IN THE PAST WEEK, I have experienced, full force, what it feels like to live in a car-centered culture without a car. I have begged bus drivers to drop me off at the bookstore where I work -- which is on the bus route, but is not a scheduled stop -- and been flatly turned down. I also had one bus driver agree to drop me off at that stop, but charge me a premium for doing so. Once I was on my way home to call a cab after being told by two bus drivers that they would not let me off at my work stop and by sheer chance my ex-husband was driving by: He stopped, and when I told him what had happened, he was nice enough to drive me to work that morning.

Once at work, I have gone from co-worker to co-worker, trying to find one whose shift ended around the time mine did and who might be willing to drive me home. People have been kind, but having to rely on the kindness of strangers makes me feel like Blanche DuBois, and that is not a comfortable feeling.

If I lived in Europe, I wouldn't need to have a car to get through the routines of my daily life. I have been thinking more and more about how hard this country makes it for its own people just to live their lives, to get to work, to the supermarket, to do anything, really. It's truly absurd when you have to consider quitting your job because you have no way to get to your job.

It's not just the car issue, either. From health care to child care, every aspect of living that requires access to practical resources or services is a hurdle in America. I am a month away from qualifying for my company's health insurance; if I leave now because I don't have a car, I will lose that health insurance. But without a job that supplies benefits, I cannot afford to buy health insurance on my own.

I am relatively lucky in that I do not, anymore, have to face the problem of child care. Those families with small children, however, have to figure out how to find affordable child care so they can take a job and at the same time they must figure out how to pay for that child care with the jobs available to them.

Europeans, by contrast, have developed a social model that identifies those things that are most valuable to the society as a whole and then, as a society, commits to paying for them, so that everyone has access to the tools they need to carry out activities that benefit everyone. And they have been able to do this largely because their financial resources have not been used to pay for huge militaries or constant war.

If Europeans haven't quite built the cooperative commonwealth, what have they built? The EU, writes T.R. Reid, betraying just a hint of patriotic anxiety, already has "a president, a parliament, a constitution, a cabinet, a central bank, a bill of rights, a unified patent office, and a court system with the power to overrule the highest courts of every member nation. It has a 60,000 member army (or 'European Rapid Reaction Force' to be precise) that is independent of NATO or any other outside control. It has its own space agency with 200 satellites in orbit and a project under way to send a European to Mars before Americans get there."

As befits a reporter for the Washington Post, Reid follows the money. Mario Monti is hardly a household name even in London, but as the EU Director General for Competition he scuttled American management idol Jack Welch's biggest deal, a merger between GE (based in Connecticut) and Honeywell (headquarters in New Jersey). Last year Monti slapped Microsoft with a $600 million fine and ordered the firm to rewrite the Windows operating system. Far from the hidebound dirigiste cripple conjured by Mead or Kagan, Reid's "United States of Europe" is an economic superpower fully capable of challenging the USA. Indeed, the euro has already put the dollar in the shade. Reid, who headed Post bureaus in Tokyo and London, really earns his trench coat with his account of the European currency's unexpected triumph (Kissinger was famously dubious; George Will flatly predicted "it will not work").

Europe's other enormous achievement is a half-century of peace on what was once the killing floor of the West. Much of the credit may well be due to the cold war, and a lot of the rest to American aid and protection. Still, the growth of what the Germans call Zivilmacht--harder than Harvard professor Joseph Nye's "soft power," a muscular sense of civil society as a force in world affairs--is one fruit of Europe's long peace. The European social model is the other. Here again it is important to be clear on what that model is not--in a word, socialism. But the breadth of the European consensus, and a sense of how wide the Atlantic has become on these matters, can be seen when Reid quotes the leader of Norway's conservative Christian Democrats: "We have decided that raising a child is real work. And that this work provides value for the whole society. And that the society as a whole should pay for this valuable service. Americans like to talk about family values. We have decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family values." And Norway isn't even in the EU!

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has an article about Steven Levitt, an economist who noticed that a precipitous drop in crime rates in the 1980s occurred 18 years after the Roe v. Wade decision; and that, furthermore, the five states that made abortion legal around 1969 experienced crime rate decreases at that same time.

Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt.

Levitt piously notes that, although this connection between abortion and lower crime rates is unpleasant to think about, we cannot dismiss its validity simply because of that unpleasantness: "Mr. Levitt repeatedly reminds us that economics is about what is true, not what ought to be true."

Of course, there is another truth, of which Levitt, if he is as eminent in his field as the WSJ contends, ought to be aware: Correlation is not causation. Given that women who have abortions are likely to be women (or girls) who do not want children or whose lives are too chaotic or unstable to have children, perhaps the drop in crime rates can be traced to fewer children living under these conditions. I haven't done the research, so I don't know if this is the case, but I am very suspicious of making a causal connection between a societal phenomenon as complex as crime rates, and any one single factor.

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IT'S EASY TO SEE why Pres. Bush and Condoleezza Rice are so hot to have John Bolton in the ambassador to the United Nations spot. He is obviously someone who develops and promotes the intelligence required by the Bush administration's policies, rather than someone who develops and promotes the policies called for by the intelligence.

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CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS like to say that people should take responsibility for their own lives, and their own mistakes. If a teenage girl becomes pregnant, she made a mistake and she should accept the consequences by having the baby. If a man smokes for 30 years and gets lung cancer, he should accept that it's his fault for smoking, not the tobacco companies' fault for selling and advertising the cigarettes. If a person has to work two or three or four jobs just to make ends meet, and ends up with no savings to retire on, that's his or her fault for not getting the right education, not being smart about foreseeing the job trends, not putting money away or spending the money that was put away.

So I would like to know: If an American fighter jet drops a 500-pound laser-guided bomb on one of its own artillery units, causing the deaths of 3 members of that unit and the wounding of 5 others, should the U.S. military order the affected soldiers to keep their mouths shut about what happened? Should the Army give the men who were maimed for life, and the families of the men who died, an official explanation for what occurred, and why? Should an investigation take place, and should those individuals deemed responsible be charged, tried, and punished? Should anyone in the upper echelons of the U.S. military apologize to men like First Lt. John Fernandez, who lost both his feet because of the serious errors and miscommunications that led to a bomb weighing a quarter of a ton being dropped on him by his own military?

One would think all of the above should happen, but none of it did, in what the New York Times described as one of the worst incidents of friendly fire in the war against Iraq.

[Specialist Jeff Coyne, one of the injured soldiers]... received a Purple Heart for his injury. But he says that at the award ceremony at Fort Sill, Okla., his superiors instructed him to keep quiet about his suspicions that he had been bombed by American forces. The Army has never given Mr. Coyne an official explanation for the accident.

"I'm not looking for somebody to spend their life in prison for what happened to me," said Mr. Coyne, a strapping 30-year-old who now walks with a limp and a cane, said in an interview in his modest apartment here. "We just want the truth. We're all Americans. There's no reason to lie to us."

The mistaken attack has remained little more than a footnote in the story of the invasion. No one was charged and no one was disciplined. Soldiers wounded in the bombing, who did not get the investigation report, have been left to trade rumors on its cause. Until recently, some believed the explosion was caused by an Iraqi grenade, while others blamed non-American coalition forces.

Samuel C. Oaks, whose grandson Sgt. Donald S. Oaks Jr., 20, died in the attack, did get the investigation report in late 2003. But for him it is not sufficient. Over the past year, Mr. Oaks has written to the White House, members of Congress and the Air Force demanding that someone be held accountable and that the pilot be required, at least, to apologize. He says he has yet to receive an answer.

"In court, they expect you to show remorse when you've done something wrong," said Mr. Oaks, a disabled welder from outside Erie, Pa. "There's no remorse here."

The incident was investigated, but the investigation was done behind closed doors, while the military did not even publically acknowledge that the mistaken attack had occurred. And when the investigation was done, the official report concluded that no one was to blame.

The principal investigator, Brig. Gen. David M. Edgington of the Air Force, concluded that the fighter pilot - a veteran Air Force instructor whose name has not been released - had rushed his decision to bomb. But the general also concluded that no one had acted criminally, negligently or recklessly, and he recommended that no one be disciplined. The United States Central Command accepted his recommendations.

