[roseviolet]

Kroger responds to denied "morning-after pill" request
"We believe that medication is a private patient matter," said Meghan Glynn, a Kroger spokeswoman. "Our role as a pharmacy operator is to furnish medication in accordance with the doctor's prescription or as requested by a patient."

EXACTLY! Which is why they should require their pharmacists to fill all prescriptions! Ugh.

[pollystyrene]

*wonders whether copying and pasting whole articles then posting onto a message board breaches copyright laws*

Very much so. Another site I post on, a foodie site, won't let people post articles, just links.

[ginger_kitty]

I hate seeing stuff like this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17524722/

Politicians needs to get past, not wanting talk about global warming and start dealing with it. I hate the laissez-fair attitude some people have, 'well we can't stop it'. Way to many people think, it won't affect me, so who cares. Or they aren't properly informed so don't realize what is going on.

[bunnyb]

*wonders if this is the same Michael Schmidt I know*

*wonders whether copying and pasting whole articles then posting onto a message board breaches copyright laws*

[nohope]

THE NEW AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN AFRICA

by Michael Schmidt


AMERICA MUSCLES INTO “FRENCH TERRITORY”

Former colonial power France maintained the largest foreign military presence in Africa since most countries attained sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s. But France reduced its armed presence on the continent by two thirds at the end of the last century, though it continues to intervene in a muscular and controversial fashion. For example, under a 1961 “mutual defence” pact, French forces were allowed to be permanently stationed in Ivory Coast: the 500-strong 43rd Marine Infantry Battalion is based at Port Bouet next to the Abidjan airport.

When the civil war erupted there in September 2002, France added a “stabilisation force”, now numbering some 4,000 under Operation Licorne, which was augmented in 2003 by 1,500 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) “peacekeepers” drawn from Senegal, Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria. In January this year, the United Nations extended the mandate of Operation Licorne until December.

But piggybacking off the French military presence in Africa are a series of new foreign military and policing initiatives by the United States and the European Union. It appears the US has devised a new Monroe Doctrine for Africa (the term has become a synonym for the doctrine of US interventions in what it saw as its Latin American “back yard”).

Under the George W Bush regime’s “War on Terror” doctrine, the US has designated a swathe of territory that curves across the globe from Colombia and Venezuela in South America, through Africa’s Maghreb, Sahara and Sahel regions into the Middle East and Central Asia as the “arc of instability” where both real and supposed terrorists may find refuge and training.

In Africa, which falls under the US military’s European Command (EUCOM), the US has struck agreements with France to share its military bases. For example: there is now a US Marine Corps base in Djibouti at the French base of Camp Lemonier with more than 1,800 Marines stationed there, allegedly for “counter-terrorism” operations in the horn of Africa, the Middle East and East Africa - as well as controlling the Red Sea shipping lanes.

But the US presence involves more than piggybacking off French bases. In 2003, US intelligence operatives began training spies for four unnamed North African countries - believed to be Morocco and Egypt and perhaps also Algeria and Tunisia.

It is also conducting training of the armed forces of countries such as Chad and in September last year, Bush told the United Nations Security Council that the US would, over the next five years, train 40,000 “African peace-keepers” to “preserve justice and order in Africa”. The US Embassy in Pretoria said at the time that the US had already trained 20,000 “peace-keepers” in 12 African countries in the use of “non-lethal equipment”.

And now, while the US is downscaling and dismantling military bases in Germany and South Korea, it is relocating these military resources to Africa and the Middle East in order to “combat terrorism” and “protect oil resources”.

In Africa, new US bases are being built in Djibouti, Uganda, Senegal, and São Tomé & Príncipe. These “jumping-off points” will station small permanent forces, but with the ability to launch major regional military adventures, according to the US-based Associated Press. An existing US base at Entebbe, Uganda, under the one-party regime of US ally Yoweri Museveni, already “covers” East Africa and the Great Lakes region. At Dakar in Senegal, the US is busy upgrading an airfield.



SOUTH AFRICA SECRETLY JOINS THE “WAR ON TERROR”

Governments with whom the US has concluded military pacts include Gabon, Mauritania, Rwanda, Guinea and South Africa. The US also has a “second Guantanamo” in the Indian Ocean where alleged terror suspects kidnapped in Africa, the Middle East or Asia can be detained and interrogated without trial: a detention camp, refuelling point and bomber base situated on the British-colonised Chagos Archipelago island of Diego Garcia, an island from which the indigenous inhabitants were forcibly removed to Mauritius.

