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

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Oregon: NO on Measure 43 





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Boo! 






Happy Halloween! I wanted to give you a Very Scary Picture, even if it's an older one. Here are all the happy wingnut gentlemen witnessing the signing of a ban on certain types of abortions.

If that doesn't frighten you how about a ride on the ghost train? For something warmer and gentler, watch a video about teaching English to the seniors. If that's too warm and human for you, would you like to know why Air America can't get any advertisers?

Chocolate is still the answer to most of the smaller problems in this life, so make sure that you are well supplied this Halloween. Have fun and be careful.

But whatever you do, don't try to dye your dog's white fur orange with food coloring for Halloween. It doesn't work, unless you had in mind a drowned-rat look.

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Your Dream Is My Nightmare 



A recent post on Eschaton mentions how "civility" is suddenly back in vogue, now that Democrats are so close to grabbing some power. Civility was out of fashion for at least a decade. Rush Limbaugh and his clones reigned the airwaves uninterrupted by any civility. Remember political correctness? P.C.? Remember how viciously the wingnuts attacked it? Well, political correctness did have a strong flavor of civility, the idea that people should be called what they want to be called rather than what ever smearword others have invented for some group. Limbaugh decided that feminists were feminazis. I don't remember many articles on the need for Limbaugh to learn civility.

But times change, of course. Now the liberals and progressives are called traitors and terrorist-lovers and so on. But civility, well, that is a problem on the left side of the political spectrum. Because the left is ANGRY. And what is the right? Never angry, it seems. Only moral and virtuous.

We are scared of the wingnuts, "we" as in the mainstream media and most political commentators. That's why suddenly there is this call for civility. Too bad that the wingnuts see civility as a female virtue, a virtue of the subjugated. Civility equals obedience for them. When the press suddenly tells us that we need to regain the old virtue of civility, be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

The reason I can write all this is that I actually am civil. It's my mother's doing, and I can't deprogram what she so excellently programmed a long time ago. Not that I haven't tried. But the civility she taught wasn't obedience. That would have been easier to get rid of as all children know. What she conveyed was the belief that all people have worth and value and that all people deserve some basic respect, even when they are mistaken or wrong in some ways. Now, I didn't get the whole lesson, but I got enough to find angry blogging quite hard on some days, and enough to make the current political games in this country tough to play.

But play them we must, and this is why: The wingnut dreams are our nightmares. Digby puts it well:

The Republicans and the Christian Right are leading America on a backward march into the Dark Ages --- and that is stepping on our dreams. As a culture, we have always been idealistic about progress and inspired by new discoveries to improve the lot of the human race. We're about invention and reinvention. It's one of our best qualities.

These people are telling us that those days are over. We have to depend upon brute force, superstition and ancient revelation. Science is dangerous. Art is frightening. Education must be strictly circumscribed so that children aren't exposed to ideas that might lead them astray.

It's a pinched, sour, ugly vision of America. For those who believe that their time on earth is all about waiting for The Bridegroom, perhaps that doesn't mean much. But for the rest of us, things like scientific breakthroughs or artistic achievement are inspirational, soaring emotional connections with our country and our fellow man. It makes us proud. The dark-ages conservatives want to take that away from us.

Anger and civility. Can they work together? We'll see, I guess.

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The Newest Moral Contraceptive 



Is an aspirin held firmly between your legs, gals. For the next stage of the abstinence-only era is upon us: The targeted market has been extended to all the twenty-somethings:

he federal government's "no sex without marriage" message isn't just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

"They've stepped over the line of common sense," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. "To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health."

Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.

The National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse.

But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

Wade Horn. The man who said what makes a family is a father. He is one of the Christianists, I bet, who have invaded the federal apparatus we used to call the government but which is now called the Religious Police Against Vice.

All this was clear from the beginning, by the way. The abstinence attack and the traditional marriage attack were not intended for just the teenagers and the poor respectively, but for all of us ultimately. Wingnuts have for decades practised an incremental approach to changing our whole lives into a Talibanish nightmare, with the hope that we are like the frog stuck in a saucepan which is then slowly heated to a boiling point. Frogs presumably get used to the rising temperature and never notice that they get boiled.

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Monday, October 30, 2006

Playing Graph Games in Gender Wars 



What has caused a reduction in the gender wage gap in the last two years? Among U.S. full-time workers women's wages are now a higher percentage of men's wages than ever before. Not reaching equality, mind you, and there certainly is no gender gap the other way round, but the gap has shrunk. The blog debate on this started with a post by Greg Mankiw in which he used this graph from the New York Times to show the behavior of the gender gap:





Graphs are fun to play with. Note the steepness of the curve which is intended to tell us how rapidly women's earnings are catching up with men's earnings. But if you look at the vertical axis more carefully, you will find that it has been stre-e-e-tched. Note where the vertical axis starts and where it ends.

That will help in making a steeply rising curve. What also helps is to use smaller units on the horizontal (essentially arbitrary-width) time axis than on the vertical percentage axis. It's easy to imagine making the same graph look much less steep with different choices. And do you still remember that the vertical axis ends before we get to equal earnings for full-time earners?

Are these choices intentional, you may wonder? Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. But the important point to get is that the visual evidence from a graph is not necessarily a reliable reflection of the actual events.

Moving on from this graph to a different one. What caused the gender gap in wages to shrink? Sadly, the main reason is not one anybody would rejoice over: Men's wages have been recently falling at a higher rate than women's wages. Yes, Virginia, you can have equality at the bottom, too:






Here is the falling wages picture (left-click on it to make it bigger). Note that it includes an extrapolated segment into the future. Such segments are always dangerous to take seriously, and I caution you against doing so. Why? Because if we just extend any trendline which is not horizontal it will ultimately go out of the graph in one direction or the other, and usually the interpretation of that is nonsensical.

The graph uses a different vertical axis for the top curve (the wage gap) than for the other two earnings curves. The relevant axis for the top curve is on the right side, whereas the relevant axis for the two earnings curves is on the left side. That can be pretty confusing, too, as it's hard not to see the top curve somehow in relation to the other two.

Why would men's wages have fallen more rapidly? I think outsourcing is one important culprit here: the loss of fairly well-paying blue-collar jobs to other countries. The demise of the automobile towns and the mining towns and the steel-producing towns. Women are much more likely to be employed in the service industry and the jobs are slightly less outsourcable. Think of waitresses or hairdressers or dental hygienists.

