As he prepares for a court hearing Tuesday, Scott Roeder, the man accused of shooting Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his church in June, says he’s full of “relief and joy” over the murder of the Wichita abortion provider. In interviews with the Kansas City Star, Roeder, who is in a Sedgwick County, Kansas, lockup, said he’d been thinking about killing abortion doctors since 1992. He praised Paul Hill, who shot and killed an abortion provider in Pensacola, Florida, in 1994 and was executed for the murder in 2003, and he described several visits to Shelley Shannon, the woman who shot and wounded Tiller back in 1993 and is currently serving 20 years for a series of abortion clinic bombings and arsons.

Roeder believes that these acts qualify as justifiable homicide, explaining to Star reporter Judy Thomas: “When a policeman shoots somebody on the street, for example, and stops somebody from taking the life of innocent people, that’s violence, and everybody’s fine with that,” he said. Since the murder of Dr. Tiller, he said, “I’ve heard that three women have actually changed their minds and had their babies because there’s no availability here,” he said. “Wichita has been abortion-free since that time." He added, “That’s total elation.”

Scott Roeder stops short of stating that he is the man responsible for what he considers the heroic act of killing Dr. Tiller, instead saying that “For the man accused of this, things fell together for that day,” and the shooting “would have been earlier if things had panned out.” Such almost coyly circumspect statements can hardly help Roeder’s case, and his attorney, Steve Osburn, would make no comment on his client’s defense strategy. But Roeder himself raised the possibility of introducing “jury nullification,” which holds that if a jury concludes the law is wrong, it can take matters into its own hands, overriding instructions from the judge, to deliver its own version of justice.
 

[Read more]

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This videographic from the Economist is well worth watching.

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Jaclyn Friedman has an interesting article over at the American Prospect about the overwhelming misogyny that supposedly characterizes American sports. Riffing off Pittsburgh Steelers' quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's alleged rape of a Harrah's hotel worker, Friedman writes that "sports misogyny apologists" leapt to Roethlisberger's defense:

You know the ones -- would-be or former jocks with Peter Pan disease, women desperate to be one of the guys, or who dream of being Gisele Bundchen to the next Tom Brady. They all cling to their game and their team above everything else, including evidence, compassion and logic.

It's almost undebatable that American sports culture is characterized by a whole lot of misogyny. But Friedman goes too far—or perhaps not far enough—when she suggests that it's sports celebrity, not celebrity in general, that's the problem. Rich, famous male athletes don't get treated differently than "normal" people because they're athletes. They don't get excuses made for them because they play for the Steelers or the Lakers. They get treated differently because they are rich and famous men. (Sometimes, as in the case of the University of Colorado football player rape case Friedman mentions, just fame is enough.) It's not just the world of sports celebrity that's full of misogyny and anti-feminist attitudes. Those attitudes pervade the entire celebrity culture: movies, music, fashion—even punditry.

That aside, I think Friedman is misreading the nature of fandom when she criticizes people for clinging "to their game and their team above everything else, including evidence, compassion, and logic." That's what a lot of team sports fandom is—rooting for one's team despite x. In a sport like baseball or football, you're rooting for a team that will probably have a very different lineup from one year to the next. If you get caught up in the personalities, good and bad, of the individual players, you're going to be switching teams every year. There are bad people and good people on every team. It should be okay to root for a team that has someone who did something bad on it—provided you condemn that person for the bad thing they did. Otherwise, how are you ever going to be able to pick a team to root for? Every team has a steroid user or a wife-beater or an accused rapist or a dog-fighting enthusiast at one point or another. The goal should be to get those people fired—not to get people to stop rooting for the team.

(This is different in individual sports. It would be hard to excuse rooting for, say, a golfer who beat his wife. But being a Phillies fan does not mean you support Brett Myers hitting his wife.)

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Here's a good indication of the obvious: in Washington, sex scandals trump institutional corruption.

Politico reports that "embattled" Senator John Ensign (R-NV), who has admitted having an affair with an employee whom the Ensign campaign paid $25,000 and who also received $96,000 fom Ensign's family (as possible hush money), remains embattled, with his chief of staff and his communications director jumping ship and with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filing complaints with the Senate ethics committee and the Federal Elections Commission. The newspaper reports:

“He’s trying to do a ‘Vitter,’” a senior Senate GOP aide said of Ensign. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) managed to say virtually nothing but that he was sorry for committing a “very serious sin” after his name turned up in the phone book of the alleged “D.C. Madam” in 2007.

“He’s just trying to get beyond this,” the aide said of Ensign. “I am not sure he can, but he’s trying.”

The article makes it clear that due to the sex scandal, Ensign may not be able to hold on. And toward the end of the piece, there is this little nugget about the fellow who will take the chief of staff slot being vacated by John Lopez:

Aaron Cohen, currently a lobbyist with Jeffrey J. Kimbell and Associates, will replace Lopez. Cohen, who served previously as senior policy adviser to Ensign and former Sen. Richard Bryan (D-Nev.), currently lobbies on behalf of drug companies like Hoffman-La Roche, according to lobbying disclosure records.

Trysting with a subordinate is indeed scandalous. But a senator hiring a drug lobbyist to be his chief of staff is not cause for the blinking of an eye in the nation's capital. Not even when that senator sits on the Senate finance committee, which is in the dramatic throes of drafting major health care reform legislation of tremendous interest to Big Pharma. This is merely S.O.P. No extramarital sex is allowed--but there's nothing wrong with getting into bed with corporate mercenaries. Alas, one of these couplings affects the public interest more than the former.

You can follow David Corn's postings and media appearances via Twitter.

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