Bean emailed this story to me, with a note saying “This story will either cause you to scream or cry – or maybe both.”

Read the entire article here.

NRO today features a “guest commentary” by Rochelle Tedesco (via Diotima), an attorney who (judging from her publications) specializes in arguing that asbestos isn’t so bad (or, anyhow, not as bad as strong tort laws are). But Ms. Tedesco isn’t talking about fire safety today: she’s here to bash feminists.

Here Ms. Tedesco seems to be arguing that it’s surprising that NOW and other “women’s groups” oppose political nominees based on their politics. But what’s wrong with feminist groups opposing anti-feminist women, or pro-choice groups opposing pro-life women? It would be sexist if feminists gave a free pass to an anti-choice judge just because of her sex.

Ms. Tedesco has a further charge to make, though: “Women’s groups” are actually sexist, in that they oppose female pro-life nominees but not male pro-life nominees. (This may be the first time in history an anti-feminist has accused feminists of being overly pro-male.)

So “women’s groups” let Mitch McConnell go “right on by.” Although Ms. Tedesco says “facts suggest” women’s groups “work hard to oppose” female jurists, this is the only fact she states in support of her case. And who are these mysterious “women’s groups”? It’s difficult to say; the only group Ms. Tedesco names is NOW.

Okay, fair enough: Let’s check out NOW’s website: did NOW let McConnell go “right on by”? No; as Ms. Tedesco would have known had she bothered fact-checking, NOW campaigned against his nomination, even setting up a page asking their members to lobby the Judiciary Committee against McConnell. (Actually, I remember receiving a bulk emailing from NOW against McConnell).

Well, even if Ms. Tedesco was lying when she said NOW let McConnell go “right on by,” maybe she’s right to suggest that NOW systematically objects more to conservative women nominees than to their male counterparts? I did a little googling, seeing how often some recent anti-choice nominees are mentioned on NOW’s website.

While it’s true (if website mentions are any indication) that NOW campaigned less against McConnell than Owens, it’s also clear that there’s no pattern of bias against female nominees. Even if we ignore Estrada, some of the pro-life nominees NOW complained the least about were women; and some they complained the most about were men. Ms Tedesco’s “facts” turn out to be fiction.

Just another day at The National Review, the magazine honesty forgot.

As the debate over the bogus “partial-birth” abortion ban goes on in the Senate, it’s instructive to look at the things the Republicans in the Senate have rejected this week.

• They rejected an act to ban abortions post-viability. Their objection? It made an exception for cases in which the health of the mother was endangered; some pro-lifers have claimed that “health” is too vague a term.

• They also rejected Dick Durbin’s bill, which would “ban all abortions after a fetus is viable unless two physicians certify that the abortion is necessary to protect the life of the pregnant woman or that she was at; risk of grievous injury to her physical health.’” Republican Rick Santorum said that since any pregnancy carries health risks, no provision at all that seeks to protect women’s health could be acceptable.
• Continuing their war on women’s health, Republicans (and three Democrats) rejected an amendment that would have sought to reduce the demand for abortion by providing health insurance coverage of prescription birth control, and making emergency birth control available to rape victims in hospital emergency rooms.
• Republicans rejected a campaign to raise awareness of the “morning after” pill, in an attempt to reduce the need for abortion. If it doesn’t restrict women’s lives, Republicans apparently have no interest in trying to prevent abortion.
• Incredibly, Republicans also rejected providing prenatal care for low-income pregnant women (by making them eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program). (Republicans have said that they’d be willing to provide the fetus with health care, but not the mother.)
• Meanwhile, in Montana, a pro-life legislator says that he plans to eliminate funding for prenatal care unless he gets his anti-abortion legislation passed. If “his amendment fails, the senator will single out programs like the one that provides medical home visits for women with high-risk pregnancies. McGee might also target a modest grant that gives pregnant women vouchers they can use to purchase healthy food at the Missoula Farmer’s Market.”
• And in an item unrelated to abortion, John Ashcroft is planning to demote the Violence Against Women office, so it will be less effective and powerful. (Republicans only oppose anti-crime measures is when the victims are women or the criminals are corporations).

