The YouTube video is only three minutes and eighteen seconds long, but it's enough to make even the most casual feminist drop chin to the floor in horror, convinced that centuries of progress have become undone.
In it, a pale, mop-haired young man named Will Albino takes to an all-girls school seeking signatures for a petition to end woman's suffrage. He is equipped with a clipboard, a cameraman, and a lot of chutzpah. The petition is a hoax. Mr. Albino just wants to prove a point -- that today's young girls don't know what's what.
The school, Padua Academy, seems like a learned place. It has been recognized as a National School of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Education. It has a powerful motto: Where Girls with Dreams become Women of Vision. But Padua gives Mr. Albino more than enough fodder to prove that its girls are lacking fundamental knowledge about women's history. Mr. Albino goes from one student to the next, and asks each to join his cause to "stop the injustice." The girls, most of them dressed in school uniform, take to his entreaty almost immediately.
"Women's suffrage is really bad," one girl says. "I thought it already ended," another adds. And so on for a few more torturous petition-signing minutes.
The clip, which has been viewed 189,529 times since it was posted in April 2006, proves how far we've come since 1920, when women first gained the right to vote. You may wish these Padua girls paid more attention in history class, or Googled the women's movement in their spare time. But can you blame them for confusing suffrage with suffering? The truth is that to these young women, a woman's right to vote is a fact of life. A given. Not something even up for debate.
We can only imagine what would happen if we went back to Padua, or any other high school, and asked about Roe vs. Wade. We can just picture students' blank faces and arched eyebrows. We can just hear their stalling "ums" and "I don't knows."
To commemorate the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade today, three Christian conservative groups have combined forces to change all of this. They've launched a survey website, RoeIQtest.com to test site visitors' knowledge of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision and fill in the gaps of what they don't know.
The underlying hope, of course, is that the RoeIQ test can turn many pro-life.
Among some of the questions in the survey: "How many abortions have been performed in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973?" "Which of our nation's founding documents contains the phrase "right to an abortion"?" The answers are intended to surprise (and attract) the most liberal survey-taker: since Roe vs. Wade, tens of millions of women have received abortions, and the "right to an abortion" is not in any of our nation's founding documents.
It's a clever survey, highlighting the need for more education around Roe vs. Wade. But it's also a misleading one. Noticeably absent from the survey are questions about women's health, quality of life, and privacy -- all things that Roe vs. Wade ensured. For example, the RoeIQ test does not show how legalizing abortion in 1973 resulted in dramatically fewer abortion-related deaths and infections. It does not show that poor and low-income women account for more than half of U.S. abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and that one of the primary reasons a woman seeks an abortion is because she feels she would provide compromised care for the unborn child, or the rest of her children if she were to have the child. The RoeIQ test certainly does not examine what other sorts of conclusions about a woman's constitutional rights we could make if Roe vs. Wade were overturned.
Despite these glaring oversights, to the outside viewer, the test seems very real - and fair. The site itself seems apolitical (We can expect both sides in the abortion debate...) and friendly (If you think you know Roe, we think you'll be surprised!) The three Christian conservative groups linked with RoeIQtest.com - Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, and Concerned Women for America - do not appear in the homepage or in the "About" section. Site visitors could not possibly know that the groups behind RoeIQtest.com also denigrate homosexuality and advocate for school prayer, abstinence-only education, and intelligent design. The groups' logos appear inconspicuously at the very end of the test, at the very bottom of the page. Even the name of the test -- RoeIQ -- masks the site's intent. By linking a high score in the survey with a high Intelligence Quotient (IQ), it implies that the questions have been comprehensive, that the high scorer has a full body of knowledge about Roe vs. Wade.
But the site is veiled propaganda. There are additional questions about test participants' church attendance, political philosophy, and educational status. RoeIQ wants to find out more about you. It wants to find out more about your friends. It wants to convince you to turn against Roe vs. Wade.
We need to do better. Today, on the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, we need to make sure we know and teach the facts. All the facts. Too often the abortion debate divides Americans along moral, religious, and political lines. The discussion needs to happen along health and liberty lines, too. We can't let a new generation of women -- like the Padua girls who didn't know about suffrage -- grow up thinking that Roe vs. Wade was unimportant to the women's movement.
If the recently released film Juno captures how we talk about abortion today, it's in alarming binary -- and ethical -- terms. In the movie, Juno becomes pregnant and is forced to decide whether or not to have a baby. She's only 16, she's not religious; she opts for abortion. But once at the abortion clinic, Juno starts to question her decision. She meets a sweet pro-life classmate protesting outside. She meets an indifferent receptionist inside. All the women in the waiting room look depressed and alone. This is the real abortion; it's murder, it's cold, it's isolating. Pregnancy? That's just lots of funny hormonal swings, ultrasound goo, and blue Slurpees.
