El Grover Norquist

I had a lot of fun trying to translate this article from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in which our Grover spells out his evil plans for the future. Spanish is not one of my languages, so I used a machine translator. The results are a lot of fun:

Question.- Who is going to gain the 2 of November?

Answer.- It gives equal. We will control the House of Representatives, and probably the Senate. If Kerry wins, it is not going to be able to do nothing that we do not love. We are not going to give money to him so that it spends. It will not be able to raise taxes. It will not be able to rob our firearms to us. Although we lose the White House, it is not going to be the aim of the world.

P.- and if Bush wins?

R.- the Democratic Party will be finished for always. If we have the control of the Legislative one and the Executive, we will reinforce our control of the Judicial Power to direct it against the democrats.We will carry out a modest limitation of the capacity of people to initiate legal processes against the companies, what will damage to the trial lawyers in those cases, that they are one of the props of the Democratic Party. We will accelerate the decline of the unions. We will trim the financing to groups of public employees, like the teachers, that they are one of the great sources of votes of the democrats. And we will begin to move the State of Well-being towards a deprived system, in pensions and health.

Here's the actual text in Spanish:

Pregunta.- ¿Quién va a ganar el 2 de noviembre?

Respuesta.- Da igual. Nosotros controlaremos la Cámara de Representantes, y probablemente el Senado. Si gana Kerry, no va a poder hacer nada que no queramos nosotros. No le vamos a dar dinero para que gaste. No podrá subir impuestos. No podrá robarnos nuestras armas de fuego. Aunque perdamos la Casa Blanca, no va a ser el fin del mundo.

P.- ¿Y si gana Bush?

R.- El Partido Demócrata estará acabado para siempre. Si tenemos el control del Legislativo y del Ejecutivo, reforzaremos nuestro control del Poder Judicial para dirigirlo contra los demócratas.Llevaremos a cabo una modesta limitación de la capacidad de la gente para iniciar procesos legales contra las empresas, lo que dañará a los abogados especialistas en esos casos, que son uno de los puntales del Partido Demócrata. Aceleraremos el declive de los sindicatos. Recortaremos la financiación a grupos de empleados públicos, como los profesores, que son una de las grandes fuentes de votos de los demócratas. Y empezaremos a mover el Estado de Bienestar hacia un sistema privado, en pensiones y sanidad.

It's really funny, isn't it? But the last sentence refers to privatization, not deprivation, of course.

Still, try to see through the funniness to what Grover is actually saying. He's declaring the end of the Democratic Party, for one thing, by hook or crook. So now you know.
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Link via Atrios.

The 60 Minutes Memos

As I write this I hear Daniel Schorr on NPR pontificate about how Dan Rather and CBS have been had in one of the most famous media spoofs of all times. This makes me wonder why it would be so famous. Consider what Digby has to say about it:

Did anyone ever call Jeff Gerth on the carpet for falling for the Scaife financed "Arkansas project" propaganda on the NY Times Whitewater stories? How about the chinese espionage "scandal" which was also a right wing hack job that proved to be absolutely bogus (aided and abetted by our good friend Rep. Chris Cox and his wholly discredited Cox Report.) Did anybody pay a price for pimping the Vince Foster story for the Mighty Wirlizter? Troopergate? The White House vandalism and stolen gifts stories? The list is endless. Years and years and years of hoaxes and smears and lies that led to tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money wasted on investigations that went nowhere and NOBODY SAYS A FUCKING WORD about the press's incestuous involvement with those who perpetrated these expensive frauds on the American public. (I won't even mention the elephant sitting in the middle of the room with the words "Saddam and 9/11" tattooed on his forehead.)

Indeed. Some spoofs are famous, some are just the truths that the so-called liberal media will publish with pleasure.

But in fact we don't even now know if the memos are forgeries. This is what New York Times says:

Mr. Howard also said in the interview that the White House did not dispute the veracity of the documents when it was presented to them on the morning of the report. That reaction, he said, was "the icing on the cake" of the other reporting the network was conducting on the documents. White House officials have said they saw no reason to challenge documents being presented by a credible news organization.

"White House officials said they saw no reason to challenge documents being presented by a credible news organization." So good it's worth repeating. But of course they should have seen a reason of criticism if the information in the memos was fraudulent. That they didn't see one seems to suggest quite strongly that the memos reflect the truth. In other words, Bush did exceedingly poorly in his Guardy duty.

It's possible that the memos are forgeries or that they are authentic. It's also possible that Mr. Burkett decided on getting them published on his own. Many things are possible.

But I still think that the theory about Karl Rove being behind the memos is most likely. It follows his M.O., and shows just the kind of sneakiness Rove is famous for. Two flies at one stroke: cast doubt on the contents of the memos by releasing some forged ones and smear more liberal-media-bias goop over the camera lenses of the media. Of course I have no evidence for this (except for the astonishingly rapid response from the wingnuts that Digby documented), but there I'm on even ground with all the other talking heads. (I like that image! My talking head standing next to the keyboard, the jaw going clickety-clickety.)

The He-Men of Hyper-Masculinity

According to one of my favorite wingnuts, George Will, the American politics is back to the stuff he really likes to talk about: testosterone:

After two testosterone-charged conventions, try to remember that three years ago there was much talk about the "feminization" of politics. The change since 9/11 explains the bind John Kerry is in and why he, more than George W. Bush, is hostage to events.
The idea, current then, that "the end of history" had arrived was partly a response to sense that mankind's elemental economic problem - mastering growth - had been solved. Henceforth the tone of politics, even for conservatives of the "compassionate" stripe, would mimic the "caring professions." Everyone would be kinder and gentler, leaving no child behind.
History had supposedly lost its motor of violent, ideologically driven conflict. That theory turned on the fact of a broad consensus that modern societies must allocate wealth and opportunity through economic markets, and must apportion political power through the markets of multiparty elections.
However, the past three years have been dominated by another fact: A violent, metastasizing minority rejects, root and branch, the idea that modernity is desirable. Islamic radicals taking up the cause of Chechen separatism are the latest dissenters to be heard from.

Will is so scared of the feminization of politics that this is at least his second column on the same topic within six months. That anybody can seriously speak about the threat of feminization of a political system that has less women in its legislative bodies than Rwanda is mindboggling. But of course wingnuts are defined by things that are mindboggling.

George Will has a lot of admiration for the testosterone-laden guys. He'd really want to be one of them, and maybe he is in his dreams. I suspect that he also has a lot of fear of women and all that femininity stands for in his nightmares. He's not alone in that, according to Stephen J. Ducat, a psychologist, who has just come out with a book entitled The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity.
Ducat has been studying the concept of anxious masculinity since the late 1980s and his book covers much more ground than the current election campaigns:

The Wimp Factor" suggests that American hyper-masculinity -- as seen in, but not limited to, the Bush administration, Christian fundamentalism and right-wing U.S. policy -- has created a contentious political landscape in which more and more men are becoming conservative. In campaign battles, politicians, meanwhile, "feminize" their opponents to establish macho credibility and call into question their opponents' manhood. (In his speech at the Republican convention, Vice President Dick Cheney told delegates that Kerry "talks about leading a 'more sensitive war on terror,' as though al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.")

Some other commenters have described this as a 'pecker-length competition', and though Bush and his lot are the most obvious wannabes in this competition, Kerry has also been seen participating. The problem with pecker races is, of course, that you need a pecker to join. If this is how politics will now be framed women will not be able to share in the making of common decisions. What's more worrying is that this inability would not then be regarded as in any sense unfair or unjust. Got testosterone, baby?

I'm not sure if Ducat is completely correct in his arguments, but maybe he's onto something. If so, where does this new hyper-masculinity come from? Ducat doesn't really answer this question, but I spot the basic idea in this quote from the interview with him:

In their most fundamental iterations, [hyper-masculinists] eschew all forms of intellectual, political and personal complexity, and show a fear of all things perceived as feminine -- including women and gay men -- that might seem comical were it not so dangerous.
The abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are one result. Online photos released in the spring showed prison guards -- mostly U.S. soldiers and private contractors -- forcing Iraqi inmates to endure humiliations that included publicly masturbating, wearing lingerie and dogpiling on one another.
"It's a scandal about the attempt to feminize the enemy, literally and figuratively," Ducat said. Noting that some guards were alleged to have sexually violated male teen inmates, he added, "The anal rape metaphor of military conquest that has been a subtext animating American foreign policy since the Persian Gulf War has extended into this one -- and the Abu Ghraib scandal is the extension of that." The guards' actions, he said, "speaks to their sense of phallic unaccountability."

