Krugman Predicts the Debate Winner

And I agree with his prediction:

Let's face it: whatever happens in Thursday's debate, cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner. This will reflect the political bias so evident during the party conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation.
But what will the print media do? Let's hope they don't do what they did four years ago.
Interviews with focus groups just after the first 2000 debate showed Al Gore with a slight edge. Post-debate analysis should have widened that edge. After all, during the debate, Mr. Bush told one whopper after another - about his budget plans, about his prescription drug proposal and more. The fact-checking in the next day's papers should have been devastating.
But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their "body language." After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore's sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush's lies. And even the fact-checking pieces "buried inside the newspaper" were, as Mr. Clymer delicately puts it, "constrained by an effort to balance one candidate's big mistakes" - that is, Mr. Bush's lies - "against the other's minor errors."
The result of this emphasis on the candidates' acting skills rather than their substance was that after a few days, Mr. Bush's defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory.

It's not necessarily the case that all of the so-called liberal media is biased in favor of Bush; some are, but others have this odd view of nonpartisanship which boils down to trying to make each party equally bad or good. Even when the facts favor one position over the other. The combined effect of Fox News -type bias plus the wishy-washiness of the rest will result in a victorious Bush, even if he says something really stupid or deceitful.

The interesting question is of course why hold the debates at all. Why not just declare Bush as the winner and get on with life?

I still hope that all this is excessively pessimistic...

What She Said

Morgaine has a new blog with this name about women bloggers. I am in the blogroll so she obviously has good taste and understanding. If you ever feel like there are no progressive female bloggers anywhere in this cyberspace, go to What She Said and pick randomly from the miles-long blogroll.

Not that this new blog will stop the periodic discussions about where all the women are in political blogging. It's far too fun to argue about it every three months or so. I particularly like the argument that women blog about people and men about issues, and that this is the reason why there are so few women blogging politics. If you actually check out what the Big Boys blog about, well, it's almost all about people: What Bush said. What Powell did. What Kerry plans. Whether Allawi has strings or not. Whether Rush has ever had sex. And so on. Come to think of it, I should blog more about people than issues. I keep whipping the issues to death, but maybe there is still some mileage to be had in talking about George and Laura and John and Theresa and whether their marriages are dysfunctional or not? Though the media seems to take care of that topic pretty thoroughly.

Virginity Testing and AIDS

South Africa's moral regeneration movement has decided to urge the return of virginity testing of teenage girls as a means to fight the spread of AIDS:

On Wednesday, South Africa's Deputy President Jacob Zuma, a member of President Thabo Mbeki's cabinet, visited the city of Umtata on the Eastern Cape and praised a group of about 40 young girls for agreeing to take virginity tests, according to several press reports.
His visit is part of a controversial campaign to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS and reduce the incidence of teen-age pregnancy through encouraging young girls to take these tests. Human rights groups have condemned the practice as a violation of human rights and a woman's dignity.
Speaking to a crowd of local residents, government officials and reporters, Zuma called a young girl's virginity her "family's treasure," and lamented what he called the erosion of traditional African family values. The current situation in South Africa, he said, is one "where more and more children are giving birth to other children while still dependent on their parents."
Virginity testing, or ukuhlola, is an ancient practice that is still common in parts of Africa. The normal procedure is for teens to lie down on mats while a female examiner checks to see if their hymens are intact.

There seem to be two ways of looking at this proposal. One argues that returning to older customs will reduce intercourse and therefore the spread of AIDS. For this idea to work, it must somehow make teenage girls able and willing to stay virgins in order to pass the test. The problem is that the teenage girls in South Africa may in general not have much power to 'just say no' to sex. South Africa has one of the highest rape rates in the whole world and the traditional values that are praised in this proposal don't include the values of self-determination for women. Also, it does smell of an attempt to shame these young teenagers in public.

The other way to look at the proposal is to note that it seems to earmark a supply of young women who are guaranteed not to have AIDS from prior sexual contact. This is the nastier way, and probably the more realistic one. After all, the proposal does nothing to check on men's behavior, so the lopsided approach is more likely to tell which teenagers might be good targets for some powerful man's sexual adventures.

The Foxy Ladies

This is not something Outfoxed covered (see my next post), but I was really struck by the looks of the Fox News female staff. They looked like something from another planet, perhaps the planet of Barbie Dolls, and in fact made the male staff look like a bunch of deformed monsters. Luckily, there weren't that many of the female type...

