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Hanna, I can't get too hot and bothered about the Choose Life license plates in Virginia either. There's a confusing legal fight over whether these plates like these violate the First Amendment right to free speech, which as Dahlia explained way back in 2003, comes down to this:
To understand the free speech issue, it's important to clarify whether specialty license plates represent government speech or private citizens' speech. Why? Because there is no question that the government may speak in a partisan manner without violating the Constitution. The First Amendment applies only to government efforts to restrict private speech; it doesn't apply back to the state itself. This is why the state is perfectly free to tell you to stay in school, or drive sober, without having to broadcast the opposing viewpoint. States may have preferences for all sorts of messages. But if, on the other hand, the government opens a forum for private speakers—if it creates a park or builds a street where you and I are free to talk—it cannot be in the business of censoring some viewpoints while permitting others. This is the core of the First Amendment.
Lesson: If you don't like the Choose Life message, come up with a pro-choice one of your own to propose to Gov. Kaine and the Virginia legislature. If they nix it, then maybe you have grounds to sue. There's something odd about a government-issued Choose Life plate, but then there's something odd about zipping around with OPNWDE on the back of your car too, as the guys on You Look Nice Today have pointed out.
About the Kansas ultrasound law: It sounds like this one merely requires abortion providers to give women the option of seeing an ultrasound before the procedure. If so, ok. Most clinics do ultrasounds before an abortion anyway, to make sure they know how many weeks along the pregnancy is. Ten other states, by my count, have laws like this one in Kansas, and as Will Saletan has argued in Slate, why should women be shielded from accurate scientific information, which is what an ultrasound is?
But there's another kind of ultrasound law that's quite different in my mind. Under this sort of statute, which is the law in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, the state requires women to review the results of an ultrasound even when the patients expressly say they do not want to. This is creepy and invasive paternalism. The Oklahoma statute went so far as to provide that a woman could avert her eyes from the image on the screen. A law that has to grant such permission doth protest too much. More here.
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Jess, I one-up your post about Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius approving the ultrasound law with this one. Virginia Gov. and DNC Chairman Tim Kaine signed a bill that allows the state to sell "Choose Life" license plates and give some of the revenue over to "crisis pregnancy centers." These centers have always driven pro-choice groups crazy. In their eyes, these are places that draw in innocent pregnant teens and convince them to keep their babies. NARAL, for example, is furious at Kaine. But supporting the centers is not the equivalent of restricting the right to abortion. These are private groups that sprung up to counteract places like Planned Parenthood. Fair play, it seems to me. Secondly, there is a rich irony here in the wrath toward Kaine. A devout Catholic, he was one of the first to show that Democrats too could use their faith to win elections. He became a party hero when he was elected governor in a Southern state in 2005, and paved the way for the party's return. Now when the left realizes he wasn't kidding—he actually IS a Catholic. Well, we can't have that, can we?
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Last week Miss Universe visited Gitmo, and blogged about it here. This is not a joke. I highlighted my favorite bits.
This week, Guantanamo!!! It was an incredible experience.
We arrived in Gitmo on Friday and stared going around the town, everybody knew Crystle and I were coming so the first thing we did was attend a big lunch and then we visited one of the bars they have in the base. We talked about Gitmo and what is was like living there. The next days we had a wonderful time, this truly was a memorable trip! We hung out with the guys from the East Coast and they showed us the boat inside and out, how they work and what they do, we took a ride around the land and it was a loooot of fun!
We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills. All the guys from the Army were amazing with us.
We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting.
We took a ride with the Marines around the land to see the division of Gitmo and Cuba while they were informed us with a little bit of history.
The water in Guantanamo Bay is soooo beautiful! It was unbelievable, we were able to enjoy it for at least an hour. We went to the glass beach, and realized the name of it comes from the little pieces of broken glass from hundred of years ago. It is pretty to see all the colors shining with the sun. That day we met a beautiful lady named Rebeca who does wonders with the glasses from the beach. She creates jewelry with it and of course I bought a necklace from her that will remind me off Guantanamo Bay :)
I didn't want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.
