Concern for the safety of women

The White House has issued Republican senators a book of talking points about Scalito, including a defense of his opinion in Casey, saying now, in 2005, that in upholding spousal notification in 1991, he was merely showing “concern for the safety of women”. Except that while his dissent was indeed male chauvinist piggish, he never mentioned safety of women except to dismiss as not especially important the instances when spousal notification would actually endanger women. His opinion was about the “interest” of the husband in the fetus, the interest of the state in supporting that interest, and not at all about the safety of women.

I said a day or two ago that the use of gulags in foreign countries gave those countries leverage over the US. You know who else might know countries those secret prisoners are held in? The secret prisoners. So in order to keep secret the details of our secret prisons, we must hold on to those prisoners, even if they no longer have intelligence value or we discover they were never guilty of anything in the first place. They might not have had any valuable intel before, but they do now.

A.A. Gill of the Sunday Times comments that “Rome,” which is playing on HBO here in the US and does get a little sillier each episode, has “a script that sounded like Gibbon rewritten by gibbons.”

Note to my English readers: you may now forget, forget the 5th of November.