Chris Boese's Weblog

High Noon at the DC Corral

Link: U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down D.C. handgun ban - Los Angeles Times.

It looks like the conservative supreme court is going to turn handguns loose into that wild west that is the rest of the District of Columbia.

The federal government sits deeply embedded in a massive slum (perhaps not as bad now as it once was), but the Supremes are ready to operate under the assumption that any person you happen to be walking up to is armed. Kinda makes you think they aren't very interested in self-preservation, doesn't it?

What's next? Will D.C. go the way of Florida, where folks are allowed to pack heat in shopping malls, schools, public buildings? That should certainly be interesting.

On one hand, you have all these oppressive encroachments on civil liberties with terrorist watch lists, shakedowns, pat-downs, no-go zones around VIPs and quasi-VIPs, which essentially make the Federal part of D.C. the equivalent of the Baghdad Green Zone for rich people.

And once the Supreme Court gets through with the Second Amendment, the rest of D.C. will also start to resemble the non-Green Zone part of Baghdad as well!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scotus19mar19,0,2685078.story

From the Los Angeles Times

U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down D.C. handgun ban

Several justices indicate they believe the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution protects individual rights.

           By David G. Savage
           Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

        10:48 AM PDT, March 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court justices, hearing a historic argument on the meaning of the 2nd Amendment, signaled they are likely to strike down a handgun ban in the District of Columbia and rule that homeowners have a right to keep a gun for self-defense.

But if the oral arguments are any guide, the outcome will not be unanimous. Several justices said they believed the 2nd Amendment was intended to protect the state's right to maintain a "well-regulated militia," not to give gun rights to individuals.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is the swing vote in close cases, said he believed the 2nd Amendment did more than bolster the state militia. "In my view, there is a general right to bear arms" that goes beyond serving in the militia, Kennedy said.

Most Americans believe the 2nd Amendment protects the right of law-abiding persons to "keep and bear arms." But the legal meaning of this provision remains in doubt. The high court has never invoked this right to strike down a gun law nor has it ruled that it protects a personal right to own a gun.

Justice Antonin Scalia, like Kennedy, described the 2nd Amendment as protecting individual guns. Justice Clarence Thomas is likely to join with them. And Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they believed the city council in Washington, D.C., went too far by prohibiting homeowners from having handguns.

"Why is that a reasonable regulation?" Roberts asked the lawyer defending the city's law.

Walter Dellinger, arguing for the city, said the framers of the Constitution were concerned about protecting the right of the people to defend the state or the community. The 2nd Amendment creates "a right to participate in the common defense," he said.

The amendment says: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Dellinger also argued that the phrase "bear arms" was a military term. He said the Washington law should be upheld because it allows homeowners to have a disassembled rifle or shotgun at home, even while it bans small handguns.

It was clear several justices agreed with this view.

Justice John Paul Stevens noted that Congress and all but two states had focused the "right to keep and bear arms" on the militia, not on personal self-defense. It was seen "as the right to keep and bear arms for the common defense," he said.

But the court's liberal bloc did not appear to have the votes to uphold the law.

[...]

               

Read the NYTimes for free!

Link: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times.

Long-awaited, one of the most ridiculous decisions in the history of journalism has been reversed! I've ding-donged about the upcoming death of TimeSelect already, so I'll avoid too much gloating and instead focus on why the decision was so stupid and obviously ill-fated, to lock up a significant portion of the site, its "newspaper of record" historical archives, and influential stable of op-ed columnists, including two, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, that this sorry excuse for a democracy can LITERALLY not be without.

What the Times essentially did was remove itself from the public agora, the forum, the space where democracy is deliberated, by trying to create a walled-garden of commodities to literally spit in the face of an evolving online "public square" or "commons."