Keep in mind what they’ve rejected. They don’t really want to ban post-viability abortions - they reject that. They don’t really want to protect fetuses - they reject prenatal care. They don’t really want to prevent abortion - they reject measures to reduce the demand for abortion.

What they do want, I’ll leave for the reader to infer for her or himself.

WARNING! This post contains clinical descriptions of some abortion procedures. Some folks, understandably, find that sort of thing disturbing to read. Don’t read the rest of this post unless you think you can deal… If you just want the “key points” of this post, Lying Media Bastards has summed it up.

I’ll be doing a few more posts about S.3, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 this week, so I hope y’all have patience. Let’s start with Diotima’s question. NOW and other groups opposed to the PBA Ban claim:

This complaint had more merit the previous two times Congress passed PBA bans; the current incarnation contains a less vague definition of what a “partial birth abortion” is. So, to some extent, NOW is either being hyperbolic or using outdated boilerplate language from years past. But just because they’re exaggerating doesn’t make them wrong.

I want to examine how this bill defines “PBA,” but first of all, let’s note what’s not in the bill. At no point does the bill mention “intact dilation and extraction” (D&X), which is the medical name for the procedure this law is supposedly aimed at banning. (”Partial birth abortion” is a term made up by pro-life partisans, with no medical meaning). Particularly since a major reason past PBA bans have been overturned is the vagueness of the term, why don’t the pro-lifers use the actual name of the procedure they wish to ban?

Well, because they don’t want to ban that procedure - and, as I will show, this bill specifically avoids banning D&X. This bill’s advocates want a vague bill that will help erode Roe; a tightly-crafted, narrow bill aimed precisely at one procedure wouldn’t serve that purpose.

Similarly, the terms “viability,” “late term,” and “trimester” don’t appear anywhere in this bill. Why not? If, as pro-lifers claim, the point of this bill isn’t to sneak an attack on abortion at every stage - including pre-viability - into the law, then why don’t they clear this up by simply writing a provision limiting the law’s effect to post-viability, or to the third trimester, or whatever?

Pro-lifers are unable to achieve their legislative goals except through deception and lying. If they wanted to ban D&X abortions post-viability, they could have simply written a law saying so. But they’ve deliberately avoided writing such a law, in favor of a deliberately ambiguous law.

So that’s what the bill doesn’t say, but what does it say? Here’s how the PBA Ban defines its key term:

The first thing to note is that language about “a head-first presentation”: the law apparently requires “the entire fetal head” to be “outside the body of the mother” before “the overt act” (whatever that vague term means) that kills the fetus is performed. Many supporters of this law claim that the ban is aimed at late-term abortions, but that’s not possible. This passage makes it clear that the ban is aimed at pre-viability abortions - abortions in the first four months of pregnancy. Why? Because no doctor would bring “the entire fetal head” outside of the body after the 16th week of pregnancy; at that point, the head is typically too large to be extracted without risk to the mother. Instead, doctors typically compress the skull - either by crushing it with forceps, or by removing the skull’s contents - before the head goes outside the mother’s body. Presumably, crushing or draining the skull is an “overt act” that kills the fetus - and in D&X, that’s done before “the entire fetal head” is outside of the mother’s body.

This is worth emphasizing: As defined by the Act itself, the only head-first abortions that could be considered “Partial-Birth abortions” take place in the first four months of pregnancy, well before viability. This is not an act aimed at late-term abortions, or at protecting post-viability fetuses.

So what would be banned?

A few actual D&X abortions would be banned (those that involved a feet-first presentation, for example). But also many ordinary D&E abortions - and D&E abortions are among the most common, safest abortions available. (D&X is technically a subcatagory of D&E, by the way. D&E stands for “dialation and evacuation.”)

Here’s how the brief of Dr. Carhart (in Stenberg v. Carhart) describes the D&E proceedure:.

So in a D&E abortion, the doctor draws the “living fetus” out of the uterus, into the vagina and out of the mother’s body. In the not-uncommon case in which the fetus remains relatively intact until it’s partly out of the mother’s body (either head-outside in a head-first presentation, or outside to the navel in a breech presentation), the doctor will be in trouble. Continuing to pull the fetus out of the body will cause dismemberment - an “overt act” that the doctor “knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus.” Suddenly, the doctor’s a criminal; she’s facing the loss of her medical license, plus up to two years in prison.