"There were numerous opportunities for breaking the chain of events leading to the release of this weapon," General Edgington wrote. He declined to be interviewed. So did Gen. T. Michael Moseley of the Air Force, who was in charge of air operations in Iraq in 2003 and signed off on General Edgington's report. A spokeswoman for Fort Sill said no one from the artillery unit was available to comment.

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I THINK Tom DeLay's days are numbered. Consider the signs in this article from yesterday's New York Times.

DeLay's "news conference" to announce that the House Judiciary Committee, on his orders, will be "investigating" the decisions made by the federal judges in the Terri Schiavo case is such a transparent attempt to distract attention from the ethical cesspool he is in that he just looks desperate.

DeLay may say that the criticism of his personal behavior is the "Democrats' agenda," but Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are not Democrats.

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said in an interview with CBS News that it was time for Mr. DeLay to stop blaming Democrats and address the American people.

"Well, that's the famous Hillary Clinton defense," Mr. Gingrich said. "This is the vast left-wing, you know, conspiracy as opposed to her description of a vast right-wing conspiracy."

DeLay needs to sit up and take notice when Newt Gingrich says something like this.

Even the White House is distancing itself from DeLay.

Asked if the majority leader and the president were friends, Mr. McClellan replied that the president does consider Mr. DeLay a friend, but suggested he's more a business associate than a social pal. "I think there are different levels of friendship with anybody."

I think Shakespeare called that "damning with faint praise."

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JOHN BOLTON is a "kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy." He "needs anger management." He "abuses his authority with little people." He is a "serial abuser." Plus, he has been nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and he despises the United Nations.

If all of this is not enough to get the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to oppose Bolton's confirmation, then how badly does a Bush nominee have to behave in order to be considered not qualified to represent the United States in any capacity?

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I CAN'T REALLY WORK myself up enough to blog about the news today, because last night my car was repossessed. I'm on the verge of foreclosure, I'm meeting with my bankruptcy attorney on Wednesday, and I have no idea what's going to happen next. I did pick up a second job -- with my friend, who is giving me 2 or 3 days of work a week working with her cleaning houses. And I still have my bookstore job, where next month I will have health insurance. Yay. Who says the news is all bad?

Best line of the week: Last night, after the repo guys left, my 15-year-old daughter said to me, "How can that be someone's JOB?"

Wow, good question. Wish I had an answer.

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REMEMBER RIGHT AFTER the Iraq invasion, when the newspapers were full of reports that Halliburton and Bechtel had snagged no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure? There was an uproar about it at the time, with critics saying that local Iraqi contractors had been passed over in favor of companies with stronger political connections to the Bush administration. Government officials like Dick Cheney, former head of Halliburton, and top management at the companies involved, struck back, saying Halliburton, Bechtel, and other companies were hand-picked because they were the only ones who could do the job. Iraqi companies with years of engineering and construction experience were not even considered.

[Dick] Cheney said last September [2003] on “Meet the Press,” “Halliburton is a unique kind of company. There are very few companies out there that have the combination of very large engineering construction capability and significant oil-field services.”

Well, now it turns out that water purification, sewage treatment, and electrical facilities that cost the U.S. government millions of dollars to rebuild and get running again are falling to ruin because Iraqi officials can't maintain them.

Of course, the coalition authorities blame the Iraqis, saying they are lazy, irresponsible, lack a work ethic, and on and on.

"This is their country. This is their water-treatment plant," said Bill Taylor, head of the reconstruction effort for the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. "They need to take responsibility. We're not going to be responsible for it. If they run it into the ground, we'll be disappointed. But this is their country."

Okay, so now it's their country. Funny, it wasn't their country when the U.S. made the decision to invade Iraq, or when the military awarded multibillion-dollar no-bid contracts to a handful of politically well-connected firms.

Some Iraqis say that this is what happens when you don't involve local people from the start.

"The main problem we suffer is our budget. There's simply not enough for our needs," said Mahmoud Ali Ahmed, the head of Iraq's water distribution system. "The money does not exist for the maintenance and rehabilitation of existing projects."

But the Iraqis also attacked the failure of the U.S. to work with them in rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, especially in the early days of the reconstruction effort.

They said the U.S. should have allowed the Iraqis more control over what projects were built and how money was spent.

Baghdad Mayor Alaa Tamimi said the U.S. should have channeled money through the Iraqi government, allowing them control over the selection of the scope, equipment and locations for new projects.

U.S. officials "made a lot of decisions themselves, and the decisions were wrong," said Tamimi, an engineer who returned to Iraq after years of exile to help rebuild the country. "This is our country. It's our city. They didn't accept that."

But it sure as hell makes a good excuse now for why millions of American taxpayers' dollars have been flushed down the toilet.

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"THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS, not with a bang but a whimper."

T.S. Eliot's famous line from his 1925 poem, "The Hollow Men," came to mind as I was reading Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse. This is how Diamond says societies end: not in a sudden conflagration, but gradually, over time, and as the result of hundreds or thousands of seemingly insignificant choices.

Jared Diamond's credentials and accomplishments are impressive by anyone's standards. He is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist and spent many years studying birds in New Guinea. He co-authored a book called The Birds of Northern Melanesia with Ernst Mayr, the acclaimed evolutionary biologist who died recently at the age of 100. He taught physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine for many years; currently, he teaches geography and environmental science at UCLA.

All of which is ample proof that Diamond is qualified about 1000 times over to write scholarly academic treatises in half a dozen scientific fields. One would not necessarily expect, however, that the general public would be interested in a book about the relationship between climate change, geography, environmental conditions, and the survival or collapse of civilizations. But that is exactly what happened with this book and the one that preceded it. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, sold a million copies and won a Pulitzer Prize; Collapse has been on the New York Times bestseller list (for hardcover nonfiction) since it came out.

Guns, Germs and Steel set out to answer the question: Why do some societies achieve dominance over others? In Collapse, Diamond explores the opposite question: Why do some societies succeed and even thrive, while others fail, and vanish from history? Diamond examines half a dozen societies, both ancient and contemporary, to discover the answers. His conclusion is that the difference between successful societies and those that fail lies in the choices they make about how to manage their natural and human environment. For example, the Easter Islanders, an ancient civilization that flourished about 400 years after the start of the Christian era, had a vibrant culture that produced, most famously, eerie-looking, gigantic statues that are still tourist attractions today. But by the time Europeans arrived in the early 18th century, all trace of human life had vanished.

The reasons are now thought to be environmental. For one thing, Easter Island is one of the most isolated places in the world: 2,000 miles from the nearest population centers (Tahiti and Chile). The island's location, of course, is not within human control. But the environmental choices the Islanders made, over many years, were under their control and they made very bad ones. One of the most significant factors in the Easter Island society's eventual collapse was their abuse of the ecosystem. In order to build their houses and provide fuel for heating and cooking, they cut down all the trees on the island. The result: An island that once was covered with forests now is completely bare.

One might ask (and many have): How could these people destroy the very natural resources that they needed to survive? What on earth were they thinking?

The answer is not as clear or obvious as we moderns might think. The truth is, we are faced with the same kinds of environmental choices today that the Easter Islanders were so many hundreds of years ago. It's not always so easy to know what the "right" choice is when economic and environmental choices conflict.

Contemporary Montana is a case in point. The state attracts over 9 million visitors a year, drawn by its spectacular natural beauty and opportunities for fishing, hiking, and other outdoor activities. An increasing number of those visitors -- the ones with lots of money to spend -- are building vacation homes in the state: The real estate industry is booming in Montana. All of this helps Montana's economy and provides jobs; it also puts a burden on Montana's long-time and permanent residents, who have traditionally made their living from ranching and farming, and creates environmental stresses that are hard to resolve in a way satisfactory to everyone. How do people make choices about land use, forest management, water usage, and so on, when there are fundamental conflicts of interest between many different demographic groups that all have stakes in the outcome?

It's not difficult to see the importance of environmental choices to the survival of the ancient Easter Islanders or contemporary Montanans; but Diamond has been taken to task for adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to explaining the survival or collapse of societies as seemingly different from each other as Viking Greenland and modern-day Rwanda. Diamond is well aware of this criticism, and acknowledges it in his book. That only makes his accomplishment in Collapse more impressive; because he manages to make a cogent and convincing case that even seemingly small or personal or unrelated decisions people make about how to use the natural resources available to them can have large effects on the health of the society as a whole -- as in the case of Rwanda, where a shortage of arable land led to conflicts between rich and poor landowners that in turn led to ethnic tensions and many smaller massacres well before the final genocide in which between half a million and 800,000 Rwandans were murdered.

