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

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

The Misdemeanor of Cindy Sheehan 



She was arrested for committing a misdemeanor in the room where the State of the Union speech was held:

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq who reinvigorated the anti-war movement, was arrested and removed from the House gallery Tuesday night just before President Bush's State of the Union address, a police spokeswoman said.

Sheehan, who had been invited to attend the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, a misdemeanor, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. Sheehan was taken in handcuffs to police headquarters a few blocks away and her case was processed as Bush spoke.

Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.


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SOTUed 



Sometimes being a liberal blogger is hard work, hard work. I had to watch the State of the Union speech tonight, and I usually avoid seeing wingnuts actually moving and kissing each other and rubbing each other's heads and stuff. I had to watch all of that tonight, and it was like fireants crawling all over my body. So many wingnuts in one room. Gulp.

Then George Bush walked in and shook hands and kissed cheeks, and everybody cheered and applauded and couldn't stop, and it all reminded me of the Emperor's New Clothes. And then the speech started, and indeed, as the betting predicted, there was a reference to 9/11 in the first few paragraphs. But the rest of the speech was about freedom, freedom and more freedom. Freedom from medical insurance in the United States, freedom to have theocracies in the Middle East which will give women no rights, because "their" idea of a democracy isn't ours, freedom from anyone criticizing him who isn't willing to back him up.

And freedom to pay hardly any taxes if you earn a lot, which translates into a freedom to starve if you don't earn a lot. But it's all freedom, you know.

George gave us a lot of good emotions. In that way the speech was like one of those Hostess cakes which looks like a real cake and tastes sweet but in the long-run will lead you into killing your nearest and dearest and then you can use the Hostess cake defence. (Except it wasn't a Hostess cake but some other kind of American weird cake, the name of which escapes me.) George tried to take a leaf from Ronald Reagan's book: Americans love feeling good and being told that they are special and meant to lead the whole world. It is nice to hear how much good we have done in combating AIDS in Africa, except Bush hasn't really delivered on that, and how we are going to have a lot more advanced mathematics classes in schools (with what money?), and how we are, once again, going to find cheaper substitutes for imported oil. George has promised to do this every single year, and so far he hasn't actually done anything important. All this is mainly emotional titillation. I look forward to seeing the actual programs get started but that might take a while. Like until after 2008.

On the other hand, the radical right-wing clerics will get more money and embryos will be treasured. Already born children, not so much. Especially not if they happen to be in Iraq. Iraq was a major topic, too, but I forgot what he said on it. Nothing new, in any case.

There were inaccuracies and outright lies. The funniest assertion was possibly the one where Bush said that if he had been able to do illegal wiretapping before 9/11, it could have been prevented, because it is known that some of the Al Qaeda members were making phone calls from the U.S. to their foreign contacts! This was funny, because of course we all remember that government document entitled, roughly: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack America". If a government document didn't make George do anything, why would illegal wiretapping?

Then there was the elaborate skirting around the "corruption in high places" meme. No names were mentioned and nothing was said about the scandal being largely Republican. This is only natural, sure, but I still have to make a note of it.

Still, the most memorable of all Bush's utterances was his appeal to bipartisanism and civility in debate! You can criticize, but only if you are willing to criticize constructively, which means that you must agree with where Bush is trying to take this country. Like right into an abyss. Democrats are welcome to tell the administration how to get to the abyss quicker and with more force but not tell the administration that the abyss isn't a good idea in the first place.

I should say something nice about the whole SOTU experience. I liked the dog in the audience a lot. He or she looked very wise.
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A transcript of the speech is available here.

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No Lies, Please 



I received this interesting letter that Congressman Conyers and others have sent to the president. It's very sad that such a letter doesn't seem at all out of place today:

Rep. Maurice Hinchey, John Conyers, and Other Members signed the following letter to the President, warning him not to make any further misstatements in his state of the Union Address. The letter was prompted by previous misstatements by the President concerning Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction and efforts to obtain uranium from Niger. The text of the letter follows:

The President

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20500



Dear Mr. President:



As you prepare to deliver your fifth State of the Union address tomorrow, we write to respectfully request your personal attention to the accuracy of the information contained within your speech. We are sure you will agree that thorough fact-checking in preparation for this event is in the best interest of the welfare of the American people and our credibility around the world.



Throughout the course of American history, the impact that the State of the Union address has had upon the Congress, the American people, and the larger worldwide audience to which it is delivered cannot be overstated. In years past, this speech has reinvigorated the disheartened, consoled the grieving, and inspired the downtrodden. Three years ago, you used this address to press Congress and the American people to war against Iraq. However, they now know that information you used in delivering this battle cry was false. Just this month we have seen additional proof from the State Department of disagreement within your administration, at the time your speech was delivered, regarding your claim on Iraq seeking uranium from Africa.



Since its first delivery by President George Washington in 1790, the State of the Union address has grown beyond being merely a constitutional mandate. In fact, there are few events on the world stage where one individual commands the attention of so many on such a wide variety of issues. After your delivery of incorrect information in the past, you must now take special care to ensure that every word you speak can be proven to be accurate. Such attention to detail is crucial to repairing the trustworthiness of you- words and your presidency, as well- as our nation's integrity and leadership on global affairs.



Therefore, on January 31, we encourage you to pledge to your audience that every piece of your State of the Union address has been verified as true. Thank you for your consideration of our request. We look forward to your reply.


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A Disturbing Story About Female American Soldiers 



In Iraq. Alternet tells us that:

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview.

It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

I'm not sure that the cause of dehydration deaths can be so clearly delineated to this fear of rape. But even if it wasn't, the problem is serious and deserves attention. Serving this country does not mean having to service the other soldiers.

Any news story like this wakes up wingnuts who then yell that women have no place in armed forces because, you know, some men will rape them or will be too chivalrous to really do their jobs because they are defending the damsels in distress. That these too arguments clash with each other doesn't seem to make any difference to the wingnuts, and of course it doesn't, because the whole point is to get women out of the military and it doesn't really matter to them what reasoning might be used. It will always be something about men being innately killers and women being innately damsels-in-distress.