Smells like misogyny to me. If the strategy is to feminize the enemy, and if this strategy is regarded as successful, then the underlying impetus must be a great contempt towards women. Or a great disgust of women using the terms of Martha Nussbaum's theory. This would explain why the hyper-masculinists would fear all things female: they contaminate. They are not actually afraid of women in the sense of frightening enemies (that would be sort of a good thing, perhaps) but in the sense of something vile, something gross, to be washed off as soon as possible, to be stomped into smithereens. Definitely not something to be compared to in an election campaign.

But this answer is only a partial one, of course. It needs supplementing with several others such as the traditional view of men as protectors, as soldiers, as warriors, as leaders; and also with the events of the last decades which have led to greater equality between men and women in many countries. Such equality could be extremely threatening to hyper-masculinists, including the women who have adopted this mode of thinking. Still, it's all depressing stuff for those who would like to see a more rational and just world.
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An afterthough:
I have noticed something in the blogosphere that does seem to reflect Ducat's arguments. Even on the lefty political blogs a heated argument in the comments sections often results in threats of anal penetration or requests to perform a blowjob to the other debater. In other words, anger at having ones position challenged turns into an attack towards the other debater as effeminate, as a sexual submissive, as female. Not all commenters do this and not even a majority, but it's frequent enough to have attracted my attention.

Some News About Me

Me! My favorite word if you haven't noticed yet...

Anyway, I'm going to be a relief blogger for the American Street on Saturdays. That will give me a place to put the more economic posts that might bore you to death.

This won't reduce my Saturday postings here, as goddesses can easily be in more than one place at the same time. Or in one place at different times simultaneously. But it will let me take a somewhat different angle for political posts.

Still, I'm probably going to start taking Sundays off from posting here to keep myself a little fresher. Unless I feel too strong an urge to post to abstain. Words do seem to flow out of my divine mouth, but maybe all of them shouldn't be presented to the world? I'm seriously trying to evolve towards a higher level of divinity.

I have been visiting the land where things are two-dimensional and in various tones of gray recently. Not a trip I'd recommend for your vacations. It's called Despair, and there are always very cheap flights available, though watch out; they are all one-way.
The brochures are so appealing and logical, telling in no uncertain terms how we are all in the same little handbasket, how the future will be like the present, only worse, how Reality Television is replacing all other culture except fundie churches and how you are the last person alive still thinking in the stupid old-fashioned terms of democracy, human rights and all that crap.

Luckily I was able to return from my trip pretty easily, but the visit reminded me how important it is to take time from politics and the news and all the rest of the bad news that masquerade as reality and to really visit reality. To go out and breathe in the air, to walk in the woods and feel the pine needles in your hand, to bake some bread just for the smell, to kiss someone without having your brain wondering about Pat Buchanan, to listen to your dogs' gentle snores in the night. See how I ruined the high-minded thread there by bringing in Pat Buchanan and snores?

The Naughty Liberals

Did you know what we are trying to do to this country? Wow, we are really terrible people:

The RNC also is running radio ads in several states urging people to register to vote.
"There is a line drawn in America today," one ad says. "On one side are the radicals trying to uproot our traditional values and our culture. They're fighting to hijack the institution of marriage, plotting to legalize partial birth abortion, and working to take God out of the pledge of allegiance and force the worst of Hollywood on the rest of America."
"Are you on their side of the line?" the ad asks before making the plea to "support conservative Republican candidates."

I better start working on these issues right away. Especially on 'forcing the worst of Hollywood on the rest of America'. Like the hairdos and the clothes and the cosmetic surgery. Don't want to disappoint any wingnuts.

Later: And note the tone of the quote. It's all about us vs. them, about war inside America. Now who's the one with the inexplicable hatred?
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Link via Chuck Currie.

It's Done With Mirrors: The Finale

Remember my theory about Karl Rove being behind the possible forged documents about George Bush's Guard duty? (Well, ok, I was just one of many conspiracy theorists on this topic.) Now go and read what Digby says about what happened!

Paralympics

Paralympics have just started in Athens with a beautiful opening ceremony. Too bad that we won't see that or any of the many events in the U.S.. The television networks here were not interested...

Flop, Flop

The flop-flop presidency! This term is due to cornbread on the Eschaton thread, but it deserves to be shouted from the top of the roofs everywhere. What has NOT flopped under Bush? Except for the bank balances of the wealthy, everything else in this country has gotten worse: incomes are down, employment is down, the cost of health care for the elderly is up, all children are left behind, mother nature is ransacked at will, and most importantly, of course, thousand of people are dead in Iraq because some Saudis butchered people here. I don't even have to mention issues like contempt for women's rights or for scientific inquiry or the eagerness to redefine torture as frat boy games.

And here's another flop I hear from a bathroom somewhere in Florida: Nader is ba-aaaa-ack! Courtesy of Jeb Bush and your other wingnut friends.

Or how about the Gallup poll today? Why is the only poll which predicts Bush ahead getting so much attention in the SCLM (so-called liberal media)? Granted, some commentators point out the confusing results, but how many bother to actually find out why Gallup polls biased and whether this is on purpose? And I'm not calling the Gallup polls biased by accidents. You can learn here and here how it is done and why.

Ok. So I'm angry. Even goddesses get angry, and this is not something humans should cause without a very good reasons. I think that I'm going to rain frogs for seven days now.

Oh By The Way...

check the news today. Friday is the day when the administration dumps all bad news, hoping that nobody reads them in their hurry to go out carousing.

If you don't want to do that, check out new ice-cream flavors before the autumn really strikes. I found a delicious one based on creme de menthe and chocolate chips and other unidentifiable but lushious bits. One day I'll write about sex with the same fervency as about ice-cream, I promise. Maybe even more fervently. But for now consider the ice-cream sublimation plot.

On Dust, Dinners and Dollars

The Department of Labor just published a study on the division of domestic chores in U.S. households. The results are what I expected, given that I have followed the research in this field for a very long time:

Because the survey is entirely new, it offers no comparison with how people spent their time 10 or 20 years ago. But it does confirm that the old divisions of labor between men and women at least partly remain.
The average working woman, for example, spends about an hour and a half a day caring for other members of the family, the average working man barely 50 minutes. Likewise, the average working woman spends more than 1 hour 20 minutes on household chores, the average working man less than 45 minutes.
Almost as many women as men hold jobs, the Labor Department said: about 78 percent of women, compared with 85 percent of men. But two-thirds of all women said they prepared meals and did housework on an average day, compared with only 19 percent of men who said they did housework and 34 percent who said they helped with meals or cleanup.

Though this particular survey may be new, many studies over the years confirm the same pattern. But it's worth noting that the percentage of men sharing in domestic chores is rising over time, albeit slowly. The figures from the late 1980s would have been much more dismal.

It's also worth pointing out that the above summary of the study doesn't tell us how many hours the men and women in the study work, and in some cases the division of labor may come from the men's longer working days. But not in all cases. And it may be interesting for you to know that single women spend more hours on domestic chores than singe men do.

All this points out the strength of traditions and perhaps upbringing and preferences by gender in determining the sexual division of labor in families. The economic explanations for such differences would fail to explain why couples where both work full-time would still have the rest of the work so unequally divided or why single women do more chores for themselves than single men do for themselves.

For a feminist, the messages of this study are several. The most obvious one is that the revolution that led women to the labor force was only a partial one. Women took on some roles that in the past were denied from them, but men have not taken on the roles that in the past were defined as female to the same extent. Or as some say, the revolution hit the streets and the offices but not the homes. That would be the next stage, perhaps, and one which should be started by both men and women, given that men have a lot to gain from being allowed more time to be a father and a partner, a lot to gain from not being viewed as a money-making machine vulnerable to a sudden breakdown. There are men and women already walking this new path of a fuller humanity for everybody.

For an anti-feminist, the message is very different. It goes something like this: See! Women can't have it all. Go back to the two extreme choices. You can have a family or you can have a job, but you can't have both. We told you so in the first place. And no, we will not change anything in the society to make other options available to you, we will not bring up children differently, we will not allow for flexibility in careers and jobs. Who do you think you are?

World's First Women's Mosque?

This is being planned in Tamil Nadu, India. The reason is that traditional mosques don't allow women to attend the jamaat (citizens' council) which is always attached to a mosque and which makes judgments on the domestic affairs of the community, including domestic violence. This means that a woman claiming that she is a victim of domestic violence cannot be present when her case is decided.

How will this plan fare? Here's one problem:

According to the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, male-controlled jamaats are stating that "women should have the right to offer prayers in mosques. In at least five percent of Tamil Nadu's mosques there are separate enclosures for women. But a women's mosque is unacceptable."

