Liberty Street

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

I REALLY HATE MAHABLOG. It's always so hard to pick out one post worthy of linking to. They're all important enough to link to! Okay, so after you read the piece on free markets, and the piece on the article in the May issue of Harper's on the Christian right's war on America, go to this one.

They agitate not, neither do they lobby; yet in America an infant "born alive" after an abortion or miscarriage has a right to health care.

So here's what I want to know: Assuming such infants exist, how many hours or days pass before they lose the right to health care and are thrown into the American health care system to sink or swim with the rest of us? At what point do the provisions of the Infant Protection Act [the Born Alive Infant Protection Act of 2002] cease and, say, those of the Texas "futile care" act kick in? Has anybody figured this out?
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The act itself came about because the Fetus People were spreading horror stories about babies who survived late-term abortions and even regular childbirth who were just put aside and allowed to die. Apparently the Fetus People are still spreading these stories, causing the Bush Administration to warn doctors they'd better clean up their act.
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Speaking of futile health care,

Hundreds of thousands of poor people across the nation will lose their state-subsidized health insurance in the coming months as legislators scramble to hold down the enormous — and ever-escalating — cost of Medicaid.

Here in impoverished southeast Missouri, nurses at a family health clinic stash drug samples for patients they know won't be able to afford their prescriptions after their coverage is eliminated this summer. Doctors try to comfort waitresses, sales clerks and others who will soon lose coverage for medical, dental and mental healthcare.

I say those waitresses, sales clerks, etc. should march to the courthouse and demand to be given the legal status of "born-alive infants."

Has any reader of Liberty Street heard or read anything about the Born Alive Infant Protection Act of 2002? Because I hadn't. And this is why blogs in general and, in particular, blogs like Maha's are so important. As far as I'm concerned, Mahablog is one of a handful of "best blogs" on the web.

PUBLIUS OF LEGAL FICTION has a fine, detailed report on "Justice Sunday." Here is his take on the comments made about abortion.

As expected, there were several references to abortion tonight. Dobson said that Roe has killed something like 44 million Americans and created the biggest Holocaust of world history. Like most Americans, and many Jews I suspect, I disagree rather strongly. I simply don’t believe that non-viable fetuses (much less microscopic embryos) are “alive” in a legal, moral, or biological sense.

But for sake of discussion, let’s say Dobson is right. Let’s say that every microscopic embryo has a divine soul and that it should be considered “alive.” From that perspective, abortion is murder. In fact, it must be murder according to Dobson.

So if that’s right, here’s my question. Doesn’t the pro-life position necessarily imply (as a matter of logic) a pro-criminalization position? If you really think that embryos and fetuses are alive, then abortion doctors are murderers who should be imprisoned and possibly executed, right? Similarly, women (even 14-year old girls) who have abortions are at least conspirators to murder if not murderers themselves, right? And if you really take this view to its logical end, then every stem-cell researcher who splices an embryo is guilty of murder, right? And if not, why not? How can you believe that abortion is murder and not support criminal penalties (or even capital punishment) for those who participate in abortion or stem cell research.

That’s what scares me most about overturning Roe. In some states, we would literally be throwing doctors and young women in jail. Call me a crazy secular Lefty, but I don’t believe that the government should use the threat of criminal sanctions to force birth on 18-year old girls.

I guess I like crazy secular Lefties. They are certainly no competition for the crazies who believe that a fertilized egg has the same human status as my grandmother who died in Auschwitz.

Monday, April 25, 2005

MANY BLOGGERS have commented on the recent Army Inspector-General's report exonerating senior officers at Abu Ghraib of all responsibility for the abuse of detainees there. So far, the most comprehensive analysis I have found is the one by Phillip Carter at Intel-Dump. Carter has done his homework. His exhaustive research into actual military rules and investigations, as well as case law, enables him to make a compelling -- and, in my opinion, airtight -- case that this report is one of the most breathtaking examples of mendacity and whitewashing in many years -- by a military that has repeatedly claimed to have the capacity to police itself.

From this vast documentation that Carter has pulled together, I will quote one passage toward the end of the piece:

Remember the Fay-Jones report? It was an exhaustive review of U.S. military intelligence activities in Iraq that was published in August 2004. Together with the Schlesinger and the Taguba reports, the Fay-Jones report provided a mind-numbing catalog of detail about the abuses which took places in Iraq. But did you know that the Fay-Jones report also produced a verdict with respect to the command responsibility of the senior officers involved? Here's what LTG Anthony Jones and MG George Fay had to say in their ExSum (PDF):

Abuse

Clearly abuses occurred at the prison at Abu Ghraib. There is no single, simple explanation for why this abuse at Abu Ghraib happened. The primary causes are misconduct (ranging from inhumane to sadistic) by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians, a lack of discipline on the part of the leaders and Soldiers of the 205th MI BDE and a failure or lack of leadership by multiple echelons within CJTF-7. Contributing factors can be traced to issues affecting Command and Control, Doctrine, Training, and the experience of the Soldiers we asked to perform this vital mission.

For purposes of this report, abuse is defined as treatment of detainees that violated U.S. criminal law or international law or treatment that was inhumane or coercive without lawful justification. Whether the Soldier or contractor knew, at the time of the acts, that the conduct violated any law or standard, is not an element of the definition.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib primarily fall into two categories: a) intentional violent or sexual abuse and, b) abusive actions taken based on misinterpretations or confusion regarding law or policy.

LTG Jones found that while senior level officers did not commit the abuse at Abu Ghraib they did bear responsibility for lack of oversight of the facility, failing to respond in a timely manner to the reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and for issuing policy memos that failed to provide clear, consistent guidance for execution at the tactical level.

MG Fay has found that from 25 July 2003 to 6 February 2004, twenty-seven 205 MI BDE Personnel allegedly requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited Military Police (MP) personnel to abuse detainees and/or participated in detainee abuse and/or violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws and regulations during interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib.

LTG Jones minces no words later in his report — on page 30, he pins direct responsibility on specific officers within the chain of command who deserve blame:

(c) (U) I find that LTG Sanchez, and his DCG, MG Wojdakowski, failed to ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation operations. As previously stated, MG Wojdakowski had direct oversight of two new Brigade Commanders. Further, staff elements of the CJTF-7 reacted inadequately to some of the Indications and Warnings discussed above. However, in light of the operational environment, and CJTF-7’s under-resourcing and unplanned missions, and the Commander’s consistent need to prioritize efforts, I find that the CJTF-7 Commander and staff performed above expectations, in the over-all scheme of OIF.

Despite these generals' findings, none of the officers responsible for facilitating these abuses will face criminal charges. Or, put another way, the Army IG has wholly disregarded the record evidence before him to arrive at an arbitrary and capricious decision that the senior Army leaders involved should face no legal consequences for their actions. What kind of message does that send to our junior military leaders? What kind of message does that send to the world?

TWO AMUSING POSTS over at Functional Ambivalent: one on Alessandra Stanley's wickedly funny remarks about Katie Couric; and the other about Colin Powell's "behind-the-scenes but in public" opposition to the nomination of John Bolton. Tom says exactly what I was thinking after reading about this: Powell obviously knows how to translate the words "Don't get mad, get even" into action.

BOOKSLUT'S MICHAEL SCHAUB directs our attention to Deroy Murdock's rant in the National Review Online about libraries as magnets for terrorists and the danger of evil librarians who regularly destroy Internet use and circulation records to protect their users' privacy.

One thing about Murdock. He may fancy himself a patriot, but he can't write worth a nickel. I had to force myself to finish the column. Turgid is the word.

BOING BOING posts on the new documentary about Enron. It seems Enron's "anything for profits" management philosophy was built on a system of rating employee performance that put making money before and above any other consideration.

Every year, all employees were rated from 1 (best) to 5 (worst). The more money you made for the company, the better your rating. (Skilling was fond of saying that money was the only thing that motivated people). Skilling mandated that between 10 and 15 percent of the employees had to be rated as 5s. And to get a rating of 5 meant that you were fired. This review process was dubbed "rank and yank."