I was back in NY on Wednesday and on Thursday I did some paper work at the office and went out for dinner. On Friday I flew to Miami for the weekend because I had a photo shoot for the magazine People en Espanol. So hopefully I might be a little lucky and have some time off to take the sun for a while :)
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Are the Republicans lining up for their first Obama filibuster? Dawn Johnsen, the president's pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, was supposed to come up for a confirmation vote in the Senate today. Instead, as Scott Horton alerts us, the vote was put on hold. This comes after every Republican on the Senate judiciary committee voted against her, except for Arlen Specter, who abstained. The Office of Legal Counsel is the sensitive branch of DoJ that advises the president on what's legal and what's not--past home to John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and the infamous Bush torture memos. What's at issue in Dawn's nomination—disclosure: She is a former Slate contributor and a friend—is her opposition to that past record and her determination to change it. If the right is going to go after her as they have, then the Obama administration and the left will have to step up in her defense. The NYT ran an editorial supporting her last week; now that seems like the opening drum roll in what will be a longer campaign.
Meanwhile, similar opponents seem to be testing the waters on going after Harold Koh, nominated to be Hillary Clinton's chief legal adviser in the State Department. Disclosure on this one, too: I have a fellowship at Yale Law School this year, where Harold was the dean until he went to D.C. last week for this appointment. The opening salvo against Harold is an attack by former Bush speech writer Meghan Clyne in the New York Post that's full of wild-eyed distortion. Perhaps the silliest but also sensational claim—and thus the one that Clyne leads with—is that Harold thinks that "sharia law could apply to disputes in U.S. courts." This supposedly comes from what one lawyer thinks he heard Dean Koh say to the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007. Honestly, this is the best they can come up with—one guy's account of Islamic takeover after drinks and golf? Let's get behind these lawyers, Obama and the left, and stop the trouble before it really starts.
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Earlier this month, Abby wrote about a Texas bill that would require doctors to give ultrasounds before performing abortions, and now pro-choice Kansas Gov. (and potential Health and Human Services head) Kathleen Sebelius has signed a similar bill into law. According to the New York Times, "The measure, which the governor signed on Friday, requires abortion providers who use ultrasound or monitor fetal heartbeats to give their patients access to the images or sound at least 30 minutes before an abortion."
The Times also quotes Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri CEO Peter Brownlie, who says that the Overland Park location of Planned Parenthood "already allowed women to see ultrasound images, but that few accepted the offer." Somehow I am unmoved by this legislation. I think that most women who are confident in their reproductive choices will not want to see the ultrasound and that giving them the option won't deter them from their conviction. What do you think, Slate women? Is this really a defeat for pro-choicers?
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Newsweek’s big lady-baiting package this week offers a detour from the catfighting between Princeton Nobelist Paul Krugman and the White House (What? You can call it that when boys do it, too!) in order to focus on the creeping “diva-ization” of America’s young women:
Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that's got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of "Toddlers & Tiaras" look ordinary. "My daughter is 8, and she's like, so into this stuff it's unbelievable," says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. "From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities."
Why are this generation's standards different? To start, this is a group that's grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading.
The article’s premise, essentially, is that women will spend a lot of money (see infographic) on things that are judged by enlightened society to be feckless and unnecessary. Yet these imposed norms about beauty get less play than the footage of hens-in-waiting clucking about lip gloss.
Perhaps the sensationalism arises because the pressures on women are so timeless. While gamely revealing her own, er, elaborate, grooming habits, author Jessica Bennett makes the fair point that TV shows like My Super Sweet 16 “raise the bar for what's considered over the top.”
But I don’t think girls are any any more worried about sprouting crow's feet than they used to be. Rather, the 21st century has amplified the traditional idea that appearance can be perfected via externalities. Leaps in technological capacity—regarding both products and the marketing thereof—have increased the pressure on us all. Suddenly, young women can learn where to get liposuction, and Botox (themselves improvements over the Ice Age techniques of never eating and never aging) via text message, or Web advertisement. They can compare themselves to schoolmates and celebrities instantly on Facebook. When I was a 'tween, you had to wait for YM magazine to come in the mail before you felt bad about yourself.
As usual, the immensely talented Sarah Haskins nails the convergence of stupidity and modernity better than I do: “Products that use pictures of science” are clearly the culprit.