In South Africa’s case, while it is unlikely there will ever be US bases established because the strength of the country’s military, the SANDF, makes that unnecessary, in 2005, the country quietly signed on to the US’s Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme which is aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic (read: imperialist) objectives.

South Africa, by signing on to ACOTA as its 13th African member, effectively joined the American “War on Terror”. ACOTA started life as a “humanitarian” programme run by EUCOM out of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1996. After the 9-11 attacks, the Pentagon reorganised ACOTA and gave it more teeth.

Today, its makeup is more obviously aggressive rather than defensive. According to Pierre Abromovici, writing in the July 2004 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique about rumours that South Africa was preparing to sign ACOTA - a full year before it did so - “ACOTA includes offensive training, particularly for regular infantry units and small units modelled on special forces... In Washington, the talk is no longer of non-lethal weapons... the emphasis is on ‘offensive’ co-operation”.

The real nature of ACOTA is perhaps indicated by the career of the man heading it up, Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, “a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 failed US landing in the Bay of Pigs,” Abromovici wrote. “He is also a former special forces officer who served in Vietnam and Laos. During the Reagan era he belonged to the Inter-American Defence Board, and, in the 1960s, he took part in clandestine operations against the Sandanistas. He was accused of involvement in drug-trafficking to fund arms sent to Central America” to prop up pro-Washington right-wing dictatorships.

Clearly, Pino-Marina is a fervent “anti-communist” - whether that means opposing rebellious States or popular insurrections. He also sits on the executive of a strange outfit within the US military called the Cuban-American Military council, which aims at installing itself as the government of Cuba should the US ever achieve a forcible “regime-change” there.

The career of the US ambassador who concluded the ACOTA pact with South Africa is also an indicator of US intentions. Jendayi Fraser, now Bush’s senior advisor on Africa, had no diplomatic experience. Instead, she once served as a politico-military planner with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Department of Defence and as senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council. According to Fraser’s online biography, she “worked on African security issues with the State Department’s international military education training programmes”.



IS THERE A MURDEROUS “SCHOOL OF THE AFRICAS”?

Those programmes include the “Next Generation of African Military Leaders” officers’ course run by the shadowy African Centre for Strategic Studies, based in Washington, which has “chapters” in various African countries including South Africa. The Centre appears to be a sort of “School of the Africas” similar to the infamous “School of the Americas” based at Fort Benning in Georgia. In 2001, it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

Founded in 1946 in Panama, the School of the Americas has trained some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including notorious neo-Nazi Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, infamous Panamanian dictator and drug czar Manuel Noriega, Argentine dictators Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola whose regime murdered 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, numerous death-squad killers, right up to Efrain Vasquez and Ramirez Poveda who staged a failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002.

Over the decades, graduates of the School have murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America, specifically targeting trade union leaders, grassroots activists, students, guerrilla units, and political opponents. The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of Nicaragua in 1980 and the “El Mozote” massacre of 767 villagers in Guatemala in 1981 were committed by graduates of the School. And yet the School of the Americas Watch, an organisation trying to shut WHINSEC down, is on an FBI “anti-terrorism” watch-list.

So Africa should be concerned if the African Centre for Strategic Studies has similar objectives, even if the School of the Americas Watch cannot confirm these fears. And there is more: we’ve all heard of the “Standby Force” being devised by the African Union (AU), a coalition of Africa’s authoritarian neo-liberal regimes. But the AU has also set up, under the patronage of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (which also covers North America, Russia and Central Asia), the African Centre for the Study and Research of Terrorism.

The Centre is based in Algiers, Algeria, at the heart of a murderous regime that has itself “disappeared” some 3,000 people between 1992 and 2003 (according to Amnesty International: equivalent to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, but ignored by the African left). The Centre’s director, Abdelhamid Boubazine told me that it would not only be a think-tank and trainer of “anti-terrorism” judges, but that it would also have teeth, providing training in “specific armed intervention” in support of the continent’s regimes.

Anneli Botha, the senior researcher on terrorism at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said, however, that only 10% of terrorist attacks in Africa were on armed forces, and only 6% on state figures and institutions, though the latter were “focussed”. She warned that a major cause of African terrorism was “a growing void between government and security forces on the one hand and local communities on the other”. Caught in the grip of misery and poverty, many people are recruited into rebel armies, even though few of these offer any sort of real solution.

