Does Experience Matter in a President? - TIME
The body part that had no name. A really good blogpost from a Muslim woman who has to explain female circumcision to her kids because they asked. General discussion of female genitalia in social terms.
The Monster: A Loyal Clinton Soldier Turns in His Badge
The number game hurts my head a little. Some pundits say Hillary has NO CHANCE at collecting the required number of delegates, some say it's Obama who should drop [although the majority think the former]. I think it's silly, really, how these two "facts" can't occur. But we shall see. the SUSA poll gives me hope for the general election at least.
Who's a better General Election Candidate?
"But what if, like me, you know that impairment need not be synonymous with "low quality of life" and that the "pain and suffering" we seek to avoid are largely inflicted not by the physicality of the disability itself but by the negative attitudes of others? Does pre-natal screening still feel like logical scientific progress? Something I am happy to buy into to ensure my first-born is top-notch? Or is it just a covert attempt to purify the human race of folk who don't come up to scratch, veiled in the guise of parental choice?"
"There: I'd made the "individual choice" about my reproductive destiny that the pro-choicer in me believes in. I had decided there was no way I would terminate my pregnancy on a positive diagnosis, so finding out if the baby has Down's was rendered obsolete. Like the colour of its eyes, hair, or sex, I'll wait until it comes screaming into the world to find out. It was an easy decision to arrive at, but a much harder debate to depart from. For it is here, where pro-choice feminism collides with disability rights, that my once black-and-white views suddenly become grey and I'm left struggling with the question of whether abortion is always justifiable, after all. The very fact that the choice to screen exists means that the woman can never win. If you terminate, you are left open to the moral scrutiny of pro-lifers. And if you decline screening, as I have, or continue a pregnancy after a positive diagnosis, you are left wide open to a charge of moral culpability, of burdening society with a disabled child. So who, if anyone, is morally culpable here? For me, the answer lies not in pointing fingers but in questioning the perception of disability as synonymous with undesirability.
It's one thing if a woman is not ready for a baby: I stand by her right to choose in that instance. But is it OK to decide you are ready for a baby, get pregnant by choice and then terminate on the grounds not of your ability to be a parent, but of your desire to be a parent to a particular type of child? As science extends our capabilities to detect more and more conditions in the womb, as it inevitably will, I can't help asking if perhaps we should pause to ask if knowledge is always power. Should we have the right to determine who does and who doesn't get to inhabit the world? For, as my own father put it when I told him I wasn't going to screen his grandchild for Down's syndrome, "I'm so glad there wasn't prenatal screening when we were expecting you." If there had been, perhaps the genetically flawed person, the "glimpse of horror" that is me, would never have existed."
source
Not sure if you heard about the FISA bill that, among other things, give the telecom companies immunity from being put on trial for information they give to the government [you know, illegally...]. The Senate passed it a few weeks ago, but good news! The House has more courage than the Senate because they redrafted the bill to take away the immunity clause! [But watch Bush veto this baby, even though he said it would be too dangerous if it didn't pass.] source