What you don't see in Juno is the real teenage pregnancy. You don't see that real pregnant teens ages 15-19 are less likely to receive prenatal care and gain appropriate weight than women ages 20 or older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You don't see that because of this, babies born to teenage mothers can be premature, underweight, and have birth defects -- effects can have devastating impacts on the child's development. And you don't see how teenage pregnancy can have negative long-term effects for both mother and child; statistically they are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to live in poverty, according to National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
In the end Juno chooses not to have an abortion, but what if she'd wanted one, and the abortion clinic -- as uninviting as it may have been to her -- didn't exist?
This is the threat that not fully understanding Roe vs. Wade poses. Today many liberal young people take the right to abortion for granted; they don't hope to have an abortion, but they know they could have one if needed. Do they know there was once a struggle to get this right, and that the pendulum of thought is swinging back -- abetted by the Christian right?
We need to remember, honor -- and teach -- the importance of Roe vs. Wade. One of the very same groups behind RoeIQtest.com, Concerned Women for America, also condemns abortion and comprehensive sexual education. It promotes abstinence-only education, instead. This is no way to address what's going on today; the reality is that nearly half of high schoolers have had sex, and one-third of sexually active high schoolers did not use condoms during their last sexual intercourse. There's an urgent need for more comprehensive sexual education in our schools, so that abortion is not used as a contraceptive. Abortion is no light matter. But neither is ushering a child into this world.
In the YouTube video "End Women's Suffrage," Mr. Albino moves swiftly across Padua's campus -- from fields to school buses, tall girls to short -- collecting his treasured signatures. It's a jarring sight, a glimpse of a future where women willingly sign away their rights to vote; their voices. We can picture them signing "Reverse Roe vs. Wade" just as easily. Mr. Albino circulates his petition to the tune of a They Might Be Giants song, called "Am I Awake?"
In December, after the new NIE on Iran was released, former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton established himself as one of the top hawks trying to undermine its credibility, going so far as to call for a congressional witch-hunt into anti-Bush “people in the intelligence community.”
During his trip to Israel this week for the the Herzliya Conference, Bolton has ratcheted up his criticisms of the report, saying on Sunday that the “illegitimate politicization” of the NIE was “a quasi-coup by the intelligence services.”
On Monday, Bolton said that the NIE put “pressure” on Israel to strike Iran because “the likelihood of American use of force has been dramatically reduced”:
“One can say with some assurance that in the next year the use of force by the United States is highly unlikely,” Bolton told AFP on the sidelines of the Herzliya conference on the balance of Israel’s national security.
“That increases the pressure on Israel in that period of time… if it feels Iran is on the verge of acquiring that capability, it brings the decision point home to use force,” he said.
Reacting to Bolton, a “senior Israeli security official” told Agence France-Presse that “one should listen very closely to what Bolton has to say.”
Asked about Bolton’s comments today, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to refute him, only saying that Bolton is “a private citizen”:
QUESTION: (Inaudible) on Israel and he basically told us (inaudible) because they said the Bush administration (inaudible).
RICE: John Bolton is a private citizen. He can say what he wants.
With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you'd think that the economy is a giant clitoris. Ben Bernanke may not employ this imagery, but the immediate challenge-and the issue bound to replace Iraq and immigration in the presidential race-is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.
It would be irresponsible to say much about Bush's stimulus plan, the mere mention of which could be enough to send the Nikkei, the DAX, and the curiously named FTSE and Sensex tumbling into the crash zone again. In a typically regressive gesture, Bush proposed to hand out cash tax rebates-except to families earning less than $40,000 a year. This may qualify as an example of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism," in which any misfortune can be re-jiggered to the advantage of the affluent.
But even the liberal stimulus proposals have me worried--not so much for their content as their rationale. Most liberals want a stimulus package that includes an increase in food stamp allotments and an extension of unemployment benefits, which are both screamingly obvious measures. Currently, the food stamp allotment amounts to about $1 per meal, and when four Democratic congresspersons tried living on that for a week last May they ended up even crankier than if they'd had to sit through a week-long filibuster by Tom DeLay.
As for unemployment benefits: They last just 25 weeks in most states and end up covering only a third of people who are laid off. If ever there was a time to create a real working system of unemployment compensation, it is now. Citigroup has announced plans to eliminate 21,000; investment banks in general will shed 40,000. The mortgage industry is in a state of melt-down; and Sprint--how did they get into this?--will lay off 4000 full-time employees as well as 1600 part-time and contract workers.
The economic rationale for more a progressive stimulus package, which we hear now several times a day, is that the poor and the freshly unemployed will spend whatever money they get. Give them more money in the form of food stamps or unemployment benefits and they'll drop more at the mall. Money, it has been observed, sticks to the rich but just slides off the poor, which makes them the lynchpin of stimulus. After decades of hearing the poor stereotyped as lazy, stupid, addicted, and crime-prone, they have been discovered to have this singular virtue: They are veritable spending machines.