Sigh.

Proud to Be American

This bumper sticker was staring me in the face for a few minutes on the road today. It also had a picture of the head of a bald eagle.
Bumper stickers are not meant to be dissected. They are meant to raise high emotions and to make the reader feel either good or bad. But I prefer dissecting.

It might go something like this: "Proud to be American. Instead of what? German? Norwegian?" What's so bad about being German or Norwegian? And why tell everybody in America that you are proud to be the same as everybody else driving on that road (with the exception of a few stray goddesses)?

And what makes one so proud about the verb "to be"? Everybody born in this country automatically becomes an American. Only those who change their nationality have some right to boast about the verb "to be".

And what does the bald eagle have to do with any of this? Or is it supposed to be the eagle who says the sentence? If so, the eagle is a very weird bird indeed, given that we nearly brought it to extinction.

And finally, why the emphasis on pride? Why would it be something that needs to be stressed? Self-confidence in my experience doesn't need to go out and boast about its achievements (goddesses are an exception to this rule, naughty you).

I'd have more data to work on if I could tell when the bumber sticker was glued on the car. It looks too new to have been there very long, however, so I doubt that this sticker was part of the 9/11 events. It might be a response to the Iraq war, stating that the driver is proud of Bush's war and telling the shameful anti-war people to shut up. But this is probably not a warranted conclusion. Most likely it's just meant to provide a small moment of patriotic pride in the day of busy commuters. Which is fine with me; only I wish that the bumper sticker makers would think a bit more carefully before they scribble something down.

It's Done With Mirrors, Part III

From CBS:

CBS/AP) Congressional Republicans on Wednesday turned the high heat on CBS News, charging that last week's revelations about Lt. George Bush, which aired on 60 Minutes, were based on fake documents and demanding that 60 Minutes and Dan Rather retract the story.

"It's very clear the documents were forged. They were laid on him and this time he bit," said Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah.

Forty members of the House signed a letter accusing the network of deception. The letter asked CBS if the documents are authentic, and why the network won't say how it got them, reports CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews.

"I think at the very least CBS should characterize the source," said Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri. "I think it's amazing that they haven't already done that."

See how it's done? Forty members of the House go to bat for Bush. What did the Democrats do when the affair of the blue dress was discussed, when the Whitewater affair was discussed? Notice how Representative Blunt demands that the press tells their source? Did he do the same in the Plame affair? Did he?

Is there freedom of press if this happens after every major news story hurting the administration? How free is the press if they're going to find the big hammer of the Republicans fall on their heads every time?

It's done with the mirrors, and the mirrors are turned away from George Bush towards the so-called liberal media or Kerry or somebody somewhere. Not our fault! Look there! Liberal bias!
That's how the game is played nowadays. Welcome to the new age.

It's Done With Mirrors, Part II

This is about the possibility that the famous Guard duty memos are forgeries. Yet, as Media Matters points out, the contents of the memos appear to be the truth. Even the White House has not disputed that, and three witnesses have stated this in the context of the most recent debacle. So we may have the odd situation that someone has bothered to forge memos which tell the truth. Or maybe not.

In any case, what is the treatment of these memos in the so-called liberal media? It goes like this:

Primetime broadcasts focused on the issue of the memos' authenticity rather than on the far more relevant issue of whether Bush shirked his Guard duties and, if so, whether he benefited from his family's connections in escaping punishment for shirking his duty. There is ample evidence, wholly apart from the disputed documents, that both claims are true; statements by Knox, Hodges, and Via provide further evidence. While each of the three major network evening news programs -- CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight -- addressed the memo controversy on September 14, only ABC reported on Killian's former secretary. And of the eleven primetime cable news shows that discussed the CBS memos on the evening of September 14, only four mentioned Knox. Although Via's account didn't emerge until late on the evening of September 14, not a single news program made the connection to Hodges.

Knox, Hodges and Via are witnesses who state that the memos are essentially accurate in contents. All this bolsters my theory that Karl Rove is behind the forgeries if the memos are forgeries. See how there is noise and furor about the authenticity of the memos while nobody even notices the fact that they're telling the truth?

The Little Red Riot-Helmet

This is an autumn re-run of a story I wrote last spring or early summer. I feel like posting it again.

The Little Red Riot-Helmet

Once upon a time in a country far away lived a little boy called Georgie. He lived in a large, beautiful house with his mama and his papa, but the family was not happy with the house. They wanted an even larger and more beautiful house. That's why one spring morning when Georgie was outside playing riot police in his brand new red helmet, his mama called him in. "Georgie Porgie", she said, "Your papa and I have an important job for you. We want you to take a basket of Bible literature and food to your dear old granny Fundie. She's not feeling well, and we need her up by the elections." "Aawww, do I hafta?" moaned Georgie.

"Yes, you do. Elections will get us a bigger house," his mama said firmly. Then she packed a basket with some inspirational fundamentalist literature, a bottle of papa's Secret Health Elixir, and several hard-boiled unborn chickens. "Now, Georgie, remember to walk straight to granny Fundie's house. Don't stay gawking in the forest. There are dangerous Democrats there and even a terrorist who eats little boys!" And after having said this, Georgie's mama pushed Georgie out of the house.

Georgie was scared of the dark woods. He had heard about dreadful happenings there; stories about hordes of horrible feminazis attacking innocent wingnuts, stories about evil people who lived off the hard-earned savings of others and who were always on the lookout for more. Georgie feared that they might steal his basket of food or his brand-new riot helmet, but he didn't believe in any terrorists. Mama was just trying to scare him!

So off into the woods went Georgie, walking very rapidly, as rapidly as he could while carrying the heavy basket. He refused to look to the right or to the left, but went straight down the path. Evening was approaching and light was falling rapidly. Georgie could hear twigs snapping in the woods and he became very afraid. To keep his spirits up, he started singing a little ditty:

I'm Georgie, my helmet is red
I'm going to granny who is sick in bed
My basket will feed her and make her sing
And then mama and papa and I will win.

This was fortunate or unfortunate for Georgie, depending on your view. A very hungry and desperate terrorist was indeed roaming the woods, looking for something to devour. He saw little Georgie, all alone in his red helmet, and thought of making a quick snack out of him, but the ditty made him plan more carefully. Here was a way of getting a real meal: both the pudgy little boy and the granny. So the terrorist quickly ran along a sidepath to granny Fundie's house and knocked on the door.

"Who's there?" croaked old granny through the door. "It's me, little Georgie, granny. I've come to see you with a basket of goodies from mama" piped the terrorist in a convincing imitation of Georgie. "Come in boy, the door is unlocked" the granny answered. The terrorist obeyed. What happened next is too awful to describe. Let's just say that granny Fundie ended up in the terrorist's stomach. The terrorist then dressed in granny's large Christian nightgown and lay down in her bed to wait for Georgie.

Georgie was unaware of all this, of course. He had been walking fast and scared and singing his ditty until he was too tired to sing. He had scratches from tree branches, and his knee hurt from a tumble caused by a nasty tree root. After that one he had taken a break and eaten all the unborn chickens. He had washed them down with papa's Elixir. Thereafter, the path seemed much shorter though curvier than before, and Georgie arrived at granny's door quite happy, except for a small fear that she might not like the basket's contents without the food and the drink. Still, what's done is done, Georgie thought, and straightened his red helmet. He knocked on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. Granny Fundie's door was always unlocked for boys like him, he knew.

Inside the cottage it was quite dark, and Georgie could just distinguish the looming shape of granny in her bed. "Hi granny, how are you?" Georgie said and sat down by the bedside. "Would you like me to open the drapes more to let in some light?" It seemed to him that granny was really unwell. She looked so different. "No! No light, please, my eyes hurt" the terrorist squaked.

"What's the matter with them, granny Fundie?" Georgie asked. "They look sort of red and bloated."

'It's all that pornography that Hollywood keeps pouring out, my dear boy. It corrupts us, even the most innocent of us."

"Ok, granny. And that's why your nose is quivering, too, I guess."

"Yes, my child. I can smell the infidels at their evil plans."

"Infidels?" George said, a little confused. "Never mind, granny. But why is your mouth so open?"

"So that I can better GOBBLE YOU UP!" shouted the terrorist and quickly swallowed poor Georgie, red helmet and all. Poor, poor Georgie. He was all eaten up.

You might think that this is the end of the story, but you'd be wrong. What happened next was this: the terrorist fell asleep, having eaten enough for the day. But he had been so greedy that neither granny Fundie nor Georgie were properly digested. In fact, they were both alive in the terrorist's belly, kicking each other and arguing over whose fault the whole disaster might be. They even made a long list of possible culprits.

