for things besides sexual health controversy to blog about, and I just can't find any other issues that I feel need to be covered so desperately. And in the absence of other posts about "place", I guess I'll just be getting that done. Please, if you want to tell us about what's going on in your city, shout out. Nobody's posting privileges have been revoked. But while I have the mike, until the menfolk come back and want to talk about election strategy, we're just going to keep the place warm as best we know how.

Away message

2006-07-14T18:14:00.000-04:00

The whole Tally Ho clan is off on vacation to the ancestral homeland for the next ten days! (I know; how is this different from our regularly scheduled not-posting?) Look for lots of great stories when we get back. Meanwhile, Chicago hosts the Gay Games, starting tomorrow! Yippee! It'll be a blast, so go check it out if you're local.

right critter, wrong place

2006-07-05T22:56:00.000-04:00

This weekend, we went down south to Soybean Town to visit Elwood's family, and they let us know that they had (ahem) a little problem with some bats. The bats were being found in the basement, apparently having wandered and flopped through the walls of the house and emerging on the bottom floor with no way to get out. The bats were not pleased by this. The family was not pleased by this. In both cases, that was an understatement.

Doors were locked and sealed. Precautions taken. We ventured into the basement cautiously, armed with sticks and light and loud noises, driven down there only by our desire for a cold drink from the fridge. Over the past few months, a score of bats have been found in that room. Some of them even made it into the main house, but none of them made it back outside.

Then, sitting on the porch Saturday night at dusk, we saw the basement bats' more fortunate relatives emerge for the hunt. They poured out of an eve in the house, maybe forty in all, and started dive-bombing the mosquitoes. I affirm that we didn't want bats in the house, don't want their guano underfoot, worry about their diseases, but suddenly I didn't want to kill them. They were eating the bugs that were eating me. I was thrilled to hear that the "bat man" will put a temporary patch on the eave after dusk, so that they'll be trapped outside the house instead of inside when they're relocated.

Last week (click fast!)* there was an article in the NYTimes.com about pigeon control. The author decried the use of poisons, traps, raptors and the like for eradicating pigeons from urban areas. Far better, he says, to have designated pigeon feeding areas and monitored dovecotes from which workers can cull eggs when necessary. I like pigeons. They make a lovely noise. Their heads are iridescent. It's fun to chase them, and they'll come over to you if you wave your arm like you're throwing a crumb. Yes, there are too many of them, and yes, we don't want to clean bird crap off the statues, so can't we control them in a sensible way? Pigeons seem to be the only wildlife that can stand up to rush hour in the Loop; they can be found crossing the street at State and Madison just like those other commuters, who make far less pleasant noises. So let's distinguish between not liking the critters and not liking their numbers, or where they live. It's time to be nice to our neighbors.
___________
*I should mention again that I always archive the articles I quote, if you're late to the party and really interested in reading them. Leave me an email.

Family

2006-07-03T11:39:00.000-04:00

So much to post, so little motivation to write. Meanwhile, though, Psycho Kitty at SBFH has turned me on to this article claiming to prove that we really are all related to each other. Recently related, that is. It's cool; go read it.

this probably does not distress anyone but me

2006-06-20T23:07:00.000-04:00

Laser eye surgery among Navy recruits is shifting servicemembers' career choices.

Perfect Vision Is Helping and Hurting Navy

More young midshipmen are going into flight, fewer into submarines. "Some people also might see submarines as a less glamorous service assignment," they say. HA! What do they know about it?

Okay, maybe a little bit. My eyes smarted when I read about the eye surgery--that stuff creeps me out, I could never consider having it done if I didn't absolutely require it. I guess I'll always be a submarine girl.

Unfortunate news from Chicago

2006-06-12T23:05:00.000-04:00

Despite the freakishly cool weather, summer is still bringing out the worst in the city's criminal youth, as reported by a friendly watchdog in the city's far-north Rogers Park neighborhood. (Fargo is a great source for neighborhood news and pictures, which you should read if you're interested in a ground-level view of the city.) I work in this neighborhood from time to time, and I feel a little protective of it. However, it has the same problems that the rest of the city does.

Chicago is considering an ordinance to allow dogs in restaurants. Chicago is supposedly a quite dog-friendly town, and already we have a Take Your Dog To Dinner night, where the pooches get gourmet and the restaurants get fined for participating. The department of public health worries about contamination. A professor of animal science worries about dog obesity. I worry that after the LATimes readers hear the names of the dogs interviewed for the story (Princess? Star? Mitzie? Prada?), they and their pets will decide to spend their tourist dollars elsewhere.

Tihs Yloh

2006-05-21T23:18:00.000-04:00

From our venerable NYTimes.com, the news of the most suddenly and startlingly popular girl-baby name since Aaliyah: Nevaeh. Which is "heaven" spelled backwards.

I work with adolescents, not toddlers, so I haven't encountered this ~~travesty~~ non-traditional name yet. And I can tolerate a little nonconformity in my baby names, though I continue to be frustrated by the fact that girls are generally the ones saddled by odd spellings, cute and fluffy names, and celebrity fads. I hoot at "Babies Named a Bad, Bad Thing". But when I go to work and find a bunch of teenagers wandering around with stupid names, it makes me sad. "LaQuentyn" is named after her father, but did he really spell it with a "Y"? If not, does it count? And when "Zackery" and "Kymberlee" apply for their first job, are their names going to cancel out some of their achievements? I miss the classics.

what the girls are saying

2006-05-17T00:17:00.000-04:00

Blog? What blog? My brain is too worn to produce analysis today, although there is fascinating news here in Chicago... immigration, election prep, the advent of road construction season. My boy Widger is RBIing some for the White Sox, and the Cubs may finally be breaking their headlong tumble. But since they're the Cubs, we mustn't underestimate their ability to lose. Without ado:

Julie at A Little Pregnant remarks on the Catholic schoolteacher in WI who let on that she conceived using IVF and was subsequently fired.

Jessica at "Cancer, Baby" passed away last week. Orange Tangerine was kind enough to pass on the news and provide a primer for those of us who never got to read her in real time. I now firmly believe that everyone would benefit from reading her analysis of mood oglers, either as a cautionary tale or as ammunition for the next bozo who comes along.

Sundry: Mela suggests it's time to bring out our very last option for impeaching President Bush. Funny. New York gals are calling out street harassers on a public blog. A White Bear muses on plagarism, both in print and online.

All yesterday and today I've been reading about the WaPo article "Forever Pregnant". As a public-health chick, this seems like an expedient plan, if not the ideal one. Bitch Ph.D partially exonerates the CDC, but methinks they'll watch their phrasing in the future as they prepare for more angry letters.

Finally, what the girls are not saying: Jeff points me to an article about the 14 y.o. Ohio girl who is being held in custody, without counsel, for refusing to be a material witness to a molestation case. Sometimes it's all in what you don't say.

for this, I will sound the alarm

2006-04-25T00:39:00.000-04:00

Adam Felber also knows the pain of American emergency rooms. Just a few days previously, he outlined US-Iranian relations for us. Forget the Daily Show; I'm getting my news from this guy from now on.

states' rights and personal freedoms: if you don't like it, leave.

2006-04-24T01:15:00.000-04:00

As someone who moved a lot as a kid, I was generally in favor of letting states decide their own policies. It's a big, wide country, and every town we lived in had its own quirks and its own way of doing things. It just made sense to let the people who lived in each state decide what they needed, and those who didn't like the policy could move. Now, as an adult with a lot more stuff and a city that I love so much I refuse to leave, I am about to officially switch sides.

As you probably heard, earlier this month Massachusetts passed a bill requiring its citizens to obtain health care--a "universal health care" plan that was hailed as an ambitious and inventive landmark. It states that every MA resident will have health insurance; extremely low-income residents will receive health care from the state, those below 300% of the poverty level will recieve a subsidy to help pay for health care, and those above 300% of the poverty level are expected to be able to pay out of pocket for individual health insurance if they don't get it through work or family. Companies with more than ten employees will be required to offer health insurance or pay a fine of $295 per employee per year. The $295 fine was negotiated carefully with the business community, down from about $800 per year; Gov. Romney used his line item veto to negate it, but his vetoes are expected to be overridden by the state congress. Everyone seems to like this plan, from health care advocates to employers. I find it alarming, and other states are pretty alarmed at the idea as well. Romney says, "We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance. And cars are a lot less expensive than people." This plan seems like it might be reasonable for someone who lives in suburban or rural MA. However, my friends in Boston pour most of their income to rent. As for Mr. Romney's comparison with car insurance, it's a bad analogy. People who don't feel like they can afford car insurance (especially those who live in an urban area) aren't required to own a car. No one who lives in MA seems to be exempt from this health insurance plan. And although the folks who crafted this legislation predict that insurers will lower their rates when more healthy people sign up, there's no evidence that anything of the sort will happen. In fact, if insurers know they have a captive audience in MA, why won't they raise their rates? I'm extremely concerned that this "universal health care" plan will give rise to more stripped down health insurance plans that fail to cover basic preventive care, particularly reproductive care for women. The bottom line: if you are a taxpayer in MA, you are now required to find health insurance.

More frightening (and far less likely to happen) is the recent drafting of legislation that would prohibit abortions in Ohio, and prohibit any Ohio woman from getting an abortion. The proposed abortion ban isn't really news, as 11 other states besides Ohio--Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia--are jumping on the bandwagon behind South Dakota. The unusual bit is that it would be a felony for a woman to seek to terminate a pregnancy, even if she didn't follow through, and she's just as liable if she obtains an abortion outside state lines. Anyone assisting her could also be charged with a felony. (The article doesn't go into specifics of the law, such as whether there's an exception for the woman's life or whether we would be like El Salvador and have to wait for fetal death or tubal rupture to fix an ectopic pregnancy.) Again, this is not legislation that describes a state's own action or prohibition, but directs the actions of residents. How do we determine residency in this situation? Would one of my college friends, paying taxes in Michigan, be bound by this law if she chose to get an abortion outside Ohio but lived there for much of the year? What about my mother, who retained her Ohio residency while the military was shipping our family to six different states? (And since my parents were Ohio residents, would I have been prohibited from obtaining an abortion even though I didn't physically live in Ohio until I was mostly grown?) Ohio seems to want to get one better on all the other states preparing abortion restrictions. Fortunately, this law is restrictive enough to jeapordize the rich folks who would otherwise be able to travel to IL or NY, so I'm hopeful that it has little chance of ever seeing daylight.

Aside from your views on abortion law or health insurance costs, these are shocking attempts by a state to mandate certain behavior from its citizens, both inside and outside state lines. Suddenly, my state residence seems much more important, and the phrase "if you don't like it, you can move" seems both more ominous and more probable from many of the states I've lived in and loved.

Sympathy? No.

2006-04-23T10:33:00.000-04:00

This is the best news on the Dan Ryan reconstruction project that I've read... well, ever. Non-Chicagoans may be living in blissful ignorance; the Dan Ryan project is knocking the southern half of Chicago's 90/94 highway out of commission for the next three years or so, removing four express lanes and leaving only two lanes of highway during construction. The ad slogan proclaims: "There is a way out! Re-route!" Re-routing has indeed kept the construction from becoming a major crisis, as travel times are still within somewhat reasonable limits for most of the alternate routes. The transportation department has spent so much time scaring us about the inconvenience of this construction project that the reality is not so bad.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that some commuters are pretty miserable using public transportation, however. The lede states, I kid you not, "Commuters Bemoan the Loss Of Quality Time in Cars." When taking public transit, the miserable commuters say, they have to deal with crowds! And weather! And (gasp) walking to and from train stops! They can't lug around 45 pounds of stuff! Occasionally people walk up and try to sell them things! Oh, the humanity!

Ann Schue chokes up when saying that she misses her car. She has been driving to a faraway mall on the weekends, instead of the mall close to her suburban house, because she misses driving so much.
Frank Pierson lives five blocks from an el stop. However, he used to drive to work and pay $18 every day to park in the city. He's unhappy about the peddlers on the train.
Jack Sloan is a regular on the train and hates that there are so many new riders using cell phones. (Okay, I can feel a little sympathy for his plight.)

Suddenly I'm starting to see this project as shock therapy for some of our suburban neighbors: we live in a city, we have to accomodate each other, and it's incredibly wasteful and selfish to drive in a town where public transit is a viable option. The travel times have gotten much worse, yes. But if you really hate to lose another fifteen minutes of your commute, you could move into the city. There are still some big houses left on the Green Line going for pretty darn cheap.

Showtime at the Smithsonian

2006-04-19T11:17:00.000-04:00

I've been a bit behind on the news lately, but I saw this article over at Kos and couldn't help by post the article here, Smithsonian Deal With Showtime Restricts Access By Filmmakers.

As part of a near-exclusive deal with Showtime Networks, the Smithsonian Institution is restricting filmmakers' access to its scientists and archives, prompting another outcry over the museum's attempts to make money.

Filmmakers who have relied on the vast holdings of the Smithsonian, and typically pay to use historic film or copy an artifact, have raised objections to the new policy of limited access to the public collections. Now most filmmakers will not have in-depth use of Smithsonian materials unless they are creating work for the Smithsonian/Showtime unit.

I don't like this at all, archives should be for public use and this looks too much like the privatization of one of our most important cultural and historical institutions. Even if you disagree with me I find the fact that they won't release the details of the contract to be troubling. But as the article points out, there have been a series of moves that have been met with skepticism

In recent years the Smithsonian has signed controversial agreements with donors for large gifts for the restoration of buildings and other needs. In return it has frequently given the donor a prominent name on a piece of Smithsonian real estate. The American History museum added "Behring Center" to its title in acknowledgement of an $80 million gift from businessman Kenneth Behring. At the National Air and Space Museum, the name of the movie theater was changed after a donation from Lockheed-Martin Corp. Those moves have all been criticized from within and outside of the Smithsonian.

Anyway, obviously I am worried about these treasures being exlusive...

Lovely and less-than-lovely quotes

2006-04-16T15:44:00.000-04:00

"Tax law should stop perpetuating the fairy tale that husbands and wives are equal partners." --The IRS's shotgun marriage, by Shari Motro, ass't professor at University of Richmond School of Law.

"I have no problem with the demonstration, but this is a business. Couldn't they have protested in the morning before work? Couldn't they have protested in their hearts?" --fishmarket owner in Florida, commenting on immigrant rallies.

And now to cheer you up:
"Scientists who undertake the work of theologians are as reckless as theologians who pretend to be scientists." --Raymond J Lawrence, Episcopal priest who is not surprised or alarmed by research indicating prayer does not improve medical outcomes.

Happy Easter, y'all.

How Much Fun is This?

2006-04-06T11:22:00.000-04:00

Beynd Delay is a great website that everyone should check out. This elected representative/high powered lobbyist gig sounds like a really fun career! I had no ideal. This is from the site's profile of Rep. Bob Ney:

In late 2001 through early 2002, now infamous Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff worked with his friend and business partner Michael Scanlon, as well as with Christian activist Ralph Reed, to close the Speaking Rock Casino run by the Tigua Tribe of El Paso, Texas. Once the casino was shuttered, Mr. Abramoff convinced the Tigua to hire him and Mr. Scanlon to lobby Congress to re-open the casino, without ever telling the tribe of the mens' role in closing the casino.

