l'embarras du choix

So, so many things to blog about today. So, so very little time. I'm also jetlagged out of my mind. Hallucinatory dreams brought on by malaria pills wake me up at odd points in the night. (Oh, poor baby! Had to run off to Mali! Has to take special pills! Is tired from her flight! Has to make a living!)

I'm going to limit my comments today. First, appealing to my love of irony is the recent revelation via WAPO that the CIA interrogates "terror suspects" (and has since 9/11's aftermath) at a series of "black sites" including former Soviet detainment camps in Eastern Europe. I defer to my favorite libertarian pundit, Andrew Sullivan, for appropriate elaboration:

"You have to hand it to the Bush administration. They get their symbolism right. In Iraq, they chose to commit some of their worst abuses at Abu Ghraib, Saddam's former torture hell-hole, and at former Baathist Secret Police headquarters in Basra. Witnesses attest to the sound of screams coming from the Basra facility as the United States continued its diplomatic offensive to win over the Mulsim world to democratic values. And when needing a secret site to torture other detainees, where else but the former Soviet Union?"

(then he says something about Reagan's commitment to human rights which I am choosing to omit because I don't agree with him. I feel justified in selectively quoting him because the Reagan comment is beside the point.)

Deuxieme probleme du jour: According to this morning's LA Times, Proposition 73, which Californians will soon vote on and which would mandate parental notification for minor abortions, is favored by a slight majority of Cali's voting public. Now, if the idea of California, that bastion of social liberalism, imposing such a requirement on its teenage girls is not enough to make you shudder, consider this, brought to my attention via a colleague here at Lillyfirm:

"Prop. 73 is essentially a parental-notification amendment. However, there's a much more sinister problem with the proposition; the Right-wing is clever and, as usual, they're operating under the radar. Prop. 73 also includes language that specifically defines the embryo as "an unborn child, a child conceived but not yet born" -- a dramatic shift in defining when life actually begins. If this proposition passes, California will have a constitutional amendment that defines life at the point of conception. This would be a lethal blow to the right to an abortion in the state of California."

Et enfin, I bring to light this surreality- although I am back at my desk here in Los Angeles, my digestive tract remains firmly anchored in the Sahelian plains of Mali. Good times.