All this made a terrible racket, of course, though the terrorist didn't wake up. He might have turned over in his sleep, though. But a brave young carpenter, called Muricanpeeple did hear the racket as he was walking by on his way to fell some Democrats. He looked into the cottage through a window, saw the terrorist snoring away, and immediately knew that something was really wrong. He tiptoed to the front door of the cottage and peeked in. The terrorist was still very asleep and didn't notice a thing. The carpenter gathered his courage and took hold of his trusty axe. Then he took a deep breath, rushed into the room and smote the terrorist's stomach open with one blow of the axe.

Out popped granny Fundie and Georgie, only slightly digested. They were so happy that they kissed and hugged the carpenter and sang great psalms of joy. They promised the carpenter all sorts of good things, like lower taxes and eternal peace as a reward and Muricanpeeple was very pleased. In fact, he was so pleased and flattered that he offered to go out into the world to look for more terrorists. Which he did.

Georgie and granny Fundie didn't go with him. Instead, they skipped hand-in-hand through the dark forest back to Georgie's house where his mama and papa greeted them with great joy and celebration. The election victory was now certain.

The terrorist also got up, holding his stomach together with his hands. He wasn't dead, you know. Instead, he was now very very angry, and ready to find many more terrorists. They would start a big war against that stupid carpenter, Muricanpeeple.

Now, all's well that ends well, don't you think?

The Bush Budget for 2006

This is very important: 1. While Bush's stomp speech criticizes Kerry's plans as big-spender ones, his own plans are likely to cost 50% more! 2. He's been spending so much on his war that he'll have to make some extremely cruel cuts in education and homeland security in 2006! He has already mortgaged our near- and far-futures, and he criticizes Kerry's plans....


According to Washington Post:

The administration has been secretive about the cost of the war and the likely impact that the bulging defense budget and continuing cost of tax cuts will have on domestic spending next year. The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include $2.3 billion in spending cuts from virtually all domestic programs not mandated by law, including education, homeland security and others central to Bush's campaign.

Also of note:

The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade.
A staple of Bush's stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator's campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan.
Bush's pledge to make permanent his tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2010 or before, would reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion over 10 years, according to administration estimates. His proposed changes in Social Security to allow younger workers to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds could cost the government $2 trillion over the coming decade, according to the calculations of independent domestic policy experts.
And Bush's agenda has many costs the administration has not publicly estimated. For instance, Bush said in his speech that he would continue to try to stabilize Iraq and wage war on terrorism. The war in Iraq alone costs $4 billion a month, but the president's annual budget does not reflect that cost.

Bush is not a small government conservative, obviously. But his large government is an unusual one: it will give little to the poor, the sick, the old or the young, but it will give loads to the wars he plans and to his pals in business. And to the conservative elite, of course.

The whole article is well worth reading, even for those who think economics is too dismal to contemplate.

The Twilight Zone

This would be a good title for the era in which we live right now, but I'm going to use it slightly differently, to talk about all those inner vortices which hide in our minds. The really weird ones.

I was once invigilating an exam with two hundred students in the room. I was a student myself, then, only a little more advanced than the ones who were taking the exam. Someone was supposed to come and relieve me after two hours but nobody turned up. I was sitting in this enormous room, on stage, for hours and the sun kept burning straight into my face. There was nothing to do but to watch all those private moments of stress and concentration and the sudden realization that the exam is impossibly difficult, to listen to the sneezes and the coughs and the furious erasings, to hunt for any cheaters and to avoid looking at the ones who were crying. I tried to do statistical distributions on the numbers of eyeglasses and blue jeans and zits to stay awake, but I was rapidly approaching a point where I needed some water and food and sounds. I had also not slept a lot the night before.

Suddenly I got this overwhelming desire to jump up and scream:"FIRE!" The more I tried not to think of doing it the more I wanted to do it. The struggle was terrible; I was biting my tongue and this really obnoxious, wild, delicious laughter was bubbling up from my stomach. My rational part was giving a long speech about responsibility, ethics, my own career prospects and the Western civilization, and my twilight part was thinking of elaborations on the initial scheme.

I was rescued at the last moment by a professor who finally remembered that I had been there for six hours alone, in the middle of a sea of humanity. But if he hadn't wondered in I don't know what would have happened. I had actually bitten my nails into my palms so hard that I was bleeding. When I got out of the room I had to run for an hour.

The moral of this story: ?

It's Done With Mirrors

A good example of the way the wingnuts have taken over what goes for the media these days:

On the September 10 edition of his ABC Radio Networks show, FOX News Channel host Sean Hannity suggested that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) may have been behind the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photos. Hannity based his suggestion on his claim that the controversial memos relating to President George W. Bush's military service, which were first aired on CBS's 60 Minutes, were obtained by "the same person that had the Abu Ghraib pictures."
From the September 10 edition of ABC Radio Networks' Sean Hannity Show:
HANNITY: [T]his woman who also produced -- was the producer who obtained the Abu Ghraib photos. ... [T]he same person that had the Abu Ghraib pictures -- the Abu Ghraib photos is apparently the same one that got these documents. ... Now here's the question. Where did she get all this stuff from? So that could mean that Abu Ghraib -- where did that come from? Was that a DNC plot too? I mean, there's a lot of questions here

See how it is done? You take an assertion which is unproven: that the documents about Bush's Guard duty are forgeries and that these forgeries come from the DNC. Then you imply that this (totally unproven) assertion implies that something else might also be a forgery arising from the DNC. The Abu Ghraib photos of torture!
Mindboggling. But this is what goes for punditry these days. I can see why I wouldn't qualify.

The most logical theory about the Bush Guard duty documents are that they are forgeries by Karl Rove. This makes sense because the facts are real, and if it was obvious that they would come out despite Rove's best attempts, then the way to muddy the waters would be to make some forgeries of the true documents. I'm not saying that my theory is true, of course, just wondering...

Uppity Negro

Aaron Hawkins, the brilliant writer and careful thinker of Uppity Negro has passed away. We all are poorer now. May you find peace, Aaron.

Taking Sex Roles Seriously

This is the title of a book by Steven E. Rhoads who seems to be an economist with not very many publications. Some reviewers call it a 'scholarly' work which might be a nice way to say that it was written by someone who has no expertise in judging the field, yet has unrelated letters after his name. I could do a few of those, too.

Anyway, Rhoads argues that sex roles are pretty much biological, that men are aggressive and criminal-minded and that women are nurturing and home-minded. Sounds like he really hates men, doesn't he? Yet his proposals are to make it easier for women to stay at home and not to have careers which would just make women unhappy.

This is a very conservative book, or rather a wingnut book, and I haven't actually read it. This makes the level of knowledge Rhoads and I have about equal on the subject matter of his book, but of course I really should read it to write about it. In my defense I could note that I have read a passel of similar books, all, by the way, written by men who seem worried about the possible demise of male supremacy, and they all rehash the studies that show differences in various behaviors by sex and then leap from that to telling how the society should be structured.

In this leap they tend to ignore the question whether these measured differences are biological, socially constructed or both, and they tend to take studies which show that some characteristic is shared by, say, 60% of women and by only 40% of men and then argue that all women share this characteristic and no men do, and so on. In other words, they tend to draw false conclusions from data (and not always from good data) and then quickly rush from these to rather sweepingly generalized policy conclusions.

More recently, these little books receive an air of authority by quoting gene research or differences in the PET scans of brain by sex. This sounds like the writers really know their stuff. The problem is that the research they are referring to is at its initial stages and doesn't provide the kind of evidence these books assume must exist somewhere. Moreover, there is a possibility that the relationship between genes and the environment is much more complex than the nature-nurture dualists assume. It's even possible that environmental conditions may turn some genes on or off. Likewise, differences in the brain images have been found to develop with behavior. One study found that the long-term memory part of the brain grew in those individuals who passed the very demanding street map test for taxi drivers in London. This means that referring to research about genes or pictures of the brain doesn't actually guarantee that any differences so spotted are inherent.

But I suspect that none of this matters for the writers of this genre. I rather imagine them beginning with the conclusions they wish to reach and then going backwards, picking and rejecting evidence, finding anecdotes and cutting out parts which don't work, and so on, until they finally write the Introduction in suitably sober and impartial tones.

It's sad, because the field of sex differences deserves better researchers and better writers. It would also be nice to have a similar field of sex similarities with journals which would publish all those studies that find no discernible sex differences at all, but that is unlikely to happen. The stakes are far too high for that for those who take sex roles 'seriously'.