On March 20, 2002, Mr. Abramoff sent Mr. Scanlon, a former staffer for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, an e-mail stating that Rep. Ney had agreed to assist the pair by pushing legislation that would re-open the casino. A mere six days after Rep. Ney agreed to push the issue, Mr. Abramoff sent the Tigua's political consultant, Marc Schwartz, an e-mail asking that Mr. Schwartz Fed-Ex $32,000 worth of checks to Rep. Ney.

In early June 2002, Rep. Ney asked Mr. Abramoff to arrange a golf trip for him and some of his staff. Mr. Abramoff complied, sending an e-mail to Mr. Schwartz explaining that Rep. Ney had asked the Tigua to help pay for a luxury golf trip to Scotland on a private plane to play at the legendary St. Andrews course. The e-mail states "our friend" "asked if we could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff . . . I anticipate that the total cost . . . to be around $100K or more."

On July 25, 2002, Rep. Ney met with Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and was surprised to learn that Sen. Dodd was unwilling to attach the Tigua's legislation to pending election reform legislation, the vehicle Rep. Ney was hoping to use to re-open the casino. Although he shared the news with Mr. Abramoff, no one, including Rep. Ney, delivered this piece of bad news to the Tigua.

That August, concerned about the inaction on the legislation, Mr. Schwartz requested a meeting between tribal representatives and Rep. Ney. Mr. Abramoff cautioned Mr. Schwartz not to discuss Rep. Ney's golf trip to Scotland stating, "BN had a great time and is very grateful, but is not going to mention the trip to Scotland for obvious reasons. He said he'll show his thanks in other ways which is what we want . . . "

Later that month, when Rep. Ney met with Tigua tribal leaders, not only did Rep. Ney fail to mention his conversation with Sen. Dodd, he assured the tribe that he would fix the Tigua's problem through a conference committee report.

It was not until October that the Tigua learned that Rep. Ney would not solve their problem. Rather than telling the Tigua the real story -- that Sen. Dodd had never agreed to legislation -- Rep. Ney lied and told the tribe that Sen. Dodd had gone back on his word. In a written statement submitted to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which eventually held a hearing on this situation, Sen. Dodd stated that he never told Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Scanlon, or Rep. Ney "that [he] would in any manner work legislatively to recognize the Tigua Tribe."

Wow, I'm in the wrong field! Why should we pay to go to Scotland while other people just use extortion to get Indian tribes to do it for them! How do I cash in on this exciting field? Kids, don't just assume that the only way to make your fortune in today's competitive economy is securities fraud, suing a major corporation, manipulating real estate prices, or, um, hard work or something. Too many talentless young people today do not consider a career in public service, mostly because they don't realize how profitable it can be. This fantastic website shares the personal stories of 12 other members of Congress who have leveraged their political office for fun and profit!

The New York Times switches teams

2006-04-04T00:23:00.000-04:00

I read a couple weeks ago via Bitch Ph.D. that the New York Times, ostensibly pro-choice, has an op-ed page that has become the bastion of skeptical or anti-choice gentlemen (in 83% of essays!). Then Wells came independently upon the original source material, and I was persuaded to take a second and more thorough read. There was discussion in both the American Prospect and Bitchville over whether the NYTimes is beginning to skew anti-abortion, or whether they are overcompensating for their known and continued support of abortion rights in the unsigned articles.

This Saturday I discovered that it's not just the op-ed page. I was reading their online digest and found two separate articles dealing with choice issues: In Senate Race, Republican Candidate Questions Mrs. Clinton's Abortion Message, and Some Doctors Voice Concern Over Abortion Pills' Safety. The former is an article outlining the attack strategy of possible Repub candidate John Spencer, who is using a bill sponsored by one of Mrs. Clinton's colleagues to direct pointed questions about her stance on abortion. He wants to set up a situation where if she votes for or supports the bill, he can claim she's too militantly pro-choice. This bill "would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on any pregnancy center that suggests in its advertising that it provides abortions", which sounds more like marketing regulation than a choice bill. But the NYTimes is there, and giving lots of sound bites to Spencer.

The latter is more problematic; it interviews doctors who are expressing concern over the use of Mifeprex and mifipristone to induce early (less than 9 wks) abortions. Comments from doctors published in the article:

"[Pills] are a lousy way to perform an abortion."
"None of these women should be dying; it's shocking."
[One doctor who provides medication abortions] "was uneasy about agreeing with abortion opponents on anything. 'But the truth is the truth,' he said."
"One needs to tell patients that the medical procedure, even though it seems more natural, may be more likely to result in death."

This fuss is being raised because two more women have recently died shortly after taking a medication abortion regimen, bringing the grand total in the United States to six. Assuming that their deaths are all linked to the pills,* that would make the real-life mortality rate six out of 560,000, or slightly over 1 in 100,000. It's yet to be shown that these deaths have anything to do with the abortion of the women's pregnancies, but no one is reporting the rate of sepsis for surgical abortions or miscarriages. It's a slanted article that overstates the risk of Mifeprex and piggybacks on a story that's already overreported. Of course, to get more information on medical misstatements in the news, go check out Ema on The Well-Timed Period, who is making a part-time job out of callling the AP on their bullshit.

So as pro-choice publications go, I think the NYTimes may have lost its stripes on both the op-ed and the general reporting fronts. Or perhaps they're so inundated with messages that abortion is dangerous that they believe talking about abortion might become dangerous unless the publication is careful to state its grave concerns. Either way, this American Prospect article has really encouraged me to go check out the LA Times.
__________________
*PPFA has released a statement about their protocol change, which may or may not address the cause of the risk. Their decision to switch protocols seems to be the spark for this recent wave of stories.

An Economic Interpretation of Quagmire

2006-03-31T12:30:00.000-05:00

There's a great piece at Tom Dispatch by Michael Schwartz, which ties the ongoing violence and despair in Iraq to the efforts of the neocons in the Coalition Provisional Authority to administer "shock therapy" privatization to the Iraqi economy in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.

I think this is an important part of the equation, although I don't think it's the whole story. For one thing, a low-level ethinic/religious conflict has been raging in Iraq since at least 1991, and this account, like the neocons', does not recognize that the ethnic and sectarian divides in Iraq are real. But the impact of the catastrophe that was the short lived CPA should not be forgotten. In addition to the wrongheaded economic policy administered by neophyte idealists straight out of think tank land, we should also remember the crippling corruption that characterized the CPA's efforts at "reconstruction" - most funds appropriated for this purpose were simply stolen, handed over to multinationals for work which was never done, or are otherwise unaccounted for to this day.

But for all its limitations, it's still a great piece that will enhance your understanding of what's really going on. Here it is. Go check it out.

More Blame the Meida; Hannity and Baldwin

2006-03-29T11:32:00.000-05:00

If you have watched Fox News Channel at all, you will find this link a bit amusing. Sean Hannity calls up to confront Alec Baldwin on a radio show, and while it sounded like a school yard shoving contest - I was left wondering why more guests don't give it right back to the talking heads. I mean, how often do you flip by a Fox News show and just laugh? Example, Crooks and Liars has this screen shot, Only on Fox. I mean honestly, "Could 9/11 been avoided if Moussaoui was tortured?", with Oliver North as a guest! At least North said torture doesn't work - but still. If you need more reason to not take Fox News seriously, ask Jon Stewart.

Tom Tomorrow weighs in on the Blame the Media Campaign, Shoot the Messenger.

Future Organic Foods

2006-03-29T11:01:00.000-05:00

Like many of you, I try to buy organic food as often as I can afford to do so. If not for the health reasons, to support local independent farmers. Today I was pointed in the direction of an article in Business Week, Wal-Mart's Organic Offensive. I realize that as more families want to consume more organic food the market will expand and more farmers will switch to cash in - and thats a good thing if you don't want to pay outrageous prices for apples. Of course Wal-Mart is going to drive down production costs - and of course it is less expensive in China or Brazil. I have pretty much given up on believing there is a realistic alternative at this point. But this is a primary concern

SHIFTING STANDARDS. The worries that the corporatization of organics could lead to more imports aren't unfounded. Cummins estimates that already 10% of organic foods like meat and citrus are imported into the U.S. Silk soy milk, for instance, is made from organic soybeans that are bought in China and Brazil, where prices tend to be substantially lower than in the U. S. Cascadian Farms buys its organic fruits and vegetables from China and Mexico, among other countries (see BW Online, 3/27/06, "Imports From China Aren't Pricier -- Yet").

And large companies have tried to use their muscle in Washington to their advantage. Last fall, the Organic Trade Assn., which represents corporations like Kraft, Dole, and Dean Foods, lobbied to attach a rider to the 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill that would weaken the nation's organic food standards by allowing certain synthetic food substances in the preparation, processing, and packaging of organic foods. That sparked outrage from organic activists. Nevertheless, the bill passed into law in November, and the new standards will go into effect later this year.

Organic farmers are straining to meet rising demand, one of the reasons that legislators have been willing to drop certain requirements for organic foods. In the past year, the demand for organic milk outstripped the supply by 10% and created acute shortages. That even prompted organic dairy company Stonyfield Farms to stop producing its fat-free 32-ounce cups of yogurt. Now Stonyfield has resumed its production, but organic milk consumption nationwide is growing 30% annually.

My emphasis added. Weakening the standards to meet the need for 'organic' is not an option unless you accompany it the slogan 'New Weaker Standards!' I know what I can afford to buy and what I can't. If the price goes up to a point where I can't buy it then I won't. But don't fool customers into thinking they are purchasing something that they are not. And that is my fear.

Yankee Stadium; Baseball

2006-03-29T11:00:00.000-05:00

Listen to yesterday's Brian Lehrer show about the controversy surrounding the new Yankees Stadium, Out of the Park.

Speaking of the Yankkes, I would be a horrible worker in the GM office due to competency issues, I have a proposal for the Yankees and Angels this coming June. Trade Gary Sheffield for either Kelvim Escobar or free agent Jeff Weaver. Hear me out, the Angels are a pitching rich organization that desperately needs protection for Vlad Guerrero. Is it clear that the Yankees want Sheffield back next season? I think it is obvious that they should go after Barry Zito - then again the let Pettite, Wells, and Clemens go after the 2003 season. As I see it now, the Angels will have a very tough time advancing in the playoffs without a second power hitter while the Yankees will have the same issue because of their lack of starting pitching. Sure, this does hurt the Yankee offense a bit - but without Sheffield they can still have Damon, Jeter, Giambi, ARod, Matsui, Cano, Posada, Williams, and someone like Crosby. Maybe it is a bad idea, but the Yanks need pitching.

The Red Sox have too many outfielders now. They announced that their roster will include Adam Stern (has to stay in the majors 17 more days) and Willie Mo Pena. Dustan Mohr and Willie Harris were left off, while Gabe Kapler is working his way back. Mohr will probably be traded, and I assume they will hold on to Harris as he can also play in the infield. But what happens when Kapler comes back? While none are power hitters, Boston is not without outfielders in AAA. Just when things looked ironed out in the infield with Tony Graffanino going to the Royals, they bring in Hee-Seop Choi - I assume as insurance in case Youkilis ends up as the everyday third baseman if Lowell can't hit. I have a feeling that the April very of the Red Sox may not look like the September version.

Also, Buster Olney writes that the National League stinks this year.

Scouts and talent evaluators will look at the same thing and still often disagree, but they are in harmony on one note this spring: The National League stinks.

"If the Devil Rays were in the NL," a scout said, "I really think they would be a wild-card contender."

That's not to suggest that an NL team can't evolve into a powerhouse during the year, or that a NL team can't win the World Series. But the overwhelming consensus is that the best five to seven teams in the majors reside in the American League, and that while a group of elite teams will fight like rabid dogs to win playoff spots, the NL will be a battle of mediocrity.

This is like the old NFC-AFC disparity of the early '90s, when it seemed that the true test of greatness was to see who emerged from the games played by the 49ers, Giants, Bears, etc.; the Super Bowl was usually a wipeout of some weak AFC team.

It appears that there will be a fine line between being good and bad in the NL this year; solid seasons from one or two key guys -- the X-factor players -- might lift a team from third or fourth to first in its division. I'm curious to see the readers' list of X-factor guys -- not necessarily the stars, but the middling guys who could surprise and lift the NL team. With apologies to Colorado, Arizona, Cincinnati and Florida (teams that are still a few pitchers away from contention), here is my list:

Go to the post to read the rest.

I heart Adam Felber

2006-03-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

Today he describes how he won the war on terror. That's all, kids. You can go home now.

A Must Read Post

2006-03-27T07:20:00.000-05:00

Elwood's digital opus; On Monsters. I don't even know where to start a comment.

Blame the Media

2006-03-26T22:46:00.000-05:00

Crooks and Liars has this great piece on CNN with Lara Logan. While not as good, Peter Dau and John Mcintyre discuss the same topic.

Bill Maher discussed religion and torture Friday.

Cegelis, Hacket, and the Primary; Even more Kevin Phillips!

2006-03-24T14:52:00.000-05:00

I realized that the IL Primary was on Tuesday, and for the first time since moving I didn't pay attention. And why should I, Elwood does a fantastic job at doing that. But over at MyDD, Matt Stoller offered his thoughts on Cegelis and the primary. Read the whole post, but the part that I found most important was this

Now, just so I don't leave anyone out in my post getting everyone angry, let me say that Cegelis proved that Paul Hackett was a coward. Hackett refused to put his choice to the voters, and Cegelis did. And this is because Hackett didn't believe in the people working for him. He didn't believe in the grassroots and the volunteers. He didn't like doing call time, so he blamed party leadership for kneecapping him and refused to organize. And then he went on a bunch of TV shows to announce his decision before coming onto the blogs, and we were his first supporters. Cegelis did the most honorable thing possible. She didn't have Hackett's advantages. She is not nationally known, she didn't have Hollywood throwing money at her. And she had a hell of a lot more firepower arrayed against her, the whole Chicago machine as against a few phone calls from Chuck Schumer. But she organized and gave the finger to the establishment that tried to crush her.

I'm not concerned with the Machine or a Chuck Schumer-Paul Hackett cage match, but I like Stoller's point. I often hear the left and other activists constantly knock the Democratic Party for being corporate DLCers, not being liberal or progressive enough, not speaking for them, being on the outside and all the rest of the tired talk. Yes, our system has not provided a stable and useful third party - but we have primaries, and activists vote in primaries. If you don't like the Democratic Party candidates support an alternative and challenge for open seats or knock off an incombent. The fact that Hackett didn't even try to beat out Sherrod Brown is disappointing. This brings me to the latest Kevin Phillips post over at TPM Cafe (while you are there, check out After the Leeves). Phillips writes

I apologize for a tight schedule and internet-denied Thursday that has kept me from posting, but one last thought. I believe that Democrats and liberals in 2006 stand to have their greatest opportunity since 1992 (which was lost). You will have the substa ntial support of many lapsed Republicans and doubters of Bush conservatism like myself. But I also have the sense that many Democrats and liberals have an instinct for for the capillaries, not for the jugular. If that leads to failure in 2006, there will be a majorprice to pay, not just for theUnited States but in terms of the credibility of your party and movement.

