hilzoy

Mystery Solved.

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by hilzoy Von earlier wondered why Democrats were refusing to allow a vote on John Bolton’s nomination. I thought that was fairly clear: the White House was refusing to provide information that had been requested by Democrats and Republicans alike in the course of their confirmation hearings, and I think that the fact that the … Read more

TPM Cafe, And Blogs More Generally

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by hilzoy

Today, Josh Marshall opened his new site, TPM Cafe. It is really, really interesting. Thus far, I particularly like America Abroad, the foreign policy section, and John Edwards’ guest blog, as well as the main “Coffee House” section. (Note: in this section, a lot of the posters are commenting on one another’s posts, so it helps to start at the beginning. To do this, go down to the bottom of the page and click what it confusingly called “Next n”, where n is the number of posts you choose to display when you sign up. Likewise, ‘previous n’ gets you back to the later posts.) Good stuff which should finally lay to rest the right-wing claim that Democrats have no ideas.

I think TPM cafe is interesting in a way that goes beyond the interest of its various posts, though; and to explain why, I’m going to have to back up and say a few things about what I think of blogs in general. I am normally skeptical of claims that blogs are revolutionizing this or that. I love them, of course; and I particularly love the fact that they let anyone at all write commentary on whatever they like, and acquire an audience through the simple fact of having something interesting to say. Blogs let me know about all sorts of interesting things I would otherwise have missed, and they provide interesting commentary and insight that otherwise wouldn’t exist at all. But this, while wonderful, is not (to my mind) enough to warrant all the breathless rhetoric about blogs that I periodically read.

But there is one thing that blogs can do that I think is as important as allowing everyone who has a computer to join a huge ongoing conversation, but that is not generally remarked on, and it has to do with rectifying what I see as huge informational gaps in the world of most citizens.

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Don’t Cry For Us, Argentina…

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by hilzoy After spending a delightful weekend birding, gardening, and reading about debt crises in various countries, I decided to check back in with blogs; and what should I find on Ezra’ Klein’s site but this truly terrifying graph from the GAO: That expanding blue portion is debt service, and this graph shows it taking … Read more

Open Thread: Rilkefan Gets Married!

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by hilzoy This evening’s open thread is in honor of rilkefan and, well, maybe we should say the rilkebride: we wish them all the happiness the world has to offer. Rilkefan will, I think, never be at a loss for words, so he will not need the Victorian Sex Cry Generator (via Amygdala), but someone … Read more

On The Rules

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by hilzoy As I noted in comments last night, our posting rules prohibit incivility, and we have interpreted this as a ban on all personal attacks on posters and commenters alike, by posters and commenters alike. You can, of course, point out the factual errors and/or argumentative flaws in someone’s reasoning, but you cannot call … Read more

Chutzpah

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by hilzoy Via Angry Bear: CNN reports the following: “Thousands of former Enron Corp. employees will share $85 million in insurance proceeds to compensate for pensions lost when the energy giant collapsed into bankruptcy, a federal judge ruled this week. (…) Lynn Sarko, a lawyer for the former Enron workers, said the settlement money would … Read more

Conservatism In Theory And Practice

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by hilzoy

According to Merriam-Webster, ‘conservatism’ means:

1 capitalized a : the principles and policies of a Conservative party b : the Conservative party
2 a : disposition in politics to preserve what is established b : a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change
3 : the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change

This is a view I can respect, even when I disagree with it. Changing institutions can often have large unintended consequences, and a generally cautious attitude towards changing them often makes sense to me. To quote a passage from Chesterton that Sebastian cited recently:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

So why aren’t more Republicans taking a conservative position on the nuclear option?

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“Circling The Wagons”

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by hilzoy

There’s a fascinating new idea abroad in some parts of the right-wing blogosphere: that Friday’s story about the torture and death of two Afghan prisoners in US custody is just an attempt on the part of the New York Times to divert attention from Newsweek‘s retraction of its story on flushing Qur’ans down toilets. Some cites:

Instapundit: “READER JAMES MCCORMICK EMAILS:

Does the latest NYT articles on deaths-in-custody in Afghanistan smack of diversion to take the heat off Newsweek? Set a fire somewhere else so Newsweek never has to acknowledge any responsibility for its acts. Newsweek can return the favour during the next NYT scandal. The MSM guild is all about authority without responsibility. Can’t have that change …

And it’s not just the NYT, as I’ve seen other examples of this phenomenon in quite a few outlets. As Martin Peretz noted, they’re circling the wagons.”

