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This week I've been a bit busy with work and a bit burned out on politics and all that, but I think this piece by Joan Ryan is worth passing on:

A million years ago when I first became a sports columnist, some of the sportswriters at the Florida newspaper where I worked took me out for a beer. They were well-meaning guys trying to help a 24-year-old woman who had no clue what she was getting herself into.

Don't be a "female" columnist, they said. You won't be taken seriously. Grateful, I mimicked their writing styles for months until one day, the obvious flaw in their advice hit me. I was female. I was a sports columnist. I had no choice but to be a female sports columnist.

More important, I came to understand why female voices on the sports pages were valuable. It's not that women write differently from men. What's different is their choice of topics and the lens through which they view them. Domestic violence, inequities in athletic scholarships and resources, sexual orientation -- all were pulled from the shadows of sports when women began showing up in stadium press boxes.

So when a study released Tuesday revealed that just 14 percent of the guests on the influential Sunday morning political talk shows are women, and that 56 percent of the episodes included no women at all, I wondered if anyone was surprised.

Read the whole thing.

[Link from Marisacat via email.]

The self-appointed breeder police in the Indiana legislature had to withdraw their turkey baster bill last week in the face of public outcry. Too bad Californians have to turn to the courts, for it seems some doctors took matters into their own hands, refusing a lesbian woman medical care involving artificial insemination.

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A California appeals court heard arguments Tuesday in the case of a woman who sued her doctors after they refused to artificially inseminate her, allegedly because she is gay.

The physicians are appealing a ruling that prevented them from raising religious freedom as a defense in the test of whether doctors can deny treatment to gays and lesbians.

Attorney Carlo Coppo told California's Fourth District Court of Appeal that religion is relevant to deciding whether his clients wrongly denied fertility treatment to Guadalupe Benitez.

Oh my! Not only does she reject the gift of a man's affections, but she also bears the guilt of being Hispanic. The judge established breeder court just in time.

In her suit, Benitez claims that Brody told her in 1999 that her religious beliefs prevented her from helping a homosexual conceive a child by artificial insemination, but that other physicians at the practice would be able to help her.

The next year, Benitez said, she was told that both Brody and Fenton were unable to help her because they did not feel comfortable with her sexual orientation.

The doctors contend they denied treatment because Benitez and her registered domestic partner of 15 years were not married.

Oh, well, that's okay, right? I mean, women shouldn't have the right to bear bastards now, should they?

A Superior Court judge dismissed the case in 2001 on grounds that federal rules covering employer health plans bar state civil rights actions. In 2003, the San Diego appeals court overturned the decision.

When the case returned to Superior Court, Judge Ronald Prager ruled before trial that the doctors could not use religious freedom as a defense because there is no such exemption under the state's anti-discrimination law, setting the stage for Tuesday's arguments.

Is this the first case to involve the Mengele appeal? I mean, if doctors are to be bound not by law but by personal dogma, Dr. Mengele would have a good case, no? If these "religious" doctors win their case, one potential consequence is the opening of clinics that refuse patients based on any personal trait or lifestyle, even if legal. Of course, they don't care about that. They just want to be comfortable in their bigotry, while still pretending to serve the public.

I don't know, but it seems to me that if you have religious reasons not to do your job fairly and without prejudice, you have no business in medicine. You might try politics. No need for ethics there.

Does this bode well for our armed forces?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The National Guard and Reserves are suffering a strikingly higher share of U.S. casualties in Iraq, their portion of total American military deaths nearly doubling since last year.

Reservists have accounted for one-quarter of all U.S. deaths since the Iraq war began, but the proportion has grown over time. It was 10 percent for the five weeks it took to topple Baghdad in the spring of 2003, and 20 percent for 2004 as a whole.

The trend accelerated this year. For the first nine months of 2005 reservists accounted for 36 percent of U.S. deaths, and for August and September it was 56 percent, according to Pentagon figures.

The Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve accounted for more than half of all U.S. deaths in August and in September - the first time that has happened in consecutive months. The only other month in which it even approached 50 percent was June 2004.

These are the men and women who are supposed to be available to, um, guard the nation.

