revision99

I don’t want to be sucked into an endless war.

I’m referring to the social and political divide in the United States that seems to be getting wider every year, and its’ participants - you and me - ever more strident and intolerant. I’m old, and I don’t want to have to fight again for the rights and freedoms that I thought we had won: education, opportunity, privacy.

I don’t want to fight, but I am cornered.

As I wrote yesterday, the Supreme Court has shifted far to the right, and is getting ready to have another look at law which they have already declared unconstitutional by a one-vote majority. The factors are:

• The law in question bans many mid- to late-term abortions.
• A moderate justice - a woman - and a conservative justice have been replaced by two conservative guys, one of them them an outspoken critic of abortion rights, and…
• The Supreme Court answers to no one.

We have to hope that the lawyers arguing in favor of a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own reproductive system are smart, dedicated, well-researched and lucky. Even then we must face the reality that this Court has been stacked specifically to take away this hard-won right, the right to a safe abortion if that is your choice. My opinion is that this process will begin now.

The court is primed to say that abortion is illegal, but the upcoming decision won’t be the last word. It will only be one of many skirmishes that have been fought over this turf in recent years. The case the Court has decided to hear affects only a small percentage of medical situations that might involve abortion, so it will not be the end of the war.

But it will be a chip taken out of our rights, and the forces that support this move will then go on to the next level, and the next, until they have returned this country to the barbarian days of back-alley coat-hanger abortions and government intrusion into the most private areas of our lives.

Or until they are stopped.

Most opponents of abortion rights are sincere, and I respect them for acting on their beliefs, working for decades and electing guys like Bush, who has appointed guys like Roberts and Alito, who have passed the right-wing abortion litmus test. I respect them, but I have to oppose them.

I’m not sure if anything can be done about the case in question. We closed our eyes for a moments’ rest, and when we woke up, Howdy Doody was president and the Supreme Court was packed. Our bad.

The Court will do what it wants this time, but let’s get started now reversing the drift to the right that has led to this state of affairs. Letters to your elected representatives in Washington are helpful in the long run, even if they don’t seem to have any effect today or tomorrow.

And we have to be thinking about the long run. Today, for example, the state of South Dakota passed a law effectively banning all abortions. This law will be fought all the way to the Supreme Court. It will take years, but when it gets there, don’t you want everyone in Washington to know unequivocally where you stand? Do you want to take the chance that Bush (or someone like him) will have appointed another right-wing fundamental idealogue to the Court?

The majority of Americans favor a woman’s right to choose, and lawmakers need to hear this, so they will know how we want them to vote on future laws that are proposed, so they will stand up and support moderate court appointees and so they will propose legislation that protects our precious rights. Right now all they are hearing is the anti- point of view.

We must educate ourselves on this issue, and not assume that our rights are safe, because hey, they’re not! Not all of us can take it to the streets, not all of us can run for office, not all of us can afford to donate money, but everyone who wants to can do something. If you want to see what action you can take you might want to start here.

This is not just about abortion. Women and men struggled through much of the twentieth century to achieve a just level of personal privacy and freedom. The tolerance expressed in the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision came about as a result of the battle for those rights and freedoms. Now those rights and freedoms are threatened again. We must read, learn, educate, demonstrate, donate and agitate to create an environment in which no president, no legislator, and no judge will ever again be able to consider revoking them.

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UPDATE: For more horrifying Supreme Court shenannigans, see this article posted today by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

This is not a political blog.

Seriously, I have written in the past about how I don’t want to focus on politics here. But I am interested in politics, and it’s hard for me to ignore certain events, when theory intersects with reality. Like today, for example.

The New Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case based on the Federal law prohibiting mid-term and late-term abortions, called by opponents “partial birth abortions.” What’s interesting about this is that the Old Supreme Court struck down an identical Nebraska law five years ago, and has since declined to hear any cases on the subject. The reason they struck down the law in the first place is that it made no exception for protecting the health of the mother, thus the government could have used it to force pregnant women and girls to risk their lives. The vote was five to four, with Sandra Day O’Conner voting in the majority. In any case, you’d think that would be that, and the Supremes would start looking around for other constitutional issues to consider.

But now John Roberts is in charge and setting the Court’s agenda, and Samuel Alito has replaced Sandra Day O’Conner. Roberts has agreed to revisit the Court’s position on a law that has been unconstitutional for the past five years, and I don’t think there’s much doubt how he and Alito will vote next year when this comes before the Court. After all, Alito is on record as saying that the landmark Roe v. Wade is bad law, and that it can be reversed by chipping away at it a little bit at a time. What a perfect opportunity for him to strike the first blow.

