OPINIONS OF ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, A MINOR GREEK GODDESS. She can be reached at: ECHIDNE-OF-THE-SNAKES.COM

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Why Does Amnesty International Hate America? 



George Bush finds Amnesty International's recent report absurd:

A human rights group's report about conditions at the U.S. military's prison at Guantanamo Bay is "absurd," President Bush told reporters TuesdayThe Amnesty International report, released last week, said prisoners at the U.S. Navy base had been mistreated and called for the prison to be shut down. The president, addressing a news conference at the White House, said the Amnesty document was an "absurd report." "It's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," Bush said of the report, which compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag. He said the Amnesty allegations were based on interviews with detainees, who hated America and were trained to lie.

It sounds like someone trying to translate something political to a class of five-year olds, doesn't it? But only two years ago Donald Rumsfeld thought highly of the Amnesty International's reports on Iraq:

On March 27, 2003, Rumsfeld said:

We know that it's a repressive regime…Anyone who has read Amnesty International or any of the human rights organizations about how the regime of Saddam Hussein treats his people…

The next day, Rumsfeld even cited his "careful reading" of Amnesty:

…[I]t seems to me a careful reading of Amnesty International or the record of Saddam Hussein, having used chemical weapons on his own people as well as his neighbors, and the viciousness of that regime, which is well known and documented by human rights organizations, ought not to be surprised.

And on April 1, 2003, Rumsfeld said once again:

[I]f you read the various human rights groups and Amnesty International's description of what they know has gone on, it's not a happy picture.

It's all about expediency, of course, but it would be fun to ask the administration why Amnesty International nails it when it comes to Iraq but is totally absurd when it comes to Guantanamo Bay.

Soon Amnesty International will be called part of the international terrorist network, I suppose. Unless it digs up something useful in Iran.

|

Deep Throat 



The Watergate source whose identity has so far not been widely known:

W. Mark Felt, who retired from the FBI after rising to its second most senior position, has identified himself as the "Deep Throat" source quoted by The Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon's resignation, Vanity Fair magazine said Tuesday

I don't really like the handle and I have no idea if Felt's claim is true. It probably is. I only want someone to do the same thing for us today. Say, concerning the 2004 elections.
----
Via Attaturk on Eschaton.

|

Today's Action Alert 



Today's Action comes from NOW:

*************************************************************

The National Organization for Women proudly salutes the introduction of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2005. Introduced in the House on Thursday, May 26, this is the first legislation to explicitly include transgender individuals in civil rights law. The bill is designed to help protect against bias crimes based on gender identity, sexual orientation, gender and disability and also adds gender and gender identity to the Hate Crimes Statistics Act.

***

The chief sponsors of the House bill are Representatives John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Barney Frank, D-Mass., Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis. NOW applauds this bipartisan effort as a further step toward eradicating injustice in our society.

***

"This legislation will have a huge legal and educational impact as we work together to stop the attacks in our society against the LGBT community," Vives said. "We will be working with our champions in the Senate and expect them to introduce a similar bill with equally broad inclusion for gender identity. With the passage of this legislation, we can take down these and other barriers of discrimination and achieve our goal of full inclusion—for all people—in our society."

****************************************************

Write to your representative and urge her or him to vote for this legislation. Thanks for taking today's action.

|

Why Women Won't Compete 



According to the great expert, John Tierney, of the once-respectable New York Times:

Discrimination is one big reason, because men have traditionally made the rules to suit themselves and keep out women. But if you think that leveling the playing field would eliminate gender disparities, consider an unintentional experiment conducted in the Scrabble world, which is hardly a hostile environment for women.

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.
...
The guys who memorize these lists have a hard time explaining their passion. But the evolutionary roots of it seem clear to anthropologists like Helen Fisher of Rutgers University.

"Evolution has selected for men with a taste for risking everything to get to the top of the hierarchy," she said, "because those males get more reproductive opportunities, not only among primates but also among human beings. Women don't get as big a reproductive payoff by reaching the top. They're just as competitive with themselves - they want to do a good job just as much as men do - but men want to be more competitive with others."

Evolutionary psychologists see two kinds of payoffs that traditionally went (and often still go) to victorious men. Women have long been drawn to men at the top of a hierarchy (a clan leader, Donald Trump) who have the resources to support children.

And when women pursued what's called a short-term reproductive strategy - a quick fling - then presumably evolution favored the woman who was attracted to a man with good genes, as manifest either in his looks or in some display of prowess. If the theory's right and the unconscious urges persist in women, you can begin to understand why some women wait in hotel lobbies looking for rock stars.

Yes, I was expecting the evo-psychos to rear their ugly heads any time soon after the last Tierney column on women. Note how far into the quote you have to read before you come to the these little words:

If the theory's right...

It's a theory, my friends, and one that we cannot prove or disprove, really. There are no archeological remains that could help us here, no paleoanthological findings, nothing. Your guess is as good as mine. Or probably better, given that I'm just an amateur and not a hi-faluting evolutionary psychologist.

But let me just point out that the traditional way of looking at the sexual selection in this genre assumes that the competition is over when a sperm has been deposited. It completely skips the nine months that follow and the years that take before the fertilized egg has become an equally fertile human adult. The assumption is that none of this long time period involves any competition whatsoever, at least not by the women. But that's all it is: an assumption. And an assumption that makes women look like they don't compete.

Besides, the arguments presented above are circular. The men that women might have had quick flings with must have "presumably" been with men who have good genes and such men must have been good Scrabble players or something. Maybe the women had their little flings with guys who had big soulful eyes and who were good at listening when you moaned and complained about the thug you were usually saddled with? Maybe these guys had gentle fingers and nimble tongues and knew a better way of cooking mammoth? Who knows what the prehistoric women thought.

Note also how Tierney discounts the idea that we might have inculcated anti-competitive values in women by the way girls are traditionally brought up (by likening discrimination to a simple leveling of the playing field), and he doesn't even question the assumption that all Scrabble players had the same opportunities to dedicate time and money to this one hobby. Tierney could have looked at competitions of other types, too, such as the pie-baking ones or the ones for the best roses or whatever, and I bet that he would have found very little support for his theory.

I'm a believer in evolution in general because I can see the evidence for it. When it comes to evolutionary psychology I'm a lot more cynical, and the main reason is the near-total absence of clear evidence for the most misogynistic arguments possible. It seems to me that most evo-psychos attempt to explain the status quo as impossible to change and in that sense they all have wingnut (caveman?) axes to hone. Never mind that the society has changed drastically over centuries, evo-psychos always stress its unchanging nature.

The wingnuts have two major approaches to the "Woman Question". One is the use of fundamentalist religion to subjugate women. The other one is pseudoscience* of various types, from Freudianism to this crap. Be forewarned.
----
*By pseudoscience I mean theories which look scientific but which don't lend themselves to proper scientific testing.

|

Unfair Advantages in Sports 



Amanda at Pandagon has an interesting post on the question whether women have unfair advantages in some sports such as certain kinds of car racing:

After Danica Patrick placed 4th yesterday in the Indy 500, Robby Gordon stepped up to be the whining crying baby.
Robby Gordon accused Danica Patrick of having an unfair advantage in the Indianapolis 500 and said yesterday he will not compete in the race again unless the field is equalized.

Gordon, a former open-wheel driver now in NASCAR, contends that Patrick is at an advantage over the rest of the competitors because she only weighs 100 pounds. Because all the cars weigh the same, Patrick's is lighter on the race track.

"The lighter the car, the faster it goes," Gordon said. "Do the math. Put her in the car at her weight, then put me or Tony Stewart in the car at 200 pounds and our car is at least 100 pounds heavier.

Amanda notes that Gordon modified his comments later on. But the interesting dilemma remains: Should we equalize people by weight to make sports fairer? Or by upper body strength? Or by innate speed? Nope, let's not go there, I bet I hear you mutter.

Though we already do this in many sports such as boxing, wrestling and weight lifting where weight determines the class one competes in, we tend not to do this where the unfair advantage favors those who have traditionally done well in the sport, and that is mostly men. The Danica Patrick case is interesting because it's the opposite of this usual case and in some ways a test case for spotting possible sexism. I would think that jockeys are also worried about the influx of women into their sport as weight is important for jockeys and women are, on average, lighter.

After sparring against partners twice as heavy as I am I tend to favor the idea of weight categories. It was fun to beat someone that big but my back didn't agree in the long run. It would have been completely adequate to wipe the floor with guys my size...

Mostly just kidding.

|

Monday, May 30, 2005

Garden Blogging, Part II 




Garden, soon


I don't feel like talking politics today. There are plenty of good blogs writing about stuff today like on all other days. Check my links for some ideas. I feel like talking about gardening, or the lack of it in my life. They say that life is what happens when you have other plans and so it has come to be with me and my garden plans. In short: I haven't raised a finger this spring.

The consequences: Doggie poops still looming large among the verdant greenery in the flowerbeds. The recent deluge has formed many of the plants into vase-shapes, with a big empty space in the middle, just the right size for a pooping Labrador retriever. Weeds grow head-high and luxuriant.

Had I been a real garden goddess I would have weeded, propped up plants, picked up old poops and planted new seedlings all over the place, not to talk about compost spreading. Still, nature has been very kind to the gutless slothful me and I do have white bleeding hearts nodding their heavy heads above white baby tulips, yellow wallflowers along - what else - walls, and the climbing hydrangea is veiling the Snakepit Inc. in bridal glory. The dogwood trees promise a whole milky way of flowers soon, best viewed from the roof of the house, and the peony buds are straining, straining to open next to the midnight blue sages.

It will be good, after all. I wish, oh, how I wish, that the same could be said about the U.S. political situation.

|

For Memorial Day 



Two poems, one from WWI, one from WWII, with very different messages. First Wilfred Owen:


Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


And for a very different view, the poem written by John Gillespie Maggee who was killed in action at the age of 19 while serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
He wrote this poem some days before his death:


Touched The Face Of God


"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed and joined the trembling mirth of sun-split clouds
– and done 100 things you have not dreamed of
– wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.

Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept hills with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew;

And, while with silent, lifting mind, I trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God!"


|

Sunday, May 29, 2005

David Brooks on the Class Struggle 



According to David Brooks, if Karl Marx came back from the realm of the dead he'd yell and scream about the American class struggle, not that David Brooks believes in a class struggle (he believes in the OT god). But in any case, Marx would point out that it's the educated elite that holds the power in the U.S. now, the educated elite which has destroyed the concept of family (read: patriarchal family) and it's the educated elite which runs this country now.

And, ta-ram-pam-pam! This educated elite consists of us latte-sipping-ivory-tower liberals! Yes, even though the wingnuts are in power everywhere you look, the real power is held by people like Echidne of the snakes!

So Brooks is right: there is a problem with class mobility in this country. And then he's horribly wrong: class is about money, not about the lefty values by some of those who are educated. He even admits as much in his column:

The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in.

The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing for itself most of the income gains of the past decades - and then ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class.

It's the moneyed class that does this, David, not the educated class, though the two overlap. Check what you say yourself in this quote: the families of the students entering Harvard are wealthy, on average. The wealth was there first, David.

Brooks is trying to make a right-wing populist case here: Let's get rid of the educated liberals and the system will be fairer! Indeed, he appears to advocate getting rid of education as a way to make the system fairer. History doesn't support David in this assertion, and in any case the educated liberals are not in power right now. The wingnuts are, David, and you're their poster child for being educated and wingnut.

|

Bad Uses of Statistics 



John Tierney gives us examples to ponder over in his latest NYT column (the one that should be Katha Pollitt's if there was any justice on this earth). The column is about how peaceful the world really is today, compared to past centuries:

The only antidote [to feeling that wars are prevalent] is to look at long-term trends instead of daily horrors. For a really long-term trend, consider that of 59 skeletons found in a Stone Age graveyard, at least 24 died from violence. Or that a quarter of the male population died fighting in some pre-agricultural societies.

In the 20th century, despite two world wars, humans had less than a 2 percent chance of dying in war or a mass killing, according to John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State. Today the risk is lower still - about a quarter the chance of dying in a car accident.

I mention these numbers not to minimize today's tragedies. I plan to be at a parade on Monday honoring the soldiers who have fallen, especially the more than 1,600 in Iraq. But I will also be thinking about the Progress Paradox and the origin of Memorial Day.

It started after the Civil War as Decoration Day, an occasion for widows wearing red poppies to decorate graves and memorials in virtually every town. If a war of that scale happened now, there would be nearly five million graves to tend. Sixteen-hundred is still too many, but if the trend continues, Memorial Day may eventually become a memory itself.

Can you spot the statistical mistakes here? There are at least two: first, it's incorrect to calculate the probability of dying in a war by including in the base all the people who lived in areas with no wars, and that's what Tierney's two percent figure uses. He then compares this to the findings from one archeological dig from one place. There's no way of knowing how representative that dig is of the general time and place.

The second one is the whole last paragraph which compares oranges to sausages in so many ways that I'm exhausted in just trying to list them. So I won't.

Tierney's column is correct in one sense, though. The world has become safer for many individuals over time, and one of the main reasons for that is something Tierney doesn't mention: the effect liberal and progressive ideas have had on social justice, education and opportunities for all.

|

Emily Dickinson 



On the question what we should know and how the media should tell it?



Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind -


|

Saturday, May 28, 2005

On Fear 



I had one of those nights when all my troubles seemed to suddenly rear up and loom enormous in the horizon. There are so many of them that I can't squeeze through into the rest of my life. This happens when I have overdozed on news of a certain kind, in this case the stories about the coming avian flu pandemic.

Several blogs had reader comments on the bird flu and the chance that it might hit home (wherever home might be), and what was most noticeable about some of the comments was the fear people feel and the need to know what to do. What to do? Should we stock medications, food, water? Should we avoid all other breathing creatures? Should we die now so that we won't have to go through this fear again?

Terrorism threats have the same effect on us. The effect is to make us panic and to act in unwise ways, such as cornering the market on duct tape. All this is understandable and human; we need to feel some amount of control over our destinies and perfect passivity doesn't feel like control. Yet the things that we could do are either ineffective or unethical, on the whole. Some of those things make us look greedy and uncaring and even vicious; hoarding antibiotics when others need them now would be one of those. But I can still understand all this, this human mess of fear and the desire to overcome it.

Most of these types of fear are illogical in the probability sense. You, my dear reader, are more likely to die because you didn't use a seat belt or because you smoked or drank or ate the wrong things than in the hands of a terrorist or in the grips of the avian flu. But these other kinds of killers get us one by one, almost invisibly, and besides, we are used to being killed by them. Avian flu or SARS or terrorists are new threats, unknown threats and it is this that frightens us as much as their suddenness. But mainly, I believe, we fear them because they make us feel so passive, so "out-of-control". Hence the out-of-control reactions.

Fear of flying has similar roots. Who cares if cars are less safe than planes; at least in a car you feel in control, even if you're doing backseat driving. Now combine the fear of flying with the fear of terrorism and a smidgen of avian flu fear and what do you get? I don't really even want to think about that one.

None of this aims to belittle the importance of preparing for a possible bird flu pandemic. It would be criminal not to prepare for it, but the job belongs to the health care systems of the affected countries, not to individuals who have been given no official advice. Still, we will never beat all the diseases that nature throws into our face and we will not get out of here alive. In one sense we are indeed totally at the mercy of external events, totally passive, flotsam and jetsam being tossed here and there by the sinister forces of nature. But nature gives us all the good things, too, and if we are careful and clever (and lucky) we can surf her waves without getting caught in the first big one. At a minimum, we can focus on worrying about those things which we can affect rather than tearing our minds apart with all those what-ifs.

So that's what I did last night, worried about the things I can affect, and stayed wide awake until dawn. I have to work a little bit more on the ending to this story.

|

In Memoriam 






The story is here.
----
Via dailyKos diaries.

|

Friday, May 27, 2005

Friday Embroidery Blogging 




monsters?


This picture has a mess of techniques: applique, reverse applique, cross stitch, stem stitch and so on. The meaning is equally ambiguous. Some days I think that I'm the winged creature flying, other days I'm the big devouring head. Some days the winged creature is making an escape, other days it's sucked in. And so on. Like life.

|

Billmon's Take On Laura Bush's Visit 



It's a good one. He builds up a story by using nothing but snippets from various newspaper stories and one quote from his own archives, this one:

The point of Shrub's "revolution" seems to be this: Get yourself a token parliament, hold a few rigged elections, make a few noises about rights for women, and you, too, can be in good graces with Uncle Sam and Big Oil. Playing host to a few American military bases doesn't hurt, either.

That's it, the plan in a wingnutshell, and the reason why I don't get very excited when Laura Bush gives speeches on women's rights in the Middle East. She's probably quite sincere, but she has no power to make any of these things real. And at home women's rights count only as a device for getting the wingnut masses really outraged. To fight against those rights.

What's worse, linking women's rights with the rest of the empire's agenda is bad news for women in the Middle East. Even suggesting that equality might be a good thing will make you look like a pro-Bush colonizer. Feminism is now just another arm of the American Empire, and the date when women in those countries will have equal rights has thereby been postponed by a few millennia. Or so I think.

|

Ahnuld and the Pothole 



California governor Arnold Schwartzenegger has been filling potholes as part of his campaign to improve transportation in his state. Too bad that the pothole he filled had been dug up beforehand so that there would be one to fill:

"For paving the streets, it's a lot of lighting,'' said resident Nick Porrovecchio, 48, motioning to a team of workmen setting up Hollywood-style floodlights on the street to bathe the gubernatorial podium in a soft glow.

Porrovecchio and his business partner, Joe Greco, said that at about 7 a.m. they became fascinated watching "10 city workers standing around for a few hours putting on new vests,'' all in preparation for the big moment with Schwarzenegger.

But their street, he noted, didn't even have a hole to pave over until Thursday morning.

