Because rape isn’t traumatic enough

Unbelievable. A woman goes to the police to report a rape – and is arrested herself because of a paperwork glitch dating from when she was a minor.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, she was denied emergency contraception because her jailers considered that “against their religion.”

“They were more interested in prosecuting her for something that’s a paperwork snafu from four years ago, that was juvenile. They were more interested in working on that than finding an experienced rapist,” stated the victim’s mother.

Still, the woman was put in handcuffs and taken to jail. She was not allowed bond, and the medical staff at the jail refused to give her the Morning After Pill even though it had been prescribed at the hospital.

“The medical supervisor would not allow her to take the pill because she said it was against her, the supervisor’s, religion. So, here we have a medical supervisor imposing her beliefs on a rape victim,” claimed the victim’s attorney Virlyn Moore. “As a human being, how someone could be so violated by this monster and then the system comes along and rapes her again psychologically and emotionally – it’s outrageous and unconscionable.”

I don’t even know where to begin, this is abominable beyond belief. The medical staff at the jail needs to lose its job. Now. Do your job, without judgment and prejudice, or GTFO. At this point I’d prefer the latter.
Raped by the system indeed. I hope the local sherrif’s campain opposition is taking notes for the next election cycle – what if that were your wife or daughter?

Feministing.com

The young woman was arrested on a Saturday, and wasn’t able to leave jail until Monday afternoon. After being raped. Just sit on that one for a while. Unbelievable.

The Reaction

I am not making this shit up. Planned Parenthood has a page where you can write and send an email to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

Feminists to the Rescue

I am so happy that another woman could spend the night in jail for being a rape victim while her rapist runs free.

ROFL

This

is so British Boarding School it makes me smile.

Actually I’m kind of surprised Italian boys didn’t think of it first…

Biting back

This is good.  A teen, sued by the music industry, sues back.

A New York teen, dubbed a pirate by the Record Industry, is counter suing them for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

In papers responding to a lawsuit filed by five record companies, Robert Santangelo, who was 11 when he is supposed to have downloaded music, has come out fighting. He denies sharing music using P2P technology and says it’s impossible for the record companies to prove that that he did.

Robert Santangelo and his lawyer, Jordan Glass, have raised 32 defences against the music industry’s charges. Amongst Robert’s defence is the information that all the music that it was claimed he downloaded he already owned on shop bought CDs.

Smart kid, and I hope he the industry gets it’s collective butt handed to it.  The music industry is facing the same pressures, philosophically at least, as the print media.  It can adapt or die.  Look at what they did with Napster – potentially the greatest marketing tool ever invented.  But alas.

Count me underwhelmed

Oh goody.

Comedian and radio talk show host Al Franken has begun calling Democratic members of Congress and prominent DFLers to tell them he will definitely challenge Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008.

The best the DFL can come up with is a boorish, vulgar clown?

Shoot me now.

Still getting it wrong

Of course, making things right – to the extent possible – would be admitting error so of course Bush and Co. can’t do that.

I don’t like to use the word “evil” casually, but I don’t know what else can be said about stuff like this.

Chinese Uighurs who have been imprisoned for the past month at a new state-of-the-art detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are being held around the clock in near-total isolation, a circumstance their lawyers say is rapidly degrading their mental health, according to an affidavit filed in federal court yesterday….

The Uighurs’ (pronounced weegurs) detention by the U.S. military, after being sold for bounty by Pakistanis in early 2002, has long attracted controversy. The men had just arrived from Afghanistan, where, they said, they had received limited military training because they opposed Chinese government control of their native region. But they said they never were allied with the Taliban or opposed to the United States, and had fled to Pakistan only to escape the U.S. bombing campaign.

Obsidian Wings:

These men were captured by bounty hunters nearly five years ago. They are in all likelihood innocent of any crime, and of any act against the United States; they have certainly never been tried and convicted of any. We have held them in captivity since then, away from their wives and families. If they returned home now, their children probably wouldn’t recognize them – and as those of you who have kids will surely recognize, those are some of the saddest words there are.

