Obsidian Wings

Could It Be ... Satan???

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 that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants "hate American people" and "are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won't do."

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to "destroy Christian America" and replace it with "a godless new world order -- and that is not extremism, that is fact," Larsen said.

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. "by self invasion." (...)

Senator Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, spoke against the resolution, saying Larsen, whom he called a "true patriot and a close friend," was embarrassing the Republican Party.

"I agree with 95 percent of this resolution but it has some language that is divisive and not inspiring other people to its vision," he said. "This only gives fodder to the liberal media to give negative attention to the Republican Party.""

Gee, ya think?

"Joel Wright, a member of the Cedar Hills City Council, was booed as he opposed the resolution.

"This might be the most divisive issue in the Republican Party," he said. "I support President Bush but he needs to support this issue harder."

When Wright said "the economic benefit (of illegal immigration) outweighs the downside" he was jeered. He warned that the Republican Party of California had "killed themselves" by taking a hostile stance against illegal aliens.

He also said the LDS Church has studied the issue and tried to determine whether illegal aliens could be given temple recommends and allowed to serve missions but "gave up" because the issue was too complex. He ended by saying "President Bush needs to fix this now" and was booed again.

Larsen was allowed to finish the debate with a one-minute speech.

"If the Democrats take over the country, we will be dead, and we will have abortion and partial-birth abortion and the Republican Party will go into extinction," he said. "Nancy Pelosi and the ACLU would oppose this (resolution).""

Because, after all, if Nancy Pelosi and the ACLU oppose something, what more is there to be said?

Everything They Touch Turns To Dross

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 plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport. (...)

The dates when the projects were completed and deemed successful ranged from six months to almost a year and a half before the latest inspections. But those inspections found numerous instances of power generators that no longer operated; sewage systems that had clogged and overflowed, damaging sections of buildings; electrical systems that had been jury-rigged or stripped of components; floors that had buckled; concrete that had crumbled; and expensive equipment that was simply not in use.

Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security situation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect."

Here comes my favorite part of the article, if "favorite" is the right word here:

"And those declared successes are heavily promoted by the United States government. A 2006 news release by the Army Corps, titled “Erbil Maternity and Pediatric Hospital — not just bricks and mortar!” praises both the new water purification system and the incinerator. The incinerator, the release said, would “keep medical waste from entering into the solid waste and water systems.”

But when Mr. Bowen’s office presented the Army Corps with the finding that neither system was working at the struggling hospital and recommended a training program so that Iraqis could properly operate the equipment, General Walsh tersely disagreed with the recommendation in a letter appended to the report, which also noted that the building had suffered damage because workers used excess amounts of water to clean the floors.

The bureau within the United States Embassy in Baghdad that oversees reconstruction in Iraq was even more dismissive, disagreeing with all four of the inspector general’s recommendations, including those suggesting that the United States should lend advice on disposing of the waste and maintaining the floors.

“Recommendations such as how much water to use in cleaning floors or disposal of medical waste could be deemed as an intrusion on, or attempt to micromanage operations of an Iraqi entity that we have no controlling interest over,” wrote William Lynch, acting director of the embassy bureau, called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office."

Given all the many ways in which we continue to infringe on Iraqi sovereignty, who would have thought that telling people how to use and care for the stuff we have built counts as an infringement of Iraqi autonomy?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

"As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide.

Titled "Echo-Chamber Message" -- a public relations term for talking points designed to be repeated again and again -- the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated aid at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans "practical help and moral support" and "highlight the concrete benefits hurricane victims are receiving."

Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies' offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's victims.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

In addition, valuable supplies and services -- such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships -- were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them. In some cases, supplies were wasted. (...)

More than 10,000 pages of cables, telegraphs and e-mails from U.S. diplomats around the globe -- released piecemeal since last fall under the Freedom of Information Act -- provide a fuller account of problems that, at times, mystified generous allies and left U.S. representatives at a loss for an explanation. The documents were obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a public interest group, which provided them to The Washington Post.

In one exchange, State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and were destroyed. "Tell them we blew it," one disgusted official wrote. But she hedged: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded.""

This is what happens when a government is taken over by people who just don't care about the most basic levels of competence.

I suppose the good news is that we might -- if we're very, very lucky -- have figured out that the best way to figure out who would make a good President is not to ask: who would I rather have a beer with? But I can think of many, many better ways of learning that lesson.

Is This What They Call "Lacking Judicial Temperament"?

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 pay -- would you believe more than the payroll of the entire Washington Nationals roster?

He says he deserves millions for the damages he suffered by not getting his pants back, for his litigation costs, for "mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort," for the value of the time he has spent on the lawsuit, for leasing a car every weekend for 10 years and for a replacement suit, according to court papers.

Pearson is demanding $65,462,500. The original alteration work on the pants cost $10.50.