This casts serious doubt on the criteria that Fox News uses in hiring news presenters. I suspect that it would be pretty easy to find that their criteria for women cover requirements not expected to be met by male applicants.

Fox Hunting

It's being banned in the United Kingdom, but I went fox hunting last night by watching Outfoxed. A fun evening with lots of junk food, and I found a parking spot right away. I had a new spell for that and it was nice to see that it worked.

Outfoxed is a documentary on the way the Fox News has reshaped the concept of journalism and the idea of what is 'fair and balanced'. The documentary has been extensively discussed on the internet and elsewhere, so there wasn't that much new in terms of the contents for me, but it was fun to see O'Reilly ridiculed as he should be. It was also very disturbing to observe how he created a lie and then stuck to it for a period of several months. He is a very uncouth man.

The real message of the movie was in the first few segments which gave a synopsis of Rupert Murdoch's rise to power. He currently reaches the majority of human beings on this earth through his various networks. Think of a large, fat spider in the middle of a wide conservative web, pulling slightly on one string, adjusting another and doing slow rounds of corpse sucking. That's how his corporation came across to me.

Journalism is not really approved of in the Fox News network. Stories are preselected based on their effects on George Bush and the Republican party, and stories which don't cast these in a good light are not covered. Likewise, the bias to be introduced in the coverage is carefully pre-specified, and those journalists who fail to abide by it are chucked out. I have naturally no way of knowing if the same happens at other networks, too, but even if it doesn't this should make us all concerned.

Not because Fox News has a conservative bias, but because they pretend to be 'fairandbalanced'. To do both at the same time is lying. Consider the ways this is achieved: not only are stories picked carefully and presented in a certain light, but certain soundbites are repeated over and over again in order to cause the viewer to be brainwashed by them, and the so-called liberal commentators are carefully picked to be as conservative as possible, as meek and mousy as possible and as ineffective as possible.

In defense of Fox News, one could argue that the 'fairandbalanced' bit is only intended to apply to their news coverage, not to the many conservative shouting-and-kicking opinion programs like O'Reilly and Hannity and Colmes. I don't actually believe that you can embed one tiny pearl of unbiasedness in the middle of the pigsty and then pretend that it lights up the whole enterprise, but in any case this is not what Fox News is doing. Their news programs are biased, too, not just quite as loudly and openly as the yelling matches that go for punditry on Fox News.

What I don't understand is why any liberal would voluntarily participate in the O'Reilly type of entertainment for the wingnuts. The game is rigged from the beginning and you can never get your point out at all. It must be money that is making some so willing to participate in their own torture.

I also don't understand why Fox News never has real lefties on. Their idea of a liberal is someone who has once whispered that maybe not exactly everything the government does is based on direct orders from the Devil. I also don't understand why Fox News is so scared of liberals who are good at yelling-and-kicking. Well, I do understand, but if they really wanted to be 'fairandbalanced' they'd give us better matches to watch.

Rapturous News

From the mouth of Jerry Falwell:

Falwell: GOP controlled by evangelical Christians now
WASHINGTON - The Rev. Jerry Falwell boasted Friday that evangelical Christians, after nearly 25 years of increasing political activism, control the Republican Party and the fate of President Bush in the November election.
"The Republican Party does not have the head count to elect a president without the support of religious conservatives," Falwell said at an election training conference of the Christian Coalition.

We knew this, of course. This is the group that is behind the current administration policies with respect to anything that has to do with women's health and their fertility choices. They also have their own reasons for wanting to have continuous warfare in the Middle East. But they're not calling the shots. That's the boys with the wallets.

BOO!

A Quiz for a Lazy Saturday

See how many of these you can answer correctly. The answers are in the first comments below the post.

How Many Of These Do You Know?

1) How long did the Hundred Years War last?

2) Which country makes Panama hats?

3) From which animal do we get catgut?

4) In which month would the Russians celebrate the October Revolution?

5) What is a camel's hair brush made of?

6) The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?

7) What was King George V's first name?

8) What color is a purple finch?

9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?

10) What is the color of the black box in a commercial airplane?

Rumsfeld's Misuse of Statistics

Rumsfeld on Friday:

We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What's the difference? We just didn't see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night. It happens here in this city, in every major city in the world. Across Europe, across the Middle East, people are being killed. People do bad things to each other.