"They just dug it out,'' Porrovecchio said, shrugging. "There was a crack. But they dug out the whole road this morning.''

Well, that's how it's done in the movies, so it's not Arnold's fault, really. Though there is the question whether taxpayers have to pay for the digging of the pothole as well as its filling. The governor's communication director argues that this event is not paid from the state funds, but

David Vossbrink, director of communications for San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales, who was in Washington, D.C., Thursday lobbying for more federal funding for BART, said the city paid the road crew and the extra security costs associated with the governor's visit -- as it would for any visiting dignitary.

Schwarzenegger's office "contacted us several days ago for a suitable area'' to depict his distribution of transportation funding, Vossbrink said. The neighborhood was chosen because "city workers were already in the area" doing repaving and resurfacing, which he said often requires peeling off old pavement and digging up roads to lay down new asphalt.

In this case, Vossbrink said, the governor's event involved "not exactly filling a pothole, but it represented the pothole aspect'' of the transportation funding measure.

That last sentence is so good it deserves to be repeated:

In this case, Vossbrink said, the governor's event involved "not exactly filling a pothole, but it represented the pothole aspect'' of the transportation funding measure.

Heh.

|

Oh Why, Oh Why, O.... 



Did I ever leave Ohio? Not that I've ever lived in Ohio, but it sounds like a fun place. First all the trouble with organizing and monitoring an election and now this coin collection fiasco. It seems that Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation has invested in rare coins as a way to hedge its investments in stocks and bonds. Sadly, though not perhaps inexplicably, some of the coins have gone a-missing, about ten million dollars worth. And the culprit appears to be:

...Tom Noe, a private coin dealer and Republican donor who led the coin investment. Democrats have alleged that Noe was awarded the state's business in return for campaign contributions to Republicans, who control most of state government.

Officials do not know what assets are missing or where those items are supposed to be, bureau spokesman Jeremy Jackson said. Investigators had gone into Noe's coin shop under a court order issued Thursday morning, but weren't able to remove coins from their cases to inspect them and verify authenticity, Jackson said.

The bureau had made $15.3 million from the investments while Noe has collected about $3.8 million in commission. His shop outside Toledo had one of the two largest coin caches in the collection.

I know that this is all old news and has been widely discussed in the lefty blogosphere. But the sum of ten million dollars is new and makes even a goddess perk up her ears. I have an excellent collection of U.S. quarters, the new ones. Could I interest some other state government in it, what do you think? If not that, then what about genuine goddess toenail clippings?

|

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Women in the Military - Take Three and Wrap 



For the time being, anyway. Those who don't want women anywhere near the frontlines lost this one, mostly because we don't have enought cannon fodder to begin with:

The plan to scale back women's service was shot down by opposition ranging from the Secretary of the Army to the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as Democrats and some members of Hunter's own party. "At a time when our armed forces are overstretched, we shouldn't be turning away people who want to serve their country," Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, a Democrat from California, told the Los Angles Times. "Invoking the names of two female soldiers captured by Iraqi insurgents and later freed, she added, 'This step is a slap in the face to the Jessica Lynches and Shoshana Johnsons of our military, who served our nation ably and nobly.'"

Of course, there's a pragmatic reason as well as a patriotic one for letting women continue to serve on the dangerous streets of Baghdad and beyond. Considering the extreme lengths that military recruiters have been going to get soldiers signed up, it's no wonder that the Pentagon doesn't want to diss women willing to give their all.

But, as the article I quote notes, we still have the "don't ask, don't tell" inanity operating.

|

Lethargy 



Can you help me with this: Are the politics really boring right now, slow and sloppy like cold oat meal porridge? Or is it me who needs to take a break from all the ranting and raving?

I keep cruising the net and looking in all the usual places and get no rise whatsoever in my body temperature. That rise is necessary fuel for writing about the issues.

It could be just the weather. Being rained on nonstop for a week does something to the very bones which is not pleasant. And to the bricks in my front porch. I had someone come soliciting yesterday and when I opened the door Hank snuck through between my legs, in order to slobber the solicitor with dog kisses. But the solicitor, being deathly scared of dogs, leapt backwards and landed on the bottom steps of my front stairs. Which promptly gave way. Now I have a big pile of rain-sodden bricks where there used to be some neat steps.

I should go out and put some big warning signs up but I'm too lethargic for even that. A possible lawsuit when the next solicitor trips and falls would at least spice up my life a bit.

The last and most frightening explanation for my political lethargy is that I have just gotten so used to the deaths in Iraq and the outrages in the U.S. Congress that I need a stronger and stronger fix to get going. Please tell me it ain't so.

|

Weird 



This is weird:

An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.

Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.

Bradford refused to remove the provision after the 9-year-old boy's outraged parents, Thomas E. Jones Jr. and his ex-wife, Tammie U. Bristol, protested last fall.

Through a court spokeswoman, Bradford said Wednesday he could not discuss the pending legal dispute.

The parents' Wiccan beliefs came to Bradford's attention in a confidential report prepared by the Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, which provides recommendations to the court on child custody and visitation rights. Jones' son attends a local Catholic school.

"There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones' lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages," the bureau said in its report.

And by weird I mean the behavior of Judge Bradford. Just imagine this: replace "Wiccan" with "fundamentalist Christian" and see how the whole thing would read.

Sounds like another activist judge to me.

|

It's That Time Again! 



The time to notice, with great astonishment, how few women there are as opinion columnists in major newspapers, including the New York Times. When the astonishment has abated a little, it's time to ponder the possible reasons for this drought of female voices and to conclude that the reasons they are unfathomable. And then it's time to gently point out that maybe there just aren't enough good female writers (though there's no glass ceiling against them any longer, no, and though evo-psychos argue that women are better at writing than men). Then, finally, it's time to set the topic aside until it's needed again because of low readership figures at some near future date.

That sounds bitter, doesn't it? Well, I've only been a blogger for eighteen months or so, and during this time I've gone through four waves of this crap. Hence the bitterness. Also because Mr. Tierney was hired by the Times and he's no great writer. Neither is Bobo Brooks. But there are some truly great female political writers out there: Katha Pollitt, Molly Ivins, Barbara Ehrenreich, yet none of them are deemed good enough for the Times.

My explanation for the lack of women's voices in the media is that those who have the power to decide on these things regard being a woman similar to being a bespectacled libertarian from SE Maine. In other words, "women" are seen as a specific subgroup of possible voices, on par with minor political groupings. One of those "women" is then plenty for the New York Times, or any other self-respecting major media outlet. But in reality women are the majority, of course, and doing what these guys are doing is just plain silly. It's tokenism.

It's equally silly to hire women as interpreters of the great womandom, and that's the other way this game is being played: A woman is hired to write, but only on what women think, or to interpret this weird feminine species for the rest of us normal beings. In both variations of the game, women lose; in the first because how many bespectacled libertarians from SE Maine do you really want to read, and in the second because a few interpreters of the tribe is plenty.

So I'm bitter. In a just system it would be me pontificating on the opinion pages of the Times. Or at least it wouldn't be Bobo and Tierney.

|

Today's Action Alert 



Someone at Atrios suggested that we let the editor at the Washington Post know what we think of today's editorial:

**************************
'American Gulag'


Thursday, May 26, 2005; Page A26

IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.

That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference held to mark the publication of Amnesty's annual report, the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times." In her written introduction to the report, Ms. Khan also mentioned only two countries at length: Sudan and the United States, the "unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power," which "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights."


Like Amnesty, we, too, have written extensively about U.S. prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have done so not only because the phenomenon is disturbing in its own right but also because it gives undemocratic regimes around the world an excuse to justify their own use of torture and indefinite detention and because it damages the U.S. government's ability to promote human rights.

But we draw the line at the use of the word "gulag" or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as "hysterical."

*********************************

Write and tell the Post that they're 100% wrong.



Editorial Policy

Letters must be exclusive to The Washington Post, and must include the writer's home address and home and business telephone numbers. (Letters via regular mail should also be signed.) Because of space limitations, those published are subject to abridgment. Although we are unable to acknowledge those letters we cannot publish, we appreciate the interest and value the views of those who take the time to send us their comments.



Letters Via E-Mail

Send e-mail letters to letters@washpost.com. Do not send attachments; they will not be read.

Regular Mail

Letters should sent to:

Letters to the Editor
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street Northwest
Washington, DC 20071

|

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Priscilla Owen 



The Owen confirmation is part of the whole filibuster deal. Too bad, as Owen surely is an extraordinarily wingnutty judge:

Owen has voted against a woman's right to choose in every abortion-related opinion. Owen is often referred to as an Enron or Halliburton appointee who, as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, consistently ruled for business and against consumers and women's rights, and tried to weaken discrimination protections in employment.

"Will saving women's lives, women's rights, and civil rights ever be considered such an extraordinary circumstance [that would allow Democratic filibustering]?," asked Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority. "If the record of Priscilla Owen and two other anti-women's rights, anti-civil rights nominees who will not be filibustered under the deal are to be the standard, then these rights are in grave peril."

Owen is going to sit on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which is already a most wingnutty court. So in some ways Owen can't wreak as much havoc as she'd like to. She's simply adding her conservative stamp to many others there.

But she's being placed with a view towards a future Supreme Court nomination, I fear. And so are the two other wingnut judges that are being given an up-and-down vote.

I've been looking very hard for examples of a nominee which would be extraordinary enough to allow filibustering if these three are just garden variety wingnuts. Attila the Hun? Nah.

|

More on Embryo Adoptions 



I recently wrote on this blog that the U.S. government gives out grant money to organizations who are willing to do community awareness on embryo adoption, i.e., the implantation of extra embryos from fertility clinics.

The pro-life movement has a problem with the whole fertility clinic phenomenom. On the one hand, here are these firms doing exactly what the pro-lifers want: creating babies. On the other hand, the process of creating these babies leaves many leftover embryos. Because the pro-life movement defines life as beginning when the sperm and the ovum meet (or, as one male writer on the topic describes it, when the sperm "pierces" the ovum) the leftover embryos constitute pre-born children to the pro-lifers, though pre-born children which happen to be frozen.

One organization offering embryo adoptions, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, actually calls them snowflakes. The organization's website has this advertisement:

NIGHTLIGHT CHRISTIAN ADOPTIONS WAS INTRODUCED BY PRESIDENT BUSH AT MAY 24, 2005, 2:10pm EST PRESS CONFERENCE ON STEM CELL RESEARCH. HE SPOKE OF THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE AND THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "SPARE EMBRYO."TWENTY ONE OF OUR SNOWFLAKES CHILDREN JOINED HIM IN ORDER TO PUT A FACE TO THESE EMBRYOS UNDER DISCUSSION.

CHECK YOUR LOCAL NEWS STATIONS FOR COVERAGE!

The website is an odd mixture pro-life statements and others which come across as describing the embryos as building material for future babies. I'm disturbed by this. Are all these embryos pre-born babies as this part says:

Finally, an option that makes sense! When your embryos were created, you knew that life had begun. When your embryos were implanted in you and you became pregnant, you prayed that your long wait for a child was nearly over. Like all pregnant women, you were probably filled with excitement - and apprehension - but, knowing that the baby's fate was in God's hands, you were ready.

Now that you have finished building your family, or have decided that embryo implantation is no longer in your plans, you are confronted with even more difficult decisions.

What will you do with the embryos that remain frozen? Destroy the embryos?... Donate them for research?...Donate the embryos for implantation?

There seems to be something missing in these choices. These embryos are your pre-born children and you want them to have a chance to be born. But, you also want some control over their destiny.

Or are they really seen as just embryos as this parts suggests:

The number of embryos a genetic family has will determine the number of embryos a family receives. Some genetic families may have twenty embryos; other families may only have two embryos. The adopting family adopts all of the embryos that the genetic family has. In any event, every adoptive family adopts a minimum of six embryos with which to begin their transfer process. Because our goal is for the adoptive family to have enough embryos for a chance at a pregnancy, they may be matched with two genetic families to achieve this goal.
...
Will Snowflakes work with a genetic family that has only one or two frozen embryos? And if so, will you support a process where the adopting family would receive embryos from multiple genetic parents?

Yes. Snowflakes provides at least 6 embryos to each adoptive family and will match an adopting family with 2 genetic families to achieve that number. The adopting family would have to agree to work with small numbers and possibly mix embryos in utero.

How did the agency decide on the number six?

The number six is based on the statistical success of embryo transfer from frozen embryos. The statistical reports from various clinics suggest a 50% success rate in thawing and 30% success rate in implantation. Therefore, if half of the six embryos survive thawing (resulting in three embryos transferred) the subsequent implantation rate of 30% would suggest that potentially one child would be born from the transfer of those three embryos. The statistics give us a starting point. There is no guarantee that a child will be born from every six embryos nor can there be a promise that multiples are not born. Based on these statistics, we have set six to be the number of embryos a family adopts.

This sounds like moral relativism and is not in accordance with proper pro-life sentiments. Embryos should be shipped in units of one, to guarantee maximum chance of life for each embryo. Anything short of this is disrespectful towards the pre-born babies.

The costs of these embryo adoptions are borne by the adopting families and come to about seven thousand dollars and up.

A 2001 article in the National Review Online about the Snowflakes Program I describe here has a fetching headline:

Frozen embryo adoption offers hope to microscopic Americans

The statistics given in the article suggest, though, that less than one in ten of these frozen little Americans were successfully converted into the kinds of Americans the pro-lifers don't care about: post-born ones. The hope offered is only partial, it seems.

|

Blackwell's Madrasa 



The writer Jeff Horwitz went to school to learn how to make campuses havens for wingnuts and then wrote an article about it for the Salon. What's interesting about the school he chose is that it's the same one Jeff Gannon went to in order to learn how to get a White House press pass without having any journalistic training or experience.

The school, called the Leadership Institute, is run by Morton Blackwell, better known as the wingnut who made those Purple Heart Band-Aids that conservatives then used to mock John Kerry. Blackwell is not a kind and gentle soul, and his latest project is to make sure young Americans leave college more conservative than they enter it.

And what does Blackwell's school teach the young activists? Here is an example:

It's nothing illegal -- no ballot stuffing necessary, even at the most liberal colleges. First you find a nonpartisan campus group to sponsor the election, so you can't be accused of cheating. Next, volunteer to organize the thing. College students are lazy, and they'll probably let you. Always keep in mind that a rigged mock election is all about location, location, location.

"Can anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"

Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"

"Stephen has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims, tossing Stephen his prize, a copy of Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah."

The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson -- that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: "This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put [the polling place] somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting." The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout.

When the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin, as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press releases.

Blackwell also gives the students some deeper advice:

"Everyone knows that for certain breeds of dogs it is customary to cut their tails short when they are a few weeks old," begins Blackwell's lecture to us on the importance of releasing negative information on your opponent incrementally. "Every time you clip the puppy's tail it hurts. It hurts. You might traumatize the puppy for life."

"The moral is that if it's your tail that's being clipped, you want it clipped once," concludes Blackwell. "But if you get a chance to clip your opponent's tail, clip that puppy as often as you can."

Thus, the campus is taken back into wingnuttia, book by book, computer by computer, building by building, right?

Well, what really matters in all this is money. The conservative organizations are top-down and shower the students they find with enormous resources. The liberal/progressive organizations are bottom-up and give the students very little help. If this will not change campuses may indeed be added to the realm of wingnuttia. Are you reading, Democratic party?

|

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

More on the Filibuster Compromise 



Dwight Meredith on the Wampum picks out the crucial question in determining whether the deal is any good for the Democrats:

Who is the least extreme nominee for whom a filibuster has been determined to be justified?

And we don't know the answer to this, which means that we don't really know what the deal means until we see what happens with the next three nominees.

|

Today's Action Alert 



Today's Action comes from NRDC.

*************************

The House version of the Defense Authorization bill could include language exempting the Defense Department from key environmental statutes. Urge your representative to vote against these dangerous and unnecessary exemptions. Here's a sample letter:

Dear Representative:

I urge you to vote to reject the Department of Defense's request for exemptions from public health and environmental laws. Specifically, please do not exempt the Pentagon from the Clean Air Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) during consideration of the Defense Authorization bill.

The president already has the authority to waive these laws for national security reasons. But the Defense Department has yet to request any waiver, and has made no case to Congress for blanket waivers that could endanger public health. In the end, our military families who live in and around bases would suffer the most. Local communities also would be adversely affected as they are left to foot the bill for cleanup or deal with permanent blight.

Again, I urge you to protect America's military families and other communities and uphold our environmental laws. Please vote "No" on language that would exempt the Pentagon from these important public health statues.

Sincerely,

************************************

Thanks for taking today's action.

|

Echidne's Advice Column 



I took a vacation yesterday from blogging by going down into the dark cave I call my basement and spending some time there with my inner washerwoman and a mountain of laundry. Then I shoveled all last winter's doghair and snake scales into one big pile and threw it over my neighbor's fence. There! Life is now so much sweeter as well as containing more clothes.

Vacations from politics are also a must. Else one starts growling at the other shoppers in the supermarket or begins to hoard weaponry in the back of the station wagon. Most people in the three-dimensional space we call reality are pretty nice, and not at all interested in politics. It's easy to forget these truths when one spends as much time in wingnuttia as I do.

For these reasons, my unsolicited advice today is to make sure that you visit apolitical life once in a while. Doing laundry isn't a bad idea, either.

|

Monday, May 23, 2005

The Filibuster Deal 



A deal was produced tonight and we were deprived of the fun of watching an all-out attack by the wingnuts. You can read about the deal at Kos. He also has some interesting responses to the deal, including one from Dr. Dobson, the "you-have-a-friend-in-wingnuts" guy.

The burning question is whether this deal is a good thing for the Democrats, and the answer is whatever you believe. The wingnuts are not happy with it but this doesn't necessarily mean that our side somehow won. The wingnuts have not been happy with anything since the Inquisition was disbanded. But their anger is a sign that things could have gone even worse for the Democrats. On the other hand, one could argue that the Democrats caved in, once again, and that this is not what the country needs.