Note also that these are full-time earners we are comparing here. Many more women work part-time in paid employment and part-time earnings are less per hour of work, not just in total numbers. If we included those earnings in the comparisons the gender gap would be a lot bigger.

As an aside, I hate the term "gender wars". Hate it with a red-hot hatred, because wanting fairness and equality between the sexes is poorly framed as a war-call, and because the very term "war" brings in connotations which are inappropriate for the proper understanding of the gender inequality in, say, much of Africa or Saudi Arabia, and because women, on the whole, don't see men as their enemies or regard feminism as a war. But some men do, as my earlier troll post shows.

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On The Insurrection Act 



Did you know that it's now much easier for the president to declare martial law in this country? Here's why:

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."

The Unitard Executive is getting stronger and stronger.

I saw this story only referenced on the angry lefty blogs, so I went out to seek some opposing commentary as a good blogger must do, and I found a conservative blog which argued that this change is caused by the lefties blaming Bush for not acting effectively in the case of the Katrina disaster. Now he can be effective, it seems, or at least totally unopposed. Which is a very scary thought.

Isn't it fascinating how everything bad is the fault of the powerless liberals and progressives? Everything. Iraq war is lost because of us. Fascism makes mousesteps forwards because of us. Even all Bush's errors are because he tries to rule like one of us. The only solution is to put the liberals and progressives in power. Then we can blame the conservatives who are not in power.

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Today's Troll Thought 



From my comments:

This is totally wrong! We still have plenty of good jobs in this country. The problem is that women are taking too many of them. We just don't have enough decent jobs to go around and we probably never will. Gender relations are all about economics and most guys will always resent a highly successful women because she's obviously a women who he's not financially qualified to have a relationship with. This is why most female CEO's never marry and never have children. Better to give the job to a guy so he can support a wife and kids.

Either America voluntarily returns to Christianity and a 1950's lifestyle or else our society is sure to implode into either a wide-spread gangsta rap style anarchy or else it will be absorbed by a fundamentalist Muslim takeover.

Men will always dominate women. The $24K question is, which race of men would you ladies prefer to be dominated by?
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One Hundred 



The number of American military personnel killed in Iraq in October 2006, and the month is not yet over. The dying is not over, either, and not only for the Americans in Iraq but much more so for the Iraqis who get killed for just being either Sunnis or Shias. For being alive, really. So much death, the smell of death and religion.

No god can gloat over all this dying.

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Onwards, Christian Soldiers 



Garry Wills has written an article on the partly hidden Christianistization of the federal government. Sorry about the monster word, but it's necessary to distinguish these folk from the more common type of Christians. The Christianists are a fairly odd type of Christians as they seem to ignore most everything Jesus ever said. But they are the ones who find George Bush an almost-winged messenger from God, and they are the ones who have been given all the jobs where the federal government might affect the lives of women, for example. Yes, my dear sisters. We are the meat that is served to the wingnuts, because our rights are dispensable.

Here is an example from Wills's article:

One of George W. Bush's first acts as president—in fact, on his first day in office, signaling its importance to his evangelical supporters—was to restore a gag rule on aid to international organizations that counsel women on the subject of abortion.[29] Though abortion is legal in the US, the President was able by executive decree to proscribe its mere discussion in other countries if they are to receive money for their population problems. This was just the beginning of the imposition of moral limits on health measures abroad. Though the President was praised for devoting millions of dollars to preventing and treating AIDS in Africa, 30 percent of that money was earmarked for promoting sexual abstinence, and none of it was for condoms.[30] Religion trumped medical findings on what is effective.

Domestically, too, $170 million were lavished on promoting a policy of "abstinence-only" in the schools during the year 2005 alone. The Centers for Disease Control removed from its Web site the findings of a panel that abstinence-only programs do not work. A study of the abstinence programs being financed by the federal government showed how little medical knowledge mattered, as opposed to moral dictation. As Chris Mooney writes in The Republican War on Science:

In evaluating the curricula of these programs, the report found that the vast majority exaggerated the failure rates of condoms, spread false claims about abortion's health risks (including mental health problems) and perpetuated sexual stereotypes.... Perhaps most outrageously, one curriculum even claimed that sweat and tears could transfer the HIV virus. You might think that this would be a fringe claim even on the Right, but Senate majority leader Bill Frist, himself a physician, repeatedly refused to repudiate the notion of such transmission in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.[31]

The religious right had for years been spreading the unfounded claim that abortion causes breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute had correctly reported that no study has proved such a thing, but twenty-seven pro-life members of Congress pressured the NCI to remove that from its on-line fact sheet.

Another concern of the religious right was the morning-after abortion pill. Bush put one of the pill's known opponents, David Hager, on the board of the Food and Drug Administration that was to decide whether that pill could be sold without a prescription. Though Hager voted with the minority of three on the board against over-the-counter sales of the pill, as opposed to a majority of twenty-four, he raised such a clamor about the danger of teenaged girls using it, increasing the pressure from the religious right, that the FDA refused to implement the board's decision. Hager gave himself and God the credit for this, telling an audience at an evangelical college in Kentucky:

I argued it from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report [sic] to influence the decision. You don't have to wave your Bible to have an effect as a Christian in the public arena. We serve the greatest Scientist. We serve the Creator of all life.[32]

Remember what happened to David Hager later on? That's the sort of man who was deemed suitable to decide over women's health and well-being by the Christianists. But then a veterinarian was deemed suitable for the job, too.

All this makes me breathe fire. But in certain ways an anti-woman program was to be expected once wingnuts were in power. What I didn't really expect was the religious takeover of the Iraq occupation and its horrible consequences:

God's war needs God's warriors, and the White House was ready to supply them. Kay Coles James had been the White House personnel scout for domestic offices. The equivalent director of personnel for the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority (headed by Catholic convert Paul Bremer) was the White House liaison to the Pentagon, James O'Beirne, a conservative Catholic married to National Revieweditor Kate O'Beirne. Those recruited to serve in the CPA were asked if they had voted for Bush, and what their views were on Roe v. Wade and capital punishment.[39] O'Beirne trolled the conservative foundations, Republican congressional staffs, and evangelical schools for his loyalist appointees. Relatives of prominent Republicans were appointed, and staffers from offices like that of Senator Rick Santorum. Right moral attitude was more important than competence.[40]

That was proved when the first director of Iraqi health services, Dr. Frederick Burkle, was dismissed. Burkle, a distinguished physician, was a specialist in disaster relief, with experience in Kosovo, Somalia, and Kurdish Iraq. His replacement, James Haverman, had run a Christian adoption agency meant to discourage women from having abortions. Haverman placed an early emphasis on preventing Iraqis from smoking, while ruined hospitals went untended. This may suggest the policy on appointments that put Michael Brown in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the parallel is insufficiently harsh. Chris Matthews brought it up on his television show while interviewing the Washington Post reporter who had covered the CPA in Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who said, "There were a hundred Browns in Iraq."[41] But there were Bible study groups in the Green Zone.