What's the difference? Let's see:

In 2000, the United States had a homicide rate of 6.1 per 100,000 people. (I chose 2000, to be nice to Rumsfeld, 2001 is higher). If this same homicide rate is applied to Iraq, then given a population of roughly 25 million, we'd expect Iraqis to have approximately 1,525 violent deaths in a one-year period. Though data on Iraqi civilian deaths is hard to obtain, one study that covered only Baghdad and three provinces out of twenty-one counted the number of violent deaths as at least 5,558 from May 2003 to May 2004. In other words, the risk of violent death for Iraqi civilians is almost four time as high as the risk of violent death in the United States, even when we use an estimate of Iraqi deaths that is obviously an enormous understatement. Some sources estimate the Iraqi civilian deaths during the same time period as 10,000, which would make Iraq more than six times as dangerous as the U.S..

These calculations are not meant to be taken as precise for obvious reasons (and for the fact that I can't verify that the U.S. homicide figure actually covers all violent deaths in the country), but they point out that Rumsfeld should eat his hat for saying such stupid things. If he has a hat.
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Thanks for the original link to Atrios.

Women's Rights in Iran

The are not faring well, of course:

Iran's new parliament, elected last February, is working to place more restrictions on women rather than expand reforms carried out under President Mohammad Khatami. According to the New York Times, the 290-member Parliament, that includes only twelve women, rejected calls made by previous reformers in the Parliament to expand inheritance rights for women and for Iran to adopt the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In addition, the Parliament rejected earlier efforts to include gender equality as goal for the next four years, reports the New York Times.

The new parliament is instead imposing more restrictions on women including segregating men and women at universities. However, a leading political scientist in Iran asserted that "the general trend in this country is moving towards reforms. These restrictions are like putting a little stone in front of a huge storm that is going for reform."

Not unexpected. I find the concept of sex-segregation fascinating. So many conservative ideologies push it, and the usual argument the conservatives make for it is to guarantee the absence of sexual mayhem in the society. Given that integrated societies can function fairly well without any such evident mayhem, something else is also hiding in the subconscious layer of the minds of segregation supporters. Divide et impera, perhaps? Guarantee that men and women don't learn to know each other as human beings? Make it easier to control women in an isolated group?

Who knows. But considering the fact that none of the pro-segregationists actually want real segregation, i.e., economies where women have their own institutions and power over them, I suspect that the control of women as an isolated group is an important basic reason for the yearnings towards a society where women are invisible in public.

On Squirrel Wheels

I have a wheelbarrow upended against the back garden fence. Its wooden handles point straight up. The wheelbarrow is there because I'm lazy, but today I found other rewards for that negligence: A squirrel was busily gnawing away at the wheelbarrow handles. When it managed to dislodge a piece, it ran up the fence, jumped into a tall tree on the other side and disappeared high up into its canopy. After a few minutes it came back and repeated this odd exercize.

What was the squirrel doing? Rebuilding the nest with really high-quality wood? Trying to make sure that I get splinters next time I invade its realm? Or was it addicted to the varnish on the handles?

I love this world. I love the squirrels doing inexplicable things, the trees that give the squirrels a harbor and the stones on the ground next to the wheelbarrow. I love the mountains and the oceans and the ponds and the frogs in the ponds and even the little insects that jump up and down on the surface of the water. I even love human beings and many of the inexplicable things they do.

That is why I keep writing, in my pretty ineffective way, on those of the things that humans do which are neither inexplicable nor good. Because some of them will hurt the squirrel and the tree and the stones and so on, all the way down the line to then return a full circle to human beings.

Silence in Schools?

Let's hope that this is as unrealistic and impossible as it sounds to any sane person:

The U.S. House of Representatives is now considering legislation that would establish an advisory board to study and regulate what is taught at American universities. This intrusion into higher education is not only unjust; it is antithetical to all values attributed to honest debate and intellectual freedom.

House Resolution 3077, titled the International Studies in Education Act, is sponsored by Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., and is up for a vote later this month. Should the legislation pass, an advisory board will help monitor whether bias is found in certain teaching methods. The sponsors and supporters claim to support academic freedom, arguing that this advisory board will help ensure all sides are heard in the classroom and that bias will be eliminated.

While bias in the classroom can be detrimental to education, an advisory board could lead to more problems than it solves. Professor Mark Tessler, who teaches several political science courses at the university, makes a valid point when he worries that the bill's provisions will be exploited by "people with political agendas." This fear is well justified, as the board will be appointed by political figures: members of Congress, the secretary of education and national security officials.

