Video: How do you tell the Mrs. you just dropped a tree on the house?

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Woman in Indiana faces 45 years in prison for "attempted feticide" after attempted suicide

The War on Women continues. Katha Pollitt (my emphasis and paragraphing; h/t the excellent aggregator Dictynna's Net):

In December 2010 Shuai was running a Chinese restaurant in Indianapolis with her boyfriend, Zhiliang Guan, by whom she was eight months pregnant. Just before Christmas, he informed her that he was married and had another family, to which he was returning. When Shuai begged him to stay, he threw money at her and left her weeping on her knees in a parking lot.

Despairing, she took rat poison and wrote a letter in Mandarin saying she was killing herself and would “take this baby with me to Hades”; friends got her to the hospital just in time to save her life. Eight days later her baby, Angel, was delivered by Caesarean section and died of a cerebral hemorrhage within four days.

Three months later, the newly elected prosecutor, Terry Curry—a Democrat—brought charges, claiming that the rat poison that almost killed Shuai had killed her baby. If convicted, she faces forty-five to sixty-five years in prison.

It is hard to know where to begin listing what’s wrong with this case. Consider the health ramifications: attempting suicide is not a crime in Indiana. It’s the tragic result of mental illness, depression and extreme emotional distress; and it’s not uncommon for pregnant women to seriously consider it, or even try it.

As Pollitt says, there's a lot wrong here. For starters:

According to a 2010 study in Obstetrics & Gynecology, suicide is the fifth leading cause of death among pregnant women. Pregnant women in crisis need and deserve compassion and treatment. But if Shuai is convicted, what pregnant woman will seek help? “Every major medical and public health organization that has considered the issue has concluded that it is dangerous for maternal and fetal health to hold women criminally liable for their pregnancy outcomes,” says Emma Ketteringham, director of legal advocacy for National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), which is co-counsel to Shuai’s defense.

Pollitt unpacks the way this kind of law, which was originally designed to be used against violent abusers of pregnant women, is being turned against the women themselves.

Of course, that's all part of the plan, part of the "antiabortion strategy to build up the legal status of the fetus as a person in so many parts of the law that when the Supreme Court finally revisits Roe v. Wade, a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy will look like a bizarre exception."

Abuse of these laws is certain, however. If a woman is responsible during pregnancy for any behavior that produces a bad outcome, what's to stop a zealous prosecutor from making quite a reputation for "justice" in a country where "15-20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage."

It's a target-rich environment, in a country where opportunistic prosecutors are slobbered over like gods by a Death Wish–worshiping public. We do love us our punishing prosecutors, don't we. (Psst: This is why our kids won't have Social Security.)

As Pollitt says:

[T]he state portrays Shuai as a heartless and calculating home wrecker ... But who is really being cold-blooded here? The woman who tried to kill herself, who held her baby for five hours as her life slipped away and wept inconsolably when she died? ... Or the prosecution[?]

"Newly-elected prosecutor" Terry Curry — you with the license to punish. You wouldn't be trading lives for votes in Marion County Indiana, would you?

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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UK Police accuse Murdoch paper of 'jeopardizing' murder enquiry

Via Huff Post

The News of the World "jeopardised" a police inquiry into a spate of murders in Ipswich, a former senior police officer has alleged.

David Harrison, who worked on the inquiry into the killing of five prostitutes in Ipswich while at for the Serious Organised Crime Agency, told the Leveson inquiry into press ethics that the tabloid had hired ex-special forces soldiers to carry out their own surveillance on a suspect, which could have "seriously hindered" the police inquiry.

"I believe that by its actions NotW jeopardised the murder inquiry," the retired officer said in a witness statement.

Rupert Murdoch is a bully who made a fortune manufacturing outrage with lies. Now that outrage is turned in his direction he claims not to have known the methods used by his minions. Read the rest of this post...