By the way, Pearson is a lawyer. Okay, you probably figured that. But get this: He's a judge, too -- an administrative law judge for the District of Columbia.*"

From an article in DC North:

"Astoundingly, Pearson, who won’t grant interviews, filed a case claiming he and other wronged customers at Custom Cleaners were due $67,292,000 for damages, mental suffering and attorney’s fees. Pearson had also claimed that the cleaners should not be allowed to display signs reading “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” “Same Day Service” and “All Work Done on Premises” because they are deceptive and fraudulent to customers. (...)

Pearson maintains that the Chungs failed to alter his pants by May 5, 2005, after he dropped them off May 3. He claims they substituted a different pair of pants that didn’t match his suit jacket.

During the hearing, [Associate Judge Judith] Bartnoff became increasingly frustrated with Pearson’s interruptions and litany of special requests. For instance, she told him he would be able to call only four witnesses from the list of 50-plus he submitted.

“The witness list is enormously disturbing,” she said, adding that their complaints regarding Custom Cleaners were way beyond the scope of the trial. “This list is so long … it’s so out of proportion to the issue in this case.”

Bartnoff questioned how much emotional distress anybody suffered over one pair of pants and also quizzed Pearson about his request to present video at the trial supposedly showing distances he had to travel to find a dry cleaner now that he no longer used the one in his neighborhood.

“I don’t think you have a fundamental right to have a dry cleaners within four blocks of your house,” Bartnoff said."

Sheesh. Pearson's bio is here. As I understand it, an Administrative Law Judge is a fairly low-level judge, which is a relief. Of course, it would be even more of a relief if someone with this sort of judgment weren't a judge at all.

***

Random bit of unrelated news: 91% of New Jersey residents think Jon Corzine should get a ticket for not having had his seat belt on when the car he was in was involved in an accident. I agree on principle: when politicians break the law, it matters that they pay the price, even though, in this case, I think that his ten days in intensive care, and the fact that he seems to have fractured eleven ribs, his sternum, his clavicle, and a vertebra, are undoubtedly more than enough to keep him buckled up for the rest of his life.

***

* I added the last para. quoted after posting this, since Gary rightly pointed out that the post was not clear without it. (Thanks, Gary.)

Consistency Is For Other People

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.

***

While I'm at it ...

Al Qaeda in Iraq, Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Other Stuff

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.

Domestic Terrorism

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 the Austin Police Department. "It was configured in such a way to cause serious bodily injury or death."

The package was found Wednesday in a parking lot outside the Austin Women's Health Center, south of downtown Austin.

Nearby Interstate 35 was briefly closed, and a nearby apartment complex was evacuated while a bomb squad detonated the device."

WIMN's Voices (also via Zuzu):

"The national press? Aside from 97 words from the AP and a brief mention from CNN — nothing (according to a Nexis search at 5:15 pm today). In that lone CNN mention, we’re told that “Officials from the Homeland Defense Team, which includes police officers, also other Austin officers, the Department of Emergency Ordnance Disposal unit and the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives” were on the scene. Yet still, not a peep from the national press. Now, imagine if this clinic had been a bank, or a high school, or a sports arena. I bet we would have heard something about it then."

Zuzu:

"For some reason, terrorism doesn’t count if it’s directed against women and their health care providers. It’s just not news, and the fact that it goes unremarked in the national media — and hell, even in the local media, as in the case of the Austin bomb — contributes to the idea that women are not important and that violence directed at women is not only to be expected, but to be dismissed. (...)

We saw something similar with the Virginia Tech shooting — the campus police initially dismissed the idea that the gunman would be a danger to anyone else — even though they hadn’t identified or caught him at the time — because they saw a dead woman and just assumed that it was a “domestic incident” and there would be no further violence. Clinic bombings are treated as the equivalent of shrugged-off “domestic incidents” — hey, it’s just violence against women. It’s not like it’s going to affect real people or anything.

And they never call it by its name: terrorism."

If you think about it, the whole AP article is bizarre, and not just because it's very short, or because it doesn't mention either terrorism or the fact that this sort of thing has a history (pdf; h/t Shakespeare's Sister.) Consider the headline: "Explosive Found at Austin Women’s Clinic". There is no agent in that headline: no one who planted the bomb in an attempt to kill people. The bomb was just "found". Possibly it fell from the sky, or wafted in on the morning breeze. And obviously the right thing to emphasize, under the circumstances, is the bomb's being found, not someone having planted the bomb in an attempt to terrorize women seeking abortions and the doctors, nurses, receptionists, and janitors who work at the clinic.

