Miscarriage of Justice

The federal "partial-birth" abortion ban has grave implications for all pregnant women, not only those seeking to end pregnancies.

By Lynn M. Paltrow
Web Exclusive: 04.19.07

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the first federal law that bans an abortion procedure for all women and all doctors in all states. By holding that Congress's interest in "preserving and promoting fetal life" trumps both scientific evidence and the health of pregnant women, the newly reconfigured Supreme Court overturned the opinions of three lower federal courts and its own precedent. While Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, claims that the "act expresses respect for the dignity of human life," the decision expressly devalues the women who give that life.

Perhaps in the only good news that can be culled from the opinion, it constitutes the death knell of one of the anti-choice movement's favorite political ruses. For years the anti-abortion movement has argued that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, in part, because it federalized abortion and took power away from individual states to decide how to address the abortion issue. In this way, anti-choice activists implicitly reassured the public that even if Roe were overturned, abortion would undoubtedly remain legal at least in states like California, New York, and Washington.

Power bills soar after electric deregulation

By Ryan Keith, Associated Press Writer | April 20, 2007

BENTON, Ill. --This wasn't supposed to happen with deregulation. Electric bills were supposed to go down. Instead, Ellie Dorchincez can almost see the dollars evaporating every time she turns on the lights or opens the freezer at her small Farm Fresh grocery store.

Her electric bill, which used to be about $800 a month, has jumped to $1,800. She's shut down a large freezer of frozen treats and now closes the store an hour early to cut costs but fears she still may have to raise prices and lay off some workers.

"I'm just trying to figure any way that I can right now to keep my business afloat," Dorchincez said. "My life is at stake here."

The cause of her distress is a common problem: the failure of deregulation to deliver its promise of lower electricity prices. In many states, it's had the opposite effect with sharply higher rates -- 72 percent in Maryland, up to 50 percent in Illinois.

Birth of the Christian Soldier: How Evangelicals Infiltrated the American Military

By Michael L. Weinstein and David Seay, Thomas Dunne Books. Posted April 21, 2007.

It took decades for evangelicals to infiltrate the military, but eventually fundamentalist theology adapted as its entry points the culture of authority, duty, and sacrifice in the armed forces.

The following is an excerpt from With God On Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military by Michael L. Weinstein and Davin Seay (Thomas Dunne, 2007).

Despite the church-state scandals that have plagued the US military in recent years, religious practice in the armed forces is hardly a new phenomenon. In the 1846 Mexican War, Roman Catholics were incorporated into the hitherto all-Protestant chaplaincy for the first time, as much to blunt implications of a sectarian war with Catholic Mexico as for any effort to address the actual religious demographics of the fighting force.

In 1862, President Lincoln, at the request of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, struck the word Christian from all regulations relating to the chaplaincy appointments, and during World War II, Greek Orthodox chaplains were allowed to minister to their flock in uniform for the first time. The Buddhist Churches of America were registered as an official endorsing agency for the first time in 1987, and six years later the Army saw its first Muslim chaplain.

Paul Krugman: The Plot Against Medicare

The New York Times
Friday 20 April 2007

The plot against Social Security failed: President Bush's attempt to privatize the system crashed and burned when the public realized what he was up to. But the plot against Medicare is faring better: the stealth privatization embedded in the Medicare Modernization Act, which Congress literally passed in the dead of night back in 2003, is proceeding apace.

Worse yet, the forces behind privatization not only continue to have the G.O.P. in their pocket, but they have also been finding useful idiots within the newly powerful Democratic coalition. And it's not just politicians with an eye on campaign contributions. There's no nice way to say it: the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens have become patsies for the insurance industry.

Conservative Policies Are Ruining Your Health

By Rick Perlstein, TomPaine.com. Posted April 20, 2007.

Conservative principle has turned into conservative and free market mania, crippling the FDA's ability to prevent health disasters like the contaminated pet food scandal.

First, they came for the spinach.

I remember the day last September. The supermarket had a new kind of salad dressing, one that looked like it would taste good with spinach. I went to the produce section to buy a bag. But they all had been recalled. Three people had died from E. coli contamination from eating spinach. I decided I could live without the spinach.

Americablog: Bush administration is prying into your medical records in violation of the law

by John Aravosis (DC) · 4/19/2007 11:15:00 AM ET

We learned yesterday that the Bush administration has created a database of every single prescription drug user/patient in the country (that would pretty much be all of us). The database was created pursuant to a 2005 law that was intended to prevent the abuse of prescription drugs. Funny that this massive new database of your private medical information is now being (ab)used for a purpose that wasn't intended in or approved by the law.

