The nation's major organizations of doctors who treat women today strongly criticized the Food and Drug Administration's handling of an application to make emergency contraception pills available without prescription, accusing the agency of caving in to political opposition and disregarding science.   

"Politics should not trump medical evidence for making Plan B [the emergency contraceptive] available over-the-counter," the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health (PRCH) said in a statement issued during their annual meeting.

The images are out there, though, and I believe there is an importance in seeing them.  As Americans, we are involved in this Iraq war whether or not we have supported it.  This is Bush's war, yes, but as Americans we bear at least part of its burden.  Even for those of us in America who disavowed this war from the very beginning, we will be forced to deal with its consequences for years to come.  When George Bush invaded Iraq, he did it representing America.  As such, any and all Americans must suffer the results of his actions.

Thus, we must do our best to fully comprehend the meaning of this war.  We must do our best to truly understand the realities of it, the brutalities of it and the marks that it will leave in Iraq, in America, and throughout the world.

Many of these pictures are graphic.  I urge you to view them anyway.  We need to understand the current costs of this war so that we may better understand and face the future costs.

The war would barely cost us anything--little time, little money, and few lives.  Wrong, wrong and wrong.  We've got 700 American troops dead and that number just seems to rise faster the longer we stay in the country.  It's a year later and our exit strategy is nearly non-existent--with a realistic occupation time of a decade if we truly want to keep the country stable.  And we've spent billions upon billions of dollars with no end in sight--and with the Pentagon short on money as it is.

So how does the administration respond to all of this?

We need a common purpose in this country and John Kerry needs to recognize that and give us a program to work with.  That is the simple truth.  After enduring a couple weeks of absolutely horrid news, both out of Iraq and within the country, I need some hope and I want the man I plan to vote for in November to give it to me.

I want Kerry to propose a serious push in volunteerism.  It should be a program with strong funding, aimed at all people but particularly the youth in the country.  It should focus on integration and coordination with local charities and humanitarian groups.  Basically, I'm thinking of some sort of central agency that would take interested calls, gather information and then direct people toward registered organizations that could use their help and that the volunteer would be interested in helping.

I think the fact that the military has become all-volunteer makes it easy for the deaths in Iraq and elsewhere to be overlooked.  We can at least partly rationalize away the deaths knowing that the troops supposedly chose to be there.  If we were talking about 18 year olds being forced against their will to this country and being murdered, it would be a hell of a lot harder to go about our business.  But just because these soldiers chose to serve their country does not make their lives any less valuable or their deaths any less tragic.

With no sign of a breakthrough in talks with rebels in Falluja and Najaf, the leader of the American occupation appeared to move closer on Sunday to a military showdown, saying that the rebels' failure to submit to American demands would require decisive action against those who "want to shoot their way to power."

"They must be dealt with, and they will be dealt with," the administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, said, breaking a week of silence on the confrontation with Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American Shiite cleric, in Najaf and Sunni Muslim insurgents in Falluja. Mr. Bremer spoke of the need to bring an early end to the standoffs, to return Iraq to the political path the United States has mapped out, starting with the formal return of sovereignty on June 30.

Earlier this month my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reported that a college student had been expelled from art school here for submitting a story "rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust" to his creative writing class. The instructor, a poet named Jan Richman, subsequently found herself out of a job. The university chose not to explain its failure to renew Ms. Richman's contract, but she intimated that she was being punished for having set the tone for the class by assigning a well-regarded if disturbing short story by the MacArthur-winning novelist David Foster Wallace, "Girl with Curious Hair." Ms. Richman had been troubled enough by the student's work to report it to her superiors in the first place, in spite of the fact that it was not, according to the Chronicle, "the first serial-killer story she had read in her six semesters on the faculty at the Academy of Art University."

Homicide inspectors were called in; a criminal profiler went to work on the student. The officers found no evidence of wrongdoing. The unnamed student had made no threat; his behavior was not considered suspicious. In the end, no criminal charges were brought.