Bible study groups in the Green Zone... Notice the odd echo here. Fundamentalist religion clashing against fundamentalist religion. God clashing against God.

What would Jesus say about that, I wonder?

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Stop the South Dakota Extremists 





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Sunday, October 29, 2006

Old Trick or Treat Chant 

Soul cakes, soul cakes,
Give to us our soul cakes,
An apple, a pear,
A plum or a cherry,
Anything to make us merry.
Soul cakes, soul, cakes.....

Soul cakes are put out on the evening of Samhein to feed the spirits who come to visit that night.

Another version:

A soul, a soul, a soul cake.
Please good ma'm a soul cake.
An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry,
Any good thing to make us merry.
Up with your kettles and down with your pans
Give us an answer and we'll be gone
Little Jack, Jack sat on his gate
Crying for butter to butter his cake
One for St. Peter, two for St. Paul,
Three for the man who made us all.
-----
In local French Canadian folklore around here it used to be important to get home before midnight on October 31. If you're still out making merry you'll run the risk of le feu follie burning you. There used to be stories about revelers who stayed out too late and were chased home to punish them for violating Tou' Sain' day. Some said they could show you where it burned their sabots just as they reached their door step.
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IDEALS v. PRACTICALITY 

The fight we all lose

Posted by olvlzl

T
here is nothing idealistic about insisting on ideals that have no chance of becoming reality right now and refusing to compromise on those ideals. People are dying now for lack of practical relief that a Democratic Congress would provide, even a compromised Democratic Congress. There is no good in ignoring death, disease, hunger ignorance and pollution while holding out for something purer in some glorious, remote future. The theoretical ideal might never be achieved and even if it could be, the lives of those who could be saved are here now. They need saving today. To insist on your ideals or principles instead of a compromise that is better than the status quo is to wager on their lives. Their lives aren't ours to bet with.

If you want to put it in stark terms, how many days are you willing to go without food for your political ideals? Are you willing to die when the odds might indicate that your ideals stand little chance of being achieved? If you imagine that you are willing to die then how many of your children are you willing to sacrifice on the same long odds? For a person facing starvation it isn't just a matter of their own life. Children are even more vulnerable than adults in most cases. If the answer is that you aren't willing to see yours die but you are prepared to take a chance on other peoples' children then you have to believe that yours are more worthy of life than people who you are betting on now. For us it's a matter of imagination. They are looking at the skulls of their children showing through their skin.

The all or nothing fixation, the worst kind of this idealism, is a form of self-satisfied preening. It has been with us for as long as one leftist could attain personal status by being the most leftist in the room. It has helped lead us into the disaster we find ourselves in today. And it has produced nothing. Nothing. Rigid, uncompromising and insistent idealism is sterile and useless in the real world. It would be better to call it what it really is, vanity.

The period of most rapid progress in the sixties was full of compromises, some clean, a lot of it pretty grimy but progress was made. The progress seems to have moved some on the left into the kind of competitive arrogance that leads to folly. The folly in this case was pretending that our individual interest groups were in a stronger position than they were. Saying so didn't make it true. We started demanding the premature delivery of the presently unobtainable and our politicians couldn't deliver. We started attacking them for not being able to do the impossible. And doing that is just plain nuts. Working coalitions with the center and among competing parts of the left fell apart. In reality were we were only as strong as the coalition based on compromises of ideals.

We all know that the other path of folly was the Vietnam war. As Martin Luther King pointed out, with spending for the war Democrats stopped being able to deliver incremental progress both for the poor and for the middle class. It might not be an accident that was when the Party began to lose support in the general population. The result was Richard Nixon and the rise of the far right. He had to deal with the old coalition and since he was most interested in playing his demented version of the great game he let it have some of the last of the great reforms it has put into law. But he also began the Supreme Court appointments that would doom many of those.

Amidst it all the rigid idealists presented the Republicans with a very useful tool. Republicans and their media, fixing on the most extreme of the radical idealists, made the rest of us into a cartoon. And the show liberals were gratified and encouraged. Even Phil Donahue who was supposed to be a liberal turned the word into a synonym for "flake". Conservatives have used this cartoon to deflect attention while they were ending the middle class, stealing everything they could for their wealthy patrons. Tricked by the media, the general population has adopted the lie to their own disadvantage, as has been pointed out many times before.

I will confess that I was taken in by idealist fundamentalism for a lot of that time. We were standing for the soundest of principles. To compromise our ideals was to betray them. Eventually, somehow, even as we faced repeated defeat, it would make us stronger to remain intransigent. Some of those hucksters have a mighty good act. But in the end it's producing results that is really idealistic.

The impatient left has been waiting for that glorious, instantaneous millennium to dawn for way too many lifetimes. The bodies of those who could have been helped by moderate assistance during that period is a pile too big to tell. Don't bother waiting any longer, it's never going to get here that way. We've never been farther from it in our lifetimes. The futile insistence on having it all now is a block to reaching those ideals. If some progress is made, incrementally edging closer to the final goal, the ideal stands a chance. If people who aren't on the left start seeing modest success instead of our present complete failure they might just think we're on to something. Especially if some of that success improves their lives. We might start building a larger coalition instead of seeing it shrinking all the time. The perfect really is the enemy of the good and it's also its own worst enemy.
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So You Think It Doesn’t Matter Who Wins The Election Next Month? 

Posted by olvlzl

Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney's office had directed contingency planning for "a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons" and that "several senior Air Force officers" involved in the planning were "appalled at the implications of what they are doing -- that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack -- but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objection."

Read this article by Daniel Ellsberg and tell me exactly why it doesn’t matter anymore.

There isn’t anything I can add to what he says about the plans to start a third Bush II war in Iran. I know what your response will be. “The Dems didn’t stop Iraq."