It's no surprise that this algorithm resulted in a corporate petri dish teeming with sociopaths who were taped in phone conversations laughing at the thought of stealing money from "grandma millies" who were hit with unaffor[d]ably high utility bills, and urging on the California wildfires by chanting "burn baby, burn!."

LIZARD QUEEN quotes Barry Goldwater on mixing religion and politics, and finds that old campaign slogan was dead-on: "In your heart you know he's right."

THE "JUSTICE SUNDAY" CROWD like to criticize "cafeteria Christians" who think they can "pick and choose" which parts of the Bible they will follow and which they won't. But, as Echidne points out, biblical literalists are doing some picking and choosing of their own.

Via Brad Plumer.

JEANNE AT BODY AND SOUL has written a substantive, thoughtful, highly nuanced piece on the new Pope's much-publicized ties to the Nazi regime in his youth. Her basic point is that the things Ratzinger did as a teenager that involved him in Hitler's genocidal policies -- like joining the Hitler Youth -- cannot and should not be held against him now. What he should and must be held to account for is his refusal now, still, to acknowledge that he could have resisted, but chose not to. It's not the choices in and of itself that bother Jeanne; it's the denial that those moral choices existed.

In his biography of Ratzinger, John Allen, National Catholic Reporter's Vatican correspondent, notes that Ratzinger has said that resistance to Nazism was "impossible," a word echoed by his brother in the recent Times of London article that revived the issue of the then cardinal's wartime experiences.

Resistance was impossible. I'm sorry, but that's a blatant falsehood. The Times follows with the comments of a woman from Ratzinger's home town:

Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, dismiss such suggestions. “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others,” she said. “The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

John Allen adds that within Ratzinger's "immediate orbit" there were several models of resistance, including Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses and even some Catholics.

Clearly, when Ratzinger and his brother (who is also a priest) say that anti-Nazi resistance was "impossible," they're lying. And it's not an insignificant or harmless lie. Denying the option of resistance insults, indeed, denies the existence of, a lot of people who made far braver and more difficult decisions than the Ratzingers. Failing to exhibit extraordinary courage is human and understandable. Denying the extraordinarily courageous their due is shameful. Denying moral agency is surely unworthy of a man who would be pope.

The Ratzingers lie about this because if they admit that moral choices were involved, they'd have to explain their choice. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who cared about moral agency would recognize the need for self-reflection, for either admitting moral failure, or asserting moral principles. I can think of many possible explanations, but none of them fit well into black and white morality.
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My problem with the newly minted pope on this issue is that by lying -- lying, I suspect, as much to himself as to the rest of us -- he cut himself off from understanding the difficult moral choices people face. By lying about it now, he shows that he's still unwilling to face the complexity of moral choice. Whatever understandable lack of physical courage he displayed as a teenager is trumped a thousand times over by moral cowardice today.

Part 1 of this review is here (scroll down, past the Thomas Friedman book review).

THE TRIALS OF OSSIAN SWEET and his 10 co-defendants in late 1925 drew national attention at the time. It was the first time in the history of black people in America that a jury (an all-white jury) affirmed the basic principle that the right to defend self, family, and property from physical attack applied to both black people and white people. The two trials (the first, in which the defendants included 10 men in addition to Ossian Sweet, ended in a mistrial; the second resulted in Ossian Sweet, tried alone this time, being acquitted of all charges) were also famous as much because of the stature and fame of the defense attorney. Clarence Darrow -- famed from coast to coast because of the Scopes trial -- took the case at the request of the NAACP, whose leaders felt that Ossian's best chance for acquittal was being defended by a white lawyer with top-notch credentials. After reading Kevin Boyle's book, it's clear that Darrow's presence was key to the ultimate verdict of not-guilty. Ossian himself, with his quietly dignified manner and eloquent testimony, played a big part in convincing the jury to free him; but without Darrow's electrifying statements throughout the trial on white racism and its overwhelming and powerful influence on the most deeply rooted fears, expectations, assumptions, and responses of black Americans, it's questionable whether the testimony of a black man alone -- even one as professionally successful as Ossian Sweet -- could have secured Sweet's acquittal at that time and place in American history.

Kevin Boyle's writing ability impresses as much as his historian's skills. Arc of Justice is written in the best narrative nonfiction style. Prof. Boyle doesn't just plop us into the fateful night when a mob of whites tried to drive the Sweets out of their new home. Horrifying as those descriptions are, without the context of Dr. Sweet's entire life and experiences before that night, it would be far more difficult to understand and feel the full measure of terror and outrage that filled the mind and heart of Ossian Sweet on that terrible night in September, 1925. When you begin to understand that events like a young black man, accused of raping and murdering a white woman, being tied to a tree by a mob of white men who piled extremely dry wood all around the tree, doused the wood with gasoline, and then handed the match to the woman's husband, were not isolated incidents at all, but routine and commonplace in the lives of black Americans in the South, where Ossian was born and raised, you can better grasp the entire lifetime of memory and experience that informed Ossian's feelings on that one night in 1925. When Ossian Sweet, hidden in some bushes, watched that young man slowly consumed by those flames, screaming and screaming and screaming until he was finally burned to death, he was only five years old. Needless to say, the scars never left him.

And when you know this other American history, which most white Americans never have to think about and probably to a large extent aren't even aware of, you can also grasp the significance of an all-white jury acquitting a black man of the charge of murder for having defended himself, his family, and his home from mob attack -- a charge no white man would ever have even had to face at all in the same situation. Although it would be another 40 years before Martin Luther King, Jr., would quote Theodore Parker's observation that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," every black man and woman in America could feel the truth of that sentiment on the day that Dr. Ossian Sweet was found not guilty of murder for the crime of self-defense.

If you would like to read more about Dr. Ossian Sweet and the 1925 trial, here are some resources:

"I have to die a man or live a coward": the saga of Dr. Ossian Sweet.

Key Figures in the Sweet Trials

The Trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet

Interview with Kevin Boyle, winner of the National Book Award

HERE IS THE BLOG of a young man from the UK who until very recently lived in Iraq. He was a relief worker, like Marla Ruzicka, trying to help the Iraqi people. There is a lot of information about Marla here, from the perspective of people who knew her personally and what she was trying to do in Iraq.

I found this blog via Riverbend.

BOB HERBERT writes about Marla Ruzicka, who died, an innocent victim of war, trying to help innocent victims of war. She chose to put herself in the midst of war, because she wanted to be a witness to the unimaginable suffering (unimaginable to most Americans, that is) that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians have experienced since the U.S. invasion of Iraq began. And she wanted to help, as much as one individual could, to break through the Bush administration's policies designed to keep ordinary Americans from seeing the enormity of the harm U.S. policies have done and are continuing to do to Iraqis. Harm like this:

In a horrifying incident that occurred in the spring of 2003, an Iraqi woman threw two of her children, an infant and a toddler, out the window of a car that had been hit accidentally in an American rocket attack. The woman and the rest of her family perished in the black smoke and flames of the wreckage. The toddler, whose name was Zahraa, was severely burned. She died two weeks later.

But Americans never hear about most of these incidents.

The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can't think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can't put a positive spin on dead children.
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There's been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq. It's an ugly subject, and the idea has taken hold that Americans need to be protected from stories or images of the war that might be disturbing. As a nation we can wage war, but we don't want the public to be too upset by it.

So the public doesn't even hear about the American bombs that fall mistakenly on the homes of innocent civilians, wiping out entire families. We hear very little about the frequent instances of jittery soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding men, women and children who were never a threat in the first place. We don't hear much about the many children who, for one reason or another, are shot, burned or blown to eternity by our forces in the name of peace and freedom.

Obviously, Marla Ruzicka's death in one of the car bombings that happen pretty much every day in Iraq now is a personal tragedy for everyone who knew and loved her. But it's also a terrible loss for Iraqis. Because who now will go door to door interviewing families and documenting civilian casualties and working to show Americans the truths that their own government does not want them to see or know about?

Sunday, April 24, 2005

FROM THE RAW STORY we learn of a bill that would make it a crime for anyone other than a parent to take a girl seeking an abortion from a state with parental notification requirements to a state where parental notification is not required. The bill also mandates a 24-hour waiting period and written notification from the abortion provider to the parent, even if it's the parent who is accompanying the girl to get the abortion. This legislation, which is aptly and accurately called the "Teen Endangerment Act" (H.R. 748), and which is referred to as the "Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act" by the American mullahs who support it, has been approved by the House Judiciary Committee. It now goes to the full House, which is expected to approve it.