Mice are people too

Very cool video of a mouse fetus developing.  Eerily humanesque - which of course simply means that God has a sick sense of humor.

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Catholic church reportedly castrated boys who reported priest sex abuse

Just when you think the Catholic church abuse stories couldn't get any worse, something else is reported. Like castrating a young boy for having the temerity to report that his priest abused him.  In this case, a politician even participated in the coverup according to the report. DutchNews:

At least one boy under the age of 16 was castrated to 'help' his homosexual feelings while in Catholic church care in the 1950s, the NRC reported on Saturday.

But there are indications at least 10 other boys were also castrated, the paper said. The claims were not included in the Deetman report on sexual abuse within the Catholic church published at the end of last year.

The paper says the one confirmed case concerned a boy - Henk Heithuis - who reported being sexually abused by priests to the police in 1956. After giving evidence, he was placed in a Catholic-run psychiatric institution where he was then castrated because of his 'homosexual behaviour'.

As Joe noted the other day, the Catholic church is still attacking their own victims (quoting the NYT):

Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.

The network and its allies say the legal action is part of a campaign by the church to cripple an organization that has been the most visible defender of victims, and a relentless adversary, for more than two decades. “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University and an advocate for victims of clergy sex crimes, “it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”

So just to be clear, the Catholic church won't pay for the pill, but they will pay for forced castration of boys who have been raped by Catholic priests. Any questions? Read the rest of this post...

Number one anti-"gay marriage" group now supports civil unions - time to pass national law

If the most virulently anti-"gay marriage" group of the religious religious right is now in favor of civil unions, then we should ask the US congress to immediately pass a nationwide civil unions law.  At the very least, civil unions should now be exempted from DOMA (which requires the law to be amended), and it calls into question local DOMA laws that ban, or would ban, civil unions - again, if the number one religious right group that opposes gay marriage is now for civil unions, clearly banning them in the states is too extremist even for Republicans.  Also, we should now be using this as evidence that every state that has a DOMA law on the books should be forced to pass civil unions, now. Read the rest of this post...

Puerto Rico really, really doesn't like Rick Santorum

Puerto Rico has proven that it really, really doesn't like Rick Santorum. In fact, they disliked him so much that they gave Mitt Romney an 83% to 8% win over him, even after Rick went to the island to pander to residents and sneak in some rays poolside (no, I won't link to the picture, so you're on your own there).

Santorum's loss comes with good reason. After his double-win in the southern states of Alabama and Mississippi last week (where respectively 45% and 52% of Republican voters also believe that President Obama is a secret Muslim, and in Mississippi a plurality of GOP voters still think inter-racial marriage should be illegal), Santorum left for Puerto Rico to begin campaigning for their weekend race. Except things there got off to an epically-bad start.

I believe the general rule of thumb in politics is to not try to piss off the people whose votes you're trying to gain (but then again I've never run for office, and have publicly clarified my stance on man-on-dog action, so what do I know). Santorum stunned the entire island and the mainland after saying that in order to qualify to join the union, Puerto Rico is constitutionally-required to adopt "English as the main language." Yes, Rickie went to a nation of Spanish-speakers and told them to learn g-damn English.

And Santorum couldn't be more wrong. Not only does Puerto Rico officially recognize English and Spanish as their official languages, but this so-called constitutional requirement does not even exist (I don't expect a non-constitutional scholar like Santorum to get that - that's why we elected Barack Obama, who taught constitutional law). Santorum would probably call this absurd claim a "misspeak." Others might use the word "lie."

Santorum then tried to walk back the comment, but it was too late. In the end, he humiliatingly lost the endorsement of a prominent former senator and the island went to Romney. Romney of course milked Santorum's fail to the dear end, telling Puerto Ricans they could speak whatever they damn well please, y'all.

Rick later managed to top himself (coincidentally an act that would be illegal under a President Santorum) by calling Puerto Rico a "country," even though it's been an unincorporated territory of the United States since 1898. Are history books gay, Rick -- is that why you don't seem to interact with them much?