Let’s review: what would this law do?

It would not ban all D&X abortions. In fact, the language of the bill may exempt head-first D&X abortions from the ban - even though the bill’s proponents have often claimed that their intent is to ban D&X abortions.

It would, potentially, ban many D&E abortions. D&E is the procedure used for 96% of second-trimester abortions in the United States.

So why does this matter?

Well, it helps explain why this bill is almost certainly unconstitutional.

The most important case to look at is Stenberg v. Carhart, the case in which the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, overturned Nebraska’s PBA ban. In particular, it’s important to look at O’Connor’s concurrence, because O’Connor is the most likely swing vote for this case. But O’Connor made it clear that laws banning D&E abortions - as this law seems to - are unconstitutional.

So that’s one way in which the PBA ban is unconstitutional. I’ll blog later this week on the second way in which the new PBA ban is unconstitutional - that it makes no exception to protect the health of the mother.

Yesterday, I wrote that “government-mandated childbirth is the essence of the pro-life position; if you don’t favor using state force to make pregnant woman give birth against their will, you’re not pro-life.”

Obeah, in the comments, wittily objected to this:

Well, no doubt some pro-lifers are interested in “the injustices that often lead women to seek abortion” and so on, but that’s not the defining trait of the movement. You don’t have to be interested in that stuff to qualify as pro-life.

The abortion debate is about one question: “Should the government force childbirth on pregnant women?” The answer to that question is what classifies someone as pro-life or pro-choice.

Everything else is extra; add-ons. An individual pro-choicer might be, like you, someone who dislikes abortion and wishes to reduce its incidence as much as possible (to make it “safe, legal and rare,” as the expression goes); she might be libertarian, or feminist, or anarchist, or vegitative activist, or whatever. The point is, it doesn’t matter which of these things she is; knowing that she’s a vegan or a libertarian or whatnot won’t tell us she’s pro-choice. Knowing that she’s against state-mandated childbirth tells us she’s pro-choice.

Similarly, some pro-lifers are Catholics, some are atheists, some care about women’s well-being, some are pro-death-penalty, some oppose the death penalty, some are republicans, some are libertarians, some are democrats, and so on. Because one can be any or none of these things and still be pro-life, none of these things can be said to be part of the core pro-life position.

So with due respect to Obeah, I’ll stand by what I said. The essence of the pro-life position is advocating laws that force childbirth on unwilling pregnant women. All the rest is optional add-ons.

Be sure to read this post on Plum Crazy, taking apart a recent editorial by anti-feminist Kay Hymowitz (Alas readers may recall that I’m not a big fan of Ms. Hymowitz). It’s exactly the sort of lovely, fact-based take-down of antifeminist nonsense that I keep on intending to do more of in this blog. Thank you Lesley!

You may also want to read the discussion in the comments, which includes a long comment by me in which I completely blow my top (kinda unfairly aiming a diatribe at a quite reasonable-sounding conservative reader of Plum Crazy).

The Head Heeb has a fascinating post about a feminist politiican in Kenya who caused a controversy by advocating abortion rights. You’d think abortion rights would be just sensible in a country where 5,000 women and girls die each year from botched, illegal abortions - but unfortunately, evangelical Christianity is a powerful force in Kenyan politics.

I thought this comment on the situation, by the head of the African Alliance for Women’s Reproductive Health and Rights, was interesting for drawing a relationship between abortion rights and colonialism:

Brookman-Amissah said in countries with liberal abortion laws, few women die from unsafe operations. “By contrast, African countries have excessively restrictive abortion laws, all inherited from colonial powers who have since changed their laws thus offering their own women wider choices,” she said.

So the Senate is banning partial-birth abortion again.

But opponents of the ban say it is about abortion politics, not about a true effort to limit late-term abortions.

“The phrase so-called ‘partial-birth abortion’ does not describe a recognized medical procedure. Rather, it is an inflammatory term invented by abortion opponents to provoke legislators and the public,” the American Civil Liberties Union said.