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THE "CULTURE OF LIFE" beloved of conservative Republicans looks more like a culture of death to Frank Rich.

Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

Rich goes on to point out how Bush administration priorities and policies feed into this cultural fascination with dead bodies while ignoring or even harming the needs of the living.

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

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NOW THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN COUNCIL Republicans are quoting Stalin admiringly and calling Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy "Satan."

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THE BOSTON GLOBE has an article about the growing split in the Republican Party between those like Tom DeLay and his supporters, who think that Terri Schiavo was "judicially murdered" and want to take control of the judiciary, and others, like George and Jeb Bush and Dick Cheney, who say they did as much as they could within the law and who have distanced themselves from DeLay's comments about "activist judges."

It's very scary when a politically significant part of the Republican Party has become so extreme that Pres. Bush and Dick Cheney start to look reasonable and moderate.

It's also scary that, although the Boston Globe article uses the term "conservative leaders" to describe the group of individuals who were part of the meeting sponsored by the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, a great number of them seem to be radical fundamentalist religious figures, not elected officials. Former federal judge Roy Moore is one of them. And Rick Scarborough, a Baptist minister, is chair of the Council.

These people think that Jeb Bush should have taken physical custody of Terri Schiavo, using police power to stop any attempts by the courts to enforce legal decisions. They think that Gov. Bush should have had Terri Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted by force in defiance of rulings by every court involved in this case. They think that judges who rule in ways that the Judeo-Christian Council and its followers don't like should be impeached; that Congress should take away funding for courts deemed by this group of people to be "activist"; that the legislative and executive branches should even strip the judicial branch of the power to hear cases on "sensitive" social issues.

While conservatives have long accused liberal judges of making, rather than interpreting, laws, Massachusetts' adoption of gay marriage last year and Schiavo's death last week have magnified their fury. Whereas before they complained about ''judicial arrogance," speakers this week accused courts of ''gang violence" and waging ''unholy war" -- and drew applause when they called for the removal of judges who believe that interpretations of the US Constitution should change with the times. Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, called the situation ''a crisis."

If there's a crisis, it's being created by people who have written legislation that would bar the Supreme Court from hearing cases in which public officials have stated that God is "the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government"; and that forbids judges to mention laws or policies in other countries, on pain of impeachment. This proposed legislation is real. It's H.R. 3799, the Constitutional Restoration Act -- an Orwellian misnomer of the first order. Because, despite Tom DeLay's belief that "Congress should reassert [its] constitutional authority over our courts," the reality is that the Constitution does not grant Congress authority over the judicial branch that is greater than the authority it grants the judicial branch over Congress. Tom DeLay is the one who should be impeached -- and then required to take a basic civics course at his local high school.

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MORE EVIDENCE of U.S. popularity in Iraq.

"I do not accept having occupation forces in my country," said protester Ali Feleih Hassan, 35. "No one accepts this. I want them out. They have been here for two years, and now they have to set a timetable for their withdrawal."

President Bush has said he will not pull troops out of Iraq until the security situation has improved.

And of course the security situation will not improve until Bush pulls troops out of Iraq.

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MARY AT PACIFIC VIEWS has a chilling account of the Patriot Act's abuses in action. Two 16-year-old girls, one from a Bangladeshi family and the other Guinean, were arrested by the FBI because, according to the government, they are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based on evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers."

Here is the sequence of events that led to these arrests:

1. When she was 14, the Bangladeshi girl developed a strong interest in Islam. She wanted to switch from her public high school to a private Islamic school and last fall decided she wanted to marry a Muslim man she had met only a short time before and whom her parents did not know at all. In other words, she was a mixed-up teenage girl trying to figure herself out and acting impulsively in ways that teenagers have been doing for thousands of years. If this girl had come from an Italian or Irish or Jewish family, or a family whose ancestors lived in this country since the Mayflower, and she developed a sudden interest in being a born-again Christian, the FBI would never have heard about her and she would be at home with her family right now.
2. A short time after the girl told her parents she wanted to marry, she did not come home one night and her parents were afraid she had run off with the young man. Her father went to the police for help.
3. In early March, FBI agents came to the girl's house, although they lied about their identity, telling the girl's mother that they worked at a youth center that helped families in conflict, and that they had come at the request of the local police the father had approached for assistance.
4. One of the FBI agents, a woman, went up to the girl's room to talk to her. After that, she left; 20 days later immigration officials came to the house and arrested the girl for wanting to be a suicide bomber.
5. The second girl, also 16, was arrested at Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where the first girl was brought after she was arrested. Why was the second girl arrested? Because she noticed that the first girl was wearing a veil, and taking her to be Muslim, greeted her in Arabic. Obviously, if one teenage girl greets another because they seem to be of the same religion, that must mean they know each other and are conspiring to be suicide bombers. So the Guinean girl was arrested, too.

Both girls were taken to a detention center in Pennsylvania and are being held there in complete secrecy. The Patriot Act allows them to be held indefinitely. The government has not filed charges against them and has refused them access to a court-appointed attorney. The government's position is that the girls are guilty until they prove themselves innocent -- although the government also steadfastly refuses to let the girls see the evidence (if indeed there is any at all) against them.

And one has to ask, also: Until they prove themselves innocent of what? The government has not even said that these girls were planning an act of terrorism, much less that they committed one, or were about to commit one. I'll say this as plainly as I can: These two teenage girls were arrested and imprisoned -- quite possibly for years or even decades -- because the FBI says they wanted to be suicide bombers. They were arrested for what the government says are their thoughts, not for anything they have done. And the government's reason for believing that they wanted to be suicide bombers is apparently because, in the first girl's case, she became interested in Islam; and in the second girl's case, because she noticed the first girl was wearing a Muslim veil and said hello to her.

This is what the United States has become. A country where high school girls can be torn away from the arms of their mothers and fathers, and disappeared into gulags that exist on our own soil and all over the globe. The New York Times article gives the last word to the woman who nurtured the "would-be suicide bomber" in her womb for nine months, and I will do the same.

The mother recalled how her daughter had played with her 4-month-old brother and helped care for her other siblings, 14 and 11. Her daughter, she said, told her during a brief detention visit that F.B.I. interrogators had warned that unless she confessed to terrorist ties, her two youngest siblings, who are American citizens, would be placed in foster care and her parents sent back to Bangladesh without them.

"I don't want to live here anymore," the mother said. "I always thought that this country is better for my children, but now ..." She broke off and began sobbing. "She's just 16," she cried. "I just want my daughter. Please, can you help me?"

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WELDON BERGER at Betty the Crow notes Tom DeLay's continuing "efforts to disenfranchise the judiciary as a coequal branch of government with a rant to the faithful at the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration." Killing two birds with one stone, DeLay delivered his remarks via videotape as he flew off to Rome for the pope's funeral. I wonder if DeLay is aware of the irony of his attempt to position himself as one of John Paul's admirers while at the same time condemning the judiciary in the United States for "following the dictates of foreign opinion" -- a veiled reference to the recent Supreme Court decision striking down the death penalty for juveniles. The United States government's continuing support for the death penalty is viewed with revulsion in Europe, and the late pope strongly opposed the death penalty on religious grounds.

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EZRA KLEIN, commenting on a post at Political Wire, says he doesn't understand the "obsession with centrism" in presidential electoral politics. Ezra says it's more important for a candidate (say, Hillary Clinton) to convince her constituents that she gets it when it comes to their issues than for that candidate to be exactly in the middle of the political spectrum. Matthew Yglesias says that's a good point, but there really is no "unique center" -- the center shifts depending on who you're talking to and what issue you're talking about.

The GOP could, for example, probably do better in presidential elections by moderating its social conservatism a little. At the same time, moving to the literal center of public opinion on abortion would be counterproductive because there are a certain number of people who will always vote for a pro-life candidate over a pro-choice one, but who, with abortion off the table, might vote Democratic or stay home. One could go on and on about this (and I'm sure some clever academicians have), but the point is simply that choosing the median stance on every issue is unlikely to actually be a winning strategy -- depending on where your opponent is, some selective extremism is likely to be useful.