On balance, I believe that it could have been worse, but I'm no more optimistic about the future than I was this morning.

|

More Polling News 



Bush is still doing very poorly, in fact, he might win the lowest ratings of any president ever if he goes on the same way. Only 33% of those questioned in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll like his Social Security proposal, and only 40% think that he's doing a good job domestically. Slightly over one half of all the respondents approve Bush's war on terrorism, probably because there has been no recent attack on the U.S. ground.

It's fair to say that this presidency is not liked. Neither is this Congress, not the Republicans or the Democrats in it, but this is fairly encouraging:

The poll also indicated Americans might want a change in Congress, with 47 percent of all respondents saying the country would be better off if Democrats were in control, compared with 36 percent who favored Republicans. Nine percent picked "neither."

The more I hear on these issues the less I understand the 2004 election results. Unless voters decided that self-flagellation is what this country needs next. Alternative explanations are wrapped in heavy tinfoil in my basement.

|

My Farewell Letter to the Wingnut Right 



Well, it isn't mine, and it isn't to the wingnut right. It's by a Men's Rights Activist called Keith Thompson, and he's saying goodbye to us simpering liberals. In a newspaper, just to make sure that we see what we are losing.

Keith's lament is very touching. It brought my muse Erecto out and he (drunk as usual) wanted to write a farewell letter, too. So here the two are: side by side. Or some snippets of them; to print all of the moaning and crying would be too boring for you, my dear readers.

Keith:

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.


Erecto:

Nightfall, Sep. 11, 2001. Thousands of innocents have just been slaughtered in a terrorist attack. Three things happen in rapid succession: the left rises to support a president they doubt because the crisis demands unity, the right decides to use the atrocity to further its own claims and Jerry Falwell states that the slaughter of innocents was God's punishment for the ACLU, pagans and feminists. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the American conservatism.

I'm leaving the right -- more precisely, the American wingnut right and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the slathering maws of self-styled Christianists -- people who once championed Christ's love towards oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways America has deserved this horrible catastrophe


Keith:

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.


Erecto:

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s. I became adept at seeing the mounting left as incoherent. To face the left's message directly posed the danger that I would have to see the right's message accurately, and to describe it so, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Ward Churchill, Noam Chomsky, Molly Ivins and all the Usual Suspects the right so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.


Keith:

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."


Erecto:

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved left". I laugh out loud at what now passes for conservative on the main lines of the wingnut right.

In the name of "religion", U.S. Senators threaten to discipline judges who are not Christian activists, U.S. Representatives propose bills that would make it unconstitutional for the Supreme Court to rule on any law that is explicitly based on the word of God, and our elected representatives wish to provide pharmacists the rights to decide which patients can receive their medications quickly and conveniently and which cannot.

Wait, it gets better. The state of Kansas is proposing to redefine science so that all mythology and religion can be included under that label, just for the purpose of teaching creationism in high school science classes.

When Wendy McElroy, a self-styled ifeminists, finds the most serious problem in feminism to be the unfair treatment of men, her sisters in The Concerned Women of America agree and appoint a man to be their representative. And Ann Coulter finds her own sex naturally less intelligent.


You get the idea? Maybe Keith's lament is more polished, but then Erecto was drunk and it took me only about thirty minutes to type mine in. I bet Keith had months of agony before he finished penning his.

Now I'm going to lean back and wait for the book offers to flood my e-mail addy.

|

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Some Graduate 



This item is a few days old but it's still worth noticing:

A pregnant student who was banned from graduation at her Roman Catholic high school announced her own name and walked across the stage anyway at the close of the program.

Alysha Cosby's decision prompted cheers and applause Tuesday from many of her fellow seniors at St. Jude Educational Institute.

But her mother and aunt were escorted out of the church by police after Cosby headed back to her seat.
...

The father of Cosby's child, also a senior at the school, was allowed to participate in graduation.


(Bolds mine.)

If it doesn't show it's ok. Another traditional value?
----
Via frogthefirst of Between the Lakes.

|

A Fun Science Site 



This one is a nice place to spend some time looking at stuff. If you, too, happen to sit at home while it's raining outside.
---
Via Sanna Emilin

|

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Echidne's Saturday Sermon 



Not really. More of a rant on sermons, probably, caused by this article in the New York Times about how the evangelical Christians are planning to take the Ivy League back to Christ from its current "pre-Christian" state. What struck me most about this article was the focus on the idea that Jesus wants his followers to be wealthy and successful in earthy goods:

Meanwhile, evangelical Protestants are pulling closer to their mainline counterparts in class and education. As late as 1965, for example, a white mainline Protestant was two and a half times as likely to have a college degree as a white evangelical, according to an analysis by Prof. Corwin E. Smidt, a political scientist at Calvin College, an evangelical institution in Grand Rapids, Mich. But by 2000, a mainline Protestant was only 65 percent more likely to have the same degree. And since 1985, the percentage of incoming freshmen at highly selective private universities who said they were born-again also rose by half, to 11 or 12 percent each year from 7.3 percent, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To many evangelical Christians, the reason for their increasing worldly success and cultural influence is obvious: God's will at work.
...
As the denomination grew, Assemblies preachers began speaking not only of heavenly rewards but also of the material blessings God might provide in this world. The notion was controversial in some evangelical circles but became widespread nonetheless, and it made the Assemblies' faith more compatible with an upwardly mobile middle class.

By the 1970's, Assemblies churches were sprouting up in affluent suburbs across the country. Recent surveys by Margaret Poloma, a historian at the University of Akron in Ohio, found Assemblies members more educated and better off than the general public.

As they flourished, evangelical entrepreneurs and strivers built a distinctly evangelical business culture of prayer meetings, self-help books and business associations. In some cities outside the Northeast, evangelical business owners list their names in Christian yellow pages.
...
"God has always used wealthy people to help the church," Mr. Havens said. He pointed out that in the Bible, rich believers helped support the apostles, just as donors to the Christian Union are investing strategically in the Ivy League today.

It's annoying. I know that human beings have always rewritten religion to go with what they wish to do anyway (whether it is slaughtering their opponents or making money or having lots of sex), but the Bible is one of the holy books which is pretty clear on the incompatibility of wealth and faith. Remember the eye of the needle and whatever was meant to go through it (some sources say a camel, some say a rope, but both are equally unlikely to make it)? And all the times that Jesus told rich men to give up their wealth? And how those who own two shirts or tunics should give one up?

Are these literalist believers, I wonder, and if so, how do they reconcile all this re-interpreting with literalism?

The idea that Christ wants you to be rich seems to be very popular these days. Many of the new megachurches thrive on this idea, and no wonder, as it makes religion rather painless. But isn't religion supposed to be something more than a way to whitewash your own greed? Something more than the chance to feel superior to all those heathens who Are Not Like Us? Isn't religion supposed to stretch our thinking and our limits in deeper ways than by suggesting that it would be a good thing to have more money?

The idea that God marks out the saved ones on earth by making them successful is not new, of course. Calvinism endorses this, for example. But Jesus did not. Read what He actually said if you don't believe me.

|

My Usual Saturday Yada Yada... 



Check out the American Street for more political blogging by yours truly, as well as others much more interesting. Or go out and have a good time. As long as you always come back here...

|

Embryo Adoption Public Awareness Grants 



I kid you not. Money is available for organizations (not individuals) who are prepared to educate the public about adopting embryos:

The Office of Public Health and Science (OPHS) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) announces the availability of funds for FY 2005 and requests applications for grants for public awareness campaigns on embryo adoption. The OPHS is under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for
Health (ASH), who serves as the Senior Advisor on public health and science issues to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The Office serves as the focal point for leadership and coordination across the Department in public health and science; provides direction to program offices within OPHS; and provides advice and counsel on public health and science issues to the Secretary. The increasing success of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has resulted in a situation in which an infertile couple typically creates several embryos through in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
During IVF treatments, couples may produce many embryos in an attempt to conceive with several being cryopreserved (frozen) for future use. If a couple conceives without using all of the stored embryos, they may choose to have the remaining unused embryos donated for adoption allowing other infertile couples the experience of pregnancy and birth. Embryo adoption is a relatively new process in which individuals who have extra frozen embryos agree to release the embryos for transfer to the uterus of another woman, either known or anonymous to the donor(s) for the purpose of the recipient(s) attempting to bear a child and be that child's parent.

Sigh. I would think that there are lots of already existing children who need help from this government.
----
Props to Bassett.

|

Combined Dog and Garden Blogging 




Dog in a Garden


This is Henrietta scratching in the garden. To set the stage for the next post.

|

Saturday Garden Blogging 



I shouldn't blog on gardens on a political blog. But notice the little title on the top? This blog is about my opinions, and today I have opinions on the garden.

On roots, specifically, and in the metaphoric sense. When I bought the Snakepit Inc. its environs were pretty bare. There was grass, tamped down with weedkillers, and a derelict doghouse. There was also a pile of construction rubble, and from this rubble shot up one solitary leaf, daffodil-like. I dug the plant up and fed it for a few years and now I have dark purple irises smelling of cinnamon all over the place. All from that solitary leaf.

I'm not sure what type these irises are. They are evergreen which narrows the possibilities down a lot, but then most evergreen irises shouldn't thrive in my climate. Because I don't know what to call these irises I think of them as my Ancestor Irises. Something that the spirits of the house gave me.

They also gave me peonies. Peonies are famous for living long lives, and there was one in my back yard, hidden by that derelict doghouse. It's one of those old-fashioned types which smell of hand-cream, and I have made it multiply over the years. But even the peony did nothing for quite a few years after its rescue. I fed it and I fed it and nothing happened. Until suddenly one spring the air outside smelled of hand-cream and all you could see for yards were those incredibly sexy, blowsy peony flowers.

The moral of the story, if there needs to be one: Sometimes grassroots take time to grow before they erupt in a wonderful rebellion of color, scent and, dare we hope, sanity?

|

Friday, May 20, 2005

Who Needs Newsweek Errors? 



WARNING: Graphic detail follows.


Or maybe all of the so-called liberal media is making this stuff up. That would be the wingnut conclusion. But here is New York Times:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

I can't comment on any of this. Not even the political gaming that might have taken place about the Newsweek-debacle and the Saddam-in-underpants-furor right when this was coming out. It's all too sickening.

|

The Female Orgasm Under the Microscope 



One of the most e-mailed New York Times stories is about the possible uselessness of the female orgasm. The article discusses the arguments of Elizabeth Lloyd that all twenty evolutionary theories about the female orgasm are wrong, that the most likely explanation for the female orgasm is that it has no evolutionary function whatsoever:

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts - a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

In that early period, the nerve and tissue pathways are laid down for various reflexes, including the orgasm, Dr. Lloyd said. As development progresses, male hormones saturate the embryo, and sexuality is defined.

In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while "females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan."

Nipples in men are similarly vestigial, Dr. Lloyd pointed out.

Hmmm. Do men have like six or eight vestigial nipples? Maybe it's a goddess thing, but my orgasms come in multiples.

The whole article is an interesting glimpse into the weird world of academic arguing, the way one is supposed to sweep aside the opposing theory with a few well-placed words and so on. But let me just point out that if a small sample size was used in a study which appeared to support one theory over the others, criticizing the study for the small sample size is correct, but this criticism doesn't prove that the theory is wrong. It just tells us that we should redo the study with a bigger sample size.

What interests me more about this article than all its (unprovable) hypotheses is the way it will be used in sexual politics. Just notice these comments by Dr. Lloyd:

"Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function," Dr. Lloyd said.

If women, she said, are told that it is "natural" to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

"Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women," Dr. Lloyd said. "And indirectly for men, as well."

Yes. But what consequences? I can think of quite a few, and most of them will not be pleasant for women. - In any case, Dr. Lloyd hasn't gotten the evolutionary story straight by just giving a different hypothesis. For that to happen we need to see much stronger proof.

I hate being under the microscope. Don't you? Especially when one expert tells us that female orgasms might be evaporating over time:

"Perhaps the reason orgasm is so erratic is that it's phasing out," Dr. Hrdy said. "Our descendants on the starships may well wonder what all the fuss was about."

Yes, while fighting off the ravenous rapists or whatever this development would do to all men who want sex. I understand that amateurs aren't supposed to comment on scientific stuff, but surely there is a very good and simple reason for the enjoyment of sex, whether by men or by women. It makes the whole process of procreation much easier and less expensive in the use of resources. Dr. Lloyd accepts as much in stating that the clitoris serves a specific evolutionary function. But the clitoris is kinda related to orgasms, and also to an area behind it in the vaginal channel. But what do I know?

|

Friday Embroidery Blogging 




Sophia Loren?


This is a not-very-successful attempt to combine the desirables in women: babedom and holiness. It ended up looking a little like Loren, I think. The techniques can be seen from the picture. If not, ask.

And the sweater says: "Good Enough?"

|

Another Action Alert 



This is from FAIR and concerns the relative invisibility of the Downing Street Memo in the U.S. media:


Network Viewers Still in the Dark on "Smoking Gun Memo"
Print media continue to downplay story

May 20, 2005

Following FAIR's call for more mainstream coverage of the "smoking gun
memo"--the secret British document containing new evidence that the Bush
administration manipulated intelligence to justify its plan to invade Iraq--a
steady trickle of news reports have appeared. But that coverage has been
downplayed in general and is still completely absent from the nightly news.

The Los Angeles Times published a page 3 story on the memo on May 12, and the
Washington Post ran a page 18 story the following day. More than two weeks after
the story broke in the Sunday Times of London (5/1/05), it finally made the
front page of a major U.S. newspaper, the Chicago Tribune (5/17/05).

After referring to the memo (5/2/05) in a story on the British electoral
campaign, the New York Times failed to report on the document's implications
about the Bush administration until today (5/20/05); the one-column story didn't
mention the manipulation of intelligence until the eighth paragraph. (Times
columnist Paul Krugman also discussed the memo on the paper's opinion page on
May 16.)

The Washington Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, who the previous week (5/8/05)
had mentioned reader complaints about the Post's lack of memo coverage without
evaluating their substance, revisited the issue with a much more critical eye in
his most recent column (5/15/05). (The ombud gave back-handed credit to FAIR and
the group Media Matters for America--both "self-described media watchdog
organizations"--for prompting him to delve into the story.) Getler wrote
that Post editors initially told him they didn't pursue the story because they
were "tied up with election coverage"--this despite the fact that the
leaked memo became a major election story in Britain and likely contributed to
Tony Blair's weak returns. When he questioned them again after the email
campaign, Getler wrote, "editors agreed that this story should be covered
and said they were going to go back and do that"; the Post's May 13 story
followed.

Getler called investigation of the memo's conclusions "journalistically
mandatory" and suggested that the Post story should have been placed on the
front page.

While the memo has begun to get wider coverage in print, broadcasters have
maintained a near silence on the issue. The story has turned up in a few short
CNN segments (Crossfire, 5/13/05; Live Sunday, 5/15/05; Wolf Blitzer Reports,
5/16/05), but the only mention of the memo FAIR found on the major broadcast
networks came on ABC's Sunday morning show This Week (5/15/05), in which host
George Stephanopoulos questioned Sen. John McCain about its contents. When
McCain declared that he didn't "agree with it" and defended the Bush
administration's decision to go to war, Stephanopoulos didn't question him
further. A look at the nightly news reveals not a single story aired about the
memo and its implications.

When finally questioned by CNN (5/16/05), White House press secretary Scott
McClellan claimed he hadn't seen the memo, but that "the reports"
about it were "flat-out wrong." British government officials, however,
did not dispute the contents of the memo--which can be read in full online at ht
tp://downingstreetmemo.com/ --and a former senior American official called it
"an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" (Knight
Ridder, 5/6/05).

The Chicago Tribune (5/17/05) named several factors that had caused a "less
than robust discussion" of the smoking gun memo: Aside from the White
House's denials, and the media's slow reaction, the paper asserted that
"the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash
the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war." Of course, it's
hard to judge the public's interest in a story the media have largely shielded
them from.

ACTION:
Please contact the nightly news programs and ask them to investigate and report
on the new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to
support its plan to invade Iraq.

CONTACT:
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
mailto:PeterJennings@abcnews.com

CBS Evening News
Phone: 212-975-3691
mailto:evening@cbsnews.com

NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971
mailto:nightly@nbc.com

PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Phone: 703-739-5000
mailto:newshour@pbs.org

As always, please remember that your comments have more impact if you maintain a
polite tone.


|

Friday Dog Blogging -Courtesy of Helga Fremlin 




Sleeping...


This is Kelly the Aussie. Proof that dogs don't sleep upside down there!

|

Santorum and Hitler 



I detest Santorum. He's like the worm that destroys the apples even when they look good on the outside. So I should feel happy that he has finally gone too far and called the Democrats nazis:

What the Democrats are doing is "the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the senate than it was the rule of the senate before not to filibuster."

Except of course he hasn't gone too far. Nothing will be too far with this lot. And that he criticized Senator Byrd for using Nazi imagery earlier this spring makes no difference:

On March 1, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) made a reference to Hitler in a speech about the nuclear option. Santorum lashed out at Byrd for his remarks. From the 3/11/05 Charleston Journal:

Byrd roused the ire of many Republicans when he tangentially referred to Adolf Hitler during a speech on March 1 defending cloture and the right to debate.

No, what all this shows is just the harvest from the movement Newt Gingrich started in the early 1990's, when he decided that the political opponents of his ideas should be labeled as the enemy, when he started using war imagery in his political speeches and when the wingnuts started memorizing the best ways to insult Democrats.

For a long time the Gingrich-created wingnuts were the only ones acting like this, but finally something gave on our side, and we started using the same imagery. Probably because acting sane and courteous got you steamrolled in a second. And now both sides are being regarded as equally extreme.

