The Global Test

The current wingnut talking point based on the first debate is Kerry's comment about the global test. Here's Kerry in the debate:

No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.
But if and when you do it, Jim [Lehrer, the debate moderator], you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

According to Bush, this means that Kerry "would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions." Ok. That's how you distort your opponent's comments, and this is nothing new in politics. But here's how the media has reported on the two interpretations of what "a global test" means:

In an October 3 Washington Post article , reporter Dan Balz reported that "Bush has seized on a statement the Massachusetts Democrat made in the debate that U.S. decisions to launch military action needed to meet a 'global test' of acceptability among major allies, and the campaign launched a new TV ad on the same theme." While Balz noted that "Kerry immediately responded with an ad describing the charge as a willful distortion of Kerry's position," he failed to explain how the ad was a distortion.
On the October 3 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, National Review editor Kate O'Beirne summarized the Bush campaign's depiction of Kerry's statement and described a new Bush-Cheney campaign ad based on that depiction. While host Tim Russert noted that "the Kerry campaign is on with a rebuttal saying he's lying about the debate," Russert, like Balz, neglected to point out how the ad is a distortion of Kerry's statement.
New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney, in an October 3 article , reported merely on "Mr. Kerry's suggestion in the debate that he might not engage in a pre-emptive war without putting it to a 'global test.'"
An October 3 article in the Chicago Tribune, by national correspondents Mark Silva and Jill Zuckman, reported only Bush's version of Kerry's statement: "Bush honed his post-debate assault with a new label Saturday for Kerry's suggestion that the United States meet a "global test" before deploying military forces pre-emptively."
On the October 3 edition of CNN Sunday Morning, CNN anchor Drew Griffin misrepresented Kerry's statement while reporting Bush's distorted attack: "At a campaign stop in Ohio he [Bush] brought up a Kerry comment from their first debate, when Kerry said any preemptive strike by the U.S. should pass a global test. The president says that's not the way to go."
During the "Talking Points Memo" segment on the October 1 edition of FOX News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly played the video of Kerry's statement from the debate, presenting it in its proper context. However, immediately following the video clip, O'Reilly asserted that Bush "pounced on Mr. Kerry's error, and he's right." O'Reilly then echoed Bush's mischaracterization of Kerry's statement, saying, "Most Americans don't want a global litmus test when our lives are at stake."
Bill O'Reilly was not the only FOX News Channel host to refer to Kerry's statement as an error. On the October 3 edition of FOX Broadcasting Company's FOX News Sunday, Brit Hume mirrored Bush campaign senior adviser Karl Rove's assessment that Kerry's remark was "very big" and "a blunder." The "'global test' phrase was -- may turn out, when we look back on this later, to have been the gaffe of the night, if there was one," Hume said.

Unbiased and objective? Or biased and lazy? You decide, as the Fox News likes to say.

My next post will offer Democrats some similar talking points. They have the advantage of actually being rather bad cases of the Bush foot-in-the-mouth disease.

Deep Thoughts for the Day

All of these are based on the words of George Bush. Sort of.

1. It's hard freedom to work mixed messages.
2. Mixed freedom works hard messages.
3. Messages of freedom work hard mixed flip-flops.

Something Different for Sunday

This is a piece I wrote some time ago. The idea is that the woman in the story is talking to her own image in the mirror. The usual warnings about taking self-defence advice from people like me apply.

How Do You Make A Fist?

How do you make a fist? What would you do if someone choked you from behind? Are you always doomed to be the prey for the silent hunters of the night?

So you were brought up to be a good girl, a little ray of sunshine in this world of shadows. You treasure the fashionable frailty of your arms, the elegant arch of your tiny foot in the high-heeled shoe. You were a good student and learned that all this is good. You learned that you are weak, in need of protection, that no woman can defend herself against the evils of this world. Your goodness was the only cloak that covered you.

It isn't enough. You sit inside at night and watch the dark windows. What moves behind the streetlights which never seem to light anything? What rustles in the bushes by your door? How many locks do you need to keep the disquiet at bay?