Sadly, this is the same Republican party that has joked about electrocuting Mexican immigrants and self-deportation (which I hear is about as popular among Latino voters as Republicans self-taxing). Even a Fox News Latino poll showed that Latino voters are picking President Obama over Romney, 70% to 14%. Santorum didn't even manage a showing in the poll, coming in as "Other."

Luckily for Puerto Ricans, Santorum self-deported from the "country" after his defeat, and has rejoined us in "America." I'm sure I'm not the only one waiting for Cinco de Mayo to roll around so Santorum can don a sombrero and tell Mexican-Americans like myself to quit having so many babies (while he tries to make contraception and abortion illegal).  Mitt Romney, on the other hand, typically can't decide whether to brag about his quasi-Mexican heritage or shun it. (I look forward to the day when Santorum starts lecturing Señor Mitt to stop having so many babies.)

And another margarita, por favor. Read the rest of this post...

Healthcare spending continues to be ugly

How in the world are people still debating this issue? Despite all of the talk by Republicans about how efficient private industry is compare to government, the facts aren't there to support their story. This isn't new news, but since the issue has been ignored by the White House and Democrats, we're back to this again. Business Insider has a collection of some good tweets from Fareed Zakarai on the healthcare spending problems. Again, none of this should come as a surprise but since we're going backwards on this issue, it needs to be stated again so people remember why we can't go back to the old model. Obamacare needs work - a lot of work - but it's still the right thing to do. Read the rest of this post...

New book: Obama admin embraced deficit reduction because they lost message war on deficit vs job creation

The problem, as Greg Sargent at the Wash Post notes, is that when confronted with the news that they were losing the message war with the GOP - that the public had accepted the Republican argument that the best way to help the economy was to cut spending, which would in fact shoot the economy in the foot - rather than fight back against that message, rather than educate the public, the White House embraced the fallacy in order to shore up the President in the polls.

First Greg quoting the book (Showdown by David Corn), then Greg:

[This is quoting the book:] With Sperling sitting in on the presentation, Garin reinforced the White House view that Democrats had to up their game on deficit reduction. His firm had conducted extensive polling and focus groups. He told the senators that voters saw jobs as the most pressing priority. This might seem to support those Democrats who believed Obama had gone too far overboard on the deficit-reduction cruise. But when asked what the president and Congress should do to boost job creation, most voters said reduce the deficit and the debt. They had imbibed the GOP message; the problem with the economy was governmental red ink.

That was not accurate. The financial crash that triggered the economic collapse was unrelated to federal deficits. But Garin measured voter perceptions, not whether voters were correct. And he told the senators that voters would not listen to what the Democrats — including the president — had to say about jobs and investments if they did not sense that the Democrats were willing to wrestle the debt monster to the ground.

[And here's Greg:] Of course, progressives argue that it’s precisely because voters conflate economic anxiety with worry about the deficit that Dems shouldn’t have allowed concern about the deficit to drive them to make the pivot. But Democrats decided to draw the opposite conclusion. As both these passages show, Dems and White House officials knew that the policy justification for the pivot to deficit reduction was flimsy at best. But they decided they couldn’t win the short-term argument, and went ahead and pivoted, anyway.

This is something a number of us suspected, and warned about, for a while now.  That the White House communications team - likely a reflection of, and constraint imposed by, the President's own thinking - has been too predisposed to what the public thinks, and to what Congress thinks, while giving less attention to whether they have the ability to move the public and Congress on any given issue.  And what's worse, they ceded much of the debate to the GOP, which is why I believe we keep seeing such terrible polling on health care reform.  The Republicans seem to attack HCR far more than the administration defends it.  Which is somewhat understandable as the message is "jobs" - but we might not have HCR much longer if the numbers go any further south.