Furthermore, while eliminating professor-induced bias, the bill might codify governmental bias. Because the board will have the power to defund international studies programs, teachers and faculty will be pressured into teaching the government-approved lessons.

This proposed bill is aimed at international studies, but if it passes and doesn't arouse a lot of opposition, more similar bills would be likely. I suspect that Women's Studies would be the first thing to go then, or at least the second after Gay and Lesbian Studies because they are not what the wingnuts want to see taught. Neither would they want courses on the consequences of colonialism or courses that critically look at the impact of religions. I'm also wondering how the Holocaust would be taught. Would there have to be an equal number of readings that say it never happened? Read the whole article. It's very scary, but I hope that this is one of those proposed laws that will never be heard about again. If not, you better start memorizing your favorite books.
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Thanks to wyzardess for the link.
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Later:

Here is another take on the proposed bill:

American scholars are alarmed by a controversial education bill that would increase government monitoring of federally funded programs in international studies at colleges and universities. Backers of the bill say it will help restore balance to Middle East studies programs, which they say are overly critical of Israel and of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Opponents say the bill could lead to intrusive investigations of faculty and will undermine the credibility of American scholarship.
Known as HR 3077, the International Studies in Education Act, the legislation reauthorizes funding for international studies. Its most controversial provision calls for the establishment of an advisory board comprised of seven government appointees: one each chosen by the majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress and three selected by the Secretary of Education, two of whom represent agencies responsible for national security. The proposed board would have the authority "to study, monitor, apprise and evaluate a sample of activities" to ensure that programs represent "diverse perspectives."
Although the legislation was born out of the polarized debate about Middle East studies, it will apply to a variety of other academic programs related to international studies, including the study and research of modern languages, area studies and anthropology.

(Bolds mine)

Whatever the initial impetus for this proposed bill, it would provide a terrible precedent, I believe. Government control over the materials that are being taught in higher education is not the way to go if we wish to live in a country where creativity and freedom of expression are valued.

Bush in the U.N. and the Rose Garden

This is late on the U.N. speech, of course, but I'm a full-time goddess, not a full-time blogger. And the snakes have been needy recently.

In any case, Bush gave a speech at the United Nations, an institution that he would like to see razed down as impotent, unnecessary and anti-American. It was an interesting performance, an attempt at a statesmanly delivery of snarky barbs.

This is what the European newspapers thought about it:

The editorial cartoon in the Times of London newspaper today was derisive: the first panel has President Bush telling the United Nations General Assembly, "Friends, our policy in Iraq is directed solely towards a successful election."
The second panel has him saying which election: "Mine."
European newspapers, including some that supported the American military campaign in Iraq, were largely critical of Mr. Bush's address on Tuesday to the United Nations.
The Financial Times contended in its lead editorial that the Bush administration "systematically refused to engage with what actually has happened in Iraq" namely, in its view, that American policy "mistakes" have "handed the initiative to jihadi terrorists" who "now have a new base from which to challenge the West and moderate Islam."

Other papers echoed these feelings:

The left-leaning Independent newspaper carried an editorial cartoon of Osama bin Laden putting up a Bush campaign poster saying "4 More Years" on a shell-pocked bit of masonry in Iraq. The cartoon seemed to be inspired by a diplomatic spat over remarks attributed to the British ambassador to Rome, Sir Ivor Roberts. After a private discussion on policy that was deemed to be off the record, Sir Ivor was quoted by an Italian newspaper as saying that Mr. Bush had become "the best recruiting sergeant" for Al Qaeda.

My favorite of all is the quote from the French Liberation which states that Bush "showed that slightly autistic self-satisfaction remains the dominant tendency of American power."

Bush would never be elected if the whole world could vote. Which makes me wonder why so many Americans (wingnuts, anyway) are either unaware of this fact or assume that it proves Bush's strong leadership skills or something. Don't they wonder what makes those funny foreigners think differently? Probably not.

At a more recent press conference in the Rose Garden Bush and his long-lost twin, Allawi, had astonishingly similar views on the events in Iraq. As one journalist commented on the radio, the press conference couldn't have been more successful if it had been staged by the Republican presidential campaign...

A Presidential Candidate Quiz

This quiz is not too bad. It serves to clarify where you stand compared to the candidates in several fields. I'm slightly left of Kerry. Which makes me a right-winger in Europe, of course.