We are all weak, but you have thrown away what strength you had. You have become prey, carefully plucking out anger, ignoring the rage that lives below your heart, letting the fear paralyze every cell in your body.

But you have a body for other purposes, legs to carry you away, arms to lift, eyes to observe, ears to listen. You can smell danger, taste it in the air. Your body wants to take the hot rage and coax it into a fire which will keep you warm, keep you safer. Your body wants to be strong and fast and good.

So how do you make a fist? You don't know? Go and find out. Never mind if you are thirty-five or sixty-five and afraid that people will laugh at your ignorance. You can learn it. Then learn how to use it. Think of all the soft, frightened places of your body: the eyes, the nose, the temples, the curve of your lips, the open neck. These are the places the hunters also have and these are your targets.

Learn to kick. If you love to dance you'll love to kick. You can learn the dances of death if you need to. It doesn't make you a hunter. Go and find out. You won't master them overnight but you will master them. Learn to be the one who leads in this dance and you'll sleep better, walk lighter, dance longer.

You don't believe this. Your education has prepared you well for the life of a prey. You believe nothing you do could ever work, could ever help. You have never studied the weapons of your body, the power of your rage; yet you are convinced of their failings. Go and find out. Seek the teachers of these arts. You'll be astonished.

You must learn to fight dirty. This can save your life one day. You can still be a good girl, only now a good girl who fights dirty. Dirty means smart. It means finding the weaknesses in the hunter who has you in his maws and attacking them fast. Dirty means staying alive, and staying alive is good.

All this will take time. The more time you put into studying your body as a weapon the more likely it is to buy you more time one day. But even a few moments of study is better than nothing. Kindle the fire in your stomach. It will melt away the frozen paralysis of your fear.

To conquer your fear you must enter it. What is it that you fear the most? Imagine it as if in a movie. Then rewind the tape and go back, step by step, asking "What should I do here?", "And here?". Add your rage, the moves of your body fighting for you. Edit until the story ends in your victory. Then make it even better. Keep working on your fears until you know that you are no longer the rabbit frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car.

Find out what you need to stay safer. If you feel weak make yourself stronger. If you feel slow practise and you'll get faster. Learn to plan, to anticipate. Stay present when in dangerous places. Know where the exits are, where safety lies. Choose your company with care.

If you do this you'll find the fear shrinking, almost disappearing. Only what is common to all people will stay. Your body will be freed to live as it was meant to, your mind will have some peace. This is the first fight your new skills have won you, and if you are lucky, it might be the only one you ever need to win. This alone is worth all your hard work.

Look at yourself in the mirror, now. Can you see the power uncoiling? Doesn't it look good on you? You look like someone who knows how to take care of herself. You look like someone who knows how to make a fist.

Cheney's Voting Record

Last July Dick Cheney said this about Kerry's voting record:

"On these and a whole host of values, John Kerry's votes and statements over the decades that he's been in office put him on the left, out of the mainstream, and out of touch with the conservative values of the heartland,"

And how does the nutcracker-jaw vote himself? Here's how:

He opposed federal funding for abortions -- with no exceptions in the case of rape or incest.
He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment for women, along with 146 other members of Congress in 1983.
On Education, he consistently opposed funding of Head Start and voted against creating the Department of Education.
Cheney was raised in Wyoming and opposes, as many Westerners do, gun control limits.
He was one of just 21 members of Congress, in December of 1985, to vote against a ban on armor piercing bullets -- called cop killer bullets.
Three years later he was one of only four members of the House voting against a ban on plastic guns that could slip through airport security machines undetected. The National Rifle Association did not oppose this ban.
Also in 1988, Cheney voted to scrap a proposed national seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases.
On the environment, Cheney opposed refunding the Clean Water Act. He voted to postpone sanctions slapped on air polluters that failed to meet pollution standards.
And he voted against legislation to require oil, chemical and other industries from making public records of emissions known to cause cancer, birth defects and other chronic diseases.
Dick Cheney consistently voted to raise military spending. He also supported aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, even after a moratorium on funding was passed.