The generica of strip mall and franchise nation has long gobbled up most of the physical public squares or commons, except for old venerated ones, like the Boston Commons. Levitown and the culture of the automobile has created a beast, the Burbs, to isolate people from more traditional senses of community, what Hannah Arendt would call our "civil society," or our less self-consciously active participation in our own communities, rather than staring into the passively-programmed sonambulism, the television.

I say less self-consciously active because sure, many people strive and work very hard at being active in their communities, and good for them. There was a time where just being alive and breathing meant you participated in your community, without having to drag yourself away from the TV to do it, rather than having to be guilted into making something for the bake sale or to participate in clean-up volunteer day at your local park.

I know people like to lump together time spent staring at the boob tube with time spent online, but I would argue that those spaces demand quantitatively different activities from our brains, the kinds of things the interactive version of the New York Times challenges us to do all the time, to talk back, argue, blog, Digg, bookmark, and so on. Yaddah yaddah, and let's all go read Michel de Certeau, "The Practice of Everyday Life," to see how ordinary people seize the day and control their own means of production.

Meanwhile, this is me making fun of what the Times has to say about its "taking down that firewall!"

Link: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times.

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

 

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Published: September 18, 2007

 

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight  tonight.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

[You know, just to belabor the point, but y'all may have not anticipated it, but if you had listened to the chorus of netizens AND new media theorists online, you would have found 80-90 percent of the people anticipating that explosion.

The New York Times may not have anticipated it, but just as MANY MANY people saw quite clearly the fiasco the US invasion of Iraq was to become, long before the ill-fated invasion ever began, a person really didn't have to rent a clue-by-four to know that building a walled garden in the open range of the public online agora would be a disaster, would effectively MUZZLE the newspaper's OWN VOICE.

It boggles the mind, how, in a world, an Information/Knowledge-based society where rising influence (whether in bits, wampum, poker chips, what-have-you) is worth more than any devaluing currencies, that a newspaper that wants to be essentially the nation's newspaper of record would deliberately undermine its own influence.

It would be like if you had nice sharp teeth, and you said, "You know what? These teeth are over-rated and get in the way of my big fat lolling tongue. I think I'm just going to pull these teeth out and de-fang myself. Yeah, that ought to increase my power and influence in the world. I ought to be able to reach more people, larger audiences that way."]

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

Those who have paid in advance for access to TimesSelect will be reimbursed on a prorated basis.

Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said that there have always been reasons to question the pay model for news sites, and that doubts have grown along with Web traffic and online ad revenue.

“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive,” he said. “The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”

[...]

Many readers lamented their loss of access to the work of the 23 news and opinion columnists of The Times — as did some of the columnists themselves. Some of those writers have such ardent followings that even with access restricted, their work often appeared on the lists of the most e-mailed articles.

[...]

Ding Dong, is TimesSelect Dead?

Let there be rejoicing in the land, if this is true. One of the most ridiculous decisions in the history of the Internet could be reversed, and, below, a catchy phrase is uttered, the idea of the "Internet of Record," used in the same way that public notices are required to be "published in the newspaper of record."

Great idea. One step away from a human imitation of the Akashic Records, the Book of Life. The place where, as both Confucious and Edgar Cayce say, "It is Written..." Plato might shudder, and those with ears to hear may call it a Tower of Babel (WWW, as any Chaldean numerologist would point out, is 666), man making himself god, but let's keep fiddling!

Hey, it's better than the Stay-Puf Marshmallow Man. Choose your destructor!

Link: Threat Level - Wired Blogs.

Threat Level Predicted Death of New York Times Firewall

By Ryan Singel August 07, 2007 | 11:32:11 AM

The New York Times is preparing to "bring down that wall" that hides its old stories and its OP-ED columnists, according to the New York Post. The TimesSelect service, which hid the paper's popular columnists to all but the 200,000 or so online subsribers, will be dropped soon, according to the piece.

THREAT LEVEL saw this coming. Saving The New York Times archives so only paying LexisNexis users could get at them was a retrograde decision in an age where search engines have deep indexes. And how are largely hidden columinists going to maintain their power when its easier for someone to read a blogger than it is to find a Maureen Dowd piece.

