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Here’s a mean-spirited and sick new federal law that criminalizes family and friends who help young women seek abortions outside their home state to escape parental consent laws imposed in 26 states.

Do not be fooled by Bush and friends, who insist they are “protecting” young women. If this were really about the rights of teenage girls, you wouldn’t have 51 Republican and 14 Democratic Senators (mainly male) or her parents determining what a young woman should or shouldn’t be able to do with her own life and body, as if she were some kind of property of the state.

The details of the legislation are amazingly backward. Anyone driving a pregnant teen to a doctor in another state risks upto one year in prison. The right to chose abortion is still protected in the US constitution, but in many states, it’s made practically impossible – sometimes even requiring the approval of a judge first.

Paul Rogers describes the violence unfolding in Lebanon as part of a broader conflict:

Whatever the full motivations of Hamas, and whether Syria and Iran are indirectly involved, the reality is that what is happening in Lebanon is beginning to evolve into a proxy war between the United States and Iran. That, at least, is how it is seen from Washington, whose explicit message is that Iran is the real problem, and that it is appropriate for Israel to cripple or even destroy its surrogate, Hizbollah, across the border in Lebanon.

Here are some blogs from Beirut: Beirut Live, Lebanese Blogger Forum
Global Voices on the Israeli blogosphere, and Mr Behi in Iran.

According to the Economist: When the president of the People’s Democratic Republic of Congo wants to make sure he is reelected, he does two things. First, he takes control of the state media and security services. Second, he hires the same Washington public relations firm that helped George W. Bush win two elections.

Yes, Stevens-Schriefer have taken a break from helping Republicans get elected in order to service Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila. Why on earth did the troubled African country get listed under “Corporate and Organizational Clients”? And is this website their work of art? Check out the videos.

Despite their address on K Street in DC, Stevens-Schriefer have also worked on campaigns in the Czech Republic, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Should one ask accountability questions when the admen have such close ties to the US government?

The Israeli Defence Force wins my vote on openDemocracy’s Bad Democracy Awards this month.

Those 12 million dastardly, illegal immigrants in America, are actually hardworking and conscientious taxpayers according to the NY Times. You’ve got to admire a system that lets people pay to be exploited.

It amazes me that the content of this article hasn’t had any major political consequences (or even news coverage). Robert Kennedy Jr. writes in Rolling Stone a detailed account of how the 2004 election was stolen. There’s a polite question mark in the headline, but he really doesn’t seem to harbour any doubts. If even half this stuff is true, Bush would have been unseated: in Finland. In America, being a lying, cheating, theif seems to be part and parcel of politics. It’s like everyone feels safer and happier upholding the lie that everything is OK. Here, Mark Crispin Miller defends Kennedy from an attack from Salon, and comments on how Markos Moulitsas, Hillary Clinton and others have implied talking about election fraud is bad, because it will disencourage people from voting. What guts. This is exactly the weak fluff that currently passes for Democratic politics. By refusing to even touch the issue seriously, the media have also failed us.

openDemocracy is cosponsoring an event with the worthiest of cosponsors, Brooklyn Breweries. If there were free beer at all the events we put our name on, there would probably be more people at them. If you’re in New York tomorrow, Thursday, you should join me and the nearly 300 people who bought tickets in advance for the premiere of the film American Zeitgeist. It’s a smart film about the “war on terror”. It’s starts with the Soviet-Afghan war in 1979, and only gets to 9/11 in the middle. The longview is good, but I’m not sure it will help make much sense of any of it. Did we win the war yet? Oh yes, Christopher Hitchens is speaking after the screening.

I’ve been in both Puerto Rico and Washington DC since my last post.

Update: Puerto Rican politics very messy right now. Shout out to my friend Laurent at Liberation, who has earned honorary membership to the Danish-Puerto Rican Society for bringing news from la isla to France. Merci.

DC was host to conference about democracy and islam. Update: Bad news is islamist parties only pretend to be democratic out of strategic interests, good news is they seem to become more democratic in the process. Also, the only people to use the word ‘terrorism’ at the conference were representatives of the American government. The schism between the concerns of democracy scholars, and USAID and MEPI were remarkable. Polite specialists on Middle East politics simply smiled as heads of both organisations told fairy tale accounts of US motivations for spreading democracy. Questions on Israel/Palestine were few, but awkward.

If you want to read more, you’ll have to keep an eye on oD. Update: Next stop on my global tour is Germany, for AnkCon. Ever wonder how to save the world from climate doom?

A group of Latino artists including at least one Mexican and several Puerto Ricans have recorded a new version of the US national anthem in Spanish. The words have not been altered, but the right wing blogs see lots to be offended about. Are they worried Spanish-speakers and illegal immigrants will find out what the song is about? Personally, I think it’s an excellent comment on the hypocrisy of discourse on freedom that exists in this country. Clearly, it’s not the ‘land of the free’ for everyone. Whom exactly is the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ supposed to represent? More than 14% of the US population is Hispanic, and the economy is kept afloat by a labour force of 12 million undocumented immigrants. It’s another language, not a lesser form of humanity.

By the way, Puerto Ricans were recently denied (again) the right to vote in presidential elections by the US Supreme Court. They have US passports but do not live in a US state. The court ruled that in order for a “territory” to vote it must either become a state or the US constitution must be changed. These days, either of those options seem as unlikely as Puerto Rico becoming a country of its own. “Unfairly treated,” were the words of the attorney who filed the appeal. That’s easier to agree on than what to do next.