I have trouble with this argument, because I believe that we all have the capacity to become killers or victims, and because the argument doesn't help us in learning how to get all the civilian women out of war zones. Since they have no training in war at all they should be at an even greater risk of being raped or an even greater attraction to the chivalrous soldiers to defend. But they are stuck in the middle of the fighting and the wingnuts don't find that disconcerting. Only the idea of female soldiers. Something to do with the ideal of masculinity and girls trying to demean it, I suspect.

But to return to the serious topic of this post. The military should do better in guaranteeing the safety of the women who serve their country, and those men who prey upon them should think about the meaning of "getting your back" and they should make damn sure that they understand what that does NOT include.

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First Do No Harm 



The old saw in medicine: first do no harm. It could be profitably extended to the repairs of the health care system, but few politicians care about the actual delivery of health care. It's mostly politics rather than policy for them. After all, they can afford any type of treatment or provider they desire.

It makes me sick to think about it. How is that for a joke? More seriously, the new proposals for fixing the system that Bush has come up with are not going to fix the system. What they are going to do is to create more desperation and more premature deaths, and they are unlikely to save much in money. Some, sure, because some people will stop seeing physicians and so save us the costs of trying to keep them healthy or even alive. Perhaps a little bit too cynical, but you see the point.

Or you will see the point after I tell what the problems of the health care system fixing are. Consider this: Every health care system has three goals:

1. To provide fair access to all in need.

2. To provide fair quality of care.

3. And to do all this at the least possible cost.

If you think about it a little you can see that the third goal fights the first two. It would be easy to guarantee that every single person in this country gets very high quality care, if we were willing to spend all the resources we have on it. Except in that case there would be no money or time left for anything else.

Add to this the complications that arise because patients really can't judge quality very well and can't do comparison-shopping in, say, appendectomies. Then add the fact that we have over forty million uninsured people who are either going to have no care or care paid by the rest of us, and you can see the political stew boiling. There will be accusations of free-loading by the indigent, there will be accusations of the first accusers wanting to see the uninsured die on the street in front of the accusers house and so on.

What Bush is focusing on in his proposal is really the third goal of the system, and he is grasping market straws as his solution. The idea is to make people responsible for their own health care costs via Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). They work like the world without any health insurance: you save and save for future illness, except you get a tax deduction on the money and some clerk in some office will decide which expenses will be covered out of that account.

Then you are supposed to go to the hospital department store and to walk around with a basket over your arm and to pick up operations and physicians and nurses and turn them over and see what the price tags are, all the time muttering to yourself: "I might need a pneumonia cure some day." By being responsible for spending your own money you will shop carefully and we will all save money! Too bad that the way we buy medical care doesn't fit this model at all. Even worse, the easiest way to get the price of medical care down is by skimping on the quality and usually few people will notice. And even worse than that: unconscious people don't shop around, people in great pain don't compare prices.

The Bush plan will not work. It won't hurt the wealthier among us, because they have plenty of private coverage for whatever they might need and even plenty of ordinary savings to use. But it will hurt the rest, the majority, by making health care less available and less affordable and by inflicting the patient with a burden of careful shopping that just is not possible in many medical need cases.

There are plans that would work better. We could focus on cost-containment on the side of the providers: equipment manufacturers, hospitals and drug firms, to begin with. We could undo the tiny provision slipped into the Medicare bill which bans the government from using its gigantic bargaining power to get better prices on the medications the elderly use. We could do a lot of stuff like that, but it would hurt Bush's base: the haves and the have-mores.

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Miners and Miners 



Miners and miners. American and Canadian. Three large mining accidents have taken place recently on this continent, two (at the Sago and Alma mines) in the United States and one (in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan) in Canada. The death tolls from these accidents: Fourteen dead. All American miners. All the Canadian miners were today brought to safety:

Rescuers retrieved all 72 central Canadian potash miners who were trapped underground by a fire and survived until Monday by using oxygen, food and water stored in subterranean emergency chambers.

Seventy-two miners were trapped early Sunday when a fire started in polyethylene piping more than a half-mile underground, filling the tunnels with toxic smoke and prompting the miners to take refuge in the sealed emergency rooms.

The Canadian and American accidents are not exactly identical and thus cannot be directly compared. But I grew curious about the idea of storing oxygen, food and water in subterranean emergency chambers, and I tried to find out if the same was done at the Sago mine in the U.S..

The answer appears to be no:

The Sago miners had oxygen devices. Why don't they last longer or have oxygen available?

MSHA's standards state that mine operators must provide "self- rescue devices" adequate to protect the miner for 1 hour or longer. A person from Homeland Security was on television and informed the nation that the miners had devices that would last 7 hours. However, this was not the case. We have been told that the devices the Sago miners had were good for 1 hour. According to an MSHA specialist, the SCSRs might last 2-3 hours "if they nurse it." Some operators will store additional self rescue devices throughout the mine in case of a mine emergency, but this is not required by the government. Again, there is the fact that while mine rescue teams can be located up to 2 hours away, miners only have 1 hour of air with their self-contained self-rescue devices.

Bolds are mine. So the government doesn't require emergency storage of oxygen in the mines. Ok. How about the Canadian government? It seems that it does.

Another interesting item I learned was this:

First, the Bush administration withdraws a regulation that would have revised MSHA's 15-year old mine rescue regulation, kills a regulation that would have helped prevent conveyor belt fires, changes mine ventilation rules that experts say will allow fires to spread more rapidly through the mine, cutting off miners' fresh air -- and now this from today's Charleston Gazette:

Just two years ago, the Bush administration rejected a proposal to give coal miners text-messaging devices that could warn them of underground fires and explosions.

If the Sago Mine had had these devices, 13 miners trapped underground could have been told it was safe for them to just walk out after a Jan. 2 explosion.

If workers at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine three weeks later had had text-messaging devices, they could have been warned sooner of a dangerous fire that killed two workers.

***
MSHA already could have acted to accept text-messaging proposals that labor and industry officials made after a major mine disaster in Alabama.