You don’t think it’s worth betting that the minority of Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq might have learned a lesson from it that the Republicans never will? If you don’t think that’s a bet worth making in 2006, I have nothing to say to you.
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I Read "Sisters"--- I Think 

Posted by olvlzl

Remember when someone posted what was said to be Lynne Cheney's lesbian novel "Sisters" on the internet? It was back when this self-suppressed novel- and seldom has the term been more charitably assigned - was coming to light. Risking the need to wash out my eyes with soap afterwards I read it. I'm a sworn enemy of Lynn Cheney and her Kaffee Klatch of Kulture warriors of long standing.

Now I wish I'd saved it because it's nowhere to be seen. It disappeared shortly after. Not running to the five-hundred or so dollars a copy sold for at e-bay during that period it was the only way to see what the ultra-right-wing doyenne of Republican efforts to save Western culture might have produced by way of a lesbian romance.

I wasn't wowed. By the time I read the chapter entitled "Miracle Whip" I was certain that what was posted was a spoof. As spoof it wasn't bad, as serious writing, pee-ewwww!. But there were people who claimed it was the real thing, absent a paper copy who knows?

Today it's not only the book that isn't to be read but apparently it's the tome that dare not speak its name. On with Blitzer the other night, Lynne was mighty eager to change the topic to one of her cut and paste jobs instead.

But according to this story, you might get a chance to see it on the boards.

Lynne Cheney's still-remembered 1981 lesbian romance novel, "Sisters," was feted Monday night in a special performance by the "Lynne Cheney Players" - to the delight of an audience of liberal East Village types.

Yeah, I know it's Lloyd Groves. But it is fun. Notice this:

Choice scenes adapted from "Sisters" included one in which two female characters write to each other: "Let us go away together, away from the anger and the imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement."

One of Cheney's characters swoons to a Sapphic love letter: "How well her words describe our love - or the way it would be if we could remove all impediments, leave this place, and join together ... Then our union would be complete. Our lives would flow together, twin streams merging into a single river."

Maybe the book was intended as a lesbian turn off. How else would you explain a right-wing, cultural tattle-tale writing something like this?
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Saturday, October 28, 2006

Can you take it? Kenneth Gaburo turns all the ScREWs 

Posted by olvlzl

..... among our far-outs, has the finest ear. Virgil Thomson

After mentioning him in a comment thread elsewhere last week someone kindly sent me a link to MP3s of Kenneth Gaburo’s legendary work, Lingua II, Maledetto. The piece of theater-music has a lot of material illuminating issues about misogyny discussed here earlier this week.

If you take the 45 minutes to listen to the two sections you will hear a lot of unsettling things about sex, anger, objectification and hate. It is called “Maledetto” for a good reason, a lot of this is about hostility and hate as well as about eroticism and humor.* I don’t know if he liked the term but this is avant-garde art of an extraordinarily original and disturbing kind. It uses cliches and an astonishing array of vulgarity (I’d never heard a lot of it before). But this isn’t used as Robert Mapplethorpe depicted similar material. It isn’t merely presented to shock and as a demonstration that he can do it if he wants to. The way they are used here opens windows into what they reveal about people and the communities that those people belong to. A lot of the things it contains are not easy to take, some are pretty disturbing. It’s purpose is to provoke thinking, not to please.

The delivery of the texts even those that are quite banal sometimes carries the meaning past the words themselves. When those are spoken in close succession or at the same time they become a contrapuntal experience. The canonic sections in which the same text is spoken by different voices beginning at different times are striking for the difference in tone and emphasis, from erotic and loving to contemptuous to angry that the same text can have.

As to the sound of the piece, Thomson was right, it contains great beauties, many of those in the form of wrenching emotional contrasts. The beginning with the group sustaining the sound “s” for a couple of minutes gives way to a reading of an entirely banal text about screws. A couple of minutes into that the other voices break in with challenges and commentary. The timing and skill of the ensemble is amazing. I’d like to see another group try to perform it without Gaburo’s direction to see what they came up with. It’s certainly not everyone’s idea of a good time but it isn’t likely to be like something you have experienced.

Gaburo was one of the most varied composers in the history of music. The pieces I’ve heard go from a very fine and original but clearly traditional string quartet to some of the most beautiful (as well as disturbing) electronic music to a series of these spoken pieces. One of the most difficult to listen to is “The Flow of (u)”, three voices signing the same pitch on the vowel “u” for 23 minutes. I don’t recommend that for the first time listener. The electronic pieces collected on “Tape Play”, Pogus CD P21020-2, would be a good place to start listening to Gaburo’s music. These include his revenge on a (literally) violent enemy of new music “Fat Millie’s Lament”, the pellucid “For Harry”. The collection “Five Works for Voices, Instruments and Electronics”, New World 80585-2 , including “The Flow of (u)” and the String Quartet, is more of a challenge though rewarding.

Other out of print CDs and LPs of his music can be bought second hand. One of these is the Music & Arts CD- 832 that contains ENOUGH! —(NOT ENOUGH)— for forty voices and percussion on a text by Benjamin Franklin. It speaks to our political condition.

* Gaburo once said that he liked forms that were exhaustive of ideas. His music didn’t leave much out. His Mouth-Piece: Sextet for Solo Trumpet on the New World CD is a good example of that. Kenneth Gaburo 1926-1993
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Blogging While Tied To The Mast 

Between the blogger problems this morning and the flickering electricity here I'm having trouble posting today. I will try later when the wind goes down, provided we still have electricity and a phone line. I am sorry for the problems.
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The New McCarthyism In Review 

WASHINGTON -- Bunnatine Greenhouse sits in a cubicle in a far corner of an office in the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) headquarters in downtown Washington, DC, where, she says, "I am treated like a non-person." Months crawl by yet her immediate supervisor just can't seem to find the time to meet with her to discuss a work assignment. The taxpayers of the United States pay her salary but, oddly, no demands are made of her.

That's a sad plight for a dynamic woman executive who is the cover girl of the July/August issue of Fraud Magazine. She's not written up for being on the wrong side of the law, only on the wrong side of the Bush White House, now a law unto itself.
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NBC is refusing to air an ad for the new Dixie Chicks documentary, “Shut Up & Sing.” Variety reports, “NBC’s commercial clearance department said in writing that it ‘cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.’”