This is not true. The voices on the left which are extreme are indeed on the fringes. The extreme voices on the right are in the very center of power. There really isn't anything one could call a moderate Republican any more, in the sense of true moderation. The moderates are powerless, regarded as fringe elements themselves.

I knew all this was going to happen when I first heard of the wingnut term "culture wars". Once you set off on this path of hatred only one outcome is possible. The one where everybody calls everybody else nazis.

|

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Media Troubles in Wingnuttia, Too 



Though this is all pretty iffy stuff. But it looks like the popularity of Fox News is declining:

Here's something you won't hear on Fox News -- ratings for the cable news channel have been plummeting since before the November election.

According to TV Newser, the number of people watching Fox during prime time in the 25 to 54 age bracket dropped in April for the sixth straight month.

TV Newser cited a CNN press release which gave these totals for Fox's primetime audience in the 25 to 54 age bracket: Oct. 04: 1,074,000; Nov. 04: 891,000; Dec. 04: 568,000; Jan. 05: 564,000; Feb. 05: 520,000; March 05: 498,000; April 05: 445,000. That amounts to a decline of 58 percent, with no sign of leveling off.

The reason for saying this is iffy is that other cable news aren't doing that well, either. Maybe people are just tired of the incessant politicking? Though CNN's ratings have stabilized in the last month and Fox's keep on falling. Dare one hope that Americans are learning? Nah.

James Wolcott gives us a funny story about the National Review Online (NRO), the web-version of the wingnut newspaper. The NRO was having a fund-raiser:

Over the weekend, I noticed that the fundraising thermometer on the site seemed stuck just above $20,000. Perhaps, I thought, there is a lag time before they update the graphic. But each time I checked in the red in thermometer had barely budged upward.

Then the thermometer was removed and the publisher thanked for contributions while acknowledging that they fell a bit short of the mark, which seems to have been $100,000.

None of this is definite, but it's interesting. Especially when one remembers that the wingnut Washington Times never makes any money. And when one remembers how the mantra of the right is that we should let the markets decide what survives.

|

Today's Action Alert 



Today's action alert comes from the Campaign for America's Wilderness:




The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote this week to prohibit taxpayer dollars from being wasted on new logging roads in the Tongass National Forest. Contact your representative today and tell them to VOTE YES on the Chabot/Andrews Tongass Subsidy amendment.

Call your representative today 202-224-3121..

Last June, by a strong bi-partisan majority, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Chabot/Andrews amendment to eliminate taxpayer subsidies for logging road construction in the Tongass. However, the provision was eventually dropped from the bill in conference.

This year, Representatives Steve Chabot (R - OH) and Robert Andrews (D - NJ) are taking the lead again to end fiscally irresponsible spending by reintroducing their amendment to the annual Interior Appropriations bill.

At a time when the government is running huge budget deficits, the Forest Service wasted $48 million taxpayer dollars last year to subsidize the timber industry's clearcutting of America's Rainforest. If the Congress continues its proposed logging schedule in the Tongass, over the next decade America's taxpayers could expect losses totaling over $1.2 billion—a hefty price tag for clearcutting America's Rainforest.

If the President and Congress are serious about cutting government waste, the subsidy to the logging industry in Alaska is a good place to start. It should not be the responsibility of American taxpayers to foot the bill to clearcut America's Rainforest. American taxpayers deserve better and so does America's Rainforest

Thank you,
Mike Matz
Executive Director
Campaign for America's Wilderness

|

Women in the Military - Take Two 



I posted about the U.S. House of Representatives committee which was going to propose a ban on women in all combat support and service units in the army. Well, the committee has now retreated on this idea, largely due to resistance from Pentagon and the fact that

the amendment rammed through a subcommittee last week would close nearly 22,000 jobs to women, undermine morale, and hamper operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Republicans in the committee got their revenge, though, for the new resolution covers not only the Army but all military forces. Specifically:

In a bid to keep women out of combat, a House committee passed an amendment late last night that would block the U.S. military from allowing female troops into any new jobs related to ground operations without congressional approval.

The Republican-led House Armed Services Committee approved the measure to give Congress more control over which units the military opens to women and to put into law a 1994 Pentagon policy barring women from serving in "direct ground combat" units below the brigade level.

Ironic, isn't it, that the original 1994 law was designed to expand opportunities for women in the military and to prevent positions that were open to them from being closed? In the new post-realistic era the same law will be used to limit women's opportunities.

The ban on women in ground combat is an essential part of the wingnut philosophy, though what the wingnuts really want is to have no women in the military at all. It's against their gender roles. Expect more steps in this direction if the circumstances allow. Right now, the circumstances are more likely to get all of us into the military, though.

|

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Homeland Security News 



A House bill under consideration would change the way the color-coded terror alert system is used:

The Homeland Security Department would be forced to scale back its color-coded alert system for nationwide terror threats and tailor public warnings to specific, targeted locations under a House bill nearing a vote.

Changes in the threat system were part of a wide-ranging bill, expected to be approved Wednesday, that would set Homeland Security priorities for next year. It also would require the hiring of 2,000 border patrol agents - far above the 210 requested by President Bush - and bolster efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the United States.

The alert system has not been an unqualified success, to put it in the mildest possible terms, and I'm not the only person who has noticed how the alerts seemed to occur right before the presidential election last November, and not much at other times. It could be that the terrorists were plotting to get Bush for another four years, of course. He's been good for their enrollment figures.

But Tom Ridge said something different recently:

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of the nation's homeland security apparatus.

Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

Fine. But wasn't it his agency that was supposed to be responsible for raising the terror alert? If it wasn't Ridge, then who was it? I'd like to know who is responsible for the psychological suffering unnecessary terror alerts caused, for the extra security costs they caused and for the "sky-is-falling" mentality which has been increasing in this country due to false alarms.

|

Self-Promotion 



I got a mention on Air America a couple of days ago, or rather, one of my posts on Atrios did. And yesterday the same post was mentioned in the Salon.


Blogger Echidne at Atrios points out that identical letters to the editor in support of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's proposal have been popping up in local papers around the country, using talking points that seem to come from Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman.


Thanks are due to Riesz for giving me the tip. And yes, I do hate self-promotion but I don't have the money to hire someone else to do it for me...

|

Self-Obsessed Ruminations on Blogging 



My recent stint at Atrios's blog made me think about political blogging, its objectives, the ways it's done and the different types of political blogs that exist. By these types I don't mean the wingnut blogs and the sane ones but rather a division of blogs into those which hunt the latest news items, preferably shocking ones, those which discuss in detail a particular item of news, those which are columnists and/or humorists and those which arouse the right emotions in the readers and the commenters. All these categories overlap, of course (reality is never as simple as the wingnuts, say, believe), but most blogs seem to specialize in one or two of these tasks.

The readers pick the blogs they like best and then frequent those, and in doing so they reveal something about what they value in political commentary and dialogue. All this has several consequences to the writers of blogs: one can't just change the tone overnight and expect approval, one can't guest blog on another blog as one would at home unless the two are of the same type, and the manner in which ones blog is classified will depend on the classifier's ideas about what constitutes politics.

I've mentioned before that much political commentary on the blogs is gossip, or it would be called gossip if it was carried out by "old wives". But it's called political commentary because it's done by political bloggers. There's nothing wrong about gossip; it's fun and it often tells us useful things, too, but it would be nice if we all could see gossip when it happens, especially because sometimes the gossip is equated with political commentary, and this totally omits blogs which apply political science principles to wider events or which see politics in our daily lives. You know, like quite a few feminist blogs.

Then there is the length issue. Some readers like to read long posts, most, I suspect, don't, but the ways one condenses a post have an impact on its message and on the tone of the message. Doing it is more an art than a science, and so is the whole question of the tone of the blog. Anger is not a bad thing in politics, especially righteous anger, but recently I've started feeling that we unleash anger which is then just circling around in the empty space above our heads. The anger needs to be directed into useful channels of activity, but this is hard to do from a blog unattached to any official political organs. The action alerts that I get from Hecate, the goddess of the cross-roads, help a little in this, but I'd like to find a better way. Unfocused anger is also destructive in the long-run, even when it arises from righteous causes.

The glory of the blogs, for me at least, is that I can ruminate on these issues right here! And nobody can take my paycheck away for that or get me fired! Still, blogs are not only for their writers but all those who read them, and if the process becomes a monologue something is lost. Even I like to hear comments from others, and I'm an uppity goddess!

Well, this is very self-obsessed as I mentioned in the title, and if you are still reading you probably know that I like to go on and on and analyze things to shreds. So posting on Eschaton was quite a stretch in some ways (in many ways, really, as it's a wonderful place and I was awe-inspired by both Atrios and my fellow guest bloggers), because the tone there is to prepare a short and telling information bomb for the discussion that will then happen. The experience was very good for me. But I'm not going to condense everything on this blog, because, as I said, I like to go on and on.

|

From Houston, With Love 



This is from the protest against Halliburton:



---
Via Democratic Underground.

|

Very Silly 



This story is:

--A former Republican official says charges that he conspired to jam Democrats' get-out-the-vote phone lines on Election Day 2002 should be dismissed because the grand jury that indicted him included Democrats.

It's so silly that it might as well be the banner of our era. The former Republican official, one James Tobin, argues that Democrats would be the victims of the crime that he is charged with and hence shouldn't be on the jury. His logic would also imply that Republicans couldn't be included because they would be the ones who benefited from the alleged crime. So that would only leave the Independents, but only if they didn't plan to vote for either of the two main parties. Or people who never participate in anything whatsoever. But these folks would refuse jury duty, probably.

A nice try, Mr. Tobin. Not.

|

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

The Interesting Part of the Poll 



"The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press" conducted a few days ago, tells us all sorts of things about the opinions people hold on issues such as the president's overall job rating (low, at 43%), the Social Security debacle, DeLay's possible ethics violations and so on.

But the most interesting part of the survey is that most people just don't care, don't follow the news and don't know what their opinion might be:

The president's Social Security proposal attracted very close attention from 36% of the public, while 30% closely followed news on the economy. Only about one-in-five (22%) tracked reports on the selection of the new pope very closely, and even fewer tracked the debate over the Senate filibuster rules (14%) and ethics complaints against DeLay (8%) very closely.

This is useful to keep in mind next time when we wonder how people can vote for the idiots: most of this stuff that I love never makes a dent in the awareness of the average person. I suspect the real numbers following the news are even lower as we all tend to state we are more informed than we actually are.

|

On Journalistic Duties 



Will Bunch has a good post on this topic on his blog, Attytood. I posted a clip of it on Eschaton, but I want to discuss it in greater depth here. Bunch says this early on in his post:

The real enemy of American journalism is a fifth column, rising up from within ourselves. It's the editors and critics who self-righteously attack "errors" in journalism while erring on the side of pro-government, pro-Establisment timidity every day. The self-appointed defenders of media ethics who swat flies while completely losing sight of why newspapers and an independent media exist in the first place, and what they are supposed to stand for. The captains of alleged honor and integrity who prefer to go down with the ship, watching the waves of citizens in search of real news migrate somewhere else, somewhere that's not drowning in reassuring yet false "objectivity."

This is the gist of it: who does the media serve? All other answers follow from the answer to that question. My idealistic hope is that the media is to serve truth first, to the extent that truth can be defined and discussed. This requires that many different voices are being heard and that journalists are properly trained in the ways of reporting and gathering evidence.

But a different (though not necessarily a contradictory) answer might be that the media are to serve the people, and this is the answer that Bunch pursues. How will the people be best served? Is it through a media that is timid and conciliatory towards the government or through a media that is aggressive and cynical? Clearly, the latter is on the whole more likely to unearth government scandals than the former, though the media could function well with some of both types of journalists as well as those in the middle.

These musings are always relevant, but especially today. The media has become so commercialized that its existence is more dependent on the pursuit of stories with enough shock value than on anything that "the people" might need to know. At the same time, the politics of reporting have become more polarized, the public's trust in the media has evaporated and we have a government which plays the media as it wishes.

So what we learn and hear is that a bride has run away, that Michael Jackson is in court, that Newsweek wrote a story which it couldn't substantiate about what happened in Guantanamo Bay. What we don't learn or hear is the significance of the Downing Street Memo, the earlier evidence on desecration of the Koran, from other sources than the one Newsweek used. We don't even learn or hear the deeper message in the runaway bride stories or the Michael Jackson stories: about fundamentalist marriages, about the enormous wedding industry, about pedophilia in high places.

It is not enough. Adding blogs to the stew is not enough. Getting news from foreign sources is not enough, though it helps. I'm not sure what would suffice, but talking about the current problems is the first necessary step.

|

Today's Action Alert 




Today's Action comes from the Democratic Party:

Please join a conference call briefing with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid this Wednesday, May 18, at 11:45 a.m. Eastern time (8:45 a.m. Pacific).

http://www.democrats.org/briefingcall

Senator Reid will give us the latest on our strategy, the status of Republicans ready to abandon GOP Leader Bill Frist's sinking ship, and what we can do to help. He'll also take your questions.

Make a list of those hard kwestuns you've been dying to ask and call in!

Thanks for taking Today's Action.

|

The Politics of Women's Health 



If the implications weren't so frightening studying the politics of women's health would be fun, in a slightly sinister way. First there is the whole school of thought which equates women's health with gynecological and obstetrical health; as if women were walking containers for their wombs only. Then there are all those little articles finding weaknesses specific to women, and these articles are grabbed eagerly by the anti-feminists (to prove that nature or god didn't mean women to work/play sports/study/be equal). It is as if these people find it impossible to fathom a world in which the sexes can differ in a few of their biological needs yet be treated equally.

Weakness is also traditionally associated with femininity, at least if by "traditionally" we mean since the Victorian era. Women are supposed to be weak, and perhaps this is why we all eagerly snatch the studies that proves them so. At the same time, women's specific needs have not been well addressed in the past, and feminists also demand special attention to them. This is understandable, but can be used in the political arena for something that is not good for women. Or men, come to that. Just think how prostate cancer awareness is only now rising. Surely part of the reason is that men are not supposed to complain about illness, are not supposed to fall victim to something, are not supposed to need help. The gender roles sometimes hurt all of us.

A recent study on the effects of alcoholism argues that women suffer from negative brain effects earlier than men and after less consumption. I haven't had time to look at the study itself, but I did see an anti-feminist rant about its findings. The gist of these is that feminism is to blame for women's alcoholism, because it has made women think that they can do anything men can do. Which is a really stupid argument but not that different from many others I've read about the horrible consequences of feminism. Feminism does horrible things to women: it makes them convinced that they can stand peeing up and see what happens then! Disaster, that's what happens then.

But the high point of the anti-feminist's rant is surely this:


According to work carried out at the University of Heidelberg by Professor Karl Mann, the effects of drinking on the brain occur earlier in women than in men, even when women are significantly less exposed to alcohol.

This follows on from research which suggests that women drinkers are likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver earlier and more easily than men.

Evidence from Denmark suggests that women's fertility is compromised more readily by alcohol than men's. Women drinking more than three glasses of wine a day have a threefold increase in their risk of developing breast cancer. Just two units of alcohol a day - a pint of beer or a medium glass of wine - and women's health starts to be compromised.

Statistics, like tequila, should be taken with a pinch of salt, but there is now enough evidence to suggest that Mother Nature is no feminist.

Well, no, Mother Nature is no feminist. After all, women live considerably longer than men on average in all the Western countries. But this is a fact conveniently forgotten in the politics of women health.

|

Monday, May 16, 2005

Stripped of Their Pensions! 



A slightly different way of protesting the United Airlines loss of pensions by several current and past flight attendants:

The five women, ranging in age from 55 to 64, posed for a 2006 calendar that depicts them in various states of undress in front of a vintage plane, on a park bench and on a plane's wing, among other locations. Reflecting a mix of humor and anger, it was released to coincide with a bankruptcy court's approval this week of United's plan to terminate $9.8 billion in employee pension obligations.

While United is never named nor its airplanes shown, every photograph in "Stewardesses Stripped (Of Their Pension?)" is accompanied by a zinger related to the record pension default by the Elk Grove Village, Ill.-based airline.

"Coffee, tea, or me without a pension?" reads one. "Marry me, fly free — but don't expect anything from my pension," says another. And the cover shot: "Are your butts covered? We thought ours were too."

You go, girls! A nice reversal you have accomplished there, of so many things!
----
Via dancinfool.

|

Science in the new Post-Realistic Era 



In Kansas, the creationists are trying to redefine science to allow for explanations that don't rely on natural phenomena:


The Kansas school board's hearings on evolution weren't limited to how the theory should be taught in public schools. The board is considering redefining science itself. Advocates of "intelligent design" are pushing the board to reject a definition limiting science to natural explanations for what's observed in the world.

Instead, they want to define it as "a systematic method of continuing investigation," without specifying what kind of answer is being sought. The definition would appear in the introduction to the state's science standards.

The proposed definition has outraged many scientists, who are frustrated that students could be discussing supernatural explanations for natural phenomena in their science classes.

"It's a completely unscientific way of looking at the world," said Keith Miller, a Kansas State University geologist.

I'm all for it, because my efforts on this are systematic and continuous! Therefore, I'm a scientist and what I say is science and should be in all school textbooks.

In other science news, Mother Jones reports that Exxon-Mobil is funding groups which are willing to criticize reports about global warming:

Mother Jones has tallied some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of "skeptic" scientists who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also includes quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website providing "news, analysis, research, and commentary" that received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even religious and civil rights groups. In total, these organizations received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received another $55,000. When asked about the event, the center's executive director, Robert Hahn—who's a fellow with the AEI—defended it, saying, "Climate science is a field in which reasonable experts can disagree."

Note the little bit about Exxon-Mobil having funded religious groups on this issue. It seems that they would agree with the creationists on the need to redefine science or at least on how to pursue it. Wow, I'll never pass the new science tests!

|

A News Summary with a Feminist Flavor 



The Newsweek story controls the discussion this morning. It will be used by Karl Rove to hammer down the last few heads standing proud of the media, the few who are still trying to criticize the administration. See Arthur Silber's blog for a good discussion of the actual issues.

