I’ve supported a woman’s right to have an abortion as long as I can remember. But nothing solidified this view more that having children of my own. And I have to say, I was extremely relieved on Friday when I saw that Scott Roeder was convicted of first degree murder in the killing of George Tiller, one of the last American doctors to perform abortions later in pregnancy.
Roeder, has said he acted in order to “halt the deaths of babies,” and his supporters, many of whom descended on the courthouse during the trial, seem to buy this logic. But while these supporters may be vocal, it is important to remember, they aren’t the majority.
In fact, the majority of Americans continue to support a woman’s right to have a legal abortion. The Pew Research Center found that “in two major surveys conducted in 2009 among a total sample of more than 5,500 adults, views of abortion are about evenly divided, with 47% expressing support for legal abortion and 44% expressing opposition.”
It’s true that this support is down, and as Pew further reports, “four-in-ten Americans (41%) now favor making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, up six points from 2007 (35%).” But there is a big leap between supporting further restrictions for abortion and killing a doctor who has dedicated his life to helping women obtain this medical procedure.
I sometimes wonder if the “moderate” anti-abortionists can be reached by facts. For example that:
- the vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester of pregnancy.
- carrying any pregnancy to term is more dangerous to a woman’s health than is an early abortion.
- about 60% of abortions are obtained by women who have one or more children already.
- history has shown that making abortion illegal will not end the practice.
and,
- that health issues, and the inability to access abortion (either due to location, waiting limits, parental notification requirements, or cost) are the major contributing factors to having a later abortion, not simple callousness. 1 2
Obviously, information like this means nothing to the Scott Roeder’s of the world. But I hope it isn’t too much wishful thinking to believe that the average abortion opponent can somehow be reached with a reality check.
10 American Baptists have been accused of child trafficking after getting caught trying to take 33 Haitian kids across the border to the Dominican Republic.
The story’s still shaking out; it’s unclear whether the group just didn’t realize it’d be a very, very bad idea go across the border with a busload of kids lacking proper documentation or if there’s something more sinister going on. MSNBC reports:
The director of the charity now watching the children told NBC News that one child said she still had parents and was only expecting a brief vacation.
He added that a policeman believed the group was trying to sell the children for $10,000 each, an allegation denied by the church members.
“As far as we know they would have been, I say it clearly, sold for $10,000 each,” said Georg Willeit, who runs the SOS Children’s Village outside Port-au-Prince. “That’s what one of the policemen told us. Every child was very desperate, hungry, thirsty. They all were in a bad condition.”
“One of the elder girls told us, ‘I’m not an orphan. I still have my parents,’” he added. “She thought she was going on a summer holiday vacation given by friendly people from America and the Dominican Republic.”
The church members, most from Idaho, said they were trying to rescue abandoned and traumatized children. But officials said they lacked the proper documents when they were arrested Friday night in a bus along with children from 2 months to 12 years old who had survived the catastrophic earthquake.
The group said its “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission” was an effort to help abandoned children by taking them to an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic.
“In this chaos the government is in right now we were just trying to do the right thing,” the group’s spokeswoman, Laura Silsby, told The Associated Press at the judicial police headquarters in the capital, where the Americans were being held pending a Monday hearing before a judge.
No charges had been filed, though Haiti’s national secretary for security, Aramick Louis, said a judge had already done a preliminary investigation into the case.
The Baptist group planned to scoop up 100 kids and take them by bus to a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic, that they were converting into an orphanage, Silsby told the AP.
If you can’t take out the illegal drug market, at least you can take out the music genre it has spawned. That seems to be the logic of the Mexican government. As Phillip S. Smith at DrugWarChronicle writes,
Under a bill presented to Mexico’s congress last week by the ruling National Action Party (PAN), musicians could be sent to prison for playing songs that glorify the drug trade. People who produce or perform songs or films that glamorize criminality could be imprisoned for up to three years, according to the proposed legislation.
The bill is aimed squarely at narcocorridos, the norteño musical form typically featuring men in cowboy hats playing guitars, accordions, and drums, and singing about the exploits, trials, and tribulations of people in the drug trade. Corridos have been a border musical form for more than a century, but in the past, their themes tended to romance, revolution, and banditry.
These days, narcocorridos are popular on both sides of the border, with groups like Los Tigres del Norte or Los Tucanes de Tijuana pulling in crowds of tens of thousands in Tucson and Torreon, Austin and Aguascalientes. But as with gangsta rap in the US, politicians, law enforcement officials, and moral entrepreneurs have denounced the form for glorifying Mexico’s wealthy, violent drug trade.