“The legislation before the Senate would seriously compromise women’s health and drastically limit physicians’ discretion to choose the most medically appropriate abortion method for their patients,” it added.

The bill would make it illegal to perform a “partial-birth” abortion except to save the life of a woman — although backers of the ban say there is never a case when it is in fact a necessary life-saving procedure. Doctors could face up to two years in prison plus fines.

Unlike previous bans, this one will not be vetoed by President Clinton (although it probably will be overturned by the Supreme Court). Assuming it does pass and is overturned, I think this could actually be a good thing for pro-choice politics in the US.

There’s a tendency, in the US, to characterize the abortion debate as a clash of extremists. I don’t think this is accurate. Even moderates on the pro-life side favor using the police to compel pregnant women to give birth against their will - which is, by most standards, an extreme stance. The most moderate pro-life position imaginable is still an extreme position (government-mandated childbirth is the essence of the pro-life position; if you don’t favor using state force to make pregnant woman give birth against their will, you’re not pro-life).

While there are some extremist pro-choicers - like me - who favor absolute abortion on demand until the moment of childbirth, we’re not in control of the pro-choice movement, or the Democratic party. On the contrary, the Democrats - including Democrats who are strongly supported by Planned Parenthood and NARAL - have proposed and supported late-term abortion bans again and again. (Here’s the current proposal). These bills would have banned late-term abortions except to protect the life and health of the mother, would have been constitutional, and would not have been vetoed by Clinton.

But republicans have prevented these bans from being voted on, again and again. Why? Because their goal isn’t to ban late-term abortions; it’s to create the illusion that the Democrats favor late-term abortions. The purpose isn’t to change the law; the purpose is to display gigantic photographs of bloody baby corpses on the floor of congress and ask how Democrats can favor such a thing. A constitutional bill that would actually ban needless late-term abortions would be supported by Democrats - which would ruin the picture pro-lifers want to paint of equal extremists on both sides of the issue.

(Along these lines, it’s interesting to notice that some pro-life activists who aren’t Republican party spinners oppose the “partial-birth” abortion ban, because they correctly recognize that it wouldn’t prevent any actual abortions from taking place. Link via Diotima).

The debate isn’t over “do we ban late-term abortions or not?” Both parties favor banning late-term abortions. The debate is over “do we define late-term abortions in a manner that would pass court scrutiny, and with an exception to protect the mother’s life or health; or do we define it vaguely, and without protecting the mother’s health, so that the courts will near-definitely strike it down?”

The legislative debate, in other words, is between centrist pro-choice democrats, and extremist pro-life republicans. Extremist pro-choicers like me - who think women have an absolute right to abortion for any reason, at any stage of pregnancy - exist, but we aren’t really part of this debate. Our legislation isn’t on the table.

If passing an unconstitutional bill (and having it signed by the White House) takes the “partial birth” abortion issue off the table for a while, that would be excellent for the Democrats. (It may be the Republicans see it this way too - look at how long it’s taken them to bring this to the floor since Bush was elected). The only hope Republicans really have is to placate their pro-life voters with side issues like these. The closer the abortion debate moves to the core issue - which is, do we want police enforcing childbirth on unwilling pregnant women? - the less happy Republicans will be.

Unspeakable Conversations, from the New York times Sunday Magazine (and via Eve Tushnet), is simply the most fascinating essay I’ve read in months. The article, by disability rights activist Harriet Johnson, describes her acquaintanceship with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. Among disabled rights activists, Singer - who advocates the right of parents to kill disabled infants - is the moral equivalent of a Nazi.

I am talking to my sister Beth on the phone. “You kind of like the monster, don’t you?” she says.

I find myself unable to evade, certainly unwilling to lie. “Yeah, in a way. And he’s not exactly a monster.”

“You know, Harriet, there were some very pleasant Nazis. They say the SS guards went home and played on the floor with their children every night.”

From Johnson’s account, Singer seems to combine an intellectual philosophy of ultimate bigotry against the disabled, with an apparently complete lack of personal bigotry against disabled people. And the intellectual exchanges are fascinating.