John Podhoretz at The Corner: “The New York Times continues the bizarre act of carrying Newsweek’s water in the wake of the false Koran-desecration story (which I write about this morning here). The paper’s lead story is a lurid account of the vicious treatment of two Afghan prisoners by U.S. soldiers — events that occurred in December 2002 and for which seven servicemen have been properly punished. Let me repeat that: December 2002. That’s two and a half years ago. Every detail published by the Times comes from a report done by the U.S. military, which did the investigating and the punishing. The publication of this piece this week is an effort not to get at the truth, not to praise the military establishment for rooting out the evil being done, but to make the point that the United States is engaged in despicable conduct as it fights the war on terror. In the name of covering the behinds of media colleagues, all is fair in hate and war.”

See also Hugh Hewitt, the inimitable Wretchard, and, of course, LGF.

This is just crazy.

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Good Question.

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One of the likely scenarios for the nuclear option involves Vice President Cheney, in his capacity as President of the Senate, ruling that it is unconstitutional to filibuster judicial nominees. After running through some of the Constitutional questions that might be asked about this position, Paul Horwitz (via Discourse.net) asks a very good question: “What … Read more

What To Say?

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Via The Light Of Reason, I see that Bush has changed his views on media responsibility for violence, and about whether the White House should tell journalists what to do. Either that, or it makes a difference that Newsweek is not involved this time: “President Bush said Friday that he did not think photos of … Read more

Blocking Judicial Nominees: Let Me Count The Ways…

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by hilzoy

Sebastian has been making an interesting argument about the history of blocking judicial nominees over in the ‘Out of Bounds’ thread, and what he said prompted me to do some more digging on the various ways in which, traditionally, judicial appointees could be blocked. A good short history by the Congressional Research Service is here (pdf). Some of the means included:

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Out Of Bounds

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by hilzoy

Today, in the debate over the nuclear option, Rick Santorum said this:

“We shouldn’t go mucking around in this institution and changing the way we’ve done things, particularly when it comes to the balance of powers between the three branches of government, and the independence of one of those branches, the judiciary. We must tread very carefully before we go radically changing the way we do business here that has served this country well, and we have radically changed the way we do business here. Some are suggesting that we are trying to change the law, that we’re trying to break the rules. Remarkable. Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine, the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago, and the audacity of some members to stand up and say, how dare you break this rule. It’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942,saying, “I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.” This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement, and it has been abused.” (Transcript mine, from the CSPAN video linked at Crooks and Liars.)

Four points. First, this is completely and totally out of bounds. And I don’t mean this in some PC, “ooh he said the H-word” sort of way. I mean: no one who had a shred of honor, or who in any way appreciated the horror of Nazi Germany, would dare to make this comparison without thinking for a very, very long time about whether it was fully warranted, and whether there was no other way to make his point. In this case, there were many other ways. Santorum could, for instance, have compared the Democrats to a child who takes her sister’s toys and then says, no, you can’t take them, they’re mine. He could have said any number of things and made the same point. But he said this. It’s dishonorable and shameful. And yes, I feel the same way when Democrats do this.

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Going Nuclear

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by hilzoy

Tomorrow morning, the Senate is scheduled to begin the debate that could lead to the Republicans invoking the ‘nuclear option’. I think that invoking the nuclear option would be a terrible mistake. I do not say this because of my views on the filibuster itself. I have tried to step back from current controversies and consider the filibuster dispassionately, and when I do, I find that I am much more strongly in favor of it in the case of judicial nominations than in other cases, both because, while legislation can generally be undone, judicial appointments are for life, and because what’s at issue in judicial appointments is the constitution of a separate branch of government. For this reason, I would oppose removing the possibility of filibustering judicial nominations in any case.

For me, the biggest problem with the nuclear option is not that it would prevent Senators from filibustering judicial nominations, but that it would require breaking the Senate’s own rules. And this is not just a problem for liberals. Here’s what Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute has to say about it:

The Senate is on the verge of meltdown over the nuclear option, an unprecedented step that would shatter 200 years of precedent over rules changes and open up a Pandora’s box of problems in the years ahead. The shaky bipartisanship that holds the Senate together–in a way that is virtually absent in the House–could be erased. Major policy problems could be caught up in the conflict. The Senate itself would never be the same.

Let us put aside for now the puerile arguments over whether judicial filibusters are unprecedented: They clearly, flatly, are not. Instead, let’s look at the means used to achieve the goal of altering Senate procedures to block filibusters on judicial nominations.