Traffickers have been known to pipe taunting or threatening messages accompanied by narcocorridos into police radio networks after some killings. And while narcocorridos often lament personal disasters in the drug trade, they also extol successes, lionize leading traffickers, and ridicule security forces.
I looked around to find translated narcocorrido lyrics. Here’s one translated verse from Lupillo Rivera:
“A ballplayer, gentlemen, throws balls in the park. I am a ballplayer, but of a different sort. If you do not understand me, friends, allow me to explain. The little balls I throw are of pure white powder, It is a very good vitamin to get you stirred up, And a toke of marijuana will serve to relax you.”
Check out Elijah Wald’s site on the Narcocorridos – he points to Los Tigres del Norte as the pioneers: “the dominant band in the field for the last 30 years. Los Tigres are kind of a Mexican equivalent of the Rolling Stones and Willie Nelson combined, the biggest ‘roots music’ stars on the scene. Their albums sell in the millions, and their concerts can draw upwards of 100,000 screaming fans.”
This post was originally published on Think Progress.
Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee were two of the main architects of the Bush administration’s torture program. As Bybee’s deputy, Yoo “was the author of much of the legal rationale for using waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques.” He argued that interrogators who harm a prisoner would be protected “national and international version of the right to self-defense,” and illegal conduct must “shock the conscience.” Bybee headed the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel and signed off on the infamous 2002 torture memo. Newsweek now reports that a senior DOJ official has essentially cleared the two men of misconduct in an upcoming office of Professional Responsibility report:
While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors — Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor — violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action — which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.
A DOJ official said that Margolis “acted without input” from Attorney General Eric Holder. Emptywheel has more.
HAITI:
It’s 2010, why are we throwing food at people like it’s the Middle Ages? Throwing food from trunks into crowds is just dumb. How can anyone call this a relief effort? Having a reporter describe people as animals during a broadcast simply perpetuates racial stereotypes. Are we distributing medical supplies the same way?
Once again it comes down to the role of government. The UN at times can be a joke. Are we talking Rwanda here? It’s obvious that the Haitian government has to get it’s feet back on the ground – and it looks like we are at the crawl before we walk stage. Progressives might place the veil of history over my face, but it seems the US military should take charge here. Who best to coordinate all the relief efforts?
Since Haiti is a failed state, one can easily predict that much of the food and goodies going into the country is going to create a serious black market in the very near future.
We’ve also reduced a country down to a city – Port-au- Prince. This is what we do in war zones.
Think Kabul or Baghdad here. The focus is just on one place and so the measurement of success is really nothing but a pictorial lie. Can you imagine if the success of life in the US was measured by conditions in Cleveland or Detroit?
by Dan Bacher
The water content in California’s mountain snowpack is 115 percent of normal for the date statewide, contrasting with snow water content only 61 percent of normal last year at the same time, according to the snow survey conducted Friday by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR).
Electronic sensor readings show northern Sierra snow water equivalents at 129 percent of normal for this date, central Sierra at 101 percent, and southern Sierra at 119 percent. The sensor readings are posted at http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/snow/DLYSWEQ.
You would think that the Schwarzenegger administration would be happy with this news, but DWR used the release of the data to perpetuate the myth that California is still in a “big drought” and to campaign for the construction of the peripheral canal and new dams.
“Today’s snow survey offers us some cautious optimism as we continue to play catch-up with our statewide water supplies,” claimed DWR chief deputy director Sue Sims. “We are still looking at the real possibility of a fourth dry year. Even if California is blessed with a healthy snowpack, we must learn to always conserve this finite resource so that we have enough water for homes, farms, and businesses in 2010 and in the future.”
Sims noted that Lake Oroville, the principal storage reservoir for the State Water Project (SWP) is at 33 percent of capacity, and 50 percent of average storage for this time of year. Lake Shasta, the principal storage reservoir for the federal Central Valley Project, is at 56 percent of capacity, and 82 percent of average for the date.
Sims failed to note that the reason why the reservoirs were so low is because they were drained to provide subsidized water to corporate agribusiness, supply the Kern County Water Bank and fill Southern California reservoirs.
“DWR’s early allocation estimate was that the agency would only be able to deliver 5 percent of requested SWP water this year, reflecting low storage levels, ongoing drought conditions, and environmental restrictions on water deliveries to protect fish species,” according to the DWR news release. “The agency will recalculate the allocation after current snow survey results and other conditions are evaluated.”
