Month: April 2007

Could It Be … Satan???

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by hilzoy Via The Carpetbagger Report comes a story that I wish was a joke, but that doesn’t seem to be: “Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan’s influence on illegal immigrants. (…) Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning … Read more

Everything They Touch Turns To Dross

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by hilzoy From the NYT (and yes, I know, Gary saw it first): “In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of … Read more

Is This What They Call “Lacking Judicial Temperament”?

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “When the neighborhood dry cleaner misplaced Roy Pearson’s pants, he took action. He complained. He demanded compensation. And then he sued. Man, did he sue. Two years, thousands of pages of legal documents and many hundreds of hours of investigative work later, Pearson is seeking to make Custom Cleaners … Read more

Consistency Is For Other People

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by hilzoy

I’m a little late on this one, but here’s ABC’s The Blotter (via TPM):

“Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.

Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for “personal reasons.”

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the “Pamela Martin and Associates” escort service “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” Tobias, who is married, said there had been “no sex,” and that recently he had been using another service “with Central Americans” to provide massages.”

Ah, yes. Whenever I want to not have sex, I hire an escort service. It gets pretty expensive, what with all the time I spend not having sex, and the people at the dry cleaners look at me strangely when I show up to pick up my clothes, not having sex while accompanied by a bevy of hunky “Central Americans” (whose green cards I naturally check first), but hey: it’s my life, and if I want to not have sex while paying not to have it, that’s my business.

Via AmericaBlog, the Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report from April 22, 2004:

“U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias on Thursday in Berlin defended the use of prevention programs that emphasize sexual abstinence in African and Caribbean countries that are set to receive assistance through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Agence France-Presse reports (Agence France-Presse, 4/22). (…) Tobias, who was in Berlin for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS’ 2004 Awards for Business Excellence, said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are “far more effective” than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. “Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective,” Tobias said, adding, “It’s been the principal prevention device for the last 20 years, and I think one needs only to look at what’s happening with the infection rates in the world to recognize that has not been working.” PEPFAR has been criticized by AIDS advocates for placing “false hopes” on abstinence and monogamy prevention programs, according to Agence France-Presse.”

Rolling Stone:

“Ambassador Randall Tobias, who serves as Bush’s global AIDS czar, issued written guidelines in January that spell out the administration’s agenda. Groups that receive U.S. funding, Tobias warned, should not target youth with messages that present abstinence and condoms as “equally viable, alternative choices.” Zeitz of Global AIDS Alliance has dubbed the document “Vomitus Maximus.” He says, “I get physically ill when I read it. It has the biggest influence over how people are acting in the field.” And under a proposal being pushed by Republicans on Capitol Hill, Tobias would be given the power to divert even more money toward promoting abstinence. “All Republicans can think about is making Africans abstinent and monogamous,” says a Democratic staffer involved in the negotiations. “It’s the crassest form of international social engineering you could imagine.”

The anti-condom order issued by Tobias is already having a chilling effect among the groups most effective at combating AIDS. Population Services International, a major U.S. contractor with years of experience in HIV prevention, says it can no longer promote condoms to youth in Uganda, Zambia and Namibia because of PEPFAR rules. “That’s worrisome,” says PSI spokesman David Olson. “The evidence shows they’re having sex. You can disapprove of that, but you can’t deny it’s happening.””

That, no doubt, is why Tobias was so busy abstaining from sex with his escorts: he was putting his own body on the line in his efforts to prevent the spread of HIV.

A pity he forgot about one other part of the policies he was in charge of implementing:

“In passing the Bush global AIDS initiative, Congress included a provision requiring that all organizations receiving federal AIDS funds to have a policy “explicitly opposing” prostitution and sex trafficking in order to be eligible for U.S. funds (The Guttmacher Institute, 2003). The policy was originally applied to foreign organizations and was later broadened to a requirement of U.S. organizations receiving federal AIDS funds (Kohn, 2005). As with other ideology-based policies examined here, the implementation of the anti-prostitution pledge has resulted in a distorted environment that sacrifices lifesaving services and places ideology over people’s lives.

As a result of the policy, groups such as Population Services International (PSI), which runs HIV prevention programs targeting sex workers in bars and brothels in Central America, appear to be losing federal support (Kohn, 2005). Last year PSI’s program made contact with 422,000 people in high-risk groups and has demonstrated a significant decrease in HIV infections among sex workers. An official with the UNAIDS office cites the program as one of the best in the region. Other organizations, such as DKT International, refused to sign the clause on free speech grounds and as a result lost funding (Kohn, 2005; Phillips, 2005). DKT International has subsequently filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government. And the country of Brazil has refused $40 million in U.S. HIV/AIDS grants because they are conditioned on the pledge requirement (Phillips, 2005).

