Rosie Leaving The View

Rosie O’Donnell announced that she is leaving the daytime television show, The View.

I didn’t always agree with the things she said, but by God, she had the guts to say them. She started many “celebrity feuds” perhaps the most famous with Donald Trump (who deserved the verbal bitch-slapping she gave him). She pounded the Bush administration hard about the war in Iraq (also well-deserved).

She is a big, outspoken woman who isn’t afraid of controversy. She says things that men who trade in contentious speech have been shouting about on television and talk radio for years.

She is a “bad girl” in a good way, because her reputation is not earned from appearing drunk in public or flashing her genitals at photographers, but because she addresses current events with well-informed opinions.

I will miss her.

Supreme Court Abortion Ruling

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A closely divided U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the first nationwide ban on a specific abortion procedure, restricting abortion rights in a ruling on one of the nation's most divisive and politically charged issues.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court rejected two challenges to the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act that
President George W. Bush signed into law in 2003 after its approval by the Republican-led U.S. Congress.

The decision marked the first time the nation's high court has upheld a federal law banning a specific abortion procedure since its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 that women have a basic constitutional right to abortion.

In a defeat for abortion rights advocates, the court's conservative majority with two Bush appointees upheld the law adopted after nine years of hearings and debate. The law has never been enforced because of court challenges.

The majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy rejected arguments the law must be struck down because it imposes an undue burden on a woman's right to abortion, it is too vague or too broad and fails to provide an exception for abortions to protect the health of a pregnant woman.

The court's four most liberal members -- Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens,
David Souter and Stephen Breyer -- dissented.

Ginsburg, who called the decision alarming, took the rare step of reading parts of her dissent from the bench.

"In candor, the Partial Birth Abortion Act and the court's defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court -- and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives," she said.

The upheld law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion when the "entire fetal head" or "any part of the fetal trunk past the navel" is outside the woman's uterus.

The procedure, which often occurs in the second trimester of pregnancy, is known medically as intact dilation and extraction.

The two cases, widely viewed as the most important of the court's 2006-07 term, had been closely watched as tests of whether Bush's two conservative appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, would restrict abortion rights. Both voted to uphold the law.

Roberts and Alito as U.S. Justice Department lawyers in the 1980s and early 1990s opposed the 1973 abortion ruling. Abortion was a central issue in their Senate confirmation hearings, when neither Roberts nor Alito would divulge how he would vote on abortion cases.

Abortion rights advocates who challenged the law denounced the ruling.

"This ruling flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women's health and safety," said Eve Gartner of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

"Today the court took away an important option for doctors who seek to provide the best and safest care to their patients. This ruling tells women that politicians, not doctors, will make their health care decisions for them," she said.

The Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote in 2000 struck down a similar Nebraska law for failing to provide an exception to protect a pregnant woman's health.

But moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who cast the decisive vote in 2000, has retired and was replaced by the more conservative Alito.

SOURCE

My feelings are mixed. The procedure sounds horrible. I am sure the decision to have the procedure is horrible as well. But knowing that the conservative movement pushed for this ban, I fear it could be a first step to outlawing abortions altogether. This would be a very bad move.

Outlawing abortion doesn’t stop it from happening. It just makes it more difficult. Especially for low income women. Wealthy women have always had access to abortions. They could travel to a location where doctors do perform abortions. Or they could persuade *coughbribecough* a doctor that the “health of the mother” clause (which has always been a part of abortion ban law) included their “mental health”. Or they lie and say they were raped.

No, outlawing abortion doesn’t end it, it just puts an additional burden on the poor, who may end up reviving horrible "back-alley abortions" performed with a wire coat hanger, in unsanitary conditions by someone who is not a physician.

Hardly a step forward.

Free Speech

How far does free speech go? When radio shock jock Don Imus, described the Rutgers women's basketball team, on the April 4 Imus in the Morning, as "nappy-headed hos," he packed so many layers of offense into the statement that it was like a perfect little diamond of insult. There was a racial element, a gender element and even a class element (the joke implied that the Scarlet Knights were thuggish and ghetto compared with the Tennessee Lady Vols).

Imus was a famous, rich, old white man picking on a bunch of young, mostly black college women. So it seemed pretty cut-and-dried that his bosses at CBS Radio would suspend his show—half frat party, half political salon for the Beltway elite—for two weeks, and that MSNBC would cancel the TV simulcast. And that Imus would plan to meet with the students he offended. Case closed, justice served, lesson—possibly—learned. Move on.

So where do we draw the line?

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