Finally, the important note that every feminist must add to posts like this one: No, I don't believe that all sex differences are socially constructed. But I also don't believe that all women are the same and that all men are the same or that there is no overlap between these groups. I believe that men and women are fairly similar, to be quite honest. Certainly much more similar to each other than to anything else I can think of.
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My information about Rhoads' book is based on Cathy Young's article. Imagine an anti-feminist attacking another!

Why so Many Americans Are Ignorant

This might be a new series portraying the culprits of the American ignorance. Or it might not, depending on how lazy I get. But here is one of the immortal statements of Rush Limbaugh to his faithful audience of dittoheads, most of whom are probably allowed to vote:

On the September 9 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show, radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed that global warming is "malarkey" and that "[t]he idea that we [human beings] have any power over nature is absolute absurdity." Yet, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Academy of Sciences has determined that "the Earth's surface temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century" and that "most of the warming over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."

This is where many get their beliefs and their evidence, folks.

Monday's Dog Blogging

Hiya, everybody!

Hank here, and ready to serve! BWAHAHAA! I sure like politics. It's like chasing them damn critters which look like little cats but then climb trees. There's one in the back and it's a terrarist if there ever was one and I'm gonna get it one day as sure as that my name is Hank. Just like George Bush who is my great idell because he shoots and doesn't think and he's kinda like me. Yessir.

I had me a good rollaround today in some shit in the woods. Nothing perks up a dog as much as a nice scary smell. The goddess is pissed-off as usual but she didn't dump me in the tub so I don't care. That's the thing I don't get about George. He's a good one, he is. But where's all the shit? Or is it hidden, huh? Like double-smart, clever trick against all those liburals? Or is he dumped in the tub every day? If so, I'm gonna go and liburate him, yes I am.

Snoozetime. Seeya all later!

Hank.

Editor's comment: Hank is a five-year old chocolate Labrador retriever. She is a jock and likes the neocons. That she's still allowed to board with the goddess shows the latter's goodness and magnificence to all. That's the only reason also why Hank is allowed to blog here.

Prone to Self-Destruction?

These thoughts bubbled up in my head as I was vacuuming: That the most important issues the Republican party is running on are the war against terrorism and the war against reproductive choice, and that if the Republicans actually succeed in winning these 'wars', pretty much nobody will want to vote Republican again. So it's in the interest of the party to make sure that these issues will not be resolved though progress must be shown in that direction.

We are probably going to have Roe hanging on by a shredded toenail for more years than I can count, and terrorism will be carefully tended but not weeded out. How's that for mixed metaphors?

All politics has this self-destructive tendency, but it's so much more obvious with the current administration as their popularity is very much limited to a couple of issues and if these issues go so will the base of the party. What would Rove think of next? I shudder to imagine that.

The 9/11 Report Revisited

Atrios links to this article on the 9/11 report, and it is really worth reading through. If you don't have the time for it, here's an excerpt which reminds us all of the importance of voting in November:

As presented by the commission, the evidence of signals missed by the Bush administration is more startling than we had known. To take one example,a memorandum written in July 2001 to headquarters by an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, specifically warned of the "'possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama bin Laden' to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools."
Though Bush administration officials said after the fact that no one could have imagined that terrorists would use planes to fly into buildings, the report shows that there had been warnings of attacks very much along those lines before September 11—including information from an informant in East Asia of the possibility of al-Qaeda's hijacking planes, filling them with explosives, and using them to crash into US cities. Richard Clarke had worried about this very possibility in connection with the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. In the commission's words, the "possibility" of this sort of terrorist attack "was imaginable, and imagined."
The most arresting document is the Presidential Daily Brief of August 6, 2001, which, until it was finally made public, had been described by the White House as "historical in nature." A single question by Ben-Veniste to Condoleezza Rice, asking her to state the title of the PDB, exposed that fiction. The title was "bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." That the commission was able to see the President's daily briefings by the CIA during the Clinton and Bush administrations at all was unprecedented. They could only do so, however, under strict rules set by the administration: only two commissioners were allowed to read the PDBs, and—for reasons that later became clear—they were forbidden to copy down their titles.
After the September 11 attacks, administration officials claimed that the information they'd received wasn't specific enough for them to act on it. But it was much more specific than they suggested. The government even received evidence in July 2001 that an al-Qaeda attack had been put off for two months but hadn't been abandoned. And the August 6 PDB itself was far more detailed than the administration admitted. It cited evidence, including reports in the press as well as clandestine information, that bin Laden had "wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US" since 1997; that al-Qaeda members had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, "and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks"; that FBI information "indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijacking or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." It cited a call to the US embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001, "saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives." It said that the FBI had seventy "bin Laden–related" investigations underway. The President told the commission that he'd found this last point "heartening." Others might have been alarmed. (The commission concluded that the FBI had exaggerated the extent of its investigations.)

Tomatoes

Someone gave me a pot of seedlings early this summer. They looked like tomato plants so I stuck them in an open slot in the sun and forgot them completely. Now I bear the consequences of it: barrels and barrels of cherry tomatoes are adorning my kitchen, and many more are still hanging green on the vines.

Tomatoes have this odd smell: pungent and slightly unpleasant, and after I pick the day's harvest my hands stay smelly despite severe soap-and-water treatments. You might have noticed that I don't like the little buggers (tomatoes, that is), and this is true. I have never liked them, but after they were found to be one of the triggers of my migraine attacks I literally hate them. (I ate three little ones from the vine last week and had one night's pain to reward me for that. I wanted to check if they still caused migraines, I guess. Sometimes my curiosity makes me so stupid.)

Not eating tomatoes cuts your culinary world into half, though, and that's why I ate them for many years despite never finding their taste pleasant. And the structure: mucus surrounding hard seeds!

I'm not alone in being wary of eating tomatoes:

In botany, the tomato is considered both a fruit and a vegetable. Actually, the tomato has been used in many different ways for more than 500 years. Before, its introduction to North America from its South American origins, the tomato went to Europe. It was the Spanish conquistadors who discovered the tomato in Mexico at the end of the 15th century and introduced it to the continent. The tomato was not really eaten until 18th century because people thought it might be toxic. In North America, its cultivation didn't become widespread until the 19th century. Despite its torturous route, the tomato is now the most eaten vegetable in the entire world!

Maybe it shouldn't be the most eaten vegetable in the world. Maybe it should be banned.

Though tomatoes look pretty if you like orange, and now I have lots of gifts to carry to both friends and strangers. I really should write about some foods that I like.

Postcards from Iraq

This is New York Times, on the recent event where American forces shot several Iraqis:

In Baghdad, American military helicopters fired at Iraqis who were scaling a burning American armored vehicle. It was unclear how many Iraqis were killed in the airstrike. At least one television journalist was confirmed dead, and photographs immediately after the strike showed a group of four men severely wounded or dead at the site. American military commanders said the helicopters were returning fire aimed at them from the ground.

Compare it to this description of the same events:

On Haifa Street, a main road that has long been under the control of Saddam loyalists, there were hours of gunfire during a US mission to capture 21 men the Iraqi Government described as terrorists.
An armoured vehicle was damaged by a car bomb. Five US soldiers were wounded in the explosion and in the operation to evacuate the crew.
Later, a crowd of Iraqis gathered around the burning vehicle. Some began dancing in celebration.
Tumeizi was describing the incident on camera when two helicopter gunships flew down and opened fire.
He was hit and doubled over, shouting: "I'm dying, I'm dying."

Guess which one is circulating all over the Arab world?

And here's another postcard from the alternate reality:

In the same context, one Islamic group threatened in a statement attributed to it on the Internet of killing the two Italian women hostages who are held in Iraq "by beheading" unless the Italian forces withdraw from Iraq within 24 hours.

The "Islamic Jihad group in Iraq" set a grace period of 24 hours for the withdrawal of the Italian forces from Iraq. The statement said "if we do not see the Italian troops withdrawing from the land of Iraq, the verdict of the God will be carried out "beheading."

So convenient that God speaks through this particular group and so very clearly. You see why I hate writing about Iraq despite its clear importance?
--------
A Postscript:
This is the reaction to the shooting of the journalist on the Free Republic forum (no, I will not link to them):

Nice, good hit on idiot terr perp loving journalist. A blasted to hell Islamfacist nazi reporter in the morning starts my day off right.

Just to remind us all that not all the hatred has gone to Iraq.