I think Ezra and Matthew both miss the point. When I hear someone say that presidential elections are won by moving to the center, I think, What center? The Kennedy-era center? The Nixon administration center? The center when Clinton was president? Or the center now? My point is, the center has been moving to the right for several decades now, and that is what liberals should be concerned about. In every presidential election, the Democratic candidate has felt the need to "move to the center" in order to be elected. And in every presidential election, that move to the center has moved the entire spectrum farther to the right. A look back at the 1964 presidential election is instructive here.

[In 1964, Barry Goldwater] was attacked by Democrats and opponents within his own party as a demagogue and a leader of right-wing extremists and racists who was likely to lead the United States into nuclear war, eliminate civil rights progress and destroy such social welfare programs as Social Security.

So how hard are you all laughing? Barely believable, isn't it? Those "right-wing extremist" positions would all be firmly in the center now. Indeed, in the first decade of the 21st century, Americans have a president who has made the destruction of Social Security the centerpiece of his second term in office; and who advocates preemptive first strikes against other nations -- including a willingness to use nuclear weapons in a first strike.

Liberals should stop worrying about presidential candidates being too far from the center of the political spectrum, and wake up to the fact that the political spectrum itself hasn't been in the center of anything reasonable for quite some time.

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THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR has an article about the issue of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. There are still no official statistics on how many pharmacists are doing this, but the anecdotal evidence is increasing. That could mean that more instances are occurring, or it could mean that more instances are being reported -- or both. I think it's reasonable to speculate, though, that pharmacists who are fundamentalist Christians are encountering greater support for their stance in the world of right-wing Christian organizations. In other words, they're getting bolder because their position is being publicly affirmed, to greater or lesser degrees, by institutions ranging from the American Pharmacy Association to specifically "pro-life" groups.

It's also possible to track the growth of this controversy by looking at state legislatures. Twenty-one states are legislatively involved in this issue: four states have laws on the books allowing pharmacists to opt out of filling prescriptions they object to for personal religious reasons; 13 states have bills in the pipeline that would allow pharmacists to refuse prescriptions; and four states are actively considering laws that would make it mandatory for pharmacists to fill all legal prescriptions, whether they personally approve of them or not. Then there's Illinois, where Gov. Blagojevich recently issued an executive ruling stipulating that all pharmacies that sell contraceptives must fill prescriptions for them.

And in the Hall of Shame is Colorado, whose Republican governor, Bill Owens, vetoed a bill earlier this week that would have required all hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, to inform rape victims about the availability of emergency contraceptives. In Texas, this scenario became reality when two pharmacists told a woman who reportedly had been raped that they would not fill her prescription for emergency contraception. To that pharmacy's credit, those two monsters were fired.

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MICHAEL SHERMER, the founder of the magazine, Skeptic, wrote a commentary in the Los Angeles Times on the controversy surrounding the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools. The piece is from March 30, but I missed it at the time.

There is a fundamental dishonesty about the movement among social conservatives to teach "intelligent design," or "creation science," as it is also called, alongside the Darwinian theory of evolution. The terminology says it all. It's not science, it's religion.

In fact, I believe strongly that using the word "science" when referring to the religious, spiritual belief that a divine being created the universe and everything in it cheapens and trivializes religion. People who insist that religious accounts of creation should be taught as science miss the entire point of religious belief. There is a difference between scientific theories, or hypotheses, and faith, or belief. Evolution as a theory has been tested. The results of those tests have been observed.

Intelligent-design theory lacks ... a hypothesis of the mechanics of the design, something akin to natural selection in evolution. Natural selection can and has been observed and tested, and Charles Darwin's theory has been refined.

Which is the essential point, for me. Why would anyone want to treat religious faith as if it were a scientific hypothesis that can be tested? If we could prove, or even demonstrate using the scientific method, that God exists and "intelligently designed" the universe and everything in it, then faith would lose all of its meaning. I don't want to think of God as the most eminent scientist of his time, teaching at the best universities, publishing in the most prestigious journals. Science is pragmatic, factual, evidence-based. Divinity is ineffable, unknowable, spirit-based.

The essence of science is, if not certainty, then informed credibility. The essence of faith is doubt. The heart of all religious and spiritual belief is mystery. Why would you want to mess with that?

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I COULDN'T POST ANYTHING last night because the Internet would not load. Site after site simply would not come up; I kept on getting error messages, or the load would freeze so long I gave up. This morning it's fine, so I don't know what was going on; maybe everyone was trying to download pictures of the pope. If I'm lucky, tonight will be better.

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Blogroll, Please

I'VE DECIDED TO TAKE A RUN down my blogroll and see what others have been writing about.

ACSBlog: Liz Aloi writes about Terri Schiavo's Law. She includes a very interesting link to a statement by Judge Stanley Birch, one of the many judges who ruled against reinserting Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube. Birch was appointed by the first Bush. And he skewers Congress.

A popular epithet directed by some members of society, including some members of Congress, toward the judiciary involves the denunciation of “activist judges.” Generally, the definition of an “activist judge” is one who decides the outcome of a controversy before him according to personal conviction, even one sincerely held, as opposed to the dictates of the law as constrained by legal precedent and, ultimately, our Constitution. In resolving the Schiavo controversy it is my judgment that, despite sincere and altruistic motivation, the legislative and executive branches of our government have acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers’ blueprint for the governance of a free people – our Constitution.

Archy: John McKay muses on the long, fascinating, or maybe sordid, history of naming popes.

The list of Popes is an official history (in the worst sense of the phrase) and must be carefully scrubbed of anti-Popes and ambiguity. Of course, all that means to me is that some pretty cool names have been knocked out of consideration.

Avedon Carol: Oh my gosh! Avedon Carol quoted me! She also quotes an anonymous commenter on a different thread:

Since the New Deal, Republicans have been on the wrong side of every issue of concern to ordinary Americans; Social Security, the war in Vietnam, equal rights, civil liberties, church- state separation, consumer issues, public education, reproductive freedom, national health care, labor issues, gun policy, campaign-finance reform, the environment and tax fairness. No political party could remain so consistently wrong by accident. The only rational conclusion is that, despite their cynical "family values" propaganda, the Republican Party is a criminal conspiracy to betray the interests of the American people in favor of plutocratic and corporate interests, and absolutist religious groups.

Riverbend turned on her tv one morning to find it had been taken over by American news programming, game shows, and reality tv.

At Daily Kos, John Conyers flat-out calls the Department of Justice liars for their frequent assertions that the Bush administration has never abused its powers under the Patriot Act.

Echidne reports that her dogs have spring fever.

Ezra Klein has a post on oil production, but that's not the subject of interest to me right now. I want to talk about one of the words in this sentence:

This is scary -- oil production in most on the non-OPEC nations is already in accelerating decline, and OPEC looks to be nearing it's maximum.

It's it's. That's the word I want to talk about. I don't mean to single out Ezra, because I've seen this on literally dozens of blogs, and it's been building up and building up, and now I just have to let it out: There should not be an apostrophe in "nearing it's maximum." It's is a contraction. It means "it is." Ezra does not mean to say, "OPEC looks to be nearing it is maximum." He means to say, "OPEC looks to be nearing its maximum. Its. Pronoun. No apostrophe. PLEASE.

The Left Coaster: G.R. Duckman writes about Tom DeLay's generosity toward others:

tom delay seems to be in a bit of a spot, and it couldn't happen to a more miserable denizen of the primordial ooze, but we can't let it stop there. As Steve and many others say, keep the toxic texan around, it's like hanging a dead skunk around an enemy, you'll smell them miles away, and never be surprised.

But, if he has to go, and shackled in chains like they did to Susan McDougal would be my favored method, lets not neglect his legacy.

Let's hang it around all those that his slime is smeared on, those that reek of his stench.

Matthew Yglesias thinks that Josh Marshall's new mega-group blog is going to further concentrate blogosphere power in the hands of a few stars. It's refreshing to know that a blogger who is himself on the A-list is concerned about a handful of blogs crowding out less influential competition.