That's why in December, THREAT LEVEL submitted this prediction for inclusion in Wired News's predictions for 2007:

NYT Goes Free

The New York Times opens its archives from behind the paid firewall, realizing it's more lucrative to be the internet's paper of record than charging readers for individual stories. Thankfully, Thomas Friedman's clichés and mixed metaphors remain behind the pay firewall for at least two weeks.

I've not heard if the Times will actually keep Friedman behind the firewall, so as to spare us from further sloppy war cheerleading and non-sensical declarations that the world is flat, but one can dream or even start an online petition.

This shouldn't surprise anyone... but it's still appalling

I am happy that this kind of information is coming out more and more. The trickle should turn into a flood, once the more corrupt folks get out of office and the appalled people who had contact with them start speaking up.

Cancer in the White House, indeed. And a Justice Department that's turned into a strong-arm wing for patronage and political vendettas.

What I really want to know is why no one is talking about this and K Street and other Bush Administration behind the scenes maneuvers as it appears to me: the blatant rebirth of overt machine politics.

Link: Ex-surgeon general faults White House - Los Angeles Times.

Ex-surgeon general faults White House

Richard Carmona says the administration 'simply buried' his scientific data on such issues as stem cell research and teen pregnancy.

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff Writer
July 11, 2007

WASHINGTON — President Bush's first surgeon general testified Tuesday that his speeches were censored to match administration political positions and that he was prevented from giving the public accurate scientific information on issues such as stem cell research and teen pregnancy prevention.

"Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried," Dr. Richard H. Carmona, who was surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, told a congressional committee. "The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation — not the doctor of a political party."

Early in the administration, when the issue of federal funding for stem cell research arose, Carmona said, he felt he could play an educational role by discussing the latest scientific research. Instead, he said, he was told to "stand down" because the White House already had made a decision to limit stem cell studies. He said administration appointees who reviewed his speech texts deleted references to stem cells.

Carmona's remarks were the latest in a series of complaints from government scientists about what they say are administration efforts to control — and sometimes distort — scientific evidence in order to support policy decisions.

NASA scientists have complained, for example, of political pressure to tone down warnings about global warming. Environmental Protection Agency officials have complained that technical information on such subjects as power plant emissions and oil drilling have been ignored.

Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently dissented from the administration's position by saying its restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research were holding back progress and should be lifted.

Scientists outside the government also have complained about what some call the administration's "war on science."

[...]

We now interrupt this blog for a bit of 1855 Leaves of Grass

Link: Leaves of Grass (1855).

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? 
Have you practiced so long to learn to read? 
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, 
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left, 
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, 
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.   

I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end, 
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.   

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now; 
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.   

Urge and urge and urge, 
Always the procreant urge of the world.   

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and increase, 
Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . . always a breed of life.   

To elaborate is no avail . . . . Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.   

Sure as the most certain sure . . . . plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, 
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, 
I and this mystery here we stand.

Walt Whitman

 

Philip K. Dick is starting to get his due

Link: Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come - New York Times.

I have to post this as vindication, for all my students who complained about my showing Blade Runner and making them do their first paper on it, for years in first-year composition.

I had a terrible nightmare this morning that had to have been something straight out of Dick, now that I think about it. It was just terrible, a flashback from my previous job. In the dream I sat for seemingly hours, trying to write three 15-second "stories," the details and order of which kept changing the entire time I was writing them, the whole time sitting in someone's ratty bedroom on some really uncomfortable upholstery. When I woke up, I was so sore, I could barely hobble to the bathroom.

They oughta do a study on how many people's dreams get polluted by waking up with NPR news bleed-thru into their dreams.

Anyway, I wasn't dreaming of electric sheep, but I do have a Dick novel I would option for a screenplay in a heartbeat. I'm not going to say which one it is, though. Someone else might get it first. [grin]

Link: Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come - New York Times.

Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come

By BRENT STAPLES

Published: June 8, 2007 

Philip K. Dick was still an obscure pulp novelist known mainly to teenage boys when a friend predicted that he would one day have more impact on the world than celebrated writers like William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. The prediction seemed almost delusional in the 1960s, when Dick was popping pills around the clock and churning out novels in a science fiction ghetto from which he seemed destined never to escape.

He did get out, but only posthumously. And with his recent celebration as the sage of futurism, and his pervasiveness on bookshelves and in Hollywood, the early predictions about the growth of his influence have come to seem prescient.

Dick was largely unknown to the general public at the time of his death in 1982. Most of his novels and short stories were out of print and seemed destined to stay that way. Things began to change after his favorite and best written novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” was introduced to the country in the form of the now classic movie “Blade Runner.”

[...]

The film struck a number of chords in the real world. Its vision of the polyglot, environmentally ruined Los Angeles spawned the phrase “Blade Runnerization” among urban planners who recognized it as a frighteningly likely vision of things to come. In recent years, movies based on Dick’s work —“Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Next” — have become a cottage industry in Hollywood. Numerous other projects, including a film based on his life, are said to be in the works.

The movie craze carried over into the book world, where publishers have pushed more than 30 of Dick’s novels and scores of his short stories back into print, this time with book covers and promotional material designed to appeal to mainstream readers. The rehabilitation hit a literary high note earlier this month, when the Library of America issued “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s,” which placed him in the company of Henry James, Saul Bellow, Faulkner and other heavyweights.

Dick wrote his share of bad novels, which is hardly surprising given that he wrote stoked up on drugs and suffered no end of paranoid delusions. His best books distinguish themselves from ordinary science fiction by focusing not on technology, but on the toll that technological advances often take on human values — and on the soul itself.

[...]

Dick was fully engaged in the science of cybernetics — which supposes a similarity between machine and human functioning — and deeply alarmed about what he saw as the encroachment of programmable machinery into human life.

His writing was shaped by the legitimate worry that human beings were merging with the technology that was supposed to be serving them and becoming less human (which is to say, more machine-like) in the bargain.

Androids in much of science fiction are cast as entertaining house pets. Dick’s androids are sinister and potentially dangerous, because they lack the leavening spark of humanity.

[...]

The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology. As his work becomes more popular, readers who know him only from the movies will find it even darker and more disturbing — and quite relevant to the technologically obsessed present.

      

 

Definitive Christopher Hitchens Rant on Falwell

I have very little stomach for Christopher Hitchens anymore. While I don't mind people who piss me off, Hitchens fell into a non-reality-based sleep (or bender) for a while there, and the iconoclastic gadfly seems to wallow more incredulously in wildly irrational rants.

That said, maybe he was more sober or lucid than normal in the bit below, or not, as the case may be. Either way, it's a great epitaph for someone (Jerry Falwell) most of us will only want to remember in terms of the kind of devils we'd like to avoid in the future.

And Hitchens does skewer media culpability in the Falwell narrative so very well...

Here are some of my favorite bits, I want to preserve for posterity, until the next time Hitchens takes leave of his senses and pisses me off (I don't care that he's a darling again now, with his book out).

Link: Jerry Falwell, faith-based fraud. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine.

fighting words: A wartime lexicon

Faith-Based Fraud

Jerry Falwell's foul rantings prove you can get away with anything if you have "Reverend" in front of your name.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007, at 12:46 PM ET

 The Rev. Jerry Falwell

 The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled "credulous idiot." The first such category consists of those who expected Falwell (and themselves) to be bodily raptured out of the biosphere and assumed into the heavens, leaving pilotless planes and driverless trucks and taxis to crash with their innocent victims as collateral damage.

[...]