The nation's 42,000 underground coal miners already could have communication devices to help them escape potentially deadly mine accidents, according to a review of public records and interviews with mine safety experts.

U.S. coal companies have known about the devices — called Personal Emergency Devices, or PEDs — since at least the late 1980s. But without an industry-wide mandate, few operators have installed the systems in their mines. Only 19 of about 800 underground U.S. mines use PEDs, according to MSHA records.

These devices, manufactured by an Australian firm, Mine Site Technologies, use ultra-low frequency electromagnetic fields to send text messages from the surface to the fields -- warning miners to evacuate and best evacuations routes, for example.

The devices have been used for almost 20 years in Australia. Following the September 2001, explosions at the Jim Walter Resources No. 5 Mine outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama that killed 13 miners, the United Minworkers recommended that MSHA require the devices. In that incident, four miners were injured by an initial explosion, but the others were killed attempting to rescue the injured miners, not knowing about the explosion or the dangers of another explosion.

The devices were used successfully in the US in a 1998 fire at the Willow Creek Mine in Carbon County, Utah, where the entire workforce of mine was successfully evacuated from a serious mine fire.

Hmmm. Miners and miners. Some dead, some alive. Like canaries in a mine. The question is why.

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Monday, January 30, 2006

We Are Famous! 



Some good news today, courtesy of EPT in my comments. Check out this picture, carefully:





It's the cover of the latest In These Times, and we are mentioned in the left-hand column, the fourth blog from the top. Nice, huh?

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No Filibuster 



I have nothing polite to say on the topic. Get your burqas ready, gals.

Well, the fight will go on, because there is no livable alternative. As we will find out, sadly, when Alito starts erasing the laws that protect reproductive choice and fair treatment of all the little people.

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RIP Wendy Wasserstein 



She died today of lymphoma:

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein died today after a battle with lymphoma. She was 55 and she leaves behind a body of work that includes hits such as "The Heidi Chronicles" (1988) and "The Sisters Rosensweig" (1993) and a little daughter named Lucy Jane.

Wasserstein was well liked on stage and off, quick with a smile and a quip in person and always popular at the box office. Indeed, her plays were pack 'em in crowdpleasers and critics sometimes dismissed her wry Manhattaneque comedies as the stuff of a female Neil Simon but that commentary abjectly misses the significance of her work. Before Wasserstein, there was no room for smart, funny, independent women on Broadway, women who stood on their own terms, not as foils for male characters who really ran the show. The playwright made a place for women on Broadway to make their own choices about love, life, parenthood and feminism.


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Partying - Wingnut Style 



NOTE: This is probably a hoax. I'm relieved to hear that.
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If this invitation to a Republican party, from a diary on Daily Kos is true, it reveals a lot about the inner Freudian of some Republicans:

A Message From Your Host

We will have a Jesse Jackson piñata , a dunk tank where you'll get the chance to sink my wife who will be dressed as Hilary Clinton, and a special guest appearance by my uncle - Rep. Timothy V. Johnson who will be giving away "Proud to be G.O.P." American Flag windbreakers. Bring a side dish if you like. We will have burgers, hot dogs, chili, and pizza, but nothing vegetarian! This party is family friendly, so feel free to bring children. It's never too early to get them involved!

See how there are flags, family values and the rituals of pretending to murder a black man and an uppity woman who also happens to be some wingnut's wife? And children should be introduced to this as early as possible! I feel a little sick, so I hope that it is a joke, even if a poor one.
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Added later: The party invitation on the gop.com excludes the reference to beating a black man but still promises the drowning of Hillary Clinton. Which reminds me of a long-overdue post about how racism is still not quite mainstream but sexism has arrived, pretty much. And yes, I know that they are pretending to drown an individual woman but boy, does Hillary not stand for all that the wingnuts don't like in women!

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Framing the Federal Budget 



Daily Kos links to an interesting article about the new federal budget by Brian M. Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing corporate think tank. Mr. Riedl is not happy with the budget, because it is written based on unrealistic assumptions. By law, it can't allot anything towards the war expenses in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran?), and it also assumes that the Bush tax cuts will be discontinued:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects a balanced budget by 2012. A number of CBO's assumptions underlying this projection are, to say the least, problematic. For example, CBO's projections assume that all of the President's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, as well as all other temporary tax cuts, are allowed to expire and that the Alternative Minimum Tax is not fixed before it digs further into middle-class incomes. CBO is also required by law to assume that there will be no more appropriations for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and for Gulf Coast reconstruction; that the pending reconciliation budget will have no effects; and that discretionary spending will not grow at all, in inflation-adjusted terms. With all these caveats in place, CBO's budget baseline is extremely unrealistic.

The Heritage wants the tax cuts to be kept, naturally. They are the whole point why Bush was made the president in the first place, at least from the corporate angle. But this desire makes the budget even more unrealistic, and the solution is to cut, and cut so severly that the budget will bleed. The poor are good bleeders, you know.

Mr. Reidl writes his proposals about how and what to cut using beautiful wingnut framing: All the things the poor get are "runaway" or "out-of-control". Real problems are treated curtly and in simple sentences of negation. Examples:

"Tax revenues are not the problem."
"Runaway spending is the problem"
" Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are out of control"
"The 2009 deficit is not the issue"
"Until entitlements are brought under control, the annual deficit will grow and rising net-interest costs will accelerate that growth"


Then there are the omissions in the article. Nothing about the war spending being out of control, for example.

But we are seeing the stage being set for the next round of cuts. They will be in pensions and in health insurance for the poor and the elderly. These are clearly the people who are out of control... It is not surprising, then, that the way Bush will solve the health insurance crisis in this country is by cutting the coverage. No coverage, no worries about its size, see?
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Alitoalitoalitoalitoalito.... 



There is an echo in the room, probably. The cloture voice is approaching and then we know how different politicians voted, so that one day, if need be, we can write down who it was, exactly, who caused the destruction of the American Constitution and spelled the end of democracy in this once-great country. There are rumors and counter-rumors and so on, but essentially I have no idea what is going on. It just seemed important to be typing at this moment.