Is this how the conservative values of the heartland translate? I don't think so. I think that our Dick is a wingnut.

A Reminder

I now also blog on the American Street on Saturdays. If you want more politics, check out my most recent sermon there. It's about security moms, or rather about the new meme that there is such a thing as women who are swing-voters but now lean towards Bush because he's seen as such a macho-man. It's all a puff of foul-smelling air from some wingnut's nostrils, as you might have guessed.

Christine on ms. musings does a very good job on this topic, and she asks for suggestions about new demographic groups for the election pundits to talk about. I like "war-thirsty wingnuts" or maybe "sundry fundies". Also "security blankets" for those people who have decided to close their eyes and brains against any evidence that might sway them from walking straight off the roof after our dear leader.

Mmmmmm!

The cake was a great success! Sorry for no picture, but it's all eaten up already. I had a few hairy bits during the preparation (the fudge hardened to a giant lollypop, the cake sank in the middle in the oven and the bottom half fell on the floor after I took it out of the oven..), but the result was brilliant and the taste is out of this world. Trust me. This is a parable for Kerry's campaign, its initial difficulties and other troubles en route to the final shining victory!

Here's the recipe:

Sweet Death

Ingredients:
4 eggs
2/3 cups white sugar
3/4 cups (a little over) pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

1 and 1/3 cups whipping (heavy) cream
1 Marabou bar or the equivalent amount of milk chocolate with almonds (four ounces is plenty)
3/4 cups dark brown sugar
2/3 cups of very strong coffee
1/2 tablespoon of butter
a handful of fine breadcrumbs (or use flour in an emergency)
oven tin of suitable size
large knife
hammer
first aid kit


Instructions:
1. Butter the oven tin and scatter breadcrumbs all over it. (Don't butter and crumb the outside!)
2. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. Beat together the eggs (only the insides!) and the white sugar until the result is very light yellow and leaves a mound for a few moments when you drop it from the beater blades.
4. Mix together the flour and the baking powder. Sieve it (through a sieve) into the egg-sugar mixture. Fold in gently (so as not to deflate the whole thing.
5. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 30-40 minutes or until the sides of the cake come apart from the sides of the tin and a match stuck into the cake (the wrong end in) comes out clean.
6. Take the cake out of oven and upend it on something clean. (Hope that it doesn't stick to the tin and then fall on the floor when vigorously shaken. If it does, piece it back together like a jigsaw puzzle.)
7. Prepare the chocolate filling: Put the chocolate bar inside a clean dishtowel or pillowcase. Take the hammer and have at the poor chocolate until the result is in nice chunks.
8. Make the coffee and let it cool.
9. Prepare the fudgey filling/icing: In a small saucepan mix together 3/4 cups of cream and the brown sugar. Cook over low heat until the mixture thickens. Add a tablespoon of butter and stir it in. (Do NOT refrigerate at this stage or you get a large lollypop!)
10. Whip up the remaining cream into a foamy stage that will stay on the cake.
11. Assemble the cake: First find your longest knife and slit the cake into two layers. (Careful with your fingers here!) Separate the layers and dribble half of the cold coffee on each. Decide which layer is the bottom this time, and cover the bottom layer with about half of the fudge sauce. Then smear about a quarter of the whipped cream over the sauce. Sprinkle half of the chocolate lumps over that. Then top the whole mess with the top layer of the cake. Cover that one with the rest of the fudge sauce. Then cover EVERYTHING with the remaining whipped cream and scatter the rest of the chocolate over the lot. Refrigerate for a few hours to make all the flavors merge into one unforgettable taste orgasm.

Meanwhile, in the real world

Today is the Cake Day! First I need to go shopping for eggs, flour, sugar, butter, cream, brown sugar, chocolate and coffee. Then I need to turn the kitchen upside down and cover it with various gooey liquids and fluffy powders. I need to find the manual for the electric beater and a ruler to measure how large my oven tins are.

