The Pagan Science Monitor

Marshall Field's protest set to liberate humanity & the earth

True Chicago story. Saturday, 3 p.m. Corner of State & Washington. The man is passing out little mint-green leaflets and waves of urgent energy are cascading off him and rippling around us passers-by. i always take flyers, & i usually read them, too. i read this one waiting for the light to change (it's short-n-sweet):
"RALLY IN SUPPORT OF FIELD'S -- SUN., 5-6, 1 p.m.!"
I want to start screaming.
This is what you care about?! Do you know that there's a war on? The light changes. i don't scream. i walk. There's a sale at Urban Outfitters, & i kinda want a new, cute hat for summer.

Israelis try to whack Nobel Peace Prize winner

No kidding.
Mairead Corrigan (now Corrigan-Maguire) shared the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1976 with Betty Williams. The 2 women organized 300-thousand women to march against the fighting between the Republican and loyalist communities in Northern Ireland.
But a Nobel Prize won't keep Israeli soldiers from shooting you with a rubber-coated steel bullet. Rubber bullets and other "less lethal" weapons frequently main and kill, despite their name.

The fascism argument

Local Chicago radical blogger Steve Lendman has a review of Chris Hedges'
2006 book, American Fascists, on his own blog, and on Chicago Indymedia.
We face a new, historically unique danger in the U.S. today.
The "fascist" epithet has been sorrily misused to describe presidential administrations that were merely nasty (Nixon, Reagan) or movements that had conservative sexual morality and a tendency toward violence (Operation Rescue).
Thinking activists on the left are skeptical: The "F-word" is inflammatory, and can be a total conversation-stopper.
But Hedges and another liberal intellectual, Joe Conason, correctly identify the authentically fascist nature of both those currently in power and the growing mass movements on the right.

Boris "Have-Another-Drink, Dammit" Yeltsin is dead at age 1,245

That's 76 in human years.
Among the great accomplishments of "Russia's first freely-elected leader" --
1) During the 1991 coup against Gorby, Yeltsin, mayor of Moscow, climbed on a tank and gave the speech of his career. (He didn't say, "Have another drink, dammit!" even once.) After that, Boris-baby had a real thing for tanks. A few years later, the Chechens hurt some of his tanks. So he bombed Grozny flat.

Joke du jour

A heart surgeon, a crusty punk, and Judge Posner are on an airplane that's going down. The pilot has already bailed out, and there are only 2 parachutes left. They're discussing who should get the parachutes.

Carhart makes overturning Roe irrelevant. What is to be done?

The obvious point (the one that all pro-choice people get) is that there is no such thing as “partial-birth abortion.” Others have eloquently made the point that the propagandistic misnomer is medically meaningless.
But it has always been a dangerous mistake to think that the anti-choicers, or the authors of the 2003 “Partial-Birth Abortion” Ban Act itself ("the Act"), intended to rename, demonize, and ban a particular procedure as a mere wedge strategy.
The mistake seems to be continuing, intractable: Wednesday and Thursday, pro-choice bloggers were (good) angry and (bad) fearful that Carhart will prove the narrow end of the wedge; that, with one more conservative justice, a future Supreme Court will overturn Roe.
This fear utterly misses what Carhart has actually accomplished.
As of Wednesday, April 18, 2007, Roe is irrelevant. Thursday marked Day One of the Post-Roe Era.
Here’s why:
1) The only issue is the Act’s intentionally-vague language.
2) Every single word about “trimesters” and “pre-“ and “post-viability” is a red herring. That language belongs to the Roe era, and the Roe era is over. We lost.
3) The vagueness of the Act’s language was always smart, intentional, and strategic, and was never an accidental by-product of dumb anti-choicers who can’t write and don’t understand medicine.

Purest, most crystaline Carhart rant

...is here, by Tennessee Guerilla Women.

Best links to primary sources: Here, courtesy Bitch, Ph.D.

Physicist explains in real time how he sees stuff

Bus Driver called pretty early this morning. He was in between routes and had parked the bus and was sipping tea from a thermos. I wanted his thoughts on Carhart because that's the only thing I cared about at that moment, but I couldn't get more than, "Wow," out of him. Instead, he started describing what he was looking at, and what he was thinking about what he was looking at. (Sleepnessness and science-illiteracy warning: If any working scientist reads this and goes, "That doesn't make any sense," it's my mistake in rendering the conversation. I hadn't slept, and there's no way I'll ever understand even basic concepts such as refraction and reflection.)

SCOTUSblog has Carhart news roundup

If you really have all night to kill, and you just can't get enough of reading the COMA (corporate media), and the Carhart decision is the only thing on your mind, then the normally-analytical SCOTUSblog has what you need: Links to every dang COMA "think-piece" and op-ed, none of which, as far as I can tell, says the only thing that needs to be said. Today, Thursday, April 19, 2007, is the first day of the Post-Roe Era.

Tags: Audioslave, Tom Morello, "The Nightwatchman", politics, law, policy, abortion, Carhart, Supreme Court, Scotus, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Planned Parenthood, "Partial Birth Abortion", reproductive rights, reproductive freedom, women's liberation, feminism.

Quotation du jour

With AUDIOSLAVE, if we sold a million records, we might be able to buy new sports cars. With The Nightwatchman [Morello's new solo project], if we sell a thousand records, we might be able to overthrow the government.
--Tom Morello (thanks, Mars!)
T.P.S.M. needs a few encouraging words just now, the day after Gonzales v. Carhart, the first day of the post-Roe era.

Tags: Audioslave, Tom Morello, "The Nightwatchman", politics, law, policy, abortion, Carhart, Supreme Court, Scotus, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Planned Parenthood, "Partial Birth Abortion", reproductive rights, reproductive freedom, women's liberation, feminism.