The Pagan Science Monitor

Is Paris burning?

...down there?...And is that why she got out of jail for a minute?
You celebrity-obsessed pinheads, why do you care?!
And if you are a celebrity-obsessed pinhead (who got here by following a link), you may as well hit the BACK button right now, because this is a pure rant.
Rant #1: Do you even care about women in prison unless it's Paris or Martha? Do you have a heart in your chest or a brain in your head? If so, what do you think they're there for? Would you please begin using them sometime, soon?
Rant #2: Letting somebody out of the klink for medical care is called, in corrections-public health jargon, "compassionate release," and it happens approximately never, as in never, ever.

Quotation du jour

The QDJ is wordless. Today, it is a sound.
It is the refrain from "Isn't She Lovely" (Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, 1976), played (with heart) on a little harmonica, by someone I glimpsed in the bustle of pedestrians on the south side of the Federal Plaza here, about 4:45 this afternoon.
The sound pulled me out of the silent world you go to in loud public places and in intense private moments. It pulled me back into the other sounds of the street, back into contact.
(Aside: Listen to Patti Smith, Twelve, 2007.)
There's a lot of grousing on these pages. It's been a grim week in this world. The sound reminded me: Thank you. The I.D. social worker who tells me, "I'm too tired to laugh." The public defender who will be drunk again tonight. The prisoner advocate who will not be (again, tonight, and for fourteen years, three weeks, and two days, right?). The accountant ("don't call me that!") at the AIDS-service non-profit who is supposed to call in a few minutes (perhaps with a proposal to get drunk). Thank you. It's been a hell of a week, all the way around, for a lot of people. But there was a sound that pulled me back into the sunlight. May you all find something, too.

Tags: politics, Stevie Wonder, Patti Smith, Quotation du Jour, QDJ, social work, social workers, public defenders, indigent defense, non-profits, Iraq, Cindy Sheehan, gratitude.

The U.S. nursing shortage: a radical analysis

The shortage of nurses in the U.S. is going to get worse for 3 structural, systemic reasons, according to a trusted expert.

Last night, I had a great conversation with a long-lost friend, the quasi-infamous M. Treloar, radical workplace organizer/meatpacker turned registered nurse. We talked about the nursing shortage in the U.S.

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.

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.

Take a deep breath. Is CARHART really the beginning of the end?

<inhale.> <exhale.> <count to 10.> ANSWER: YES.
The Court's 5:4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart is exactly what it appears to be, and don't let your "Take It Easy, Honey" friends tell you anything different.
Take it from that gate-keeper who has more in common with her colleagues on the bench than she has with the women who already don't have access to reproductive health care. Take it from Justice Ginsburg:
"Today's decision is alarming. It refuses to take Casey and Stenberg seriously. It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between previability and postviability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health.
"I dissent from the Court's disposition. Retreating from prior rulings that abortion restrictions cannot be imposed absent an exception safeguarding a woman's health, the Court upholds an Act that surely would not survive under the close scrutiny that previously attended state-decreed limitations on a woman's reproductive choices."

High court upholds boob-job ban

The American Taliban's plan all along was to re-name arguably one of the safest (and least common) medical procedures, to emphasize that it is not very aesthetically pleasing. On that basis -- and make no mistake, on that basis ALONE, the Supreme Court has decided that IDX (intact dilation and extraction) is okay to ban -- decided, in fact, that the vagueness of the ban is okay, too, so that other methods of abortion may be illegal as of today.
So i'm taking suggestions, folks. What's the grossest operation? Let's make 'em all against the law. Big Number One on my list: Boob jobs.

In the Pagan Science Reading Room

William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
New in paperback.
"...[S]ome readers will take away from [this book] the fundamental conclusion — even though [Easterly] doesn't draw it — that foreign aid just doesn't work; and that would be deeply incorrect. The fact is that many of the people you meet in any African village are alive because of foreign aid."
-- Nicholas D. Kristof, reviewing the book last October in The New York Review of Books
There are links to other reviews, and to debates and discussions, on Easterly's NYU website.
T.P.S.M. will have a longer discussion Monday. Top question on the list: Does anybody talk about capitalism and white supremacy anymore?

Tags: politics, law, policy, development, international aid, Bono, debt relief, capitalism, racism.

Guns yes! Dildos no! Happy Valentine's!

Question presented: Is there any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for allowing y'all in Alabama to buy that, but not a dildo?
Eleventh circuit's answer today: Yep, sho nuff.

Is Redbecca having a heart attack? (state of the union, part 6)

Bush trying to rehabilitate his bankrupt presidency ought to be giving folks cold sweats and chest pains.
But over at Lefter, Warmer, Reb has something else going on: a very personal story with a hard-nosed public health policy analysis.