In better news, Kuwait is going to let women vote and run for political offices, though not this year:


"We made it. This is history," said prominent activist Roula al-Dashti. "Our target is the parliamentary polls in 2007. I'm starting my campaign from today," she told reporters.


Yes!

A study on gender equality finds that the Scandinavian women do best. Maybe it's because the Viking raids got rid of all the aggression and desire for hierarchies? Let's hope my theory is wrong, because that would be bad news for the rest of the world's women, at least in terms of how long they have to wait and what needs to happen first. Kidding, just kidding. But in any case:


Women in the Nordic countries are most likely to be paid on a par with men and experience equal job opportunities, according to a global report released Monday. At the other end of the spectrum, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan have the widest economic gaps between men and women.

The World Economic Forum's report also singled out the United States for criticism, saying it lagged behind many Western European nations.

The report used criteria including equal pay for equal work and female access to the labor market to rank 58 countries - all 30 OECD nations and another 28 emerging markets - on a "Gender Gap Index." It also examined the representation of women in politics, access to education and access to reproductive health care.

No country on the list managed to close the gap entirely, the Swiss-based think tank found.

"Gender inequality is one of the most prominent examples of injustice in the world today," said Augusto Lopez-Claros, WEF Chief Economist and author of the report.

Lopez-Clarez said that women continue to be discriminated against, often on the basis of cultural, religious and historical beliefs, and countries that fail to close the gender gap do so at their own risk.

"Countries that do not fully capitalize on one-half of their human resources are clearly undermining their competitive potential," he said.


That no country has managed to close the gap entirely is not surprising. The reverse system has operated for thousands of years, and it is overly optimistic to assume that its effects will be wholly gone in a little more than one generation.

|

Anti-American Riots and the Koran Desecration Question 



You are probably aware that several Muslim countries have anti-American riots right now. The immediate cause is supposedly a small story that appeared in Newsweek about the Koran being flushed down the toilet in Guantanamo Bay. Desecrating the Koran is a crime punishable by death in some Muslim countries, and the possibility that something of the sort took place in a prison run by Americans is a very good match to use to light the big jihad fire.

But now we learn that Newsweek got it wrong, that perhaps there was no such desecration in the first place:

Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.

Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Koran down the toilet.

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.

The acknowledgment by the magazine came amid a continuing heightened scrutiny of the U.S. media, which has seen a rash of news organizations fire reporters and admit that stories were fabricated or plagiarized.

The Pentagon told the magazine the report was wrong last Friday, saying it had investigated earlier allegations of Koran desecration from detainees and found them "not credible."

The May 9 report, which appeared as a brief item by Michael Isikoff and John Barry in the magazine's "Periscope" section, had a huge international impact, sparking the protests from Muslims who consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.

Desecration of the Koran is punishable by death in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Did they or didn't they? And will we ever know for certain? There are two possible explanations of what happened here, and only one is that the Newsweek got its facts wrong. In any case, whether the news is true or not will not make much difference in the Middle East, according to some observers. The anti-American sentiment is strong enough to ignite riots on its own.

But it's still true that the U.S. administration must take some blame for events of this sort. Abu Ghraib did happen, and stories about using fake menstrual blood to upset Muslim believers were there before the Koran desecration story.

At the same time, I think that killing people for destroying a book is a good example of what is wrong with literalist religions in general. And so is the idea that there is something so filthy about women and their sexuality that menstrual blood could be used as a method of torture.

Did I already mention today how I feel caged between two religious fronts here?

|

Sunday, May 15, 2005

On Limits 



Much of life is learning about limits, points at which you get stuck, points beyond which you can't go or points beyond which the hell breaks loose. Many of these are physical limits, like learning that throwing 240 pound guys on the mat when you weigh 120 pounds will break your back over time, or mental limits, like learning that nine different blog posts on three different blogs in one Saturday makes a goddess resemble the corpse of an insect and makes her fall asleep for the next twenty hours and so on.

But other limits are societal, determined by outsiders, and you learn what they are by seeing what happens to others who violate the rules, or if you're really unlucky you learn by being the violator yourself. Authoritarian societies have more limits and more punishments for violating them, but all societies have some, and many of them are hidden ones, to be found only by breaching the point.

The reason I'm a feminist is that there are more of these hidden limits for women, on the whole, and the punishments for violating them are more severe if the woman does the violating. But I can also see the other kinds of limits, and I get mad at all of them unless there are good reasons for the limits to exist and unless the limits are set fairly for all of us.

Then there are the overall limits. Like the point at which all sane Americans will rise up and say that this administration has finally gone too far. I keep hoping that we have reached that limit, but, alas, I have so far been wrong. That's one reason for the rant below, and the other one is the dead-insect thingy. But I wake up optimistic most mornings. The sun rises and one day so will the American people.

|

For A Liberal Sunday 



This post is a good one.

|

Saturday, May 14, 2005

A Rant 



Here we go: A place to scream, to kick holes in the wall, to tear out any hair you might have left and to spit at pictures of the powers-at-be. In other words: Echidne's Rant Room.

These are some of my hatefullest things:

That this country is run by a man who was selected, then possibly elected; who doesn't read, who doesn't know history, who cannot speak English or any other language, come to that; who takes pride in his intellectual laziness and his lack of diplomacy, who pads his crotch as much as he pads his lies; who thinks pleadings of mercy from someone to be executed are funny, who seems to completely lack the empathy button in that square box on his back, who thinks the square box might be a hot line to god, who doesn't think much at all; who reads the Pet Goat with glazed-over eyes when the country is attacked and who then bravely goes to the site of the attack several days later, who is not even informed when the country might have been attacked again because he was biking in an area where biking is forbidden and who wants the Commander of the Armed Troups to be informed about any fucking thing?

That this man made up a reason to go to war, that thousands of people then died, that this man might even now be plotting to invade yet more countries, and all the time bin Laden is free as a bird.

That a minority, a small group of fundamentalist wingnuts, have grabbed the power in this country and are telling me to live according to their inane interpretation of morals and ethics, that they are allowed to get away with this by others who are supposed to be saner, that we all are supposed to respect the fact that these wingnuts are religious, respect it, even when they plot to lock me up in a kitchen all silent and submissive, respect it, even when they urge for the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution, just keep on respecting, yessir, to accept that this earth was created a few thousand years ago, to accept that Adam and Eve were chased out of paradise by dinosaurs, that they then had children who busily had enough incest to create all of us though of course women were created to be permanently guilty for the snake thing and gays should not exist and so on. But fucking respect!

And the Islamic fanatics, those stalwart thinkers of the ninth century, who want what their Christian fundamentalist brethren do, only in much more extreme and painful forms, including the killing of women who are no longer viewed as stainless flags of family honor. And the fact that I and so many others are stranded between these two armies: the Bush one and the one of the bin Laden types, and nobody has asked us if we like to be in the middle, because neither of these armies fucking cares.

That the corporate powers to be are funding the Bush administration in exchange for getting the best picks of all the lucrative projects that can be made up, picking the bones clean in places of suffering, that the corporate powers are in bed with the extreme clerics, that the corporate powers are using this government to guarantee that the American workers will be poorer, will work longer hours and will have less protection against illness and old age. That to even say this causes accusations of fucking communism.

That this is the end of an era, the era of enlightenment, that we are sliding into the new dark ages where reality is whatever the government tells us, where everything is relative (and this from the party who tells us that our values are relative!), where facts are no weightier than opinions and where wingnut opinions are facts even if they fucking aren't.

That this is an era where the press is meek as lambs and much of the clergy ravenous as hyenas, an era where the uneducated and ignorant decide what is education and knowledge, an era where the only choice we seem to have is between bread and circus on the one hand and bread and church on the other. And not much fucking bread either way.

|

Saturday Dog Blogging 




Hank (when little) and Henrietta


For those of you, like Angie, who like something nice and peaceful! Though you might notice that Henrietta is still a little uptight in this picture, not quite sure what that small monster is doing in her realm. She fixed it fairly soon afterwards.

|

A Reminder, Again 



I post Saturdays on the American Street, and today also on the Eschaton. So far the topics include the anti-American riots in Muslim countries, Fred Phelps (these two on the American Street) and Wal-Mart (on Eschaton).

What I really want to write is a totally rude, swearwords-filled obscene rant against this U.S. administration and the fundamentalists all over this poor ball of mud we call the earth. Maybe I will, too.

|

Friday, May 13, 2005

Resolutions 



Most of us think of resolutions as something you make for the New Year and promptly forget about. Not so the Southern Baptists. They make resolutions in their summer gettogethers and they never forget them. Neither do we, because most of them are so hilarious or insulting that it's just not possible to forget.

In the past the Southern Baptists have resolved that women should gracefully submit to the manly godliness or godly manliness that is their husbands, and that women cannot be called for ministry. If they think so they should have their hearing checked, because the Southern Baptist god only talks to men that way.

This year's resolutions are still a secret, but one which has been proposed is an anti-gay resolution:


A Houston lawyer who called on Southern Baptists to remove their children from ``godless'' public schools last year is now asking churches to investigate whether schools are promoting acceptance of homosexuality.

Bruce Shortt's resolution was voted down last year, but he is proposing another to be considered at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Nashville next month.

The resolution says schools promote acceptance of gays through officially sanctioned gay clubs, diversity training, anti-bullying courses, safe sex and safe schools programs.

It says that if churches find that public schools are teaching acceptance of homosexuality, parents should remove their children and either home-school them or enroll them in Christian schools.

The resolution was co-written by the Rev. Voddie Baucham Jr., a Christian speaker and writer from the Houston suburb of Spring.


If this proposal goes through does it mean that the Southern Baptists approve of bullying? To be quite honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they quite liked the idea of bullying, in secret, of course.

|

Friday Embroidery Blogging 




Generations


This is an embroidery I have given away, and the picture is not by me. You can't see the details at all. The trees and the background are embroidered with various stitches, and the apples are stuffed to stick out from the ground.

|

A Nice Picture for Friday 



From Grass Root Dems:



|

Air Force Academy News 



The Air Force Academy sounds like a scary place. First we heard all about the sexual harassment the curriculum seems to contain, now we hear that not only are Jewish cadets treated badly but also all those who are not born-again Christians. Poor Echidne. She'd be eaten up there in no time at all, if she wasn't an all-powerful pagan goddess.

The most recent incident is the possible firing of a chaplain who was only born once:


An Air Force chaplain who complained that evangelical Christians were trying to "subvert the system" by winning converts among cadets at the Air Force Academy was removed from administrative duties last week, just as the Pentagon began an in-depth study of alleged religious intolerance among cadets and commanders at the school.

"They fired me," said Capt. MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran minister who was removed as executive officer of the chaplain unit on May 4. "They said I should be angry about these outside groups who reported on the strident evangelicalism at the academy. The problem is, I agreed with those reports."


The Academy denies her claims. But it is true that a recent Yale Divinity School survey of the campus found the atmosphere reeking of born-againness:


As part of its response to the sexual assault charges, the academy asked a team from Yale Divinity School to visit the campus during the summer training for incoming freshmen.

"We were asked to study the quality of cadet-centered pastoral care," said Yale Prof. Kristen Leslie. "What we found was this very strong evangelical Christian voice just dominating. We thought that just didn't make sense in light of their mission, which was to protect and train cadets, not to win religious converts."


But of course it makes sense if you are an evangelical yourself, and believe that the country, including its armed forces, should reflect your beliefs. Natch.

Do you think the born-agains are also born-again virgins?

|

How Will We Be Remembered? 



I don't know, but one thing is certain: Future history books will contain this text:


A British official identified as "C" said that he had returned from a meeting in Washington and that "military action was now seen as inevitable" by U.S. officials.

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

"The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

The memo further discussed the military options under consideration by the United States, along with Britain's possible role.

It quoted Hoon as saying the United States had not finalized a timeline, but that it would likely begin "30 days before the U.S. congressional elections," culminating with the actual attack in January 2003.

"It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," the memo said.

"But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

The British officials determined to push for an ultimatum for Saddam to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq to "help with the legal justification for the use of force ... despite U.S. resistance."


This is a description of a memo about a high-level meeting held on July 23, 2002, and it has caused Tony Blair some problems, because it shows that the supposed causes for the Iraq war were all manufactured. But to George Bush, the instigator of the war? Not so much. Americans are more interested in runaway brides and Michael Jackson. Or so the American media seems to think.

But now eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress have sent president Bush a letter asking what his explanation for the contents of the memo might be. Will we get an answer? Add the sound of crickets here.

|

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Faith-Based Facts 



Feministing tells us that the wingnut policy of allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense prescriptions that don't agree with their values has had a paradoxical effect:


A mother of six claims a pharmacist refused to fill her prescription for an emergency contraceptive and berated her as a baby-killer, leaving her so traumatized she didn't seek out another pharmacist and ended up having an abortion.

"The pharmacist crossed the line," said Tricia Knight, the attorney for the woman. "It's one thing to conscientiously object. But you cannot intend to inflict emotional harm on a woman when she is making a very important and often very emotional decision in her life."


The logic of this case is...faith-based, I guess.

Also by Feministing, a school which invited an inspirational wingnut speaker to speak to its graduating class got more than they bargained for. Tina Marie Holewinski warned the teens about the dangers of drinking, drugs and premarital sex, but according to Tom Wells, the father of one of these teens, she also told them


that condoms lead to cancer, that birth control pills are only 20 percent effective, that sexually transmitted diseases are spread by skin contact alone, that third-trimester fetuses can be aborted, that video games lead to homicide, that human papilloma virus can be transferred through condoms and that teens can achieve "second virginity" through abstinence.


When asked to clarify her position, Holewinski replied:


that she spoke mainly against against drugs, drinking and driving, and debunked "the media's" glamorization of sex, alcohol, drugs and violence.

She maintained it's true that there are cancer-causing agents in latex condoms; that 80 percent of teenage girls who seek abortions are already on birth-control pills; and that human papilloma virus is small enough to pass through condoms. She said she does promote the idea of second virginity.


Now you know. Holewinski's ideas about what constitutes information are fascinating. But I agree with her about the recycling of virginity. I've been reborn a virgin more times than I can recall.

|

Deep Thought for the Day 



This is from a Guardian article about a new fashion for religious diet books.


Don Colbert, a Florida doctor and author of What Would Jesus Eat?, portrays his book as a way of putting some backbone into weak-willed believers.

"They're letting the flesh rule them and they're eating anything they want," he told the Guardian. "We're making them accountable. Many people will not eat the right kinds of food unless they're held accountable and before they put something in their mouths ask: 'Would Jesus eat this?'"


Sinful, we are sinful. Even eating is a sin.

|

Today's Action Alert 



Today's Action comes from Barbara Boxer:

1. Call Lincoln Chafee's Senate office at (202) 224-2921 and log your opposition to John Bolton.

Thanks for taking today's action.

|

Doctor Hager and Women 



W. David Hager is a physician. He's also on the advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and an outspoken evangelical wingnut. Now he has decided to take the credit for the failure of Plan B, which would have allowed over-the-counter sales of the so-called morning-after contraceptive pill. The story is unusual, because the FDA has a habit of following the recommendations of its advisory panel, yet it decided to go against the panel's advice in this particular case. Hager explains this as follows:


Speaking at the Asbury College chapel in Wilmore, Ky., Hager said, "I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA. For only the second time in five decades, the FDA did not abide by its advisory committee opinion, and the measure was rejected."

Hager told the group that he had not written his report from an "evangelical Christian perspective," but from a scientific one -- arguing that the panel had too little information on how easier availability of Plan B would affect girls younger than 16. The FDA later cited that lack of information as the reason it rejected the application.

"I argued from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report to influence the decision," Hager said. "Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good."


A cunning little plot, isn't it? Pretending to go all scientific on us while all the time meaning for the godly side to win.

The wingnuts like Dr. Hager don't like Plan B because it might encourage unsafe sexual behavior. Thus, it comes as a teeny surprise that Dr. Hager himself has been accused of unsafe sexual behavior. His ex-wife, Linda Carruth Davis, has this to say about Dr. Hager:


According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."
...
"I don't think I was married even a full year before I realized that I had made a horrible mistake," Davis says. By her account, Hager was demanding and controlling, and the couple shared little emotional intimacy. "But," she says, "the people around me said, 'Well, you've made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.'" So Davis commenced with family making and bore three sons: Philip, in 1973; Neal, in 1977; and Jonathan, in 1979.

Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager embarked on an affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a friend of Davis's. A close friend of Davis's remembers her calling long distance when she found out: "She was angry and distraught, like any woman with two children would be. But she was committed to working it out."

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.


Can this possibly be true? One thing we goddesses know is that ex-spouses usually have a rather sour opinion of each other. Well, it's good to be sceptical, but in this case other witnesses seem to support Ms. Carruth Davis's claims:


Linda Davis chose not to bring allegations of marital rape into her divorce proceedings; her foremost desires at the time were a fair settlement and minimal disruption for her sons. Nonetheless, she informed her lawyer of the abuse. Natalie Wilson, a divorce attorney in Lexington, asked Linda to draw up a working chronology of her marriage to Hager. "[It] included references to what I would call the sexual abuse," Wilson explained. "I had no reason not to believe her.... It was an explanation for some of the things that went on in the marriage, and it explained her reluctance to share that information with her sons--which had resulted in her sons' being very angry about the fact that she was insisting on the divorce."

As it turned out, when the dust settled after their divorce, nearly everyone in the Hagers' Christian and medical circles in Lexington had sided with Hager, who told people that his wife was mentally unstable and had moved in with another man (she moved in with friends).

