I first heard about this case when I was listening to BBC radio on Tuesday. I tuned in during the middle of of this story, and it seemed so bizarre that I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Well, now I got the chance to hear the whole story. It turns out that some foreign aid groups tried to take a group of 103 children out of the country. The aid workers are now accused of child trafficking and violating international laws.

Some members of the NGO Children Rescue/Arche de Zoe have been arrested for attempting to take the 21 girls and 82 boys - the youngest being about a year old and the oldest about 10 - out of Chad. The agency workers were French. Three journalists who were travelling with the volunteer workers and the Spanish crew who were to fly them back to France are also being held. In Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, a prosecutor on Wednesday also charged Jacques Wilmart, a Belgian pilot involved in the affair, with “complicity in abduction”, before sending him to jail.

Zoe’s Ark says it wanted to rescue children from Darfur, but French officials and UN aid workers say they believe many were from Chad and were not orphans.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called the attempt to separate the more than 100 young Chadian children from their parents and then take them to France for adoption an “illegal and totally irresponsible move.” The UN said the children had family in the country.

“They are not orphans and they were not sitting alone in the desert in Chad, they were living with their families in communities,” Annette Rehrl of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters in Abeche.

UNICEF spokesperson Veronique Taveau told journalists in Geneva that what happened had violated international rules, such as The Hague Convention on international adoption and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Taveau said the case was not an isolated incident but one that was highly visible because of the size of the group of children.

L’Express reports the Europeans offered sweets and biscuits to encourage the children to leave their homes.

“My parents had gone to work in the fields. As we were playing some Chadians came and said here are some sweets, why don’t you follow us to Adre and then we’ll take you home. We were taken to the hospital in Adre,” said a young boy who gave his name as Osman. Adre is a town on the Chad-Sudan border.

“We spent seven days in Adre and I’ve been here in Abeche for more than one month. We were well fed by the whites, there was always food. I would like to go back to find my parents,” he told reporters at the Abeche orphanage where the children are being cared for by local and international aid workers.

Many European media outlets were putting a slightly more favorable spin on this, but as more information comes out, these so called aid groups are not looking good at all. The UN has said that most of these children were not orphans, which they found out from interviewing the older children. Now many of the children are separated from their families, and there are concerns that the youngest children may not be reunited because they are too young to talk. Needless to say this is not going over well with people all over Africa. As the International Herald Tribune article cited in this paragraph notes:

The scandal has sparked outrage and condemnation across Africa, where it has a deep resonance from the colonial era, when slave traders, missionaries and colonial officials blithely separated African families with little regard to their wishes. In Congo, government officials suspended all adoptions by foreigners to examine their procedures more carefully, according to The Associated Press, and protesters angry about the attempted kidnappings took to the streets in Chad.

The scandal has also raised tensions between Chad and France just as the European Union begins deploying a peacekeeping force in the region aimed at shoring up Chad, which has been increasingly drawn into the four-year-old conflict in neighboring Darfur.

This history is one reason why adoptions by Westerners are not common in African countries. Incidents like this contribute to the destruction black families, and I suspect these aid workers felt no need to respect the rights of poor black African families.¹

1. Why oh why am I having flashbacks to this old Rachel’s Tavern post/comment? I was so angry at that woman. I could barely contain myself. (back)

From Three Wise Men:

Crazy, racist, hate mongering Congressman Tom Tancredo has announced he will not seek re-election, regardless of the outcome of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. I pretty much can’t think of anyone in the House that’s more clearly a bad human being than him.

I agree. For more on Tancredo, check out these posts at Migra Matters: 1 2 3 4.

From Para Justicia y Libertad!:

Congratulations to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner who has become the first woman to be elected president in Argentina’s history. Kirchner, 54, is the wife of current President of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner and a former senator for Buenos Aires Province. In the Oct, 2007 general election, Mrs. Kirchner, she ran for president of Argentina, representing the ruling Front for Victory party, a center-left Peronist party.

Fernández is the second woman to be elected leader of a South American nation in two years, after Michelle Bachelet, who became Chile’s president last year. […]

Her election extends the trend of left-leaning elected governments in Latin America, although she is more moderate than the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez. Mrs Kirchner is expected to maintain her husband’s friendly relations with Chavez.

Fernández has vowed to continue the work of her husband after winning a presidential election widely seen as a referendum on his economic policies. She has fiercely rejected the pro-market policies of the 1990s, which she blames for the 2001 crisis.