HT: Sullivan who observes: Hey, they’re terrorists. Because … er … we say so.

Mike Gallagher is an ass

Why does this right wingnut radio host hate America?

Seeing Jane Fonda Saturday was enough to make me wish the unthinkable: it will take another terror attack on American soil in order to render these left-leaning crazies irrelevant again. Remember how quiet they were after 9/11? No one dared take them seriously. It was the United States against the terrorist world, just like it should be.

Hat tip: Atrios 

Spoiling or saving?

Interesting piece at DKOS compares the “Green” spoiler effect that gave us President Bush, to the libertarian spoilers that gave us a Democratic Congress in 2006.

Missouri Senate

McCaskill (D) 1,047,049  50
Talent (R)    1,001,238  47
Gilmour (L)      47,504   2

Montana Senate

Tester (D)      198,302  49
Burns (R)       195,455  48
Jones (L)        10,324   3

Democracy or ethnic cleansing?

OMFH. Tell me again WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BE ACCOMPLISHING?

The soul of conservatism

Great piece by Glenn Greenwald on the state of conservatism, both in general and regarding Sullivan’s new book.

Read it.

But did they have hairy feet?

Cool!

The tiny skeletal remains of human “Hobbits” found on an Indonesian island belong to a completely new branch of our family tree, a study has found.

The finds caused a sensation when they were announced to the world in 2004.

HT:  The Reaction

At war with modernity

The Telegraph reports on increasing Islamist tendencies among the younger generation of Muslims in Britain.

It’s not pretty.

Forty per cent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 said they would prefer to live under sharia law in Britain, a legal system based on the teachings of the Koran. The figure among over-55s, in contrast, was only 17 per cent.

In some countries, people found guilty under sharia law face penalties such as beheading, stoning, the severing of a hand or being lashed.

My friend Michael van den Galien observes:

It has to be noted that the organization which conducted this study is a right-wing think-tank called Policy Exchange. For those who have a hard time believing this high percentage and / or who automatically want to dismiss everything published by a ‘right-wing think-tank’ there is this: months ago I reported for what was then my blog, Liberty and Justice, that the Dutch secret service conducted a similar study. The result? 40% of Moroccon-Dutch youth believes that democracy is incompatible with Islam.

Europe has bent over backwards to be accomodating, but at some point lines must be drawn.  Is there no responsibility for assimilation among those who immigrate?  If you don’t want to be British, why the hell do you move to Britain?

Michael continues:

How to fight this (development)? For one thing ‘we’ in Europe (it’s not ‘just’ a British problem, it is a European problem) have to keep up the debate about the way Muslim immigrants and their children integrate and participate in our societies. We cannot allow the debate to be silenced by the political correct crowd. They have made themselves, regarding immigration and integration at least, irrelevant. They’ve had their way for decades, and today we can witness the disastrous results of those ways.

He has some good ideas – including some things that from a civil liberties standpoint would make Americans cringe, but the situation in Europe is, by some measures, dire.  I  can appreciate their situation if not always the methodology.

Other voices:

Vox Popoli:

The Spanish defeated Islam in their country by forcibly evicting the Moriscos, creating the Inquisition to locate conversos who feigned the abandonment of their previous loyalties and maintaining a strong barrier against Muslim entry. They did not invade the Iraq or Morocco and attempt to turn the culture into a neo-Spanish one. The historical strategy worked and kept Islam in check for centuries. The democratization strategy already shows signs of massive failure after less than four years.

Pigilito Says:

His call to end overt displays of other cultures goes too far, in my opinion, but otherwise he hits the mark with his essay.

The iWitness

This idea of holding onto one’s roots and values is obviously not unique to Muslims, many third/fourth generation immigrants go through similar experiences. With all eyes on you, its hard to fade into the background, go unnoticed – you’re different and you know it, so why not embrace the only thing you really identify with?

