1. Most commonly, they ingest a whole bottle of quinine pills, with castor oil...we try to get them to the ER before their cardiac rhythm is interrupted...

Sometimes they douche with very caustic products like bleach. We had a patient, a teen, who burned herself so badly with bleach that we couldn't even examine her, her vaginal tissue was so painful....

2. Our local hospital tells me they see 12-20 patients per year, who have already self-induced or had illegal abortions. Some make it, some don't. They are underage or poor women mostly, and a few daughters of pro-life families...

If you assume the quotes above come from a veteran of the abortion rights movement, talking about the "bad old days" before Roe v. Wade, when desperate women suffered death and injuries because abortion was illegal, you'd be partly right.

The speaker is a longtime worker in reproductive health, whose involvement with abortion started before Roe. But the situations she describes are occurring now.   more »

The Palestinian people have been searching for peace since World War One when they were colonized by the victorious British.

The British decided to give Palestine to European Jews to establish a state of their own. In 1947 the United Nations adopted a partition plan to establish two states living side by side. Arab regimes did not accept the plan and Israel established itself unilaterally in the war of 1948.

The Palestinian people have never had a vehicle or a political mechanism to assert their self-determination or exert a political will independent of the Arab states.

Palestinian Prime Minister, Ahmad Qureia, recognized the importance of this election and said that it inaugurated a new era in Palestinian history.

Hamas is a radical Islamist movement which is designated as a terrorist group by the US and EU It has not has refused to renounce the armed struggle against Israel.

Hamas has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and has pledged itself to the destruction of the state of Israel. But Hamas has basically followed the model established earlier by Ben Gurion and the founders of Israel.

Respecting the sanctity of the lives of non-combatant civilians is a recent concept. The United States showed no such respect in its war in Vietnam.

Every war has always targeted civilians indiscriminately and the term “terrorist” has been applied by one party to a conflict in order to dehumanize the other party.   more »

Or, when in trouble, raise the specter of 9/11, mention terror, terrorist and terrorism as often as possible to get the knee-jerk, conditioned response that the Bush Regime's relentless propaganda has instilled in us. Have you been programmed?

KARL ROVE: PROGRAMMER-IN-CHIEF

Rove stepped up to the lectern at the gathering of the Republican national committee in Washington last Friday to invoke the spectre of 9/11.

Little else matters but that Bush grasps that it changed everything and that Democrats, of course, do not. "We need," Rove said, "a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in."

As Rove spoke, Lewis Paul Bremer III, the former presidential proconsul in Iraq and head of the coalition provisional authority (CPA), was promoting his memoir, My Year in Iraq. "We really did not see the insurgency coming," Bremer told NBC. His arguments for more troops had been rebuffed by Donald Rumsfeld.

Rove's call to the faithful lacks Bremer's specificity. For the political theme to remain vital, recent history must be obliterated. For the moment, Rove appears not as a citizen under suspicion, but the cardinal of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide.   more »

Israel and the United States have said they would not deal with a government led by Hamas, which has carried out dozens of suicide bombings and which they consider a terrorist group. So, what does that mutual disregard mean for the peace process?

What it means is that the peace process is absolutely dead in the water as of this moment.

The Israelis say that they will not talk to Hamas, unless Hamas disarms and recognizes the right of Israel to exist.

Hamas says that it won’t even talk to Israel until Israel makes some concessions on points that we know Israel will never agree to — the return of Palestinian refugees to their original homes, the future of Jerusalem, the release of all Palestinian prisoners — all matters that Israel has already said a definitive “no” to in the past.

And the American position is that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and they won’t talk to them either.

So, right now, you have the two sides in the process — the Israelis and the Palestinians — neither of them talking to each other, and both of them practically refusing to recognize one another. So, the peace process is really dead in the water.   more »

All this while, George Bush gladly represents bible-believing Christianity. Millions of Christians led by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson intercede for him. George Bush claims to make his decisions through prayer.

Supposedly, Christianity’s omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God has an American President representing Him, a President whose every decision should parallel this God’s alleged values of righteousness, justice, wisdom and integrity.

So where is the righteousness, justice, wisdom and integrity in George Bush’s decisions? Read the above list again and show me where these alleged qualities are? Is this the benefit of being “one nation under God?”

Most Christian Bush supporters would rather keep playing church then face these realities. What is on trial in the minds of Americans is not just George Bush, but his God and his brand of Christianity.

Nevertheless, either, Nietzsche was right when he said, “God is dead” or God just plain doesn’t give a fuck! No wonder our founding fathers kept the mention of God out of the Constitution.   more »

The voters decide: Galloway is evicted from 'Big Brother' to face public ridicule. He was voted out in a landslide.

The Respect MP, ridiculed for pretending to be a cat on the show, was chosen for eviction by nearly two-thirds of viewers.

George, 51, was met by a barrage of boos as he left and told host Davina McCall: "I don't normally lose elections and this was a big one."

Earlier, he won a £150,000 libel fight but faces a fraud probe over alleged kickbacks from Saddam Hussein.

A week may be a long time in politics but for George Galloway the bizarre events of the last 21 days could yet account for a whole career.

The elected Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow was voted out of the Celebrity Big Brother house last night with 64.7 per cent of the ballot by a public unimpressed by his brazen-self-confidence.

Despite the cat-calls and jeers a smiling Mr Galloway blew kisses to the crowd as he emerged from the house a political climate distinctly chillier to the one he left when he entered three weeks ago.   more »

Ahmadinejad's declarations, which are seen by many experts here as related at least as much to his domestic political strategy as to his foreign policy worldview, have not only been manna from heaven for neo-conservatives, who have long had Tehran in their gun sights.

They have also stirred very serious concerns among the generally more dovish U.S. Jewish community, whose influence in the Democratic Party has already spurred several leaders, including its presumptive 2008 presidential nominee, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, to attack Pres. George W. Bush for being too complacent about the threat posed by Iran's nuclear programme.

These Democrats argue that the administration must work urgently to get Iran referred by the IAEA to the U.N. Security Council and then put maximum pressure on Russia and China to go along with far-reaching economic and diplomatic sanctions, including a cut-off in supplies of refined gasoline to the country.

Their demands generally echo those of the most powerful Israeli lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In an unprecedented action in November, the group publicly criticised the Bush administration for failing to act more aggressively against Iran. The influential American Jewish Committee (AJC) also announced its own international campaign to impose a global a diplomatic and economic embargo against Iran until it halts its nuclear programme.   more »

25 JANUARY

Black Men on the 'Down-Low': Just Like the Honkies in "Brokeback Mountain"

The Radical/Progressive Left: We've Got to Pull Ourselves Together

Consumer-Crazy China: Devouring the World's Resources

It's Time Maureen Dowd Analyzed The Bush Regime's Chauvinism

US Army in Iraq: Thugs'R'Us

Male Chauvinist Pigs of War

Why the West Will Attack Iran

Hamas & The Rise of Political Islam