I'm looking forward to this a lot. Probably best to wear something like a painter's overall? And I need to cover the dogs with some tarps.

Creativity is so fun! You never know what comes out of all the activity, but the experience is what really matters.

If you don't hear from me soon I probably put myself in the oven by accident. It's all for a very good cause, though.

The October Surprise

Karl Rove says that he has a few ready for the Kerry campaign:

President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, said Wednesday that the Bush-Cheney campaign is planning some October "surprises" for challengers John Kerry and John Edwards.

"We've got a couple of surprises that we intend to spring," Rove told ABC radio host Sean Hannity while explaining that he intends to wage an aggressive campaign no matter what the polls show. "It's 34 days [till the election] and that's a long time in politics, and when you get complacent you lose," the top White House adviser said.

We all know what one of those surprises might be. It starts with the letter "O" and might be frozen. The others are probably similar. Maybe Rove will stage a situation where Bush can save the life of a small child? Or there could be a group hug of war widows by the president who finds that loving them is hard work? Just kidding.

But be prepared: it's going to be something smelly, given that this is from our Karl.
-----
Original link via Kevin Hayden.

A Must-Read

This article in Media Matters for America is a very good one. It compares the pre-debate and post-debate spins and shows how the events are twisted so that they cannot benefit Kerry's campaign.

For a while there I was actually feeling gentle vibes of love towards all and sundry, even the pundits, but now I'm back to my normal state of cynical health.

Not to Rain on the Parade, But

It's good to remember that the debates don't necessarily help in determining how Americans might vote. And there is something a little sad in a country of this size ending up with two candidates who are both men and who are both white and who both have lots of money and who both went to Yale and belonged to the same secret society there as our two options for the president.

We should really try to do better in the future. Maybe overhauling the two-party system would be the first thing to work on? The countries with proportional representation and multiparty systems do a lot better in having both women and men and people of different ethnic origins in their parliaments.

But for now I'm glad for the pitiful fact that we have two (two!) candidates to choose from two (two!) parties.

Tiptoeing in Violets

This is allowed for one day. Everything looks so bright this morning! The sun kisses my eyelids and the snakes are dancing in the garden. It's good to be alive!

Tomorrow is soon enough for reality. But if you need to get back to the fight sooner than that, read this post about the aging Supreme Court and why it's so very important to assure that Bush is not back for another four years. Other reasons abound, of course, some of them more urgent and frightening, but the long-term effects of a fundie rule are not to be underestimated for anybody whose civil rights depend at least partially on laws of the country.

If you're not in the mood for anything that serious yet, Amanda is very funny about the G-spots here...

Putting on the Leash

This is a quote from the first debate:

Mr. Kerry Well, first of all, I appreciate enormously the personal comments the president just made, and I share them with him. I think only if you've - if you're doing this, and he's done it more than I have in terms of the presidency, can you begin to get a sense of what it means to your families. And it's tough. And so I acknowledge - his daughters, I've watched them, I've chuckled a few times at some of their comments. And -
Mr. Bush Trying to put a leash on them.
Mr. Kerry Well, I know - I've learned not to do that. And I have great respect and admiration for his wife. I think she's a terrific person -
Mr. Bush Thank you.

I'm sure that Bush was trying to be funny with his leash comment, but it might backfire pretty badly. For one thing, it reminds us of the torture scandal in Iraq, what with a leash being used in that one, too. For another, most young women don't want their fathers to put them on leash. I wouldn't, anyway.

More on the debate

Seriously, Kerry was a much better debater. His arguments were simple and clear and based on facts. He responded well and managed to make several important soundbites. He skated gracefully on the thin ice of fighting against his opponent while respecting the U.S. president. He brought out all his main points and he made Bush's strategies look as unthought as they are.

Bush, on the other hand, was very good at repeating the same brainwashing messages all over again, not giving much data at all (which is regarded as an advantage here) and quite often falling back on saying nothing much at all.