Preposterous Universe: Sean has an interesting analysis on Paul Krugman's observation that academics tend to be liberal because conservatives are becoming increasingly anti-intellectual. I think that's always been true, but here is part of what Sean has to say:

The tendency of academics to be liberal runs much deeper than a reaction against the current wave of know-nothingism in the Republican party.

If we try to put[it] in terms that are as value-neutral as possible, I think that it comes down to idealism and universalism. Conservatives tend to take pride in their tough-mindedness, a realistic and hard-nosed approach to the dog-eat-dog world we find ourselves in. Looking out for number one is not only a life strategy, but a moral good. Academics, meanwhile, tend to have a different set of values; not only do they value learning for its own sake (above more straightforward values of material success), but they develop an ability to understand and sympathize with people in different groups and circumstances. In the truest sense of the word, to be "conservative" is to cherish certain established verities, while a good academic is always questioning accepted ideas, and approaching alternatives in a spirit of open-mindedness.

Shakespeare's Sister: This one is truly special, and one of the reasons why I love this blog so much. The lady who writes this blog can share discoveries that are poignantly personal as well as political. She does that here, telling us about a blogger who has invited readers to share their deepest secret on a postcard, and then posts the cards on his site.

Talk Left: The Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography was awarded to the photo staff at the Associated Press; and a veteran staffer at the San Francisco Chronicle won the Feature Photography Pulitzer for a photo essay on the efforts by medical staff at an Oakland, CA, hospital to treat a 9-year-old Iraqi boy who was very badly injured in an explosion in Iraq.

This would be wonderful news for most people, but right-wing bloggers like Michelle Malkin and Powerline are not most people.

War and Piece: Think it would not be an insurmountable task for the world's mightiest military machine (aka the Pentagon) to put together a program to teach foreign languages to U.S. soldiers? Think again.

Kevin Drum: I apparently missed this piece on Jeanne's blog about the Los Angeles Times comparing pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives to soldiers who refuse to torture prisoners. I'm glad Kevin read it and posted about it here.

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THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S announcement that U.S. citizens are soon going to need passports to get back into their country from Mexico and Canada, is being played as a way to keep Americans safer. But like most everything else this president has done in the name of security, the only things there will be more of if this measure goes through are bureaucracy, hassles for Americans who don't have passports and never needed them before to travel to Mexico or Canada, and bad feeling between the United States and its neighbors. Already, Canada has announced that it might require Americans to show passports before they can enter Canada.

The Homeland Conservative, a blog written by a "right-wing neoconservative" Canadian, makes a good point about the counterproductiveness of turning the United States into an isolationist fortress:

Granted, we need to be secure, we need to be safe, we need to be vigilant but not at the expense of our own freedom. America cannot barricade doors and bar her windows, refusing to allow friends and family inside, whilst expecting to conduct business as usual or join allies when it suits U.S. interests.

Such ideology will only alienate those closest to Lady Liberty. It will not ease concerns on the part of top allies that U.S. politicians are charting a go-it-alone course in foreign policy. The doors of friendship swing both ways.

This guy is pretty far out there in most of his political opinions, but on this much I think what he's saying is commonsense. You don't make yourself safer via policies that convey suspicion, mistrust, and even hostility toward the rest of the world. And although we all might be safest if we never left our homes, that's no way to live. Travel is the ultimate broadening experience; it almost always serves to help people of diverse backgrounds understand each other better. Yet the most immediate impact this policy will have is to reduce tourism -- ours and theirs. Many Americans who travel to Mexico or Canada for weekends or short vacations don't have passports and don't want them, either. College students wanting to go to Mexico or Bermuda on their spring breaks will chuck the idea if they have to get passports to do it. Canadians are likely to feel the same way.

Until now, Canadian citizens have been the only foreigners allowed to enter the United States without a passport. The U.S. has accepted a driver's licence, birth certificate or a certificate of citizenship instead.

Canadians make an estimated 60 million trips into the United States each year. I foresee a drastic drop in that number as these obsessed rules become effective. Canadians will not shell out $90 CND to for the occasional one-day shipping spree across the border. Nor will students deplete fun money for annual Spring Break revelry. Tourism will take another definitive hit.

Potential terrorists are probably the only demographic group who will not be deterred by the new passport requirement. Since when have terrorists been intimidated by the need to carry a passport? Back in February, 2002, the New York Times ran an article by Jeff Goodell about passport forgery. Goodell asked Alain Boucar, the director of Belgium's antifraud unit, how long it would take him to put someone else's photograph in Goodell's passport.

Boucar examines it. It's a standard United States passport, issued eight years ago, with a laminated photo page. ''Five minutes.''

He sticks his thumbnail into a corner of the laminate, showing me how you can peel it back. (You can loosen the laminate by sticking it in the freezer or a microwave oven -- it depends on the type of laminate -- or, better yet, by dissolving the adhesive with Undu, a product that is easily ordered on the Internet.) Boucar then points to the little blue emblem, called a guilloche, that overlaps the photo and the passport page and is supposed to make the photo difficult to remove. ''You might see a little line here. But if I do a good job, you would not notice.'' Of course, that person would have to be around the same age, height and weight as me, but Boucar's point is well taken: doing a passable job of doctoring a typical passport is not very hard.

Boucar then explains the tricks criminals use to fill in stolen blanks: how they feed passports into laser printers, for example. Or how they can create a perfectly good dry stamp -- an inkless stamp that leaves an embossed image on paper and is used to authenticate the passports of many countries -- by placing an old vinyl record over a passport marked with a real seal, then heating the record with an iron; the record is then pressed onto a fresh passport. Candle wax also works. As for ink stamps, they pose no challenge at all. Years ago, forgers would cut a fresh potato in half and use it to transfer a stamp from one passport to another. Today ''you just scan the page of a passport into a computer, print it out, then take it to a copy shop,'' Boucar says. ''They'll make you a rubber stamp in two minutes.''

Of course, the State Department has developed a high-tech biometric passport, and Belgium already has one. But the new U.S. passport raises security, privacy, and personal safety concerns that are potentially just as alarming as passport forgery.

I can't think of one positive result that could come out of requiring passports between friendly neighbor countries where none were required before. Bush and his groupies have a positive genius for coming up with the policies most likely to alienate people and make international relations worse. It really is absolutely astounding.

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CONNECTICUT PLANS TO FILE A LAWSUIT against the Bush administration over the No Child Left Behind Act. The cause of action is the government's refusal to adequately fund the mandates that NCLB creates. The law requires Connecticut, and other states, to pay tens of millions of dollars for standardized testing and funds only a fraction of the amount the states have to pay out.

Connecticut's attorney general is trying to get other states to join in the lawsuit.

Delicious.

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I HAD READ THIS BEFORE, but this article says it with particular glee. And I like that.

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WHILE THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION in Washington, D.C., is trying to renew legislation that takes away Americans' freedom in order to keep Americans safe, the other Bush administration, in Florida, is working on legislation that makes it easier for Americans to kill each other. The law, SB 436, will allow Floridians to attack, and even kill, anyone they feel is threatening them. In any public place. The law will absolve them of any legal consequences for doing so. The legislation has been passed by Florida's House and Senate, and Gov. Jeb Bush has said he will sign it.

Add this to Tom DeLay's and John Cornyn's approving comments about violence against judges, and it beats me why the Bushies are so concerned about protecting us from terrorist violence. We've already got terrorist violence right here, and our leaders think it's so cool they are manufacturing more of it.

I do have one question, though. What about school shootings? Will they be covered under this new law? If a kid mows down his classmates and later says they were threatening him, I don't see how he could be charged with murder.

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ALBERTO GONZALES revealing his secret ambition to be the next Marlon Brando:

...Gonzales, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, strongly defended the administration's use of the terror-fighting law and warned that any effort to dismantle it would be tantamount to "unilateral disarmament" in fighting terrorism.

Unilateral disarmament? You mean, if the government can't slap gag orders on librarians, the barbarians will storm the gates? Come ON now. Is Congress actually going to fall for this?

"The act has been integral to the government's prosecution of the war on terrorism," Gonzales said. ". . . Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups still pose a grave threat to the security of the American people, and now is not the time to relinquish some of our most effective tools in this fight."