The White House had the support in this woe-is-me, the-president-has-no-power-to-influence-congress-or-the-american-people, thinking from a small but influential group of young liberal pundits who had never actually worked in politics.  And those pundits were wrong.  Presidents may not be able to cast a vote in Congress, but they have unprecedented power to sway the country and Congress on an issue if they do their job right.  It's no guarantee.  And on some issues, it might be wiser for the President to cave to public opinion.  But on far too many issues during the first two years of the Obama presidency, the White House seemed to cave far too easily on issue after issue - if the poll numbers were bad, if the initial vote tally in congress was bad, the White House punted rather than attempt to change those numbers - and the President and Biden often noted that Obama wasn't God, that he wasn't king, etc., only reinforcing the notion that he was weak.

As I noted this morning, I think all of that has started to change.  I think the President has been fighting back a lot harder this past year, and I think public opinion has turned as a result - certainly the electoral math has changed, and the President's approvals seem to have increased some, while Republicans are more loathed than ever.  Hopefully the President learns a lesson from this that outlasts November. Read the rest of this post...

Gallup confirms that unemployed dropped again last month

What's even more important is that the under-employment rate is coming down as well. The numbers aren't earth shattering, but any improvement is positive news. Gallup:

The U.S. government will report its March unemployment rate on Friday, April 6. It will be based largely on mid-month reference week conditions. At 8.8%, Gallup's mid-March unadjusted unemployment rate is down by 0.3 points from 9.1% in February. This suggests that "real" unemployment decreased in March. Of course, Gallup's unadjusted rate in February was substantially higher than the government's unadjusted 8.7% rate.

The 0.3-percentage-point decline in mid-March moderates the 0.5-point increase Gallup found in February, but it still leaves the mid-month rate higher than the 8.6% in January. A year ago, Gallup recorded a similar decline in the March unemployment rate of 0.4 points, as it fell to 9.9% in March from 10.3% in February. The percentage of Americans working part time but wanting full-time work also declined in mid-March, to 9.8% from 10.0% in February. While the percentage of unemployed Americans is lower than it was a year ago, the percentage of Americans working part-time but seeking full-time work in mid-March is higher than the 9.2% of March 2011.

Note that Gallup's unemployment numbers for last month are higher than the US government's numbers. The explanation is complicated, but you can click through to Gallup's explanation. In any case, both the USG and Gallup both show unemployment dropped, which is good news. Read the rest of this post...

Murdoch's paper hired Special Ops team to monitor UK police

How creepy is this? It's still amazing to think that Rupert Murdoch and his media empire in the US is not tarnished by this ongoing investigation. Does anyone really believe this is not a rogue media organization that will do anything to stir up a story and smear anyone who gets in their way? Using alleged former Special Ops teams to monitor the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) doesn't sound right any way you try to spin it. For a team that likes to view themselves as supporters of law and order, they sure don't struggle with staying within the boundaries of the law. The Telegraph:

Mr Harrison said that, on at least two occasions, a vehicle parked up on a roundabout on the outskirts of the town attempted to follow the Soca surveillance team. "We identified them because they were sat in the position that we would sit in if we were doing the same job," he said. "We were told that they were probably ex-Special Forces soldiers who would have a good knowledge of surveillance techniques."

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What the NSA is up to (part 1 of Running against the state)

This is Part 1 of a two-part post I'm calling, "Running against the state." Part 2 will be along in a bit, and at that point you'll see what the title is about.

Part 1 is about the NSA, because we always want to keep you informed about the news here at Casa Chez Nous. And this really is news — a major Wired article about what the NSA is building and just how big the National Spook apparatus really is.

As you read this, do think about the NSA. But also consider the state itself as an entity. The NSA is a part of the state.

James Bamford reports in Wired on where we are with the NSA, how far have they gone in their domestic spying and what's in the works. It's technologically fascinating and politically frightening (sorry, kids, but someone has to tell you; my emphasis and paragraphing):

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

... Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.

The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”

It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes.