It would have been quite painful to watch if this had been a debate at a university or some other such place. Given the mainstream media's noticeable conservative bias, though, we are going to be told that the debate was at least a draw if not an outright win for Bush. And Kerry's ears looked too white.

The Shorter Debate

Kerry: blablablabla I'll get the job done blablabla.
Bush: blablablabla freedom blabla hard work blabla clear messages blablabla.
Kerry: blablablabla He doesn't get the job done blablablablabla.
Bush: blablablablabla freedom blablabla hard work blabla mixed messsages from Kerry blablabla
Kerry: blablablabla I'll get the job done blablaba.
Bush: blablabla freedom ha-a-ard blablabla.

Actually, Kerry won hands down, but that was pretty expected, really. He's intelligent and articulate and knows stuff. Bush kept saying the same brainwashing slogans over and over and showed that he doesn't understand anything about Korea.

But of course the media pundits will decide that Bush won. No, actually, they seem to declare it a draw. After all, they have far too much invested in Bush.

Campaigning for Women's Votes

This appears to consist of scaring women, then making up a fun category called "security moms", and then telling that they're going to vote for Bush because he has kept us so safe ( like on 9/11 2001). Or of feminism ultralite as discussed in my earlier post on this page. Campaigning for women's votes has practically nothing to do with asking women what they want from the president of this country.

An article in Women's E-news points out that there are many ways of finding topics that women voters could be interested in:

To illustrate: A front-page story in the Aug. 22 Atlanta Journal-Constitution on new rules for overtime pay used as an example a female McDonald's team leader earning $28,000 annually who would lose her overtime pay because she can hire and fire, and contrasted her with a carpenter earning $125,000 a year who can still earn overtime because he doesn't supervise anyone. Note to politics reporter across the room: Why not ask the campaigns what they'll do about that?
An article in the same edition, on the metro page, profiled a couple who have been foster parents of 39 children, and now take in only those who are medically fragile. A good day for them begins at 6 a.m. and ends at 2 a.m. For this they earn about $4 an hour ($2 apiece) per child. Why not ask the campaigns where the family values are in that scenario?
A week later, a mention of a lack of family-friendly policies for working women is noted in a story about a female mayor of Athens, Greece. Hey, how about the lack of supportive policies for working women soon to vote for president of the United States?

But naah, this is soft stuff. It's not what politics is about today. We worry about a few thousand terrorists instead. Never mind if many more people are killed for quite preventable reasons at home or if the money we keep pouring into Iraq ends up in the pockets of Enron-like corporations and their shareholders. Look there! A terrorist warning! It will state that there is no special terrorist warning about the debates, but this could be just because the terrorist are so scary that they might attack without warning!

The soundbite is that Bush is keeping us safe by standing rigid against terrorism as he defines it. In reality, many American women are not safe in their homes or on the streets, and this has nothing to do with terrorism of the Bush type. But to speak about crime and its victims in general is not fascinating and interesting and adequately macho-smelling this year.

The Compassionate Pentagon

Too bad that its compassion is in the wrong direction, towards those that sell it products and services:

More than 40 percent of all Pentagon contracts, a total of $362 billion, have been awarded on a no-bid basis over the last six years, according to a report issued yesterday. It showed that the biggest companies won the bulk of their contracts without going through a competitive process.
The nation's largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., received the most Pentagon business on a non-competitive basis. Seventy-four percent of Lockheed's $94 billion in Pentagon contracts since 1998 were awarded without competition, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington non-profit group that studied 2.2 million Pentagon contracts totaling $900 billion.
"Competitive bidding at the Pentagon happens less often than we think, and the no-bid controversy surrounding Halliburton in Iraq actually is, unfortunately, not an aberration," said Charles Lewis, the center's executive director. Lewis' organization was one of the first to study contracts won by Halliburton and other companies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yesterday's report grew out of that earlier work.

To have things delivered on the no-bid basis is a little like you calling up the local car dealer and asking them to send you a nice little vehicle at whatever price they deem fair. I can easily imagine how that would go down with most of us. We'd get very expensive cars.