DWR tried to blame the “lack of water” on protections for Delta smelt and Central Valley salmon, rather than the real reason – rampant mismanagement of California water by the state and federal governments. Agribusiness giants such as Stewart Resnick, owner of Paramount Farms and Fiji Water, have made millions of dollars in profits off the marketing of subsidized water in recent years under the current “management” scheme.
“DWR estimates that fishery agency restrictions on Delta pumping adopted in the past year to protect Delta smelt, salmon, and other species could reduce annual deliveries of State Water Project water by 30 percent,” DWR stated.
Yes, that’s right, the fish – not water marketing and water privatization by big corporations – are the “reason” why “poor farmers” in the Westlands Water District and Kern County could have their deliveries cut “by 30 percent,” according to DWR’s poor logic.
And DWR has a “solution” – build the peripheral canal (”water conveyance”) and new dams!
“Governor Schwarzenegger has championed a comprehensive water plan that he recently signed into law,” DWR stated. “The package would safeguard the state’s water supply through conservation, more surface and groundwater storage, new investments in the state’s aging water infrastructure, and improved water conveyance to protect the environment and provide a reliable water supply.”
Of course, even if torrential storms of biblical proportions were causing massive flooding throughout California right now, Schwarzenegger and DWR staff would be campaigning for the peripheral canal, new dams and the passage of the $11.1 billion water bond as the “solution” to the problem!
Salmon Water Now, a collaboration between fishermen and media professionals, has released a superb new video, “The Water Pirates,” describing how agribusiness maintains a dangerous stranglehold on water management policy in California. You can watch the Video at: YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwqVc8Hbmqk&fmt=18 or Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/8521134.
Not so good? Me either. However, if you want another shot, Jeanne Peterson sent me “100 Painless Resolutions for a Healthier, Happier, Fitter New Year ” It’s very basic, but so many items on the list are things we should be doing. Except maybe for drinking a glass of milk. I’m against that. Probably not good for adults.
Whatever you think about Mother Teresa’s (torturous) adherence to Catholic concepts of redemptive suffering and subsequent sainthood, that a Mother Teresa stamp violates separation of church and state seems a small issue considering the other Establishment Clause violations in the country: our health care delivery system is doctrinal and discriminatory; our schools continue to depart from science-based education, and our political process is bullied by reverence for one particular Fundamental faith.
And yet it’s a debate that’s being had, thanks to a challenge by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Here’s a clip from Deceiver:
Forget about the Presidential Medal of Freedom and that little thing called the Nobel Peace Prize. (Okay, bad example…) But it’s obvious, at least to the folks at theFreedom From Religion Foundation, that the Postal Service hasno businessputting super-humanitarian and all around do-gooder Mother Teresa of Calcutta on a stamp.
Why? It’s the nun thing.
Freedom from Religion Foundation spokeswoman Annie Laurie Gaylor told Fox News that issuing the stamp runs against Postal Service regulations because, quite simply,
Mother Teresa is principally known as a religious figure who ran a religious institution. You can’t really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did.
…There’s this knee jerk response that everything she did was humanitarian, and I think many people would differ that what she was doing was to promote religion, and what she wanted to do was baptize people before they die, and that doesn’t have a secular purpose for a stamp.
The Postal Service, of course, disagrees. As far as they’re concerned, the Mother Teresa commemorative stamp has nothing to do with her religion. As Postal Service spokesman explained:
Mother Teresa is not being honored because of her religion, she’s being honored for her work with the poor and her acts of humanitarian relief,” Betts told FoxNews.com.
“Her contribution to the world as a humanitarian speaks for itself and is unprecedented,” he added.
Don’t miss the comments where Mother Teresa’s legacy is parsed and inspected!
If you’ve got a strong enough stomach, read every word of Anand Gopal’s eye-opening report in TomDispatch.com about the terror tactics U.S. troops are using in Afghanistan. Why do Afghanis have to be snatched from their homes in the middle of the night and spirited away to secret places where they are often tortured, while their families know nothing of their fate for days, weeks, or even months? Gopal records two different answers from Americans who issue and carry out the orders for such tactics. Coming one right after the other in the article, the two responses reveal something of the maddening (in both senses of the word) illogic of the war:
“’You can’t trust anyone,’ says Rodrigo Arias, a Marine based in the northeastern province of Kunar. ‘I’ve nearly been killed in ambushes but the villagers don’t tell us anything. But they usually know something.’ An officer who has worked in the Field Detention Sites says that it takes dozens of raids to turn up a useful suspect. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to bust down doors. Sometimes you’ve got to twist arms. You have to cast a wide net, but when you get the right person it makes all the difference.’”