When Al Gore ran for President, and when John Kerry ran for President, we could have done something. We could have voted instead of staying home. Only a few popular votes would have made a difference. But in 2000 we were apparently overwhelmed by the evildoing of President Clinton, and by 2004 we were terribly frightened, so in both cases we had to elect the honorable and brave George W. Bush.

So Bush appointed these new guys, and there’s nothing we can do about them. They don’t have to pay any attention to what we want. Letter-writing and threatening to vote against them is useless, since they are not elected. Even throwing out the bums who appointed them won’t make any difference, since they have been appointed for life. They get to stay, for about thirty more years. We have to let them hear the case, deliberate, and vote on it, while we do what we seem to do best: Sit on our hands.

If Alito’s stated agenda of reversing abortion rights in this country a little bit at a time is successful, I think I’ll go into the abortion business. I’m not a doctor, but then if I were, I wouldn’t be allowed to perform abortions in our fundamentalist conservative future. I have a nice supply of coat hangers, sterilized with rum and a Bic lighter, so I think I’m qualified.

God forbid your little girl ever needs this service. If you’re wealthy, of course, you’ll always have access to safe, legal abortions overseas. If you’re not, get ready to send me your daughters.

Next: What can we do?

This is the new home of revision99, and thank you for coming to look.

It’s my own domain (revision99) and it lives on my own web host (1&1 Internet - see the sidebar). The software that powers it is WordPress (a very cool open-source program) and this theme, or template, is called Letterhead and was designed by Robin Hastings.

I’ve brought most of the stuff over from the old blog - all the posts and all your comments, as well as my blogroll. Not everything is ready for prime time yet, but the whole thing should be usable right now.

I hate to give up the community of Blogger - there was always a chance I’d make a new friend by way of the “Next Blog” button - but in fact I was losing readers and getting more isolated as the months went by, so maybe it’s for the better that I hide out here. Now my blog can go back to being what it was when I first started it: a journal of my thoughts, written by me for me. (Realistically, let’s face it: This blog probably won’t change very much.) I warn you, though: I intend to keep in touch with those blogs I’ve been reading on Blogger and elsewhere, and I hope you will stay in touch with me here.

I’m still learning the ropes, and I’d appreciate a heads up from any of you who find technical difficulties. I have a lot more control here over the way things work, but I don’t know for sure if I’ve set it up as trouble-free as the old Blogger site, so please let me know in a comment or email if you discover any problems.

I won’t get into the geektalk right now. There wil be plenty of that in the future (sorry, I can’t help myself). As always, my wistful heart sees you in its dreams.

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED. SEE BELOW.

Holy shit, Dick Cheney has actually shot a guy.

That’s right, the Vice President sprayed a fellow quail hunter yesterday with shotgun pellets at a range of thirty yards. The shot hit Harry Whittington in the face, neck and chest, and he’s in the ICU at a hospital in Texas.

For some reason, the Vice President’s office didn’t announce this when it happened on Saturday morning, and in fact didn’t bring it up publicly for a whole day - after the shooting was reported on the web site of the local paper. They say they wanted to wait until Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the ranch where this took place had a chance to make the announcement herself, but of course I think otherwise.

I think Cheney has finally gone over the Rambo wall and is sending a message to Scooter Libby, Joe Wilson, Mike Brown(ie) and any other chickenshit “whistleblowers” that may be out there: “I might be the Number Two man in D.C., but I’m the baddest Dick in America and if you fuck with me I’m goan take you down.”

Nobody really knows how many heart attacks the guy has actually had. He may not have that long to live, and he may want to take a few scaredy-cat, anti-American, fetus-killing tax-and-spend liberals with him. Of course, the guy he shot is a millionaire Texas Republican lawyer, but I’m just sayin’ “watch your back.”

Can you imagine what poor Karl Rove is going through right now? I sure wish I could have been there when he got this news.

• The administration’s poll numbers are down in almost every category, and most of them are below 50% approval.
• Hurricane Katrina won’t go away.
• Michael Brown has developed political rabies and turned into a vicious, snarling beagle.
• The lapdog New York Times ratted them out on the court-free domestic spying.
• Libby’s indicted.
• Social Security “reform” is dead.
• Delay’s indicted.
• Republicans are slipping and sliding up and down K Street on Jack Abramoff’s grease.
• The “war on terror” and the occupation of Iraq are going badly and getting damned unpopular.
• Even Rove himself remains under investigation by the bulldog prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

It must be hectic to spin all this stuff every day so that it looks like it was exactly what they had planned and that it really is a good thing for America and Freedom. Now this.

“Cheney did what!? Was it self defense? Please tell me it was self defense. Can we say it was self defense? I want every doctor in Texas at that guy’s bedside, and no photographers. Oh, shit, what’s his face look like? Never mind, I don’t want to know. OK look. Here’s our story. The guy circled around - he might have been drinking - and he came up behind Cheney - no, he snuck up behind. He didn’t follow hunter’s protocol, he didn’t announce himself, it was his own fault. Get him to make a statement to that effect. It was his own fault.