Justice delayed is better than none at all, I guess. From Feminist Law Professors:

Today the Georgia Supreme Court ordered the release of Genarlow Wilson.  Wilson was sentenced to 11 years in prison (with a mandatory 10-year sentence) for receiving, at a time when he was 17, oral sex from a 15-year old girl.  The Georgia legislature subsequently changed to 12 months the maximum sentence available in similar cases involving consensual sex acts between teens.

Mr. Wilson’s successful Petition for Writ of Certiorari is here.  A copy of the Court’s decision is here.  For news reports, see here and here.

Mr. Wilson has been in jail for 21 months.

-Bridget Crawford

See also this post on The Debate Link.

Francis Holland calls this “a victory for the afrosphere.” I don’t know enough about the Georgia Supreme Court to know if this is true, but I’d certainly like it to be true.

Meanwhile, conservatives have their own spin on the Wilson case.

(I previously blogged about Wilson’s case here.)

Via The Bias Committee:

In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.

Huzzah for my hometown! Portland, Oregon, wooooooo!

So a man was videotaping the police searching his next-door-neighbors property.

Without warning, cops charged at Waterhouse, ordered him to put down the camera, and then shot him with a beanbag gun and a Taser as he was video recording them. As a result, the officers issued criminal citations against Waterhouse, although he was acquitted of all charges.

One of the cops justified the attack in a report by writing “He had refused to drop the camera which could be used as a weapon.”

Waterhouse is suing for $30,000. I’m sure that me and other Portlanders can feel that paying off citizens who are attacked by cops for pretending this isn’t a fascist country is a very good use of our tax dollars.

From Melissa at Shakesville:

So there’s this judge. Her name—her name—is Teresa Carr Deni, and she’s a municipal judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. And recently, a defendant in her courtroom was accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint—and inviting three of his friends to rape her, too. It might even have been more, except that when a fifth man arrived and was offered a turn, he asked why the girl was crying and declined to rape her while she wept and his friend pointed a gun at her, instead deciding to help her get dressed and leave.

The thing is, Judge Deni dropped all sex and assault charges at alleged gun-wielding gang-rapist Dominique Gindraw’s preliminary hearing. She decided he should be held on armed robbery for “theft of services.” Not only can prostitutes not be raped, according to Judge Deni, but calling what happened to the 20-year-old victim rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”

Words fail me, but the title of Skemono’s post — “Prostitutes aren’t people, after all” — seems to sum it up. But it’s worth mentioning that after being let go by the judge, this man raped another woman (also a prostitute, raped in the same manner) four days later.

But later today I’m still going to try to write a letter: Mike in the comments at Feministe posted a link to the Complaint form for the Pennsylvania Jucidial Conduct Board.

Or you can contact Judge Deni’s office directly (curtsy to Rotten Word).

Echidne writes:

The case also makes me wonder what all the sins are that we collectively assign prostitutes. There is an assumption that prostitutes have somehow consented to be abused and perhaps even murdered and that therefore the society is not responsible for awarding them the same protection other citizens deserve.

See also posts at Group News Blog, Reclusive Leftist, Lawyers Guns and Money, Young Philly Politics, Quizlaw, Anonymous Law Student, Angry Grrl, and Vomit Comet.

I’m really doing a lousy job of quitting blogging this week. :-P

Anyhow, Bitch PhD has the info you need to help override Bush’s veto of health care for poor children. Here’s some of it, please click through for the whole thing:

The good news is that the Senate has enough votes for SCHIP to override Bush’s asshole veto.

The bad news is that the House doesn’t. We need 25 more Representatives to act like decent human beings and switch their votes. [But that’s doable; this writer thinks that there are 46 “no” voters in the House who might change their mind, if their constituents are outraged enough. –Amp]

So. Do the decent thing. Go here and find out who your representative is.

Then scroll down the list below to see if his or her name is on it. These are the folks who voted against SCHIP.

Write them (you can do so via the first link, or you can google their name and find a real honest-to-god mailing address) and tell them to change their vote. That’s all you have to do.

Go read the rest at BitchPhd. And if your Rep is on her list, please send them an angry email.

Echidne writes:

What does Bush’s veto mean for those 6.6 million? In thirteen states they may become uninsured within a week or two and in yet another 23 states by the end of the fiscal year 2008.

By the way, although the House of Representatives is approximately 85% white, about 99% of the Representatives who voted against health care for poor kids are white. What a shock.