The Centre in Algiers operates under the AU’s Algiers Convention on Terrorism, which is notoriously vague on what defines terrorism, opening the door for a wide range of non-governmental, protest, grassroots, civic, and militant organisations to be targeted for elimination by the new counter-terrorism forces. It would be naïve to think that bourgeois democracy - which passed South Africa’s equally vaguely-defined Protection of Constitutional Democracy from Terrorism and Other Related Activities Act into law last year - will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.

http://www.zabalaza.net/index02.htm

[missladyj]

Okay okay here's my list so far of the morons who could suck a fart out of my ass :
Ann Coulter,
Paris Hilton
and
Elizabeth Hasselback

I actually wrote a song about how much I hate Ann Coulter, its called Ann Coulter Needs a Cheeseburger.
She is horsey faced, looks like she hasn't had a drink of water in months. Who knows maybe ingesting one of my farts will make her look hydrated.

my favorite line: "Spread your legs for the media bitch!"

[grenadine]

i have a friend whose son was conceived while using one of a bad lot of condoms (the company later recalled all that lot and paid damages to some). he believes he could've gotten a pretty big settlement for that, but it was never even a question in his mind because, as he said, "i would never want my kid to feel he wasn't wanted."

as far as i'm concerned that woman is just part of the self-righteous litigious b.s. that is part of what's wrong with our society. she decided to keep the kid; she could have given it up for adoption. i'm not saying it would be an easy choice, but sometimes choices aren't easy. that's life. it doesn't mean planned parenthood has to pay for your rent for the next 20 years.

[culturehandy]

I never even thought about how that would make the child feel.

[bunnyb]

There was a similar case here a couple of years ago with a woman seeking damages because only one of her twins was successfully aborted. She posed for photos with her surviving daughter and I thought how callous it was to do so and that 12 years later (the girl was 4 y/o) the daughter would ask, "mummy, why did you not want me or my twin?" Like freckle, I'm pro-choice - the offending thing here is not the wanting of an abortion but the publicising of it to their unwanted child, which would probably be damaging to that child.

[freckleface2727]

Article about a woman suing Planned Parenthood for child support after failed abortion.

(cross-posted in CBC thread)

ok, this just sort of gut punched me in the reaction of how is her child going to someday feel?
when she learns that her mother tried not just once but mulitple times to eliminate her?
granted I am a mom, no secret there, but I am also mostly pro-choice/cbc as well and that Still strikes me that way.
I don't think I have the right objectivity to weigh in on the lawsuit aspect of it, bc I can see both sides.
any medical treatment should be done correctly and the patient has every right to expect it so.
however, as I have said from the time of frecklette's (5 yr early according to the "Plan") conception:
'babies come on Their schedule, never ours. we can only adapt and love them regardless.'

the financial compensation yes, to some extent, but I hope above all she is/becomes a good parent bc her child certainly didn't ask to be born into that situation.
=end rant.=

[mouse]

i agree wholeheartedly about hunting. if you hunt for sport but eat what you kill (probably some happy natural deer who's had miles to roam around and died instantly), i think that's far more ethical than buying meat in the grocery store from an animal that's never had more than a two foot area to walk around in its entire life and was pumped full of hormones. i think that anyone who's not a vegetarian needs to be conscious of the fact that meat comes from living animals, and the vast majority of meat available is from animals who have not had a happy life. i think it's incredibly important to be aware of how your food gets on your plate, and if you've put it there yourself--i think that's noble and rare in this world. of course, trophy hunting and killing an animal just for show is gross, and killing a caged animal is cruel and stupid....but if you kill it yourself in the wild, and then eat and use what you can, i have no problem with it and actually would admire you.

one of the very few episodes of the simple life i ever watched was one where paris pitches a fit to save the one bull that she doesn't want to get turned into hamburgers......a year later, she films a commercial for carl's jr. i mean, wtf, how do you NOT make that connection?

[falljackets]

not to take time away from bashing coulter, but:

john couey was just found guilty on all counts of (burgulary, kidnapping, sexual battery and murder in the first degree) in the death of 9yr old jessica lunsford. i don't know if it was a widely known case outside of florida, but i'm so glad to see that this fucker is going to be behind bars for the rest of his life, at minimum. this is one situation in which a death penalty is not even enough. he took her from her home, raped her and then buried her alive. she was NINE!

[pollystyrene]

When the thing with her dissing the 9/11 widows happened, I had a friend who was "playing devil's advocate" (or so he said; I suspect he's a closet conservative Republican) and saying, "she has come out and said that most of what she says is just for shock value/a joke/to sell books, so I don't take her seriously."