In the lecture hall that afternoon, Singer lays it all out. The “illogic” of allowing abortion but not infanticide, of allowing withdrawal of life support but not active killing. Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone- chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness. It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible.

As soon as he’s done, I get the microphone and say I’d like to discuss selective infanticide. As a lawyer, I disagree with his jurisprudential assumptions. Logical inconsistency is not a sufficient reason to change the law. As an atheist, I object to his using religious terms (”the doctrine of the sanctity of human life”) to characterize his critics. Singer takes a note pad out of his pocket and jots down my points, apparently eager to take them on, and I proceed to the heart of my argument: that the presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life. I question his replacement-baby theory, with its assumption of “other things equal,” arguing that people are not fungible. I draw out a comparison of myself and my nondisabled brother Mac (the next-born after me), each of us with a combination of gifts and flaws so peculiar that we can’t be measured on the same scale.

He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments. He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can’t help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I’m not exactly angry with him. Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged — but it’s for the big room, 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail.

If you read one article today….

Okay, let’s review.

Step one: The state of Oregon, in its wisdom, decides to equalize funding of schools throughout the state. All kids should have access to a good education, after all, whether they live in in tax-Rich Portland or a not-so-tax-rich rural area. Being a good liberal, I highly approved of this when I moved to Oregon seven years ago. Wealthier areas should subsidize schools everywhere else in the state, after all.

Step two: A fiscal crisis hits Oregon. Portland schools are hit particularly hard, and briefly have the shortest school year in the country (even Doonesbury makes fun of us). But schools all over the state are in trouble. We have to make a choice: Either we raise taxes, or we let our schools suck.

Step three. So Measure 28 is proposed, a temporary income tax that would have cost a typical Oregonian less than ten bucks a month. Since the proposed income tax is progressive, Portland taxpayers (who have higher average incomes) would have paid the largest share of the new taxes. 57% of voters in liberal Multnomah County (where Portland is located) vote for the tax hike, but the mostly-conservative rural counties of Oregon reject it, and the measure fails.

Step four: “Okay,” says Portland. “We were willing to raise taxes to pay for everyone’s schools, but y’all rejected it. So, fine; we’ll just raise our local taxes and pay for our schools that way.”

Step five: Oregon conservatives throw a hissy fit. “How dare you selfish Portlanders educate your kids? We’ve decided that no Oregon kids should get a decent education! And if you try to fund your own schools, we’ll take that money away from you!”

Look, folks. If you want to say we’re all in it together, Portland liberals will be more than willing to play ball. We’ll gladly send 30 cents of every tax dollar we pay educating rural kids; we’ll gladly vote for a tax increase if that’s what’s needed; and we’ll gladly pay for the lion’s share of that tax increase, too. Decent schools for all is what we want.

But y’all had a chance to vote for decent schools for all, and you rejected it. Fair enough; if you prefer to drown rather than pay a measly ten bucks a month extra to keep the state afloat, that’s your choice. But it’s spiteful to insist on dragging us under with you.

Equal funding for schools is a mutual support pact, not a suicide pact.

Emma at The Oregon Blog has more on this general subject. Here’s a sample:

Personally, I think we should go ahead and have the damn war. The rural districts despise the metro areas and try to punish them at every opportunity. They complain that Portland dominates policy in their own areas and drain resources while compelling rural citizens to live by city values. But here’s the question: does rural Oregon really want to declare war on the Willamette Valley?

Who would pay for roads and bridges and dams in, say, Malheur County? Surely not the 32,000 people who live there. Which means Jackson and Coos Counties would have to chip in: no more Multnomah County gravy train. And let’s face it, the tri-county area in Portland is the major generator of revenue in Oregon. Most of the tax revenue is generated there and spread throughout the poorer, rural counties. They don’t like to be called poor stepchildren, but would they like to pay for their own services? Of course not.

Update: Jack Bog’s Blog has some comments, too.

From the LA Times:

Attorney General John Ashcroft is reconsidering a Clinton administration policy that was designed to make it easier for victims of domestic abuse to gain political asylum in the United States, a Justice Department spokesman confirmed Thursday.