The federal database of your private medical information is now being used by federal law enforcement to investigate crimes that have nothing to do with prescription drug abuse. We know this because yesterday ABC News disclosed that the feds checked the database to see what prescription meds the Virginia Tech shooter might have been on. How does the mass murder of students and faculty at Virginia Tech have anything to do with prescription drug abuse? It doesn't.

Supreme Court Upholds Late Abortion Ban: Right-wing Judicial Activism Run Amok

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted April 18, 2007.

Bush’s court-packing pays off, and Democrats who voted for Scalia and Roberts get their comeuppance.

Last year, in defending his decision to vote for the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, Senator Bill Nelson (D-NE) said that it was based, in part, on Alito's "pledge that he would not bring a political agenda to the court."

Today, Nelson and the 18 other Democratic Senators who voted against the attempted filibuster of Alito reaped what they sowed. The new court -- the first in American history made up of a majority of conservative Catholics -- upheld the 2003 ban on so-called "partial birth" abortions, a made-up term that's become a hot-button issue for social conservatives, but is largely based on junk science and flies in the face of medical "best practices." It will go down as a text-book case of right-wing judicial activism, with the justices essentially overruling the medical community.

Administration tried to curb election turnout in key states

The Feminine Face of Poverty

By Riane Eisler, AlterNet. Posted April 19, 2007.

Seventy percent of those living in absolute poverty in our world -- that is starving or on the edge of starvation -- are female. Not only that, in our wealthy United States, women and children are the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor.

If you're a woman, or a man who cares about his mother, sister, or daughter, there's something you need to know. Seventy percent of those living in absolute poverty in our world -- that is starving or on the edge of starvation -- are female. Not only that, in our wealthy United States, women and children are the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor.

Women are entitled to know that statistically women worldwide are far more likely to be poor than men. Even if you're a guy, this "women's issue" is about your mother and your grandmother. It's about your sisters and it's about the future of your daughters.

David Neiwert: Beyond Imus

Like Sara, I welcome the firing of Don Imus as a significant blow in the ongoing battle to beat back the rising tide of open bigotry that has been creeping into our public discourse, particularly when broadcast over the national airwaves.

But I'm probably not as optimistic about how significant a step forward it actually will be, mainly because the underlying problems are so deep-rooted and systemic. Considering the course of the discussion in the wake of Imus' firing, it feels more as though we've just tossed a bucket of water back into the ocean.

NYRB: The Evangelical Surprise

By Frances FitzGerald

1.

Last year the Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, Ohio, became a regular stop for journalists covering trends in Christian right politics. In 2004 its pastor, Russell Johnson, helped organize a campaign for a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and succeeded in having it put on the ballot for the November elections. It passed with 63 percent of the vote, and many believed that it gave George W. Bush his narrow margin of victory in the state and returned him to the White House. The following year, Johnson launched the Ohio Restoration Project with the goal of recruiting two thousand "patriot pastors" to register three hundred new voters each and bring them to the polls for "values candidates" in 2006 and beyond.

Johnson's meetings and rallies began with a chorus singing hymns while images of the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and American troops in combat moved across huge video screens overhead. Johnson would then speak of "the secular jihad against people of faith" and warn Christians against standing by, as Neville Chamberlain did, while the Jews died in Europe. Talking with visitors to his nondenominational evangelical church, Johnson, energetic and a skillful debater, spoke forcefully on "the bigotry against the teaching of Creationism," the war against Christmas, and Roe v. Wade, which, he said, had led to the crisis in Social Security by killing millions of American taxpayers. He also described how he worked with other state activists, some with ties to national organizations, to create computerized lists of sympathizers in conservative churches throughout Ohio, and to follow up with the distribution of voting guides and the recruitment of volunteers to bring church members to the polls.

Pew Survey Finds Most Knowledgeable Americans Watch 'Daily Show' and 'Colbert'-- and Visit Newspaper Sites

By E&P Staff

Published: April 15, 2007 11:30 PM ET
NEW YORK A new survey of 1,502 adults released Sunday by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that despite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans' knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little. For example, only 69% know that Dick Cheney is vice president, while 74% could identify Dan Quayle in that post in 1989.

Other details are equally eye-opening. Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot -- with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

The Coming Party Realignment

by LAWRENCE GOODWYN

[from the April 30, 2007 issue]

Intransigence and myopia. The flowering of these habits within the GOP is driving the Democratic Party to clarity. And the potential for serious consequences is real. It is not enough to suggest that a big Democratic win is possible in 2008. Something far more strategic is at work: large-scale party realignment with historic implications.