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Sunday, January 29, 2006

On Abstinence Pledges and Silver Rings 



The Bush administration is pushing hard for abstinence education at schools, and only abstinence education, with no mention of those nasty contraceptives which might fail. One abstinence approach is to ask the teens to make a pledge that they will stay virgins until the wedding night. If you are feeling wobbly about the force of your pledge, you can supplement it with a silver abstinence ring.

My inner bad poet immediately made up a poem about the abstinence rings:

With this ring I thee wed,
my dearest Abstinence,
but I'll still give head.

It doesn't count as intercourse,
this I know for a fact.
And though this is banal,
neither does anal,
or anything that leaves my hymen intact.

Bit of a first draft, but it does convey the flavor of a long follow-up study of those who had made abstinence pledges:

Teenagers who take virginity pledges -- public declarations to abstain from sex -- are almost as likely to be infected with a sexually transmitted disease as those who never made the pledge, an eight-year study released yesterday found.

Although young people who sign a virginity pledge delay the initiation of sexual activity, marry at younger ages and have fewer sexual partners, they are also less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex, said the researchers from Yale and Columbia universities.

"The sad story is that kids who are trying to preserve their technical virginity are, in some cases, engaging in much riskier behavior," said lead author Peter S. Bearman, a professor at Columbia's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. "From a public health point of view, an abstinence movement that encourages no vaginal sex may inadvertently encourage other forms of alternative sex that are at higher risk of STDs."

Studies like this are tricky to do because those who choose the abstinence pledge might have been abstinent longer in any case. So it's not quite clear what the effect of the pledge itself might be. To find out that, we'd need to have two populations of similar teenagers and somehow make one of them take the pledge and also somehow make sure that the other population hears nothing about such pledges. This can't be done, which means that the studies will always be suggestive rather than definite.

And where did this post come, you might ask. Someone discussed the abstinence study on CNN today. And then I read this article about how the Bush administration favors abstinence as the main tool for fighting AIDS in Africa. Given the findings that abstinence isn't really protecting against sexually transmitted diseases when people interpret it as anything-but-intercourse-proper, I'm worried that the same might happen with these AIDS prevention programs. Which would make them useless.

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Tarja Halonen Headed for Re-Election 






Halonen is the president of Finland, and yes, she is a woman. It looks like she has been elected for another term:

With 99.9 percent of votes counted, Halonen had 51.8 percent against Sauli Niinisto's 48.2 percent. Voter turnout was 77 percent.

A 77 percent voter turnout! And did you notice that they use paper ballots?

I'm not terribly aware of Halonen's politics in general, but one thing I do like about her: She refuses to have "an extreme makeover" to look like the marketable notion of a female president. She just keeps dying her hair bright red, probably at home, and smiling away. There is something very refreshing about that, given the rarity of average-looking older women in the media.

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Some Good Tidings 



Or at least cracks in the wingnut dominance. First, an editorial in the New York Times says things about the Bush administration that only bloggers have dared to say so far:

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

Read the whole editorial for more Bush-clearing.

Second, Ted Koppel has now said some critical things about the media. Of course he is no longer dependent on their financial support, but we take what we can get. A quote from Ted:

Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.

"It created programming to satisfy the market" is a very gentle way of saying that Fox is biased. But it is a way of saying that. Of course everybody knows that Fox is biased; what we play here is a game of pretending to know things or pretending not to know things, sort of like the Alito nomination game. Only real politics wonks like the pretending games, but within those games Koppel's statement matters.

Finally, an article assessing Bush's chances of turning his dismal performance around says this:

Bush's approval rating now stands at 42 percent, down from 46 percent at the beginning of the year, although still three percentage points higher than the low point of his presidency last November.

The poll also shows that the public prefers the direction Democrats in Congress would take the country as opposed to the path set by the president, that Americans trust Democrats over Republicans to address the country's biggest problems and that they strongly favor Democrats over Republicans in their vote for the House.

The political stakes this year are especially high. What happens will affect not only the final years of Bush's presidency, but also will shape what is likely to be an even bigger election for his successor in 2008. Republicans have been on the ascendancy throughout the Bush presidency, but they begin the year not only resigned to some losses in Congress but also fearful that, under a worst-case scenario, an eruption of voter dissatisfaction could cost them control of the House or Senate or both.

This looks like a situation the Democrats could use to their advantage. Now, where did they put those spines? Hmmm.

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Saturday, January 28, 2006

A Very Final Announcement on the Gender Gap in Wages Series 



It is now permanently available for clicking on my address at the top of this blog. You can also see some of my embroideries at that site. If you click F5 the embroidery shown on the frontpage changes to another one. Neat, eh?

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Wives as Property, Wives as Hostages to Love? 



According to the ABC News:

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."

The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized American journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.

This is unethical. We shouldn't punish the family members of someone we suspect of a crime. It is also a highly inflammatory strategy in a country where the honor of a family is regarded as lodged in its women. It's stupid, in short.

But it's also a possibly feminist topic for discussion. Possibly, because I can imagine the U.S. intelligence doing the same to male family members of someone they suspect of being an insurgent or a terrorist. Still, doing it to the women strikes a different tone, because of the women-as-honor concept I mentioned and because many still view women as the property of their families or their husbands and fathers. Or as an appendix to the men, something that is seen as belonging to them, something that is not seen as a separate individual person.

Whatever your opinion on the feminist contents of this topic might be, it certainly is true that kidnapping wives in Iraq is an extremely bad policy if we want the American ideals of fairness and democracy and all that shit respected all over the world.

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Saturday Nothings and Wingut Framings 



More of a writing exercise than a real post, because I had these tremendous deep thought experiences last night and I didn't write them down and now I can't remember them. They were really good ideas about the American political system and how to fix it. But they are gone the way so many other things have: the Great American Novel, what to plant in the northeastern corner of my garden, how to reuse those jeans I love which have large holes in dangerous places. Where do ideas go when you don't pay attention to them? Do they sulk and hide, just to come back one day, or are they gone for good, to be given to someone else who does pay attention?