The pledge also is having a chilling effect, as groups wary of losing precious funds cut activities that are aimed at assisting sex workers. The ambiguity of the policy, which, for example, does not clearly define what it means by “prostitution,” exacerbates the problem. As a result, for fear of losing funding, nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia discontinued plans to provide English language classes to sex workers — classes which would potentially open opportunities for alternative income generation (CHANGE, 2005b). By forcing service providers to take a position condemning the very people they are seeking to help, the anti-prostitution pledge is yet another example of the Bush administration’s fervent commitment to serving the demands of its social conservative base. And it does so at the cost of the lives of those it purports to help through its HIV/AIDS funding and programs.”

Opposition to prostitution: it’s fine to impose it on others, but don’t ask the members of the Bush administration who defend and implement this policy to practice it themselves.

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While I’m at it …

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Al Qaeda in Iraq, Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Other Stuff

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by Charles

I was listening to one of NPR’s hourly news updates last Wednesday, and they were talking about the bombing that killed nine of our soldiers from the 82th Airborne. They covered the who, what, when and where, but not the why and not all of the who. Because of this, their report was misleading. They stated that a "car bomb" struck the soldiers, but failed to mention that it was a suicide bombing and failed to mention that an al Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility. By excluding the likely perpetrators, NPR is telling us only part of the story. The part they aren’t telling us is the increasing involvement of al Qaeda in these attention-getting attacks.

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Domestic Terrorism

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by hilzoy The AP, via Zuzu at Feministe and Phil in comments: “Explosive Found at Austin Women’s Clinic A package left at a women’s clinic that performs abortions contained an explosive device capable of inflicting serious injury or death, investigators said today. “It was in fact an explosive device,” said David Carter, assistant chief of … Read more

Scary Monsters Open Thread

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by hilzoy

Skeletorvagina

Ace of Spades: “Best friend gay — okay, I can see that one going either way; one of my best buds is a homo. Turned off by c****lingus? Eh, a lot of guys don’t dig that. Who the hell knows what’s going on down there. It’s like H.R. Geiger giving up ink and canvas to work in the avant-garde medium of Play-Doh and bacon.”

Play-Doh and bacon? Play-Doh and bacon??

Through a truly remarkable degree of fortitude, I will resist any of the obvious comebacks. (I won’t even point out the spelling mistakes, one of which is obscured by asterisks in any case. Note: asterisks added in an update, to make it work safe. Sort of work safe, at any rate.) Instead, I’ve made a pictorial guide to this little corner of Ace’s world below the fold.

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Sexual Assault And Native American Women

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by hilzoy Amnesty International issued a report yesterday on sexual abuse of Native American women. From the Washington Post’s account: “One in three Native American women will be raped at some point in their lives, a rate that is more than double that for non-Indian women, according to a new report by Amnesty International. The … Read more

Remove All Doubt

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by von ROGER SIMON’S [*] most recent attack on John Edwards basically discredits him as a pundit and blogger: Does John Edwards include Jews in his prayers? Or Muslims? Or Hindus?  Or any other non-Christians? He didn’t the other day. The other day, in order to commemorate those killed at Virginia Tech, Edwards led a … Read more

Lower Than Dirt

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by hilzoy

For some reason — don’t ask — I was looking at Rush Limbaugh’s web site, and I saw this headline: “Can Any Good Come from V Tech Horror?” followed by this blurb: “Maybe, just maybe, we’ll face the hatred for American traditions and capitalism infesting our campuses.” No, I thought. No, no, no. So I clicked the link. The transcript I found quoted at length from an article called “Was Cho Taught To Hate”, by one James Lewis, published in the American Thinker (sic):

“Still, I wonder — was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes — did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently — was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho’s English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites. (…)

The question I have is: Are university faculty doing their jobs? At one time college teachers were understood to have a parental role. Take a look at the hiring and promotion criteria for English at VT, and you see what their current values are. Acting in loco parentis, with the care, protectiveness, and alertness for trouble among young people is the last thing on their minds. They are there to do “research,” to act like fake revolutionaries, and to stir up young people to go out and revolt against society. Well, somebody just did.

I’m sorry but VT English doesn’t look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words “civilized behavior” are ridiculed — at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it’s too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.”

This is beyond despicable. Members of the Virginia Tech English Department seem to me to have tried hard to get Cho help. Prof. Roy, in particular, called the police, notified the administration, and repeatedly urged Cho himself to get counseling. If I were looking to cast blame for the acts of a deeply disturbed killer, which I’m not, they would not be very high on my list.