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This post comes from Tim Noah, a Slate-ster of the XY variety who has written extensively on health care in the United States, in response to our conversation about Natasha Richardson and socialized medicine:
The Great Debate about whether socialism (in the form of Canada's single-payer health care system) killed actress Natasha Richardson turns largely on the availability of CT scans. In the March 26 New York Post, a stateside physician named Cory Franklin wrote:
Richardson's evaluation required an immediate CT scan for diagnosis-followed by either a complete removal of accumulated blood by a neurosurgeon or a procedure by a trauma surgeon or emergency physician to relieve the pressure and allow her to be transported.
But Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts is a town of 9,000 people. Its hospital doesn't have specialized neurology or trauma services. It hasn't been reported whether the hospital has a CT scanner, but CT scanners are less common in Canada.
Two days later Max Harrold, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, acting on a hunch that at the very least Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts has telephones, phoned the radiology department of the hospital in that remote town to which the actress was taken after she complained of a headache. Do they have a CT scanner? They do.
I take Rachael's point that the United States has almost five times as many MRI machines per person as Canada, and about 1.5 times as many CT scanners. But this is not an unmixed blessing. In her excellent book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, Shannon Brownlee writes, "In cases involving a head injury, giving a patient an unnecessary CT can be almost as bad as not ordering a test and missing a brain bleed" because a CT scan can render a false negative and/or cause unnecessary delay in treatment. A common complaint about contemporary medicine is that doctors are so fretful about malpractice lawsuits and so enamored of medical technology generally that they over-rely on high-tech imaging at the expense of more reliable diagnostic methods. British doctor/blogger John Crippen writes:
These days, and particularly in the medico-legal climate prevalent in North America, it would be a brave doctor indeed who did not wait for the CT scan before drilling the burr holes. It would be a career making or career breaking decision. Few American doctors are brave. Defensive medicine is the order of the day. You cannot have a migraine in the USA without someone ordering an MRI scan.
Had this accident happened at base camp on Everest in a helicopter-blocking snowstorm, a doctor would likely have drilled. Had this accident happened in a ski resort forty years ago, before CT Scanners had been invented, a doctor would likely have drilled. Then a subdural/epidural haemorrhage was a clinical diagnosis. Apparently minor head injury, lucid interval, headache, sudden deterioration in consciousness, a dilated pupil ... all adds up to an obvious diagnosis.
Medical technology has deskilled doctors.
Also, she really should have worn a helmet.
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Here's my culture question of the week: Is it possible to put on a good production of Hedda Gabler in an era when women have so many choices available to them? Hedda, after all, is one of Ibsen's great female characters, a restless housewife with an existential streak; she roams the rooms of her villa wondering how to achieve freedom. (A much more interesting version of the Betty character on Mad Men.)
I ask because on Saturday I saw the Roundabout Theater Company's new production of Hedda Gabler, starring Mary-Louise Parker. And I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since, because Parker's interpretation of Hedda is at once incoherent and fascinating. She plays Hedda with a detached, ironic anomie that illuminates the play's dry humor but makes it hard to understand the character's motivations (particularly her choice at the very end of the play). Afterward, I was reading about the play on the Web and saw that David Edelstein asks a version of this question is his sharp New York review of the Parker production. He's on to something interesting: Today, I think, contemporary movies, plays, and art are much more likely to depict trapped women in one of two distinct ways: Either they are trapped by social circumstances, trapped in a non-progressive society (think Betty in Mad Men) or they suffer from some existential ennui. (Think, I don't know, something like 4.48 Psychose.) But you rarely see a female character in which these two issues are blended together... Or do you? In any case, I think it gets to part of what makes Hedda so difficult to produce today.
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Eve,
It makes me uncomfortable when individual medical cases become fodder for national debate, from Terri Schiavo to Natasha Richardson. It seems macabre to turn a family's private grief into a public debate. But since you brought it up ...
You make a valid point about helicopters: They are perhaps overused here. I certainly wouldn't want to use one in the event of non-life-threatening injuries.
But I had a different takeaway about what makes Natasha Richardson's death the fault of socialized medicine. The New York Post's article on this matter suggested that the first hospital that Richardson went to might not have had a CT scanner and that by the time she got to a hospital with one, it was too late. This blog post says that she did have a CT scan at the local hospital, but that she wasn't transferred to a larger hospital with a trauma center for another three hours.