Harvey Weinstein, who is distributing the movie, issued the following statement:

It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America. The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is profoundly un-American.

ThinkProgress has obtained the ad NBC doesn’t want you to see. Watch it:
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Ohio GOP Smears Al Franken In Press Release With Doctored Photo, Fabricated Quote

Yesterday, the Ohio Republican Party sent out a news release (full text here) attacking Rep. Sherrod Brown (D) for enlisting the support of comedian Al Franken:

It is not surprising that Sherrod Brown is enlisting the help of a Hollywood liberal, who like him, is so far out of the mainstream of Ohio values. What is troubling is that Brown would solicit support from someone [Franken] who compared conservatives to Nazis “who should drink poison and die.”

The quote used in the news release is taken from Bernard Goldberg book, 110 People Who Are Screwing Up America, in an alleged interview between Goldberg and Franken. But in his book, Goldberg makes it clear that the exchange is completely fictional. The Ohio Republican Party represented it as fact.
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You know about Limbaugh already. And Coulter, Drudge, .....
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Why We Can't Avoid Fixing The Voting System Now 

There are reports of voting machines recording Democratic and other votes as votes for Republicans:

A friend of our family ours went last Friday to early vote in Maplewood at Sunnen Park. He voted for Claire McCaskill, but each time he, the election worker, and the election supervisor pressed the screen for Claire, the screen said he had voted for Jim Talent.

I sent this info along to a friend that works in Claire'’s campaign. I have the name and number of the guy this happened to if you are interested.

Bradblog suggests bringing video equipment when you go to vote to record incidents of this kind of thing. I'd look into whether or not that is permitted where you vote first but a witness or making a complaint about it at the polls is certainly a good idea. Make sure that it's a big enough complaint that other voters will hear and check.
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What If We Dodge The Bullet? 

Posted by olvlzl

What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal?

After what we've seen in the past six years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.

Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1964. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast, to counting it, to reporting the results and to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.

The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested bias exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public. Women and minority groups have to control parts of the electronic media.

The cable "news" channels have betrayed the public trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as in money.

They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.

Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the Peoples's voice almost all of the time. The Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true

Our government is always presented as being those who hold office , that is where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked. We have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.

If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy than the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.

Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarches and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out. And they'll make their come back having learned from the mistakes they made this time. Like the aristocratic conspirators in ancient Athens, they will be more dangerous than ever.

Along with these two absolute prerequisites to securing democracy there is the necessity for a full and public appraisal of the thefts and other crimes of the Bush II and previous presidencies. There has to be a full program of congressional hearings, done in public, of what has happened. They have to be congressional hearings because that is their responsibility. A commission or blue ribbon panel or other kind of establishment dodge won’t do it. Those are mechanisms for obscuring and stalling. This is a job for those appointed by The People. They asked for the responsibility, no one forced them to run.

There will be a chorus of media and politicians and the Republican talking points network telling us to “get over it”. They are the PR voice of the criminals. We have to be prepared to force these reforms over their constant lies and slogans.

Just going along as we have been is a guarantee that the disasters will continue. We will have to push the next Democratic congress to work simultaneously on all these issues while taking up new business. They are not extras they are the only way we are going to find out how to go forward, to make progress instead of making the same mistakes we have made before.

If the Republican who have created this disaster win a majority next week, the problems will not disappear they will certainly get worse. Giving up before those problems are fixed securely is not an option for us.
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Friday, October 27, 2006

Another Bowl of Popcorn, Please 



This is a very funny reality if you manage the sarcastic angle that is necessary for full savoring of the comings-and-goings of American elections. I was reading of the impossibility of fitting Jim Webb's whole name into an election machine when I came across this comment by someone called Niranjan Ramakrishnan:

There, but for the grace of God... was my first thought as I read the report. If the machine deemed "James H. 'Jim' Webb" too long, I could only thank my luck that I had firmly turned down all requests to run for the Senate from Virginia this year.

I scanned the Post quickly to see if a similar fate had attended George Allen, Webb's incumbent opponent in the race. A quick tally revealed that George Allen had more letters in his name than James Webb -- and even more, if you added recently-acquired middle names like 'Macaca' and 'Stock Option'.

Actually, Allen did pretty well in what might be termed Great Ballot Massacre of 2006. The report goes on to say George Allen is one of the few whose names appear in full, although his party affiliation has been cut off. Fortune finally appears to be shining on Allen. What a godsend, in a time when according to every poll, the presence of the letter 'R' after the candidate's name is tantamount to electoral cyanide!

Luscious. And it is all very funny, if you're a world-weary and cynical goddess. But it's also fairly outrageous. That few people find it outrageous just goes to show how very despondent people are about democracy. What does it matter what the name is on the ballots, after all, when we don't even know how the ballots are counted or if they are counted. Who cares if you have to vote for some guy called Jim, or if you have no idea what the party affiliation of Allen might be. Who cares about anything anymore? Except the absolute necessity of requiring all voters to have photo IDs based on valid birth certificates, so that they can go vote for some guy called just Jim or some guy with no party affiliation.

What matters is that nobody should have to fix this problem before the elections. Now, that is more important than having a farce for elections.

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Friday Funnies 



Freeway blogger has a new great idea, and animation is applied to political discourse on Iraq. Then George Bush asks "what's in a name".

Enjoy the weekend, too.

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Friday Cat and Dog Blogging 



All with borrowed cats and dogs. But great ones.





This is spinoza's cat lying on the floor snoozing away. I forgot to find the cat's name.


And these are Barry's dogs, Cruiser (in the first pic) and Arrow (in the second):







A great lineup, even if I say so myself.

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Such Good News 



For the ExxonMobil Corporation:

The ExxonMobil Corporation reported today that it earned $10.49 billion in the third quarter, the second largest quarterly profit ever posted by a publicly traded American company. The largest on record was also reported by ExxonMobil — $10.71 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005.

High oil and natural-gas prices and strong demand for energy made the quarter a robust one for the company and for much of the industry. But the search for new supplies is growing more costly as the international oil giants push into ever remoter or more politically unstable territory, leading Royal Dutch/Shell to report a sharp fall in net income today.

ExxonMobil's results in the quarter were 26 percent better than in the same period in 2005, and translated into earnings of $1.77 a share, well above the consensus Wall Street forecast of $1.59 a share.