The bill is being opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and by women's rights and pro-choice organizations (of course). Also, 14 House Democrats have written a letter of dissent that will be attached to the legislation upon its entry into the House.

No surprise, the groups supporting this legislation (like Focus on the Family, among others) say the legislation is a response to "activist judges" who try to sabotage parental notification laws in states that have them. The mantra of the religious right is that the Teen Endangerment Act supports the rights of parents, upholds families, and protects the health and well-being of pregnant girls.

That is a bunch of unvarnished horseshit. First of all, the restrictions and requirements of this proposed law, as well as the punishments for violating them, include no exception for the health of the girl. In other words, it is a crime punishable by heavy fines, a year in prison, or both, for anyone in a girl's life -- older sibling, aunt or uncle, grandparent, minister or rabbi, best friend -- to help a girl get an abortion in another state: even if the girl's health or life is in danger; even if the girl's family is abusive or nonfunctional and the friend or relative is trying to save the girl's life. Even if it's the girl's own parent who is taking her across state lines, that parent is subject to criminal sanction if she or he does not follow the rules in the law: waiting 24 hours and not proceeding without notification by the physician.

That is not only heedless of the girl's health; it's also totally anti-family! How dare the government tell a parent or another family member how to care for their own child or close relative? What business does the government have interfering in family relationships? NO business!

There is more, so much more, that is wrong with this legislation. It presumes to come between a doctor and her patient, second-guessing medical judgments and putting roadblocks in the path of a physician whose job it is to protect and preserve a patient's health. It's anti-medicine and anti-doctor.

And, once again -- where have we heard this before? -- it violates the principle of federalism that is a fundamental part of what this country is about. There are 27 states in the United States of America that either have NO parental notification laws, or have more lenient parental notification laws. This proposed legislation, if passed, would impose the laws of states that have parental notification laws on states that don't, forcing some states to abide by the laws of others. And the bill violates what is arguably the most essential right individuals can have in a country built on republican (small r) or federalist principles: the right to travel freely from any state to any other state without restriction in order to get a lifestyle, a service, a job, or a legal environment; or to fill or satisfy any tangible or intangible need the individual might have that cannot be met, filled, or satisfied where they are.

Supporters of this bill say it "will help spark communication among girls and their parents." That is such blathering nonsense. It will do precisely the opposite. Communication is "sparked" by love and trust, not by legal requirements and threats of imprisonment and fines. How is communication between girls and their parents going to be facilitated by a law that makes it a crime for a girl to cross state lines in an effort to get an abortion without notifying her parents when the pregnancy was caused by her own father raping her? How is communication sparked in a family where a girl knows, or has excellent reason to believe, that she will be brutally beaten, or called a cunt and a whore and a bitch, or kicked out of the house, if she obeys the law that says she has to notify her parents before her aunt or her grandmother can take her to another state to get an abortion?

These are exactly the kind of horrors that could and do happen, and for which this legislation makes no allowance. From the letter of dissent signed by 14 House Democrats:

Some young women justifiably fear that they would be physically abused if forced to disclose their pregnancy to their parents. Nearly one-third of minors who choose not to consult with their parents have experienced violence in their family, feared violence, or feared being forced to leave home. Enacting this legislation and forcing young women in these circumstances to notify their parents of their pregnancies will only exacerbate the dangerous cycle of violence in dysfunctional families. This is the lesson of Spring Adams, an Idaho teenager who was shot to death by her father after he learned she was planning to terminate a pregnancy caused by his acts of incest. It is clear that when a young woman believes that she cannot involve her parents in her decision to terminate a pregnancy, the law cannot mandate healthy, open family communication.

We are well aware of proponents' claims that the travel provision would protect the rights of minors who cannot obtain parental consent because they have the option to appear before judges and obtain a judicial bypass for any parental involvement laws. While bypasses may have some theoretical benefits, in many cases it is difficult if not impossible for troubled young women to obtain them. Some teenagers live in regions where the local judges consistently refuse to grant bypasses, regardless of the facts involved. For example, one study found that a number of judges in Massachusetts either refuse to handle abortion petitions or focus inappropriately on the morality of abortion. Other young women may live in small communities where the judge may be a friend of the parents, a family member, or even the parent of a friend. Still others may live in regions where the relevant courts are not open in the evenings or on weekends, when minors could seek a bypass without missing school or arousing suspicion.

The difficulties in obtaining a judicial bypass were clearly illustrated by Ms. Billie Lominick during her testimony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution. Ms. Lominick was a 63-year old grandmother who helped a pregnant minor from a physically and sexually abusive household cross state lines to obtain an abortion. Ms. Lominick testified that her assistance was essential because the minor was unable to find any judge in her home state of South Carolina who would hear her judicial bypass petition.
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With respect to the Federal Notification Provision, the section requires a 24-hour or more waiting period and written notification, with no medical emergency exception, even if a parent accompanies his or her daughter to an out-of-state physician and consents to the abortion services. In such cases, this requirement acts as a built-in mandatory delay, imposing logistical and financial hardships on functional families who are trying to support their daughters. Even in a health emergency, this bill robs a parent of his or her ability to authorize immediate care. For example, if a parent and daughter were vacationing together in California and the parent brought her daughter to a hospital for emergency abortion services, this provision would needlessly require a doctor to wait 24 hours before providing that care.

We would also observe that the Federal Notification Provision’s very limited exceptions provide no safety net for the most vulnerable teens. For example, the section’s “exception” for teen victims of certain forms of abuse only applies if the young woman “declares in a signed written statement that she is the victim of abuse.” This “exception” ignores the painful reality that most abused teens are too afraid to tell anyone that they are being abused. Moreover, because the bill requires the doctor to notify the authorities of the abuse before the abortion is performed, many teens will not report the abuse for fear that their parents will discover the abuse report. As Justice O’Connor aptly stated in Hodgson v. Minnesota, an “exception to notification for minors who are victims of neglect or abuse is, in reality, a means of notifying the parents.” Moreover, “[t]he combination of the abused minor’s reluctance to report sexual or physical abuse . . . with the likelihood that invoking the abuse exception for the purpose of avoiding notice will result in notice, makes the abuse exception less than effectual.”
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The bill also illogically sanctions the criminal activity of a parent by authorizing lawsuits to be brought by parents suffering “legal harm” against any person assisting a minor in obtaining an abortion across state lines. The private civil remedy aspect of both the Travel and Federal Notification Provisions are so broad that even a father who committed rape or incest against his own daughter would be empowered to bring a lawsuit seeking compensation under the legislation. If the pregnancy of the minor is a result of incest with her father, the minor must still comply with any parental consent or notification law in the state of her residence under this bill unless she signs a written statement and agrees to allow the physician to notify the authorities about the sexual abuse. If the minor decides not to sign a written statement or notify the authorities and is accompanied by her grandmother across state lines to a doctor in another state for abortion services, the father who committed the incest can bring a civil action against the grandmother and the doctor, effectively profiting from his own criminal wrongdoing.

The absurdities in this law go beyond anything even Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka could devise.

Likewise, the Federal Notification Provision also imposes complex and absurd requirements for physicians and their patients. As noted above, section 2432 would require that the physician give 24 hours “actual notice” to a parent before performing an abortion on a minor from out-of-state. This provision would apply even if the minor came from a state that did not have a parental consent or notification law, and even if the parent went to the other state fully intending and approving of his or her child’s abortion. [Emphasis added.] The section defines “actual notice” as “the giving of a written notice directly, in person.” This section would seem to require that the physician or a member of her staff travel out-of-state to visit the parents of the patient in person. The section would allow for the physician to give “constructive notice” to the patient’s parents if it is not possible to provide them with “actual notice” after the physician has made a “reasonable effort” to do so. The section defines “constructive notice” as notice that is given by certified mail, to the last known address of the person being notified with delivery deemed to have occurred 48 hours following noon” on the day after the mailing occurred. The section does not define “reasonable effort.”

