It's the 'telemed' part, not the 'abortion' part they object to

What do you do when you are a fetus fetishizing tea bagger but governor of a fairly progressive state? Or at least one that was the first in the US to offer medical abortions by teleconferencing?

When you're Iowa ReThuglican Governor Terry Branstad, this is what you do.

First, appoint all ten members of the Iowa Board of Medicine. Check.

Then, hold hearings into the 'safety' of the procedure. Check.

Make sure the former anti-choice legislator and chair of the board is an idiot. Check.

Dr. Greg Hoversten, the state board’s chairman, suggested that the system amounted to an experiment on Iowa women.

Have the board listen to the evidence -- all good -- then have them vote 8-2 to effectively ban the procedure on the basis of safety. Check.

Now let board members ignore a 2010 report written by a board investigator after several months of looking into safety concerns of the regime (presumably raised by fetus fetishists). Check.

The board’s chairman, Dr. Greg Hoversten, told the Register last week that he and his colleagues did not read the report before voting Friday to effectively ban use of the video system.

(I mean, who knows what that report might have said? That telemed abortion was JUST as evil and dangerous and life-threatening as fetus fetishists contend?)

Pay attention. The next part is key.

When two doctors request a copy of that damning report, refuse to release it. Check.

Oh, they had a good reason of course.

The board’s executive director, Mark Bowden, said in an email to The Des Moines Register on Wednesday that state law says such investigative reports are confidential. If the board files formal charges against a doctor, he said, the doctor would have a right to a copy. But since no charges were filed in 2011, he said, the report must be kept under wraps, even from the agency and doctors it concerns.

Got that? No charges were laid, so the report must be kept confidential.

Nah. That doesn't stink at all.

But it does demonstrate the essence of current conservatism: Remain wilfully ignorant, make decisions on pure ideology, then keep everyone else just as ignorant.

The doctors are considering a lawsuit to get the report.

Here's a long and thoughtful blogpost by Kelly Bourdet about telemed abortion in Iowa. Bourdet goes on to make the obvious point. Telemedicine is used in all kinds of situations, for all kinds of treatments. It's already used in the US military, for example.

But it is ONLY in this application of the new tech does anyone 'worry' about its safety or appropriateness or whatever.

Odd, eh wot?

Stephen Taylor gets Twitter smackdown

Nobody deserves it more than he does, and nobody is better equiped to smack down dickheads than @kady is.

This, of course, is all about the PMSHithead MASSIVELY mispoken observation that triggered the #HarperHistory hashtag.

More at the Toronto Star, via @SusanDelacourt and others, here, here and here.

Click on small pic to get enlargement.

Stupid on Crime, Part Umpty-Two

Here's the thing about crime stats. You can squeal and lie and dismiss all you want. One stat does NOT lie. The homicide rate.

Canada’s crime rate fell again last year and is now at its lowest level in almost 40 years.

Crimes reported to police dropped 5 per cent in 2010. The decline spanned a wide range of offences, including the homicide rate, which fell by 10 per cent to a level not seen since 1966.

“Homicide is one of the few types of violent crime that almost invariably comes to the attention of police and, as such, is generally recognized as a country’s barometer of violence,” Statistics Canada said in a report released Thursday.

In addition, an index measuring the severity of crimes fell 6 per cent from 2009, reaching its lowest point since it was introduced in 1998.

The national crime rate, which has been falling steadily for the past 20 years, is now at its lowest level since 1973, Statscan said.

Because, unlike sexual assault or theft under/over or other crimes, which may be differently defined or reported, a homicide pretty well entails a dead person and dead people are hard to ignore or redefine.

There is much more uniform reporting of murder stats across jurisdictions, which is why they're preferred for international comparisons.

Here's the StatsCan report. Just about every sort of crime -- including youth crime -- is down markedly.

So what did the Stooopid on Crime Cons have to say? Here's Justice spokesthingy:

"We don't use these statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals," said spokeswoman Pamela Stephens.

Hoooo-kay.

But this report is throwing a spaniard into ConCrime plans:

"From the government's perspective, crime going down is probably an embarrassment," said Anthony Doob, a criminologist at the University of Toronto. "For the rest of us, it's probably a nice thing to have less crime in our community."

Doob said crime rates and punishment policy are not linked.

"The one thing we know with any kind of certainty is that (a falling crime rate) doesn't have much to do with policies related to punishment," said Doob. "Sending more people to prison may reduce the likelihood that they're committing offences while they're in prison but, if anything, it increases the likelihood that they'll commit offences after they've been released."

Why can' we have nice, productive, progressive evidence-based policies? Why, when we know the facts, know what works and what doesn't, do we ignore all that and behave stupidly? Why do we let stupid people run things?

Of all the lying, fear-mongering, venality, and just plain meanness on the civic stage at the moment, what most distresses me is the WILLFUL IGNORANCE.

We need to make courage politically desirable. Not only tell the truth, but act on it.