The second such category is of slightly more importance, because it consists of the editors, producers, publicists, and a host of other media riffraff who allowed Falwell to prove, almost every week, that there is no vileness that cannot be freely uttered by a man whose name is prefaced with the word Reverend. Try this: Call a TV station and tell them that you know the Antichrist is already on earth and is an adult Jewish male. See how far you get. Then try the same thing and add that you are the Rev. Jim-Bob Vermin. "Why, Reverend, come right on the show!" What a fool Don Imus was. If he had paid the paltry few bucks to make himself a certified clergyman, he could be jeering and sneering to the present hour.

Falwell went much further than his mad 1999 assertion about the Jewish Antichrist. In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism on American civil society in September 2001, he used his regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were a divine punishment of the United States. Again, I ask you to imagine how such a person would be treated if he were not supposedly a man of faith.

[...]

Seeking to deflect the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice, Falwell adopted the cause of the most thuggish and demented Israeli settlers, proclaiming that their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was a holy matter and hoping that they might help to bring on Armageddon and the return of the Messiah. A detail in this ghastly narrative, as adepts of the "Left Behind" series will know, is that the return of the risen Christ will require the mass slaughter or mass conversion of all Jews. This consideration did not prevent Menachem Begin from awarding Falwell the Jabotinsky Centennial Medal in 1980 and has not inhibited other Israeli extremists from embracing him and his co-thinkers ever since. All bigots and frauds are brothers under the skin. Trying to interrupt the fiesta of piety on national television on the night of Falwell's death, I found myself waiting while Ralph Reed went all moist about the role of the departed in empowering "people of faith." Here was the hypocritical casino-based Christian who sought and received the kosher stamp from Jack Abramoff. Perfect.

Like many fanatical preachers, Falwell was especially disgusting in exuding an almost sexless personality while railing from dawn to dusk about the sex lives of others. His obsession with homosexuality was on a par with his lip-smacking evocations of hellfire.

[...]

The evil that he did will live after him. This is not just because of the wickedness that he actually preached, but because of the hole that he made in the "wall of separation" that ought to divide religion from politics. In his dingy racist past, Falwell attacked those churchmen who mixed the two worlds of faith and politics and called for civil rights. Then he realized that two could play at this game and learned to play it himself.

[...]

It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and it's extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the "faith-based."

Stories you probably didn't hear about, and don't want to miss

The Project Censored series of books remains as important as ever, but for now, let's focus on the stories on this list, and make sure they are not forgotten.

Link: Amazon.com: Censored 2007: The Top 25 Censored Stories (Censored): Books: Peter Phillips,Project Censored,Tom Tomorrow,Robert Jensen.

From a helpful reviewer on Amazon:

This year's CENSORED 2007 is PC's 30th anniversary edition and, along with the top 25 censored stories of the year and the usual array of supplementary essays on media bias, this year's edition includes updates on the most important stories of the last 30 years - a nifty bonus. 2007 stories include:

1.  The Future of the Internet: giant cable companies seek a monopoly on cable Internet
2.  Halliburton charged with selling nuclear secrets to Iran - illegally - under Cheney
3.  The worldwide death of oceans: warming, toxic buildup, dead zones, changing PH balance, fish, grass and kelp die offs 
4. Hunger and homelessness in the US on the rise: Government solution? Discontinue Census surveys that keep statistical tables on poverty
5.  US supports genocide in the Congo to gain access to resources used to make high-tech gadgetry such as cell phones
6.  The end of federal whistleblower protections
7.  US operatives torture detainees to death in Afghanistan and Iraq
8.  Pentagon exempts itself from the Freedom of Information Act
9.  World Bank funds the Palestine-Israel Wall
10. The death toll of civilians in Iraq from the expanded air war
11. Dangers of genetically modified foods confirmed
12. The dangers of common pesticides like Roundup
13. Homeland Security contracts KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) to build detention centers in the US
14. The EPA's primary research partner is the chemical industry
15. Ecuador and Mexico defy the US on the international criminal court
16. The Iraq reconstruction promotes OPEC agenda: profit for major US oil companies
17. Physicist concludes that official 9/11 explanation is scientifically implausible
18. Destruction of rainforests is at an all-time high
19. Bottled water: a global environmental problem
20. Gold mining threatens ancient Andean glaciers
21. Billions in homeland security undisclosed
22. US Oil targets Kyoto in Europe
23. Cheney's Halliburton stock rose of 3000 percent last year
24. Pentagon plans to build new landmines
25. US military in Paraguay threatens the region