The main issue taken up by a lot of papers was the clear difference between opinions of the older and younger generations. Anyone who knows must realise that the effort put into ‘fitting in’ and ‘not making a fuss’ was astonishing amongst the first generation of Muslims in this country. As times have changed, so have attitudes. Perhaps the new generation have taken a certain British attitude and taken a stand for what they believe in and are willing to shout it off rooftops.

Augean Stables:

My reaction to this data, in addition to still greater alarm than is my wont, is to wonder what these youth have in mind? There’s no way they’ll be happy in a Sharia state, and if they want to try one out, they can always move to Saudi Arabia or maybe parts of Sudan or Nigeria to get a sense of it. But I strongly suspect they don’t want that. For them Sharia is women wearing veils (74% of the youth want that), women not marrying non-Muslims (56%), and being able to threaten dissidents (37% agree that apostates from Islam deserve death). For them, I suspect, the appeal is the nihilism of destroying a society that makes them (as individuals and as a group) feel inferior, the instinct for destruction that fills with hope the breast of he who has been denied honor.

All hail mighty shrubya

Is this what people had in mind by “responsible government?”

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats.

I thought the dangers of political hacks running too much in Washington was a lesson learned back in the Garfield administration.

Apparently Bush doesn’t read much history…

The anti-Bush

Greenwald presents Bush and offers a contrast:

The view of America as advocated by George Bush and his followers is as antithetical as can be even to the views of the individuals to whom they claim allegiance. They exploit historical events and iconic individuals as tawdry props, and they neither understand them nor actually care about their meaning. They turn them into cheap cartoons — Churchill! Lincoln! America! — drained of their actual substance and converted into impoverished, degraded symbols used to promote ideas that are the exact opposite of what they actually embody.

Churchill accomplished exactly that which Bush cannot manage — namely, he convinced his country that the war he was leading was legitimate and necessary and that confidence in his war leadership was warranted. It’s precisely because Bush is incapable of achieving that that he and his followers are now insisting that democratic debate itself over the Leader and the war is illegitimate and unpatriotic. One can call that many things. “Churchillian” isn’t one of them. Nor, for that matter, is “American.”

Karma

Minnesota fans know exactly what I’m talking about.

The mother of four of former NBA star Latrell Sprewell’s children sued him for $200 million Monday, alleging Sprewell broke their long-term cohabitation deal and roughed her up last month in their Westchester County home.

Deodorizing the permenantly smelly

The execrable Dinesh D’Souza takes to the opinion pages of the Washington Post attempting to defend his latest atrocity. He begins:

As a conservative author, I’m used to a little controversy. Even so, the reaction to my new book, “The Enemy at Home,” has felt, well, a little hysterical.

Curious words, since his mangum opus, such as it is, has come under nearly universal condemnation even on the right. When Powerline isn’t in your corner, who’s left?

David Schraub has perhaps the best summary:

When the US tries to act like the beacon of liberty we were founded to be, there is a backlash. Solution: Stop supporting liberty. D’Souza can twist and turn all he wants, but that is the nut of his thesis.

Even as the cultural left accuses Bush of imperialism in invading Iraq, it deflects attention from its own cultural imperialism aimed at secularizing Muslim society and undermining its patriarchal and traditional values.

Undermining patriarchy? Say it ain’t so! Again, the argument from D’Souza is clear: America’s conception of liberty (including, we now know, opposition to patriarchy) is exported around the world. Traditional Muslims don’t like this. Hence, the US needs to reassert patriarchal values here. I.e., capitulate.

When D’Souza says that Muslims don’t hate us for our freedoms, he may be right. But one thing is clear: D’Souza does hate us for our freedoms. And his book is a not-so-subtle call for eliminating them.

The Carpetbagger Report shines as well.