This has been a sad week in politics, for me at least, because it has shown the debased nature of so many political pundits. They have been bought, lock-stock-and-barrel, by the wingnuts, and we still hear all the screaming about the liberal media. Now I have to listen to Canadian and English news every day just to know what might be happening.

I have also learned that the wingnut framing of liberals as angry has taken hold. This is only possible in a faith-based world where Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are courteous old-timers who have tea with tiny cucumber sandwiches and gently whisper compliments to each other. We are uncouth and mean-spirited, but joking about giving Justice Stephens rat-poison is the new black.

Then there is the new framing of all of us liberals in the blogs: we are the radical fringe extremists, the bothersome fleas biting at the butts of the Democratic establishment. Poor Democrats, as they must cope with us who don't matter at the same time as coping with the wingnuts who do matter. See the touch of the conservatives in all this? One base is all-important: the wingnuts; the other base is nutters, to be ignored.

These frames are dangerous. I am not a radical extremist, and neither are 99% of the other lefty bloggers on the net. But soon we are all going to cower in fear when we look in the mirror and see those fangs and those red eyes.

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The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth 



The title makes little sense. Neither does what it refers to: the way prominent pundits keep arguing that the Abramoff scandal is bipartisan. The American Prospect commissioned a study of the actual Indian tribes donations to Democrats and Republicans, both before they had Abramoff as their lobbyist, and after. The study also compared the donations of Indian tribes who did not employ Abramoff with the donations of those who did. The conclusion of the analysis was this:

"If you're going to make the case that this is a bipartisan scandal, you have to really stretch the imagination," says Morris. "Most individual tribes were predominantly Democratic givers through the last decade. Only Abramoff's clients switched dramatically from largely Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican donors, and that happened only after he got his hands on them."

Yet this is what we heard just yesterday from a mainstream media pundit:

From the January 27 edition of NBC's Today:

LAUER: Howard Dean was on this program yesterday and asserted, basically, that it is a Republican scandal. Let me play you a clip.

DEAN [video clip]: It is a Republican-financed scandal. Not one dime of money from Jack Abramoff ever went to any Democrat. Not one dime.

LAUER: Katie pressed him on that, and then we -- we did some research. We went to the Center for Responsive Politics and we found out that, technically speaking, Howard Dean may be correct. But here's what we found: that 66 percent of the money in this situation went to Republicans, but 34 percent of the money -- not from Abramoff, but from his associates and clients -- went to Democrats.

"Technically correct"! Indian tribes have donated money to the Democratic party for years. Then Abramoff enters the picture, and the tribes which employ him start largely donating money to the Republican party, though they still give something to the Democrats, too. And this is a bipartisan scandal? Except in the "technically correct sense"? I need to bang my head against the garage wall. Excuse me for a moment.

Then there is the real scandal of this whole scandal: That we are all discussing calmly how much influence money can buy in a system that is supposed to be a democracy.

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Friday, January 27, 2006

A Deep Thought for the Day 



How many members of Opus Dei do we need on the Supreme Court of the United States?

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Your Illiberal Media in Action 



Go to Oliver Willis and click on the video concerning CNN's newscast on John Kerry. It is not exactly neutral and unbiased. For those of you who can't see the video, the woman states that John Kerry flew home from "an exclusive Swiss resort" for a last-ditch attempt at a filibuster. The screen is divided, and the other side has a picture of John Kerry with the words "Gulfstream Liberal". This is probably a wingnut joke on "Limousine Liberal" !!!!!!

To check what Kerry might be doing at this "exclusive Swiss resort" note this:

The Massachusetts senator was speaking on the margins of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

To see what the World Economic Forum is, go here.

I cannot find the contact information for the CNN ombudsman, if they even have one.

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Friday Puppy Blogging 





We need some cute this week. It has been exhausting and even downheartening. So I'm happy to present you with teh cute: A nice Wheaten terrier puppy. Those black markings fade after a while.

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On Rat Poisons 



Ann Coulter has joked about the need to give Justice Stephens some rat poison:

Coulter had told the Philander Smith College audience Thursday that more conservative justices were needed on the Supreme Court to change the current law on abortion. Stevens is one of the court's most liberal members.

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," Coulter said. "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

Have you noticed that when liberals get angry, as happened in the Washington Post blog comments scandal, some media pundits waste no time getting to the lamentations about the incivility of the left's discourse, but comments by Ann Coulter are not incivil. They are just... jokes.

They don't make her sound like terrorists, noooh. Only lefties like Michael Moore and John Kerry sound like terrorists. Here is Rush Limbaugh on the topic of Osama bin Laden's latest tape:

Wait a minute, who's translating who, there? Sounds like Ted Kennedy was telling bin Laden what to say.

Now, to prove my point, folks, 'cause I've been getting some wide-eyed stares from Snerdley, today, when I say, "The Democrats look at, to me -- to me -- they look to Bush as the enemy." They don't see bin Laden as the enemy. They see Bush as the enemy.

Well, bin Laden and the Democrats sound similar, would you not agree? What is so outrageous about that? It's not -- you know what? It's not outrageous. You just can't believe I'm actually saying it.


But joking about murdering a Supreme Court Justice is just good clean fun and not at all treasonous.

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The Vegan Danger to America 



This article talks about FBI surveillance of a vegan protest outside a store that sells hams. The ACLU of Georgia has obtained copies of the government files on one vegan, Caitlin Childs:

For example, more than two dozen government surveillance photographs show 22-year-old Caitlin Childs of Atlanta, a strict vegetarian, and other vegans picketing against meat eating, in December 2003. They staged their protest outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

The detective also wrote that Childs was "hostile, uncooperative and boisterous toward the officers." Those vegans!

Childs's picture was also in the files. Here she is protesting the ham store:





Don't you sleep safer now that you know what the government does to protect us?

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Thursday, January 26, 2006

Santorum in the Memory Hole... 