Past versions of this proposed law have been passed by the House, so if this bill is going to be defeated, it's going to take the best efforts of every person who cares about the health and safety of teenage girls, the integrity and autonomy of families, the right of everyone in this country to freedom of movement, and the right of doctors to make medical decisions in consultation with their patients without fear of government sanction. Just as an aside, it's quite revealing that the Republican leadership supports making it harder for individuals to file medical malpractice suits against doctors who do actual harm; but oppose the right of doctors to make medical judgments in partnership with their patient on whether to perform a legal medical procedure.

A pro-teen endangerment site run by Focus on the Family urges its readers to "contact your House members and ask them to do their part to make sure the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (H.R. 748) becomes law." Surely those of us who actually care about children can do no less to insist that our legislators make sure this very bad bill does NOT become law. At the end of this article, readers are instructed to "see the CitizenLink Action Center" for "help in contacting your lawmakers." The CitizenLink Action Center is set up to help right-wingers lobby their representatives on abortion, public prayer, anti-gay measures, and so on. (I didn't realize this until I clicked on the "Issues and Legislation" tab.) So let's us use their "Action Center" to find our lawmakers to defeat their repressive, oppressive, hateful legislation.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

NOT THAT THIS affects me anymore, but I'm glad to see the sponge is coming back. It was taken off the market in 1995 after the FDA discovered that the water being used by the manufacturer to make it was contaminated, and the equipment used to detect contamination was not functioning properly. The sponge is easy to use (unlike a diaphragm) and does not contain hormones (unlike birth control pills). It also has a very high success rate (89 - 91%).

The only problem is, it works by physically blocking the passage of sperm, which are absorbed into the sponge and then killed with a spermicide. Does anyone else think that the religious fanatics who oppose pills that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus will cry foul at the return of the sponge, given that the sponge prevents the sperm from fertilizing an egg and then murders the sperm?

ECHIDNE is tired of hearing lefties talk about the day when Democrats "will be back in control." She doesn't feel "in control"; and doesn't think she ever will.

I will never be in control. I have never been in control and expect never to gain control over anything much. This I know for a fact. Why, then, can someone else so trustingly expect to have control over the political situation? What is it that makes me feel as if I have really very little say on this planet? There are many billions of people who probably have less say in reality. Or is it just that I don't believe in the generalized concept of control by one political party or another? Most of us don't have power over political effects, after all. So was whoever made the initial statement someone with access to real power? Or just someone who feels much more empowered?

This is all totally trivial. Or is it? Why do I feel as if my voice is inaudible in this world? Because it is? Because all our voices are inaudible in a world where only money and guns and gods can speak? Or is this a woman-thing? Something to do with the new pope, perhaps, with the celebration and glorification of a man who would not listen to women? Who would not listen to anyone with values like mine?

Maybe that is the answer. I no longer see, hear or read my values expressed positively in the media that stands for our common living-room. Can you think of a single person with liberal or progressive values who has easy access to mainstream media networks and who is actually allowed to speak uninterrupted for a few minutes? I can't think of a single living person like this. Some dead ones, sure, like Martin Luther King. But the dead are inaudible, too.

Via Archy, who adds some thoughts of his own on feeling in control that are very well taken. For one thing, he is not so sure he wants anyone to be "in control." That kind of hierarchical thinking is anathema to him -- and to me.

Personally, I don't like the idea of anybody being "in control." I want competent and liberal people in positions of responsibility and authority. But, I want them to [be] answerable to me, not in control of me. "Control" is a word like "leadership" that immediately puts me on the defensive. As long as I have been aware of elections, I've cringed at the biennial demand for leaders. I don't want to be led, thank you very much; I'm a grown up and I can make my own decisions (even if I take a long time to do it).

Both words imply the sort of top-down, hierarchical thinking that I despise. I'm a bottom-up, collegial sort of guy. I don't view the current struggle as our dictatorship versus their dictatorship. I view it as dictatorship versus democracy. If we have a dictator--even if it's our dictator--I'm going to do everything I can to undermine him (or her, but probably him).

HERE'S MY TAKE on the report in the Washington Times about the 8th grade guidance counselor in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, who recited an altered Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom, replacing "under God" with "under your belief system":

She should not have done that -- not because it was the Pledge of Allegiance, but because no guidance counselor (or teacher or principal, or janitor, for that matter) has the right to unilaterally change the wording in any official text. Obviously this woman has no common sense, which is alarming in a guidance counselor.
Okay, so what? Nobody was hurt, nobody died, nobody lost anything valuable. There are one or two things going on in the world that are more terrible than a phrase substitution in the Pledge of Allegiance. A little perspective would not be out of place here. As Norbizness said, "There is a lesson here: And that lesson is that regardless of the rampant environmental destruction that is occurring on Earth Day, the continuing attack by a group of millenialist nutballs on the separation of powers and the integrity of the judiciary, the blatant cover-ups of international law violations despite damning evidence to the contrary, the deteriorating-to-near-flatlining national fiscal situation, and the surging violence and failure to form a government in Iraq... one junior high school official can wash that shit away on national and cable news shows for at least a week."
The fact that the phrase "under God" is in the Pledge to begin with assumes a unity of belief that does not exist. James Joyner at Outside the Beltway puts it well: "Obviously, re-writing the Pledge is outside the purview of a school guidance counselor. Of course, the idea that a national patriotic ritual should include phraseology that's offensive to a substantial number of Americans is rather bizarre to begin with. "
Given that it's the Washington Times that broke the story, is it even true? (Just kidding -- I think.)

JOHN TIERNEY writes amusingly in his column today about the new JAMA study on weight and mortality.

For those of us lacking six-pack abs, this week's report that the overweight live longer is the greatest medical news in history. The authors of this study deserve a Nobel, not just for medicine, but for peace, too.

They have taken away the favorite cudgel of the scolds who used the "obesity epidemic" as an excuse to attack the flabby. The supposedly deadly consequences of fat provided the scientific rationale for the last politically correct form of prejudice.

The fatophobes are fighting on, disputing the new study and arguing that it still shows the fatal dangers of being seriously obese. But they have lost the scientific high ground. Not only do people of "normal" weight die younger than the moderately overweight, the study shows, but thin people die even younger than those of normal weight.

The Center for Consumer Freedom says the moral of the JAMA study is that "fitness (not fatness) is key" to longevity. And in case you're wondering about the credentials of the people who say this, don't worry. They are stellar.

Taking a direct stab at previous research that overemphasizes people's waist lines, the JAMA article notes that "most studies" of the flawed Body Mass Index (BMI) standard "and other measures of obesity have not adequately accounted for physical fitness." Says who? The authors hail from the National Institutes of Health, the University of Florida College of Medicine, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the Rhode Island Hospital, the Atlanta Cardiovascular Research Institute, and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

David Brooks, snarky as ever, makes an attempt at conveying good cheer at the news that fat is healthier than skinny, but his real reason for crowing is that, according to him, the study proves that there is no point in being disciplined and responsible, because life rewards irresponsibility and slovenliness.

Mostly, I'm happy on an existential level. I like to be reminded that the universe is basically crooked. This is what the zero-tolerance brigades and all the better living gurus never quite get. They're busy trying to mold everybody into lifelong valedictorians, who spend their adulthood as carb counters and responsible flossers - the sort of organized folk who actually read legal documents before they sign them.

In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve. The people with the worst grades start the most successful businesses. The shallowest people end up blissfully happy and they are so vapid they don't even realize how vapid they are because vapidity is the only trait that comes with its own impermeable obliviousness system. The people regarded as lightweights, like F.D.R., J.F.K. and Ronald Reagan, make the best presidents, while you - so much more thoughtful and better read - would be a complete disaster.

Life isn't fair, logic is of limited value and, as Woody Allen observed years ago, everything your parents once thought was good for you turns out to be bad for you: sun, milk, red meat and college.

The chief moral lesson I take away from this report is that Mother Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible misbehavior. She doesn't want you to go completely to seed. If you're truly obese and arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket at any moment.