Davis had only told a handful of people about the abuse throughout her marriage, but several of her longtime confidantes confirmed for this article that she had told them of the abuse at the time it was occurring. Wilson, the attorney, spoke to me on the record, as did Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis's close friend of twenty-five years. Several others close to Davis spoke to me off the record. Two refused to speak to me and denounced Davis for going public, but they did not contest her claims. Many attempts to interview nearly a dozen of Hager's friends and supporters in Lexington and around the country were unsuccessful.


Now I'm totally confused. Does Dr. Hager love women like Jesus did, as he argues? You know, like a good, all-knowing patriarch does. Or does he love women in a rather different sense of the word, one that might raise the hair of some of his ob-gyn patients?

Janice Shaw Crouse of the Concerned Women of America (of whom I have blogged before) has no such doubts. Dr. Hager is a wingnut and that's good enough for her:


"I would not be at all surprised to see Dr. Hager elevated to a higher position or to another very influential position when it comes to women's care," [...] "Because he has shown that he does care about women regardless of...the [religious] issues that people want to try to raise.... When people try to discredit him, he continues on. He hasn't caved in, and he hasn't waffled. He has been a gentleman. He is a person of character and integrity, and I think people admire that."


Be still, my beating heart, be still.

|

This Is Not A Blog Post 



Welcome to "this is not a blog post", a truly amateurish and bumbling pouring-out of the heart. And whatever brains I have left.

I have been doing real blogging for a few days now, on Eschaton, and I have worked very hard. Not that it shows much in the results, because I condense them into a little pill, suitable for being shot out of an air rifle. But goddess the amount of research that goes into that! I have a totally different level of respect for all real journalists and bloggers now. Awe, in fact.

Now I also know pretty much everything that is going on in American politics, and believe me, it ain't pretty. There are mules involved and group sex and who knows what else! Someone should write a book on wingnut sex. It would be a best seller, even among the wingnuts, though they must know most of it already.

Part of my time has been spent in the outer reaches of the marshland that some call the right blogosphere. Where the wingnuts have their own little blogs and stuff. I don my hazmat suit and big wading boots and a butterfly net and go hunting there. But it's hard work, hard work for a kindly and sensitive goddess. Afterwards I need to shower several times and then weep into my nectar mug. - I have learned that the one thing all wingnuts share is their dislike of feminists, by the way. Some of them worship the Southern Baptist god, some worship the evolutionary psychologists, some worship nothing but their own private parts and many worship money. But they all hate and fear me and women like me.

Which should make me feel powerful. But I'm already powerful, being of the divine type, and there is something very sad about people who have decided that most of their problems would be solved if another type of people would just agree to go on their knees (and yes, interpret that as you may). Just like there is something very sad about all people who find simple certainties the solution to life's traumas, because simple certainties are like free lunches: they don't exist.

Ok. Where was I? Free lunches don't exist. And neither do free blogs, really. Someone must do the research and writing on every blog that gets regularly renewed, and my hat goes up to all of those who do this invisible toiling. Or my hat would go up if I wore one. Bloggers deserve some praise in these days when it's fashionable to discuss the deplorable lack of professional standards and ethics in the blogosphere. Regard this post as my salute to all the amateurish and unethical bloggers out there, even the wingnut ones.

|

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

No Women in Army Support Units? 



The wingnuts don't like women in the military, not even in support units. So it comes as no surprise that:


A House Armed Services subcommittee voted along party lines Wednesday to ban women from key positions in the Army.
he ban on women in combat service support units, supported by the panel's majority Republican members, would only go into effect if it is accepted by the House and Senate in their deliberations on the 2006 defense authorization bill.

The Army opposed the measure and offered to brief members of Congress about the role women play in the Army, according to Army spokeswoman Maj. Elizabeth Robbins.

"The Army remains in strict and full compliance with Department of Defense policies," Robbins said Wednesday. "Women Soldiers have performed magnificently in all formations in which they are permitted to serve."


A woman soldier is an impossibility in the wingnut worldview. Never mind that


Female soldiers are used often in Iraq on patrols to interact with Iraqi women, including searching them if they are suspected of insurgent activities.

The Marine Corps used 14 women from Combat Logistics Battalion 8 to assist in searching women and children during the November offensive in Fallujah.


|

Some Lead with That Cereal? 



Do you like lead? One myth says that it was the lead in the aquiducts which dulled the ancient Romans so that their empire fell. Lead is a useful metal for many things, but it's not exactly healthful for human beings. Small children, in particular, tend to suffer serious health problems if they ingest lead. This can happen in buildings which contain old paint as lead was a routine additive in paint before 1978. When the paint deteriorates particles fall off and look like something interesting to taste for toddlers. Smaller particles enter the air and can be breathed in. All this is exacerbated when the building undergoes renovations.

The health harm from lead is a serious problem:


Lead exposure is especially dangerous to infants and toddlers, and has been linked to developmental disabilities and behavioral problems.


But removing lead paint is also very expensive. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is concerned about the high costs of treating lead paint. It's thinking that regulations might not be the best way to go about this. Maybe education and voluntary activity would be better!


The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly delayed work on completing required rules to protect children and construction workers from exposure to lead-based paint, exploring instead the possibility of using voluntary standards to govern building renovations and remodeling.

The EPA move, first disclosed in documents provided by an agency whistle-blower, has prompted angry questions from Democrats in Congress, the attorneys general of New York and Illinois, and public health advocates around the country.


That is about the vilest proposal I've heard from this administration for some time. Voluntary standards will lead to more children with developmental retardation, but someone, somewhere will save money. Gah.

And consider this: Children who most suffer from lead paint exposure are poor children whose families live in old buildings which are not well cared for. Don't these children matter to the pro-family administration?

Or consider this: The administration that so eagerly hounds women whose behavior may damage their fetuses during pregnancy thinks that voluntary agreements are enough when something threatens 1.4 million children per year. Because it's not the mothers who are at fault here?

|

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

On Christian Media 




I'm sure that you have heard your fair share about the so-called liberal media in this country. If it weren't for the Fox News (and a few other networks better left unnamed), all the news would be delivered to us in pink-tinted commie packages, right?

What you might not know (given that you are reading this blog) is that this country also has a Christian media, one with religious-right values and a selective take on the news of the day. True, it is not yet a large proportion of the total media industry, but it is a rapidly growing one. The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which produces Pat Robertson's 700 Club, is only one of many Christian television and radio networks:


Conservative evangelicals control at least six national television networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes, and virtually all of the nation's more than 2,000 religious radio stations. Thanks to Christian radio's rapid growth, religious stations now outnumber every other format except country music and news-talk. If they want to dwell solely in this alternative universe, believers can now choose to have only Christian programs piped into their homes. Sky Angel, one of the nation's three direct-broadcast satellite networks, carries thirty-six channels of Christian radio and television — and nothing else.


An intriguing thought, this: that Christians can choose to receive nothing but Christian news. We are slowly moving towards a system where Republicans will only accept Republican news and Democrats only Democratic news. So why not have religious news broadcasts to groups who are especially religious?

The logical conclusion to this trend is frightening: a nation where no values are shared, where nobody can communicate with the members of groups who think differently and where nobody agrees on what is actually happening. Trends like home schooling could exacerbate this outcome.

But of course these Christian news providers are not truly separate from the Republican news producers. The Christian media is right-wing and evangelical. What this means for the bias in the news it chooses to cover is obvious:


Many evangelical networks and program producers are also tax-exempt nonprofits. But while most were careful not to endorse candidates by name, they openly pushed the Republican ticket in the run-up to the 2004 election. During his last pre-election broadcast, the International Intelligence Briefing host Hal Lindsey told audiences that liberals were determined to "bring about our literal annihilation," and that "a vote for the conservative cause . . . is a vote to . . . reverse America's decline and restore her to the path of morality, conscience, and strength of character. It's a vote to continue America's return to her rightful place as the strongest beacon of hope in a terrified world." Other broadcasters went further, launching and promoting massive voter-registration drives with the apparent goal of helping Republicans clinch a victory. The host James Dobson held pro-Bush rallies that packed stadiums and told his 7 million U.S. listeners that it was a sin not to vote.

During the pre-election frenzy FamilyNet, the television arm of the Southern Baptist Convention's media empire, added a political talk show to its formerly entertainment-heavy lineup. It was also during this period that it established its news department. The network, which reaches 30 million homes, reported live from both parties' conventions, and ran evening coverage on election day — all of it salted with pro-Bush commentary. Several other Christian networks also ran continuous, live election coverage for the first time. Much of it carried a clear bias. USA Radio Network, for example, ran pieces produced to sound like news stories, but with a single conservative perspective. One segment, based solely on an interview with the former CIA analyst Wayne Simmons, reported that Osama bin Laden spent years laying plans to destroy America, only to have them thwarted by a tough-talking Texan. "He never planned on running into a president with the strength, character, and conviction of George W. Bush," Simmons said. "If George W. Bush wins the presidency, his fate — meaning Osama bin Laden's fate — is sealed. If John Kerry wins, he'll go back to business as usual because he knows he'll have another administration in there where he did nothing and let them plan attacks on us."


It's possible to conclude that the Christian media is a subsection of the conservative media, one which focuses more on religiosity but no less on the conservative talking-points. What makes this combination tricky is the holy flavor it imparts to purely secular political concepts. How will a Christian consumer of biased news interpret them? As just opinions, or as divine messages?

We shouldn't be surprised by any of this, given that president Bush himself views the world in the starkly simple terms of good and evil. Still, there is something exceedingly creepy about this description of a Christian lobbying trip:


The role that evangelicals are credited with playing in the recent election seems only to have improved broadcasters' access to power. During the opening session of the 2005 NRB convention, Wright described a recent lobbying excursion to Capitol Hill. "We got into rooms we've never been in before," he said. "We got down on the floor of the Senate and prayed over Hillary Clinton's desk."


|

Men's Rights Movement 



Amanda at Pandagon has written a five-part series on the men's rights movement. (You can access it by going to the last part which gives the earlier links.) She deserves accolades for putting all this information together in one place. Her series should be required reading for all who are interested in feminism.

Amanda also links back to Ampersand's work on the same issues, especially his careful discussions of the incidence-of-rape studies. Another piece that should be added to the basic libraries of feminists.

Edited to add: I'm busy right now, but later on I want to write more about this topic. Some of the claims this movement makes are valid, others are, as Amanda points out, just a demand to have male dominance regarded as equality.

|

Poor Big Pharma! 



The pharmaceutical industry has had such a hard time, what with the Vioxx scandal and such. So it comes as a relief to learn that the government is helping these suffering firms out by giving them a tiny tax cut. It goes like this:


A new tax break for corporations is allowing the biggest American drugmakers to return as much as $75 billion in profits from international havens to the United States while paying a fraction of the normal tax rate.

The break is part of the American Jobs Creation Act, signed into law by President Bush in October, which allows companies a one-year window to return foreign profits to the United States at a 5.25 percent tax rate, compared with the standard 35 percent rate.

Any company with profits in other countries can take advantage of the law, but the drugmakers have been the biggest beneficiaries because they can move profits overseas relatively easily, independent analysts say.

The money the companies are bringing home has come from many years of using legal loopholes in the tax law to aggressively shelter their profits from U.S. taxes, tax lawyers say. While the companies' tax returns are private, fragmentary information about their tax payments is buried inside their annual financial statements.

Those figures show that the drugmakers have told the Internal Revenue Service for years that their profits come mainly from international sales, even though prescription drug prices are far higher in the United States than elsewhere and almost 60 percent of their sales take place in America.


I'm very glad to learn this, because now we are obviously going to find the prices of drugs drop by a significant amount. Aren't we?

|

Monday, May 09, 2005

The Dangers of Cohabitation 



Did you know that cohabitation between unmarried couples is still illegal in seven states? North Carolina is one of them and is having its law challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):


The law against cohabitation is rarely enforced. But now the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to overturn it altogether, on behalf of a former sheriff's dispatcher who says she had to quit her job because she wouldn't marry her live-in boyfriend.

Deborah Hobbs, 40, says her boss, Sheriff Carson Smith of Pender County, near Wilmington, told her to get married, move out or find another job after he found out she and her boyfriend had been living together for three years. The couple did not want to get married, so Hobbs quit.

Her lawsuit, filed in March in state court, seeks to have the cohabitation law declared unconstitutional.


What I found interesting about the case is this argument for keeping the law on the books:


"We think that it's good to have a law against cohabitation because the studies show that couples that cohabitate before they're married, that their marriages are more prone to break up, there's less stability in the marriage," said Bill Brooks, executive director of the conservative North Carolina Family Policy Council.


Bill Brooks confuses causality and correlation here. This is commonly done by the right-wingers, because they don't like "living in sin". Why would cohabitation raise the odds of later divorce? It makes no sense. If anything, living together before marriage should make divorce less likely, because fewer unsuitable marriages will be made in the first place. No, the correlation between cohabiting and divorce is much more likely to reflect the fact that the people who are opposed to cohabitation are also opposed to divorce, even when the marriage makes them miserable.

|

Meanwhile, in Boston 



White supremacists from Arkansas decided to travel to Boston to see the sights. Also to do a little protesting outside Faneuil Hall while Holocaust survivors were inside commemorating the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (of the Olympic fame) expressed his disgust at these visitors:


"Today of all days, to have white supremacists come here from Arkansas, is most disappointing," he said. "I wish they'd go back home where the came from and bury themselves under the rocks that they crawled out from."


And the people of Boston were unamused, too. In fact, they had a bit of tussle with the white supremacists.

Most of us would agree that the behavior of the supremacists was atrocious. But if the current trend in media "fairness and balance" continues, we will soon see them interviewed as "the other point of view" in any discussion of the Holocaust. This is the logical outcome of the view of the media's task as simply reporting what people say.

|

On Stoning 



Docferg in my comments linked to a story about in Afghanistan. It is a familiar one, in many ways, though that doesn't mean it isn't a horrible one. The story is about a married woman being caught in a sexual relationship with an unmarried man and what happened next: she was killed, possibly by stoning, and he was whipped. These punishments are based on the shariah law.

What seemed different about this story to me was its point of view: it is written from the angle of those who did the killing. The reader is invited to identify with the murdered woman's father and mother and the other villagers, and it is indeed possible to see why they would have chosen to murder the adulteress in a rather amateurish, hesitant way, while all the time grieving over the necessity of doing so.

I may be unfair to the writer of the article who is also trying to show how mores are changing in Afghanistan, how some doubts about the process have entered, how officials were contacted before the village decided to mete justice in the traditional manner. But what struck me most was how the story made me not identify with the stoning victim. These stories usually have that effect.

What is the point of this post? Perhaps the importance of questioning the point of view of any piece of news, especially those articles which appear unusually balanced and neutral.

|

Guest Blogging 



Atrios of Eschaton has decided to go gallivanting and Avedon Carol and Attaturk are taking care of his blog. I'm minding them. Well, not really. I'm the last guy in the bullpen (if such a masculine simile is allowed), the one that everybody hopes will not be needed in the game.

So this subbing should have no impact on my own blog, with the possible exception of some cross-posting.

It's quite an honor to be in the Eschaton bullpen (cowpen?), but the experience is also frightening. Imagine some stranger turning up at your bedroom door, insisting that for the next nine days he or she will be your partner. You look around and your lovey-dovey is nowhere to be found! That's probably how it feels for many of Eschaton readers. Luckily, both Avedon and Attaturk are really good.

And if we are really lucky they will blog the whole game.

|

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Pope Ratzo in Action 



Pope Benedict XVI has been busy with some spring cleaning. Out with the old and in with the new! And in particular, out with the old moldy liberals.


An American Jesuit who is a frequent television commentator on Roman Catholic issues resigned yesterday under orders from the Vatican as editor of the Catholic magazine America because he had published articles critical of church positions, several Catholic officials in the United States said.

The order to dismiss the editor, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, was issued by the Vatican's office of doctrinal enforcement - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - in mid-March when that office was still headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said. Soon after, Pope John Paul II died and Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, taking the name Benedict XVI.


Reese is what one might call a moderate liberal. He also seems to have committed the sin of covering both sides of an argument as well as some sensitive topics.

I was ready for something like this, anyway. More purges will no doubt follow.

|

Feeding Time 



This filibuster debacle is going to be fun to watch (if you ignore what's at stake):


With the climax nearing, the tone of the debate is escalating. A radio address taped by three Christian conservative leaders for broadcast Monday called the judiciary "the last playground of the liberal left." In the address, James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, described the fight as the tipping point of the Bush presidency. "Nothing good took place last November, only the potential for something good," Dr. Dobson said.


Yes, it is feeding time. Our dear Dobson wants to be reimbursed for the wingnuts' votes. His belly is growling. That's probably why he sounds so grumpy in that quote.

Dobson's dilemma is that he really has nowhere to go if the corporate wing of the Republican party refuses to do his bidding. But then the corporate wing depends on the fundamentalist base to stay in power, which might mean that Dobson will get his dinner soon. Though, on the other hand, if the wingnuts get the judiciary they want why would they bother to vote at all in 2006?

See why I think it might be fun to watch? Always assuming that it happened in some other reality where real people didn't suffer because of people like Dobson.

|

And Remember Mother Earth, Too 




Happy Mothers' Day
---
Courtesy of Helga Fremlin

|

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Happy Mothers' Day! 



Time to celebrate all the mothers, right? Well, the Office of the Surgeon General has slightly different ideas about what is suitable for this weekend. Richard D. Carmona believes that this is a very good opportunity to remind mothers of their Holy Duties!