So while the Log Cabin Republicans wring their hands about Bush's decision, I can only shake my head.  This is what you get for aligning yourself with a man who essentially hates who you are.  I'm not going to walk into a Republican convention, proclaim that Bush is the worst president in the history of the United States and expect to see nodding heads and hear low murmurs of, "You know, he has a point."  Similarly, gay Republicans should have known from the beginning that Bush has no concerns for them or their civil rights.  The million or so homosexuals that voted for him do not trump his religious base.

Theoretically, 75% of unintended pregnancies could be stopped with emergency contraception.  Which means that thousands, if not millions, of abortions could be stopped as well.  I'm a guy who believes fully and whole-heartedly in a woman's right to have an abortion.  I also believe fully that abortion is a procedure that, ideally, no woman would ever have to go through.  From everything I understand, it can be an incredibly trying experience that no woman would want to experience.  So I believe abortion should be available and I also believe that the fewer abortions performed, the better.

Things are about to change, though:

Flush with newly raised cash, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry said Thursday he planned to beef up his television advertising just as President Bush was rolling back his own efforts on commercial airwaves.

The Massachusetts senator said he would soon begin a new round of TV advertising with a "positive, affirmative" message about his life story and political agenda.

Arianna gets it right.  We need hope in this country once again.  I know that this constant focus on Bush is wearing me down.  It tires me.  He's doing horrible things to this country and reading about them day after day just helps to create despair.  I do think what he is doing needs to be publicized, but we also need to counter his destruction with a hope of our own.  I think the country is weary and they are looking for something to rally around.  We've been driving into the ground with a blanket of fear about terrorism and all the nasty people in the world that want to get us.  We've been beaten night after night by the news about all the terrible things that happen in the world, in our country, in our communities.  It seems any more that we are blanketed with all the terrible things and the good things--the millions of good deeds that occur every day--fall to the side of the road, never to be heard from.

I think part of the reason that the 527s have not become as dominate on the Republican side is because the Republican message is a machine.  It is controlled centrally by the RNC and they keep a very tight control over the message.  Appropriately, the money tends to get funneled through them or through campaigns that obey their order.

The problem with 527s, of course, is that they are independent.  MoveOn, ACT, the Media Fund, etc. don't follow the rules of the DNC.  Which isn't to say they act in opposition of the DNC, just that they act as they see fit, not as the DNC sees fit.  This works out okay on the Democratic side, because they are typically espousing progressive values that the DNC, most of the time, is happy to be associated with.  In particular, since the 527s have come up, they've been particularly focused on being anti-Bush, which of course is fine with the DNC.  So there's been a defining message that all are on board with, even if they act independently.

They're starting out today with "an exclusive, eyewitness account of how Bush officials inside the Defense Department twisted intelligence in the rush to the Iraq war."

And, according to the letter from the editor, there will be more:

I wrote in a previous diary entry about True Majority running a campaign to help persuade secretaries of state to enact laws demanding a verified paper trail for all voting machines.

They asked for $50,000 by February 13.  I received an email from them today with an update on the campaign and, apparently, they have received $120,000 in small donations from members.

This is great news.  Voting Machine Fraud is one of the most important issues facing the country this year.  It's been well documented that these machines from Diebold and other companies are very vulnerable to hacks, glitches, crashes and tampering.  The simple reality is that votes could be changed and stolen through malicious means.  Yet it's simple to fix--we just need a verified paper trail with which to do recounts/audits.

Since Federal legislation has been completely stalled, True Majority is looking to enact laws state by state by putting pressure on Secretaries of state, who typically have control over elections.

[In the extended text is the] email I received today:

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God, I wish I could go to San Francisco. I want to walk through City Hall, to meet couples there waiting in line to get married. I want to feel that atmosphere. This is something incredible going on in San Francisco right now. This is the very front of our generation's civil rights battle. Seriously, I wish I could convey how this makes me feel. There are hundreds, thousands of people who are for the first time in their lives being allowed to realize their dream, who are finally able to do what every straight American is allowed to do from day one.