This would be so whether or not Lewis’ description of the English Department were accurate. But if blogging has taught me anything, it’s that whenever people run this sort of hit piece on academia, it’s always worth checking out the actual department they’re supposedly describing.

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Going Down In Flames

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by hilzoy Since I couldn’t get into TypePad last night, I didn’t have a chance to write about Alberto Gonzales’ appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. (Transcripts here: I, II, III.) Having slept on it, his performance seems even more astonishing than it did yesterday. Think about it: he has had a very long … Read more

Abortion Invective

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–Sebastian I received an interesting email today (one word edited for our at-work readers): Hey, you won a round. Now you get to threaten the lives of 124,000 women a year who need a certain medical procedure, and you get to root around until you find doctors to prosecute. F*** you, mysognistic killer. — Mithras … Read more

At Last!

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by hilzoy

Like many of you, I’ve noticed a certain lacuna in commentary on the Virginia Tech shootings. To be sure, Debbie Schlussel has provided her usual incisive commentary*, those bravos at NRO have carefully graded the heroism of each and every one of the victims, and Rush Limbaugh offers us this tasteful speculation: “maybe the liberals and their culture of death is the problem, folks.” But I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that what we really need to know is: What does Dinesh D’Souza have to say about this?

Well, wonder no more.

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Limited Thought on the Shooting

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–Sebastian This is a limited thread–we have one for mourning and one for gun control, this is a more limited question. From various people I respect I’ve seen the opinion that after the first two murders, the college administrators should have locked the college down.  The college has more than 20,000 people, so locking it … Read more

Look! Dropping Shoes!

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by hilzoy Via TPMMuckraker, The Hill: “The FBI searched the Virginia home of Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) last Friday in its investigation into ties between the congressman and his wife, Julie, and disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to law enforcement and other Congressional and K Street sources. (…) Doolittle came within three percentage points … Read more

Dear God

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by hilzoy CNN: “Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has ordered the arrest of a top army officer after a string of bombings that killed more than 180 people Wednesday, the prime minister’s office announced. A written statement said the decision was made because of “the weakness of security measures put in place to protect civilians … Read more

Cast Thy Blame Where Blame Is Due

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by publius I haven’t read anything about it yet, but I saw (via LGM) that the Supreme Court upheld the partial-birth abortion ban. I’m swamped with work and other things, and will write about it when I can. But very quickly, I wanted to make one important point. This case was not decided today. It … Read more

Derbyshire Ain’t Nuthin’ to F*** With

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by publius Ana Marie Cox has gone too far this time. Just a few weeks ago, she criticized John Derbyshire (a more Brit-friendly version of William Wallace) over at NRO for ridiculing the captured British troops for not being brave enough. Now, he’s calling out the Virginia Tech students getting shot at for not fighting … Read more

Shooters

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by hilzoy

My heart goes out to everyone who was shot today, and to their friends and families, and to the community at Virginia Tech. I cannot imagine their grief; all my thoughts are with them.

I was out all afternoon and much of the evening, and so it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would have made this into some sort of political issue. Not so soon. Not now, when kids are probably still in surgery, and their parents are pacing outside the doors of their hospital rooms.

I do not want to get into this, other than to make this one point: the idea that normal deterrent measures will affect people in the state of mind in which they might so much as think of lining people up and shooting them is, I think, completely wrong, at least, if my experience is any guide. Of course, it may not be: we know next to nothing about the shooter at the moment, and it could be that he — the coverage suggests that it is a he — has nothing in common with other people who do, or consider doing, similar things. But questions of policy should not turn on features unique to him in any case, so consider what follows a story that might or might not have any relevance.

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For the Fallen

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by publius They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. – Laurence Binyon Small comfort though. All thoughts today to Blacksburg.

Bodies

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by von "AT LEAST 20 people were killed this morning at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University after a shooting spree at two buildings on the campus." (Washington Post) Other sources put the total number of dead at 21, including the gunman, with about the same number wounded. (Indianapolis Star.)  UPDATE: MSN reports that at least … Read more

Taxes

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by hilzoy In honor of April 15 and the delights of paying taxes, I thought I’d post some simple figures from the Treasury Department’s figures for FY 2006. All figures are in billions of dollars. Total Receipts: 2,407 Total Outlays: 2654 Total Deficit: 248 Total Spent On Debt Service: 405.9 — Yes, that’s right: had … Read more

And Now, For A Change Of Pace: Poetry!