What's Pentagon's excuse for this horrendous practice? This:

Thomas Greer, a Lockheed spokesman, said that because of "the substantial investment and lengthy development cycles followed by limited annual production quantities," it is often not cost-effective for the Pentagon to have competitive bidding. Greer added that "it is important to note that sole source awards still mandate contractor performance."

So Pentagon is sort of married to a few corporations because it's too difficult to ask for bids on these specialized projects. Ok, maybe. But how is the contractor performance mandated? Or rather, who analyses the costs and efficacy of the contractors? Hmmm:

Currently, for instance, half of the defense budget is outsourced to contractors, while oversight of these contracts has declined, the report said. The Pentagon has reduced the number of government officials who supervise contractors, instead hiring contractors themselves to oversee and manage others, according to the report, which said that the Pentagon hired a contractor to determine how many contractors it had employed.
"There is an even more fundamental problem underscoring our entire investigation: the stunning lack of accountability," said Lewis, who added, "This is a Keystone Kop situation where no one is monitoring the monitors. This is a very serious situation and the Pentagon is treating it like a hair in the soup."

It's a mess. And this is one of the reasons for the mess:

The leading recipient of campaign donations from military contractors has been President Bush, who has received $5.4 million from the industry since 1998. Military contractors, however, began stepping up contributions to Sen. John Kerry after he won the Iowa caucuses.
Before the caucuses Kerry had received $332,000 from the industry, and he has received just under $2 million since then. The Republican Party has received $62 million from the industry since 1998, compared with $24 million for the Democratic Party, according to the report.

No Title Stupid Enough Exists for This

Here is MSNBC on the coming debates in the U.S. presidential campaign:

President Bush's ability to stick to a scripted defense of his policies on Iraq and terrorism should give him an edge over Democratic rival Sen. John Kerry in Thursday's presidential debate, analysts say.
The war in Iraq, which has plagued the administration with escalating violence and intelligence lapses, is widely expected to produce the most heated rhetoric of the 90-minute face-off over foreign policy and homeland security. It is the first of three Bush-Kerry debates scheduled between now and the Nov. 2 election.
MSNBC.com will air the debate live in a Webcast from 9 to 10:30 p.m. ET. The debate also will be broadcast at the same time on NBC and MSNBC Cable.
Kerry will likely showcase his new hard-hitting language about chaos and casualties in Iraq by accusing Bush of mismanaging the war and diverting U.S. attention from the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
But analysts say Bush has recently neutralized Iraq as a political liability, through campaign ads and stump speeches that have boiled the issue down to a series of scripted messages about strength and optimism.
"It's hard to argue with 'strength is good' and 'are you saying you're not for strength?'," said Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Where are my ashes and sackcloth? Where's the whip for self-flagellation? Why on earth did I ever bother going to school? Anyone want a spare PhD certificate to decorate the bathroom with?

So the debates are over before they have started, and the winner? Ding, ding, ding! George Bush, the great debater!

Well, what did you expect. After all, this is the way the winner is actually decided:

Kerry's sometimes meandering style could weigh down the Democrat in a contest analysts said would likely be decided by post-debate media coverage featuring the pithiest sound-bites.

(Bolds mine)

This is because people aren't actually expected to follow the debates, noooh. They are supposed to find out later by listening to what the pundits have to say about the pithiness of the two contestants. And we already know that Bush is extremely pithy. How? Well, the pundits have told us so.

Geez, I'm going to give up.

Self-Made Billionaires

There is no such thing. Every billionaire on this earth has had the advantage of the markets that the laws and government regulations provide and maintain, of the education systems that offer subsidized education to millions of people, including future billionaires and the people who are going to work for them and buy their products, and the police forces that allow the billionaires to keep their gains, whether ill-gotten or not.