Without getting into the parliamentary minutiae–the options are dizzying, including whether points of order are “nested”–one reality is clear. To get to a point where the Senate decides by majority that judicial filibusters are dilatory and/or unconstitutional, the Senate will have to do something it has never done before.

Richard Beth of the Congressional Research Service, in a detailed report on the options for changing Senate procedures, refers to it with typical understatement as “an extraordinary proceeding at variance with established procedure.”

To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation–debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say–regardless of the view held since the Senate’s beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents–they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority.

There have been times in the past when Senate leaders and presidents have been frustrated by inaction in the Senate and have contemplated action like this. Each time, the leaders and presidents drew back from the precipice. They knew that the short-term gain of breaking minority obstruction would come at the price of enormous long-term damage–turning a deliberative process into something akin to government by the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Rule XXII is clear about extended debate and cloture requirements, both for changing Senate rules (two-thirds required) and any other action by the Senate, nominations or legislation (60 Senators required). Ignored in this argument has been Senate Rule XXXI, which makes clear that there is neither guarantee nor expectation that nominations made by the president get an up-or-down vote, or indeed any action at all.

It reads: “Nominations neither confirmed nor rejected during the session at which they are made shall not be acted upon at any succeeding session without being again made to the Senate by the President; and if the Senate shall adjourn or take a recess for more than thirty days, all nominations pending and not finally acted upon at the time of taking such adjournment or recess shall be returned by the Secretary to the President, and shall not again be considered unless they shall again be made to the Senate by the President.”

By invoking their self-described nuclear option without changing the rules, a Senate majority will effectively erase them. A new precedent will be in order–one making it easy and tempting to erase future filibusters on executive nominations and bills. Make no mistake about that.

I agree with Ornstein completely. This is serious business. So let me try to address some of the procedural issues involved.

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My Job Is Safe For Now

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by hilzoy Department of Louise brings scary, scary news: people are not just developing, but actually marketing and using, software that supposedly enables computers to grade (or, more accurately, “grade”) essays. According to one of the people who is selling this stuff, their biggest problem is that no one believes that computers can possibly do … Read more

Great Takedown

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by hilzoy Praktike posts a really wonderful takedown, by Thomas Barnett, of “How We Would Fight China”, Robert Kaplan’s latest article in the Atlantic. (I’ve linked to praktike’s site, since Barnett’s site has the piece as a Word download, whereas praktike has posted the whole thing.) I have read Kaplan’s piece, and it is as … Read more

An Interesting Comparison…

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by hilzoy From Angry Bear: “This coming Thursday, May 19, 2005, will be the 1,346th day since the attacks of 9/11. That is the same length of time from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the end of WWII on V-J Day. (Dec 7, 1941 to Aug 24, 1945) Most comparisons between WWII and the … Read more

Hilzoy Hearts Barney Frank

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by hilzoy Barney Frank reminds me (yet again) why he’s my favorite liberal of the blogospheres Congress: “Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Party, said yesterday that the US House majority leader, Tom DeLay, ”ought to go back to Houston where he can serve his jail sentence,” referring to allegations of unethical conduct against … Read more

What Is “Price Indexing”?

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by hilzoy

I have been messing around with a long post on Social Security, and in the course of writing it I realized that I did not fully understand what ‘price indexing’ was, in the context of Social Security. The general concept of price indexing was easy enough: something that is currently indexed to wages would, under price indexing, be indexed to prices instead. Since prices tend to rise more slowly than wages, this would lead benefits to grow more slowly (or: be cut, depending on which you prefer) over time. But what, exactly, were people proposing to price-index? I had somehow picked up the (correct) idea that the mysterious indexed entity was not benefits themselves: these are adjusted each year according to the Consumer Price Index, which is to say: they are price-indexed. Price-indexing in the context of the Social Security debate, I knew, had something to do with the initial calculation of benefits, and thus with the mysterious arcana of Social Security benefit calculations that I have thus far tried very hard to avoid having to figure out. But I realized, as I wrote my Social Security post, that I couldn’t avoid this any longer. If I was to be a Truly Responsible Blogger™, I had to figure it out. Having done so, I thought I might as well try to explain it as clearly as possible, since it’s not what you might think.

Warning: it’s wonky.

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Uzbekistan

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From CNN:

“Hundreds of people have been killed by government soldiers in the wake of violent anti-government protest in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, Russia’s Interfax news agency report human rights monitors as saying.