McCain continues to fall & More Kevin Phillips

2006-03-23T12:20:00.000-05:00

Once positioning himself as the Maverick anti-GOP establishment candidate... this is him now, via Josh Marshall. Remember a few weeks ago during a straw poll asking GOP activists to vote for President Bush instead of the other GOP candidates even though he can't run for a third term? Anyway, watch Bill Maher's commentary on McCain during his New Rules segment.

I really try not to repost everything I read from TMP or TMP Cafe, but when they have guest bloggers such as Kevin Phillips, it is hard not to. He writes

This true-believer endgame has been accelerating for many decades, especially since the creation of Israel satisfied the biblical prophecy of the Jewish return to Palestine. As we will see shortly, the growth during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in the numbers of Protestant fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Pentecostals was explosive. Many became Republicans and helped to give the GOP an increasingly religious coloration. Although the stunning sales of the Left Behind series grabbed most of the cultural attention, other books and videos during the late nineties descrived how Saddam Hussein was rebuilding Babylon, the citadel of evil. Still others pondered whether the antichrist was already alive and who he might be. (Saddam himself was a frequent choice.) Nearly one-quarter of Americans polled in 2002 even believed that the Bible had predicted the events of September 11, 2001! While these beliefs were surely a factor in Republican invasion planning, they are difficult for politicians to acknowledge—and they are especially tricky to discuss publicly, so they are instead quietly promoted in clandestine briefings or loosely signaled by phrases and citations that reassure the attentive faithful.

Jim Webb

2006-03-23T11:19:00.000-05:00

Jim Webb is running for the US Senate against George Allen in Virginia. Over at TPM Cafe he writes about getting back the Reagan Democrats.

The end result of this voter migration is that the Democrats have struggled in national elections since 1968, having lost much of their support base in the South. Republicans have won 5 of the last 7 presidential elections, and Bill Clinton’s victories owed much to the Perot vote.

It’s time for the Reagan Democrats and others who left the party to understand that their natural base is in the traditional Democratic Party – the party that best gives a voice to those who lack a full voice in the halls of power. To start with, the Republican party of George W. Bush is not the Republican party of Ronald Reagan. Other than with those who identify with the Christian right, it would be wrong to think that the Republicans have the firm loyalty of those who left the Democrats for Reagan. The decline in public education and the outsourcing of jobs has hit this culture hard. Their sons and daughters serve in large numbers in a war whose validity is increasingly coming into question.

It's that Time of Year Again!

2006-03-23T10:53:00.000-05:00

Yes, it is baseball season - but also when baseball tell columnists that they are idiots. In Buster Olney's great post on the Pena-Arroyo trade, he mentions his favorite emails,The You-Must-Hate-My-Favorite-Team-So-You're-An-Idiot e-mails. In it he examines Pena's numbers against the NL Central's best pitchers

The You-Must-Hate-My-Favorite-Team-So-You're-An-Idiot e-mails mentioned that since Pena's batting average is .275 against those pitchers, and the average hitter bats .240 against the pitchers I picked, then in fact Pena is adept at hitting good pitching and of course any suggestion otherwise is only possible if you have a double-digit IQ.

Look at the strikeouts again: 53 in 120 at-bats. Project those numbers over a full season of 600 at-bats against that kind of pitching, and Pena would strike out 265 times. Those are numbers that suggest he's overmatched. Rival scouts and good and experienced pitchers love to see those kind of guys in the lineup in important games, because they can work around the hitters in front of them and go for the strikeout. A hitter who strikes out at that rate is like a potential lifeline for a pitcher struggling to work his way out of a rough inning (see Alfonso Soriano in the 2003 World Series).

This goes on, and I won't bore the non-baseball fans with all this. What I don't get is why fans would think that Bronson Arroyo, Boston's seventh starter this spring, would yield an already great player. Cincinnati is in an entirely different position as Arroyo will probably be the Reds second or third starter. Boston traded a pitcher that they would never get the full potential out of the next two years for a young player with natural power who needs more work. Did you remember when David Ortiz was 24? Didn't think so. Still, Arroyo is my favorite Red. Schilling and Wakefield will be back next year with Wells retiring. Trading Clement won't be easy, and if he has a comeback they won't. Thus there is still not room for both Papelbon and Lester in the rotation for 2007.

Speaking of pitching, I think the AL East looks interesting. While Toronto does have the division's best pitcher in Roy Halladay, I'm not sure they have enough to pass the Yanks or BoSox. However, seeing that the BoSox are unsure about the closer situation and the bottom of the order and the Yankees starting pitching is once again suspect - it could be closer than in previous years. The end result may be the AL East not getting the Wild Card - AL Central looks real tough, especially if Bobby Jenks can't locate the strike zone.

Am I Missing Something?

2006-03-22T13:25:00.000-05:00

Is it that the Bush Administration never took a civics course or is it that the US Constitution is 'just a piece of paper?' I'm just a bill

For anyone who took fifth-grade social studies or sang "I'm Just a Bill," how legislation turns to law always seemed pretty simple: The House passes a bill, the Senate passes the same bill, the president signs it.

"He signed ya, Bill -- now you're a law," shouts the cartoon lawmaker on "Schoolhouse Rock" as Bill acknowledges the cheers.

But last month, Washington threw all that old-fashioned civics stuff into a tizzy, when President Bush signed into law a bill that actually never passed the House. Bill -- in this case, a major budget-cutting measure that will affect millions of Americans -- became a law because it was "certified" by the leaders of the House and Senate.

After stewing for weeks, Public Citizen, a legislative watchdog group, sued yesterday to block the budget-cutting law, charging that Bush and Republican leaders of Congress flagrantly violated the Constitution when the president signed it into law knowing that the version that cleared the House was substantively different from the Senate's version.

The issue is bizarre, with even constitutional scholars saying they could not think of any precedent for the journey the budget bill took to becoming a law. Opponents of the budget law point to elementary-school civics lessons to make their case, while Republicans are evoking an obscure Supreme Court ruling from the 1890s to suggest a bill does not actually have to pass both chambers of Congress to become law.

Right, so remind me why we need both the House and the Senate? Oh, yeah - that pesky constitution thing again...

"The most effective response to Roe is not to pretend that it does not exist."

2006-03-22T11:37:00.000-05:00

More fallout on the South Dakota abortion ban, with some unexpected arguments on both sides:

The National Review argues that the recent SD legislation is actually misguided in the fight to take Roe down. (The title quote is from that article, entitled "Costly Gestures".)

Meanwhile, the DCeiver argues that the best thing PP could do is not present a legal challenge to the SD ban. DCeiver makes a persuasive argument, though in the final analysis I disagree. (See quote above.)

Bitch. Ph.D points out that the NYTimes.com is letting men frame the abortion debate, particularly when they're skeptical/dismissive of choice issues. Perhaps I should be spending more time on the LATimes.com instead.

And leading the category of "strange and outrageous", the Kaiser Daily RH notes that Amazon.com has finally removed the search engine feature that asks, "Did you mean 'adoption'?" when users enter a search for "abortion". First, thanks to them for presenting a bias-less search. Second, why was that "correction" there in the first place?

More Cops, Cameras in NYC

2006-03-22T11:36:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I came across this NYTimes article In a Shift, New York Says It Will Add 800 Officers. I am not against the addition of new police officers, and certainly am for reducing crimes of all kinds. Today the NY Daily News is reporting that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has ordered 505 surveillance cams. The results of such surveillance are questionable at best. While the cameras look to be coming from Homeland Security funds, the added police seem to be city funded. We are continuously told that NYC crime rates are lowering - and they are. But remember it wasn't that long ago the Mayor Bloomberg reduced the size of the police force - and crime still continued to drop. But two weeks ago a NY Times article discussed the lack of funding in public housing, thus introducing new fees to residents. I guess my larger point is that we paying a lot attention to security and safety but what about poverty, housing, wages - and other issues that exist in a city as expensive as ours?

Read the latest on Kid Politics, How to spot a baby conservative.

Does anyone STILL take this guy seriously?

2006-03-22T10:13:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess if you are in support of Catholic hospitals being able to deny emergency contraception pills for rape victims - then yes. Any guesses? None other than everyone's favorite Fox News Democrat, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Bush-CT). Read Colin McEnroe's piece Cats And Dogs: Of Chaos And A Feline Who's Barking Like Rover. A few highlights

Lieberman at times seems to be working hard to make it almost impossible to vote for him. Consider his remarks about the controversy here in the state over a bill that would force all hospitals to offer emergency contraceptive pills to rape victims.

Lieberman said the Catholic hospitals shouldn't have to hand out the pills and that transportation should instead be provided, for the rape victim, to some other hospital. He said, "In Connecticut, it shouldn't take more than a short ride to get to another hospital."

Wow. You've got a woman who has been raped. She's shattered, shivering, sobbing, frightened. It's 3 a.m. She just spent hours at St. Somebody for the humiliating and invasive process of evidence collection. Now you're going to hustle her into a cab or shuttle bus to go somewhere else and get a pill that would keep her from bearing the rapist's child because you can't stand to prick the conscience of a hospital administrator?...

...As much as I admire Lieberman's willingness to stand on principle, I've noticed an arrogance creeping in. It's one thing to support the war and the president, which he does. It's another to say, as he did last year, that those who do not parrot his support are unpatriotic.

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril," Lieberman said.

Does anyone take this guy seriously?

2006-03-22T00:51:00.000-05:00

I'm serious - who is this guy? He is a barking lunatic! Who am I speaking of? Yup, you guess it, Pat Robertson. From Crooks and Liars: Robertson hearts David Horowitz. He refered to faculty memembers as 'killers.' Were you beaten into submission or brainwashed by professors during your university studies?

Favorite Places

2006-03-21T22:00:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of one of my favorite places to visit - County Dorset in England. I visited Dorset for the first time this past summer. This past weekend I was in New Orleans for the first time since Katrina - and it was more depressing than I imagined. There has always been a lot to enjoy about New Orleans, and I am happy to report that many people I met are dedicated to staying in New Orleans and wanting to see the rebuilding to be fair and equitable - but regardless it is heart breaking. The politics is something to keep an eye on, and this only a taste of BushCo speak.

Two weeks before, the administration had rejected Louisiana's housing recovery plan. Mr. Powell's own idea of housing aid excluded thousands of homeowners, many of them poor, who lived in the flood plain but did not have flood insurance when Hurricane Katrina hit.

Asked about those who had counted on federally built levees to protect them, Mr. Powell, a wealthy man from the dry Texas Panhandle, noted that he had been responsible enough to buy flood insurance for his home in Amarillo.

The members of the Louisiana Bankers Association were not won over. Nor was The Advocate, Baton Rouge's newspaper, which demanded Mr. Powell's dismissal, calling him a "flint-souled" bean counter whose only concern was "guarding the money."

Those with a more charitable view, Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, among them, complained that he lacked the authority to be effective, and some critics wondered if he was simply another presidential crony.

See, blame poor people for not being responsible. Let's ignore poverty, roots of poverty, and the harsh realities of the society we will in and divorce yourself from reality. In any case, I can't really explain it - but these two places felt worlds apart.

Also watch Lou Dobbs on Bill Maher and Lou Dobbs with Kevin Phillips. Speaking of Kevin Phillips, read Alan Brinkley's review of 'American Theocracy.' Lastly, go read the Financial Times piece by Hywel Williams titled How the City of London came to power. Here is a bit

The ability of the British political elites to cut a good financial deal as a result of their power arrangements has been a constant theme. There is a direct line of crooked dealing that connects the church lands grabbed by early 16th-century politicians because of the Protestant reformation with the share options and directorships garnered by their late 20th-century successors because of the Thatcherite privatisations.

The hegemony of today's City elites is, however, very different from the eminence of their predecessors, who had to compete and coexist with other forms of elite power. Britain's once self-regulating professional elites have had the heart ripped out of them by the benchmarking, target-focused state and by a bogus consumerism, with its empty jargoneering about "customer-shaped service delivery".

This is as true of doctors and of dons as it is of teachers, soldiers and policemen. In the process, Britain has lost its independent-minded public service elite. City lawyers and accountants now derive their status from the firms they work for rather than from their membership of a professional body.

WBC Champs and the Arroyo Trade

2006-03-21T13:02:00.000-05:00

Did anyone catch last nights game between Cuba and Japan? Personally, I thought it was a great game. I stayed up to watch it, and to me it was every bit as exciting as an MLB playoff game. Due to the length of the major league baseball season I'm not sure there is ever a good time for the WBC, but it sure beats the Olympic Games version. In any case, I am glad that he US did the right thing and allow team Cuba to play - making it a true World Baseball Classic.

So Bronson Arroyo's agent was right, taking a 'home team' discount made him the most desired extra pitcher on Boston's roster. Is this a bad move? From the standpoint that Boston fans could view Arroyo as they view Wakefield - a lifer, willing to pitch in the rotation or pen and never have injuries - then yes, it is a bad move. From the standpoint that counting Jon Lester Boston had 8 starters, none with a history of arm or shoulder injuries while lacking both a fourth outfielder and power in the minor league system - then yes, it was a good move. In the end Boston has too many pitchers and Cincinnati has too many outfielders. Thus, a natural move. Plus, I think Arroyo will do well in the NL Central.

Boston didn't really want to trade David Wells for three reasons. Firstly, his lifetime record in Fenway Park is outstanding. Secondly, he is the only left handed starter. Thirdly, he is a big game pitcher. Boston couldn't really move Matt Clement to the Reds as he costs way too much. Earlier I wondered if Boston was going to try and move Clement and Nixon to Philadelphia for a prospect and Bobby Abreu. But this deal seems better as the Sox potentially have Nixon's replacement in the fold and if Lowell or Youkilis does not work out Aubrey Huff is a free agent at the end of the season. The only downside I see is if two major injuries occur to the Red Sox rotation. I still think the biggest question mark is the health of Keith Foulke - and if he isn't ready to go will Francona go with Hansen or Papelbon to close? What this trade also tells me is that Boston is not happy with their potential line-up offensively and want more options.

Ugh: Why money matters in this city

2006-03-19T23:25:00.000-05:00

I'm a big, big fan of Eric Zorn's weblog, opinionated though he may be, and every time I take a few weeks off from it I find I've missed things that should be required reading for every member of my fair city. This week it's about how being rich can get you more polite treatment while they're manhunting you. No kidding. I was talking with my awesome spouse about if and why Americans perceive Chicago as qualitatively different, and we had a great discussion over what we were and what we may become. Do you think, reading this, that in other parts of the country people would read this and say, "Egh, Chicago."? Or would they perceive that this could be their town, too?

Daily Show Hackett Link and Boston Legal Link

2006-03-15T11:36:00.000-05:00

Here is the Daily Show's Paul Hackett piece with Ed Helms. Also check out this link to a Boston Legal segment, both from One Good Move.

For (and about) the girls

2006-03-15T00:25:00.000-05:00

All of you counting on me to bring you the latest SD news? I ain't got it. There is no March for Women's Lives this year, at least not that I know about. Those of you who are praying folk, please remember that keeping Stevens on this earth and motivated to adjudicate is our highest priority. Meanwhile, Wampum educates us on what the lack of a health exception means in real life. Go read; it's quick.