Via Eschaton, I hear that Rick Santorum, that holy warrior from Pennsylvania, is having a sore tummy or something else that makes him pretend he isn't a holy warrior, after all. Like recently he denied that the K Street Project exists at all:

But, in interviews with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he has said those discussions -- which he previously referred to as "the K Street meetings" -- are merely to ensure Republicans are putting forward good candidates for the jobs.

As if that weren't enough to make you question the veracity of Santorum's latest denials, here's what he told the Post-Gazette about the K Street project back in November:

"The K Street project is purely to make sure we have qualified applicants for positions that are in town," Mr. Santorum said. "From my perspective, it's a good government thing."

This is confusing. Because in this 2003 article Santorum is cited as the major power behind the K Street Project:

When presidents pick someone to fill a job in the government, it's typically a very public affair. The White House circulates press releases and background materials. Congress holds a hearing, where some members will pepper the nominee with questions and others will shower him or her with praise. If the person in question is controversial or up for an important position, they'll rate a profile or two in the papers. But there's one confirmation hearing you won't hear much about. It's convened every Tuesday morning by Rick Santorum, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, in the privacy of a Capitol Hill conference room, for a handpicked group of two dozen or so Republican lobbyists. Occasionally, one or two other senators or a representative from the White House will attend. Democrats are not invited, and neither is the press.

The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs--specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington's K Street, a canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House that is to influence-peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street. And Santorum's Tuesday meetings are a crucial part of that effort. Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."

Poor Ricky. He's suffering from a Memory Hole syndrome.

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Filibustering Alito 



I believe that the Democrats should filibuster Alito. There are arguments opposing filibustering which have some general merit, especially the one thistle mentioned in earlier comments about the problems we might build for the future if we filibuster people who have a paper trail. This encourages nominees with no paper trail.

The other argument against filibustering I keep hearing has to do with civility. Well, the wingnuts have deserted the land of civility a long time ago, and we have been there all alone, talking to shadows. If one is bothered by civility, one can filibuster politely.

Then there is the argument about Alito not mattering very much as he is only one judge and there are still some non-wingnut judges on the bench and Alito won't change anything. So goes the incremental argument for boiling the frog, too. Keep heating the water slowly, slowly, and the frog never notices it gets boiled.

So on balance I believe in filibustering. Because I'm not at all sure that we will ever get a change to experience what might happen to a Democratic nominee if we let the Republican power grap to be complete. You may from now on call me the goddess of tinfoil. I don't care. Indeed, I will carry my helmet with pride.

I don't see what most Democrats have to lose from going along with a filibuster. It's not as if wingnuts will decide to vote for them just because they didn't filibuster.

There are no links in this post because it is an expression of my own personal opinion. If you agree with my opinion, contact your Senators.

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On the Palestinian Elections 



Moonbotica is an English blogger. Her Palestinian friend borrowed her blog to tell about how the elections went:

finally hamas won and that is what i guessed would happen , fatteh is as an old shoe now , hamas will try to make palestine as an islamic country , the situation will be so bad next days , israel refused hamas and USA too, then who voted hamas will know he was mistake , hamas will not develop the palestin,s cities as people think , who vote hamas believe that hamas is fair , they dont know that it will make our life as hell , we will dont have our freedom on the street and they will try to force girls to wear veil ( new afghanistan in middle east) , then it will be big catastrophe,

I predict that within a month Hamas will issue some laws that restrict women's rights. It's an odd thing how the more authoritarian regimes always focus on the control of women. Not odd, really, I was just trying to be sarcastic. The control of women guarantees the control of the next generation so it's all good for the power-hungry.

Those who voted for Hamas probably didn't vote for the control of women, on the whole. The vote was as much a protest against the corruption of Fatah or a vote for change. But what will change is most likely not what the people are hoping for. An Islamic state may be in the books.

Well, I will try to stay optimistic.

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Thank Goddess for the Paywall at the NYT 



It saves lots of innocent people from reading David Brooks. He is now telling us that the Democrats have failed because such a small proportion of people are poor and the rest don't care about economic policies at all. What they care about is Values, and the wingnuts do them so much better:

Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein to offer their own recipe for social renewal: churches that restrain male selfishness, decency standards that check hedonism, social norms that discourage childbearing outside wedlock.

Funny that he doesn't point out how the evangelicals plan to restrict us womenfolk. It's a much larger share of their agenda than restricting male selfishness.

And the idea that the wingnuts are the ones with Values looks truly sick when you read what Bob Herbert* has to say. And yes, he should not be behind the wall:

Reality has been dealt a stunning blow by Mr. Bush. The administration's high-handedness with the Katrina investigators comes at the same time as disclosures showing that the White House was warned in the hours just before the hurricane hit New Orleans that it might well cause catastrophic flooding and the breaching of the city's levees.

That was early on the morning of last Aug. 29. On Sept. 1, with the city all but completely underwater, the president went on television and blithely declared, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

This guy is something. Remember his "Top Gun" moment aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln? And his famous taunt — "Bring 'em on" — to the insurgents in Iraq? His breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that's the real problem. That's where you'll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence.

Fantasy may be in fashion. Reality may have been shoved into the shadows on Mr. Bush's watch. But the plain truth is that he is the worst president in memory, and one of the worst of all time. Many thousands of people — men, women and children — have died unnecessarily (and thousands more are suffering) because of his misguided and mishandled policies.

The Republicans are running a populist strategy to garner the votes that will maintain them in power for their real base which is the monied folks. The populist strategies almost always consist of finding the nasty emotion that can be generalized enough to start a movement, the "them-against-us" kind of trigger. It's often something about blacks exploiting the country, though in recent years it has been about uppity women destroying the good old America and about pagans destroying Christmas, and it is certainly going to be about immigrants. All groups that can be fairly safely labeled as "them" rather than as "us". And no, the Democrats are not allowed to use the same trick to point out how the "them" is really those guys with money, the ones that look like militant earthworms (coughKarlRovecough). Because that would be class warfare and only the rich can wage that.