UPDATE: By the way, there was a legitimate reason to vote against SCHIP — the final version in the House discriminated against children of immigrants. But that ship has now sailed; it’s shitty that the version that passed the House was that one, but that’s what happened. Now that it has passed, overriding Bush’s veto is the thing to do.

From today’s SF Chronicle:

“Leading gay rights organizations, with the pointed exception of the Human Rights Campaign, withdrew their support Monday from a landmark gay civil rights bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination.

The intense backlash by the gay community surprised House Democratic leaders, forcing them to postpone what had been intended as a big House vote this week to include gays and lesbians in the nation’s job discrimination laws for the first time in American history.

The debate playing out between gay rights activists and two of their biggest supporters in Congress raises a classic political question: Are activists better off compromising and accepting progress or continuing to fight for everything they want?

Gay rights groups have been waiting for a decade for the bill to pass, and many say a few more months to try to build support for including gender identity would be worth the wait. They say transgender people will have little chance of winning protection from discrimination if they aren’t included in this bill.

Pelosi and Frank, however, fear the inclusion of gender identity will kill the overall bill - again denying gays and lesbians protection against job discrimination.

I can understand the fear that if lesbians and gays don’t take what they can get now, perhaps they won’t be able to get anything at all. How many years more will it take?

Nonetheless, opposing a Federal anti-discrimination bill that excludes transgendered people is the right thing to do. The reason that it’s harder to pass a bill including transfolks — which is that open bigotry against trans people remains entirely acceptable for bosses, corporations, governments, and congresscritters — is the same reason legal protection for transgendered people is essential.

I’m thrilled to my bones that the queer rights groups have refused to sign on to the Democratic Party’s compromise. It’s solidarity in action. And it’s fucking great.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings suggests that us blog readers can show a little solidarity, as well:

If you think that people should not be fired because they seek gender reassignment surgery, or have some other sort of gender misalignment — if the very idea of choosing one of the toughest parts of a person’s already tough life to take away his or her livelihood for no good reason makes you as mad as it makes me — then now would be a good time to write your Representative and ask him or her to support the extension of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to transgendered people.

UPDATE: I must quote “Edward,” from Obsidian Wing’s comments:

As a gay man, I don’t mind saying, I have no interest at all in becoming a “first-class citizen” if it comes at the expense of someone else’s status. I’ll happily take my chances with the current law before I’ll passively support the hideous assertion that gays and lesbians are kind of ok now, but transgendered Americans are still very much not ok. That folks can’t see why that’s so offensive to many gay folks suggests to my mind they don’t see why the current lack of protection is offensive to us either. It’s not about us. It’s about what’s right.

What this boils down to, quite frankly (no pun intended), is that I trust the motives of the transgendered community in this battle much, much, much more than I trust the motives of those among general public who are coming around and now ready to condescend to suggest I might be worthy of some of the same civil liberties they take for granted. In other words, if the sh*t hits the fan again, I’d rather stay aligned with the folks who’ve shown me constant, genuine support, regardless of how small a minority they may be, than be worried my new allies are still harboring bigotry and might turn against me again.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to international affairs, there is a major protest (estimates of 100,000 people) against the military dictatorship in Burma,which is now called Myanmar. The protest, lead by Buddhist monks, has been peaceful, but tension is rising, and as I writing this post I just found out that 4 monks have been killed by the military.

This dictatorship has been in place for 20 years, and the last major protest ended with the military killing thousands of protesters. You can learn more about the history of Burma/Myanmar in this article.

Here’s a photo of the protest from the AFP.

Caption: “Buddhist monks protest by marching with a banner that reads, “We shall replace (crackdown) unjustice with justice” before police conduct a crackdown in downtown Yangon. Myanmar security forces used batons, tear gas and live rounds Wednesday in a violent crackdown on mass protests against the military junta, killing at least four people including three Buddhist monks.(AFP)”You can also find more info. at Women of Color Blog.

(This guest post is reprinted from Daisy’s Dead Air with Daisy’s kind permission.)

Left: Pfc. LaVena Johnson, photo from Essence

From the blog BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS comes a case that I have heard NOTHING about, which is pretty amazing, news-hound that I am.

Thus, the fact that I didn’t know, makes me instantly suspicious.

Private First Class LaVena Johnson, died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005. The first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq, she was only nineteen years old.