Most amazing tornado video I've ever seen...

I used to chase these storms with a still camera in the 1980s, over on the Arkansas side of the OK/AR state line, but if I'd ever been this close (and I was in one in my home, but in bed, at 4 a.m., and that was enough for me), I'd have been truly wetting my pants.

The storms over there are bad, and my sympathy goes out to that Kansas town that just experienced that F5 (200 mph?). This one is surely much smaller than what wiped out Greensburg, Kansas. That one was 1.7 miles wide, more like the Oklahoma City tornado from 1999. I wonder if this current tornado outbreak compares at all to that one.

Link: YouTube - INCREDIBLE TORNADO VIDEO!! May 4, 2007 - Ellis Co., OK.

The term "partial birth abortion" is a right-wing political invention, a "scam"

Why believe me? It's right there below in the words of the founder of Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion group.

It's about a political movement (and it's well-paid PR and marketing professionals) forcing its rhetorical framing devices on an uncritical and under-funded media class.

Link: AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: How Media Mistakes Fueled the High Court Abortion Ruling.

How Media Mistakes Fueled the High Court Abortion Ruling

By Gloria Feldt, Women's Media Center
Posted on April 21, 2007, Printed on April 23, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50788/

[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but [also] a public relations goldmine. ... The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it. -- Randall Terry

So said the founder of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-choice group that blockaded abortion providers, in 2003.

Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision (Gonzales v. Carhart) upholding the federal abortion ban is the fruition of that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right.

Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court's majority, in addition to using the inaccurate term "partial birth abortion," also referred to the "abortion doctor" repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as "doctors," or "ob/gyns"? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to "tonsillectomy doctor" or "hysterectomy doctor"? Of course not. But those who want to take away entirely a woman's human right to make her own childbearing decisions have used the term "abortion doctor" for so long as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to adopt their language.

Such bias is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle over what losing plaintiff Dr. Leroy Carhart has called "partial truth abortion." There is no such thing as partial birth abortion. The term will be found in no medical book. It was coined in 1995 by Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right-to-Life Committee, and former Congressional representative and current Florida appeals court judge Charles Canady explicitly to confuse, horrify, and deceive -- to manipulate language with the intent of sensationalizing the abortion debate.

[...]

An almost identical abortion ban was found unconstitutional by a different Supreme Court in 2000.

[...]

Now we have a landmark Supreme Court decision, built upon the counterfeit foundation of a made-up term that the media accepted and used uncritically, and that has propelled the highest court to issue a ruling permitting a law that at a minimum:

1. Does not provide adequate exceptions for a woman's health, which means that a fundamental legal principle of the primary importance of women's health has been overturned.

2. For the first time upholds a federal law that steps directly into the physician's exam room and tells him or her what medical technique cannot be used even if the physician's judgment is that it is the safest to protect a patient's health and future fertility.

3. Will not reduce the number of abortions but will over time, according to the doctors who know women's health best, cause an increase in medical complications, and possibly even deaths.

The public relations goldmine of those who aim for nothing less than to eliminate reproductive justice at all times from all women has paid off for them. Language, after all, has consequences too.

Gloria Feldt is the author of "The War on Choice"  and "Behind Every Choice Is a Story."  She is currently at work on a book with the actress Kathleen Turner, entitled "Take the Lead, Lady!"