According to the most recent evidence, the United States has 313 billionaires now. The total wealth of these people would be enough to buy the gross national products of many, many countries. To be quite honest, I think that there is something extremely distasteful in one person owning so much that a whole struggling nation could be lifted up from poverty with the same amount of money. Any argument that relies on the deserved fruits from the effort of the single individual leaves me cold as for it to apply I'd need to assume that one person could actually be worthier than a whole nation. I also can't see what kind of pleasure one could get from earning another billion on top of a big pile of them: we can only eat and drink and wear so much, and it's not possible to live in more houses than one at the same time. In short, successive dollars are worth less to you the richer you are.

Given this, it's totally mindboggling that Bush is giving these billionaires and others in the top one percent of the wealthiest Americans even more money as tax cuts. This money is not giving them something that they can't already buy, and the same amount could do so much good if it was given to the very poor. But instead:

Bush has reduced the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest one percent of Americans, who control about 35 percent of the country's wealth, from 22.2 percent in 2001 to 20.1 percent this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Meanwhile, the middle fifth of Americans, who control about 15 percent of the pie, saw their tax burden rise from 18.7 percent to 19.5 percent. The wealthiest one percent received an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while the middle 20 percent's average take was $1,090.

Can you imagine what could be done with the money if every person in the top one percent of the wealthiest decided to give the average $78,460 to some good purpose? I very much doubt that they would ever miss this money, yet if it was used to fund extra school supplies and teachers to the poorest children in this country, wonderful things might happen.

But it's not acceptable to suggest this as it goes against Bush's new slogan of the United States as an ownership economy. As if everybody could become billionaires in this country. As if everybody could own without anyone being the owned one. As if this slogan is anything but a little bit of hot air. Just check whose ownership economy Bush is busy helping.

The Wise Viewers of Fox News

This is fun. Go to the Fox News website, and check their most recent poll. It asks:" Do you believe that Saddam Hussein was part of the 9/11 attacks on U.S.?"

The current answers:

Yes 54% (36,409)
No 38% (25,835)
I did but no longer think that 2% (1,560)
None of the above 6% (3,448)

This is hilarious! Even George Bush doesn't believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Just goes to show how informative Fox News is.

Nigeria's Sharia Law

Human Rights Watch has published a report criticizing the effects of the introduction of sharia as the law in northern Nigeria:

The adoption of strict Islamic law in 12 predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria was mainly done for cheap political gain, but it has resulted in the systematic violation of citizens' fundamental human rights, subjecting women to unfair discrimination, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday.

The New York-based group said in a 111-page report titled 'Political Sharia'h: Human Rights and Islamic Law in Northern Nigeria' that some of the religious zeal that came with the adoption of the legal code from 2000 onwards has waned. But it said that the human rights abuses that came with the introduction of Sharia'h have remained.

Its findings were swiftly rejected by Nigerian supporters of Sharia'h law as western propaganda against Islam.

Yakubu Ali, a judicial official in Sokoto State, the first state to order a convict to be stoned to death for adultery in 2001, said: "Westerners have never liked Islam and we don't expect them to praise sharia'h."

This is the problem in a nutshell: How to discuss the oppression of women that has a religious basis without seeming to criticize that religion or all religions? The literalist interpretations would argue that this cannot be done. If the text states that women are unequal to men, then this is the truth.

All the holy books of the major religions contain snippets that can be used to argue such a case. At the same time, they also contain opposing snippets which appear to assume that the sexes are equal. Maybe we should point this out to the literalists who imply that debate on these questions is not allowed?

In any case, the current application of sharia in Nigeria is not equal across the sexes. Women are more likely to be found guilty of adultery than men:

Women have faced particular discrimination under sharia'h, especially in adultery cases where mere pregnancy is considered adequate evidence of guilt and allegations of rape are hardly ever investigated by judges, the report said.

This situation left male defendants with undue advantages, since Sharia'h rules of evidence require that four witnesses must have seen the man committing adultery or rape.

It is unlikely that most rapes would have four witnesses (do they have to be male witnesses?), and this rule alone will make women much more likely to be found guilty of adultery.