A U.N. official and news reports said Saturday that Uzbeks fled to neighboring Kyrgyzstan as well toward the Kyrgyz cities of Osh and Jalal-Abad.

The violence began Thursday when a group of local citizens angry about the arrest of several prominent business owners stormed the prison where they were being held.

At one point, about 10,000 protesters gathered in the city center to demand the resignation of Uzbek President Islam Karimov and his government, who are allies of the United States. The president’s office described them as criminals and extremists. (…)

Interfax quoted Saijakhon Zainabitdinov, head of the Andizhan human rights group Appeal, concerning the death toll.

“Government troops opened fire on civilians on Friday evening and hundreds of people died. At dawn today, the dead bodies were taken away on five vehicles — three Zil dump trucks, one Ural heavy truck and one bus. All of the vehicles were filled with bodies,” Zainabitdinov said.”

The demonstrations have reportedly spread to the nearby city of Ilyichevsk, where refugees are trying to flee across the border to Kyrgyzstan.

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Bolton Redux, Redux, Redux…

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by hilzoy I have, on several occasions, promised myself that I would not write any more Bolton posts. The basic issues are clear; anyone who is reading this blog has presumably already made his or her mind up, so why bother? But then some new detail emerges about the ongoing train wreck that is John … Read more

Demonstration Effects

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by hilzoy

***UPDATE: Newsweek is stepping back from this story:

“Their [the reporters’] information came from a knowledgeable U.S. government source, and before deciding whether to publish it we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur’an charge. (…)

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur’an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them “not credible.” Our original source later said he couldn’t be certain about reading of the alleged Qur’an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we. But we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.”

*** [End of Update. What comes next is the original post…]***

Here’s an obvious thought: it’s really, really important that in our efforts to defeat al Qaeda, we not be seen as fighting a war on Islam itself. It’s important because we should not actually be fighting a war on Islam, but on Islamic terrorists, who bear about the same relation to Islam that people who blow up abortion clinics bear to Christianity. And it’s important because it would be disastrous if ordinary Muslims, who might otherwise not support al Qaeda, got the idea that they had to defend Islam itself against us. This is not exactly rocket science.

Unfortunately, it seems to have eluded some of our interrogators at Guantanamo. From Newsweek:

“Investigators probing abuses at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, placed Qur’ans on toilets and, in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

In light of this, I transfer to Newsweek and its reporters this quote from the original post: “Way to go, guys. Way to make us all proud.”

Flushing a Qur’an down the toilet. Gosh, that’s really helpful. I hope they got a lot of useful information that way, given the consequences:

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Right-Wing History, Part 2

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by hilzoy This time it’s Pat Buchanan: “True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – … Read more

Bolton Hearing On Now

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On CSPAN 3. George Voinovich has stated that he will not vote in favor of Bolton’s nomination, but will vote to report it out of the Committee, without recommendation, so that it can have an up or down vote. From the Washington Post: “In a tense atmosphere, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee debated John Bolton’s … Read more

As If She Wanted To Change Her Skin

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Via kos, a quote from Seymour Hersh:

“I get a call from a mother. She wants to see me somewhere in northeastern America. I go see her. There’s a kid that was in the unit, the 372nd. They had all come home early. If you remember the timeline, they did their stuff in late 2003, reported in 2004. This mother is telling me — I’m writing in the spring of 2004 — March of 2004, the kid had come home in the same unit totally changed. Young, pretty woman, vibrant. Depressed, disconsolate, inconsolable, isolated. Had been newly married. Left her husband, left the family, moved to a nearby town, working a night job or whatever. And nobody could figure out what’s going on.

She sees the stories about Abu Ghraib. She goes, knocks on the door, shows the young woman the newspaper, and door slams, bam! And at that point, as she tells me, later — as she tells me in real time — this is May, early May — she goes back, the kid had been given a computer, a portable computer like. (…) So she claims — this not a woman familiar with Freud or the unconscious — she claims at that point she just decided to look at the computer after hearing about Abu Ghraib. She said she had — she just hadn’t looked at it. She just was going to clean it up and take it to her office as a second computer. No thoughts. And she is deleting files. She sees a file marked “Iraq.” And she hits it, and out comes 60 or 80 digital photographs of the one that The New Yorker ran of the naked guy standing against a cell in terror, hands behind his back so he can’t protect his private parts, which is the instinct. And two snarling German dogs — shepherds. Somebody said they’re Belgian shepherds, perhaps, but two snarling shepherds, you know, on each side of him. And the sequence — in the sequence, the dogs attack the man, blood all over. (…)