Dr. John Johnson, Lavena’s father, was initially told by an Army representative, that his daughter “died of self-inflicted, noncombat injuries,” but initially added that it was not a suicide. The subsequent Army investigation reversed this finding and declared LaVena’s death a suicide, a finding refuted by the soldier’s family. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dr. Johnson pointed to indications that his daughter had endured a physical struggle before she died - two loose front teeth, a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home - suggesting that “someone might have punched her in the mouth.”

KMOV (St Louis) eventually aired a story which revealed details not previously made public: Parents question their daughter’s mysterious death in Iraq.

News 4’s Matt Sczesny took a close look at the evidence gathered by the military and asks the question, “was it murder or suicide?”

Among the thousands of graves at Jefferson Barracks cemetery there are stories of bravery, heroism, and proud service.

Among the thousands is the grave of Private Lavena Johnson, whose story is clouded in mystery and according to her parents, marred by murder and cover-up.

Lavena’s father, Dr. John Johnson, has waged his own personal crusade to find out what really happened to his daughter in Iraq on July 19, 2005.

The army ruled her death a suicide, the victim of a gunshot wound to the head.

In documents and autopsy photos obtained by the Johnson family and shared with News 4, more questions are raised than answered.

One strange fact was that Lavena was apparently abused, physically, and the autopsy didn’t address the physical trauma to her body.

Military documents also show no apparent indication of suicide, her company commander wrote that Johnson was clearly happy and healthy physically and emotionally, something her mother knew by a phone conversation the day before she died.

Johnson’s parents also question how their daughter at 5’1”, could handle a 40 inch M-16 to kill herself while sitting.

In fact, a military laboratory even concluded that based on a gunshot residue test, Johnson may not have even handled the weapon.

Additionally, Johnson’s military debit card was never found, even though she used it two hours before her death to buy candy.

No bullet was ever found where she died, and a trail of blood is seen in photos outside the tent. Even stranger, it appears as if someone tried to set her body on fire.

So if it wasn’t a suicide as the Army maintains, then how did Lavena Johnson die?

Based on the autopsy photos, her father believes that she was raped.

The military is unconvinced and consider the case closed.

A Pentagon spokesman says that the case was investigated thoroughly and that there is no evidence to reopen.

News 4 tried for weeks to get the Army to say more about the death of Private Johnson, but they’re only response is that the investigation is closed.

Certainly the documents military investigators have gathered seem to say a lot more.

Johnson’s father is now trying to have her body exhumed at Jefferson Barracks to have an independent autopsy performed.”

From BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS:

[Official]documents provided elements of another scenario altogether:

* Indications of physical abuse that went unremarked by the autopsy
* The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death
* Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her
* A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found
* Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire

The Army has resisted calls by Dr. Johnson and by KMOV to reopen its investigation.

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! Why haven’t we heard about LaVena?

… it takes moral outrage, family vocalization, and community involvement to the government, to bring to bear upon the Army to find the truth, to tell the truth, to honor the men and women who put on the uniform to serve their country, says alot about the callousness of this country which saw fit to send these young women and men into a war with a country which has done no aggression against America. No huge outcry has yet come to bear in the case of LaVena. There are no loud chorus of voices demanding that the military be held accountable for their actions, or lack thereof in the mishandling of this young woman’s case. Anyone, and everyone, can and should, speak for her. It may seem that the comparision between the cases of LaVena Johnson and Pat Tillman may seem unrelated, but both cases are the same. In both cases, the death of a young soldier in a dangerous place, in an unjustly declared rogue war, was not explained to the families they left behind, the families that gave them up to go halfway around the world to fight a war for oil, to put their lives on the line for those of us here in America. The Army should not be so cold and heartless in how it disregards its soldiers. It is not too much to ask that the Army take into consideration all evidence of this young woman’s death. (The attempt to set her body on fire; the trail of blood found outside of her living area.) That her family has many unanswered questions surrounding her death, and the inept handling of Lavena’s case (judging by the evidence left at the scene of her death )by the military, speaks volumes to military injustice in how it treats, or rather, mistreats its soldiers.

Please do not let this young soldier’s death be in vain. She took it upon herself to serve her country, with honor. Let her be honored by not letting her story fall into silence.

1. Sign the online petition to the Armed Services Committees in Congress asking them to direct the Army to reinvestigate the death of LaVena Johnson.