Naturally, being David Brooks, he does not get it at all. The "chief lesson" in this study is that morality and weight have nothing to do with each other -- but if Brooks insists on bringing "personal responsibility" into this issue, then it must be the thin people who count calories obsessively but never get any exercise who are being irresponsible; and the overweight people who eat what they want to eat but are physically active are the ones who are behaving appropriately.

EZRA KLEIN has been blogging all this week on the health insurance policies of half a dozen nations around the world, and how they compare to ours -- or, more accurately, how ours compares to theirs because, in most cases, the U.S. falls quite a bit short of the mark when it comes to both the cost of health care and universal coverage.

Over at Angry Bear, Kash takes the zoom-in approach, with a series of posts on different aspects of health care in the United States.

Via Kevin Drum.

And if you want a regular source of information about health care issues, the Health Care Blog is just the ticket. I found it by way of a link on Ezra's blog.

Friday, April 22, 2005

Another Week in Post-Saddam Iraq

Wednesday, April 20 ... Iraqi security personnel pulled about 50 bodies out of the Tigris River, and more were pulled out the next day. Iraq's interim president, Jalal Talabani, claims they are the remains of as many as 100 Shiites who were abducted in Madain (a town near Baghdad) a week ago. But Iraqi police and health officials in the area say the bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition, indicating that the victims had been murdered and thrown into the river more like 3 or 4 weeks ago, and that they might have come from anywhere.

The corpses showed evidence of horrible mutilation.

Some had their hands cut off, others are headless or burnt. Another was strangled, with his tongue lolling out. [An Iraqi man interviewed at the scene] thinks one bloated, slime-covered corpse might be his younger brother.

The interim government also announced that 19 Iraqi soldiers had been found shot to death in a soccer stadium in Haditha, a Sunni town in Anbar Province. The soldiers were apparently murdered in firing-squad style -- against a wall, blindfolded and hands tied behind their backs -- and their bodies piled in the stadium afterward.

Back in early 2004, when thousands of Shiites who had been murdered by Saddam Hussein's regime were found buried in mass graves, the Bush administration took full advantage of the propaganda value to say what a monster Hussein was and how right and justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been: the major point being that now that Saddam Hussein was gone, Iraqis would be so much better off -- particularly Shiite Iraqis, since they were the ones who had been persecuted when Hussein was there.

The hundreds of Shiites who were executed and thrown into the Tigris River were also killed by Sunnis, quite possibly followers of Saddam Hussein, but these Shiites were killed after Hussein was overthrown.

In other times the massacre might have prompted calls for international intervention. But there are already 150,000 US and British troops in Iraq and this was done under their noses. Abu Qaddum’s pictures are a terrifying testament to the chaos of Iraq.

Madain has had no police force since a mob of criminals and insurgents burnt down the police station last year. The police fled.

Sunni guerrillas quickly took over, running the town as their own criminal fiefdom and randomly killing Shia residents, whom they considered infidels and US sympathisers. Then they launched an all-out attempt to purge the town of its Shias.

The Bush administration's response to the grisly discoveries in the Tigris and in Haditha was considerably more muted than it was to the discovery of those mass graves in 2004. According to the Washington Post, the official U.S. response to the killings in Haditha came from the Marine Corps; they said that the U.S. had no information about any killings in Haditha. Luckily, the USMC was able to state with confidence that "insurgents ransacked a television and radio station that provided emergency information, news and entertainment to the local population."

As far as I have been able to discover, the Bush administration had no comments to make at all about the bodies pulled out of the Tigris River.

Thursday, April 21 ... Insurgents in Iraq shot down a Russian-made helicopter, killing 10 men. There were 6 American contractors and 5 other men on board; the 11th man survived the crash and was shot in a volley of gunfire as he tried to walk away. The insurgents filmed the execution in the minutes before an American medical helicopter arrived at the scene.

Friday, April 22 ... At least 9 Iraqis were killed in a car bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Baghdad. Two of the dead were children.

IF YOU ENJOY reading hilariously funny, very well-written reviews of truly awful books, then you should read Matt Taibbi's review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat.

I haven't read Friedman's book, but apparently the man is the Master of Malapropisms.

The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting—ironically, as it were—with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

"Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa business class." When he reaches India—Bangalore to be specific—he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas."

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

**********

If you've read The World Is Flat and are craving a good book; or even if you haven't read The World Is Flat and you're craving a good book, pick up Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle.

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, takes the first part of its title from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous quote of Theodore Parker's observation: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." The book resurrects a murder trial that took place in Detroit in 1925. The case was famous among Detroiters, so much so that even today many long-time residents of Detroit still know about it; but outside of that city, most Americans have never heard of it.

In the early 1920s, a young black doctor, Ossian Sweet, set up a practice in Detroit. After marrying and having a child, Dr. Sweet bought a house in an all-white neighborhood. It would be hard to overstate what a revolutionary act this was at that time and in that place. Detroit, like many northern cities in the second decade of the twentieth century, was rigidly segregated. Black Detroiters were forced to live in one small section of the city called Black Bottom. Even after the black population grew way beyond the capacity of that one neighborhood to provide safe and decent living conditions for its residents, African-Americans were not allowed to live anywhere else. Black Bottom was for blacks. The rest of Detroit was for whites. And that unwritten rule was enforced with intimidation and mob violence whenever it was violated (which was not often). The year before Dr. Sweet bought his house, another black man who bought a house in a white neighborhood left after one terrifying night in which hundreds of whites massed in front of his home, screaming racial epithets, storming the house, and threatening to lynch him. Not many black Detroiters had the courage it took to cross that color line.

Dr. Ossian Sweet was one who did. Before he and his family even moved in, word spread around the neighborhood that a "nigger" family had bought the house. An organization was formed for the specific purpose of putting the Sweet family out of the house. The first night that the Sweets were in their new home, a crowd of whites from the neighborhood massed in front of the house. The Sweets had moved into the house earlier in the day, knowing that when the sun was out, they were relatively safe; adults were at work and children at school, and the pogrom they fully expected was most likely to start after darkness fell.

Dr. Sweet was just as terrified as you might imagine him to be, but he was determined not to flee. He was strengthened by the conviction that he had the right to live anywhere in the city that he could afford to live and wanted to live. That first night, the mob was outside until the small hours of the morning, but no violence occurred.

The next night was different. Whites massed in front of the house again; but this time the mob was huge: At least 800, with some reports at over 1,000, whites invaded the Sweets' block, completely filling and overwhelming the surrounding streets. Luckless black people who found themselves in the area by bad chance were attacked and beaten. One man who was in his car drove into the neighborhood by accident and was immediately set upon by hundreds of whites who tried to smash his windows and drag him out of the car. He was badly hurt, but finally escaped.

Inside the Sweet home, the Sweet family was neither alone nor unarmed. Ossian had brought a cache of weapons into the house, and had prevailed upon friends and family to stay in the house that night and help him protect his family and his property. The insane tension continued to build. Then, people in the mob outside started to attack the house with rocks. The rocks pelted the roof and knocked tiles off. Then rocks began to smash against the windows in an upstairs bedroom, where one or more of Ossian's friends were keeping guard. Suddenly a gun thrust through the bedroom window, and shots rang out. Outside, the lynch mob panicked and began to run, but two white men were shot, one of them fatally.

Go to Part 2 of this review.

ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES asks: Why is George W. Bush trying to prevent the World Health Organization from saving the lives of up to 68,000 women by putting two pills that induce early abortions on its essential medicines list? These pills would be suggested for use in countries where abortion is already legal; their purpose would be to provide doctors with an alternative to surgical abortion, which is much riskier to women in third-world countries because of unsafe practices.

My conclusion: It must be because the Bush administration prefers that abortions be performed surgically at 8 weeks or at 12 weeks of pregnancy rather than immediately or within a few days after unprotected sex. It must be because he doesn't care if 68,000 women a year die from abortions that were not done properly because of substandard medical conditions.

The Bush administration calculus of values is clear: The loss of fetuses counts for more than the loss of already existing lives.

Echidne goes on to quote from an article in The New Republic Online that notes much of the objection to emergency contraception among "pro-lifers" is that it "encourages promiscuity." But since Plan B also is a safe and highly effective way to prevent pregnancy without abortion, and since abortion opponents are so concerned about having a "culture of life," then shouldn't a method that "reduces the approximately 1.3 million abortions that take place yearly in this country by half...trump the issue of premarital sex?"