The liberals do have values, and very good values they are: fairness, justice, concern for the others. Brooks is setting up strawmen in his post by stating that the liberals don't have values, and he demeans the concept of values by making them match the Republican framing. Notice how coercive his values are?

But I must admit that it's brave of him to release this poorly thought-out post on values right at the cusp of the Abramoff scandal.
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*I had Frank Rich here earlier. Don't know why. Thanks to Nancy for the correction.

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Final Offering 



To remind you to read or to copy my series on the gender gap in earnings. I toiled over it and so should someone else... Here are the links

Theory

Empirical Evidence

Addressing Wingnut Distortions

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Now and Then 



Then:

Bush not concerned about Bin Laden.

Bush: "So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him. … And, again, I don't know where he is. I — I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."


Now:

"When he says he's going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it," Bush told reporters after visiting the top-secret National Security Agency where the surveillance program is based. "I take it seriously, and the people of NSA take it seriously."


Then:

In June, 2002, Republican Sen. Michael DeWine of Ohio introduced legislation (S. 2659) which would have eliminated the exact barrier to FISA which Gen. Hayden yesterday said is what necessitated the Administration bypassing FISA. Specifically, DeWine's legislation proposed:


to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to modify the standard of proof for issuance of orders regarding non-United States persons from probable cause to reasonable suspicion. . . .


In other words, DeWine's bill, had it become law, would have eliminated the "probable cause" barrier (at least for non-U.S. persons) which the Administration is now pointing to as the reason why it had to circumvent FISA.


Now:


REPORTER: General Hayden, the FISA law says that the N.S.A. can do intercepts, as long as you go to the court within 72 hours to get a warrant. I understood you to say that you are aggressively using FISA, but selectively doing so. Why are you not able to go to FISA, as the law requires, in all cases? And if the law is outdated, why haven't you asked Congress to update it?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: If FISA worked just as well, why wouldn't I use FISA? To save typing? No. There is an operational impact here. And I have two -- two paths in front of me, both of them lawful: one, FISA; one, the President's authorization. And we go down this path because our operational judgment is: It is much more effective. So we do it for that reason. I think I got -- I think I've covered all the ones you raised.

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The first two from hadenough on Eschaton threads.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2006

From My Mailbag 



There is a new blog for feminist law professors. Check it out.

Alternet has started a new blog on the way wingnuts frame the public debate in order to make it impossible for us to do anything but play defence. Lakoff stuff. I find this an important idea to tackle, mostly because I have caught myself thinking about so many problems using the wingnut frame, even when it is blatantly stupid. We need to learn to play the media better, and this new blog could help.

WAM: Women, Action and the Media, is preparing for its third annual conference. I went to the first two and had a great time. They have started taking registrations. You can find out more and register here.

I have been interviewed at bloggasm. They have many other fascinating blogger interviews but that one is the most fascinating...

And in a much more serious vein, John Gorenfeld (our expert on the Reverend Moon) writes about some sick Gilead stuff that is happening to teenagers right now.

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Blogger Going Down... 



Most likely just for a few hours but it's a good idea to have something posted before.

Here is a silly poem BG sent me by e-mail:


Overheard from Congressman Seuss


That Abramoff!

That Abramoff!

I do not like that Abramoff!



"Would you like to play some golf?"



I do not want to play some golf.

I do not want to, Abramoff.



"We could fly you there for free.

Off to Scotland, by the sea."



I do not want to fly for free.

I don't like Scotland by the sea.

I do not want to play some golf.

I do not want to, Abramoff.



"Would you, could you, take this bribe?

Could you, would you, for the tribe?"



I would not, could not, take this bribe.

I could not, would not, for the tribe.



"If we strong-armed corporations

Into giving you donations?

They'd be funneled to your PAC.

Would you then cut us some slack?"



I would not, could not, cut you slack.

I do not care about my PAC.

I do not want to play some golf.

I do not want to, Abramoff.



"A plane! A plane! A plane! A plane!

Would you, could you, for a plane?"



I could not, would not, for a plane.

Not for a bribe, not for the tribe.

Not for donations from corporations.

Not for my PAC, not for some slack.

Not from any schmoe named Jack.



"Would you help us buy some ships

Perfect for quick gambling trips?

Talk to people in the know

For a little quid pro quo?

Oh come now, don't be a snob.

Let us give your wife a job."



I will not help you buy some ships.

I do not wish for gambling trips.

My wife does not need a job

Even if she is a snob.

We do not like bribes, can't you see?

Why won't you just let me be?



"You do not like bribes, so you say.

Try them, try them, and you may.

Try them and you may, I say."



Jack. If you will let me be

I will try them, then you'll see.



Say.... I do like playing golf!

I like it, I do, Abramoff!

I do like Scotland by the sea.

It's such a thrilling place to be!

And I will take this bribe.

And I will help the tribe.

And I will take donations

From big corporations.

And I will help you buy some ships.

And I will take quick gambling trips.

Say, I'll give anyone the shaft

As long as it involves some graft!



I do so like playing golf!

Thank you! Thank you,

Abramoff!



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Another Step Towards Gilead? 



The reference is to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale which describes a future dysthopia where religious fundamentalists rule as dictators. Such a dictatorship didn't seem possible in the United States because of the law against using the military for purely domestic purposes and because of the fact that each state has its own local police force. Now this seems to be changing. From Talk Left, it appears that the Patriot Act will contain a proposal to establish a federal police force:

A permanent police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret Service Uniformed Division,'" empowered to "make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence" ... "or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony."

I like that "without warrant" bit. So carefree and decisive.

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The Secret Administration 



Listen to this:

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

...

The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.

"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.

In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.

Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members. Mr. Rapuano has given briefings to the committees, but the sessions were closed to the public and were not considered formal testimony.

The administration wants its communications to be secret but wants to spy on all the rest of us. Am I getting this right? Sheesh. And the despairing people in New Orleans don't matter one whit.

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The Gender Gap. Part III: Addressing the Wingnuts 



You should read the first two parts of this series first, to fully appreciate what I write here. The theory post is here and the empirical evidence post is here.