"High oil and natural-gas prices...made the quarter a robust one for the company." The problem with this sentence is that the energy industry has some power over the prices. It's an oligopoly, meaning that the supply side consists of only a few large firms, and an oligopoly doesn't just react to prices but affects them directly.

Did you spot how the good story was wrapped with a few complaints, too? The way I always tell of my good news (such as a new story getting published) by complaining about my tempero-mandular joint disorder or whatever. That way my friends don't get overly envious. Here the equivalent complaint is about having to go to more and more marginal and dangerous areas in search for more oil resources.

But the high prices of oil make that profitable, you know, even a price that has fallen down from $80 to $60:

Oil companies -- at least private oil companies in the US and Europe -- do face a big future problem. It isn't oil at $60. It is that they aren't likely to be able to replace their existing oil fields -- oil fields that generally were developed with the expectation that oil's long-term price was well below $60 -- with comparably cheap fields.

Oil fields that were meant to turn a profit if oil averaged $20 will need to be replaced by oil fields that will only turn a profit is oil is well above $20. Hey, that's life. No country with oil should be selling their oil forward at that low a price right now.

There is going to be a crisis about energy fairly soon (assuming that you don't think the Iraq war is about oil, really). China and India want to drive SUVs, too, and there isn't enough oil for all those potential new suburbanites as well as the old suburbanites in the West, especially with the peak oil problem.

I don't see much being done about any of this. What I see is more short-term thinking of the "drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall die" type.

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The U.S.-Mexico Border Fence 



Remember my earlier post on Dana Goldstein's article about the scarcity of women commenting on politics in the media? In that I quoted Goldstein writing this bit after listing some women she thinks are good commenters:

But even these women seem to be tokens. Most of the time, they haven't covered horserace electoral politics, the Iraq War, weapons proliferation, the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics that op-ed pages prioritize in this time of wars and midterms.

I wrote down all those hardbally things into a shopping list format, and I'm going to write on all of them, though to be fair to me I have already written about the immigration problems and the Iraq war.

Hence the anti-immigration fence topic for this post. So what do I think about it?

As a practical solution it's inane. It might work if human beings couldn't climb, or if we equipped it with military towers every mile or so, staffed by gun-carrying border guards told to shoot at first sight of an illegal immigrant. But then the fence would be utterly unethical.

The walls in history which have worked (The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall) were guarded day and night. Those walls also had advantages the U.S.-Mexico border fence does not: The Great Wall was meant to stop invading troops which would have had not just men but animals and gear, both of which would make wall-climbing harder, and the Berlin Wall was in an urban area and only needed to span a short distance. As far as I can tell from the pictures this new fence is going to be a chain-linked one (fairly easy to climb or to cut through) and will run in uninhabited areas. No illegal immigrant is going to be stopped by the fence if they aren't already stopped by the idea of walking across the hot and waterless areas, guided by criminal smugglers.

As a symbolic solution the fence is great. It looks like a great victory to every foreigner-hating or foreigner-fearing Murkan patriot and it's going to give lots of money to whatever Republican company gets the job of building it.

That's my feminine opinion of the anti-immigration fence. It's hard to think that writing about it is seen as paying proper attention to hardball politics of great importance. Because it is a very silly topic.

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Thursday, October 26, 2006

More on Misogyny 



If you scroll down on this page you will find a post about how thoughts ripen which links to several good posts on the topic of fascism and misogyny on other blogs. I got so many thoughts after reading those posts that my brain stayed up and had a rowdy party late into the night and most of the thoughts still have hangover.

So I looked up some of my older posts on misogyny, to see what I thought about the topic in my previous lives. This is one which still reads fairly well. It's a review of a book on misogyny. And this and this might be of interest, too.

Then I tried to understand why saying anything more about David Neiwert's post on fascism and misogyny was so hard for me, and part of the explanation is that his treatment of the topic is excellent and sufficient on its own. It's not always important for me to chime in.

Still, that hasn't stopped me in the past too often, so I dug deeper, and came up with this: The basic story about misogyny and fascism is based on the idea that deep in the subconsciousness of all/some men, or perhaps of all/some people, is this diffuse and bitter hatred of women. David puts it like this:

Recognize, first, where it originates: In the twisted, sad view of humanity as innately evil and sick. In the strange mentality that perceives nature -- God's creation itself -- as sinful. In the demented, pathological view of women as lesser humans. These are all ideas we often associate now with our barbaric past, but the truth is that they live on in innumerable ways, especially embedded as they are in popular culture. Why do you think, after all, that a two-hour display of sadism such as The Passion of the Christ could be such an immense crowd-pleaser? Why would a show like 24 draw such immense ratings? Why would slasher films constitute their own moneymaking genre?

The old Catholic misogyny has devolved in our times to the proto-fascist's murderous style of misogyny. Only in the 21st century, instead of being organized, it's just routinely celebrated, as it has been lately in so many American thrillers and horror films. Sure, the psychopaths in them are all scary. But they all have a psychosexual hatred of women. The concept of women as the cause of their psychopathism is embedded in all these entertainments. But when these entertainments are played as mainstream, then the fascist pathology they are about slips into the cultural bloodstream, where it joins, echoes, and nurtures the latent fascism already there, as well as that coming from other sources. Eventually, it announces itself in a thousand atrocities, large and small.

...

The irrationalism that misogyny embodies, buried deep in our systems, simply can't be dealt with gently. The kind of men -- and women -- who will fall for the new misogyny aren't going to be impressed with compromises and halfway measures. The only thing they understand is "my way or the highway." So those are the options they should be given.

See, this is where I get all despondent and start having the rowdy brain-party instead: "The irrationalism that misogyny embodies, buried deep in our systems..." Do I have this hatred of women deep inside my female system? And if so, why? Can some armchair evolutionary psychologist enlighten me how hating women has helped the human race to survive? And if misogyny is irrational, why have it in the first place?

Combine this with the argument I have often read that the hatred of women has its roots in the fear of death, fear of nature and fear of all the bodily liquids which somehow denote nature and death. In this view, women are closer to nature than men, having more bodily fluids and that fear-inducing permeability. It is this smelly and liquid and squishy type of femaleness that men are supposed to hate, because they come out of it, desire to re-enter it and see it as death. Which is all quite poetic and also totally incomprehensible at the same time, because women are not one whit closer to nature or more mortal, and this doesn't explain how a woman could be a misogynist in a genuinely primal way but only by imitation.