On Whales and Sex-Segregated Schools

The Women's Educational Equity Act has been refunded by our current government! So Bush is for women after all. Except that the funding is less than one half of what has been allocated to the Whaling Partnership Program which benefits a small number of people in Alaska and Hawaii. And except that a large chunk of the funds which used to be applied to gender equity will now be used to study sex-segregated education...

Molly Ivins in the most recent Mother Jones summarizes the sneaky war that Georgie Porgie has waged against women. Go and read it if you can. If you can't the children's nursery rhyme about Georgie Porgie captures the spirit well enough.

Will We Win this Election?

The "we" meaning the powers of good (borrowing the language from the other side here) and the "election" being the U.S. presidential one. The question is a serious one, and I want to try to answer it here from the point of view of a minor goddess.

The answer is that I have no idea. The powers of darkness are strong and getting ever stronger, and anybody who is willing to employ anything, simply anything, in the internal politics of a country is hard to beat. For most of us, politics has to do with the care of common affairs, but a few isolated souls think that politics is a game where the winner gets all, a game of greed and cruelty and lying and twisting an unethical pretzel into even more bends and reverses if it serves some point in the campaign. That's what we have in the other corner of the ring. So be prepared for many rounds and much cheating and things like stones in the boxing gloves. And be prepared to hear that it's our guy who had the stones and that he must have punched his own face. That's why there is all that blood.

Add to that the referees, the media, who are pretty much on the take and have already printed out the final victory certificates with the other guy's name.

So I don't know. On logical grounds, on ethical grounds, on rational grounds we should win easily. But these are not grounds much trodden here, so anything is possible. What is not possible is giving up. This is a match, however long, on which the shape of our world depends. It will determine what, if any, rights we all are going to have, and it will determine whether we will repeat some of the horrendous history of the human race. So the towel will not be thrown in, the match will not be declared as over until we win.

Or perhaps the sporting metaphors are wrong here. The job we have in front of us is more like getting an operation for a precancerous mole or for shoveling out the shit in the stables. Unpleasant, not something we'd want to do, but a job that needs to be done anyway. No choice about it. Either we do it this year, or the year after, or the year after. It's as simple as that. Some things are.

In Memory of 9/11

This is something I wrote about a month after September 11, 2001.

This is an autumn in a neglected garden. The earth has shifted on its axis, the sun has turned its gaze away for a moment and blood has rained on the earth. Gardens have been forgotten.

But nature is not only cruelty. It is also life and compassion and time moves on without blinking an eye. My garden has grown while I have been somewhere far away, not caring or caring too much, and when I return my tortured mind still finds respite in its depths, in its astonishing, contradictory jungle. The last roses dangle from their branches, below them the grass is covered with the inexplicable riches that nature gives the smallest rose petal, the faint memory of all that scent with its thousands of little memories about lips and skin and lily heads heavily leaning against the night still hovers in the crisper air. Bipolar wall flowers blossom in every crack and crevice, ignoring the wrong time of the year for this feast and rogue wood tobaccos that I didn't have the heart to weed out earlier now tower over me; their white flowers staring at me with concern, their enormous leaves whispering: "Are you all right?"

I am not all right. Someone I knew was weeded out young, will never come home, will never be all right again. But the garden is still the place where it seems possible that one day the world will heal even these wounds, that new life will grow out all this senseless death, too. Nature demands that things will be all right again, maybe not soon, maybe not for some time, but ultimately, spring will come again.

This does not seem possible. Winter will be endless this year, I fear. Violence has cast its seeds and these will breed more violence, more showers of hatred. Garden after garden must die or grow nothing but fear.

But nature doesn't listen to me. She has other plans, and maybe she knows better. Maybe.

I have planted spring bulbs today. Just in case. Just in case life returns.

Nature knew better, of course, but this is certainly a time I don't want to live again, ever.

Music

Music is a wonderful thing, they say. I wouldn't know. My ears are made largely to keep frames of sunglasses in place. But I like the vibrations.

I went out tonight for some vibrations, and had a very good time, despite the too-salty pizza and the too-small mint-chocolate-chip ice cream I consumed. The vibrations were excellent. Have you ever noticed how different types of music seem to vibrate most clearly in different energy gates of the body? Jazz, for example, vibrates in the pelvic region, mostly, while Gregorian chants vibrate in the forehead. Of course, most music is more complicated than the simple scenario I have proposed. Still, check to see what vibrates next time you listen to your favorite piece.

Despite being almost completely amusical, I do love Laurie Anderson's music. I hope that this is not an insult to her. I also like jazz, sort of, and Gregorian chants in the car, and I adore Charlie Parker and Nina Simone. But I have a lot of trouble with concerts because I hate to sit down for so long without having any reason for sitting there and then I get restless. This angers the people who have taken me to concerts and then they start yelling at me. So now I don't go to concerts unless I really have to, and then I spend the time making up stories in my head about the people sitting around me and what they are doing there. You know, like the white-haired man in front of me with the young woman is not a father-daughter pair, but the top agents of a famous underground spying organization trying to find a new way to brainwash people into voting neoconservative, or two traders in illegal drugs pretending to be a father-daughter pair because the police is looking for them and they have just realized that they in fact are a long-lost daughter and her errant father, and it's all too late because they are both criminals and their lives are ruined.
And so on.

The problem is when people afterwards want to talk about the music and I remember none of it. But 'awesome' or 'touching' or 'interesting' is usually enough. Still, it would be nice to be more musically inclined so that I could tell you what was good about tonight's vibrations. On the other hand, this weakness just shows that even goddesses are not perfect. Now, that's going to make you feel much better, isn't it?

Computer Surveillance Systems

My computer had one of these in the most recent sweep. Its produced by Amecisco, and it's called Amecisco Keylogger. Supposedly it records every key stroke from the attacked computer, including visits to chat groups and what is being said there.

I feel unreasonably flattered by this. I am going to write a long monologue about footrot next, and then I'm going to find a chat group for people who have a footrot fetish.

Framing in Politics

George Lakoff has interesting ideas on the reasons for the rise of the radical right-wingers to power in the United States. He thinks that the radical right is excellent in framing:

Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.
If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" — something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Framing is present in almost all political slogans that I can think of, and Lakoff is right that the Republicans have mastered this skill. This, in turn, has led the Democrats to fight a largely defensive battle withing the same frame; a struggle that is doomed to failure. Consider the conservative framing in the term "tax relief". Here's Lakoff on this term:

The phrase "Tax relief" began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for "relief." For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add "tax" to "relief" and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.
"Tax relief" has even been picked up by the Democrats. I was asked by the Democratic Caucus in their tax meetings to talk to them, and I told them about the problems of using tax relief. The candidates were on the road. Soon after, Joe Lieberman still used the phrase tax relief in a press conference. You see the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.

This quote is from an older interview with Lakoff and he points out that the Democratic usage of this term has now declined. But that is not really enough; the framing should be changed. For example, "paying your bills" or "sharing the common costs" or something cleverer but in the same vein would evoke a different frame about taxes.

And consider the most famous current term with framing issues: "the war on terror". This, according to Lakoff, is why the Republicans are controlling the issue of how to address terrorism:

You've said that progressives should never use the phrase "war on terror" — why?
There are two reasons for that. Let's start with "terror." Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the "terrorist." The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The "war on terror" is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.
Next, "war." How many terrorists are there — hundreds? Sure. Thousands? Maybe. Tens of thousands? Probably not. The point is, terrorists are actual people, and relatively small numbers of individuals, considering the size of our country and other countries. It's not a nation-state problem. War is a nation-state problem.

All this made me think about the framing that anti-feminists also employ so cleverly. "Feminazi" is a very good example. It picks up the beginning from the term "feminist", but then appends it to a term which has enormously obvious framing intentions: "nazi". The nazis were an authoritarian rule bent on death.

This framing casts feminism as an anti-freedom movement, a movement to control and to kill. It leaves out the struggles for equality and freedom for women that the initial term "feminist" might convey. This is quite a preposterous reframing of a term. Nevertheless, the reframing has been successful, perhaps beyond the most ambitious dreams of Rush Limbaugh, the inventor of feminazism.

I even think that the now slightly stale term "political correctness" might have been created by some clever conservative playing with frames. My guess is that he (I'm pretty sure that it was a he) started with "civil rights" and then sought for the closest synonyms for each term which would sort of say the same except negatively. Though in some ways p.c. doesn't fit well into the framing theory, in other ways it's an excellent example of it as it allows the frame to be whatever the listener picks. Thus, a rabid racist or sexist hears the term as containing all that crap about equality and fairness which can therefore be attacked by just piping up with p.c. accusations, whereas a conscience-stricken liberal hears in the term only the most extreme exaggerations of attempts to be sensitive to various group issues. Then both can agree that political correctness is really bad!