I've been spending time in high schools (did you know that class there begins at 8 am??) and have been pleasantly surprised to find that this year, all my students can read English. It must be because of that terrific reading material they've got nowadays. Naomi Wolf reviews, in this NYTimes article, an example of recent young adult fiction, and how it glamorizes the materialism and self-absorption* we generally claim to abhor about adult media culture. Be very afraid.

Neither here nor there: this article, "Silent Struggle", presents a new resource-competition theory of pregnancy as it relates specifically to pre-eclampsia. When I have more energy, perhaps I will get cool and find the real science article. Til then, it's secondary sources for you!
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*I love that I, too, can rail about self-absorption while posting to my third blog tonight. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, I'll be here all week.

Stewart & Colbert

2006-03-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

For those of you who don't work as late as I do, thus have a life - did you see the report by Ed Helms with Paul Hackett on the Daily Show? Helms played a Democratic consultant advising Mr. Hackett to be a bland and not take a stand. Its hilarious and unfortunately true. I'm sure One Good Move will have it tomorrow and it comes on a day when Sen. Feingold correctly states on Faux News, err Fox (link from Think Progress), that

I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide. … Too many Democrats are going to do the same thing they did in 2000 and 2004. In the face of this, they’ll say we’d better just focus on domestic issues. … [Democrats shouldn’t] cower to the argument, that whatever you do, if you question the administration, you’re helping the terrorists.

I like Russ, and I miss Paul Wellstone.
Colbert's interview with Keith Olberman was pretty good as well.

SAS Soldier Quits and More Links

2006-03-13T15:28:00.000-05:00

Sean Rayment in the Telegraph writes, SAS soldier quits Army in disgust at 'illegal' American tactics in Iraq

He said he had witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human.

The decision marks the first time an SAS soldier has refused to go into combat and quit the Army on moral grounds.

It immediately brought to an end Mr Griffin's exemplary, eight-year career in which he also served with the Parachute Regiment, taking part in operations in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Afghanistan.

Peter Baker of the Washington Post writes, Senior White House Staff May Be Wearing Down

Of all the reasons that President Bush is in trouble these days, not to be overlooked are inadequate REM cycles. Like chief of staff Card, many of the president's top aides have been by his side nonstop for more than five years, not including the first campaign, recount and transition. This is a White House, according to insiders, that is physically and emotionally exhausted, battered by scandal and drained by political setbacks.

This may be, but I doubt that the White House troubles are due to lack of REM sleep. The decisions on Iraq, declaring the President infallible, the Katrina response, Iran having nukes, major budget problems - it seems to me that he needed a new staff long ago.
Michael R. Gordon writes for the NY Times, Dash to Baghdad Left Top U.S. Generals Divided

From the first days of the invasion in March 2003, American forces had tangled with fanatical Saddam Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, who was leading the Army's V Corps toward Baghdad, had told two reporters that his soldiers needed to delay their advance on the Iraqi capital to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.

Soon after, General Franks phoned Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the commander of allied land forces, to warn that he might relieve General Wallace.

The firing was averted after General McKiernan flew to meet General Franks. But the episode revealed the deep disagreements within the United States high command about the Iraqi military threat and what would be required to defeat it.

The dispute, related by military officers in interviews, had lasting consequences. The unexpected tenacity of the Fedayeen in the battles for Nasiriya, Samawa, Najaf and other towns on the road to Baghdad was an early indication that the adversary was not merely Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guard.

The NYT Editorial, The Death of the Intelligence Panel, is spot on.

The Senate panel has become so paralyzingly partisan that it could not even manage to do its basic job this week and look into President Bush's warrantless spying on Americans' international e-mail and phone calls. Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman, said Tuesday that there would be no investigation. Instead, the committee's Republicans voted to create a subcommittee that is supposed to get reports from the White House on any future warrantless surveillance.

It's breathtakingly cynical. Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate sets up a panel to watch him do it and calls that control. This new Senate plan is being presented as a way to increase the supervision of intelligence gathering while giving the spies needed flexibility. But it does no such thing.

The Republicans' idea of supervision involves saying the White House should get a warrant for spying whenever possible. Currently a warrant is needed, period. And that's the right law. The White House has not offered a scrap of evidence that it interferes with antiterrorist operations. Mr. Bush simply decided the law did not apply to him.

The piece by Times reporter Janny Scott titledNew York Asks Help From Poor in Housing Crisis is rather eye opening if you aren't aware the state of urban public housing. Also, check out Elizabeth Warren's report over at TPM Cafe, Multiplying the Risks. Lastly, Temple men's basketball coach John Chaney retired today and Adrian Wojnarowski adds more. I would check the Philly media for more coverage than a national one like ESPN. I will always remember Chaney's match-up zone and some of his great teams in the past. Can you imagine the Atlantic 10 without him? My bet is that the next coach will be U Penn's Fran Dunphy. If not, I bet it will be someone with Philly roots.

Sorry for the unoriginal content, but I'm busy!

We Miss you Already

2006-03-10T09:14:00.000-05:00

NPR: O'Connor Decries Republican Attacks

Suppressing the Body Count

2006-03-09T08:01:00.000-05:00

Read Erin Knickmeyer's piece in Washington Post this morning, Official Says Shiite Party Suppressed Body Count.

BAGHDAD, March 8 -- Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine unleashed a wave of retaliatory killings of Sunnis, the leading Shiite party in Iraq's governing coalition directed the Health Ministry to stop tabulating execution-style shootings, according to a ministry official familiar with the recording of deaths.

The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings...

...Abductions and killings of Sunni Arab men, usually by gunshots to the back of the head, have occurred with increasing frequency over the past year and are widely blamed on government-allied Shiite religious militias and death squads alleged to be operating from inside the SCIRI-dominated Interior Ministry. In particular, Shiite militias have been accused of abducting and executing large numbers of Sunni men in the days immediately following the Feb. 22 destruction of the Askariya mosque, a revered Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra.

After a lull in recent days, abductions and killings flared again in Baghdad on Wednesday. Police in west Baghdad found a minibus that contained the bodies of 18 bound and strangled men, and 50 employees of an Iraqi security firm were kidnapped on the east side of the city.

I think it speaks for itself.

Items

2006-03-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

A couple things that caught my eye this morning. Apparently the GOP Senate has agreed to give the administration 45 days of wiretapping before going to a court - and read the 'oversight.' The article points out Sen. Specter may not be happy about it, but he seems to eventually back the administration after making critical statements. Read Sen. Rockefeller's comments. He writes “As one of the few members of Congress who have been briefed on this program, I can honestly say the worst mistake we could make at this juncture is to legislate or attempt to amend FISA without having all the facts.” Also check out Big Brother is Listening from the April Atlantic. Here is a tease

Such facts worry Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who worked for the NSA as an intern while in law school in the 1980s. The FISA “courtroom,” hidden away on the top floor of the Justice Department building (because even its location is supposed to be secret), is actually a heavily protected, windowless, bug-proof installation known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. “When I first went into the FISA court as a lowly intern at the NSA, frankly, it started a lifetime of opposition for me to that court,” Turley recently told a group of House Democrats looking into the NSA’s domestic spying. “I was shocked with what I saw. I was convinced that the judge in that SCIF would have signed anything that we put in front of him. And I wasn’t entirely sure that he had actually read what we put in front of him. But I remember going back to my supervisor at NSA and saying, ‘That place scares the daylights out of me.’”

Lamberth bristles at any suggestion that his court routinely did the administration’s bidding. “Those who know me know the chief justice did not put me on this court because I would be a rubber stamp for whatever the executive branch was wanting to do,” he said in his speech. “I ask questions. I get into the nitty-gritty. I know exactly what is going to be done and why. And my questions are answered, in every case, before I approve an application.”

It is true that the court has been getting tougher. From 1979 through 2000, it modified only two out of 13,087 warrant requests. But from the start of the Bush administration, in 2001, the number of modifications increased to 179 out of 5,645 requests. Most of those—173—involved what the court terms “substantive modifications.”

This friction—and especially the requirement that the government show “probable cause” that the American whose communications they are seeking to target is connected in some way to a terrorist group—induced the administration to begin circumventing the court. Concerned about preventing future 9/11-style attacks, President Bush secretly decided in the fall of 2001 that the NSA would no longer be bound by FISA. Although Judge Lamberth was informed of the president’s decision, he was ordered to tell no one about it—not even his clerks or his fellow FISA-court judges.

Also from the Times, 'Brokeback Couples.'

It looks like Mr. Abramoff is talking, writes TPM Muckraker, and here is the Vanity Fair article.

Today on the Brian Lehrer Show they were discussing the potential impact of South Dakota law banning abortion. But something caught my ear - the guest, Slate's Emily Bazelon, made some interesting comments. Most interesting was how if a woman's right to choose is rejected by a future court on the grounds that it is not a right of privacy, the 14th Amendment would be argued on the grounds that it interferes with ones religious faith - that banning abortion could be viewed as the government choosing one religion over another. The example given was Orthodox vs. Reform Judaism. There were a few good calls as well. Long live Justice Stevens!

Pam files this under "Republicans," "bad ideas"

2006-03-09T00:51:00.000-05:00

Via Pam at Pandagon: the National Republican Senatorial Committee is sending out a fraudulent-sounding "survey" and money grab. To read a first-hand account and see copies of the "survey", check out BlueNC. Even the opt-out option is a scam:

Your Survey is REGISTERED IN YOUR NAME ONLY and MUST BE ACCOUNTED FOR upon completion of this project. If you decide not to represent your local voting district in this important Republican Senate Leadership Survey - please RETURN THE SURVEY DOCUMENT - AT ONCE - IN THE ENVELOPE PROVIDED.
...
No. I do not wish to particiapte in the Survey, nor do I wish to make a donation to help the Republican Party. I am returning my Survey Document, along with a contribution of $11 to help cover the cost of tabulating and redistributing my Survey.

This is built to look like a governmental document. (Which might be confusing, because the government also wants your money. Try to keep up.) How many checks for $11 do you think they have so far received?

Women's work

2006-03-08T11:24:00.000-05:00

Shall I mention that this is International Women's Day and also the day when the fem-libs Blog Against Sexism? Oh, I guess I did. Here are my highlights so far: Twisty provides a great roundup, and manages to editorialize without too many four-letter words. (I love her blog every day, though the understandable rage and sailor-iffic swearing is sometimes a shock to one's system.) WBEZ had a paid dedication this morning on the way to work from a guy named Paul to "all women everywhere" in honor of this day. I got a little misty-eyed. Damn hormones. This was quickly followed by a "Morning Edition" report on the effort in NH to change child support structures to reduce payments for non-custodial parents who spend lots of time with their children. This report made me cry for real, because although it seems sensible on its face, it continues to reduce time with children to an economic formula, where time spent per hour is supposed to cost (or earn) a certain amount of money. Women know, of course, that time spent with children costs money, but I've never heard women clamoring for billable hours. The idea of tracking visit time and applying it to a "total child cost" makes me heartsick. Children are people, not a project or an investment. And you have to spend money on them, because they are family and sometimes you have to spend resources to take care of people you care about. The basic argument of this re-structuring is that it would be terrible if some non-custodial parent "overpaid" and provided too much money or too much time with his kid (yes, they're mostly male parents we're talking about). Can you EVER spend too much time with a young kid? If parents purchase quality stuff for their kids instead of cheap bare-minimum clothes from Wal-Mart, is that a bad thing? And if YOU decide to buy a nice bicycle for your kid, does that mean you should get to take it out of the child support check? Absolutely not. Parenting to the minimum acceptable standard is what too many folks are doing already, and I don't want to see NH write into the law that if you pay $X you don't have to spend time with your kid, or if you spend X time you don't have to pay additionally for him. It just doesn't work like that.

Everyone needs to go watch the progress of Ema at The Well-Timed Period, as she spots incorrect info at the National Institute of Health about the morning-after birth control pill, calls them on it, and receives the response that "this is handled by another company, we'll have to talk to them and check it out." It's nice that they replied to her, but lame that they would post information from an outside agency without doing any fact-checking first. Aren't they supposed to be, like, health experts or something?

That's all for now, as I must go educate more young minds on the mystery of the menstrual cycle. A woman's work is never done.

Huff Post: Howie Klein on Lieberman

2006-03-07T14:50:00.000-05:00

Click here for the whole piece at the Huffington Post, but I wanted to post part of the text here, a piece good for discussion and why so many are supporting Ned Lamont's primary challenge to Joe Lieberman later this year. I hope Lamont wins.

One thing I always noticed about people who are naturally predisposed towards the political right is that they inevitably seem to think that when they are called on their crap they can declare, as if by fiat, that reality is something more malleable than it is. In his letter, Dan attributes "slanderous statements [to me] about Lieberman being a racist and a homophobe. Those accusations are not open to debate."

Is that so? Let's debate them anyway.

Now I never called Dan's old boss a racist, of course (Dan, who prides himself at being a communications expert, made that up to make a point). What I said was that Lieberman "made racism quasi-acceptable by framing it as being against unfair affirmative action." Dan points out that in 1963 Lieberman "marched with Martin Luther King, hardly the work of a racist" (Dan's strawman again). Well today Joe Lieberman marches with George W. Bush. And between his heady student days in the 60's and his taking up residence deep in Bush's posterior, he had been marching with William F. Buckley, Rick Santorum, Lynn Cheney and Bill Bennett.

I'm not an African-American. But I'll invoke Dr. Manning Marable, Professor of History and Political Science and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, as he assessed what Lieberman's addition to the Gore ticket meant for African-Americans in 2000:

I looked at the staged New York Times photograph of Senator Lieberman standing before the meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus at the recent Democratic National Convention. Standing o either side of Lieberman are Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Only hours before, Herman and Waters had engaged in a spirited public disagreement over the selection of Lieberman. In the photo, Herman looks relieved, and Waters appears sad. Perhaps Maxine reflects the grim realization of other black Democrats, who are now forced to campaign for candidates and a party platform they privately oppose. All they are left with is to frighten black voters to the polls with the spectre of a Republican victory.

They don't realize the obvious: the Republicans have already won. By accepting Lieberman onto the ticket, as NATION writer David Corn states, Gore "has accepted -- or surrendered to -- the Bush terms of battle." Bush, Cheney, Gore and Lieberman, in the end, only reflect variations of the same bankrupt political philosophy.

Anyway, read the whole piece. I am sure we will hear endlessly about the next few months.

Era of State Activism Cont.

2006-03-07T12:25:00.000-05:00

This is a piece by Nathan Nemwan over at TPM Cafe is about how states have changed a WalMart national policy - this one dealing with the Illinois Governor and Connecticut A.G. Newman's point is

This victory reflects the power that states wield to change the policies of even the largest company in the country. This is also reflected in Wal-Mart's scrambling in recent weeks to upgrade health benefits for its employees as states move increasingly to require large companies to provide health benefits. And in many cases, workers denied overtime or minimum wages by Wal-Mart have used more favorable state labor laws to bring lawsuits against the company-- putting pressure on the firm to improve conditions.

The lesson from the various Wal-Mart campaigns is clear-- progressives don't have to wait for action on Capitol Hill to fight for and win national victories.

There was a Yahoo article that no longer exists from December 2003 which claimed that it will be the states bringing progressive reforms, not the federal government. That article, I believe, was based on Elliot Spitzer's job as New York A.G., as well as Lisa Madigan of Illinois.