None of this seems apparent, of course. Indeed, for a number of hopeful partisans, such a possibility seems beyond reason itself. Politics is assumed to be modulated through the inherited customs of the two major parties. Complacency and sloganeering are settled habits among Republicans. Clarity, on the other hand, can scarcely be called an ingrained cultural habit among Democrats. In the face of corporate saber-rattling, a fair degree of communal Democratic wilting is highly probable. This traditional analysis, while time-tested and even accurate as far as it goes, is leading to inside-the-Beltway conclusions that are superficial and obsolete.

The Governor's Database

Texas is amassing an unprecedented amount of information on its citizens

by Jake Bernstein

Piece by piece, Gov. Rick Perry’s homeland security office is gathering massive amounts of information about Texas residents and merging it to create the most exhaustive centralized database in state history. Warehoused far from Texas on servers housed at a private company in Louisville, Kentucky, the Texas Data Exchange—TDEx to those in the loop—is designed to be an all-encompassing intelligence database. It is supposed to help catch criminals, ferret out terrorist cells, and allow disparate law enforcement agencies to share information. More than $3.6 million has been spent on the project so far, and it already has tens of millions of records. At least 7,000 users are presently allowed access to this information, and tens of thousands more are anticipated.

What is most striking, and disturbing, about the database is that it is not being run by the state’s highest law enforcement agency—the Texas Department of Public Safety. Instead, control of TDEx, and the power to decide who can use it, resides in the governor’s office.

Bubble People and the Faith-Based Market

Trouble in Squanderville

By MIKE WHITNEY

Two years ago, anyone who wrote about the housing bubble was dismissed as a conspiracy nut. Now hardly a day goes by that the headlines aren't splattered with the details of the massive meltdown in the real estate market.

What changed? The facts are essentially the same today as they were back then. In fact, the "Economist"--as well as many independent journalists--had already shown that the Fed's low interest rates had inflated the biggest equity bubble in history which could potentially bring down the entire economy.

How Tax Cheats Are Using Your Money to Fund Republicans

By Lucy Komisar, AlterNet. Posted April 17, 2007.

When it comes to tax cheats, the government has been vocal about catching the little guys but hasn't focused on the big-time frauds, like Swift Boat financier Sam Wyly, who happens to be a top-tier Republican contributor.

Every year, just before Tax Day, the Internal Revenue Service conducts a dog and pony show to demonstrate how it is cracking down on tax cheats.

Routinely, the IRS focuses on stories that involve crooked tax preparers and small-time taxpayers who try to erase a few hundred and occasionally even a few thousand dollars from their bills.

Global Warming Hits Southwest

By Mike Davis, TheNation.com. Posted April 16, 2007

The Arctic is not the only theater of unequivocal climate change and polar bears aren't the only heralds of a new age of chaos. Global warming is already affecting the U.S.

The polar bear on its shrinking ice floe has become the urgent icon of global warming and runaway climate change. Even the flat-earther in the White House now concedes that the magnificent bears may be doomed to extinction as the sea ice melts and the Arctic Ocean is transformed into open blue water for the first time in millions of years. Humanity's "great geophysical experiment," as the oceanographer Roger Revelle long ago characterized the steeply rising curve of carbon dioxide emission, has knocked nature off its Holocene foundations in the circumpolar lands.

But the Arctic is not the only theater of spectacular and unequivocal climate change, nor are the polar bears the only heralds of a new age of chaos. Consider, for example, some of Ursus maritimus's distant relatives: the black bears that forage happily but ominously in the fabled Chisos Mountains of Texas's Big Bend National Park. They may be the messengers of an environmental transformation in the Borderlands almost as radical as that taking place in Alaska or Greenland.

Hullabaloo: Blog Against Theocracy Part VII: Culture Is Religion

by tristero

This is the final set of excerpts from With Liberty & Justice for All: Christian Politics Made Simple by Joe Morecraft. Here Morecraft discusses the relationship between religion and culture. He asserts that all culture is, by definition, religious, but not necessarily “theistic,” i.e. based in God. Since religious neutrality is a “myth,” any attempts by a “secular” state to assert a tolerant attitude towards a diversity of religions are utterly misbegotten. In fact, such a “secularist” state privileges a “pragmatic” and “technalist” philosophy, all in the service of a dangerous non-theistic state religion: “humanism.”

Climate change could trigger 'boom and bust' population cycles leading to extinction

Climate change could trigger "boom and bust" population cycles that make animal species more vulnerable to extinction. , according to Christopher C. Wilmers, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Favorable environmental conditions that produce abundant supplies of food and stimulate population booms appear to set the stage for population crashes that occur when several "good years" in a row are followed by a bad year. "It's almost paradoxical, because you'd think a large population would be better off, but it turns out they're more vulnerable to a drop in resources," says Wilmers.

Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn on Iraq, Vietnam, Activism and History

In a Democracy Now! special from Boston, two of the city's leading dissidents, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, sit down for a rare joint interview. Noam Chomsky began teaching linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge over 50 years ago. He is the author of dozens of books on linguistics and U.S. foreign policy. Howard Zinn is one of the country's most widely-read historians. His classic work “A People's History of the United States’ has sold over 1.5 million copies and it has altered how many teach the nation's history. Chomsky and Zinn discuss Vietnam, activism, history, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq, which Chomsky calls "one of the worst catastrophes in military and political history." [rush transcript included]

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees

By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross

Published: 15 April 2007

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

Paul Krugman: Way Off Base

Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.

But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

Kennedy Wants Lenders Blocked From Data

Request Comes Amid Scramble to Protect Student Information

By Amit R. Paley

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 16, 2007; Page A02

The chairman of the Senate education committee urged the Bush administration yesterday to block student loan companies from accessing a national database that holds confidential information on tens of millions of students.

The request by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), came after The Washington Post reported on inappropriate searches of the database that could violate federal rules and raise concerns about data mining and abuses of privacy.

Debunking Bush’s Whoppers On Pork

President Bush has tried to justify his planned veto of Congress’ Iraq withdrawal legislation by complaining about the non-Iraq related funds included in the bill.

American Progress senior fellow Scott Lilly, who served for years as Clerk and Staff Director of the House Appropriations Committee, debunks Bush’s rhetoric:

Progressive Taxation: Some Hidden Truths

By George Lakoff and Bruce Budner, AlterNet. Posted April 16, 2007.

Through unfair tax cuts paid by the wealthy and the cost of Iraq, our national wealth is being drained and the American infrastructure allowed to fall apart.

At this time of year it seems there are only two things certain in life, taxes and anxiety about taxes. Instead of the perennial talk of a simplified tax form, how about a simplified understanding of the progressive values that underlie our tradition of progressive taxation?

Such an understanding won't move the tax deadline. But it might eliminate some of the anxiety. Understanding the hidden truths behind progressive taxation might also lead to more coherent -- and more just -- tax policies.

How a PR Firm Helped Establish America's Cigarette Century

By Allan M. Brandt, AlterNet. Posted April 16, 2007.

How the tobacco industry-hired Hill & Knowlton to develop many of the propaganda techniques against science used today to attack climate change and evolution.

Note: The following excerpt is from chapter 5 of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America by Allan M. Brandt, (Basic Books, 2007). The passage starts at the moment that the tobacco industry began to face serious scientific data suggesting the connection between lung cancer and cigarette smoke. The tobacco industry's response to hire a PR firm to fight the scientific evidence gave rise to the approach that industry and ideological groups use in their contemporary attacks on science.

By the time Hill & Knowlton took on the tobacco industry in 1953, it was already the most influential public relations firm in the United States, with a client list that included the steel, oil, and aircraft industries.

John W. Hill had cultivated close relationships with executives in these fields since the 1930s. And his firm had also worked with the liquor and chemical industries, areas where the health risks of products had emerged as issues in the past. He shared his clients' strong opposition to government intrusion into business. "The role of public relations in the opinion forming process is to communicate information and viewpoints on behalf of causes and organizations," Hill later wrote. "The objective is to inform public opinion and win its favor." He had quit smoking in the early 1940s for health reasons, but such concerns would not affect his work on behalf of his tobacco clients. For Hill, the tobacco industry had a public relations problem that his firm could effectively manage.

Women Who Ditch Their Career for Homelife Could Be Making a Huge Mistake

By Leslie Bennetts, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted April 16, 2007.

Women who abandon their careers and become financially dependent on their husbands often look back on that decision as the biggest mistake of their lives -- even women in stable, enduring marriages.

Everyone knows that authors have to be prepared for negative reviews. What I didn't anticipate was an avalanche of blistering attacks by women who hadn't read my book but couldn't wait to condemn it. Their fury says a great deal about the current debate over women's choices -- all of it alarming.

I wrote The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? because the typical reporting on the job-versus-family issue was so biased and incomplete. The media gave lots of coverage to women who quit the labor force to become full-time mothers, but they treated this decision as if it were simply a lifestyle choice. They never seemed to mention the risks of economic dependency -- or the myriad benefits of work. As a result, women were being lulled into a dangerous sense of complacency about relinquishing their financial autonomy. Why wasn't anyone telling the truth about how much they were sacrificing -- or what the consequences could be?