Never forget.

Facebook find of the morning. Conveys much in one simple image.



I still remember reading the NYC newspapers as a young kid. Every week there were stories of women who died alone in dirty alleys from botched coat hanger abortions. I'm long past the concerns of unwanted pregnancy but I fight for women's reproductive rights because I don't want to return to those days again.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Whatever you do, don't say vagina

The Republicans in my virtual home state of Michigan, living exemplar of GOP dominance in government, got a little too arrogant with their power today, drawing well deserved national mockery. In the Statehouse, Michigan GOPers forbid Democratic women Representatives from speaking, about any pending legislation for the offensive use of anatomically correct identification of lady parts and suggesting men be subjected to the same indignities that these Neanderthals want to inflict on women.

I did the polite, long form blogging at Detroit News so all I'll say here is if men were the ones that got pregnant from sexytime for fun, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all. [More at Think Progress.]



[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Mayor Bloomberg bans bagels

Not to worry bagel lovers, Bloomberg's bagel ban only applies to the homeless. In fact he's banned all donated food to homeless shelters.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s food police have struck again!

Outlawed are food donations to homeless shelters because the city can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content, reports CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

Well of course it makes sense to a guy who's net worth is over $19 billion. He doesn't want be held responsible for feeding street people such unhealthy food as fresh bread and vegetable stew and such. So those bleeding heart do-gooders who have been donating surplus food to shelters for the last 20 years will have to find some worthier cause than feeding the hungriest people in the city.

And I'm sure his real agenda has nothing to do with trying to get the homeless to leave Gotham City altogether. Even though everybody knows if you feed those strays, they never go away.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Bum's Rush

CNN posted and op-ed today from the Women's Media Center co-authored by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem. They want the FCC to take legal action against the toxic gasbag Limbaugh since his bosses won't do it.

If Clear Channel won't clean up its airways, then surely it's time for the public to ask the FCC a basic question: Are the stations carrying Limbaugh's show in fact using their licenses "in the public interest?"

I'm afraid revoking the licenses of the stations over one show is a bridge to far for me to cross. In the first place, I don't want the government to be in the business of adjudicating which speech is allowed. In the second, this line of reasoning only reinforces the con's censorship defense of Limbaugh which is taking root in Greater Wingnuttia. Exhibit A: Doug M at OTB pleads, "don't make me defend Rush" on just those grounds.

His argument is, of course, bogus and selective. He's very concerned about the concerted effort of the lefty hoi polloi to get Rush fired. Because, you know, the right would never do that. I don't know he was even blogging then, but as I said in comments there, I wonder what Scott Beauchamp thinks about this. Or that kid working for minimum wage at Walmart who got fired because he wasn’t properly deferential to the words “Merry Christmas.” Or that kid working the phones at whatever station who made the joke about the X briefly appearing over Cheney’s face and got fired? Or the photographer who took the pictures of Cheney’s estate, with his permission? Or Graeme Frost?

And no, Bill Maher and Keith O and every liberal politician who ever made an offensive reference to Palin or Bachmann is not analogous. If there was any major liberal voice who defended their ugly remarks, I didn't see it and neither did I see anyone disputing their suspensions for going over the line of civil discourse. Neither have I ever seen any leading Democrats hastening to ask their forgiveness on bended knee for disagreeing with their wrongful speech.

In any event, I'll support the vile Limbaugh's First Amendment right to spew his hateful tripe on the air. I don't think it's the FCC's place to shut him down. Especially not when it would shut down other useful voices in order to take away his soapbox.

Let Limbaugh alone be judged in the court of public opinion. And his vile imitators too. It appears to be working quite well.

Scott Walker brews trouble for beer crafters

Conservative hero Scott Walker redefines small government.

Tucked into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) much-discussed budget was a little-noticed provision to overhaul the state’s regulation of the beer industry. In a state long associated with beer, the provision will make it much more difficult for the Wisconsin’s burgeoning craft breweries to operate and expand their business by barring them from selling directly to restaurants and liquor stores, and preventing them from selling their own product onsite.

The new provision treats craft brewers — the 60 of whom make up just 5 percent of the beer market in Wisconsin — like corporate mega-brewers, forcing them to use a wholesale distributor to market their product. ...

A move made to protect his corporate donor MillerCoors from the slight competition offered by the small craft brewers. Said provision having been snuck into the budget with no announcement, debate or input from the small brewers themselves. But of course, the claim is Walker's Republican minions in the Statehouse were "protecting" the little brewpubs from the other big distributor Anheuser-Busch.

Wondering how my conservative small government loving "fans" are going to justify this one. [Photo via Two Beer Dudes.]

FDA salt assault

Much as I hate nanny government, I'm not that upset about the FDA's planned war on salt in processed foods. Even though ironically I've been to the hospital twice because my sodium was so low that I had to be pumped full of saline, most people in this country eat way too much salt, most of it hidden in convenience foods.