2. Find your Senator or Representative on the Armed Services Committees list and contact them directly about LaVena. (Thanks to the blogsite, http://www.lavenajohnson.com for outstanding work to keep Lavena in the public’s mind.)

3. For background on Lavena Johnson, please view the KMOV-TV news report from 02.21.07.

Please do your part, and again, thanks so much to BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS for truth-telling in this matter!

BRING THEM HOME NOW!

Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested and pled guilty to disorderly conduct after he was caught propositioning an undercover police officer for sex in an airport bathroom.  Pam has the run down on his votes on key gay/lesbian policy issues:

* Voted YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. (Jun 2006)
* Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
* Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
* Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. (Sep 1996)
* Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation. (Sep 1996)

This would be funny is this guy didn’t wield so much power, but at least he didn’t say a black man scared him into offering a blowjob like the last Republican who was caught doing this.

Is anyone keeping count of how many Republican politicians have been caught in gay sex scandals this year?

Via Mahablog and Lawyers Guns And Money, I read this interesting Washington Post article about a split in the “pro-life” movement over the “Partial Birth Abortion” ban.

What’s interesting is that some of the pro-lifers are admitting to the truth about the Partial Birth Abortion ban (PBA ban) — truths that leaders of the pro-life movement have been blatantly lying about for years. In this story, pro-lifers admit:

• That a PBA ban will not prevent a single abortion.
• That the alternative procedures are more dangerous for women.
• That some alternative procedures doctors will use now are if anything more brutal from a fetus-centric point of view.
• That PBA bans have nothing to do with reducing abortion and everything to do with fundraising and Republicans winning elections.

It’s refreshing to read pro-life leaders finally (albeit temporarily) telling the truth.

The most appalling quote comes from the vice president of Focus on the Family, Tom Minnery, arguing in favor of the PBA ban. It’s nothing we didn’t already suspect, but it’s amazing that Minnery was careless enough to say it in pubilc:

“The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling.”

For years pro-lifers have been pushing the same lie: they’ve claimed¹ that a procedure that involves inserting forceps into a woman’s uterus as many as a dozen times over (a standard D&E) has no greater chance of causing injury than a procedure which requires only a single insertion (a D&X, which is more-or-less the procedure that’s been banned by the Partial Birth Abortion ban).²

Now Focus on the Family’s man in charge of policy not only admits that was a lie, but suggests that increased risk to women is a benefit: the “greater danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus” is good, because it might discourage some “later-term”³ abortions.

As Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes:

As you can see, most anti-choicers (despite the bad faith Congressional findings that 2+2=171) don’t really think that these bans on a safer procedure protect women’s physical health. They simply believe that women can’t be trusted to make judgments about their own lives, and if this causes some women to be seriously injured that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s almost impossible to overstate how disgusting this legislation is, and how deeply entwined outright misogyny is with the American “pro-life” movement.

Although Minnery is correct to say that the ban he and his movement favor puts women in danger, I doubt there will be any less abortion as a result. Chuck Donovan of the pro-life Family Research Council is probably right when he says “there may not be even one fewer abortion in the country as a result” of the PBA ban — but note that he’s only admitting that now that the PBA ban has been made law. For years, contrary to what Donovan now admits, pro-life leaders have been claiming — ridiculously — that the partial-birth abortion ban would save little baby lives (all the better to pry open the wallets of the pro-life rank and file). And the vast majority of pro-lifers in this country, who are either totally amoral about lying or complete dupes of their leadership, have been content to let them get away with it.

Now some in the pro-life movement — although no one as major league as Focus On The Family or the Family Research Council — are complaining about the constant lying about this issue by pro-lifer leaders. From “An Open Letter To James Dobson”:

Dr. Dobson, you mislead Christians claiming this ruling will “protect children.” The court granted no authority to save the life of even a single child…. Your correspond­ence depart­ment… told us that with this PBA ruling, “The U.S. Supreme Court made it illegal for women to have an abortion in the last trimester.” Online at KGOV.com, we also document other pro-life media outlets misrep­resenting this vicious ruling. Following your example, many national ministries have spent years using the PBA ban to motivate financial donations, all the while misrepre­senting the legal effect of the ban. Today millions of Christians, including your own staff, have been deceived. …The court explicitly stated the PBA ban “does not on its face impose a substantial obstacle” to “late-term” abortion (p. 26). And since this ban cannot prevent a single abortion, of course, it imposes no obstacle, and neither does it “protect children” (your words) or ban “abortion in the last trimester” (words offered by some of your staff).