The Woman Question

Let me begin this discussion about who American women are going to vote for by stating that almost nothing angers me as much as the treatment of women voters as some weird, alien breed, possibly mammal; a breed that must be analyzed apart from the breed voters, a breed that can mostly be ignored except for a few obvious leftovers that are thrown to the hungry hordes of these exotic creatures at the end of campaign speeches: W stands for women!!! Kerry stands for choice!!! Look at these cute babies!!!

Now why would this common journalistic practice anger me? Could it have anything to do with the fact that women are the majority of the voters in this country, yet so invisible, so marginal that what they want from the government is only discussed when there is nothing else of interest to discuss or when the polls appear to suggest that this inexplicably mysterious group has suddenly and unexpectedly veered away from the path that has been marked for them?

Then the analysts get cracking with their statistical software programs and blunt pencils, coining new and unenlightening terms such as 'the soccer mums' or now 'the security moms', or start trying to find similar descriptions of single women. As if we don't live in a fairly integrated society with lots of women everywhere you look, pretty much.

Gah. Enough ranting. The New York Times (which is herself viewed as a woman, by the way) has an article about the possibility that women, or rather, married women, are no longer supporting Kerry as they are supposed to but appear to intend to vote for Bush, the man who has the W that doesn't stand for women unless 'women' is sort of like spare ribs. This is what NYT says:

In the last few weeks, Kerry campaign officials have been nervously eyeing polls that show an erosion of the senator's support among women, one of the Democratic Party's most reliable constituencies. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last week, women who are registered to vote were more likely to say they would vote for Mr. Bush than for Mr. Kerry, with 48 percent favoring Mr. Bush and 43 percent favoring Mr. Kerry.
In 2000, 54 percent of women voted for Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, while 43 percent voted for Mr. Bush.
Democratic and Republican pollsters say the reason for the change this year is that an issue Mr. Bush had initially pitched as part of an overall message - which candidate would be best able to protect the United States from terrorists - has become particularly compelling for women. Several said that a confluence of two events - a Republican convention that was loaded with provocative scenes of the Sept. 11 tragedy, and a terrorist attack on children in Russia - had helped recast the electoral dynamic among this critical group in a way that created a new challenge for the Kerry camp.

So now we are told that men don't really worry about their children being killed by terrorists, but women do? Pardon me if I disbelieve that. Or that women react emotionally to the 9/11 events but men don't? Pardon me if I disbelieve that, too. I also don't believe that feeling emotions makes one unable to think cogently.

May I also add that Kerry has offered nothing specifically for women voters in his speeches. You need to go to his website to find what his campaign stands for in this respect, and I doubt that many women do that. In short, Kerry has taken women for granted. This is nothing new in American politics, of course.

How about reversing the sex roles in this study? Why do men go for Bush in larger numbers than for Kerry? Is it because they are gung-ho about violence and don't care if some children get killed? Or could it be, just possibly, that men and women have rather similar reasons for choosing whom to vote for? Including, of course, ignorance of the actual issues in the elections. This is what the Kerry campaign should focus on, not some miraculous new term to cover all those mysterious female choices.

Bad Lusty Poetry

This is a piece of eternal art still in the making. It just popped out of my head as it is, just like Athena supposedly popped out of Zeus' head. That teaches us all a lesson, so if you can think of any improvements please let me know!

I saw his back
and my world went bust
and flaming hot
and pure and cold
with unrepentant lust:
those lips, those hips, those fingertips...

(Please help me Goddess
to keep my cool.
Don't let him think
that I'm a fool.)

He turned around
and my lust went dead
"I vote for Bush"
his t-shirt said
"with abstinence in bed".

(Oh, thank you Goddess
for saving me
from something worse
than virginity!)

The Conscience Clause Revisited

Since July 2004, health care workers in the state of Mississippi can refuse to perform almost all types of health care services if they have moral or religious grounds for this refusal. Something similar has cleared the U.S. House of Representatives last week:

[It] would prohibit local, state or federal authorities from requiring any institution or health care professional to provide abortions, pay for them, or make abortion-related referrals, even in cases of rape or medical emergency.

(Bolds mine)

It's not clear what the Senate will do about this sneaked-in provision, but we should be on the alert.

The well-being of the patients is clearly at risk here. Notice that the provision would allow the health care professionals not to refer a patient in dire need to another provider, for example. This is blatant withholding of information.

I'm so furious that my attempts to write a detailed critique of this crap are futile. Read the article.

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.
---------------
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?
----
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?
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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?