While it's true people shouldn't eat so much processed food, it's often the only alternative for those on strict budgets or tight schedules. Besides, salt is cheap. You can always add salt but you can't remove it. Over the long run it will make for a healthier population and that will benefit everyone in many ways.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

The GOP's war on gambling

You probably remember when the Republicans still controlled both the White House and Congress they passed a law making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites. This greatly affected the market share of overseas companies. Times being what they are now, the European Union, which oversees trade policy for a 27-nation bloc, revisited the issue and released a report noting the crackdown on European online gambling companies violates U.S. commitments under the World Trade Organization. They're presently seeking "a negotiated solution with the United States rather than file a groundbreaking complaint at the WTO."

The new Democratic majority apparently agrees and plans "to introduce legislation after the April 6-17 congressional break to overturn the U.S. ban on Internet gambling." It's about time. The GOP's vendetta on gambling struck me as one of the more egregious examples of nanny government run amok. I'd love to see the morality police of the American Taliban kicked back to the curb on this one.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

Meet our new national Family Planner

By Libby
Updated below

Well, since this didn't require Congressional approval, it's not surprising that Bush appointed a new Family Planning czar that doesn't believe in family planning. Well unless you count completely abstaining from sexual intercourse unless you intend to get pregnant, a plan.

Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

The White House is of course touting her qualifications, which like her disgraceful predecessor include equating the use of birth control pills with murdering babies. She further supports abstinence-only as the sole acceptable education program and her administrative creds include a stint as a professor at Pat Robertson’s Regent University and a directorship with the ultra-right wing fundie group, Family Research Council.

I figure it should take her about six months to set back the progress made in reproductive policies in the last 30 years. Only in Bushamerica...

Update: Daniel DiRito has the top ten reasons Bush made this appointment. My personal favorite is number seven.

Orlando's charity free zone

Libby Spencer

Via Avedon, here's a charming story to brighten up a Christian holiday. Eric Montanez, was arrested in Orlando, FL for assault and battery on hunger in homeless people, by use of a deadly weapon - a ladle. Montanez, a member of that dangerously subversive group, Food not Bombs, was caught as result of undercover surveillance and arrested after officers filmed him doling out food to hungry people.

Police reportedly "collected a vial of the stew Montanez was serving as evidence."

The Orlando law, which is supported by local business owners who say the homeless drive away customers but has been challenged in court by civil rights groups, allows charities to feed more than 25 people at a time within two miles of Orlando city hall only if they have a special permit. They can get two permits a year.

Well isn't that great. Feeding the hungry once every six months ought to hold them.

Leaving aside the discriminatory and inhumane aspects of the law, it's only a misdemeanor charge. It raises the question, why the hell are police officers conducting undercover sting operations over this in the first place? The case isn't worth the cost of the vial in which they stored the evidence. Shouldn't they be spending their time looking for thieves and terrorists or something?

Goodling ...So help her God

Libby Spencer

Now I understand why Monica Goodling refuses to testify about the attorney purge scandal at Justice. As a born-again Christian, she's not allowed to lie. Makes you wonder how she and 150 fellow graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law ever got jobs with the Bush administration in the first place, but it does explain why her most memorable public quote is "no comment."

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate fills us in on the backstory about Regent U and generally doesn't have a problem with the administration filling its ranks with grads whose "express goal" is "to tear down the wall between church and state," but I find it really objectionable myself. Without the undue influence of AG Gonzales and this team of young holy rollers, this might not have happened.

In the five years after 2001, the civil rights division brought no voting cases on behalf of African-Americans. It brought one employment case on behalf of an African-American. Instead, the division took up the "civil rights" abuses of reverse discrimination—claims of voter fraud or discrimination against Christians. On Feb. 20, Gonzales announced a new initiative called the First Freedom Project to carry out "even greater enforcement of religious rights for all Americans." In his view, the fight for a student's right to read a Bible at school is as urgent a civil rights problem as the right to vote.

How is that not problematic? I have to agree with Michael J.W. Stickings.

... [H]ow is it possible for religious (in this case conservative evangelical Christian) legal scholarship not to distort the law according to its own religious purposes? If you're out to do God's work, after all, you likely won't have much time to do the work of a secular liberal democracy with safeguards against religious rule like the United States.

...[T]here is something profoundly anti-American about this Christian leadership out to change the world. It's bad for America, which isn't the theocracy these zealots imagine it to be, and likely also bad for Christianity, which ought to concern itself not with politics but with faith.

Amen to that and on another note, take a look at Ms. Goodling's webpage. Don't you think she's showing an awful lot of leg for a good God-fearing Christian? I thought they had some strict rules about modesty.

Legal drugs more lethal than pot and ecstasy

Although I don't speak about it much here, I started my first blog, Last One Speaks, to focus on my pet issue of drug policy reform. So I love this study.

LONDON -- New "landmark" research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.

...In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.

Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.

And a word of warning to those who enjoy the legal drugs. This could very well be the first salvo in a call for a new prohibition among the nanny government types.

While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved.

Nutt called for more education so that people were aware of the risks of various drugs. "All drugs are dangerous," he said. "Even the ones people know and love and use every day."

In fact, everything is dangerous if consumed to excess - even water, as those who recall the recent death of a radio show contestant in California will remember. The point is once you start the slide down the slippery slope of allowing nanny government to dictate non-infringing personal behavior, it's extraordinarily difficult to get back up that hill to common sense.

[h/t Tits McGee]