Of course not. Now is never the time for government authorities to give up broad police powers. It never has been. Can anyone imagine Alberto Gonzales telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that the time has come for the government to give up the power to get search warrants in secret or try detainees in military courts hidden from the public?

Even when they admit they don't need to spy on Americans, they still want to be able to do so, with no accountability:

Authorities have obtained information under the controversial business records provision 35 times, including driver's license records, credit card records, Internet subscriber records and hotel and apartment records, officials said. Gonzales said the provision has not been used to obtain records from medical providers, gun shops, bookstores or libraries, although he said the administration would oppose any attempt to exempt such categories.

"The department has no interest in rummaging through the library records or the medical records of Americans," Gonzales testified. "We do have an interest, however, in records that may help us capture terrorists. And there may be an occasion where having the tools . . . to access this kind of information may be very helpful."

I expect nothing but craven obeisance from Congress on this. However, there is hope in the form of what is being called an "unlikely coalition" between conservative libertarians, gun enthusiasts, and some Republicans such as former congressman Bob Barr.

Barr voted for the law, known as the USA Patriot Act, just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, but has become one of its leading critics, a shift that reflects the growing unease among some conservative libertarians over the expansion of the government's powers in fighting terrorism.

He joined with other conservatives as well as the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday in announcing the creation of the new coalition, Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, aimed at curtailing some of the law's more sweeping law-enforcement provisions.

The sections of the law that are of concern are Sections 213, 215, 218, 505, and 802. The full text of the Patriot Act is here.

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What a kick in the teeth to quit smoking and then be diagnosed with lung cancer 20 years later.

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THE GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS issued an emergency ruling today after several women were turned away by pharmacies that refused to fill their prescriptions for contraceptives.

Responding to recent complaints filed against a licensed Illinois pharmacy that refused to dispense prescription contraceptives, Gov. Rod Blagojevich today filed an emergency rule that clarifies pharmacies in Illinois that sell contraceptives must accept and fill prescriptions for contraceptives without delay. The Governor was joined by leaders of national and local women’s organizations in announcing today’s action. Over the past two years, the Governor has worked with lawmakers to expand women’s access to contraceptives and other important health care services. Today’s action is intended to ensure Illinois continues to move forward, not backward, in helping women obtain the care they need.

“Five weeks ago, two women called in prescriptions to their local pharmacy in the South Loop to purchase contraceptives. The law gives them every right to do that. Each woman had a prescription from her doctor. Both women only sought to buy contraceptives. And yet both were denied. Why? Because the pharmacist refused to fill the prescription. Unfortunately, this story is not unique to Chicago or to Illinois. Cases like this have been popping up all over the country. It’s happened in Wisconsin, Texas, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, California, and in other states around the country. Now I don’t believe this is a coincidence. I have a sneaking suspicion that in all likelihood, this is part of a concerted effort to deny women access to birth control. Those involved in this effort may be getting away with this in other states, but here in Illinois, we are not going to let that happen,” said Gov. Blagojevich.

Hooray for Illinois, land of Lincoln, Sandburg, and Blagojevich!

And a tip of the hat to Nellie at Dancing with Derrida.

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DAILY KOS has a nice roundup of blog commentary on John Cornyn's support for assaulting and killing judges.

UPDATE: And here are a few more that I found after I posted the above:

Edwardpig, who points out the source for the perception, if it is indeed out there, that the judiciary is "making political decisions with no accountability":

Could it be from speeches Republicans made in the House and Senate? (And these are just the statements obtained from a brief look at the 108th and 109th Congresses)

Tom DeLay: "We will continue to better protect and educate our children, to protect the institution of marriage, to protect the Constitution from judicial activism, and protect the role of family and faith in the public square." (Note: DeLay has also refused to explicitly condemn violence directed at judges)

Ron Lewis (KY): "America's judicial branch has become increasingly overreaching and disconnected from the values of everyday Americans . . . . I believe these actions usurp the will of the governed, circumvent representative government by allowing tribunals of a select few, not elected or otherwise politically responsible, to conclusively rule on issues that are radically reshaping the societal traditions of our great Nation."

Lamar Smith (TX): "The Supreme Court's recent use of foreign law as a precedent in several cases is disturbing. This judicial activism threatens our Nation's sovereignty."

Trent Franks (AZ): "Mr. Speaker, there have been many external threats to this Republic across the years. Recently, we have been highly focused on the war on terrorism and diminishing global nuclear threats. We have always been able to face such external threats successfully because our country has had a strong internal foundation. But, today, it is critically important to sound a past-due warning about the internal threat to this republic. We are going to awaken to the fact that our own courts, in spite of their sacred duty and charge to defend the United States Constitution, have now become the greatest threat to its survival. The rule of law itself and the underpinnings that hold this Nation together are now at stake."

Orrin Hatch: "This judicial activism is a nefarious practice that seeks to undermine the principle of democratic rule. It results in an unelected oligarchy--government by small elite. Judicial activism imposes the will of a small group of politicized lawyers upon the American people and undermines the work of the people's representatives."

Ezra Klein:

The whole thing stinks of nothing so much as McCarthyism, with demagogues assaulting America's foundational values while allied opportunists stand by and watch, not necessarily in agreement with the statements but aware of the political benefits they confer. Republicans, who've long advocated strict adherence to the constitution, sit meekly by while some of their numbers attempt to destroy the judicial independence the Founders worked so hard to grant. As a party, they should be ashamed. As individuals, they should be clamoring to expel the offenders. What Tom Delay and his friends are advocating is, in the simplest and clearest terms, unAmerican. And anyone who stands by while they do it is betraying their country as well.

Matthew Yglesias:

Does Senator Cornyn want more people to go about murdering judges? One doubts it. But it seems that he's happy to try and use such incidents to advance his own agenda. Happy to use them, one notes, even though the recent high-profile cases don't seem to actually have a political agenda. His hope -- along, it seems, though less clearly -- with Tom DeLay's is that judges will begin to operate under a cloud of intimidation. They may not like the idea of buckling under to whatever it is Cornyn wants them to do, but Cornyn is making it clear that he's the judges' friends. He doesn't want to see them killed, or maimed, or assaulted. He's trying to save them. Trying to warn them. Warning them that unless they change their ways someone -- someone who has nothing to do with John Cornyn or the Texas cabal running the country, mind you -- just might decide to do something crazy. But here's Cornyn offering a safe harbor. Confirm all of Bush's nominees, no matter how incompetent, corrupt, or inept they are, no matter how unsound their view of the constitution. And for the others, try to conform your views to those of Bush's new appointees. Do it and you'll be safe. If you don't do it, well, then, certainly John Cornyn wouldn't advocate killing you, he's just pointing out that it will happen.

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SISTER HELEN PREJEAN writes in the New York Times today about John Paul II and the death penalty. She describes how she struggled for years over how she might be able to engage the pope in a conversation about the death penalty, from the point of view of someone who for 14 years had accompanied convicted killers into the death chamber and watched them be killed, in cold blood. Sister Prejean was especially eager to talk to John Paul about the 1995 encyclical in which he wrote that life in prison should be substituted for execution, "except in cases of absolute necessity."

At last, in 1997, I finally got my chance to communicate directly with Pope John Paul II. It happened through the case of a Virginia death row inmate, Joseph O'Dell, whose spiritual adviser I had become and whose plea for justice had attracted the pope's attention. Lori Urs, who was working on the legal team trying to save Mr. O'Dell's life, visited Rome and handed my letter to the pope on Jan. 22, 1997. A friend of mine in the Vatican, present when my letter was delivered, assured me that John Paul read every word of my letter.

And an impassioned letter it was, pouring into the pope's lap 14 years of searing experiences of accompanying human beings into killing chambers and watching them be put to death before my eyes. "Surely, Holy Father," I wrote, "it is not the will of Christ for us to ever sanction governments to torture and kill in such fashion, even those guilty of terrible crimes. ... I found myself saying to them: 'Look at me. Look at my face. I will be the face of Christ for you.' In such an instance the gospel of Jesus is very distilled: life, not death; mercy and compassion, not vengeance."

I spoke candidly about my disagreement with one part of the pope's 1995 encyclical, "Evangelium Vitae" ("Gospel of Life"), which, while urging imprisonment instead of execution, allowed the use of the death penalty in cases of "absolute necessity." Whenever governments kill criminals, I pointed out in my letter, they always claim to act out of "necessity." I urged him to close the loophole and make Catholic opposition to government executions unequivocal.