It's not that I necessarily disagree with this view. I just can't relate to it in anything having to do with personal experience. I'm better at grasping the related idea of the need to control women or at least women's fertility, and I can even see how an uncontrolled woman might look like chaos to the eyes of very authoritarian people, because women are in some ways very desirable property to have. But why the whore-virgin dualism? Why are "good women" the ones who don't want men physically at all? Why are the women who do want men physically labeled "bad women"? Why, why, I ask, and I mean the question in a very deep sense. None of the answers that are given suffice to explain to me what exactly it would be in the male psyche that would create this, assuming that this is what David means when he talks about misogyny in "our" systems.

Sometimes I think that the deep reason I'm looking for has to do with dependence. The theory that it is the need for the other, and the rage we may have felt as infants when we were hungry or wet and no giant emerged to care for our needs within the first second of our rage-red screaming, combined with the realization that we were totally helpless otherwise. Could misogyny have its seed in that experience, forgotten now, or buried under years of other memories? Could it be that misogyny is caused by our primary carers being almost totally women? I don't know.

But the tugging between independence and dependence may have something to do with all of this; the need to stand alone, to be strong, and the simultaneous need for the society, for other people, for sex and caring. The fascist solution makes the independence and strength primary and tries to codify the caring into a forced maintenance activity, available at the press of a button. But really only available for men. What do women do about this conflict between independence and dependence?

The common story is to argue that women don't have the same desire for independence, that women are less separate from the webs of the community. I'm not sure if this is the final story we are going to tell or if this is how women are socialized to be right now. It could also be that women seek independence in different forms and places, or that the need for independence comes out in different distorted forms in women more often than in men: higher rates of depression, anorexia, bulemia. Or maybe not. This is all the stuff that dances around in my brain and in my stomach.

And the whole connection between violence and sexuality. Are they alternatives? An old military story is this one:

Whatever background knowledge a recruit possessed about rifles was sure to lead to mistakes when learning the M-14. Unfamiliarity with rifles may have given some (like myself) an advantage in this regard. Nevertheless, any recruit from either kind of background was prone on occasion to incorrectly refer to his rifle as "a gun." Such verbal mistakes like this one were quite common and drew attention to the perpetrator. As punishment, a recruit would likely stand at attention outdoors (sometimes clad only in his undergarments or even naked) and repeat over and over "This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for shooting, this is for fun."

Military stories I've been told often use sexuality to turn women into the other by both making them into the valuable property that is to be protected and by making the act of killing itself into something akin to fucking. Weapons are given female names and the act of intercourse transfers from the recruit to his mechanical tools. How close is this to misogyny? Under what conditions does it work to make misogyny into a tactic of war? Or am I going to deep here?

Here are some of my half-digested ideas on the topic of woman hatred. I carefully chose to be all intelligence in this discussion, because my emotional reactions to the whole topic are not happy ones. But to ignore the emotional reactions in the general debate is most likely a grave mistake.

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False Balance, Again 



Sometimes blogging is really easy. I just go to some other blog and harvest all the hard work there. Yesterday, for example, Atrios put together two posts about false balance in the media. "False balance" is when you decide that neutral writing means finding a nasty deed on both sides of the political aisle before you can write about the nasty deeds at all. An example would be if your next door neighbor was found guilty of murdering people and you wanted to tell this to your cousin in Nebraska but wanted to make it sound neutral so you'd add that the neighbor on the other side sometimes rakes her leaves into your yard instead of picking them up. So it sorta evens out.

Translated into the political arena, false balance means something like this:

In a report on how recent campaigns advertisements are "getting ugly," ABC News, unable to point to a single instance of "nasty" attacks from Democratic candidates or their supporters, suggested it is only a matter of time before "the left" begins to "unleash its garbage as well." ABC News offered no evidence to back up its allegation that Democrats might soon resort to distasteful, negative advertising.

Or something like this:

KLEIN: You know, I just can't get over Rush Limbaugh. Boy—you know, people who live in glass pillboxes shouldn't throw spitballs, right? I mean, this is the guy—the guy least in the country who should be criticizing an ad like this, given his own history of addiction.

And I got to say that, you know, for the vice president of the United States to legitimize a guy like Rush Limbaugh is every bit as bad as all those Democrats who went out to Las Vegas to kiss the ring of the Daily Kos and the left-wing bloggers. I mean, can't we—can't we just stop this crap?

Now, anyone who has read Kos for more than once knows that comparing him to Limbaugh is ridiculous. But even if it wasn't, surely what the vice president of the United States does matters more than what some Democratic politicians do.

False balance in the media is a funny thing, though. It tends to work in only one direction: to make a Republican lapse look less significant. If the story is about, say, Hillary Clinton and her marriage the writers never feel an urgent need to poke at the marriages of wingnut politicians for the sake of some similar balance.

So what is behind this odd phenomenon? The fear of wingnuts, pretty much. They are in power and they are always ready to blame the media for being too liberal. Sadly, the solution to this may necessitate that we become as vicious as the right. We, too, may have to start nipping at the heels of the journalists, to create a different kind of balance, the balance of harassment.

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Uncovered Meat 



This is what Australia's Mufti, Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali, has called women who do not wear the hijab or stay at home if uncovered:

Sheik Alhilali's comments were delivered in a Ramadan sermon to 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, a newspaper report said.

He blamed women who "sway suggestively" and who wore makeup and no hijab (Islamic scarf) for sexual attacks.

"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat," he said.

"The uncovered meat is the problem.

"If she was in her room, in her home, in her hajib[sic?], no problem would have occurred."

Hmm. Not very appetizing, are we? I'm not quite certain if the comments are intended to apply to all Australian women or only to Australian Muslim women. It's relevant to know of the two recent gang rapes by Muslim men to understand why this statement has been met with great anger and outrage:

Sheik Alhilali's comments have drawn strong criticism from some federal politicians and the federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward, who said he should be sacked and deported.

"It is incitement to a crime. Young Muslim men who now rape women can cite this in court, can quote this man ... their leader in court," she told the Nine Network.
"It's time we stopped just saying he should apologise. It is time the Islamic community did more then say they were horrified. I think it is time he left."

I once got into a heated debate on another blog about my right to discuss the religious commandments of another religion. The point I had made was that religious people often bring their values out into the public arena and that there they can affect the lives of those who are not of the same religion. And in some instances these effects can take women's rights backwards.

This particular case is a good example of the worries that made me engage in that debate.

