The New York Times runs “all-sex-workers-are-victims” op-eds. The sex workers, blogging in force at Bound, Not Gagged and elsewhere, beg to differ. They also provide some practical policy guidance. Here, for example, is a list of policy goals from Jill Brenneman of Sex Worker’s Outreach Project East.
• Decriminalization of all aspects of sex work [...]
Scott Swensen suggests the following Prostitution Pledge for Politicians.
As an American politician I will stop all hypocritical, self-righteous moralizing and judgment of the lives of others. I pledge to support legislation that treats all humans as equals and ensure that foreign assistance dollars intended to stop HIV/AIDS are allocated using the very best public health [...]
So New York’s Democrat governor Elliot Spitzer admits to having been a naughty boy. He wanted to have sex with someone who wasn’t his wife, and pay for it. Tut tut. Paroxysms of delight from his enemies at The Wall Street Journal and comment about Spitzer’s staying power and other analysis many other places besides. [...]
Ted Gideonse doesn’t understand how Obama can be up two points in one poll and Hillary up 12 points in another. Because I’m in Bangkok and it’s past my bedtime, I’m going to be lazy and refer back to an earlier but ever more pertinent post: Voting is like sex.
The Center for Global Development invites readers to rename PEPFAR, the 15-soon-to-be-at-least-45 billion dollar aid programme for HIV care (and a bit of prevention) in developing countries. The finalists are now open for voting on; they include such inspirational suggestions as American Sustainable HIV/AIDS Relief Plan (A-SHARP) and Program to Encourage Partnerships Focused on AIDS [...]
Finally, a reporter in Ghana put George Bush on the spot about earmarking over a billion dollars for abstinence-only programmes which Bush’s own scientific advisors say don’t work (recent thoughtful comment here).
Here’s what Bush said:
“I monitor the results,” he said. “And if it looks like it’s not working, then we’ll change. But thus far [...]
From the ever-helpful Kaiser Family Foundation comes a very useful summary of where each of the US presidential candidates stands on HIV issues.
The summaries for Obama and Clinton are so similar that I ran a “compare docs” on them. Besides substituting names and genders (he/she), the only real differences are: Obama supports “comprehensive sex education”, [...]
The capital of the United States has HIV rates higher than those of Congo and Ethiopia. A lot of those infections are among drug injectors. Many in the city were hugely relieved when a ban on funding for needle exchange programmes in DC was effectively dropped just a couple of weeks ago. The city’s mayor [...]
As citizens of a country founded on the slogan “No taxation without representation”, Americans living overseas get to pay taxes without any dedicated representation in Congress. But they do get to vote in primaries. The Democrats make it easier than the Republicans , even providing helpful on-the-spot voting sites in pubs in Dublin and donut [...]
Salon’s Sheila Kaplan, Newshoggers and Michael Clark bring to our attention the latest salvo in the Bush administration’s war on science — this time, it was suppressing information about possible toxicity of trailers used to house victims of Hurricane Katrina because of formaldehyde, though it might just as well be the safety of condoms (which [...]
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