And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted.

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

The article is full and well worth your read.

A few key points to notice:

■ The "near-bottomless" storage capacity and the notion of digital "pocket litter." In other words, there's no disincentive to storing everything they can get their hands on. And they can get their hands on everything they want.

■ The connection between storing everything and code-breaking. As the article explains, if you stored coded stuff you can't break now, you have that stuff for later when the code is broken — even if it's years later. In essence, everything on earth that was electronically communicated and stored will someday be open — to them. Read the article for that explanation.

■ The way the NSA blew right past the "rules" and is now running in a rules-free environment.

The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email.

In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. ...

Start reading there to focus on this part of the article. Again, fascinating.

■ And finally, this chilling, unexpanded (unexplained) quote:

The former NSA official [Binney] held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

The article doesn't go further, but stays focused on data collection. This is the most intriguing part of the interview, however, and clearly the author included it deliberately and provocatively. The speaker meant something by the comment — we just aren't told what.

I don't want to go too long here. Do read the article — it's rich and full. Bamford is author of author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. He knows whereof he writes.

As fascinating as this is, however, there's a yet-larger point. This is not about the NSA per se; it's about the state. Please stay tuned.

Enigmatically yours,

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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High-dollar donors less willing to give to Obama this time around

Washington Post:

President Obama is struggling to draw in big-dollar donations, with half as many people writing large checks to his campaign than at this point four years ago.

Obama is outpacing his Republican rivals in fundraising overall, and his advisers have concentrated on amassing small-dollar backers, part of a strategy to get more people invested in the reelection effort. At the end of January, 1.4 million people had donated to the Obama campaign, responding to appeals for contributions as small as $2.

But Obama lags behind Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in finding donors willing to give $2,000 or more — a surprising development for a sitting president, and one that could signal more worrisome financial problems heading into the general election

As the story notes, there are a combination of likely factors here.

1) The economy sucks. I donated $1,000 to candidate Obama in 2008, but I don't have any extra money to give to anyone at this point.

2) A lot of people are happy-er with the President than they were the first two-years-plus of his presidency, but no one is singing "Yes We Can" this time around. The bloom is off the rose, partly through attrition and partly because President Obama seemed less willing to fight for the presidency after he got it, and it soured a lot of people on the man. And once people start questioning who you are as a person, it's difficult to ever win them back completely.  That's not to say you can't win the back sufficiently to vote for you again, to support you, to defend you, but I'm not sure you can ever recapture the love once it's lost.

I think the President made a mistake, during the campaign and after the election.  He doesn't seem to relish maintaining relationships, at least political ones.  I know a number of people, who far outrank me in importance, who did some seriously heavy lifting during the campaign and felt it was never truly appreciated.  The same feeling, and concern, has persisted about now-President Obama - the man does not woo.  And that leaves people feeling taken advantage of, in the same way that many Democratic voters, who expected the President to come out swinging for a number of his proposals once elected, felt that many of his legislative efforts, until lately, were only half-hearted.  Failure to fight for a promise; again a failure to woo.

As an aside, when I attended the White House Christmas party in December with my sister Kathy, and granted our encounter with the President and First Lady was all of 8 seconds long, but both my sister and I noticed the same thing.  The President in greeting us was rather meh.  The First Lady came off as vibrant, energetic, fun.  But not him.  She was interested in us personally as fellow Illinoisans, and she left both of us thinking she was beautiful, and wanting to know her better (and she pulled all of that off in under ten seconds).  You shouldn't meet the leader of the free world and leave wanting to share a beer with his wife.

I'm not convinced that the President can't turn this around, and I think he's begun to, by fighting a lot harder for things lately, and a lot harder against the GOP.  But I think the President would have been in a much better stead vis-a-vis voters and donors, and the country would be in a much better position economically, had the turnaround happened sooner.

But he is turning around, and it has been successful to date.  He just needs to keep at it. Read the rest of this post...