At one point this year more than half of the combat forces in Iraq were National Guard.

"That's a first," said Army Maj. Les Melnyk, historian for the Pentagon office that manages the Army and Air National Guard. "The Guard can't claim that (level of combat) for World War II or World War I - the other major wars we fought in. Never more than 50 percent of the combat forces were Guard."

At present, of the approximately 152,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, about half are reservists: 49,000 Army National Guard, 22,000 Army Reserve and 4,000 Marine Reserve, according to figures provided by those organizations.

The trend is almost certain to be reversed next year, when the active-duty Army is scheduled to make a proportionally larger contribution to the overall force. The number of National Guard brigades in Iraq, for example, is scheduled to drop next year from seven to two.

But what does this say for the burden on the Army? If the Army can't handle the occupation without tag-teaming with the Guard, what does that say about our deployment ... and what we could possibly do if, heaven forbid, a real security problem arises? And what's wtih 50% of the troops being reservists? Aren't reserves supposed to be kept in reserve?

Forget the politics a moment. Can we sustain an occupation using such overextended and overtaxed force structures? Is it even smart to do so?

The latest "evidence" is that, as a member of the advisory board for the SMU law school, she advocated funding a program for women speakers. There's no indication that she had a hand in the selection of actual speakers, or just how active she was in the effort.

In the late 1990s, as a member of the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school, Ms. Miers pushed for the creation of an endowed lecture series in women's studies named for Louise B. Raggio, one of the first women to rise to prominence in the Texas legal community. A strong advocate for women, Ms. Raggio helped persuade state lawmakers to revise Texas laws to give women new rights over property and in the event of divorce.

Ms. Miers, whom President Bush announced on Monday as his choice to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, not only advocated for the lecture series, but also gave money and solicited donations to help get it off the ground.

But hold those liberal-parade horses a moment! Aren't these advisors supposed to raise money for the school, no? Isn't that the purpose of their appointment in the first place? And don't conservative women advocate women speaker panels?

Besides, Molly Ivins notes that Miers and Raggio were friends across the divide:

One of Miers' key backers was Louise Raggio, a much-revered Dallas feminist lawyer. The women lawyers groups favored Miers despite her stand on abortion because she was a candidate acceptable to the Establishment, thus making her electable as a woman.

So there's no reason to think that Miers' efforts as a member of a fundraising board is anything but scratching the back of her own back-scratcher. In fact, it's clear that Miers was quite active with women professionals, without compromising her conservative credentials at all:

Miers sometimes took women judicial candidates through her very prestigious firm Liddell, Sapp for the obligatory meet 'n' greet and even donated to Democratic candidates. Both these behaviors were well within the conventions of Dallas city and judicial politics, particularly in the 1980s. Dallas city politics are nonpartisan, and rather like Texas tea ("sweet or un?") come in only two flavors -- Establishment or less Establishment. Miers qualifies as ur-Establishment, despite "being a girl," as a few of the old dinosaurs still put it. The slightly feminist tinge to her credentials is a plus, but she is quite definitely anti-abortion.

In other words, reading anything into this as being reflective of her actual views is simply wishful thinking.

--As it is wishful thinking to believe she supports gay rights (while opposing repeal of Texas sodomy laws?)--

--As it is wishful thinking to believe she's pro-choice (while running for office as a born-again "pro-life" conservative?)--

By lending too much credence and significance to these rather oblique reports on Miers, the SCLBs are coming off as stretching the truth to try to fit over their hopes. I can see pointing at these tidbits of information as helping to paint a fuller picture, and perhaps even offer cause for hope (against hope). But why the veritable campaign to color her liberal? I just don't get it. And I ain't buying it.

Why is liberal columnist Molly Ivins (who knows her Texas conservatives) singing one of the few solitary notes of concern? ("Uh-oh. Now we are in trouble.")

In case you missed Bush's speech today, he spoke at length about the religious fanatics who want to establish a theocracy, where they control religion, who want to police the soul, who hate and mistrust freedom and democracy, who want to establish a power base where they tell everyone else how to live, yadda yadda yadda....

And no, he wasn't talking about the evangelical Christians. (Why on Earth would you think that?)