Salon.com Politics | Bush to impose new abortion limits — JACKASS! Bush has decided to try to reissue the global gag rule in a form that cannot be overridden by the will of Congress (i.e., the people’s representatives). I can only hope that people remember this thuggish, Napoleonic streak of Bush’s come 2004…

P.S. Why does Bush continue to repeat that It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion either here or abroad? It’s already against the law for this to happen. What Bush is complaining about is taxpayer funds which are earmarked not to go towards abortion, going to family planning groups which also do provide abortion advocacy or abortion services. If Bush is going to say that that constitutes U.S. money going to abortion, then why the hell don’t faith-based initiatives constitute giving taxpayer money for evangelism? (Answer: they don’t, and neither does giving taxpayer money to family planning services constitute using taxpayer money for abortions). Bush is either (a) stupid, (b) lying, or (c) crazy. The sad thing is I really can’t rule out any of them.

Not to pursue my unhealthy obsession with David Horowitz further, but I found a note on IndyMedia about an excellent article on Horowitz and the Myth of the Radical University.

Thanks to conservative author David Horowitz’s recent lecture at the University of Texas, I have new hope for radical political organizing on campus.

Many of us on the faculty with left/progressive values have felt rather isolated on what we all thought was a conservative campus. But it turns out that all this time we’ve been working in a nest of left-wing radicals who have over-run the place, leaving conservatives cowering in silence.

At least that’s Horowitz’s analysis. University faculties around the country, including UT, are skewed far to the left as a result of conservative professors being systematically purged, according to Horowitz, a one-time leftist turned right-winger.

My colleagues and I are hoping Horowitz will help us find where all these radicals are hiding; more company would be nice.

After doing activist work both in a staunchly liberal small liberal arts college in Michigan, and in a big, heavily conservative university in Alabama, I can only say Amen! to someone actually taking the time to point out that, contrary to popular opine, The fact, however, is that the typical American university is dominated by centrist to moderately conservative faculty members and administrators, with steady movement to the right in the past two decades.

The Village Voice opens its review of Gladiator by comparing it to Titanic. And like Titanic, it urgently raises the question: why the hell is this thing nominated for 12 Oscars?

Salon.com News | Mir makes fiery plunge into Pacific, causing a spectacular show for residents of Fiji. Sadly, I will not get my free taco from Taco Bell.

Excellent news from Switzerland, as the Swiss Parliament has legalized abortion. The Swiss are notorious laggards when it comes to women’s rights issues: that whole women’s suffrage thing didn’t go through until 1971, but this is an encouraging sign. Unfortunately the Christian People’s Party may be able to hold up decriminalization for a few years by forcing a referendum before the new law is enacted. I do applaud CPP for their honesty about the fundamentally obstructionist, anti-choice, anti-woman nature of their stance: the Party President, Adalbert Durrer, summed it up by saying that The question of abortion should not be considered by the woman alone. [She needs a big strong white-coated man in there to overcome her feminine irrationality!]