OTM: Revisiting Postman

2006-03-06T13:07:00.000-05:00

If you did not catch OTM's story this week titled "Re-musing Ourselves" - I suggest giving it a listen or read the transcript tomorrow. Also, check out Jay Rosen's Press Think.

36% in Indiana; Duh

2006-03-06T11:03:00.000-05:00

Indiana has figured something out that Joe Lieberman apparently hasn't yet, Mr. Bush is not doing a good job according to Hoosiers.

Robert Schmuhl, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, called the poll numbers a "very revealing" portrait of a presidency gone awry.
"Since his inauguration to the second term, we have seen something akin to a reverse Midas touch," in which everything Bush handles turns not to gold, but lead, Schmuhl said.

Though I am not sure Americans know just how bad these people have been. As Lewis Lapham wrote in the Haper's article below regarding his article "The Case for Impeachment"

Although the abuses and usurpations are self-evident, obvious to anybody who takes the trouble to read the newspapers, the Bush Administration makes no attempt to conceal the Object evinced in the design of its purpose, because it counts on the romanticism as well as on the apathy of an American public reluctant to recognize the President of the United States as a felon. Who wants to believe such a thing, much less acknowledge it as a proven fact?

Also, Andrew Lehren and John Leland article in the New York Times, "Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents Are Told"

For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows...

...But some workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them. And many teenagers say they never considered hiding their pregnancies or abortion plans from their mothers.

"I would have told my mother anyway," said a 16-year-old named Nicole, who waited recently at a clinic in Allentown, Pa., a state that requires minors to get the permission of just one parent. Nicole's mother and father are divorced, and it was her mother she went to for permission to have an abortion.

What amazes me is that someone actually thinks a parental notification law would decrease either pregnancy or abortion rates among teens. I hope Trope comments on this, but it seems to me just as silly as saying that the death penalty decreases murder rates.

Monday Baseball News: Wells Stays in Boston

2006-03-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

As a fan of major league baseball, specifically the AL East and the Central Divisions, I thought I would provide a bit of my geekdom over the next several weeks. This article about David Wells resciding his trade demand is actually big news - but it also creates a problem for Terry Francona and the General Manager Theo Epstein.

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Apparently, those waves of San Diego can wait a year for David Wells. The ageless left-hander, who asked the Red Sox to trade him to a West Coast team as far back as October, reversed his stance on Sunday, saying that he'd be fine with spending what is likely to be the final season of his entertaining and successful baseball career in a Boston uniform.

For as much as Wells loves to hop on his surf board on blissful San Diego mornings with his kids, he also loves to win.

"I'm just looking at the situation we have here. I think we're a better team this year than we were last year," said Wells, who won 15 games for the Red Sox in 2005. "If you're going to go out on top, you might as well do it with a team you feel good with."

This is a luxury, and a problem. The Red Sox have seven big league starters, none of the them have a history of arm problems – and with the exception of Wells, none are slow this spring training. This surely means that once the early season rest days are over, Terry Francona will carry twelve pitchers: Schilling, Beckett, Wells, Wakefield, Clement, Arroyo, Papelbon, Riske, Seanez, Tavarez, Timlin, and Foulke. This means that Triple A will consist of Jon Lester, Craig Hansen, Manny Declarmen, and Lenny DiNardo – all of top prospects right below the bigs. This also means Dustin Pedroia will also be in the minors. This pitching staff is young, old, in their prime, and with arms below in case of injury or flexibility. The three biggest questions I have about the Red Sox this years are: 1) is Keith Foulke 100%? If not, this flexibility allows Francona use Papelbon or Hansen as the closer – or make a trade closer to the deadline. The Dodgers have two closers in the final year of contracts and look as if they could use one more starter. 2) The outfield. Kapler will not be back for sometime, and Boston continues to platoon Nixon in right. A Jay Payton type player is not available for the job either. Boston has brought in Dustin Mohr for the role this year. Nixon is in the last year of his contract, and I can see Boston sending him with Clement to Philadelphia for a prospect and Bobby Abreu. 3) What will Lowell, Youkilis, and Gonzalez give offensively at the bottom of the order?

More later...

Update: Article from Boston Globe states

But assuming Wells is healthy -- ''My knee is still hurting, I'm not getting any younger, my arm feels great and the rest of me is subpar" was his self-assessment -- it appears more likely that the Sox will hold onto Wells while fielding offers for Matt Clement and perhaps Bronson Arroyo. Ideally, this is the rotation the Sox would like to open the season with: Curt Schilling, Wells, Josh Beckett, Tim Wakefield, and Jonathan Papelbon. In that scenario, Arroyo goes to the pen as a swingman, and Clement is pitching in another uniform.

Trading Clement and Wells retiring really doesn't change the outlook for the rotation and staff in 2007.

From Harpers, with Pic

2006-03-05T23:30:00.000-05:00

How many of you read Harper's? Well, the Harper's index may be worth the yearly $15 subscription price! Here are a few choice ones:

Average percentage decline in U.K. child injuries during weekends when a new Harry Potter book is released: -46

Percentage change since 1995 in the number of U.S. fantasy books about dragons: +91

Number of the 193 "laughing episodes" during Supreme Court arguments last term that were caused by Antonin Scalia: 77
Number caused by Clarence Thomas: 0

Minimum number of sex offenders who evacuated during Hurricane Katrina and cannot be accounted for: 2,000

Minimum number of times Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld's vacation home: 25

Percentage of U.S. House contests in 2004 that were decided by few than 10 percentage points: 5

Number of U.S. counties where more than a fifth of "residents" are prison inmates: 21
Number of these that are in Texas: 10

A list of things

2006-03-05T22:40:00.000-05:00

Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post write on top Democrats questioning DNC Chair Howard Dean's spending.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) challenged the former Vermont governor during a session in Pelosi's office, according to Democratic sources. The leaders complained about Dean's priorities -- funding organizers for state parties in strongly Republican states such as Mississippi -- rather than targeting states with crucial races this fall.

Neither side was willing to give ground, according to several accounts of the meeting. Dean argued that his strategy is designed to rebuild the party across the country, and that he had pledged to do so when he ran for party chairman. Reid and Pelosi countered that if Democrats squander their opportunities this year, longer-term organizing efforts will not matter much.

Democratic congressional leaders are particularly worried because the Republican National Committee holds a huge financial advantage over the DNC. One congressional Democrat complained that Dean has -- at an alarming rate -- burned through the money the DNC raised, and that Republicans may be able to swamp Democrats in close races with an infusion of RNC money.

I agree with Howard Dean on this one. Mrs. Pelosi is an improvement from Mr. Gephardt and I think Mr. Reid is a large improvement over Mr. Daschle, but the Democratic Party cannot continue to run elections in a handful of places and continue to think they can have a majority. Every seat needs to be challenged. Every state needs a Democratic infrastructure. Mississippi will probably always be more conservative than Illinois or New York, but that shouldn't matter. Democrats have to be a national party.

Check out this New York Times editorial about Bush Administration policy failure towards Iran and the rest of the "axis of evil".

During the period before the Iraq invasion, the president gave lip service to the idea that Iran and Iraq were both threats to American security. But his advisers, intent on carrying out their long-deferred dream of toppling Saddam Hussein, gave scant thought to what might happen if their plans did not lead to the unified, peaceful, pro-Western democracy of their imaginings. The answer, though, is now rather apparent: a squabbling, divided country in which the Shiite majority in the oil-rich south finds much more in common with its fellow Shiites in Iran than with the Sunni Muslims with whom it needs to form an Iraqi government.

Washington has now become dangerously dependent on the good will and constructive behavior of Shiite fundamentalist parties that Iran sheltered, aided and armed during the years that Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. In recent weeks, neither good will nor constructive behavior has been particularly evident, and if Iran chooses to stir up further trouble to deflect diplomatic pressures on its nuclear program, it could easily do so.

There is now a real risk that Iraq, instead of being turned into an outpost of secular democracy challenging the fanatical rulers of the Islamic republic to its east, could become an Iranian-aligned fundamentalist theocracy, challenging the secular Arab regimes to its west.

The New York Times also has a nice piece by Andrea Elliot titled "A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds".

"America transformed me from a person of rigidity to flexibility," said Mr. Shata, speaking through an Arabic translator. "I went from a country where a sheik would speak and the people listened to one where the sheik talks and the people talk back."

This is the story of Mr. Shata's journey west: the making of an American imam.

Over the last half-century, the Muslim population in the United States has risen significantly. Immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa have settled across the country, establishing mosques from Boston to Los Angeles, and turning Islam into one of the nation's fastest growing religions. By some estimates, as many as six million Muslims now live in America.

Leading this flock calls for improvisation. Imams must unify diverse congregations with often-clashing Islamic traditions. They must grapple with the threat of terrorism, answering to law enforcement agents without losing the trust of their fellow Muslims. Sometimes they must set aside conservative beliefs that prevail in the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam.

Meanwhile in France, Dominique de Villepin has ruled out the privatiztion of a major electrical supplier.

His move followed the controversial plan to push Gaz de France into the private sector through a merger with Suez, the Franco-Belgian water and power company. While elsewhere in Europe this proposed merger has prompted allegations about French protectionism, it has also triggered domestic anxiety from unions about the effect on jobs of privatisation.

Mr de Villepin told a newspaper that EdF, SNCF, the train company, and Areva, one of the world's top nuclear power groups, were "major pluses" for France. "The French like them being in public ownership, for good reason," he told le Parisien newspaper. "This would therefore exclude an attempt to go down the path of privatisation for these public services."

Seriously, Folks . . .

2006-03-03T16:14:00.000-05:00

"All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could it be a good thing?" Keeping all that tension and stress pent up inside is bad for your blood pressure and crippling for you emotional life. Just let it out folks! Nothing like a good old fashioned civil war to release those tensions and find an outlet for your pent-up feeling of aggression and hate.

Gotta love Fox News. Seriously, ya gotta. Or else.

ETA: I'm making this loony screenshot into a contest over at my blog, just because it made my day. Submit your responses as comments, and you too could win a prize and get drunk!

Was it this Obvious?

2006-03-01T15:17:00.000-05:00

Did any of you click over to This Mordern World today? If you did - you would have seen the post The thin line between reality and satire. It was written two weeks after the invasion. Also, check out Sen. Kerry's post at Kos, Fighting Democrats. Kerry writes

I think electing Iraq war veterans in 2006 is the single most important thing we can do to change that. Here's why. Stars and Stripes reported that "Seventy-two percent of troops on the ground in Iraq think U.S. military forces should get out of the country within a year." Imagine that. No matter what you think the right course is in Iraq, what does it tell you that many American troops see that a long term, massive military presence in Iraq with no end in sight isn't the answer? In that article - which I hope everyone will read - the man who organized the survey makes an important point: "there are those in the U.S. who will speak for the troops, so there is a real value in seeing what they are actually saying." That's what counts here. To hear the Administration and their Republican allies talk, anyone who has a different view than George Bush is lacking in patriotism and doesn't support the troops. Remember freshman GOP Congresswoman Jean Schmidt who invoked our troops in smearing Jack Murtha? I wonder what Jean Schmidt would have to say confronted by the informed and expert opinions of soldiers home from Iraq -- whatever they believe. The Republicans might just be forced to debate the merits of the issue! Talk about throwing a wrench into the partisan smear machine these Republicans rely on to stifle debate. That's why I want people like Jean Schmidt to have to stand face to face on the floor of Congress and be forced to debate a veteran who's been there. It will elevate the dialogue in our country, it will change the voices in the conversation.

That's what this is all about. Imagine if the voices of today's veterans weren't just reflected on the front page of Stars and Stripes, but in votes and voices on the floor of Congress. That's what I'm committed to getting done.

TPM Posts

2006-02-27T14:20:00.000-05:00

Check this post out by Joshus Marshall at Talking Points Memo

Under every administration there are examples of individuals or tax exempt groups (associated with the opposing party) getting audited by the IRS. It always, or usually, looks a bit fishy. But there's seldom any concrete evidence of politicized decision-making at the IRS to point to. So partisans on one side or another make their judgments in the absence of hard proof. And that's pretty much where it ends.

There's a astounding piece on page A3 of the Post today about one of these instances -- only in this case there appears to be more or less conclusive evidence that it was a political hit.

The group is question is Texans for Public Justice -- a outfit which had a lot to do with turning up the information about illegal fundraising and money distributions that eventually ended Tom DeLay's reign as Majority Leader.

They got audited by the IRS. And after what was no doubt a lengthy process, they've been cleared.

But why were they audited?

Check out the whole post. Is anyone actually surprised by this? Also check out Max Sawicky's post over at TPM Cafe titled, It's Who You Know, Stupid.

Today Krugman elevates a new progressive meme. Not necessarily brand new. I've talked about it myself. From behind the infernal NYT subscription wall, PK calls attention to what I could call the meritocratic fallacy. This fallacy is that income or wage inequality results from an increasing "skill" differential. It's your own damn fault you don't make more money. You should have spent more time drilling calculus and less in all-night games of hearts followed by excursions to Dunkin Donuts. If you're worried about outsourcing, you're a weenie; real men are not afraid to compete in the new world economy.

I would label it the Bullshit Human Capital story (BHC). BHC was big in the Clinton Administration and lives on in the Gospels of Sperling (a.k.a. Gene Gene, Neo-Liberal Machine). The Clintons attributed the suffering we must endure from free trade to lack of investment in training and education, and they had the courage to actually devote several teaspoons of resources to look like they were fixing that problem.

In an important departure, Krugman says it's about Power. It's not that more education is not always better than less; of course it is, and more public support for education and training should be welcome. But BHC does not strike at the root of the problem, nor its solution. It's about who makes the rules of the game, including the labor market game. We are not living under meritocracy. Merit is substantially compromised by privilege.

Privilege derives from wealth, race, and gender. It biases decisions in college admissions, employment, housing, political appointments, and credit allocation. It reduces economic efficiency and growth because a biased decision entails waste of real resources.

The resulting elite is what PK calls an oligarchy.

Meritocracy is not everything. Ideally, we would leaven meritocracy with public notions of social justice and divert resources from their best economic use for ethical reasons. Now we have the worst of both worlds: waste for the sake of a self-indulgent ruling class.

I posted the whole thing, but there should be more comments on the link by the end of the day. Check it out.

Update: Ed Kilgore responds. Here is the lead:

Max Sawicky's post today riffing on a Paul Krugman op-ed about the sources of inequality made a valid and important point, and then carried it across the line into a strange attack on Gene Sperling and Clintonomics. Since Max has earlier made it clear he'd rather Democrats stay out of power than repeat the "centrist" policy heresies of the Clinton era, I think we're dealing with a pattern here that's worth challenging.

Max's valid point is that income inequality in America cannot be completely explained by deficiencies in educational and skills levels. Max's invalid point is that anybody, especially "neo-liberal" Clintonites, who stresses these "human capital" assets as important to the future economic welfare of currently disadvantaged Americans is buying into a "meritocratic fallacy" that justifies inequality perpetually.

Update II:
Max Swaicky responds with Goodbye, Horatio Alger. Here is the intro

Ed's opening gambit conflates criticism of Clinton policies with a preference for Republican rule. If you're not with us, you're against us! This prompts the 'Naderesque' insult from a commenter. Trying finding any such assertion in what I wrote.