But what is really fascinating about political correctness is how very upside-down it turns the world. In reality, of course, what is politically correct is that which those who hold political power prefer. So in the United States to be p.c. should mean to be for the values of Christian fundamentalists and neoconservatives. Yet nobody calls them politically correct...

How to Make A Cake

I want to make a birthday cake for someone, and given that I'm not the Goddess of Cakes I e-mailed someone who is and asked her for a recipe that would make the socks turn around on the eaters' feet, but that would also be relatively easy for someone who isn't really at home in the kitchen.

This is the response I got, pretty much:

First, make a four-egg base as usual. Slice it in as many layers as needed. Make enough strong coffee to moisten all the slices. Fill the cake with crushed chocolate, whipped cream and layers of hard fudge. Cover the top with cream and the sides with the fudge. Rum can be added as a flavoring if desired."

It reminds me of those car repair guides which start:"First take out the engine." What is a four-egg base? Do the eggs get peeled first? How do you slice eggs like that, and how do they stay upright? Where's the flour in all this? How do you make fudge? Where do you add rum?

I sent a plea for help and clarification and got back a recipe for a four-egg base (it turns out to contain flour and sugar, too, and something called potato flour...) and a recipe for fudge (a lot of work). But then she tells me to bake the cake as usual. What is usual for cakes might not be usual for goddesses. I assume the cake goes in the oven but for how long and at what temperature?

And how do you slice a cake? I assume horizontally, but where can I find a knife long enough for that? Maybe I could use long wire to do that? Tie one end to the doorknob and saw with the other end?

But I will try this recipe, and if it turns out wonderful I will post a thorough and easy-to-follow set of instructions, too. Unless potato flour must be made by first growing potatoes and so on.

Does This Ring A Bell?

From William L. Shirer. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Pan Books, 1981:

"No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realised how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were."

And no, goddesses are not subject to Godwin's law!
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Thanks to Connecting Dots on Eschaton's comments threads.

Samira Bellil

She died far too young:

Samira Bellil, whose book recounting gang rape she suffered as a teenager in a tough Paris suburb put her in the avant-garde of a small movement fighting for French Muslim women's rights, has died of stomach cancer. She was 31.
She died Friday in Paris, according to her publisher Editions Denoel.
Bellil's 2002 autobiographical narrative, "Dans l'Enfer des Tournantes" (In the Hell of Gang Rape), explores the violence she endured during her childhood in a tough Parisian suburb, from drugs to gang rapes at the age of 13.
The book, written in the street language Bellil grew up speaking, was the final step in her fight to regain a sense of self-worth and quickly became a best seller.
Bellil herself was rejected and abused for bringing charges against her aggressors following the gang rape, thus breaking the law of silence that reigns in the high-rise zones where men and boys hold sway.
The publication gave France a rare firsthand account of the troubles faced by girls in the heavily immigrant suburbs that ring major French cities.
It also put Bellil in the forefront of a small movement fighting to improve the lot of Muslim women and girls trapped in what she called the "cultural shackles" of the suburbs.
Bellil was considered the "godmother" of the womens' rights group "Ni Putes Ni Soumises" (Neither Whores Nor Submissive.)

To the Dead Children

This is the song of the earth to all the children who have died in wars and acts of terrorism, or maybe a faint echo of it:

These are my children, the dead ones, the beloved: the ones covered in mud and dirt, the bloodied ones, the limbless ones, the ones who were scattered by bombs like crumbs thrown for the birds. These are my children: the burned ones, the raped ones, the starved ones, the buried ones. See how beautiful they all are, my beloved children.

I seek for them everywhere, I call for them and at nightfall I find them. I gather them to me and give them sleep. The night I turn into a silken shawl, the sky into a blue blanket. I weave cradles and nests out of my hair, and I find a place for each one of my children, however hurt and frightened.

My lap is wide enough for all of them and their pain, and I give them dreams of pine forests, of fresh streams in sunlight, of young foxes gambolling in a clearing. I give them dreams of peace and quiet, of stars and sailboats, of flowers and meadows. I give them dreams of snow and sun and sweetness. I give them what was taken away from them and when I cannot do that I give them oblivion and rest. And the wind sings a lullaby, gently, in all my tongues.

It is my milk that feeds all, and my tears that sate all thirst, and these children, my beloved, will never lack food or drink or a place to slumber in my lap or a peace that cannot be broken..

How Low Will They Go?

The wingnuts, that is. Well, this is the newest low from the mouth of Dick Cheney:

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

(By the way, 350 supporters! What's the matter with the Republican campaign? Not enough faithfuls or too many loyalty oaths to sign?)

The funny thing about this statement is that the terrorists struck on Cheney's watch and that there is evidence that suggests people in crucial places ignored the threat. So a careful reading of the comment might convert many voters to John Kerry. On the other hand, it is probably true that the risk of terrorism will be higher in the future, whether it is Bush or Kerry in the White House, as this administration has done nothing to prevent new terrorists from being created and might in fact be argued to have contributed to the next wave of terrorists by their misguided foreign policies.

But on the third hand, this is just the same message the wingnuts have been campaigning from the beginnning: "Be afraid. Be very, very afraid."
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Link via Eschaton.

The Glass Cliff?

British psychologists Alex Haslam and Michelle Ryan are the researchers in a study which found that women who break through the proverbial glass ceiling may find themselves teetering at the edge of a glass cliff. (All this glass is getting on my nerves; I fear that they might shatter. And yes, I know that I have used similar metaphors before, but I did it much better.)

The 'cliff' refers to their finding that firms, political parties and so on tend to nominate women to important positions when times are bad, when the job is seen as impossible to perform. According to Haslam, this is not only true for the first appointments of new, eager managers or politicians but a recurring problem for women and, he speculates, for racial and ethnic minorities as well.

The Haslam-Ryan study can be summarized as follows:

Prof Haslam and a colleague, Dr Michelle Ryan, compared the stock market performance of FTSE 100 companies with their appointment history.
The 19 that had appointed women to the board in the previous year had done worse than those whose appointments had been all male.
"But in all cases women had only been appointed after the company performance had slumped," Prof Haslam told the British Association science festival in Exeter yesterday.
"If everything had gone swimmingly, then they carried on with the old jobs for the boys."
A similar pattern emerged in a study of candidates for the Scottish parliamentary elections. Women were more likely to be nominated as candidates for harder to win seats.
The glass cliff also emerged in experiments in which 300 students were asked to pick a candidate for a fictional senior management post.
Given a man and woman with identical qualifications, students were far more likely to pick a female candidate than a male one if the company was doing badly.
The reason for the discrimination is unclear. Prof Haslam believes it could be explained by overt sexism - that men were handpicked for the good jobs, leaving women to take posts in failing companies.
More subtle forms of discrimination could be in play, he said. The predominantly male managers of companies were likely to recommend desirable jobs to their predominantly male friends, but give "poisoned chalice" jobs to those they did not know.
Another explanation was that women were perceived as being better at crisis management, he added.

See how we can't get rid of the glass? Now it's a poisoned chalice.
But the results are interesting and even suggestive. I have often wondered if Condie Rice wasn't one of those appointments, given that her background made her a pretty astonishing choice for advising about current security concerns. Her selection could have been seen as a win-win solution for the Republicans: if she fails it's because she's a woman and a member of a racial minority, if she succeeds, well, then the Republicans can take the credit for being smart in their choice and gender- and color-blind.

What is serious about all these cliffs and ceilings is their real impact on fairness and on productivity, of course. Note the way the correlation with poor performance of stocks and the appointment of women into positions of power can be distorted:

It was reported in 2003 that UK business had gone downhill in the previous year as the number of female directors on the boards of FTSE 100 companies had risen by 20%. A newspaper commentator said: "The triumphant march of women into the country's boardrooms has wreaked havoc on companies' performance and share prices."
Professor Haslam said: "What we found was that in all of those cases, women had only been appointed after company performance had slumped quite dramatically."

The problem here was that old tiresome assumption that correlation implies causality or that the order of the causality is obvious from the correlation. If the bad performance preceded the appointment of women as Haslam stated, then to argue that the 'triumphant march' (what framing!) of women has 'wreaked havoc' (what framing!) is lying. In fact,

Haslam also said: "The appointment of a woman director was not associated with a subsequent drop in company performance. Indeed companies that appointed a woman actually experienced a marked increase in share price after the appointment."

I think that the real glass cliff is in the tongues of some journalists and public commentators who never learn to appreciate basic statistics as well as the glib sounds that so easily slide out of their mouths.