“And God damn it, I don’t want to see pictures in the Times of Cheney laughing and holding up a bloody quail by the feet.”

UPDATE, WEDNESDAY, FEB. 15, 2006: OK, it was funny for a minute, even though we all knew the joke was on poor Harry Whittington. But the party’s over, and I am ashamed of myself for making light of it. Whittington is in much worse condition than I knew. Some of the shot has worked it’s way inside, near his heart, and he’s had a heart attack and been returned to intensive care, where they intend to keep him for another week.

Cheney did not go public with this story for somewhere between 18 and 22 hours. The White House is acting like they didn’t have the full story for that long. Plus, they have been trying to make like Whittington himself is to blame for not “announcing his presence.” This is bullshit, of course.

Why the long delay? Is it because Cheney was drunk? Where is the police report? Or is this just another example of Cheney and the rest of his arrogant gang withholding information from the public, simply because they can?

Every hunter will tell you that the shooter is always the one responsible. When you fire, you have to know where everyone is. If you shoot someone, it’s your fault, end of story. At the very least, the Vice President should grow some balls, stand up, admit he made a stupid mistake and apologize to Whittington and his family publicly.

This is a case of criminal negligence. Fat chance there will be any prosecution, but at least Cheney should be man enough to take the blame. He will finally break his silence on television today at 6 PM Eastern time.

Surprise: He has chosen Fox News as the venue.

I wrote in my previous post that it may be possible to take back our country,

but that it would be necessary for everyone to help in the effort. Shephard suggested that I produce a list of whom to contact if you want to try and make a difference. So here’s the deal.

Everyone has to participate. You have to learn about the issues, and you have to vote. You can educate yourself on the internet (you’re already on the internet, right?) and also just by reading the paper and listening to news on the radio. Note that you will have to filter what you read and hear, but the only way to get good at that is to do it. It may take some time, but if we don’t get involved in what’s happening to the world we deserve what we get. For example, we have only ourselves to blame for the current administration in Washington. These guys won on the slimmest of electoral margins, while many of us stayed home. What if we had all voted?

In between elections you have to challenge politicians who do bad things. You can do this by taking part in demonstrations and by writing to your elected representatives and to newspapers. It’s important to make your voice heard on the issues that matter to you. How else can our elected officials know how we want them to act?

To summarize:

• Learn what’s happening to your world.
• Stand up and be counted in public ways. Don’t be afraid. Get some shit on your Permanent Record.
• Tell your representatives what you think (write to them).
• Tell everybody what you think (write letters to the editor).
• Vote. The Republican strategy has been to make you stay home on election day. They are not the majority, but they can win if we fail to oppose them at the polls.

Here are a few resources:

• Project Vote Smart. Type in your zip code at this site and get a list of all your elected representatives, including links to their web sites so you can get their addresses and write to them.
• The Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington used to be conservative, now she’s liberal. This is the direction everybody goes when they learn what’s happening in the real world. No matter - her site provides a forum for writers, artists, observers, politicians and pundits of all stripes, from centrist to leftist. You get to talk back to all of them.
• Donkey Rising. Also known as EDM, or The Emerging Democratic Majority. Here you’ll find (centrist) strategy and analysis of just how we will take back the nation. Again, you are able to contribute to the conversation.
• Open Secrets. Who is paying for your government? Follow the money at OpenSecrets.org.
• National Public Radio. Fair and in-depth reporting on news of the day. Read the news or listen online, or find your local affiliate station. There must be a reason the Republicans keep wanting to eliminate their funding.
• Move On. News, inspiration and involvement opportunities. Also, somewhere in there is a guide to writing effective, likely-to-be-published letters to the editor. (Someone let me know when you find it, OK?)
• TruthDig. This is where Robert Scheer went when the LA Times fired him for being too liberal. An interactive site featuring news, commentary and videos “…for people actively seeking to understand the world…”

Obviously this list is not exhaustive, nor is the Right represented at all (they do a fine job of that themselves). Not only that, but some of this stuff is hard reading. If we’d been paying attention for the past two decades this wouldn’t be necessary. But if you are concerned about the future, get started!

This is not a time to be timid. We can’t afford to lay low and keep out of sight. But we can improve things if we all take part. We haven’t come this far only to have Big Oil take over the government, strip us of our human and civil rights and send us off to Permanent War. If you’re afraid now, how will you feel when The Patriot Act is made permanent and the Supreme Court declares that anything is legal if the President says it is?

A groundswell is beginning. See the wave. Be the wave.