Ed claims the Clinton Administration did not limit its attack on inequality (sic) to BHC remedies. Actually the Clinton support for BHC was more rhetorical than real. And the support for remedies outside of BHC is a figment of Ed's imagination.

Here's a chart showing Federal outlays for education and training in constant dollars, from 1988 to 2006. Source is Table 9.9 in the Historical Statistics of the U.S. Federal Budget. It's clear where the valley of fatigue lies. Note that a flat profile of constant dollars means a declining ratio in terms of GDP; we should at least be keeping level in those terms.

Baseball News

2006-02-27T11:17:00.000-05:00

As you know, I am a fan of the AL East baseball. I like all baseball - other than the West Coast teams. Anyway, this was in the Washington Post today.

There are far more teams looking for starting pitching help this time of year than teams with extra starters to deal, but the Nationals feel there are potential trade partners -- perhaps most notably the Boston Red Sox, who are prepared to give top prospect Jonathan Papelbon the fifth starter's job, making another starter such as Matt Clement and/or Bronson Arroyo expendable.

However, Clement, who is owed $9.5 million in both 2006 and 2007, may be too expensive for the Nationals. Arroyo, meantime, signed a three-year, $11.25 million contract with the Red Sox in January. Complicating the Red Sox' picture is the fact the team reportedly promised veteran lefty David Wells that they would try to trade him to a West Coast team by the end of the spring.

According to a team source, the Nationals have already approached the Red Sox about a trade involving second baseman Alfonso Soriano, whom the Nationals acquired in a December trade and are trying to persuade to accept a move to left field, but the Red Sox showed very little interest.

I don't buy it for a second. First, Washington made a very bad trade this off season by trading for Alfonso Soriano. Firstly, his batting average has dropped four straight seasons. Of couse he has good power and is only 30 years old - but secondly, the Nationals already have a second baseman in Jose Vidro. Were they not aware that Soriano had no interest in moving to the outfield? Anyway, my point is - trading Soriano should have been considered when they first acquired him. Thirdly, why would the Red Sox want Soriano at this point? When building a team this off season, I wouldn't be surprised if Boston would have considered it if they traded Manny Ramirez. But now that they have Mark Loretta and his OBP at second with Ortiz and Ramirez behind him - where would Soriano play? Also, why would Boston consider trading a never injured and affordable Bronson Arroyo for a player who would have no position for the Red Sox? It doesn't make sense at all. Terry Francona has said all off season that you can never have too much pitching - seeing Boston's winter moves says it all. The only way I see Matt Clement being moved is if Jon Lester is a big league starter by the end of June. Otherwise, I can't see the Red Sox trading away valuable players. With a healthy Schilling and Beckett (though Francona may pitch Wakefield in between) and Papelbon - Clement may be the fifth man in the rotation. In conclusion, in the mostly post steriod era no way Boston trades away their biggest assets. If they need to trade pitching for offense - it is more likely going to be Clement and Trot Nixon to Philadelphia for Bobby Abreu - that is, if Philadelphia is still trying to trade him and their pitching staff has holes.

Lapham: The Case for Impeachment

2006-02-27T10:24:00.000-05:00

Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush
I have always enjoyed the articles by Lewis H. Lapham, and this is just another one. Here is a taste

On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press—nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.

“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn't know.” So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:

“I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news.”

Also, the other day I decided to read over the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution for fun. The Declaration of Independence will always be a special document to me. Especially this part:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

I'm certainly not advocating a new government, I just have a soft spot for this document and felt like putting it on the blog. However, our legislative and judicial branches took an oath to defend the constiution, not an oath to their political party - the Constitution gives remedy for the current situation, and it doesn't have to be impeachment - just use the power the constiution gives you.

I still love my state

2006-02-25T00:23:00.000-05:00

An Ohio legislator (state senator Robert Hagan, D-33) has introduced a bill to bar Republicans from adopting children, in response to the bill which seeks to bar adoption by gay people. The language is hilariously similar, and the logic behind it is just as solid as that behind the gay-adoption ban.

Hagan said his "tongue was planted firmly in cheek" when he drafted the proposed legislation. However, Hagan said that the point he is trying to make is nonetheless very serious.

Hagan said his legislation was written in response to a bill introduced in the Ohio House this month by state Rep. Ron Hood, R-Ashville, that is aimed at prohibiting gay adoption.

"We need to see what we are doing," said Hagan, who called Hood's proposed bill blatantly discriminatory and extremely divisive. Hagan called Hood and the eight other conservative House Republicans who backed the anti-gay adoption bill "homophobic."

Hood's bill, which does not have support of House leadership, seeks to ban children from being placed for adoption or foster care in homes where the prospective parent or a roommate is homosexual, bisexual or transgender.

To further lampoon Hood's bill, Hagan wrote in his mock proposal that "credible research" shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing "emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities."

However, Hagan admitted that he has no scientific evidence to support the above claims.

Just as "Hood had no scientific evidence" to back his assertion that having gay parents was detrimental to children, Hagan said.

Found via Pandagon, which you should pop in and read for its funny commentary. Thanks, Pam...

Harper's Cartoon of the Day

2006-02-24T16:14:00.000-05:00

You can find the cartoon at Harper's Magazine and other work by Mr. Fish at Clowncrack Productions. Click on the cartoon for a larger size.

Illinois, This is your Governor

2006-02-24T14:15:00.000-05:00

While I would never pick on Illinois for Blago as long as Gov. Pitaki is in Albany, this is just too funny. Ill. Governor Confused by 'Daily Show' Bit

ST. LOUIS Feb 23, 2006 (AP)— Gov. Rod Blagojevich wasn't in on the joke. Blagojevich says he didn't realize "The Daily Show" was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the sometimes-puzzled Democratic governor.

"It was going to be an interview on contraceptives … that's all I knew about it," Blagojevich laughingly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday's editions. "I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was 'the gay governor.'"

The interview focused on his executive order requiring pharmacies to fill prescriptions for emergency birth control.

Interviewer Jason Jones pretended to stumble over Blagojevich's name before calling him "Governor Smith." He urged Blagojevich to explain the contraception issue by playing the role of "a hot 17-year-old" and later asked if he was "the gay governor."

At one point in the interview, a startled Blagojevich looked to someone off camera and said, "Is he teasing me, or is that legit?"

The segment, which aired two weeks ago, also featured Illinois Republican Rep. Ron Stephens, a pharmacist who opposes the governor's rule. Stephens has said he knew the show was a comedy.

"I thought the governor was hip enough that he would have known that, too," Stephens said.

Okay, I can understand the Governor not knowing a thing about the Daily Show, but doesn't he have a staff? See the clip here

CT-Sen: Lamont v. Lieberman and NOW vs. NARAL

2006-02-23T13:59:00.000-05:00

I'm sure everyone is aware of what is about to pass in South Dakota, the criminalization of abortion. Personally I don't think this legislation is intended to ever become law, just a test, and I think it is doubtful that the SCOTUS will uphold it. Regardless, I flipped over to Kos on a break to see what is cooking on the good old blogosphere. I don't flip over too often, though I have noticed how there have been many support Ned Lamont posts in the upcoming primary against Sen. Lieberman. Personally, if I had money to give to a primary candidate in the 2006 primary season, Mr. Lamont would be one (Mr. Hackett would have been the other - bang up job Washington and Ohio Dems). I have also had several email discussions with Elwood about NARAL's support of Lincoln Chafee before the primary! - but I won't get into that. Back to the point, this post - CT-Sen: NOW gets it is an interesting one. I would love to hear our resident experts discuss this.

I'm torn regarding the filibuster. Justice Alito was going to be on the court. 55 GOPers marching in synch is too much to over come without Democrats getting Mr. Alito to come out and say that the Executive Branch has the authority to spy domestically without judicial review or that the Executive Branch can detain people as long as they want. Since the Democrats failed to accumulate enough no votes for cloture, the filibuster was more or less a symbolic gesture by the minority - that Justice Alito deserved more than a no vote. In any case, I think opposition to Sen. Lieberman obviously isn't about the Justice Alito vote, but a multitude of things - most notably carrying the water for Bushco. We need two things in the Senate right now, more votes for a Democratic Majority Leader and Democrats that don't carry the water for an unpopular Republican administration that has not yet proven they can effectively govern. In any case, its worth the read and check out the blog Kos links to.

Getting even and shutting up

2006-02-22T22:45:00.000-05:00

I know that we 'Murkins spend too much time with our noses in our own newspapers and don't pay enough attention to what else is going on in the world. So let me see if I can even report this correctly: 1,600 female workers in two UK hospitals win an equal pay settlement of 300 million pounds--and they don't want to talk about it. This settlement (not an award) included back pay since 1997 and now includes a pay structure equal to men's. No one wants to make a national issue of it, the union is keeping mum and not pushing for equal pay for other female employees, despite the fact that "the pay gap between men and women is actually growing." The women involved in the settlement that were interviewed in the Guardian article are jubilant at their own good fortune, but circumspect about how it may translate to other workers. The article implies that the disparity in pay between male and female workers is huge enough that if word gets out, it might crash the system. Don't take my word for it; read it over and tell me what you think. Perhaps it's the very idea of universal health care and the employment structures it might necessitate that makes me confused.
(hat tip: Josef K over in the postless comment thread of Twisty's blog.)

73 gigs

2006-02-21T11:08:00.000-05:00

Bad news, boys: the RIAA says that ripping CDs for use on an mp3 player is not necessarily "fair use". In their recent filing, they also said that "Similarly, creating a back-up copy of a music CD is not a non-infringing use....". So whatever good reason you had for that external hard drive, it's time to come up with an even better reason.

On the other hand, this man can say anything he wants

2006-02-10T10:36:00.000-05:00

Did you know that Barack Obama has a podcast? I haven't tuned in yet, but I'm thrilled. I wonder if the sound quality is good enough to distract me at the gym when I'm on the hamster wheel. This man (if we're lucky) is the future of the Democratic party.

And did I mention how I shook his hand once?

Oh, Bill. We'd love you even more if you'd just stop talking.

2006-02-09T16:56:00.000-05:00

How is it that our Mr. Clinton can be so energizing and so aggravating at the exact same time? This is from the NYTimes.com's report of Coretta Scott King's funeral.

Of the four presidents, Mr. Clinton was the obvious favorite of the crowd. A huge cheer went up as he reached the open area near Mrs. King's coffin, and the crowd gave him a thunderous standing ovation when he approached the microphone with his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Clinton was followed by the far more formal remarks of Senator Clinton, who until then had stood silently nodding her head as he spoke.

Mr. Clinton began by saying, "I'm honored to be here with my president and my former presidents." Then he paused briefly and gestured toward Mrs. Clinton, his unspoken words seeming to suggest that he wanted to say future president, too. When the crowd began cheering, Mr. Clinton laughed and said, "No, no, no."

Can there now be even a smidgen of doubt that she's going for it? In my perfect world, there would be no war, we'd use budget surpluses to shrink the deficit, give everybody health care, and I'd probably vote for Hillary in a primary. In the real world, I don't think she can win. If Bill keeps talking about it, the Dems might be paralyzed by the idea long enough to lose another election. Why can't he just stop talking already? It's the same problem that Gore and then Kerry had: you can't win with him, and you can't win without him.

Quote

2006-02-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

Working at home, and having an IFC program about the days of punk - I heard this

Hardcore is as American as fake wars, baseball, and apple pie.

- Henry Rollins

Going too far

2006-02-03T11:41:00.000-05:00

See? It's February, and still the "choice" posts roll in. Yes, here at the Tally Ho we will keep blogging these issues all 12 months of the year!

Annoying detritus from work: Catholics for a Free Choice has just released a survey which shows 35% of Catholic hospitals in New York, South Carolina, California, and Washington State do not provide emergency contraception (those states have "EC in the ER" laws, saying that hospitals must provide EC to female sexual assault victims upon request. (It does make me pleased that almost 3/4ths have SANE-trained nurses who specialize in collection kits and testing/treatment for sexual assault. If you have the time, it's worth reading the full report.) This is relevant to everyone in those states because as hospitals consolidate, the closest/only hospital may be a Catholic hospital, even if the patients and medical staff are not Catholic. In many cases, the hospital's stated EC policy diverged from the day-to-day availability. Again, it's worth remembering that EC will inhibit ovulation, but not implantation, which puts it on par with other hormonal birth control (page 3). (found via Kaiser DWHPR)

Next, a report from San Antonio saying that Mexican pharmacies are stocking EC and customers are "mainly young, even teenaged, women who buy the pill, and that some of those women are from the United States." Gasp! They're buying a drug that an FDA committee has already recommended for over-the-counter use! And they get it so easily! With only a "short trip" across an INTERNATIONAL BORDER! (I'm sorry, I can't restrain the sarcasm.) Which do you think is easier: going to the drugstore down the street for condoms and foam, or crossing the border to Mexico to get EC? My opinion is that if teen girls are taking the trip to Mexico for EC they probably need it to avoid pregnancy (duh) when they can't find a confidential doctor and/or aren't in relationships where they can negotiate condom use. Anyone who's taken EC knows that it is a last-resort drug with some pretty nasty side effects. Perhaps someone who lives in that part of the world could clue me in on how much of a short/easy trip this might actually be.

Finally, AlterNet reports that some female soldiers have died of dehydration because they are afraid of being assaulted or raped by male soldiers if they use the latrine after dark.

[former Abu Ghraib commander, Col. Janis] Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

This kind of puts to rest the theory that women shouldn't be in combat because male soldiers would be so devastated if they got hurt. It's a pretty horrible story. (Hat tip: Phoenix Rising.)

Comments issues

2006-01-30T00:23:00.000-05:00

Please look to Blogger from here on out, not to Haloscan... it will be leaving us very soon. I realize that I've scared all the trolls away with my last post, but I promise that if you leave me a note, I won't send you to jail.

Intent to Annoy

2006-01-29T11:32:00.000-05:00

I understand that some of the trolls over at Bitch's and Twisty's are getting obnoxious, and that we all hate getting spam, but please, folks, don't help. CNET reports that early in January, Bush signed a law (the Violence against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act) which includes a prohibition against sending annoying material over the Internet without disclosing one's identity.

The FAQ offered is pretty comprehensive, including the the question of whether this should be the province of state or federal regulation. The law does state that one must intend to annoy the target, which means that a few of the people I'd really most like to shackle would be untouched. Sigh.

Blogging for Choice

2006-01-22T15:18:00.000-05:00

NARAL has declared, on their Bush v. Choice blog, that this is "Blogging for Choice" month. That's well and good; we blog about choice over here quite a bit. Today is the 33rd anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision on Roe v. Wade, and so lots of people are amped up and putting in their two cents.