You know, to tell mothers how it is their responsibility and obligation to make sure that the fetus and then the baby is going to be healthy. What else could the Mothers' Day possibly be for than a little extra space and time for adding to what some call the mothering guilt? Dr. Carmona gives the mothers of America this:


1. Eat Healthy. It's good for you and your baby. Follow the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Also, every woman of childbearing age should consume at least 400 micrograms of folic acid each day. Folic acid can prevent neural tube defects (including spina bifida) and congenital malformations, which are the leading cause of infant mortality. http://www.healthierus.gov/dietaryguidelines/index.html 2. Don't drink alcohol when you are pregnant or might become pregnant. There is no known safe level of alcohol consumption for pregnant women. Alcohol can affect an unborn baby even before a woman knows that she is pregnant, and the problems caused by prenatal alcohol exposure are lifelong. Alcohol-related birth defects are completely preventable, and eliminating alcohol will prevent all alcohol-related birth defects, including growth deficiencies, facial abnormalities, central nervous system impairment, behavioral disorders, and intellectual development. http://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/pressreleases/sg02222005.html 3. Get prenatal care early. As soon as you think you may be pregnant, see a health care professional for prenatal care. And continue going for prenatal care during your pregnancy. Immediate and consistent prenatal care can prevent preterm delivery, and improve pregnancy and childbirth. http://mchb.hrsa.gov/programs/womeninfants/prenatal.htm 4. Don't smoke. And don't allow anyone else to smoke around your baby. Smoking during pregnancy can lead to a low birthweight baby and can reduce your baby's lung function. Even second-hand smoke can have a harmful effect on your baby's breathing and can have long-term respiratory consequences like impaired lung growth, chronic coughing, and wheezing. In addition, disorders related to preterm birth and low birthweight are the second-leading cause of infant death. Diseases of the respiratory system (aggravated by second-hand smoke) are one of the leading causes of infant hospitalization and infant doctor visits. For help to quit smoking, please visit http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/how2quit.htm 5. Breastfeed your baby. Breastfeeding for at least the first six months of life has significant health benefits, and maintain a healthy diet after that. Babies who are exclusively breastfed for six months are less likely to develop ear infections, diarrhea, and respiratory illnesses. Mother's milk has just the right amount of fat, sugar, water, and protein that is needed for a baby's growth and development. Breast milk has agents called antibodies to help protect infants from bacteria and viruses and to help them fight off infection and disease. http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding 6. Place your baby "back to sleep." A baby should sleep on a firm mattress, on his or her back, with no fluffy pillows or stuffed animals. Following these simple steps can lower the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the third-leading cause of infant death in the United States. http://www.nichd.nih.gov/sids/reduce_infant_risk.htm 7. Always use a car safety seat. Be sure your baby rides in an age- and weight-appropriate child safety seat, correctly installed, on every trip. If you have any questions about how to install your child safety seat, many local fire and police departments will help you. And children should always ride in the back seat. http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/childpas.htm 8. Never leave your baby unattended. To prevent unintentional injuries, the sixth-leading cause of infant death, never leave a baby unattended on a bed or changing table, always use the harness on a stroller or high chair, and use baby gates and window guards. Never leave a baby unattended in a bath or near a pool. http://www.hhs.gov/safety/index.shtml#injury 9. Safety-proof your house. To prevent accidental poisoning, move all medications and cleaning products to high shelves. To prevent burns, set the temperature of your hot water heater to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and never leave cups of hot liquid on tables or counter edges and never carry hot liquids or food while holding your child. To prevent choking, be sure that any toys your child plays with do not have parts that are small enough to choke on. You can test any toy part by simply dropping it through a paper-towel roll. If it goes through, the piece is too small and could become a choking hazard. Never allow infants to play with balloons or plastic bags. To prevent drowning, install a toilet lid lock on every toilet in the home. Drowning can happen in less than a couple of inches of water. http://www.hhs.gov/safety/index.shtml#injury 10. Never, ever shake your baby. Shaking a baby, even a little, may lead to severe brain damage and death. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/shakenbaby/shakenbaby.htm 11. Fully immunize your baby. Be sure your baby gets all immunizations on time. Immunizations have prevented death and disease for millions of children throughout the United States and the rest of the world. Talk with your child's pediatrician about keeping up to date on all vaccinations. http://www.cdc.gov/nip/recs/child-schedule.htm#Printable 12. Learn infant first aid and CPR. Be prepared. Know how to call for help and learn infant first aid and CPR. We hope you will never have to use this skill. But if you do, the life you save could be your child's.


So now you know one possible speech topic for Sunday. You could even make up a game about these rules, just to find out if there are any unfortunate mothers who didn't know at least one of them or who may have even (horror of horrors!) violated one of them! It should make the party a lot more interesting.

Now, why couldn't Dr. Carmona publicize this list some other time of they year? Why couldn't he talk about the health issues of mothers and how to help mothers in general? And what on earth will he talk about on Fathers' Day...

And do you know how he ends this diatribe? He says:


"Being a mom is the toughest job in the world, and I'm proud to be able to give you these tips as a gift on this Mother's Day."


Is this man for real?

----
Via Ann Chuckling.

|

Ssssaturday! 



I have written a long post in praise of secularism on the American Street. Go there and tell how to think about the topic better. Of course, only if you are interested in saving the world.

Maybe I shouldn't write that a post is long? It could be a damper. What if we pretend that I said it was a very short post with lots of sexy pictures, too? Or that at least it is mostly waffle? Choices, choices.

|

Friday, May 06, 2005

Friday Embroidery Blogging 




Yin-Yang Fishes


This is a pillow/cushion cover. It's a joke on the yin and yang stuff. I'm always annoyed by dualisms, even when they are sophisticated ones.

The technique is applique as can be seen. The round surround (not all of which is visible here) is supposed to be a porthole in a submarine, so the fishes are outside the window.

|

Today's Action Alert 



Today's Action is based on an email from the DNC:

Can you imagine what Republicans would say if a liberal went on national television and said that conservative judges are a greater threat than terrorism? Or that Clarence Thomas was a Commie? Or that 9-11 was no big deal? They would be (as my old boss Bill Clinton used to say), "squealing like a pig stuck under a gate."

But when Pat Robertson spouts this nonsense, what do we hear from his fellow Republicans?

Thundering silence.

What's worse, Sen. George Allen of Virginia, Robertson's home state, apparently thinks now is a good time to deliver the commencement address to the ultraconservative graduate school Robertson founded. Allen should know better. He should be repudiating Robertson and his hate speech, just as John McCain did in the 2000 GOP primaries. Then again, we saw what the far right did to McCain when he had the guts to take them on. So Allen is headed to Robertson's graduation cookout. I guess that’s just the sort of payback Robertson expects after saying Allen "would make a tremendous president" on national TV and giving the maximum allowable contribution to Allen’s most recent campaign.

When George Allen lends legitimacy to Robertson's offensive rhetoric and Bill Frist joins the Family Research Council's "Democrats hate God" telecast, it just proves how far Senate Republicans will go to pander to the right wing fringe.

Contact Senator Allen and ask him not to speak at Robertson's graduation.



Thanks for taking today's action!

|

Friday Dog Blogging 




Henrietta, Plotting

|

Thursday, May 05, 2005

WOW! 



Go to dailyKos and read this diary. Then listen to the audio link in the diary.

|

Driplets 



Is that a word? If it isn't I declare ownership of it. Driplets are these multiple things that ooze out when I try to write something serious that takes effort and stewing and time. They are trivialities or significant mantras or both.

Here are a few that have been buzzing around my head today:

-What is nucular? Is it the opposite of secular? Like in the "nucular option"?

-Who let out the "air" from Tony Bl***?

-What is "a woman's woman" like? Does she even exist? There is something called "a man's man", like a higher type of a man. Isn't there? Isn't there?

|

Fair and Balanced Reporting by Echidne 



It is time for me to stop being a lefty propagandist and to adopt the mature approach of the mainstream media to events in this world. For instance, the way to address ethics violations is to show that both sides are equally guilty. So here I go:

First, John Kerry paid parking tickets and Red Sox tickets from his campaign funds! The scoundrel! Here are the details:


Sen. John F. Kerry tapped campaign funds for Red Sox tickets and to pay nearly $300 in overdue Boston parking tickets in March, records show.
Kerry's Senate campaign committee wrote a $287 check to the City of Boston Parking Clerk on March 31, 2005. The Bay State senator listed ``travel expense'' as the purpose for the expenditure.
Kerry leased a car for campaign-related travel in Massachusetts that was cited for about a half-dozen parking tickets in Boston.
Most of the tickets were issued in October and November 2003 and not paid until more than 15 months later in March 2005 after accruing penalty fees.
``They were leftover tickets we only found out about when we closed out the lease,'' Kerry spokeswoman Jenny Backus said. ``The car was used for the Senate campaign by staffers and volunteers.''
Kerry, meanwhile, used presidential campaign funds for a $3,150 tab for Boston Red Sox tickets in July when he threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park before the Democratic National Convention.
A Federal Election Commission spokesman said congressmen are entitled to pay for parking tickets and other expenses from their campaign funds as long as they were ``campaign-related.''


Aren't you glad that we didn't elect this unethical man to run our country?

Second, the Republicans do it, too, of course:


American officials rushing to start small building projects in a large swath of Iraq in 2003 and 2004 did not keep required records on the spending of $89.4 million in cash and cannot account at all for another $7.2 million, a federal watchdog reported yesterday.

Most of the poorly documented spending appeared to involve incompetence or haste, but in some cases the auditors said they suspected theft. "We found indications of fraud," said the report by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. Some cases were referred to a criminal investigations unit of the inspector general's office.
...
The report also noted that two field agents finished their contracts and left Iraq with apparent cash surpluses of $777,000 and $715,000. The money has not been located.

In one of those cases, the report said, the manager closed the agent's account with a paper transfer of $777,000 to a different office without ascertaining where the money went. "This appears to be an attempt to remove outstanding balances by simply washing accounts," it said.


See? It all balances out.

|

Masculinity in Jesusland 



For one thing, you can't donate sperm if you are a gay man. Who knows where that penis has been:


To the dismay of gay-rights activists, the Food and Drug Administration is about to implement new rules recommending that any man who has engaged in homosexual sex in the previous five years be barred from serving as an anonymous sperm donor.

The FDA has rejected calls to scrap the provision, insisting that gay men collectively pose a higher-than-average risk of carrying the AIDS virus. Critics accuse the FDA of stigmatizing all gay men rather than adopting a screening process that focuses on high-risk sexual behavior by any would-be donor, gay or straight.

"Under these rules, a heterosexual man who had unprotected sex with HIV-positive prostitutes would be OK as a donor one year later, but a gay man in a monogamous, safe-sex relationship is not OK unless he's been celibate for five years," said Leland Traiman, director of a clinic in Alameda, California, that seeks gay sperm donors.


Might this all be a fear of gayness being inheritable? Hmmh?

Our dear Reverend James Dobson (who is going to be the head mullah when we get theocracy set up properly here) doesn't believe in inheritability here, which is a little shocking to me. He thinks that boys need to be made into heterosexual men by showing what an achievement masculinity is! (Femininity, on the other hand, requires only a lot of submission training). This is how you bring up a son:


Meanwhile, the boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.


So cute, isn't it? I'm learning so much about Jesusland today. It's making me a teeny bit worried.

|

Meanwhile, in Jesusland 



This is a quick runthrough of the most recent Southern Baptist -type developments in Jesusland. First, Wiccans can't read invocations at the meetings of a Virginia county:


The court said in Marsh that as long as the selection of a particular minister did not stem "from any impermissible motive," it was constitutional. The Marsh opinion also strongly emphasized the long history of prayer in both Congress and the Supreme Court itself.

The 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield County's Board of Supervisors did not show impermissible motive in refusing to permit a pantheistic invocation by a Wiccan because its list of clergy who registered to conduct invocations covers a wide spectrum of Judeo-Christian denominations. Simpson v. Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, No. 04-1045 (April 14). Chesterfield County is in the Richmond suburbs.

"The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths," Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the opinion.


Indeed. What else can we possibly need than the god of the Old Testament, the blood-thirsty, jealous and punishing one? Read more about this by Amanda on Pandagon where I got it from.

Second, David Brooks has wet dreams about the evangelicals:


The key to Lincoln's approach is that he was mesmerized by religion, but could never shake his skepticism. Politically, he knew that the country needed the evangelicals' moral rigor to counteract the forces of selfishness and subjectivism, but he could never actually be an evangelical himself.


The wet dreams explanation is my attempt to be polite, for otherwise I should point out that Brooks is lying and stuff.

Third, the wingnut women have their own website (via World O'Crap) in which they can spout all artistic. Here is a lovely little poem for Mother's Day:


YOUR HIGHEST VOCATION!





Dear happy homemakers, a wonderful breed,

God's purpose for you is to raise a godly seed,

Children that are obedient, holy and pure,

With mother at home, they'll be happy and secure.



Secure in God's love and protected from the world,

Guarded from evil and grounded in God's Word

By a mother who has embraced her calling divine,

The prophetic word God gave from the beginning of time.



You're now planted at home, you've found your "glory"!

Left your job behind - that was another story!

You've now been promoted to a much higher career!

You're in God's perfect will so you don't have to fear.



You're nurturing, nourishing and building your nest,

Under your husband's covering, you're totally blessed.

God has promised to provide, He is Jehovah Jireh,

He will always be faithful, He is not a liar.



You are an "arrow polisher", daily sharpening your arrows,

You're not pecking on the ground like little sparrows,

But soaring like the eagle, your stature is high,

You're changing the course of the nation as on God you rely!'



Dear mighty mothers, stand up and be strong,

Don't be fooled by the enemy and the worldly throng,

Don't be deceived by the "mindset" of this society,

Embrace your motherhood, it is your highest priority!



Don't be conformed to the humanistic trend,

It only leads to heartache in the final end.

Be a non-conformist, stand against the tide,

You don't have to be governed by this world's pride.



Instead be transformed by God's living Word,

He is restoring His truth, will you be stirred?

Will you be part of this end-time restoration,

To bring forth the godly seed and change the nation?



God is preparing a people for Jesus' second appearing,

He wants an army of arrows, trained and unfearing,

Straight arrows to go forth from the parents' bow,

The deceptions of Satan to overthrow.



May you experience God's anointing and His daily renewing

As you become part of this revival which is all God's doing.

You will be part of heralding the coming of the King

As you build God's army – and His praises will ring.


Wow! I have to retire from the business of bad poetry. I have been so beaten!

|

Weary of War? 



According to the recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll Americans are growing weary of the Iraq war. I'm growing weary of the growing weary of the Americans. If you get my meaning.

In any case, now fifty-seven percent of those questioned say that the war wasn't worth it. Wasn't worth what? And still forty-one percent think that it was worth it, whatever the "worth it" might be. What is it that these people think we are doing in Iraq? Spreading freedom and democracy to the dark continent? Securing oil for our SUVs? Punishing the Iraqis for what the Saudis did to us on 9/11 2001? Making a flytrap in our neighbor's yard so that the flies (or terrorists) end up there and get killed there (together with lots of the neighbors) instead of bothering us at home?

Yes, I am growing weary of all of this. I'd love to go to sleep for a few centuries and then wake up to read all about this era in the historical records. But then I just might wake up in Gilead and find that reading is illegal for us womenfolk.

|

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Sinuses 



It's no accident that sinuses start with "sin". What do we need them for, anyway? Mine seem to think that it's to produce the most vivid red and green grouting material.

I don't recall ever before having a sinus infection in May, feeling dizzy and showing red welts on the arms, wanting to sleep for twenty-four hour spans and so on. Maybe this is one of those signs that the universe is finally revolting against the Bush Reich? Like locusts and earthquakes. Add to that congested goddesses. This one is going to see the quacks tomorrow.

The only reason I'm mentioning this (other than for the totally pure motive of whining) is to explain why my writing might seem a bit porridgey and smelly for a while: it is sharing the space with those red-and-green clumps.

|

A Shocker? 




A military judge Wednesday threw out Pfc. Lynndie England's guilty plea to abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, saying he was not convinced the Army reservist who appeared in some of the most notorious photos in the scandal knew her actions were wrong at the time.

The mistrial marks a stunning turn in the case and sends it back to square one.


Is Pohl another activist judge? Heh:


Pohl said her statement and Graner's could not be reconciled.

"You can't have a one-person conspiracy," the judge said before he declared the mistrial and dismissed the sentencing jury.

Under military law, the judge could formally accept her guilty plea only if he was convinced that she knew at the time that what she was doing was illegal.

By rejecting the plea to the conspiracy charge, Pohl canceled the entire plea agreement. The agreement had carried a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison, but the prosecution and defense had a deal that capped the sentence at a lesser punishment; the length was not released.

Neither prosecution nor defense lawyers would speak to reporters after the deal was discarded. England, shielded by her defense team, would not comment outside the courtroom.

Allen Rudy, a Dallas attorney, said Wednesday he could not recall a military plea being scrapped under such circumstances during his 25 years as a Navy lawyer and judge.


I think the judge was right. The whole thing smells of a protection scheme for the higher-ups.

|

A Group Picture of the Wingnuts 






They were demonstrating against what they view as the liberal media. It's nice to see all of them, isn't it?

|

What We Didn't Know 



About all these wars. Well, we did know, perhaps. At least some of us. Bush attacking Iraq after bin Laden attacked the U.S. was nonsensical from day one, unless one assumed that the plan to invade Iraq had been in the works for a very long time indeed. Which it had, of course, as we now know from the newly revealed documents that are hurting poodle Blair in the U.K.. Bush cannot be touched by any of this, it seems. This is because he has a funny wife, and must therefore not be a monster, after all.

But the British are not so easily distracted by funny wives or runaway brides:


The families of soldiers who died in Iraq will launch a bid on Tuesday to take Prime Minister Tony Blair to court over his "deception" in going to war.

Two days before the election, the families will deliver a letter to Downing Street outlining the legal case they will bring against the Prime Minister.

"Some of the families are seriously concerned that their children died in circumstances where the war was illegal," Military Families against the War said in a statement.

The families said they decided to take action after reading pre-war advice from the government's top lawyer, the Attorney General, which raised doubts over the invasion's legality.