To begin with, an admission: The gender wage gap has indeed been misused by some feminists and some on the political left, to imply that the total difference in average earnings between men and women is evidence of direct wage discrimination of the type where women are not paid the same for exactly the same work as the one men do. I'm sure that some of the misuse is because this is not an easy topic to understand. Many right-wing and anti-feminist commenters in the field make the exact opposite mistake by arguing that NONE of the observed gap is due to discrimination of any kind.

The facts are in the middle, as I have mentioned in the second part of this series. But discrimination does exist, and the only relevant type of discrimination is not the one where women are paid unequally for the same work. Even this type of discrimination occurs, and not all of it gets fixed by the court system because we tend not to know what others earn at work.

The anti-feminist wingnut framing choices in discussing the gender gap in wages are interesting. The basic emotional trick is to turn the discussion to two issues: That believing in the existence of discrimination makes you into a whiny victim, and that such a focus demeans the great achievements of women: that they have narrowed the gap since 1950. Here are examples of both emotional strategies:

"These dependency divas are once again using misleading statistics to convince women they are victims in order to advance their big government agenda," says Carrie Lukas, director of policy at IWF.
----

The gender wage gap is a manufactured crisis borne of interest group politics, not a reflection of the reality of women's lives. The arguments advanced by feminist groups on Equal Pay Day are deliberately misleading. Worse, their underlying assumption is that women are incapable of making free and informed decisions about their lives-or for standing up for their right to fair compensation. I for one have more faith in the female sex. I know that we will continue to succeed-but on our own terms.

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Are women victims? Or can they hold their own in the workplace? Women's inequality in society is a standard refrain in the popular media and thus in the conventional wisdom. The purveyors of that point of view assume that women are systematically discriminated against on all levels of society, especially in the workplace, and that this discrimination has kept them from reaching equality with men. But the facts show otherwise.

These are all selected from the writings of the wonderfully cheerful gals who belong to the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), a right-wing site that fights feminism. It is funded by Richard Schaife, by the way, which makes the "independent" part of the group's name a little hilarious. These ladies do most of the heavy lifting in anything political that touches women's rights, and thus most of my examples in this post comes from them. They love to use Warren Farrell as an expert! Farrell's opinions on issues concerning women include the argument that the contraceptive pill destroyed men's lives completely as in the past the pregnant women needed men to do stuff and now they don't. Farrell also believes that women lead privileged lives compared to men but he doesn't want to change anything. Mindboggling.

The emotional bag of trickery the IWF uses is not limited to victim-blaming and the exhortation for women to pull themselves up by their brastraps. It also includes a reverse type of victim blaming: Women are blamed for the wage gap because the IWF sees everything as a consequence of women's free choices. Even some women perhaps not in the IWF do this. Here is a happy-fuzzy example:

Women may never achieve parity with men in the workplace, but that is not bad news for women. Some will choose not to work, while others will set their sights to lead the top corporations in America. The majority of women will fall somewhere in between

Replace "women" with "blacks" in that sentence and see how it sounds then.

So much for the emotional approach the wingnuts and their henchwomen take. What they fear is government intervention in the markets, of course, and as most of them view markets almost as highly as they view the Christian god this fear galvanizes them to lie, to distort and to misinform. The common ways to misinform are the following:

1. Omission of any evidence that shows discrimination exists.

2. Emphasis on women's free "choice" as the "real" explanation for the gender gap.

3. Emphasis on "free" markets as incompatible with sex discrimination.

4. Biased interpretations of studies which look at a narrow section of workers.



The most common of these is the first one, omitting any information on labor market discrimination, or even pretending that nondiscriminatory reasons have accounted for ALL of the gender gap in earnings. Here are some examples with Echidne's commentary:

The reality is that, when considering men and women with similar fields of study, educational attainment, and continuous time spent in the workforce, the wage gap disappears. This is true for some women in high-paying "male" fields such as engineering, chemistry, and computer science.

The reality is no such thing. When we standardize for all known nondiscriminatory reasons why women might earn less, on average, we still find an unexplained remaining gender gap in wages, in study after study. To argue otherwise is untrue. There are fields which women's earnings are a much higher proportion of men's earnings than in other fields, true, and there are probably also fields where discrimination is nonexistent. But such cases are exceptions to the general rule. Consider the study I discussed in Part II of this series, one which used a very large sample of women and men from all walks of life, one that was commissioned by the Bush administration, one which standardized for marital status, for the number of children, for the age of the youngest child, for being a part-time worker and for the occupations people choose, presumably at least partly for their flexibility or safety or other desirable characteristics, we still could only account for a little more than one half of the initial difference in average earnings!

Note also that if we standardize for everything the ladies of the IWF want to see standardized, including extremely detailed occupational choice, the evaluations from bosses, (perhaps even the color of the hairbands women use) and so on, we are also going to hold discrimination constant, if it works through what the boss writes about female and male workers or if women are steered into certain jobs by the school system, parents and the firms themselves.

Here is another common message from the IWF:

Feminists have ignored how women's lives and goals differ from men's. In doing so they have overlooked the fact that it women's life choices -- not sex discrimination -- are responsible for the infamous wage gap.

The idea of the wage gap between men and women being the result of free "choices" by women (and men?) is the most common of all right-wing arguments. As I wrote earlier in this series, it is very difficult to measure "choice" in empirical research. But even if it was choice that caused women to focus more on household responsibilities the studies that do control for the variables that might reflect such choice still find a large chunk of the gender gap remaining. To imply that the "choice" has somehow made all further discussion unnecessary is just blatant lying. Or at least reflects some severe confusion of the concepts of "opinion" and "fact".

The anti-feminist or wingnut writings never mention the studies (such as the audit studies I mentioned in Part II of this series) which demonstrate that discrimination still exists. Some quickly glance through the issue by quickly typing "of course discrimination exists but", while some others argue that courts are there to take care of any discrimination that still lingers. Alito might remove that remedy, of course, because the federal laws depend on an interpretation of the Commerce Clause which Alito might not like. Also, remember the difficulty of finding out whether you actually make the same as your coworkers in the same job.