To which I replied, "That's bullshit- she's saying horrible, offensive things about people, hurting their feelings, adding insult to injury and she gets to play the 'I was just kidding' cop out? No way. If your one of your kids [he has 3 daughters under the age of 6] was going around calling people 'doodyheads' or something, and when you called them on it, they said, 'I was only kidding, Daddy' would you let them get away with that?"

Yeah, that shut him up.

[ginger_kitty]

Yeah, the fact that she waited seems really odd. And the reason, I could see her saying restitution for anguish(pain and suffering or what not). But it was her choice to keep the baby. I'd really like to here more about her situation though before I cast judgement.

Mentioning quail, reminded me of something from when I was little. I was raised on a farm near a game reserve. Well one year my dad decided he wanted raise pheasants. But they were clever little birds and they all managed to escape and evade capture. So at the time all the pheasents in the game reserve had vanished years ago, but my fathers repopulated the area and flourish to this day.

missladyj, if you can't fight that urge....you can roast a goose just like duck with a delicious orange sauce. But make sure it's in season before you going hunting.

[sixelacat]

I can kinda see why she's filing two years after, CH, just because she probably didn't know it was even possible at first, and most likely the lawyer who actually filed for her wasn't the first lawyer she talked to.....I'd bet she was looking around for a lawyer to take her malpractice case because according to the article she received rather bad care twice at two different facilities. And yet, the whole idea of filing for child support like that is just.....odd. I have to say that seriously never would have occurred to me. Probably she'll get some sort of one-off settlement, which I don't really have a problem with (I mean, failed abortion AND failed to detect she's still pregnant?! good grief).

On hunting, just want to say I've hunted, and will probably do so again sometime. I also spent a fair amount of time in the country/on farms, and have killed, dressed, and cooked my own meals many times. I think all kids at some point should learn where their food comes from, start to finish. We toured a slaughterhouse as early teens on a school field trip, and even though some kids went vegetarian and some got more into 4H because of it, nobody was pretending there was a garden of cheeseburger bushes anymore.

Oh, and there seems to be some weird mental split when it comes to Ann C., at least around here. I have a couple of friends who say they like her, but are also quite supportive of my own dyke self. It's like, what comes out of their mouths totally doesn't match what they actually do. It's so weird how people can do that.....

[culturehandy]

Why would a person sue for malpractice two years after the fact? I don't mean just this specifically. But in general. People will take their dr to court years after the event? Seems kind of strange to me.

[nickclick]

well, at least she's bringing attention to the fact that unwanted children need caring for after they're born. listen up, pro-lifers!

[pollystyrene]

Article about a woman suing Planned Parenthood for child support after failed abortion.

(cross-posted in CBC thread)

[hoosierman78]

Unfortunately, some people must still pay attention to her, otherwise she wouldn't be given so much damned air time. Personally, I have yet to meet anyone that takes her even slightly seriously - and I'm from a very red state. I just fail to understand how someone can have such contempt for an entire group of people they probably know absolutely nothing about. The real kicker is their claim of Christianity as an excuse. I guessed they missed the Sunday school lesson that covered 'love thy neighbor'.

My dad lives in West Virginia, and anyone that has ever been through there has almost certainly either had a close call with a deer on the highway, or has seen the dead deer along the side of the road. They are almost over-populated to the point of being pests. They check about 150,000 deer that hunters take with legal licenses every year, and figure that only accounts for about a third of the deer that are bagged - and they still have entirely too many of them. If, between my dad and I, get more than 2 deer in a season, there is a program there to donate the meat to various homeless shelters & orphanages in the area.

AP - You mentioned the quail were difficult to eat. Was it just because they are so small & bony that it's tedious, or is it due to having to chew lightly so as not to bite down on a pellet from the shotgun? I've found that anything hunted with a shotgun, no matter how dilligent you are in cleaning it, always runs the risk of cooking the meat with little steel pellets in it. Not fun to bite down on, that's for sure.

[girltrouble]

does anyone (other than ditto heads), really pay attention to her anymore? i mean, other than to hear what stupid thing she's said now, roll their eyes, and wait for her to return to her cave.

i think the problem with mr washington was that he said it specifically about a co-worker, then went on a tear using the word repeatedly to try to make himself look better.

besides, we know she's a biggoted dumbass, she's proved it ad nauseum. that he's one, well, that's news. *shrugs* you assume that most people aren't assholes or stupid until they prove you wrong. he proved us wrong. i thought he ws great...until his comment, and the ones after, didn't really help.