Officials insist that Ashcroft has not made up his mind, but women’s groups and lobbyists for immigrants said they fear he will reverse the policy.

That, they say, would doom many women who have fled to the United States seeking refuge from domestic abuse, the threat of honor killings or sexual slavery in their home countries.

Generally, I try to remember that in any debate, people on all sides of the debate are arguing for policies they believe will bring about good outcomes for all. We may see radically different paths to the goal, but we all share a goal of a world in which everyone is well-fed and free and not subject to violence and abuse.

Usually I even believe that. But it’s hard to account for stories like this without thinking that Ashcroft is just malicious.

Further on in the same article, we hear the arguments for not granting asylum, which are either insincere or concocted by idiots:

But those on the other side of debates over immigration policy argue that the Alvarado case improperly extended asylum to cover people threatened by private individuals, rather than by government officials.

“If we make political asylum based on family issues, sexual preference issues, other general issues, it eventually opens the door to everybody in the world who is unhappy with where they happen to be,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

So the first argument is a public/private distinction: asylum is only for people threatened by government officials, not private individuals. However, the distinction between public and private is artificial, because how free “private individuals” are to threaten people is determined by public policy. If the country of Freedonia has no official policy against Jews, but also refused to protect Jews against anti-Semitic violence, declaring such violence “a private matter,” everyone would recognize it as an anti-Semitic government in action.

Governments act not only directly, but also by withholding action. When basic government services - like police protection from violence - is withheld from a particular group, that’s state action against that group. This is just as true when police decide it’s not their business to interfere with sexual trafficking, or with “private” problems of battered women, as it is when Rwandan police decide not to interfere with “private individual” Hutus massacring private individual Tutsis. It is governmental bigotry translated into non-action.

The second argument is a slippery slope argument: If we allow people into the country for personal matters, soon judges will be letting everyone in, for any sort of unhappiness.

One unstated premise of this argument is the (in this case) false distinction between personal matters and public policy, which I’ve already discussed; when a battered woman can’t get effective government protection, that is a matter of public policy.

The second unstated - but utterly disgusting - premise is that violence that happens to women - “domestic abuse, the threat of honor killings or sexual slavery” - is a petty, unimportant, private matter. These women aren’t victims of vicious, deadly discrimination; they’re just, in the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s charming words, people “unhappy with where they happen to be.”

To understand why the “slippery slope” argument is nonsense, it’s necessary to provide a little context. Janet Reno proposed rules to (in the Washington Post’s words) “allow battered women to be granted asylum as members of a social group if they can show government complicity in their suffering.” Reno was responding to the case of Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who was granted asylum during the Clinton administration. What was Ms. Alvarado fleeing from?

In 1984, at the age of 16, she married Francisco Osorio, a former soldier, who was five years her senior. Almost immediately after they were married, her husband began to threaten her, and to carry out violent assaults. Those assaults continued without respite over a ten year marriage. Osorio raped and sodomized Rodi, broke windows and mirrors with her head, dislocated her jaw, and tried to abort her child by kicking her violently in the spine. Besides using his hands and his feet against her, he also resorted to weapons — pistol-whipping her, and terrorizing her with his machete.

Rodi’s repeated attempts to obtain protection failed. The police and the courts refused to intervene because it was a “domestic” matter. When she ran away, Osorio found her and beat her unconscious. He told her that she could never get away from him, because he would “cut off her arms and legs, and…leave her in a wheelchair, if she ever tried to leave him.”

Okay, with that in mind, let’s return to the slippery slope argument. According to this argument, anyone who’s “unhappy” where they are will be able to claim refugee status. Why? Because, I presume, FAIR thinks American judges are such drooling morons that they’re incapable of distinguishing a case like Ms. Alvarado’s and someone who’s unhappy with the weather conditions where they live.

Because, you know, wanting to escape constant rapes, beatings, and death threats is just a case of some whiny woman who’s “unhappy with where they happen to be.” Who could tell the difference? Certainly not a judge.

One more comment on that “slippery slope” argument; if that slope is so slippery, why hasn’t it caused a problem in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand? All those countries offer asylum to victims of gender-based violence, and haven’t experienced the collapse of the asylum system nay-sayers in the US are predicting.