More pro-life dissidents, quoted in the Washington Post article:

Rev. Bob Enyart, a Christian talk radio host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, said the real issue is fundraising. “Over the past seven years, the partial-birth abortion ban as a fundraising technique has brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars” for major antiabortion groups, “but the ban has no authority to prevent a single abortion, and pro-life donors were never told that,” he said. “That’s why we call it the pro-life industry.”

In Rohrbough’s view, partisan politics is also involved. “What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they’re really a wing of the Republican Party, and they’re not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child — they’re geared to getting Republicans elected,” he said. “So we’re seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we’re deceived about what they really do.”

But despite this deep split within the pro-life movement, rest assured that there are some things that they all have in common. For instance, the way that virtually all of these pro-life spokespeople are men. For another, the way that none of them ever express the slightest concern for women’s health or well-being. So you see, they agree on the fundamentals.

More blogging on this story: Our Bodies Our Selves, Feministing, Balkinization,A Foolish Consistency, Dizzy Dayz, Political Animal, and Ryoga. And the aforementioned Mahablog and Lawyers, Guns and Money. And (edited to add) The Debate Link, The Thinkery, Fattmixx, Bligbi, RH Reality Check, Pseudo-Adrienne, The Carpetbagger Report, Obsidian Wings, and Pandagon.

1. See, for example, the text of the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban, which explicitly claims “partial birth” abortions are never safer. (back)
2. This article, via Mahablog, describes other ways doctors are experimenting with possibly less safe procedures in order to avoid breaking the new law. (back)
3. In fact, as Mahablog points out, most uses of the now-banned D&X procedure take place pre-viability, and would be more accurately described as “mid-term” than “late-term” abortions. (back)

From a CNN story on the Supreme Court’s upholding of the “Partial Birth” abortion ban:

“A lot of us wish that Alito weren’t there and O’Connor were there,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who opposed Alito’s nomination, said.

Harry Reid was one of 17 Democrats who voted in favor of the Federal “partial birth” abortion ban becoming law (without those 17 democrats, the bill wouldn’t have passed). If Reid thinks that the Court should have found the Federal PBA ban unconstitutional, then WHY DID HE VOTE FOR IT???? As Johnathan Adler writes, “Call me old fashioned, but I believe that if a member of the Senate believes a law is unconstitutional, he or she should vote against it.”

And why didn’t CNN point out Reid’s hypocrisy?

From The New York Times:

Two female students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute complained to authorities about the behavior of Cho Seung-Hui, the killer in the shooting rampage there, when he contacted them in separate incidents in 2005. Police questioned Mr. Cho and he was sent to a mental health facility, but no charges were filed against him. […]

Also in 2005, Lucinda Roy, an English professor, shared her concerns about Mr. Cho with the Virginia Tech police, but no official report was filed. The writings did not express threatening intentions, or allude to criminal activity, the police said today.

In the incidents involving the female students, the police said that in late November 2005, Mr. Cho contacted a fellow female student, by phone and in person, and she notified the campus police. She later declined to press charges, but officers spoke with Mr. Cho, who was referred to the University’s disciplinary system.

On December 12, 2005, a second female student complained to the police about an instant message Mr. Cho sent to her by computer. The police then spoke with Mr. Cho and asked him to have no further contact with the student. The police said the message was not threatening, and the student characterized it as “annoying.” […]

Neither of the female students who complained about Mr. Cho were among the shooting victims, and the police said they did not know if they were in the vicinity of the shootings. […]

Federal investigators said Mr. Cho — a South Korean immigrant who Americanized his name and preferred to be known as Seung Cho — left behind a note that they described as a lengthy, rambling and bitter list of complaints focusing on moral laxity and double-dealing he found among what he viewed as wealthier and more privileged students on campus.

It’s too early to know for sure, but it’s my guess that Seung Cho was not just an asshole but a misogynistic asshole.¹

Everyone’s noticed that these kinds of mass shootings are exclusively perpetrated by men? Just like rapists are almost exclusively male. I don’t think the parallel is a coincidence; I think both kinds of attacks are usually rooted in strong feelings of male entitlement, and in strong fears of failing to be a man. Whether or not that’s true of Seung Cho remains to be seen, admittedly.

1. As Myca said in comments, “What do you want to bet this guy was a misogynist twit?” I have to admit, though, that I was also expecting that he’d be white, and I was mistaken about that. (back)