The article's first sentence reads: "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." There is an agent in this sentence, which is a relief: it would be spooky if all these things kept happening with no one actually doing them. But what's left out this time is intention. The bomb was not planted at the clinic; it was left there. Leaving something somewhere is something you can do by accident -- "Oh no, I left my keys locked in the car!", or "Darn, I left my leopard skin pillbox hat on the bus!" Perhaps we are to imagine that someone, somewhere, might be saying: "Silly me; I left my bomb at the abortion clinic!"

Somehow, I doubt it.

In the second paragraph, we learn that the bomb "was configured in such a way to cause serious bodily injury or death", but, again, the grammar obscures the person who did the configuring. In the next paragraph we hear again that the bomb was "found". And those are all the points in the article, such as it is, at which the fact that a human being tried to kill or maim other people might have come up.

The article does not underplay the lethality of the bomb itself. But at every point it underplays or omits the fact that someone designed it to be lethal, and then planted it in a place where, had it not been detected, it would have killed people. It's as though the bomb just appeared all by itself by spontaneous generation, without the assistance of any actual human being who was doing his best to kill his or her fellow human beings.

Scary Monsters Open Thread

by hilzoy

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.

Sexual Assault And Native American Women

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 report, "Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA," noted a variety of reasons that rape is so prevalent on reservations, according to its authors.

In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in Oliphant v. the Suquamish Indian Tribe that tribal governments have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians. When a crime is committed, tribal police and their non-Indian counterparts must hash out whether the suspect is Indian or not.

Tribal governments lack the funds and staffing to patrol their lands, the report said. At the million-acre Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which straddles North and South Dakota, seven police officers are on duty. In Alaska, where state and native police patrol a vast landscape, officers took four hours to reach the village of Nunam Iqua, during which time a barricaded suspect raped a 13-year-old girl in front of her siblings.

"It is extremely frustrating," said Jason O'Neal, chief of the Chickasaw Lighthorse Police Department in south-central Oklahoma. "It's confusing for the victim because they don't know who they should be calling. A victim of domestic violence may call 911, the sheriff's office or our office."

As a result, victims are reluctant to report rapes because of these circumstances, the report said. When they do, their cases are often mishandled. Health facilities on native lands are so underfunded that many nurses are not trained to counsel victims of sexual assault or to use a police rape kit to gather and preserve evidence of a crime. (...)

Amnesty International's study was carried out in 2005 and 2006, drawing on victim interviews, questionnaires submitted to law enforcement officials such as police and prosecutors, and numerous reports. More than 86 percent of rapes against Native American women are carried out by non-native men, most of them white, according to the Justice Department.

The Amnesty study focused on three areas: Oklahoma, Alaska and the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North and South Dakota. But its findings, said Virginia Davis, associate counsel for the National Congress of American Indians, are reflective of Indian country across the nation.

"It's jaw dropping," Davis said. "We've been talking about this for years. I think this is an incredibly complicated problem. Most Americans can live their daily lives and never think about it.""

There's also a good NPR story on the report here.

The legal issues involved strike non-legal me as confusing and, in some cases, downright perverse. What earthly reason is there for making the question whether tribal police can arrest a suspect depend on that suspect's ethnicity? If the suspect won't tell, do the police have to wait for some sort of evidence of ethnicity before making an arrest? As far as I can tell, the case that established this peculiar principle, Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, wasn't based on positive law, but on the absence of any explicit provision, combined with various treaties, etc., that led the Court to assume that Congress must have assumed that tribes lack jurisdiction over non-members. If so, Congress should rectify this by creating some system that actually makes sense. In addition, of course, we should fund the Indian Health Service adequately. We should also fully fund the Violence Against Women Act, which includes money for battered women's services on Native American reservations.

In the meantime, the NPR story I linked above describes one shelter that's at risk of closing for lack of funds. Pretty Bird Woman House is the only shelter on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which includes 2.3 million acres in North and South Dakota. On the list of counties with the lowest annual per capita income in the US, the two counties that make up most of the reservation ranked sixth (Sioux County ND, $7,731) and seventh (Corson County SD, $8,615.) According to the Amnesty report, 45.3 of the women on the reservation live in poverty, and the unemployment rate is 71%.

The shelter, Pretty Bird Woman House, is named for its founder's younger sister. NPR:

"Ms. JACKIE BROWN OTTER(ph) (Resident, Standing Rock Indian Reservation): I’m in McLaughlin, South Dakota. I live on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

SULLIVAN: Jackie Brown Otter lives about 30 miles from the nearest shopping center. The reservation covers 2.3 million acres. There are seven tribal patrol officers. Otter’s little sister was raped, kidnapped from her home and murdered six years ago.

Ms. OTTER: Chingkawa Wastewi(ph). That’s her Indian name. And that translates in English to Pretty Bird Woman. She smiled and she was well liked and always laughing.