This was no small thing. The teaching of the Catholic Church upholding the right of the state to execute criminals "in cases of extreme gravity" had been in place for 1,600 years.

But that's precisely what the pope did: he removed from the Catholic catechism the criterion "in cases of extreme gravity." The omission changes everything, because Catholic teaching now says that no matter how grave the crime, the death penalty is not to be imposed. This cuts the moral ground out from under American politicians who advocate the death penalty for the "worst of the worst criminals."

Via a post by Jeanne at Body and Soul. The same post has links to three other articles about John Paul: one by the former archbishop of Sao Paulo, Brazil, on the pope and liberation theology; one by Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice; and the last from Democracy Now! about one woman's decision to disobey a papal order not to speak publicly on the ordination of women.

Some of the commentary in these articles is critical of the late pope's positions on specific issues, but they are all worth reading.

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THERE MUST BE A COMPETITION going on in Congress to see which Republican can come up with the ugliest comments about the judiciary. First TomDelay implicitly threatened the judges who ruled in the Terri Schiavo case: "The time will come for the men responsible for [Terri Schiavo's death] to answer for their behavior, but not today. "

Now, John Aravosis reports from Washington that Sen. John Cornyn, from Texas, said that recent incidents of violence against judges are an understandable response to their "political decisions" and "lack of accountability."

SENATOR JOHN CORNYN: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence." [Senate Floor, 4/4/05]

Aravosis has attached the entire relevant part of the transcript, so that the above passage can be read in context. There is no doubt that Cornyn is sympathizing with physical violence against judges.

Sources: AmericaBlog.com, Shakespeare's Sister, and Think Progress.

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THE LOS ANGELES TIMES has an article about the sacrifices more and more Americans are making to pay for health insurance.

As employees continue to absorb more of their healthcare costs, an increasing number of people — even healthy ones — are drastically altering their lives simply to hold on to their insurance. They are delaying homeownership, putting off saving for their children's education, or otherwise sacrificing their financial security to guard against a catastrophic medical bill.

Many people, especially lower- and middle-class workers and the chronically ill, are beginning to spend a once-unimaginable share of their income on health coverage. In some cases, health costs have become the single biggest expense in family budgets.

Between 2000 and 2004, the number of people spending more than 25% of their earnings on healthcare — a figure normally associated with homeownership — rose by nearly a fourth to 14.3 million people, according to Washington, D.C.-based Families USA, a healthcare advocacy group. Over the same period, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, health premiums rose an average of 59%; federal data show the average employee's earnings rose 12.4%.

Even having a good job is not the protection it once was. Employers keep increasing the employee contribution portion of their insurance plans, in response to ever-rising premiums. Some employers are starting to cap the amount they will contribute, no matter how high the premiums go. And others are dropping their health insurance plans altogether.

With all this, even solidly middle class Americans are being affected.

[Glenn Melnick, a Rand Corp. economist and a USC professor of healthcare finance], says he expects the profile of the uninsured to change over the next few years to include more middle-class families with stable jobs. The most recent census data shows that 14% of those without insurance now make between $25,000 and $50,000 a year. A recent California HealthCare Foundation survey found 17% of Californians could not pay one or more medical bills in the last year.

I can't help but wonder what Pres. Bush has in mind when he talks about creating an "ownership society" when an ever-increasing number of Americans who actually are in the ownership class are finding their position more and more tenuous, and those Americans who have less financial stability are seeing their aspirations to buy a home or start their own business fade into the distance.

It seems pretty obvious to me that Pres. Bush does not have a clue what people who are losing health insurance and choosing to go through the winter without heat are up against. He doesn't have a clue because he's never been in that position and he doesn't know anyone who has been in that position. And even if there should be a security break in that carefully maintained bubble he lives in, and he actually did find out about people who have to gamble with their health to pay the heating bill, or gamble with getting sick because they kept the heat off to pay their health insurance, he wouldn't care.

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INTERESTING THAT in the New York Times article in today's edition, Adam Nagourney writes about John Paul II's "assertiveness" in trying to influence American politics in favor of conservative policies on abortion, gay marriage, and end-of-life issues -- but has nary a word to say about the Vatican's strong opposition to the death penalty and to war as a means of solving conflict. John Paul II took an equally dim view of environmentally destructive policies, which the Bush administration consistently supports. He frequently spoke out on behalf of the Palestinian people, decrying the conditions in which they were forced to live, the continued denial of their right to nationhood, and the daily brutalities committed against them. And he made no secret of his feeling that unfettered capitalism was an affront to the dignity of workers and a reversal of the priorities that are implied in the Genesis account of the Creation:

[T]he danger of treating work as "merchandise" -or as an impersonal "work force"-remains as long as economics is understood in a materialistic way. It is this one-sided approach that concentrates on work as the prime thing, leaving the worker in a secondary place. This is a reversal of the order laid down in the book of Genesis. The worker is treated as a tool whereas the worker ought to be treated as the subject of work, as its maker and creator. This reversal - whatever other name it gives itself- should be called 'capitalism"- an economic and social system that historically has been known as opposed to "socialism" or "communism." The error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever the worker is treated as a mere means of production, as a tool and not as a subject. To consider work and the worker in the light of humanity's dominion over the earth goes to the very heart of the ethical and social question. It is in insight that should be applied to all social and economic policy, within each country, but also internationally, to the tensions between East and West, North and South" [from Informed Comment].

It's arguably true that John Paul, although opposing U.S. conservative policies in the above areas, was more openly active in lobbying American Catholics to vote against issues like abortion and gay marriage. Then again, those are the issues that are the most flammable in American social and political life, so it becomes a self-enforcing mechanism: Abortion is a huge issue in every election; the death penalty is barely mentioned, if it's discussed at all.

I'm not Catholic, but if I were, I would be hoping that the next pope will be more effective at conveying the idea that abolition of the death penalty, workers' rights, Palestinian self-determination, and responsible environmental policies are central parts of the culture of life.

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EDWARDPIG writes that, according to an article in the Dallas Morning News, Tom DeLay really does want to "neuter the judiciary as an independent branch of government."

Hat tip to Kevin Drum.

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JUAN COLE has written a thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent piece about John Paul II's passing and the meaning of his papacy. The gist of it is Cole's point that John Paul's legacy is larger than just his well-known hewing to Catholic doctrine on abortion, celibacy for priests, homosexuality, and the ordination of women. The late pope also spoke out against war -- particularly the Iraq war. He opposed the death penalty. And he openly supported the rights of workers not to be exploited by the forces of globalization. Cole says it's important for progressive people to acknowledge the ways in which this pope supported the causes we value, even though in other areas we strongly opposed his stands.

John Paul II was a complex man and among the more intellectual popes in history. Because of his admirable stance against Stalinism in Eastern Europe (which did not in fact involve any denunciation of communism or socialism per se) and his anti-abortion stance, he is often claimed as an ally by the American Right (which is mainly Protestant and mainly about the best interests of wealthy business people).

But John Paul II was often an inconvenient man, whose moral vision would be upsetting to the US Republican establishment if it were taken seriously. He opposed the death penalty, to which George W. Bush is so attached. He opposed the Iraq War. He condemned laissez-faire capitalism and cared about the exploitation of workers, who he felt should have a dignity that is seldom bestowed upon them by the Walmarts and other firms in the US. And he cared about the rights and welfare of the Palestinian people in a way that virtually no one in the American political establishment does. He symbolically blessed the Palestinian claim that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Palestinian people.

That is, the Pope's message sometimes had a strong progressive content, and he was in some important ways on our side. That progressives might have had differences with him on some issues should not forestall our celebrating his progressive legacy. The American Right appropriates shamelessly anyone who even halfway agrees with them. We on the left must learn to make sectional alliances and commemorate those areas of agreement we have with people like John Paul II.

I think Cole is right, and his piece is important reading.

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GREAT POST from March 31 at Shakespeare's Sister about Ted Kennedy's lacerating words in response to Tom DeLay's statement, regarding Terri Schiavo's death, that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior."