Echidne's answer:

There are specifications to the "culture of life" in wingnuttia and these exclude most anything that promotes better lives for already existing people. "Life" in the wingnut jargon usually refers to fetuses and to people who are brain-dead. Some already existing lives (such as those of Iraqis or Afghanis) don't matter much. Women's lives are valued as equipment for making future wingnuts but don't seem to possess much intrinsic worth. And in general wingnuts lose all interest in the saving of any lives if it costs them something. Hence the eagerness to ban abortions and the reluctance to fund anything that would make bringing up children easier.

JEANNE OVER AT BODY AND SOUL wrote a superb post on Monday which I did not see until now. Jeanne uses her daughter's field trip to a Catholic mission in Santa Cruz, California; and the 30th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge invasion of Cambodia, to observe that there is more than one way to enable genocide. The U.S. media can be critical of the President and Congress for "letting genocide happen" by doing nothing about it -- as in the instances of Darfur and, before that, Rwanda. But genocide can also occur, or increase vastly in scale, because of the actions the United States does take, in addition to the actions the United States does not take.

Jeanne quotes Nicholas Kristof on the Darfur atrocities as an example of this tendency to recognize only one way governments such as the U.S. encourage genocide.

Like Samantha Power, who he goes on to quote, Kristof believes that genocide takes place only when the United States is too spoiled, too lazy, or too preoccupied, to play its proper role as the world's policeman. Sometimes Power and Kristof are right. I frequently refer back to Power's writing on Rwanda, and I think she is probably right on the cost of our failure to intervene. I think Kristof is probably right today when he writes about Darfur. I don't know if intervention is necessary or wise, but it would be impossible to shine too much light in the direction of the atrocities taking place there, and Kristof's light has been one of the strongest.

But genocide doesn't take place only when we turn our backs. It is as likely to stem from our actions as from our inaction. Cambodia is a perfect example.

...Sometimes the killing takes place with active American involvement -- and rewards for those most involved.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

SHAKESPEARE'S SISTER on the latest addition to the Hollywood Walk of Fame:

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is really going downhill:

The host of "American Idol" has become an idol himself.

Ryan Seacrest was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Wednesday in a ceremony attended by his Fox TV colleagues, "Idol" judges Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell.

"Listen, Simon," Jackson said to Cowell during their ceremonial speech. "What would we say about this day?"

"Ill-deserved," the famously grumpy Cowell replied, dryly. "I cannot believe that April the 20th is going to be Ryan Seacrest Day. I am officially taking this day off my diary."

At least megabitch extraordinaire Simon still has some sense.

Awwww, I kinda like Ryan! It's the voting public I have a problem with. Those idiots voted Anwar off the show! I was really upset about that. How is it that Scott Savol stays on week after week, but the best male singer on the show has to go home? Plus: Anwar went to Montclair (NJ) High School -- my daughter's school!

All of us here are truly bummed out.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

I MUST ADMIT to feeling quite smug about the report that came out today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It seems that last year's government study, which purported to show that 400,000 Americans died every year as a result of excess body fat; and that excess body fat killed more people than tobacco, was misleading and inaccurate.

The [new] study estimated that obesity killed about 112,000 people, most of whom were extremely obese with body sizes equivalent to a 5-foot-4-inch woman who weighed 204 or more pounds. The effects of milder obesity on death were less severe.

In addition, the scientists found that being underweight killed an estimated 34,000 Americans each year. Risk of death from being underweight was especially high among the elderly.

The scientists reported that people who were merely overweight, as opposed to obese, suffered 86,000 fewer deaths than those whose weight was in the so-called healthy range.

Detractors say that the new study did not adequately control for people who are thin because they smoke or because they are sick -- ignoring or forgetting the fact that last year's government study, published by the Centers for Disease Control, came under fire when it was discovered that a number of CDC scientists had expressed serious concerns about the study's methodology prior to its publication. Plus, I find it odd that thin is considered normal by definition except in certain specific instances -- but studies connecting excess body fat with increased mortality rates do not generally break down those mortality rates to see how many of those overweight people were completely or almost completely sedentary as well as how many were morbidly obese. Perhaps, if scientists want to say that thin is normal except for smokers and sick people, they should also say that excess body fat is not abnormal or unhealthy, except for people who don't get significant amounts of exercise and except for people who are at the very extreme end of obesity.

THE U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY can add religious harassment to its list of unfriendly behaviors. Students at the USAF who are not Christian have been aggressively proselytized (at an institution paid for by public taxpayer dollars); and, even worse, have been verbally attacked and intimidated by the good, devout Christians on campus. Some of those taunted and insulted are Jewish. They face the usual slurs; being Jewish myself, I know them all too well.

Mikey Weinstein, an academy graduate and a lawyer in Albuquerque, said that his son Curtis — a sophomore at the academy — had been called a "filthy Jew."

"When I visited my son, he told me he wanted us to go off base because he had something to tell me," Weinstein said. "He said, 'They are calling me a … Jew and that I am responsible for killing Christ.' My son told me that he was going to hit the next one who called him something."

The problem got even worse after Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was released.

Hundreds of movie posters were pinned up in the academy dining hall advertising the film. Cadets did mass e-mailings urging people to see it.

School leaders denounced the e-mails, saying students should not use government equipment to promote their religion.

At that point, officials began looking into the situation.

Colorado Springs, where the USAF is located, is the Grand Central Station of right-wing fundamentalist and evangelical Christian groups. One of those groups, Focus on the Family, has already managed to turn this around into an example of Christians being persecuted, and the group's vice-president of public policy, Tom Minnery, even implied that, since 90% of the USAF's student body is Christian, they have a right to bully and force their beliefs on the other 10%.

"If 90% of cadets identify themselves as Christian, it is common sense that Christianity will be in evidence on the campus," he said. "Christianity is deeply felt and very important to people … and to suggest that it should be bottled up is nonsense. I think a witch hunt is underway to root out Christian beliefs. To root out what is pervasive in 90% of the group is ridiculous."

Apparently Minnery believes that "deeply felt Christian beliefs" include the need to tell non-Christians they are going to hell if they don't convert, and to accuse Jewish students of killing the Jewish rabbi they call Christ. And let's not forget that "deeply felt Christian beliefs" have not been viewed by many of the cadets at the USAF as an impediment to raping and sexually harassing dozens of female cadets over the years.

If condemning vicious attacks on non-Christians, and raping female cadets, constitutes "rooting out Christian beliefs," perhaps those particular Christian beliefs need an overhaul.

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST, via Kevin Drum:

Army intelligence officials in Iraq developed and circulated "wish lists" of harsh interrogation techniques they hoped to use on detainees in August 2003, including tactics such as low-voltage electrocution, blows with phone books and using dogs and snakes -- suggestions that some soldiers believed spawned abuse and illegal interrogations.

The discussions, which took place in e-mail messages between interrogators and Army officials in Baghdad, were used in part to develop the interrogation rules of engagement approved by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then commander of U.S. troops in Iraq. Two specific cases of abuse in Iraq occurred soon after.

Army investigative documents released yesterday, as well as court records and files, suggest that the tactics were used on two detainees: One died during an interrogation in November 2003 while stuffed into a sleeping bag, and another was badly beaten by inexperienced interrogators using a police baton in September 2003. The documents indicate confusion over what tactics were legal in Iraq, a belief that most detainees were not covered by Geneva Conventions protections and alleged abuse by interrogators who had tacit approval to "turn it up a notch."

I admit to being puzzled by that phrase "inexperienced interrogators." It was inexperience that caused these interrogators to beat a man with a police baton? If they had been experienced, would they have beaten him better? Or is it that experienced interrogators would have known better than to beat the detainee? Does it take experience to know that it's wrong to beat a person on the soles of his feet and on his back and buttocks while the person is in a painful stress position? How much experience does an interrogator need to have before he knows that?