Then there is the U.S. case of Pat Tillman:


Army officials knew within days of Pat Tillman's death that the former NFL player had been killed by fellow Rangers during a patrol in Afghanistan but did not inform his family and the public for weeks, The Washington Post reported.

A new Army report shows that Gen. John P. Abizaid, the theater commander in Afghanistan, and other top Army officials were aware an investigation had determined the death was caused by an act of ``gross negligence'' four days before a nationally televised memorial service, the Post reported after reviewing nearly 2,000 pages of documents it had obtained.

Tillman, 27, turned down a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was taking cover behind a boulder along a canyon road near the Pakistani border when a firefight erupted at twilight on April 22, 2004.

The Post reported on its online edition Tuesday night that troops on the scene said they were immediately sure Tillman was killed by a barrage of American bullets.

The documents show that officers erroneously reported that Tillman was killed by enemy fire, destroyed critical evidence and initially concealed the truth from his brother, also an Army Ranger, who was near the attack, the Post reported.


But we didn't know! Nobody knew anything of importance, not Bush, not Rumsfed, not those in authority at Abu Ghraib. Look over there! A runaway bride! Mmm, yes. Much more interesting than the total extent of today's carnage in Iraq.

It's the post-reality era, gals and guys!

|

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

John Tierney 






John Tierney inherited William Safire's column in the New York Times. Safire is a wingnut and so is Tierney, of course. It's an old and important tradition of liberal tolerance to give all the best column space in the Times to right-wingers who can't write. In fact, it looks like this tradition is slowly turning into giving almost all the column space to wingnuts. That way the liberals look truly unbiased and fair. What could possibly be fairer than rolling over, baring your stomach and directing the attacker's teeth to the largest vein?

Or this is how I first saw the hiring of John Tierney. He's a clone of the babbling David Brooks. Neither can write. Both think that their task in the world is to push the arrogant faces of the coastal liberal elites into the backsides of what they call the real America or the red states. You know, where the people who matter live. Both Brooks and Tierney act like tour guides on some safari, full of poorly disguised contempt towards the tourists who have hired them, making up stuff as the tour progresses and leading the group to all sorts of dead-ends.

But then it occurred to me that maybe this is really a cunning plot! Maybe the Times is carefully hand-picking clumsy wingnut writers with nothing interesting to say to keep its readers angry and liberal! Nah.

|

A Stolen Quote 



I nicked this one from SWR in the Eschaton comments. It's just so perfect for describing the differences in the way the U.S. and the British media treat the leaders of the respective countries:


Ted Koppel actually did a pretty good segment on the differences between the British and the American press last week.

It was *very* enlightening.

British Reporter: Oh come on Mr. Prime Minster Wanker. You simply have not answered the bloody question. Fess up. You lied.

American Reporter (quivering with fear in the presence of Dear Leader): I would like to apologize in advance for being unAmerican and objectively pro Islamofascist, but would you please tell us why (unbenknownst to your magnificent self of course), some of our troops don't have sufficient body armor?


|

The Lefty Feminist Echidne 



I was linked to on Slate:


Fair and balanced and … public? In the latest example of backlash against the allegedly liberal news media, CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson is "pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias," reports the New York Times. Among several controversial moves, Tomlinson reportedly hired an outside consultant to keep track of guests appearing on Now With Bill Moyers and urged public broadcasting officials to air a program hosted by the editor of the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page.

Needless to say, lefties are outraged. "It's funeral time for PBS," writes the feminist Echidne of the Snakes. The left-leaning Phonograph notes how people who allege bias among news organizations "tend to have a bias themselves." Linkmeister has some choice snippets from a recent New York Times Magazine interview with Ken Ferree, the interim president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.


It's naturally proper for my divine opinions to gain wider readership (assuming someone reads the Slate), but my reaction to being defined as a lefty feminist was very odd. I had to go out and walk in the woods to think about it for a while and to ask the trees for some advice.

This lefty feminist Echidne of the Snakes is some other goddess, someone on the barricades with one breast showing, someone quoting from Mao's Little Red Book. Or so it seemed to me. You see, I am normal. I have the right opinions on everything which means that I must be in the center and others are too right or too left.

Likewise, to be defined as a feminist implies that others are not so. I refuse to think that very many people support unequal opportunities for or worth of men and women, though of course I know that this is the optimistic view. Still, the impression I get from the quote above is that my being a feminist is somehow marking me as an oddball. It could be that I'm just oversensitive and read too much into it all.

But it's the lefty bit that really troubled me. I have never even voted for a socialist candidate in any elections! I advocate a mixed economy! I like the idea of laws that protect workers and ban discrimination, but I have never argued for any banning of capitalist activities. Yes, I am indeed a lefty in the United States, but what does this say about the way we define the political dimensions? Attila the Hun is seen to be middle-of-the-road, that's what it says.

None of this is of any interest to anyone but me. Except that it shows how self-definition is not the same thing as societal definitions. It's the societal definitions that determine how others react to us, and usually certain groups have much more power in naming than others. The political correctness debacle was all about the right to name and the content of the labels that are given. The powerful won it by using ridicule (some of it earned) and the fear of hierarchies turned upside-down. Thus, they still have the right to name, not those on the lower ladders of the hierarchy.

The hegemony is not as total as it once was, and the blogosphere is a good example of the variations now possible. Many of us call the extreme right wingnuts, for example, at least among each other. As they are in power this is kind of exhilarating, cheeky and even a little dangerous. But the term has no mainstream relevance. On the other hand, the originally quite neutral term "liberal" is widely viewed as one of the worst things a politician in the U.S. can be called. This shows how strong the power of naming can be.

|

A Contest 



This is something I had in my mailbox:

Hello,

Today marks the beginning of Chastity Awareness Week in Pennsylvania and NARAL Pro-Choice America has an activity for your readers to keep their minds sparkling clean.

President Bush has recently asked Congress to provide more funding for his abstinence-only until marriage programs. Despite the fact that study after study has shown that these very programs are ineffective and even harmful for our kids, Bush has decided to yet again offer us the latest in medieval birth control: Chastity!

What's in these "abstinence-only until marriage" curricula? Slogans like:

* Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date!
* Don't Be a Louse, Wait For Your Spouse!
* Would you want a cookie that someone had already taken a bite out of?

These slogans might be out-of-date but that hasn't stopped President Bush from providing federal funding – your tax dollars – to buy them to teach our kids.

I do hope you will participate in this contest - your chastity may very well be at stake! To enter, please send an email to GiveUsRealChoices@gmail.com. We will announce the contest winner on May 7th.


Sincerely,

Amelia Field
GiveUsRealChoices.org
|

Today's Action Alert 



Today's Action comes from NARAL:

Next week, May 2-6, Members of Congress are high-tailing it out of Washington for a late spring recess. Will your senators join Tom DeLay for a "non-lobbyist-funded" trip to an exotic destination? Or will they actually come back to your state to meet with you - their constituents?

Maybe we're old-fashioned, but we believe that our elected officials should go back to their home states to meet with voters one-on-one. It seems that this group of senators disagrees. During last month's congressional recess we couldn't track many of them down - forget about locating a public town hall meeting! Perhaps these "missing in action" senators didn't want to be questioned on issues like the nuclear option.

We're hearing that Sen. Frist could launch the nuclear option as soon as the Senate returns from recess, making next week even more important for activists to speak out. The nuclear option would effectively eliminate the filibuster and end pro-choice senators' chances for blocking Bush's anti-choice nominees. The good news is that the vast majority of Americans stand with us - a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 66 percent of Americans oppose changing Senate rules.

This recess, don't let senators play hide and seek while President Bush and Sen. Frist have the future of the Supreme Court in their crosshairs!

Track down your senators!

* Let your senators know you're keeping an eye on them next week - and that you want them to talk with voters about the nuclear option.



* Visit your senators during the recess next week. Check your local newspaper or visit your senators' websites for dates and times of town hall meetings. Or call your senators' offices at 202.224.3121 to schedule a personal appointment with your senators for you and your pro-choice friends.

* If you can't catch up with your senators, get creative and have fun! Get your friends to write a brief, personal note opposing the nuclear option, then deliver your notes to the senators' office nearest you with a bag of atomic fire ball candy.

Thanks for taking today's action.

|

Monday, May 02, 2005

IOKIYAR 



It's Ok If You Are Republican. Even possibly advocating the overturning of the American Constitution. Pat Robertson just did this, too. This one radical extremist cleric is taking over my blog. Help! Someone in the government, someone in the media, someone sane anywhere in the world, help! Notice that this lunatic is a lunatic and cut off his preferential treatment to all good media perks. No, Americans are not that fringey. No, you are not going to lose your cushy livelihood if you point out that he is raving mad:


Appearing on ABC's "This Week," Robertson — who founded the Christian Coalition — also said he would be wary of appointing Muslims to top positions in the U.S. government, including judgeships.
...
Robertson, who launched a brief presidential bid in 1988, said that if he were president he would not appoint Muslims to serve in his Cabinet and that he was not in favor of Muslims serving as judges.

"They have said in the Koran there's a war against all the infidels," he said. "Do you want somebody like that sitting as a judge? I wouldn't."


Note that Article 6. of the Constitution explicitly bans any kind of religious test for judges. But even if Robertson didn't mean to literally require that candidates should not be Muslims, his argument makes no sense. Remember that we are right now in the big wingnut push to have more religious judges in the Supreme Court? Well, wouldn't fundamentalist Muslim judges be just the sort of people Robertson is looking for? People of the book, interpreting things strictly on religious grounds and so on?

Gah. All he wants is a Robertsonian Gilead where everybody thinks just like Pat. Which is a world where nobody thinks at all.
----
Via Americablog.

|

Another Reason to Emigrate... 



The Reverend Pat Robertson:


Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists, the Rev. Pat Robertson claimed yesterday.

"Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that's held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings," Robertson said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

"I think we have controlled Al Qaeda," the 700 Club host said, but warned of "erosion at home" and said judges were creating a "tyranny of oligarchy."

Confronted by Stephanopoulos on his claims that an out-of-control liberal judiciary is the worst threat America has faced in 400 years - worse than Nazi Germany, Japan and the Civil War - Robertson didn't back down.

"Yes, I really believe that," he said. "I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together."


Is there something like Godwin's Law about whoever first mentions Al Qaeda in a net conversation? If there is, it wouldn't apply to truly lunatic cases like this extreme radical cleric. Funny how he can't see that he has more in common with bin Laden's ideas than those of most any ordinary American.

|

A Garden of A Sort 




My garden was of air.
Do not come so near.
The children cannot hear
the arrival of the fear.

You are a bee, you sting.
I never learned to sing.
The children cannot flee
the stinging of the bee.

My garden was of air.
Yet I could not leave.
The children cannot bear
the adulthood of grief.

I never named this thing.
I never learned to sing.
The children cannot tell
their garden is a hell.


|

Fairer and Balanceder....The New PBS 



The New York Times reports about the man behind the curtain at the new and improved Public Broadcasting Service, one Mr. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Mr. Tomlinson wants to make the PBS fairer and more balanced. I agree with him. It would be nice to have the same number of liberal and lefty interviewees as those from the wingnut side. But this is not where Mr. Tomlinson sees problems. Rather, he thinks the PBS is a vile left-wing plot, the beating heart of the so-called liberal media, the oppressor of all things right and wingnutty, and he wants to stop this horrible state of affairs.

Which he can handily do. He is in power. So what does Mr. Tomlinson plan? Here is a hint:


Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, "Now With Bill Moyers."

In late March, on the recommendation of administration officials, Mr. Tomlinson hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member, corporation officials said. While she was still on the White House staff, she helped draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.

Mr. Tomlinson also encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast "The Journal Editorial Report," whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. And while a search firm has been retained to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox, the corporation's president and chief executive, whose contract was not renewed last month, Mr. Tomlinson has made clear to the board that his choice is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.


The article I quote from is full of references to people who no longer work for the PBS. I think that Mr. Tomlinson is doing some spring cleaning... You might be interested in learning that the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has only three non-Republican members out of a total nine. Why is this seen as fairly balanced?

But of course it is. Mr. Tomlinson's idea of balance is to get rid of voices like Bill Moyers' and to make sure that no anti-government investigative journalism will be performed in the future. And this clarifies his views even further:


Last November, members of the Association of Public Television Stations met in Baltimore along with officials from the corporation and PBS. Mr. Tomlinson told them they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate.


It's funeral time for PBS. Every program will now be toothcombed for liberal nits, except for the wholly wingnut programs which will be assumed to be fair and balanced by their very nature. Tomlinson will pay for secret studies to see if Sesame Street advocates homosexuality or contains too little praying and so on. And people like bow-tie Tucker Carlson and the Wall Street capitalists will roam around freely.

The New York Times article doesn't say this, of course. It is oh-so-polite and advocates a wait-and-see attitude in the hope that the wingnuts will be friendly and fair and balanced. But we all know what will really happen. The Fox news are not enough for the wingnuts, Scarborough Country does not suffice. No, what is needed is a totally wingnut media without a single breathing hole left for those of us who actually think.

Of course, the PBS has never been especially left-wing. Only extreme wingnuts think so. But it has covered controversial issues and it has offered more thoughtful coverage than the average corporate-controlled newsmill. I think that all this will now be in the past. Limbaugh will be so pleased.

|

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Spring is Coming! 





Spring is Coming!


This is a Southern hemisphere garden, so it's not really a Spring garden. But it is lovely. My bulb gardens this May turned into squirrel buffets as usual. In return the squirrels plant a lot of horse chestnut trees around my small house. If you have seen a horse chestnut tree you know that it's very important to weed out the seedlings. Otherwise there will be no space for the car or the dogs or anything else.

I had a good April, though. Blue muscaris peeking from under the frothy hems of yellow forsythias. The bluest of blue scillas flowering everywhere! Now the scillas are rotting in the same places, and I can't cover up the rotting if I want the blue next year, too. What to do, what to do. Gardening consists almost totally of what-to-dos interspersed with moments of utter pain (poison ivy) and utter ecstasy (the scent of honeysuckles drifting above white rose garlands in a June night).

But I doubt the readers of this blog are into gardening. I think I will write about gardening when I turn into Olive the Omnivorous Ovary. She wants her own blog. She could always write about the delirious mating orgy that we usually call a flowerbed.



|

From the Barricades 



Did you know that you are a survivor of the abortion holocaust? This is the language of some pro-lifers. Imagine us as embryos: darting about, fleeing the evil abortionist or whatever, somehow miraculously surviving to the point after which pro-lifers no longer care about us: the birth. Pro-lifers seem to view women as aquaria: some empty, but with water that must be kept clear for future fishes, some with fish already in them and some all dry and dusty, no longer useful at all.

A thirteen-year old in state custody in Florida is one of those aquaria with fish. She is more than thirteen weeks pregnant. She got pregnant after running away from the state home. The girl herself wants an abortion and her state-appointed custodian was helping her to get one until higher powers-that-be decided to intervene. The pro-life plot is to keep the case in court until abortion is too late.

Giving birth is considerably more dangerous for a girl of this age than getting an abortion, but the case isn't about her, of course; it's about the rights of the fetus. Even though this can be clothed as a desire to properly punish the girl and whoever she had sex with:


A spokesman for Florida Right to Life said: 'There is a rush to abort. To get rid of the evidence. Who impregnated her? You do not consent to sex at the age of 13.'


The argument that this girl is too immature to make a decision about abortion is an odd one. She is supposedly mature enough to give birth and possibly to mother a child. And in court she sounded pretty mature to me:


"Why can't I make my own decision?"

That was the blunt question to a judge from a pregnant 13-year-old girl ensnared in a Palm Beach County court fight over whether she can have an abortion.

"I don't know," Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez replied, according to a recording of the closed hearing obtained Friday.

"You don't know?" replied the girl, who is a ward of the state. "Aren't you the judge?"


and


L.G., who told Alvarez she had run away at least five times from her youth shelter, maintained, "It would make no sense to have the baby."

"I don't think I should have the baby because I'm 13, I'm in a shelter and I can't get a job," the girl said as Alvarez and her guardian ad litem, assigned to shepherd her in the legal system, questioned her.

L.G. laid out different reasons for wanting an abortion.

"DCF would take the baby anyway," she said, but later added: "If I do have it, I'm not going to let them take it."

She also questioned the health risk of carrying the fetus to term.

"Since you guys are supposedly here for the best interest of me, then wouldn't you all look at that fact that it'd be more dangerous for me to have the baby than to have an abortion?" she asked. Alvarez called that "a good point."


Writing about this case makes me feel nauseous. This thirteen-year old child should be protected, should be allowed to have a childhood, should never have been in a situation where she got pregnant in the first place. We didn't care enough about her until she got pregnant. Then some of us care an enormous amount about her uterus but not at all about the rest of her.
---
Second link originally from Feministing.

|

Quote of the Day 



This is a verry interesting one, by Laura Bush at the White House correspondents' annual dinner on Saturday:


Laura Bush, who is often seen smiling sweetly at her husband's side, stood up just in time to rescue the audience of political heavyweights and Hollywood celebrities from Bush's retelling of a joke about steel rail "cattle guards" that bombed before a Montana town meeting in March.

"Not that old joke -- not again," Laura Bush said, as her husband willingly relinquished the stage.

"I've been attending these dinners for years and just quietly sitting there," the First Lady told the audience. "Well, I've got a few things I want to say for a change."

One of her main targets was the president's bed time.

"I said to him the other day, 'George, if you really want to end tyranny in this world, you're going to have to stay up later,"' Laura Bush said. "Nine o'clock and Mr. Excitement here is in bed, and I am watching 'Desperate Housewives' -- with Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife."


A joke, of course. What else could it possibly be?

|

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com
Progressive Women's Blog Ring
Join | List | Previous | Next | Random | Previous 5 | Next 5 | Skip Previous | Skip Next
  • DONATE: FEED THE GODDESS!