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

On Hen's Teeth and Women Political Columnists 



They are about equally common, it seems. Dana Goldstein has written an interesting piece on the rare sightings of that unusual breed: the argumentative political woman writer. She hooks the story with the recent changes in the New York Times:

Gail Collins stepped down earlier this month as editor of the New York Times opinion pages. If you're concerned about the lack of women in American political discourse, this seems like bad news: Women are losing their representative in what is, arguably, the most powerful post in opinion journalism. What's more, Collins' successor is the consummate male insider, current deputy editor Andrew Rosenthal, son of late Times executive editor A.M. Rosenthal. The generally sorry state of women in the realm of elite opining is evidenced by the fact that when Collins returns to her old columnist's post after a six-month book leave, it will be the first time since her 2001 promotion that the nation's pre-eminent op-ed page will have more than one regular female contributor.

Across the board, women continue to account for only one-quarter of syndicated columnists. Editors say up to 80 percent of submissions to newspaper op-ed pages are penned by men, and the gender disparity worsens when the topic is politics. At four major liberal political magazines (The American Prospect, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Washington Monthly), a cursory survey of mastheads shows that only about one in every five editorial staffers are women, and just a single top editor, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel.

So although Collins' tenure has been eulogized in the pages of her own newspaper and elsewhere as a feminist watershed, when it comes to increasing the gender diversity in serious American political journalism, Collins' ascension up the masthead amounted to mere symbolism. The two empty columnist spots that opened up during her five year tenure were filled by men, David Brooks and John Tierney. To be sure, it's worth lauding Collins' fine work in arraying a stable of truly diverse and interesting Times Select contributors, from the graphic artist Maira Kalman to the contrarian scholar Stanley Fish -- in fact, it was through the guest columns and blogs behind the Times Select subscription wall that Collins truly did bring more women into the fold, including Slate legal expert Dalia Lithwick; the class-conscious Barabara Ehrenreich; Perfect Madness author Judith Warner; and Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Stacy Schiff. But even these women seem to be tokens. Most of the time, they haven't covered horserace electoral politics, the Iraq War, weapons proliferation, the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics that op-ed pages prioritize in this time of wars and midterms. (Lithwick is an important exception. Someone offer that woman a higher profile job, pronto.)

Pardon me while I go and gag a little. I'm ever so slightly allergic to any mention of the brothers-under-the-skin Brooks and Tierney, you may know. Did Collins really shift through an enormous slush pile at the Times, in desperate search for good female voices, only to end up happily clutching a piece by one of these guys to her chest instead? Did she run around the office, shouting "Heureka! I've spotted the Great Columnists of this generation!" That would make a good opening scene for a movie.

To return to Goldstein's article, I'm fascinated by the statement that up to eighty percent of all submissions to op-ed pages are by men and that this is why there are so few women printed on those same pages. Rarer than hen's teeth, we are. Except that most major op-ed pages don't accept uninvited submissions. Or that's what they tell me right after the bit about my piece having obvious merit. And in general I would question that eighty percent figure, because I alone am responsible for roughly forty percent of all uninvited (and unwanted) submissions to op-ed pages. Not to mention all those letters-to-the-editor which were refused because I have no last name. What is Ofthesnakes, then, if not a last name?

But it's most likely true that women don't send in as many manuscripts. Many women are far too objective and self-critical, and a certain hubris is necessary to get published. It helps to think of yourself as a divine creature, for example. Or a man if being divine is a little too much self-promotion. Just joking, here. About the man part. Still, to learn to accept rejections is the first rule in the game of getting published.

The second one appears to be to write about Real Politics, not girl stuff:

Most of the time, they haven't covered horserace electoral politics, the Iraq War, weapons proliferation, the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics that op-ed pages prioritize in this time of wars and midterms.

Hardballs... Fascinating how political topics become sexed. Some are important and hard and require sports terms and pictures about killing. Others are less important and soft and gooey and suitable for women to write about. None of this is an attack against Goldstein. She's writing as she sees it, and she sees it correctly. But there is nothing inherently more important about anti-immigration fences than education or health care. Now I really want to write a woman's eye article on one of these hard-testicled topics, a funny one...

But nobody would read that one. That's the impression I draw from this quote:

But then how can we account for Collins' failure to recruit more serious female political writers? Here was a female editor with all the necessary power and the inclination to do so. But as she explained to Sullivan, her hands were tied because she received so few op-ed submissions from women. "The pool is weighted toward men. … Within that, the number of people who are capable of writing 700 words twice a week and making it sound fresh and interesting … that's a very tiny pool."

A tiny, tiny pool and Brooks and Tierney take up most of it already. Besides, it's hard to sound fresh and interesting, twice a week, unless you make up stuff and go all wingnutty. And then there is the toothless hen problem. We should get hens implants.

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How Do Thoughts Ripen? 



Are they like tomatoes, slowly turning red and juicy? Like peaches, suddenly letting go of the branch and tumbling down? Mine are not. My raw thoughts are horrible spiders with sharp jaws and hairy toes, crawling around in my stomach. They will NOT come up to write until they are good and ready, and here I sit, all nauseous.

So I can't write about David Neiwert's misogyny-and-fascism post because my bloody spiders are busy having snacks and arguing each other. I HATE them.

After you read David, go read flea and Amanda, too.

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The Greatest Country On Earth 



Is ranked fifty-third in a global freedom of the press index:

Some poor countries, such as Mauritania and Haiti, improved their record in a global press freedom index this year, while France, the United States and Japan slipped further down the scale of 168 countries rated, the group Reporters Without Borders said yesterday.

The news media advocacy organization said the most repressive countries in terms of journalistic freedom -- such as North Korea, Cuba, Burma and China -- made no advances at all.

The organization's fifth annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index tracks actions against news media through the end of September. The group noted its concern over the declining rankings of some Western democracies as well as the persistence of other countries in imposing harsh punishments on media that criticize political leaders.

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Although it ranked 17th on the first list, published in 2002, the United States now stands at 53, having fallen nine places since last year.

"Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism,' " the group said.

"The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 U.S. states, refuse to recognize the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism," the group said.

Lucie Morillon, the organization's Washington representative, said the index is based on responses to 50 questions about press freedom asked of journalists, free press organizations, researchers, human rights activists and others.

But of course we can ignore such reports. Because they must be tainted by leftiness.
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Via