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by hilzoy Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. And every sand becomes a gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back they blind the mocking eye, But … Read more

Speaking Of Voter Fraud…

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by hilzoy I had just finished reading Publius’ wonderful post on election fraud, and I pulled up Kevin Drum’s site, and what should I find but a link to a new NYT article on what seems to have become our topic du jour. This time, the NYT has tried to find out how many people … Read more

Block the Vote

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by publius

Discussing voter disenfranchisement, Scott Lemieux writes, “It’s almost impossible to overstate how much this matters.” I agree. So today, I want to follow-up on Hilzoy’s excellent post on voter fraud with some thoughts of my own.

Our national voting system is a disgrace. And while sham “voter fraud” plays an important role, it’s only one slice of a much larger and more systemic problem. To understand the scope of the problem, you must first understand that voting consists of far more than merely showing up on Election Day. There are many different phases along the way – and vote suppression can and does occur at any one (or all) of these phases, from the registration process up through voting day.

Before I outline these different phases, I should say that almost all of the information in this post comes from the Brennan Center for Justice (NYU) and its tireless efforts to protect the vote and educate the public. In particular, today’s post relies on this powerpoint (pdf here), which was part of a larger Brennan Center presentation at an ACS event in DC last year (which was great).

As the powerpoint explains, there are five different methods that states are using (or could use) to suppress turnout of eligible voters: (1) restricting voter registration drives; (2) erecting barriers to getting on voter rolls; (3) purging existing voter rolls; (4) imposing voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements at the polls; and (5) failing to ensure electronic voting machine security. Note that these suppression efforts arise at different stages of the voting process, often months prior to Election Day.

#1 – Registration Drives. Some states’ restrictions on voter registration drives are so absurd and punitive that they are, frankly, hard to believe. According to the Brennan Center, these restrictions include imposing insanely high fines and even criminal penalties on voter registration groups for what are essentially administrative errors. In Florida, for instance, the legislature imposed the following fines on voter registration groups: (1) “$250 for each application submitted . . . more than ten days after the form was collected”; (2) “$500 for each application . . . submitted after the [registration] deadline”; (3) “$5,000 for each application collected but not submitted to election officials.” These potential penalties obviously make people think twice about initiating, or participating in, voter registration efforts.

The Brennan Center has documented similar efforts in other states. In Ohio, individual registration volunteers had to personally turn in the forms they collected. In other words, they couldn’t hand them to a supervisor to be turned in collectively. They had to walk them to the office themselves. In New Mexico, they went a step further. There, “groups are given only 48 hours to submit the forms they collect to the state board of elections or face criminal charges.”

The effects are obvious. States are either making voter registration efforts extremely risky, or are increasing their administrative costs. The net result is less voter registration. And again, all this happens well before Election Day and outside the (watchful, Sauron-like) eye of the media.

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Sometimes, Justice Prevails

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by hilzoy From the NYT: “North Carolina’s attorney general declared three former Duke University lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper innocent of all charges on Wednesday, ending a prosecution that provoked bitter debate over race, class and the tactics of the Durham County district attorney. The attorney general, Roy A. Cooper, said the … Read more

Still More Poetry

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by hilzoy Insects “These tiny loiterers on the barley’s beard, And happy units of a numerous herd Of playfellows, the laughing Summer brings, Mocking the sunshine on their glittering wings, How merrily they creep, and run, and fly! No kin they bear to labour’s drudgery, Smoothing the velvet of the pale hedge-rose; And where they … Read more

Oops!

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by hilzoy Via TPM, the AP reports: “The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business. Congressional investigators looking into the administration’s firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the … Read more

Voter Fraud

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by hilzoy

Via Matt Yglesias, the NYT:

“A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.

Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats.

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.” (…)

A number of election law experts, based on their own research, have concluded that the accusations regarding widespread fraud are unjustified. And in this case, one of the two experts hired to do the report was Job Serebrov, a Republican elections lawyers from Arkansas, who defended his research in an e-mail message obtained by The Times that was sent last October to Margaret Sims, a commission staff member.

“Tova and I worked hard to produce a correct, accurate and truthful report,” Mr. Serebrov wrote, referring to Tova Wang, a voting expert with liberal leanings from the Century Foundation and co-author of the report. “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”

He added: “Neither one of us was willing to conform results for political expediency.””

Note that that last email is not a comment in response to the Times’ questions; it’s an email sent to a staff member of the commission. I leave to your imaginations what earlier questions or remarks by the commission or its staffers might have prompted one of the study’s authors to write: “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”

Commentary below the fold.

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