And then there's that last sentence. These detainees were treated this way because the Americans were confused about whether such tactics were legal or not? This was an issue of believing that the Geneva Conventions did not protect "most detainees" from being stuffed into sleeping bags and tied with electrical cord? Are we to conclude that the only way to figure out whether it's all right to "fear up" detainees with dogs and snakes is to know whether the Geneva Conventions apply to "most detainees"?

Call me naive, or uninformed, but I would have thought knowing right from wrong is a matter of basic conscience -- something every mentally healthy person possesses. I wouldn't have thought one could be "confused" about whether it was okay to allow a man to die inside a sleeping bag tied with electrical cord while you interrogate him.

So you can imagine my relief when I got to the last paragraph of the article and discovered that at least one member of the military is not confused about these things.

Another interrogator, with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion, wrote a response to the headquarters e-mail with cautions that "we need to take a deep breath and remember who we are." "It comes down to standards of right and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient," the soldier wrote. "We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there."

Maybe copies of that e-mail should be sent to all the inexperienced interrogators in Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever else they may be located.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

THE PHARMACY ISSUE keeps growing. Now conservative religious pharmacists in Illinois are fighting Gov. Blagojevich on his emergency ruling requiring all pharmacies in the state to fill legal prescriptions for contraceptives.

"The governor is trying to make a decision that must be left to the pharmacy," said [State] Senator [Frank] Watson, whose family business, Watson's Drug Store in Greenville, Ill., does not stock the pill. "It's an infringement on a business decision and also on the pharmacist's right of conscience."

Why is this becoming such a huge issue now, especially since pharmacists who refuse to dispense emergency contraception are still relatively few compared to the total number of pharmacists in the U.S.? To me, the answer is: politics. The religious right is still a minority in terms of absolute numbers, but the influence they have gained within the Republican Party is way out of proportion to how many of them there are. Thanks to George W. Bush's pandering to the most extreme fundamentalist elements in the GOP, those elements exert frightening amounts of power to shape the social agenda in this country. That's why 12 states are now considering "conscience clause bills" for pharmacists, doctors, and other health care professionals -- but two federal bills, sponsored by Barbara Boxer and Frank Lautenberg respectively, that would require all legal prescriptions to be filled "are not expected to get very far," according to the Times article.

It seems that the "right of conscience" is a very selective thing. When the Colorado legislature passed a bill recently that would have required all hospitals, including Catholic ones, to tell rape victims about the availability of emergency contraception, Gov. Bill Owens vetoed it -- because, he said, "It is one of the central tenets of a free society that individuals and institutions should not be coerced by government to engage in activities that violate their moral or religious beliefs."

But when Camilo Mejia refused to return to Iraq because his experiences there convinced him that taking human life in war was morally wrong, he did not have any "right of conscience." Rather, he was viciously attacked for being irresponsible and a coward, not just by his commanding officers, but also by his chaplain --a man who, if I were taking bets, I would be willing to bet agrees with those pharmacists who think a pill that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus is "taking a human life." In the end, the only way Camilo Mejia was allowed to exercise his right of conscience was from a jail cell.

And don't think that it's easier to exercise your right of conscience not to murder people in war if you do it before entering the military. In order to have his right of conscience recognized by the military, a man has to apply for conscientious objector status, which requires demonstrating in writing and personal testimony that he arrived at his beliefs through a specific process and that those beliefs have influenced his life in significant ways. The burden of proof is always on the individual to convince a skeptical and even hostile audience that his beliefs are sincerely held and spiritual or moral in nature. Can you imagine what the response would be if the American Pharmacists Association required pharmacists to apply for permission to refuse to fill legal prescriptions and to demonstrate that their beliefs were sincerely held?

UNTIL I READ Kevin Drum's blog today, I didn't know that Time had decided to disgrace its cover with Ann Coulter. I was only able to read the first paragraph of the main article on her before I was stopped by a subscription wall -- which is probably for the best, judging by how sickeningly sycophantic that first paragraph was.

It has nothing to do with left or right. There are plenty of popular conservative pundits Time could have profiled if they wanted to. The fact that Ann Coulter is conservative is beside the point; she is an embarrassment to opinion writing, and the right should be hiding their faces in shame that she is one of them. Opinion writing is supposed to be supported by well-researched facts. Ann Coulter doesn't even attempt to concern herself with facts or truth or research. Her stock in trade is the ad hominem attack. Read any one of her columns or books. From start to finish, they are tirades filled with name-calling, unsupported accusations, and lies.

I won't say any more, though, because Melissa McEwan over at Shakespeare's Sister has said it all much better than I could. She wrote a letter to the editors of Time, blasting them with all the facts about Coulter's total disdain for facts. Here it is.

Monday, April 18, 2005

PETER D. KRAMER has an essay in the magazine section of the New York Times about the peculiar way that depression is viewed in our culture: as a form of deeper vision. People who suffer from depression are thought more likely to be writers, painters, creative visionaries. Depressed individuals are sensitive souls who feel -- just a little bit more than those who don't experience depression -- the pain and suffering that comes with being human.

I agree with Kramer that depression is often viewed this way -- that in some way depression is seen as conferring a deeper connection with the sacred mysteries of life -- but I also think this coin has a flip side. In my experience, people who have never dealt on a personal level with major or chronic depression are just as likely to dismiss the seriousness and "realness" of the feelings associated with it (a sensation of total bleakness, emptiness, hopelessness; difficulty concentrating; having to exert enormous effort to do the smallest tasks) as they are to romanticize it. Far too many people think that depression is mere self-indulgence, mental laziness, something a person could "snap out of" just by deciding to do so.

These attitudes about depression are wrong. There is nothing romantic or self-indulgent about depression. It's a disease, and it has serious consequences.

Depression is associated with brain disorganization and nerve-cell atrophy. Depression appears to be progressive -- the longer the episode, the greater the anatomical disorder. To work with depression is to combat a disease that harms patients' nerve pathways day by day.

Nor is the damage merely to mind and brain. Depression has been linked with harm to the heart, to endocrine glands, to bones. Depressives die young -- not only of suicide, but also of heart attacks and strokes. Depression is a multisystem disease, one we would consider dangerous to health even if we lacked the concept ''mental illness.''

Depression is not a special way of viewing the world and it is not an automatic response to tragedy and horror.

Depression is not a perspective. It is a disease. Resisting that claim, we may ask: Seeing cruelty, suffering and death -- shouldn't a person be depressed? There are circumstances, like the Holocaust, in which depression might seem justified for every victim or observer. Awareness of the ubiquity of horror is the modern condition, our condition.

But then, depression is not universal, even in terrible times. Though prone to mood disorder, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was not depressed in his months at Auschwitz. I have treated a handful of patients who survived horrors arising from war or political repression. They came to depression years after enduring extreme privation. Typically, such a person will say: ''I don't understand it. I went through -- '' and here he will name one of the shameful events of our time. ''I lived through that, and in all those months, I never felt this.'' This refers to the relentless bleakness of depression, the self as hollow shell. To see the worst things a person can see is one experience; to suffer mood disorder is another. It is depression -- and not resistance to it or recovery from it -- that diminishes the self.

YESTERDAY I COMMENTED on Frank Rich's op-ed noting the fact that most, if not all, of the men in the smarmy Tom DeLay crowd are also fundamental religionists. Today, the Times has an article about one member of this club, Ralph Reed. Reed, who used to head the Christian Coalition and now is a high-priced consultant and a candidate for lieutenant-governor in Georgia, is under fire for accepting millions of dollars in fees to finance a Christian-based campaign against Indian gambling casinos. The problem? The money, paid to Reed by Jack Abramoff, comes from payments made to Abramoff by other Indian gambling casinos. In short, Reed is using gambling money to fund a religious-based fight against gambling.

Naturally, Reed claims he had no idea Abramoff's money came from gambling -- even though Reed, now 43, has known Abramoff for well over 20 years; even though Reed was executive director of the College Republican National Committee when Abramoff was the chair of the Committee; and even though Reed is one of Abramoff's closest friends. The Times piece says that "[t]he men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff's couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife. "

Yet somehow Ralph Reed is unaware that Jack Abramoff is being investigated by the feds for shady business dealings -- which is how the $4 million deal came to light -- and did not even consider examining the source of that king's ransom.