So she looks at this stuff and eventually calls me. And we do it all, and we get permission. We run the photographs, just one — how much — and the thought there of the editors was how much do you humiliate the Arab world and the Arab man. One is enough. You know, we can describe what else is on the picture. We just don’t need more than one. And then, later the mother calls me back, and we became friends. This happens a lot to people in my business. You get to like people. And she says, you know, one thing I didn’t tell you that you have to know about the young woman, when she came back, every weekend, she would go and get herself tattooed, and eventually, she said, she was filling her body with large, black tattoos, and eventually, they filled up every portion of her skin, was tattooed, at least all the portions you could see, and there was no reason to make assumptions about the other portions. She was tattooed completely. It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.” (emphasis added.)

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There They Go Again…

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by hilzoy Via Crooked Timber, I see that those wacky guys at Powerline are at it again: “It’s great to see someone standing up for colonialism, especially British colonialism. I agree wholeheartedly with this observation, for example: Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy … Read more

I Love Bug

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I spent the weekend getting acquainted with my new nephew, now about two and a half weeks old (and unbelievably cute. We call him Bug.) I love kids; at this stage, I tend to be fascinated by the question: what on earth is it like to try, with that endearing total earnestness that infants have, … Read more

Vioxx: Now With Soul Force!

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From the Washington Post, via ThinkProgress, comes an article about Merck, the maker of Vioxx, which “was withdrawn from the market last September after another clinical trial found that people who had taken the drug for 18 months were five times more likely to have heart attacks and strokes than those on a placebo.” “Merck … Read more

Busy Busy Busy: Open Thread

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by hilzoy Sorry to have vanished for a few days; my students’ papers are due tomorrow, so in addition to the usual job, meetings, etc., I have been counseling people on how to improve their rough drafts. And then, on the one evening I had free, I decided to install Tiger on my computer. The … Read more

Yet Another Bolton Post

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From the notoriously left-wing US News and World Report (via War and Piece): “As the Senate inquiry into President Bush’s U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton rages on, new tales are surfacing about his aggressive management style. Senate staffers are now said to be looking into how Bolton, as under secretary of state for arms control, … Read more

Stop It.

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by hilzoy

This judge-bashing stuff has gone too far. From the NY Daily News, via Atrios:

“Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists, the Rev. Pat Robertson claimed yesterday.

“Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that’s held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings,” Robertson said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“I think we have controlled Al Qaeda,” the 700 Club host said, but warned of “erosion at home” and said judges were creating a “tyranny of oligarchy.”

Confronted by Stephanopoulos on his claims that an out-of-control liberal judiciary is the worst threat America has faced in 400 years – worse than Nazi Germany, Japan and the Civil War – Robertson didn’t back down.

“Yes, I really believe that,” he said. “I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together.” “

And, a few weeks ago, from Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council:

“The court has become increasingly hostile to Christianity, and it poses a greater threat to representative government — more than anything, more than budget deficits, more than terrorist groups.”

Just to state the obvious: we haven’t controlled al Qaeda; judges are not more of a threat than al Qaeda is, and they are certainly not the greatest threat we have faced in our history. But there’s a larger point, which I’ve been wanting to make for some time, and may as well make now.

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What Do Women Want?

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by hilzoy In the case of women who live with men (unlike me, she said, pouting), this: “A Spanish designer has come up with what could be the perfect solution for the woman who feels frustrated that she has to do all the house chores. It is a washing machine called “Your Turn”, which will … Read more

For The Historical Record

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by hilzoy From the Independent (UK), news of a leaked British government memo: “A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute … Read more

To My Government: Please Stop.

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by hilzoy

From the New York Times:

“Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were “beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.” Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly, “Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights.”

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan’s treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.”

More below the fold.

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Not My Moral Values

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by hilzoy

From the Denver Post, via Bitch, Ph.D.:

“The protocol of six Catholic hospitals run by Centura calls for rape victims to undergo an ovulation test.

If they have not ovulated, said Centura corporate spokeswoman Dana Berry, doctors tell the victims about emergency contraception and write prescriptions for it if the patient asks.

If, however, the urine test suggests that a rape victim has ovulated, Berry continued, doctors at Centura’s Catholic hospitals are not to mention emergency contraception. That means the victim can end up pregnant by her rapist.”

Or, in short: if a rape victim doesn’t need emergency contraception, the hospitals’ doctors will tell her about it; but if there’s a significant chance that she might actually get pregnant as a result of her rape, and therefore does need it, they won’t say a word.

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