If it takes dozens of raids to turn up even one “useful suspect,” why should Rodrigo Arias — or anyone else — believe that the villagers “usually” know something ? Perhaps that belief eases the conscience of Arias and all the others who do the door-busting, the arm-twisting, and (as the article demonstrates) much worse. If you’re convinced that every victim is likely to know something valuable, it’s surely much easier to keep turning up the pain levels on those who happen to get caught (sometimes by sheer chance, as the article demonstrates) in the “wide net” of U.S. terror.
No, it’s not too difficult to understand why many U.S. military personnel would assume that they’re surrounded by “natives” who know something about “the bad guys,” keep it secret, and therefore must be sympathizing with, if not actively helping, “the bad guys.” If you’re a GI who is “just following orders” — if the alternative is to face disciplinary action, perhaps even a court martial — you might easily assume all that, if only to justify doing what you feel you have to do.
What’s harder to understand is why these illegal actions, and virtually all the actions, of the U.S. military in Afghanistan go so largely ignored here at home. In the 70-minute State of the Union address, a war that will soon see some 75,00 Americans at the front got one scant paragraph. That was right after the president solemnly declared “We’ve prohibited torture.” Tell that to the Afghanis, Mr. President. Better yet, tell it to the U.S. troops who apparently haven’t yet gotten the word.
As long as the prohibition on torture is honored more in the breach than the observance — which it will be, no doubt, as long as the war goes on — wouldn’t it at least be polite of the president to tell all of us, in detail, precisely how our tax dollars are being used over there?
But as the president well knows, it would not be politic. Bearers of bad news are not likely to win the next election. As the whole State of the Union speech reminded us, most voters want to hear an upbeat, feel-good message. It makes them feel a lot more secure. And after all, the whole point of the Afghanistan war is to protect our national security, isn’t it? So good news must be delivered, if the war aim is to be achieved — and, not so incidentally, if the Democrats’ control of the federal government is to remain secure.
Of course the corporate media are happy to oblige. The Wall Street Journal publishes Anand Gopal’s dispatches from Afghanistan, which carry mixed tidings. His most recent report begins with the news that this likely to be the deadliest January yet for foreign troops, but ends on an upbeat note: 70% of Afghanis now tell pollsters that Hamid Karzai is doing a good job as president and things are “going in the right direction” in their country — which makes me wonder whether the pollsters talked to the Afghanis who told Gopal about their fear of U.S. terror attacks in the middle of the night.
But don’t expect to see the grim truths about those attacks revealed in the WSJ or any other mass media outlet in the U.S. After all, the media have their own security concerns, measured in ratings, dollars, and access to administration officials.
“Security” is a big word. It means lots of different things to different people. Thank goodness we have courageous reporters and alternative media to give us a clearer picture of just what “security” now means, and why it’s so hard to find, in the villages of Afghanistan.
Illinois’ U.S. Senate Democratic primary is coming up in less than a week, and it poses a potentially enormous problem for the Democratic Party, in Illinois and therefore nationally. That “therefore” is important: Because President Obama is from Illinois, and because Republicans have invested so much time and resources trying to nationalize the concept of the corrupt “Chicago politician,” whoever ends up the Democratic nominee for Obama’s old seat will likely be made by the GOP into a face of the Democratic Party as a whole.
That’s why the candidacy of Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias is so problematic. Holding a slight lead in the polls against other Democratic challengers, he has become a poster child for everything that is wrong with the American economy – everything that the Republican Party’s right-wing populism desperately needs to find traction. Here’s what I mean:
Broadway Bank, the troubled Chicago lender owned by the family of Illinois Treasurer and U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias, has entered into a consent order with banking regulators requiring it to raise tens of millions in capital, stop paying dividends to the family without regulatory approval, and hire an outside party to evaluate the bank’s senior management.
The Jan. 26 consent order with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Illinois Division of Banking comes less than a week before Mr. Giannoulias — Broadway’s chief lender and then vice-president from 2002 to 2006 — must face voters in the Democratic primary for the Senate seat previously held by President Barack Obama.
He’s faced criticism, principally from former city Inspector General David Hoffman, who’s running against him, for his past role at the bank and the $70 million in dividends the family took out of the bank in 2007 and 2008 as the real estate crisis was becoming apparent.