The Decadent Left

This term is something writers like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens might use. It's not intended for general consumption but for the select few with the gastronomic tastebuds to appreciate its flavor in political discourse. Or so I surmise.

It would be fun to study this term from the point of view of an alien, and this is what I have done. The trick is to pretend that I don't know what decadent means (which turned out not to be much of a pretense at all), and to seek for its meaning in all the usual places.

I started with the Google. The impression Google gives on decadence is that it is a characteristic of kinky sex and chocolate gateaus. Only the third page gives a dictionary definition:

Noun 1. decadent - a person who has fallen into a decadent state (morally or artistically)
bad person - a person who does harm to others Adj. 1. decadent - marked by excessive self-indulgence and moral decay; "a decadent life of excessive money and no sense of responsibility"; "a group of effete self-professed intellectuals"

My Webster's Unabridged gives these synonyms for decadent:

corrupt, immoral, degenerate, debased, debauched, self-indulgent

It seems that the decadent left is an immoral, degenerate and debased left; that a decadent lefty is a person who does harm to others. This is strong language. But I doubt very much that most readers catch the intended meanings. The connections of decadence to chocolate cakes and exotic sex are just too strong in themselves.

When I see the term I think of old smoke-filled apartments with lofty ceilings and antique lace curtains covering the windows, Victorian furniture, bone-china tea cups erudite conversation carried out in languid voices. Perhaps there are small tarts with elaborate icing, expensive wine served in toothmugs, long rants about some revolutionary dead a hundred years. Somehow I can't imagine any kinky sex here but maybe I should try harder.

This may be an example of political sloganing where the framing has failed. Decadent sounds like a rather nice thing to be, on the whole, or at least an impotent thing as far as its politics are concerned. But more importantly, it makes me think of imaginary groups which have nothing to do with the real left.

A Labor Day Block Party

We have a very nice tradition in these parts of having all neighbors come together at the end of the summer for a block party. Everybody brings a dish or two, some lend their grills, some bring balloons and music, and the road is blocked off from traffic. And soon the street fills up with chairs and ballgames and children running to and fro with dogs and each other and adults standing eating and talking in large and small groups.

We had one these parties today and it was very successful! Nobody else even got near the chocolate ice-cream cake, though the side-effect was that I slept the rest of the day, and even got a little flegmatic before the party was over. This was why I sat down for a while just watching, and realized that the block party was like a big leap back in (imaginary?) history, to a real communal world where children could run free and take risks, where the parents could relax, knowing that many others watched over their children, where gossip and important information was equally exchanged, joys and griefs shared together with the food and the drink. I suspect that there were some Republicans there, but everybody was smiling and friendly. For one day, at least, we were indeed good neighbors.

That's what is going wrong with the public discourse in the United States. The atmosphere in the media is not that of friendly neighbors arguing over common matters but much more that of two armies negotiating a possible siegefire. The fault lies almost totally with the wingnuts who started this all with their slogans of culture wars, and trying to a be a good neighbor to someone who wants to raze down your house doesn't work. But I do wish we could try a little bit harder to build bridges across ideological chasms. For the other side are human, too, whatever else we sometimes imply.

More on Blogs

My recent political fervor has had some unpleasant side-effects. Like sleeplessness and devouring innocent bypassers. Also that I have been reading many more political blogs than usual, and commenting on quite a few of them.

Once again, this has brought me face to face with misogyny, even on the blogs that are supposed to be on our side. Why can't some people attack a female politician or a female journalist or the wife of a politican without discussing her breast size, her cunt, her general fuckability or the lack of it? What is it about this world that for some people being a woman is in itself a crime of a sort? A crime that then lends itself to various slurs, none of which can be isolated to apply to only the woman attacked. They apply to all women, unfortunately.

I'm the first person to admit that the wingnut women deserve criticism, but the criticism should be about the first part of the definition, 'wingnut', not about the second part of the definition: 'woman'.

Why is this so difficult?

Bush By Numbers

From this excellent article. A short quote:

1 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.

104 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.

101 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned missile defence.

65 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned weapons of mass destruction.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses.

73 Number of times that Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his three State of the Union addresses.

83 Number of times Bush mentioned Saddam, Iraq, or regime (as in change) in his three State of the Union addresses.

$1m Estimated value of a painting the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States and Bush family friend.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned Saudi Arabia in his three State of the Union addresses.

1,700 Percentage increase between 2001 and 2002 of Saudi Arabian spending on public relations in the United States.

79 Percentage of the 11 September hijackers who came from Saudi Arabia.

3 Number of 11 September hijackers whose entry visas came through special US-Saudi "Visa Express" programme.

140 Number of Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, evacuated from United States almost immediately after 11 September.

14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents assigned to track down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries where al-Qa'ida is active.

$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.

$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.

$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS's existing terrorism budget.

$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.

$5m Amount a 1996 federal commission was given to study legalised gambling.

7 Number of Arabic linguists fired by the US army between mid-August and mid-October 2002 for being gay.

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Thanks to rojopelo for the link.

It's All Emotion

My analysis of the Republican campaign has concluded that appealing to reason is so outdated. All that is required of a campaign is to cause the right emotions to surface. Never mind if they are not based on any facts at all. This worries me a lot, because if the Republicans succeed with this heinous plot it's pretty clear proof that democracy stinks.

The basic emotions the Republicans wanted to evoke were fear of terrorists, hatred of Democrats, especially Kerry, and a desire for a strong leader who views the Americans as ten-year olds needing an authoritarian father. And maybe they succeeded. Though the early polls were taken at a time when most Democrats were probably not paying attention to anything but the Labor Day weekend, and though there are some questions about the way the polls were conducted, they may show a post-convention bounce for Bush. Whether this will last is a question for the future. Maybe defreezing bin Laden is the next step in the emotional war of the right.

In any case, the Republican campaign asks the audience to leave their brains home. This I find very upsetting, not an emotional reaction that they intended. But then I won't vote for them so my upset doesn't matter.

Here are examples of the way fudging facts is done by the Republicans:

At last week's Republican convention, President Bush and Vice President Cheney repeatedly linked the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the war in Iraq, largely abandoning the rationale offered when the Bush administration invaded the Persian Gulf country.
Announcing the invasion on March 19, 2003, Bush said in a nationwide televised address that the United States "will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder." Two days earlier, Bush had asserted in another address to the nation, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
But no such weapons were found after the invasion, and the subject was only fleetingly mentioned from the podium in Madison Square Garden. Instead, the war on Iraq was presented as a part of a seamless thread that stemmed directly from the terrorism of the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have fought the terrorists across the earth -- not for pride, not for power, but because the lives of our citizens are at stake," Bush said, before listing Iraq along with the struggle against terrorist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

And:

The message of the week was: You know where Bush stands. You can't be sure about Kerry. But that headline also came with a misleading subhead: Bush is fighting the war against terrorism, and Kerry wouldn't. It was a theme that was pounded from the very start of the convention, and it depended on a sly conflation— the notion that the war in Iraq and the war against the 9/11 terrorists were one and the same. We heard far more about Bush in the World Trade Center rubble than we did about the U.S. in the Iraqi quagmire. And when Iraq was raised, it was done in a deceptive and simpleminded way. Even John McCain, who gave the most serious foreign policy speech of the week, presented a false choice: "Our choice [in Iraq] wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat."

You see what I mean? There is something very sad in watching a democracy shake and start crumbling by the use of such vicious and unethical tactics as simple lying and yelling louder and louder when one points out that the facts are missing. Never mind busing people in to Bush meetings, if it happens, here we are lying about the very blood and meat of the campaigns.

The Republicans have always appealed to the lowest common denominator, of course, and what's so worrying about it that it may just be working. According to Newsweek polls, 49% of Americans do believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 slaughter. And this is solely attributable to the Republican campaign to make it seem so. What are the conservative values nowadays that lying is regarded as a virtue?

In other political news, the wives of presidential candidates are once again judged. Theresa Kerry is seen as a potential negative for Kerry, while Laura Bush is all good news. This is another example of appealing to emotions, this time to those of the men who don't like gender equality of who fear their own wives, perhaps. Look, Laura is quiet as a mouse! A good traditional wife!

Why does it matter what the personalities of the candidates' wives are? After all, the candidates have been married to their respective spouses for some time, and coped just fine with that fact. Why would this suddenly change? Of course it doesn't, and it doesn't matter, but the point is to get people to vote with their lower animal minds, to focus on primal fears and desires, to ignore what is actually happening in this world and in their own lives. If this works it makes me very scared of living in this country. Just saying.