SULLIVAN: It took almost a day for tribal police to arrive when Pretty Bird went missing. Her house was torn apart. A window was broken and bloody bedding was stuffed into the trash bin. It took several more days for the FBI to arrive. Her body was found later, beaten to death along a rural road. Otter opened a shelter for women at Standing Rock in her sister’s honor. But the group will run out of funding this month and will probably have to close. And still, the attacks keep coming.

Ms. OTTER: We’re so overwhelmed that we can’t see beyond the perimeters of it. It’s just beyond words for me."

One of the shelters I used to work for served (among others) a substantial Native American population, and as someone who tried her best to help Native women navigate the (cough) fascinating bureaucracies they had to work with, and to deal with various cultural issues that arose, I can attest to the fact that even the best intentions are no substitute at all for having shelters run by Native American women on reservations. Moreover, besides providing shelter and crisis hotlines and the like, shelters also provide women with a lot of important information about dealing with domestic violence and assault, and when they build up relationships over time with law enforcement personnel, they can also make a big difference in how law enforcement operates. This particular shelter also helps women get to the various places they need to go to in order to file for protective orders, get medical help, and deal with the legal system; given the sheer size of the reservation, this is invaluable.

I emailed the woman who runs the shelter (they don't have much of a web presence), and she says that they can use whatever help they can get. Most of their staff is volunteer, and they seem to work on a shoestring. nbier at dKos has more information, and is starting a ChipIn page (so far, not linked to the shelter.) I sent them some money; anyone else who wants to should send a check to:

Pretty Bird Woman House
P.O.596
McLaughlin South Dakota 57642

Thanks.

Remove All Doubt

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 prayer “in Christ’s name” at Ryman Auditorium, which bills itself as “Nashville’s  Premier Performance Hall.”

Edwards has a perfect right to pray publicly or privately any way he wants to. But people who are not Christians often feel left out of prayers like his.

Now, I'm on record as despising John Edwards as much as any candidate -- and I am second to no one in appreciating a cheap shot -- but c'mon:  attacking Edwards from the hyper-PC right?  Suggesting that Edwards' prayer needed to reference Gaia, Vishnu, Little Red Riding Hood, and Lucy the Ape to be suitable inclusive?  It's a freakin' prayer, for Chrissake: that it includes reference to a particular religion is a feature, not a bug.

Anyway, Simon's attack on Edwards is ... umm ... at least, new, I suppose.  Kinda stupid.  Definitely in bad taste.  But new.  Which is important, of course, that the stupidity is new.  And newly expressed and blog-o-cast.  Pixilated, even.  Army of Davids.  Et al., viz., and pace.  Go Fisk yourself.  If Allahpundit will not go to the Mountain, bring the Mountain to Allahpundit.  Chamberlain, Chamberlain, Chamberlain, Chamberlain .... BushNazi!  Yada yada ....

Oh, nevermind.

[*] UPDATE: D'oh.  My initial post included a cheapshot against Roger L. Simon (you know how I love them).  Dave S. points out that this is a different Roger Simon, not Roger L.  I've corrected the error by deleting the reference.

Maureen Dowd Update And Open Thread

by hilzoy

Sorry to have been absent the last couple of days -- busy busy busy. Now that a little stretch of free time seems to have appeared, I decided to read the newspaper, and what should I find but a Maureen Dowd column, in which she seems determined to prove one of the points I made about her last Saturday. In that post, I said that Dowd's last column, about John Edwards' haircut, was part of a pattern:

"It is absolutely standard operating procedure for (male) Democratic candidates to be cast as wimpy, emasculated wusses, and for this to happen based on stories that either are false or don't imply anything of the kind."

And, as if on cue, here's Maureen Dowd today:

"Usually, I love the dynamics of a cheeky woman puncturing the ego of a cocky guy.

I liked it in ’40s movies, and I liked it with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, and Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in “Moonlighting.”

So why don’t I like it with Michelle and Barack?

I wince a bit when Michelle Obama chides her husband as a mere mortal — a comic routine that rests on the presumption that we see him as a god. (...)

Many people I talked to afterward found Michelle wondrous. But others worried that her chiding was emasculating, casting her husband — under fire for lacking experience — as an undisciplined child."

Ah: the mysterious unnamed "others" who provide the hook for Dowd's entire column. It's not Dowd herself who says this -- we can't tag her with the belief that Obama is being "emasculated" by his wife. We don't get to ask her for any sort of evidence that this is in any way a reasonable belief. No: she is simply reporting, no doubt reluctantly, that "others" think this, and then going on and on for an entire column about it. "Others" worry about Obama's manhood. "Others" are unfamiliar with the fact that wives sometimes tweak their husbands. ("Others" have apparently forgotten about the time Laura Bush teased her husband for trying to milk a male horse.) If it weren't for "others", Maureen Dowd might be able to write about something important, like Obama's recent foreign policy address.

Silly "others"! And silly Maureen Dowd: the Democratic Party's very own concern troll.