Incidentally, one possible outcome of Ashcroft’s “reconsideration” of Reno’s policy is that Ms. Alvarado will be sent back to Guatemala, where her husband has stated he plans to kill her. What a silly, whiny woman, unhappy to be in Guatemala.

An easy action you can take right now
The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights has set up an easy-to-use form, for sending letters to Ashcroft. Please use the form and “urge him not to issue final regulations that reject gender-related violence as a basis for asylum.”

Update: TalkLeft has also posted on the issue, including important information on the appointment process, which you should be certain to read. From TalkLeft:

Ashcroft has decided to halve the number of appointees on the Board of Immigration Appeals, from 23 to 11. The Washington Post article today states that all five BIA members Ashcroft has dropped in accord with his planned reduction are Clinton administration appointees and three were dissenters in the Alvarado case. [...]

The board handles 30,000 - 40,000 cases a year. It is the last resort for most immigrants facing deportation, as only a few thousand have been able to appeal to the federal courts. In January, there was strong criticism of the board because in attempting to reduce its backlog as Ashcroft directed, it was deciding cases literally within minutes. As T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a law professor at Georgetown University and former Immigration and Naturalization Service general counsel said “We are already seeing results: Many, many cases are decided at a speed that makes it impossible to believe they got the scrutiny a person who faces removal from the United States deserves.”

This was odd… this columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle emailed me. He was writing a column on the dangers of paperless voting machines, and he wanted to include a cartoon of mine (which he had seen on another website) as an illustration. But he couldn’t offer any money.

Well, I saw it, and mentally kinda blew it off. I mean, my fees are on a sliding scale starting at five freakin’ dollars, and the Chronicle is a major newspaper. I don’t buy for a moment that they can’t afford to pay me a measly five bucks.

But then, two days later, I thought again. Hey, it’s no skin off my karma if the Chronicle screws over freelancers, and it has a much bigger circulation than most places that print my cartoons. What’s the harm of letting more people see my work? So I email the dude and let him know that if it’s not too late, he can use my cartoon.

Here’s the email he sent back (I’ve changed the names):

Thanks, Barry. When I didn’t hear from you, I called Joan Doe, who put me in touch with Bob Smith, who gave us his permission, as long as we credited B. Deutsch of Amptoons.com. He said he could represent you in that respect. On that basis I went ahead and submitted the bitmap I grabbed off Joan’s site, and the credit line. Barring some last-minute change I’m not aware of, it has probably been printed already and should appear in Monday’s Chronicle.

What the fuck?

I had never given Bob permission to represent me in any respect.

Now, Bob seems like a nice person; he’s got good politics, he likes my cartoons. Probably, in his mind, he was doing me a favor. And in a way, he did me a favor: in the end, I did decide to give the cheap-ass Chronicle permission, but it would have been too late had Bob not intervened.

But, nonetheless -

What the fuck?

What the hell is wrong with some people?

Probably I should email “Bob” just to remind him that he doesn’t have the right to speak for me, but I’m still too amazed at his chuzpah to know what to say.

So I just saw a rerun of Spin City, a sit-com I normally avoid because somehow I’m just not interested in comedy about Michael J. Fox’s sex life. In this particular episode, however, a group of fat activists come to Fox’s office (in the show, Fox is the deputy mayor of New York City) with demands for wider doors on buses, bigger subway seats, wider bathroom stalls, and so on.

Somehow, this turns into the Michael J. Fox character (I tried typing “the Fox character, but it doesn’t work; he’s not “Fox,” he’s “Michael J. Fox”) agreeing to wear a 300 pound fat suit for the day. And he ends up wearing it to the annual “bachelor auction,” where of course none of the women bid on him at all. And so Fox learns and grows… awwww.

But as Bean (who watched it with me - oh yeah, baby, if I’m going to admit in public that I watched an episode of Spin City, I’m taking my friends down with me!) pointed out, the scriptwriters utterly missed the point. To understand what the fat activists were saying, the character should have worn the fat suit while wandering around the city attempting to use public accommodations. Forget being attractive to women at an auction; try getting through a subway turnstile.