Reed's defenders use the old "You gotta step in the mud if you want to grab the pig" argument:

"Thirty or 40 years ago, the people who you would see as the spokesmen for traditional values kind of things were people who were outsiders railing against the system," said Kelly Shackelford, a prominent Christian conservative and president of the Free Market Foundation in Texas. "And if they didn't get a hundred percent of what they believe in, they weren't going to play." Mr. Reed led a new wave of Christian conservatives, Mr. Shackelford said, who "understand that you have to be part of the system, and you can't sit outside and throw rocks at everybody."

That argument might make some sense in a straight crime-fighting context, where the FBI or the local police authorities infiltrate the organizations they're trying to bust. But we're not talking about law enforcement or public policy here. Ralph Reed and his minions are on a moral campaign against a practice they consider (in their claim) to be wrong for religious reasons. That requires a higher standard of behavior, in my opinion. There is no credibility or validity to a moral position that condones sinful behavior in the name of fighting sin.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

FRANK RICH points out the difference between Washington political scandals of time immemorial, and the kind practiced by Tom DeLay and his cronies: The DeLay brand comes wrapped in pious Judeo-Christian religiosity.

In the DeLay story almost every player has ostentatious religious trappings, starting with the House majority leader himself. His efforts to play God with Terri Schiavo were preceded by crusades like blaming the teaching of evolution for school shootings and raising money for the Traditional Values Coalition's campaign to save America from the "war on Christianity." Mr. DeLay's chief of staff was his pastor, and, according to Time magazine, organized daily prayer sessions in their office. Today this holy man, Ed Buckham, is a lobbyist implicated in another DeLay junket to South Korea.

But it's not merely Christian denominations that figure in the religious plumage of this crowd. Mr. Abramoff [Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist and close friend of Tom DeLay's], who is now being investigated by nearly as many federal agencies as there are nights of Passover, is an Orthodox Jew who in his salad days wore a yarmulke to press interviews. In Washington, he opened not one but two kosher restaurants (I hear the deli was passable by D.C. standards) and started a yeshiva. His uncompromising piety drove him to condemn the one Orthodox Jew in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, for securing "the tortuous death of millions" by supporting abortion rights. Mr. Abramoff's own moral constellation can be found in e-mail messages in which he referred to his Indian clients as "idiots" and "monkeys" even as he squeezed them for every last million. A previous client was Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, unlike Senator Lieberman, actually was a practitioner of torture and mass murder.

Another Abramoff crony is the political operative Ralph Reed, whom Mr. Abramoff hired for his College Republicans operation in the early 1980's. Mr. Reed, who has called gambling "a cancer on the body politic" and is running for lieutenant governor in Georgia, is now busily explaining that he, like Mr. DeLay, had no idea that some of his consulting firm's Abramoff-Scanlon paydays ($4.2 million worth) were indirect transfers of casino dough. Mr. Reed, of course, is best known for his stint as the public altar boy's face of Pat Robertson's political machine, the Christian Coalition.

Rich's point is that the cynically manipulative, lying, deceitful, I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you'll-scratch-mine style of politics, mixed in to this extreme biblical religiosity results in a particularly virulent kind of zealotry; one far more dangerous than anything we've seen before. It's the cross in one hand and brass knuckles in the other.

The values alleged so far in this scandal - greed, hypocrisy, favor-selling, dissembling - belong to no creed except the ruthless pursuit of power. They are not exclusive to either political party. But the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets.

It's not for nothing that Mr. DeLay's nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a "body bag." The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right's anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope's funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, "Death solves all problems; no man, no problem." The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get "a few more bodyguards." It wasn't necessarily a joke.

You can see why Dick Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay's threats of retribution against judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric, they've got a political Armageddon on their hands. Mr. DeLay got the message, sort of. At his Wednesday news conference, he tried to dial back some of his words, if only as a way of changing the subject from Indians and his own potential outings in a court of law. Unlike Bill Frist, he has yet to sign on to next Sunday's national Christian right telecast bashing what its organizer, the Family Research Council, calls "out-of-control courts."

PRES. BUSH'S WORDS:

In a free society, we will find out the truth, and everybody will see the truth. In a society that is a free society, there will be transparency in the process. People will testify; there will be fair trials, if there are trials; the truth will be known. In societies run by tyrants, you never see the truth. You never find out the truth. This country honors every individual. We believe in human rights and human dignity. And the example we will set for the world will confirm that.

Bush's actions, though, show that he prefers opaqueness in government, not transparency. David Sirota lists five examples, the first one being the scrubbing of the State Department report on terrorism.

Hat tip to Kos.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S decision to stop publishing the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report because it showed a huge jump in terrorist attacks in 2004 has been widely covered in the political blogosphere, but I first read about it on Weldon's blog. The story was first reported by Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder. State Department officials, including Condoleezza Rice, say that the report was axed because the methodology it used to calculate the number of terrorist attacks in the past year was flawed.

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism," eliminated weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

I don't find this hard to believe. After all, it's well known by now that Pres. Bush only wants to hear good news. The conclusion reached by the State Department's report -- that there were more terrorist attacks worldwide in 2004 than in any year since 1985 -- obviously is a direct challenge to the White House's relentless insistence that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have made the world safer.

What is astounding to me is that people as smart as Condi Rice is supposed to be would think that the Bush administration's credibility is enhanced by articles that open like this:

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Praktike, who is guest-blogging on Kevin Drum's site this weekend, says much the same thing.

I think the Bush administration is making a huge mistake. It's important to maintain the public's confidence in what the government is doing; I can't think of any valid reason not to publish the numbers other than fear of the political headwinds. If it's complicated to explain the methodological change, too bad. Have some courage, I say. Aren't we supposed to trust in the judgment of the American people?

Perhaps both of us are giving the Bushies too much credit. Perhaps they know how it looks to the American people and to the world when a government report is terminated because it shows an increase in terrorism instead of a decrease; perhaps they don't care. Publishing the numbers, discussing the methodology, and explaining why they disagree with the report's conclusions; or, even, why terrorist incidents might have increased, takes honesty, integrity, thoughtfulness, and, as Praktike noted, courage. What makes any of us assume that anyone in the Bush administration's inner circle possesses those qualities?

NELLIE AT DANCING WITH DERRIDA has posted the Bill of Rights on her blog, as a reminder to those who have forgotten, or who never knew, what "Americanism" actually means. Notice that nowhere in those 10 amendments does the word "citizen" appear. The right to speak freely, even if what you have to say is unpopular or critical of the government; the right to worship or not worship as you choose; the right to be free from government endorsements of religion; the right to petition the government and to demonstrate in public; the right to a speedy and fair trial; the right to be free and secure in your person and home, unless the government shows probable cause to be issued a search warrant; the right not to be tried twice for the same crime; the right to an attorney; the right not to be forced to testify against yourself; the right not to have your property, your life, or your freedom taken away from you without due process; the right to know what crimes you are charged with if arrested and detained; the right to see and face your accusers; the right to see the evidence against you; the right to have witnesses who will testify in your behalf; the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishments: ALL of these rights are given to "the people" or to "the accused." None of them are reserved exclusively for citizens.

There is no way that a rational or fair-minded person could read these guarantees of freedom and deny that the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, the C.I.A.'s renditions program, and the way detainees in the "war on terror" have been treated violate almost every one of them. It is clear as Waterford crystal that the Bush administration declared war on the U.S. Constitution beginning on September 12, 2001; and has been tearing the pieces into smaller pieces ever since.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Housekeeping Note

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I enjoy political debate. There is no true debate about anything without disagreement, and I welcome that. That's why I set up a Comments feature on Liberty Street. Comments don't have to agree with my views; they don't even have to be logical or intelligent. The only thing they MUST be is civil. Curses, abusive language, ad hominem attacks, and personal vendettas will not be tolerated. If you have a burning desire to do these things, you will have to go elsewhere.

Why am I saying all this? Because two individuals posting comments on Liberty Street decided they preferred hate and rudeness to civility and reasoned discussion. Both these individuals have been banned from commenting on my blog again, and the comments they already posted have been deleted.

This is MY blog. I decide what goes on it and what stays on it. So if you want to behave like a neanderthal, do it somewhere else.

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