I am a little amused by the "Blogging for Choice" label. If all we're meant to talk about today is abortion rights, shouldn't we be declaring it "Blogging on Abortion" month? Perhaps that's too direct, or the choicers might feel that it appears they are pressuring folks to get abortions. That's laughable, but abortion-rights advocates and opponents accuse one another of some pretty insane things. I often ask my students what peer pressure is, and whether or not there's a kid in the lunchroom pointing his finger in everyone's face and saying, "Go buy sneakers just like mine. Then go have casual sex and spend your lunch money on pot." They laugh and say no, but then they usually give an intelligent description of all the subtle ways kids pressure one another in middle school. Similarly, I do believe that there's a lot of pressure on some women to get abortions, and we need to address that honestly before we can delve into the deeper moral and cultural implications of abortion. Everyone in this country can agree that it's wrong to force a woman to have an abortion when she doesn't want one--this means that we should look carefully at what cultural forces are coercing women into having abortions about which they feel deeply ambivalent. (Hint: it's not the abortion clinic workers.)

I work in several middle schools over the course of any given year, and I was in the teachers' lounge of a new school a while back when I met Mr. R. He didn't ask me anything about who I was or what classroom I was working in (I think he assumed that I was a substitute teacher), but we traded names and started to make some light conversation. I remarked that the students seemed to be getting rebellious with the warmer weather, and he jumped into a diatribe about how students today are so much worse than students of twenty years ago: disrespectful, irresponsible, no sense of community, etc. Then he leveled a finger at me and said, "You know why they're like this? It's because of abortion." He explained that millions of babies were being killed each year (actually, according to the CDC, the number of abortions is much less than he presumed) and that these kids instinctively knew that adults were "murdering" their siblings, that it was a war on children, and that his students were angry and getting revenge because of it. I raised my eyebrows and asked if any of his students had brought this up with him. He said, "They KNOW! They just know!" and continued to rant a little bit more. Then, abruptly, he looked at his watch and noticed it was time to pick up his class in the cafeteria. He stuck out his hand and told me how nice it was to have met me, and left. Another teacher had told me, just that morning, that she was having an abortion for medical reasons that week and that we'd have to change our schedule. She grieved deeply about it, and I was grateful that she was not in the room for Mr. R's pronouncement. I can hope that it's not a frequent topic of conversation with him, but I suspect it is.

But wait! We're blogging about choice, not abortion! (I got distracted, sorry.) As a post-Roe baby, I've never felt any suppressed rage towards adults my parents' age. I remember my mother telling about the friend who stayed on their couch for a few weeks during the first year of my parents' marriage, because she needed to get money to travel to New York for an abortion. It never occurred to me to be upset that she didn't have a baby who would then grow up to be my colleague. I never felt sad to think that there weren't more kids in my kindergarten class because some women the year before I was born had chosen to have an abortion. When I was nine or ten, I decided for a while that I wanted an older sibling, but I never quizzed my parents on their use of birth control or chastised them for not trying harder to first have a baby that wasn't me. (My desire for an older sibling didn't resurface until I was 23, and it still didn't occur to me to question any of those things.) When I force myself to consider that women were having abortions at the same time my mother was pregnant with me, I can't feel any grief for the loss of those pregnancies. Entirely the opposite: I feel comforted and reassured that my parents wanted me before I was even born. I've never asked how hard my particular parents wished or hoped for a baby when they made me, but I know that at the very least when my mother was pregnant she chose to bear me. I wasn't forced upon anyone, or cursed as a burden, or wished dead. That's a pretty good minimum standard to give our children, I think.

Many of my friends are just beginning their childbearing years. Some of their pregnancies are planned well in advance and devoutly wished for. Others arrived unexpectedly but by the time the baby was born, the woman was able to meet her child with joy and enthusiasm. I watch my friends raise their kids and I'm amazed when I see all the patience and love and time they are able to give. I'm privileged to spend time with these kids occasionally. And it gives me peace to know that all these parents made the choice to have this particular child. Sometimes reproductive endocrinologists and birth families played a role in making that choice. Sometimes birth control and abortion play a role, as well. Let me say this: It makes me thrilled to see a parent dote on his two kids, instead of trying to corral or ignore a pack of six. It makes me thrilled that the pregnant woman who feels angry, resentful and powerless is able to have an abortion instead of bearing children and directing that hate towards them every day. I also see some parents, and some women who have abortions, whom I suspect have made the wrong choice. I can't control that; it's not my choice to make. I hope and pray that every woman choosing abortion has made the decision in peace with her God or her own code of ethics, and that every woman bearing a child has been somewhat thoughtful about whether she's able to handle the responsibility of parenthood. I wish that every man impregnating a woman was committed enough to her that he could join her in these decisions. At the end of the day, every child deserves to have parents who say, "Welcome. We're so glad you're part of our family." I choose to live in a world like that. And even though it makes me tired occasionally, I choose to continue working for abortion rights and continue supporting parents until we get a world like that.

Lie to Me

2006-01-17T23:02:00.000-05:00

First, please go check out Pandagon's coverage of Virginia Delegate David Englin's (D-45) speech on gay rights. The text of the speech is inspiring. Then go check out the man's political website. If this man can get elected in Virginia, what's our excuse in this big blue state?

Next, lookee! It's "Blogging for Choice" month. Of course, I'm blogging for choice every month over here, so I'm not sure what to make of this assignment. The recent NYTimes.com article "Some Abortion Foes Forgo Politics for Quiet Talk" is piquing my interest, both because of my personal experience and because the "Quiet Talk" the NYTimes purports to document is actually a loud and active political movement.

Like many crisis pregnancy centers, A Woman's Choice is designed to look and feel like a medical center, not a religion-based organization with an agenda. Becky Edmondson, the executive director, said the center chose the look and name to reach women who were bombarded with pressures to abort and might think they had no other choice.

If callers ask how much the center charges to perform an abortion, Lisa Arnold, a counselor and leader of the postabortion group, said: "I say, 'It changes, but why don't you come in for an ultrasound and we'll talk about it.' You don't want to deceive them, but you want a chance to talk to them." Once women come to the center, staff members - who oppose abortion even in cases involving rape and incest - encourage them to make further appointments, and refer them to doctors who share the center's views on abortion.

I've never seen "crisis pregnancy centers" admit in print to lying about the services they offer to women, but I do remember vividly a health fair I attended in the 'burbs one summer afternoon. I was in the basement of a church, next to a Latina woman from one of these anti-abortion pregnancy groups. We traded brochures and tried to network a little, but found we had a huge language barrier. She spoke halting English and I have less than 200 words of Spanish (my grammar is so abominable that I can usually speak only in nouns). However, she pointed carefully to the required baby-peeking-from-under-blanket pic on the front of her brochure, then explained slowly how women will call asking for abortion services and they will say, "Yes, we do that. Come in in two weeks for appointment." Then, they "show videos" and talk to the woman about her baby. The brochure also counseled abstinence for single women and natural family planning* after birth for married couples. This "colleague" of mine was smiling and very, very proud of the work that she did. The fact that she said it slowly, in such broken English that I ended up helping her with words, made it all the more excruciating.

Crisis pregnancy centers are dangerous to pregnant women because they will lie about how far along the pregnancy is, attempt to stall women until it's too late to obtain a legal abortion, and bait-and-switch women in regards to the care they can receive. (Earlier abortions are easier, cheaper, and medically safer. To stall a woman who has made up her mind is pretty idiotic on several counts.) But it's a small inconvenience compared to how they treat women after an abortion, even as they claim compassion towards her.

A Woman's Choice links the church [Southeast Christian Church: attendance 18,000/budget $25M)] to a national network of crisis pregnancy centers and postabortion groups that share marketing strategies, legal advice and literature emphasizing what they say are the harmful effects of abortion - including increased risk of breast cancer and a psychological condition called postabortion syndrome, which are considered scientifically unsupported by the National Cancer Institute and the American Psychological Association.

To "post-abortive" women, they claim that any negative psychological experiences are the result of the abortion they foolishly chose to have. They run support groups where women name their aborted pregnancies, read them poems and buy them baby clothes. This is the real political work of the center: to mainstream the idea that abortion is always damaging, whereas having a baby will always be fulfilling, and that "post-abortive" women can expect depression, anxiety disorders, and breast cancer as a result of their misguided choice. By getting "recovered" women to mobilize and tell their stories (over, and over, and over) they can shift the opinions of men and those 60% of American women who haven't had an abortion to believe that the procedure is damaging or dangerous. They can convince women who have had an abortion that they are mentally unstable and in need of ongoing care. And they don't require anti-choice laws, as they plan to shame and stigmatize pro-choice doctors, politicians, and women back into the cultural closet.

The title of the article is the most damning bit of this very biased piece. How does any of this equate with "forgoing politics"? Some workers in these crisis pregnancy centers are doing this work out of a genuine belief that abortion is immoral, whereas some might have a peculiar interest in raising the birth rate among certain populations or simply keeping women in their place by forcing them into their "natural calling". But in terms of cultural impact, their motives don't matter. CPC's like "A Woman's Choice" are engaging in widespread, nonstop social propaganda. They lie to their ~~patients~~ clients. They go against established science and threaten cancer. They victimize and pathologize women who choose abortion, instead of accepting them as moral agents. It must be politics, since it sure as hell ain't science.

further reading:
abortion clinic days (beware the comments, they've gotten vitriolic)
Exhale (nonpartisan talk line)
I'm Not Sorry (the opposite of "post abortion syndrome")
Feminists for Life (a very slick anti-choice website)

_______
*I'm not against natural family planning in theory. However, it takes training by a medical professional and several months of charting before skipping the backup methods. Counseling this method to post-partum women without regular cycles is, to me, hideously irresponsible.

Cut or uncut?

2006-01-11T22:21:00.000-05:00

The Alito hearings are making me sick, so I'm looking for news that's closer to home, and have suddenly found that circumcision is the other big issue this month. Those of you who don't hang out with liberal chick bloggers may not know of the blogfight a few weeks ago between flea and frog over the issue of infant circumcision. Flea took her sons to a bris and blogged about it, frog is against any kind of child harm and considers circumcision to be such, frog de-linked flea and made a lot of noise about it, flea then removed her post (in contrition? spite? who knows?) and sadly ended a real-life friendship. I didn't think anyone paid attention to those blogrolls anyway.

My middle schoolers have various opinions when I explain circumcision, ranging from scorn for the procedure to fear of foreskin infection to total and noisy indifference. Dan Savage did the debate in his book "The Kid". Conversations with any male foolish enough to engage me in discussion about sex have not produced any strong opinions for or against the procedure. And despite Charlotte's shock in Sex and the City, the females I've spoken to seem pretty tolerant of either, um, model. That's why I was a little surprised to see frog and flea fall out so heavily. Now, I read that even Mayor Bloomberg is caught up in the fray.

The NY Health Department is trying to decide whether--or how--to restrict the metzitzah b'peh among Hasidic Jews. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is claiming that the mayor let the issue die down before the election, then raised the issue again afterwards. The Health Department has solid reasons to restrict the practice--at least three infants have contracted herpes, one fatally, another suffering brain damage. However: "The mayor and his health commissioner said they would continue to study the matter but that they would not ban the practice, with Mr. Frieden saying that such a ban could be seen as interfering with religious freedom, and that a ban would be unenforceable anyway." The publicity these stories have generated seem to embarrass the Hasidic community, who heard phrases like "constitutional separation of church and state" to imply more support for--or less scrutiny of--the practice than what they actually received after the election. Lots of Gentiles are suddenly weighing in, with Christopher Hitchens from Slate saying, "I'll trade him his stupid prohibitionist ban if he states clearly that it is the government's business to protect children from religious fanatics." Eh, we're bartering laws now? He must be from Chicago.

Among my breeding friends, opinions are mixed; some have, some haven't circumcised their boys. (Please keep in mind that the risks of circumcision in a hospital setting are minimal, and since none of my friends are Orthodox Jews, rabbis did not hold any sharp instruments near their sons.) I'm wondering whether this debate has always simmered, or whether my generation has just got a little too much time on its hands presently.

"Mental defectives"

2006-01-09T23:04:00.000-05:00

Don't veterans have enough to worry about already? scottscidmore points us to a recent article in CQ.com which discusses the Transportation Security Administration's desire to scour DoD and VA databases for names of "mental defectives". Weeks before Rigoberto Alpizar was shot down on the runway for claiming he had a bomb, the TSA was soliciting contractors to gather the names of veterans with mental health problems for a special watch list. It's unclear how they would gather the information and what flight restrictions would be placed on the list. Lest you assume that they're specifically targeting veterans, the TSA's notice says that they plan to add two new data sources each year; the DoD and VA records may just be the easiest to obtain. Under the TSA's plans, I'm not sure how long it would be before the mental health history of the general public would come under scrutiny, and what criteria would be used to determine whether someone is safe to fly. Would my past prescription for Zoloft disqualify me at some point? Airport food is terrible. I'd rather take the train anyway.

I've never heard any evidence (or even any urban legends) that combat-fatigued veterans are posing a risk to airplanes or their passengers. This database idea is ludicrous.

Free booze

2006-01-08T11:21:00.000-05:00

Via Damien's Spot: The Canadian Medical Association Journal just published a study that suggests free alcohol makes homeless people healthier and safer. The tiny study gave 17 participants in Ottowa a "small amount" (up to 15 glasses of wine or sherry a day) of alcohol in return for the opportunity to provide them with basic health care.

After an average of 16 months, the number of times participants got in trouble with the law had fallen 51 per cent from the three years before they joined the program, and hospital emergency room visits were down 36 per cent.

...The report showed participants in the program drank less than they did before signing up, and their sleep, hygiene, nutrition and health levels all improved.

The per capita cost of around $C771 (US $665) a month was partially offset by monthly savings of $C96 (US $82) a month in emergency services, $C150 (US $129) in hospital care and $C201 (US $173) in police services per person.

The report was unclear on whether the per capita cost included the medical care participants received, or just the costs of booze and staffing. One of the study authors warns that he "agree[s] 100 per cent that abstinence is the most appropriate route," and so forth, but that for a subset of folks who will not stop drinking this may be an effective way to provide care. I don't think it will ever really happen, since the idea of giving alcoholics more alcohol is just too counterintuitive--and to a lot of folks, immoral. But from another direction, it makes sense: people who are homeless are almost always that way because they are in crisis and can't meet their basic needs. For an addicted person, that crisis is their addiction and their basic need is their drug. If you meet that need, it stands to reason that they would have a better chance of being successful in other parts of their life.

I'd be interested to see if a control group that was somehow persuaded to spend equal time at the research location fared just as well. For the drunks outside my office, one of the unmet needs is shelter; they don't have anyplace in the neighborhood that will allow them to linger, or even come in to use the bathroom. The result is that I will occasionally find steaming piles of human shit next to my car. I'm not interested in giving anyone free booze, but since they're in the neighborhood (the cheap liquor store is two doors down from my office) it would benefit EVERYONE to meet a few of their basic needs, and it's time we started getting creative again about how to do that.

hiatus

2005-12-28T23:23:00.000-05:00

Just a brief one. Subscribe to the RSS feed so you'll be the first of the cool kids to know that we're back. And go read Elwood in the mean time; he's got some good stuff up lately.

Vonnegut on anti-intellectualism in Washington

2005-12-19T10:22:00.000-05:00

He writes in an article for In These Times:

The boisterous guessers are still in charge—the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on.

Please, don’t you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell.

NY Transit talks and the "unborn"

2005-12-16T11:12:00.000-05:00

What article was I reading again? The NYTimes report this morning on transit union negotiations in New York city (written before anything was decided) had a strange pair of quotes:

"The M.T.A.'s long-term financial outlook, like every business and government in this country, is seriously clouded by the extraordinary growth in pensions and health-care costs," Mr. Kalikow said. "It might be easy to ignore this fact, but that would be a disservice to both our riders and the city, now and still unborn."