And today, another wonderful post about DeLay at Shakes, this time about Dick Cheney's jaw-dropping and totally delicious condemnation of DeLay's implied threat against the judiciary. The commentary by Shakes on this is equally delicious:

When the satanic cyborg known as Dick Cheney utters the words “I don’t think that’s appropriate” about the behavior of someone in his own party, you know that particular someone has seriously pushed the envelope further than anyone previously thought it would stretch.

Satanic cyborg, giggle, giggle! What an inspired choice of words!

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DIGBY AT HULLABALOO thinks that Tom DeLay may be getting too extreme to keep his job, if the Democrats keep his penchant for pandering to the right-wing lunatic fringe front and center. Digby sees signs that libertarian Republicans and Republicans who are not part of the evangelical religious wing of the party are starting to get seriously disillusioned with the whole Fox Factor in the Republican Party.

Via Pandagon.

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ESTROGEN MONTH IS OVER at Pen-Elayne's place, but the fun of finding fabulous female bloggers continues ad infinitum, right here.

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ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES writes about the disproportionate effect of December's tsunamis on women. Oxfam International has published the results of a study showing that most of the deaths as a result of the tsunamis were women. In some refugee camps, men outnumber women by 10 to 1.

There are a number of reasons for this. The most obvious one is the fact that women are usually not as physically strong as men, and thus would find it harder to outrun the monstrous waves, or escape the waves in ways such as climbing trees. But gender roles and cultural norms also played a significant part:

• Women were more likely to be at home caring for children when the tsunamis hit, and often perished because they stayed behind to save their children or other family members. Women's lesser physical strength plays in here, too: carrying a child or several children to safety would be much harder for a woman than a man.
• Most women in places like Sri Lanka and Indonesia cannot swim, because swimming is considered immodest for women. Men often escaped the raging water by climbing trees; women were much less likely to do this, because it would be considered immodest.
• Although women in the larger cities often wear western dress, women in rural areas and small villages still are expected to wear saris, again because they are considered more modest. Saris are long pieces of cloth wrapped around the body. It's easy to see how such clothing would facilitate drowning.
• Women's long hair got tangled in trees and debris. Long hair for women is also a cultural expectation in this region.

The impact of so many more women than men being killed by the tsunamis has been enormous, and will continue to be for a long time. Sexual abuse and harassment, up to and including rape, is a huge problem in the refugee camps. Many women have been forced into marriages, often to much older men, because there are so few women left relative to the number of men. And children who survived but lost their mother are left to be raised by their fathers, who traditionally take very little part in raising their children.

Echidne wrote this piece after reading a post on the same subject by Linnet.

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A FEW DAYS AGO, Kevin Drum over at Political Animal, posting about Democracy Arsenal, a new blog on the left, commented that liberals should start to come up with solid ideas about what their political philosophy stands for.

Today, Jeanne at Body and Soul makes an observation, in a post entitled "John Paul and Tom Friedman," that I think is one essential item on the list of things liberals should stand for:

In 1987, John Paul issued an encyclical -- Sollicitudo Rei Socialis -- which, though it never uses the word "globalization," is a reminder of how exploitative global economic policies not only harm the least powerful, but undercut the basic human dignity of all of us, pushing us to see foreign workers as "some kind of instrument, with a work capacity and physical strength to be exploited at low cost and then discarded when no longer useful," instead of as our "neighbor," pushing us to see ourselves first as consumers, not as full human beings.

You need only read Tom Friedman's paean not to creating economic relationships that meet human needs, but to creating men and women who fit neatly into the economic machine, to see a perfect, and repulsive, example of what John Paul was talking about.

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''

Reading Friedman on the day after John Paul's death, I can't help but see the latter, whatever his other flaws and virtues, as the anti-Friedman. And that is a voice I am very sorry to lose.

Although Jeanne was not talking here about what liberals should stand for, it seems to me that she has unwittingly come up with what, arguably, should be first on the list. Liberals, and liberalism as a political philosophy, should stand for the idea that human beings, and not corporations or faceless economic institutions, should inform economic and political arrangements. Economic policy should serve human needs, and should be shaped with the needs of human beings in mind; rather than asking human beings to shape themselves to serve the needs of corporations and business.

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HAVING RETURNED TO BLOGGING, Publius hits one out of the park with the first post.

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PUBLIUS AND LEGAL FICTION are back!

Ok - it's become painfully obvious over the past 2 weeks that I can't quit doing this cold turkey. I feel very much like a jackass given my "last" post, but so be it I suppose. I'm not sure how to analogize it - it's either a drug addiction, or it's one of those relationships that you really want to end until you actually go and end it.

Don't sweat it, Publius. We're just glad you're back.

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I AM IN A STATE OF SHOCK. I just found out the Plaza Hotel is shutting down, forever; construction crews will soon be swarming all over it, turning the fabled haunts of Eloise into condominiums and fancy stores. It's not that I ever stayed at the Plaza. It's not that I ever expected to stay at the Plaza. Hell, I don't even think I've ever been inside the Plaza. But it was one of those gorgeous buildings that have been around since always, and that so symbolize Manhattan, that it's impossible to think of the city without them.

The owners of the Plaza say it's an "extensive redevelopment into a mixed use retail, residential and hotel complex," but after all that it's not going to be the same place anymore.

The Plaza is one of many beloved signature buildings, gone now, that took on, each in their own way, part of the essence of Manhattan.

Taken together, these lost buildings and rooms form a kind of ghost city, an island of memory that hovers above the real, evolving Manhattan. It is a shadow New York that once was and might have continued to be, had the economic and political forces that shape the city been different. It is also the only New York that is a perfect New York, for as Marcel Proust wrote in "Remembrance of Things Past," "the true paradises are the paradises we have lost."

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Dance of Joy

IT'S WORKING AGAIN! It's working, it's working, it's working, it's working! My posts are publishing, the error messages are gone, I have my blog back again! Oh, joy, oh rapture, oh wonder, oh glorious hosts of heaven!

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VIA NELLIE AT DANCING WITH DERRIDA, I found this Human Rights Watch report. The lives of Ugandan children are being sacrificed to the U.S. house brand of right-wing fanatical religious ideology. The HIV/AIDS education curriculum taught in Uganda's primary and secondary schools omits all mention of HIV and AIDS prevention other than abstinence until marriage, thanks to the strictures imposed on these programs by the U.S. government, which funds them. The Bush administration had all information on safer sex, condom use, and the risks of HIV transmission in marriage removed from the primary school curriculum; and added false information to the secondary school curriculum stating that condoms had microscopic pores that could allow the HIV virus to get through. High school students are now also taught that people who have sex before marriage are "deviant."

U.S. officials describe their strategy in Uganda as “ABC”—a popular acronym standing for “Abstinence, Be Faithful, use Condoms.” Some experts credit the “ABC” strategy with helping to reduce HIV prevalence in Uganda from about 15% in the early 1990s, to less than 10% today. However, Human Rights Watch’s new report documents how condoms are left out of the equation, especially for young people. A draft “Abstinence and Being Faithful (AB)” policy released in November 2004 by the Uganda AIDS Commission cautions that providing information about condoms alongside abstinence can be “confusing” to youth. Teachers told Human Rights Watch that they have been instructed by U.S. contractors not to discuss condoms in schools because the new policy is “abstinence only.” President Museveni has publicly condemned condoms as inappropriate for Ugandans, leading some AIDS educators to stop talking about them. ...

The U.S. government has already budgeted approximately U.S. $8 million this year on abstinence-only programs in Uganda as part of President George W. Bush’s global AIDS plan. The National Youth Forum, headed by Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni, a vocal proponent of abstinence-only, has received U.S. funding under the plan. The First Lady has lashed out against groups that teach young people about condoms and called for a national “virgin census” to support her abstinence agenda. The Virginia-based Children’s AIDS Fund, an organization with close ties to Janet Museveni, was recently approved for a major abstinence-only grant, despite having been deemed “not suitable for funding” by a technical panel of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The HRW report does not oppose abstinence education -- just abstinence-only education. The message that abstinence is the best and most effective way to prevent HIV infection is a positive and important one; but many Ugandan young people will have sex before marriage, and they deserve to be informed about AIDS prevention strategies. It's unconscionable that the U.S. government puts ideology above human life and responsible public health policy.

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