Either way, it sent me a-Googling for numbers comparing the United States with Canada. During a conversation with a friend who'd just had an MRI, my friend told me that the MRI tech had told her there are more MRI scanners in Orange County, Calif., than there are in Canada. If that's inadmissible as hearsay, there is this: Canada in 2007 had 419 CT scanners and 222 MRI scanners. We have more than 10,000 MRI scanners in the United States and more than 6,000 CT scanners. Even if you account for the population difference (33 million people in Canada vs. 300 million in the United States), this country is outfitted better with high-tech life-saving medical equipment.
Did socialized medicine kill Natasha Richardson? I don't think we can say one way or the other, and I hope that her family is able to ignore the hubbub and grieve in peace. Health care in this country is far from perfect. But even with all the problems we have, this is just one reason that I'll take my chances in the United States over Canada any day.
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For months, or maybe it's years by now, critics of the Bush administration's wrong turn into torture have been musing that the officials behind it might soon be forced to stop traveling abroad. Behind this fond hope or fear, depending on where you stand, lies the threat of prosecution abroad for war crimes. And now the Spanish may oblige, courtesy of prosecutor Baltasar Garzon, who made his name going after Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Garzon’s list of six high-level American officials is in line with much of the reporting, including ours at Slate, on who knew about and approved coercive interrogation—Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Jay Bybee, Doug Feith, and John Yoo. You can’t fault the Spanish for settling for the low-level bad apples, as the Abu Ghraib prosecutions here in the United States did. Though missing from the list are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush—suggesting that Garzon is bold, but not crazy bold.
Losing the freedom to travel abroad isn’t the more serious curtailment of freedom that some critics of the administration might wish upon these men. But it’s not nothing, either. It’s an embarrassment. It pushes these former officials off the world stage—now they’ll have to think twice about defending themselves before a European audience, even if they want to. The threat of prosecution is also, of course, a challenge to American dominance. At home, it will fuel the criticism of international treaties and institutions that in any way purport to give foreign courts jurisdiction over Americans. Abroad, this news from Spain is of a piece with international defiance of the United States over the financial crisis leading into the Group of 20 meeting this week. How has the United States lost its moral authority abroad? Let us count the ways.
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Pixies bassist, Breeders front woman, former high-school cheerleader and all-around indie rock icon Kim Deal was on NPR's Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me yesterday morning, because the show was broadcasting out of her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Superficially, Kim is a cautionary tale: She is a seminal figure in indie rock who even had a good deal of commercial success with the Breeders in the early '90s, only to struggle with drug and alcohol addiction and end up living with her parents back in Ohio. But listening to her girlish Midwestern twang on the radio yesterday, it's clear that Kim is not some pathetic example. She charmingly answered questions about squid sex and seemed in general good spirits. It's more proof that Cool as Kim Deal is a state of mind and not about the trappings of rock stardom. For you '90s-rock aficionados, here's a clip of the Breeders' biggest hit, "Cannonball."
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During the brief period when I wanted to be a photographer, Helen Levitt, who died Sunday, was my muse. She was the slightly underappreciated member of the great '40s generation of photographers; profiles always mention that she was "friends" with James Agee and Walker Evans, as if she couldn't stand alone. She always said, girlishly, that she was too shy and tech-phobic to be a photojournalist, although that's essentially what she was. She roamed the poorer neighborhoods of New York and captured what I always think of as the theater of hanging out. She loved to photograph people on the stoop wearing exaggerated expressions—crying or laughing so hard they look like they're faking it. Often "props" appear in her photos—a cardboard cutout of the president or a strange figure drawn on the street in chalk. Her many photos of children had none of the poster cuteness of Henri Cartier-Bresson's—something I imagine she tried hard to avoid because she was a woman. The effect is of New York as one giant improv, with a huge cast of characters, human and otherwise, and alternating moments of hilarity and grimness.
One thing she did better than any of the male masters is transition to color photography. Her contemporaries seemed scared off by bursts of street color they couldn't control but she just got better and better. In every photo in her book, Slide Show, it's hard to believe she didn't place that red balloon or those aqua shorts just so, but of course she never did. Unlike the men, she was happy to submit to the randomness.