Mr. Toussaint portrayed the authority's proposals as repugnant because they would make life worse for future generations of workers.

"They have to get away from the notion that in this round of bargaining the T.W.U. will give up its young, will give up its unborn," he said.

Kalikow is chairman of the transportation authority; Toussaint is the union president. I want to know: when did all this language about "the unborn" trickle down into union talks? What message are they trying to get across? To a certain extent, I expect rhetoric about "the unborn" when at work or talking about abortion issues. But unborn subway riders? Unborn transit workers? C'mon, people.

Russ

2005-12-08T13:21:00.000-05:00

This from JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer:

WASHINGTON - House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement Thursday to extend the USA Patriot Act, the government's premier anti-terrorism law, before it expires at the end of the month. But a Democratic senator threatened a filibuster to block the compromise.

"I will do everything I can, including a filibuster, to stop this Patriot Act conference report, which does not include adequate safeguards to protect our constitutional freedoms," said Sen. Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record), D-Wis., who was the only senator to vote against the original version of the Patriot Act.

The House and Senate delegates to the Conference Committee have achieved a "compromise" on the Patriot Act which once again sells out our fundamental freedoms, our privacy, and our right to be presumed innocent and not surveiled constantly by the government. The most controversial parts of the Act will be authorized for another four years: provisions authorizing roving wiretaps and permitting secret warrants for books, records and other items from businesses, hospitals and organizations such as libraries. Most of the rest of the Act would become permanent. It is true that some sections of the are necessary and good and removed an unreasonable wall that prevented the sharing of information between various government bureucracies. But many provisions of this law are unecessarily intrusive, don't really make us any safer, and violate any sane reading of the Constitution.

Proponents argue that we need such government power to protect us against the threat of foreign and domestic terrorism, and that we should trust them to be circumspect about how these powers are used. But look at what our government has been doing: holding people for years without charges or evidence. Kidnapping people and sending them off to secret prisons or handing them over to Syrian or Egyptian secret police to be tortured. Putting people on trial as "terrorists" with only their political and religious beliefs as evidence.

For anyone who has actually lived on this planet and paid attention, the question of human nature has been difinitively answered, at least in practice: humans are vile and depraved, not inherently "good." If you give a group of people too much power, they will use it to dominate and harm others. There can be no "trust" when it comes to goverment. The only way governments can operate without oppression are transparency, checks and balances, and the rule of law. Nobody should be given a "free hand" to fight terrorists or to do anything else. Ever. The law exists to bind everyone down, to hobble them and prevent them from acting alone to dominate others.

When you compare the number of people killed by authoritarian regimes over the past century with those killed by terrorists, it becomes very clear which evil we need to fear more. I'll take my chances with the terrorists rather than trusting my "safety" to a totalitarian daddy state.

And yet, when the time of crisis came, the checks and balances were voted away in favor of "safety" by a vote of 99-1. Only one man chose liberty over security. Rumor has it he's running for President in 2008.

Consider this an early endorsement.

"We regard the question as live and open" (p.17)

2005-12-07T10:49:00.000-05:00

I have been wanting all week to post this with some insightful analysis, but I find myself with little time (now that I'm constantly tweaking my RSS feed). Here's the .pdf of Alito's 1985 memo regarding Thornburgh v. ACOG. The cover of the memo states in a note from Charles Fried, "I need hardly say how sensitive this material is, and ask that it have no wider circulation." The text of the memo is fascinating for its legalese, and the logic is extremely chilling. I also love finding the little typos in the proposed draft of the introduction, just because in my opinion it's always nice to see the opposition mis-spell things.

Must go work now.

Well, that's a relief

2005-11-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

I haven't been able to get this odd story out of my brain this weekend.

The Kaiser Daily Report*, always a useful source of information, reports this weekend that an ordinance in Honolulu which bans aerial signs has drawn the ire--and the lawsuits--of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. This California-based antiabortion group's "most effective method of advocacy is flying banners with pictures of aborted fetuses above beaches," according to their lawyer. Which strikes me as a little odd, because from the Chicago shoreline, these signs are almost illegible. In my volunteer efforts, I've seen many bloody fetus pictures, but from a distance of several hundred feet, these posters are even less persuasive. However, when you consider that that the CBR's other resources include e-cards (graphic link), this may indeed be their most effective tactic. In which case, we can all breathe a little easier.

It should be noted that Hawaii places no state restrictions on abortion, but does allow pharmacists to dispence emergency contraception "behind the counter" to patients. No word yet on whether or not this had decreased HI's abortion rate. (Thanks to KAH for the link.) I would be unsurprised if the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform takes full credit for any decrease that might occur, no matter how illegible their towed airplane banners might be.
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*Kaiser recently changed the name of this report from the "Daily Reproductive Health Report" to the "Daily Women's Health Policy Report". I'm pissy about this change for several reasons, not the least of which is that we may no longer get interesting articles about sperm production in the future.

the disappeared

2005-11-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

Padilla was finally indicted today. It's something, at least. Until recently the Administration was arguing that it had the right to hold a US citizen indefinitely, without trial, as an "unlawful combatant" without having to present evidence to anyone. Under those rules, of course, the government would have the right to kidnap any one of us and hold us incommunicado - we're not enemy combatants, but if the government doesn't have to show evidence, it doesn't need evidence. They can come in the middle of the night and take you away without explanation, yes, Mr. Durbin, just like in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union or Saddam's Iraq (or, increasingly, the new Iraq as well). So charging Padilla is a step back from the brink, but considering everything else that's coming to light, it's not enough.

I don't even have the words for what's happening to our country, so I'm just going to have to direct you to a few people who have been able to tell it better than I can. The news about what I've been calling America's "Gulag Archipeligo" for the past two years just keeps getting worse. And in the name of maintaining this national abomination, Congress has moved to strip us of our most basic legal rights. From the Tribune:

Senate may rethink detainee rights
Guantanamo measure immediately challenged

By Frank Davies
Knight Ridder/Tribune
Published November 12, 2005

WASHINGTON -- For almost eight centuries the "great writ" of habeas corpus has been a bedrock principle of English and American law, from the Magna Carta to today's jails and courts. It's the means for a prisoner to contest his imprisonment before a judge.

That's one reason legal experts were stunned when the Senate, after an hour of debate, voted Thursday to overturn the Supreme Court's extension of habeas corpus protection to 500-plus detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

Opponents vowed Friday to fight the measure, and negotiators on the issue said the Senate may reconsider it early next week. The White House, which previously has opposed oversight of Guantanamo by Congress and the courts, supports the Senate action, spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo said Friday.

Under the provision, proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo no longer would be allowed to challenge their detentions in federal court. Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and many have been held for almost four years without charges. . .

Among the many problems with this policy, the biggest one is that without the ability to challenge their detention in court, innocent detainees have no way to get out of prison. I'm not talking here about detainees who merely claim they are innocent, I'm talking obout people whom the military's own tribunals found innocent months ago - people who were detained in Afghanistan becuse they were non-Afghan and Pakistani bounty hunters wanted the $5,000 reward for turning in "al Quaeda members."

Read this piece. Seriously, read it right now. The kicker:

The government thinks it is perfectly acceptable not to inform counsel or the court when it determines that detainees are not enemy combatants, even though the allegation that they are enemy combatants is central to the justification for holding them. They seem to think, in addition, that it is acceptable to mislead counsel and the Court about the status of those detainees. They also think it is fine to keep those detainees at Guantanamo, to chain detainees who are not enemy combatants to the floor, and to deny them the right to communicate with anyone in the outside world, including relatives who think they are dead, and to confiscate things like photographs of their families as contraband. They claim that they cannot discuss the efforts they are making to place those detainees, and that they cannot release those detainees until those efforts, whatever they are, are completed, which will be "'soon' in kind of the hopeful sense of the word."
. . .
This is shameful. We paid Pakistani bounty hunters for captives. I'm sure there are reasons for doing this, but it obviously creates incentives for bounty hunters to claim that people who have done nothing wrong are terrorists; and if we, as a nation, are prepared to create those perverse incentives, then we, as a nation, should be prepared to take action when we realize that we have wrongly imprisoned someone as a result. (In this case, I think that we should find some non-precedent-setting way of offering them asylum.) We took these men captive, and held them for years after we realized that they had done nothing wrong. We have stolen years of their lives, and they are still in prison to this day.

Now we have stripped them of the right to take their case to the courts and make it heard. We have said, in essence, that we will simply trust the government to do the right thing. We should not trust any government in this way, and certainly not this one, which has already shown a truly shocking disdain both for the legal rights of anyone who falls into its hands, innocent or guilty, and for the separation of powers; and an equally shocking unwillingness to even begin to police itself.

Speaking of unlawful imprisonment, I've been yelling for years about the existence of an American "Gulag Archipeligo" of secret prisons aroung the world, which has now be confirmed by Washington Post:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; Page A01

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

And this is what happens to the people who stay in our custody. At least as troubling has been the policy of "Extraordinary Rendition" under which suspects in American custody are taken by a "Special Removal Unit" to countries where torture is routinely practiced, and handed over with the understanding that any "intelligence" gained will be shared. From the New Yorker:

On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.”

Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man’s brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.
During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of “the Special Removal Unit.” The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board.

Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, “just began beating on me.” They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. “Not even animals could withstand it,” he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. “You just give up,” he said. “You become like an animal.”

A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism.

As that little vignette reveals, the problem with torture is that people eventually confess to whatever you want them to, in order to stop the torture. That's not real useful if you're trying to get actual information out of people. But it's real convienient if you're trying to throw together a bogus case for war:

A few months after September 11th, the U.S. gained custody of its first high-ranking Al Qaeda figure, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi. He had run bin Laden’s terrorist training camp in Khalden, Afghanistan, and was detained in Pakistan. Zacarias Moussaoui, who was already in U.S. custody, and Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, had both spent time at the Khalden camp. At the F.B.I.’s field office in New York, Jack Cloonan, an officer who had worked for the agency since 1972, struggled to maintain control of the legal process in Afghanistan. C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents were vying to take possession of Libi. Cloonan, who worked with Dan Coleman on anti-terrorism cases for many years, said he felt that “neither the Moussaoui case nor the Reid case was a slam dunk.” He became intent on securing Libi’s testimony as a witness against them. He advised his F.B.I. colleagues in Afghanistan to question Libi respectfully, “and handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” He recalled, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’ ”

Cloonan’s F.B.I. colleagues advised Libi of his rights and took turns with C.I.A. agents in questioning him. After a few days, F.B.I. officials felt that they were developing a good rapport with him. The C.I.A. agents, however, felt that he was lying to them, and needed tougher interrogation.

To Cloonan’s dismay, the C.I.A. reportedly rendered Libi to Egypt. He was seen boarding a plane in Afghanistan, restrained by handcuffs and ankle cuffs, his mouth covered by duct tape. Cloonan, who retired from the F.B.I. in 2002, said, “At least we got information in ways that wouldn’t shock the conscience of the court. And no one will have to seek revenge for what I did.” He added, “We need to show the world that we can lead, and not just by military might.”

After Libi was taken to Egypt, the F.B.I. lost track of him. Yet he evidently played a crucial background role in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s momentous address to the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003, which argued the case for a preëmptive war against Iraq. In his speech, Powell did not refer to Libi by name, but he announced to the world that “a senior terrorist operative” who “was responsible for one of Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan” had told U.S. authorities that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two Al Qaeda operatives in the use of “chemical or biological weapons.”

Last summer, Newsweek reported that Libi, who was eventually transferred from Egypt to Guantánamo Bay, was the source of the incendiary charge cited by Powell, and that he had recanted. By then, the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had passed and the 9/11 Commission had declared that there was no known evidence of a working relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Dan Coleman was disgusted when he heard about Libi’s false confession. “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq,” he said. “I could have told them that. He ran a training camp. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with Iraq. Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links, but there weren’t any. The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way.”

Most authorities on interrogation, in and out of government, agree that torture and lesser forms of physical coercion succeed in producing confessions. The problem is that these confessions aren’t necessarily true. Three of the Guantánamo detainees released by the U.S. to Great Britain last year, for example, had confessed that they had appeared in a blurry video, obtained by American investigators, that documented a group of acolytes meeting with bin Laden in Afghanistan. As reported in the London Observer, British intelligence officials arrived at Guantánamo with evidence that the accused men had been living in England at the time the video was made. The detainees told British authorities that they had been coerced into making false confessions.

So there you have it, folks. The steady erosion of our constitutional and human rights at the hands of the Bush Administration, to the deep and profound disgrace of our country. A big player in this slow death of our freedom has been a gentleman by the name of Lindsay Graham, who hypocritically votes to ban the use of torture while making sure that America's detainees are deprived of the legal protections necessary to prevent it. Show him some love, people.

Don't some of these people swear an oath to preserve and protect the constitution? And if they break that oath, isn't that grounds for impeachment?

Guess who's moving in now?

2005-11-11T09:42:00.000-05:00

I'm always tickled when my little town makes the NYTimes. This week the news is about the proliferating suburban coyote in Cook County. Yes! It's a boon for the topsy-turvy ecosystem of the suburbs, where Canadian geese were threatening to bury the landscape (literally). Lawrence Downes writes:

Here is what is really strange: Humans have barely noticed. Egg-rustling, night-howling varmints are raising litters in storm drains, golf courses, parks and cemeteries. They are sometimes heard but seldom seen. In cities, they keep to themselves and work nights. There are coyotes, Professor Gehrt says, living in the Chicago Loop.

You could call that sneaky. Or you could call it discreet. Professor Gehrt said that one surprising discovery of the study was how little danger the coyote poses to his unwitting human neighbors. "The risk is quite low, as long as we don't monkey with their behavior," he said. If you assert yourself when you see one - by yelling, cursing and throwing sticks - it will respect your space and lie low. The coyote's tendency to avoid people - and more important, raccoons - has made rabies a nonissue, Professor Gehrt said, with only one case of coyote-to-human transmission ever recorded.

Coyotes will behave, he said, as long as people do not feed them. Leave nothing tasty outside in an open trash can or food dish, and definitely nothing small and fluffy at the end of a leash. Professor Gehrt says with confidence that the sensible suburban toddler has little to fear from the suburban coyote, but he will not say the same for the suburban Shih Tzu.

The Tribune this week is also running a series on alleys, and alley wildlife. They make no mention of coyotes in the city (as for them living in the Loop, I'll believe it when I hear it). But as much as the city dwellers try to ignore and the suburbanites try to control our landscapes to death, there are always animals and plantlife to outsmart us. I love it. As for the Shih Tzus: those who insist on keeping the foolishly-bred dogs should monitor them. I still believe that rowdy teen boys are more a risk to my pets than coyotes would be, but hey--that's because I have smart pets.

Paleo

2005-11-08T13:04:00.000-05:00

Seventy-three years ago today Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President of the United States. A few words from the man to warm this Paleoliberal's heart, courtesy of DailyKos:

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward."
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"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government."
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"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little."
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Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
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Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
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Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
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Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.
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The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
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True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
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If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

Here's to regaining our sovereign control over the government in the near future.