electricland

I am so thrilled about this year's Nobel peace prize. The Grameen Bank is such a brilliantly simple and simply brilliant concept, and it's helped so many people. I hope we don't see the same sort of grouching as we did when Wangari Maathai won two years ago. I'm interested and pleased that the committee seems try and take a broad approach to the concept of "peace" -- the prize doesn't just go to people who try and end conflicts, but sometimes it goes to people who try to address the roots of conflict in the first place.

Current Mood: happy

Some links:

Via

makinglight's comments section, also

shetterly:

Cecilia Fire Thunder, Oglala Sioux Tribal President, is kind of annoyed at South Dakota's recent unpleasantness. So she's hoping to establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is of course sovereign territory and no subject to South Dakota law (in this case and many others). Planned Parenthood clinics are, of course, good for much more than just abortions.

Ways to donate, in case you want to help with this.

Next, Salon has more on a disturbing story:

[T]he anti-birth-control movement's efforts are making a significant political impact: Supporters have pressured insurance companies to refuse coverage of contraception, lobbied for "conscience clause" laws to protect pharmacists from having to dispense birth control, and are redefining the very meaning of pregnancy to classify certain contraceptive methods as abortion. In increasing numbers, women and men opposed to contraception are marshaling health facts and figures to bolster their convictions that sex for anything but procreation is morally wrong and potentially deadly. Although its medical arguments are really just thinly veiled moral and religious arguments, using findings that are biased and unfounded, the rising anti-contraception movement, echoed by the Catholic Church, is making significant inroads. Leaders of the pro-choice movement know it, are worried about it, and realize they can't take it lightly, as they mount their own strategies to battle it.

"It is very hard to awaken people to the threat," says Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, "because who can believe that something so accessible can be at risk? But that's what [people] said when they started attacking Roe, and now look at how close we are to losing Roe."

And Dan Savage notes:

Straight Rights Update: Earlier this month Republicans in South Dakota successfully banned abortion in that state. Last week the GOP-controlled state house of representatives in Missouri voted to ban state-funded family planning clinics from dispensing birth control. "If you hand out contraception to single women," one Republican state rep told the Kansas City Star, "we're saying promiscuity is okay." On the federal level, Republicans are blocking the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception and keeping a 100 percent effective HPV vaccine—a vaccine that will save the lives of thousands of women every year—from being made available.

The GOP's message to straight Americans: If you have sex, we want it to fuck up your lives as much as possible. No birth control, no emergency contraception, no abortion services, no life-saving vaccines. If you get pregnant, tough shit. You're going to have those babies, ladies, and you're going to make those child-support payments, gentlemen. And if you get HPV and it leads to cervical cancer, well, that's too bad. Have a nice funeral, slut.

What's it going to take to get a straight-rights movement off the ground? The GOP in Kansas is seeking to criminalize hetero heavy petting, for God's sake! Wake up and smell the freaking Holy War, breeders! The religious right hates heterosexuality just as much as it hates homosexuality. Fight back!

Finally, because it's never too late to keep those hits coming and this seems like an excellent post for it: Bill Napoli.

napoli (not to be confused with the proper noun, which indicates the Italian city)
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): napolied
Pronunciation: nA’poli

1. To brutalize and rape, sodomize as bad as you can possibly make it, a young, religious virgin woman who was saving herself for marriage. 2. To hella rape somebody.

Etymology: From State Senator Bill Napoli’s (R-SD) words on an acceptable description of rape that would merit an exemption from South Dakota’s abortion ban.

[Edited to add stuff. I knew I had more than I originally put in...]

I cheered (quietly) reading the comments of the judge who sentenced Ahmed Ressam:

Judge John Coughenor called the sentencing of Mr. Ressam, a failed claimant for refugee status in Canada who used a Vancouver motel as his base for assembling explosives to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, the most difficult decision in his 24 years on the bench.

But he pointed out that all proceedings took place "in the sunlight of a public trial" without the indefinite detention of Mr. Ressam, subjecting him to a secret tribunal or denying him the right to a lawyer -- procedures U.S. authorities regularly employed against suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"Unfortunately, some believe that the tragedy of Sept. 11 renders our Constitution obsolete. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won," Judge Coughenor declared, his voice heavy with emotion.

Indeed. Let that be a lesson to all our governments (Canada, with its "security certificates", is hardly innocent of these kinds of tactics either).

Actually, the last part made me giggle, too.

(BTW, the Globe's Insider Edition really gets up my nose. I am already a subscriber to your paper edition. NOW you want me to pay MORE to get "exclusive web content"? Fuck you. No. And I had to Google to get this story -- it wasn't visible from their home page or their Ressam page, which is just bizarre.)