All this is true, but it is also a form of economy fetishism, or should I say worship? If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being. We've seen the economy grow without wage gains; we've seen productivity grow without wage gains. We've even seen unemployment fall without wage gains. In fact, when economists want to talk about life "on the ground," where jobs and wages and the price of Special K are paramount, they've taken to talking about "the real economy." If there's a "real economy," then what in the hell is "the economy"?
Once it was real-er, this economy that we have. But that was before we got polarized into the rich, the poor, and the sinking middle class. Gross social inequality is what has "de-coupled" growth and productivity from wage gains for the average household. As far as I can tell, "the economy," as opposed to the "real economy," is the realm of investment, and is occupied by people who live on interest and dividends instead of salaries and wages, aka the rich.
So I'm proposing a radical shift in rhetoric: Any stimulus package should focus on the poor and the unemployed, not because they spend more, but because they are in most in need of help. Yes, when a parent can afford to buy Enfamil, it helps the Enfamil company and no doubt "the economy" too. But let's not throw out the baby with the sensual bubble bath of "stimulus." In any ordinary moral calculus, the baby comes first.
Far be it from me to make the revolutionary suggestion that babies are more important than profits. My point is just that our economy--with its dizzying bubbles, wild lending sprees, reckless downsizings, and planet-wide hyper-sensitivity --has gotten too far disconnected from ordinary human needs. We could take the current crisis as an opportunity to fix that, at least in part, by shoring up government support for the needy and the dislocated. Or we can wait around and watch while the appropriate imagery gets nasty, as this ghostly creature, "the economy," starts acting like a nymphomaniac junkie in withdrawal.
“Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”
Insight: Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, Joe Lauria
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency's Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The name of the official - who has held a series of top government posts - is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.
However, Edmonds said: "He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives."
She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials - including household names - who were aiding foreign agents.
"If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials," she said.
Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.
The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain[base ']s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.
Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America.
She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities' failure to act.
One of Edmonds's main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.
A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.
"What I found was damning," she said. "While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on."
The Turks and Israelis had planted "moles" in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. "The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States," she said.
They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles - mainly PhD students - with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.
In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.
The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan[base ']s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.
Edmonds said: "I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2+ years. There are almost certainly more."
The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.
Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachs in the Turkish embassy.
Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.
The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.
Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan's nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.
Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. "We were aware of contact between A Q Khan[base ']s people and Al-Qaeda," a former CIA officer said last week. "There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end."
It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.
Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.
Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.
Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.
Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. "A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, 'We need to get them out of the US because we can[base ']t afford for them to spill the beans'," she said. "The official said that he would 'take care of it'."
The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.
Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.
"The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information," she said.
"The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their 'hooking points', which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to."
One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.
"He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001," she said.
Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder.
Edmonds said: "Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers."
In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: "We have a package and we[base ']re going to sell it for $250,000."
Edmonds's employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.
She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.
The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI's methods and current investigations.
Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing.
She was able to discuss the case with The Sunday Times because, by the end of January 2002, the justice department had shut down the programme.
The senior official in the State Department no longer works there. Last week he denied all of Edmonds's allegations: "If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that[base ']s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this."
In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds's story.
One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. "We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s," the source said.
How Pakistan got the bomb, then sold it to the highest bidders
1965 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan[base ']s foreign minister, says: "If India builds the bomb we will eat grass . . . but we will get one of our own"
1974 Nuclear programme becomes increased priority as India tests a nuclear device
1976 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist, steals secrets from Dutch uranium plant. Made head of his nation's nuclear programme by Bhutto, now prime minister
1976 onwards Clandestine network established to obtain materials and technology for uranium enrichment from the West
1985 Pakistan produces weapons-grade uranium for the first time
1989-91 Khan's network sells Iran nuclear weapons information and technology
1991-97 Khan sells weapons technology to North Korea and Libya
1998 India tests nuclear bomb and Pakistan follows with a series of nuclear tests. Khan says: "I never had any doubts I was building a bomb. We had to do it"
2001 CIA chief George Tenet gathers officials for crisis summit on the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to other countries
2001 Weeks before 9/11, Khan's aides meet Osama Bin Laden to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device
2001 After 9/11 proliferation crisis becomes secondary as Pakistan is seen as important ally in war on terror
2003 Libya abandons nuclear weapons programme and admits acquiring components through Pakistani nuclear scientists
2004 Khan placed under house arrest and confesses to supplying Iran, Libya and North Korea with weapons technology. He is pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf
2006 North Korea tests a nuclear bomb
2007 Renewed fears that bomb may fall into hands of Islamic extremists as killing of Benazir Bhutto throws country into turmoil
The nasty spat between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama last night sure created fireworks, but after the debate attention turned to an offstage encounter, between Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards.
According to eyewitnesses, they both walked out of their green rooms after the debate and agreed to talk, then went behind closed doors in Edwards green room.
In December, after the 