The effects of sharia are different on women and men even in less serious cases:

The report cites restrictions that have been placed on women's daily lives reminiscent of Taliban restrictions on Afghan women including their freedoms of movement, dress, and right to associate with others. According to HRW, some state governments have introduced measures not codified in law to limit women's freedom of movement and association. For example, in some states measures were implemented preventing men and women from being seen together in public. The hisbah, a group given responsibility to make sure Sharia law has been enforced, were found to pull women out of taxis if the driver is male. There were even cases of drivers being flogged for carrying female passengers. By 2003, HRW reports that these measures have been enforced less stringently, however, there are still cases of taxi drivers refusing to carry females in the Zamfara State.

The inequality here applies to other aspects of life than just being punished for crimes; in fact, to all of life.

I wish the major religions were more interested in the actual meaning of their holy texts, not the literal interpretation of rules written for a very different society.

What to Write?

I'm sitting here chewing the keyboard. Not a single interesting idea for a post in the whole room or the cyberspace attached to it! Granted, I am working on something about the Patriot Act, but that means sitting down and actually reading dry legal text for several minutes. Or I could always torture wingnuts, but I don't feel like doing so today.

I'm taking Henrietta the Hound to the veterinarian tomorrow. She has a lump on her chest. She is at least twelve years old, and every time she has to go to the veterinarian I worry. So I worry right now, and the worry drives away other things that my head could be used for. But Henrietta is a mean old revolutionary and a few little lumps won't get her!

She means a lot to me, as does Hank. The relationship we have is not the same as that with humans, of course. For one thing, dogs don't say stupid things in politics. For another, it's so easy to make a dog happy: just scratch in the exactly right spot. But these interspecies relationships have something deeper in them, too, and I have learned a lot about bouncing back from Henrietta. She was an abused animal when we met, and nine years later she's the queen of the household. I like that in a bitch.

More seriously, she is the Einstein of the dogdom and her extrasensory abilities are enormous. Every night she checks that the doors are locked, then she tells me to go to bed and finally rearranges all the pillows on her bed to make a nest. And she keeps Hank under some restraint. How she does that I have never been able to fathom. Maybe it's just the simple fact that she trashes Hank every afternoon?

The veterinarian will find her perfecty healthy, I hope. And then I get a bill for two hundred dollars and can whine about that instead. I hope.

Frank Gallup is Turning Over in His Grave

Frank was proud of the quality of his polling organization. In fact, we all were, and Gallup became the generic name for all scientific polling. Alas, things are not the same today:

...according to http://pollingreport.com, August surveys of likely voters showed Kerry up by one to seven points in nine national polls and Bush up by three to four points in three national polls. Curiously, all three of the outlier Bush-favoring polls were conducted by Gallup. The other nine were conducted by nine different polling organizations using nine different polling methods. One has to conclude that Gallup's methods are seriously flawed.
Recently, The Wall Street Journal, Pew, Harris, Investor's Business Daily and Democracy Now all released polls showing the race was neck and neck again with neither candidate ahead by more than two points. On Sept. 17, Gallup released a poll claiming that Bush is up by 13 points nationally.

Of course, it could be that the Gallup polls are correct and all the others wrong. But the fact that Gallup was wrong in the 2000 elections, too, makes me suspect that something is wrong in their polling methods.

The most recent Gallup polls suggest that Bush has an eight percent lead among likely voters. The reasons for this sizable lead might be in the way the Gallup methodology defines 'likely voters'. For some reason the filter they use lets more Republicans through than Democrats. Steve Soto points out the consequences of this. The latest Gallup poll had the following sample proportions:

Likely Voter Sample Party IDs – Poll of September 24-26
Reflected Bush Winning by 52%-44%
Total Sample: 758
GOP: 328 (43%)
Dem: 236 (31%)
Ind: 189 (25%)

No wonder that the poll predicts a strong Bush lead; after all, the Republicans are the largest group of those polled. This wouldn't be a problem if Republicans in fact voted in these very same proportions compared to Democrats and Independents. But this is not what happened in the 2000 elections. If it is not what happens this year, Gallup will, once again, fail in its predictions.

Other pollsters appear not to use the same filter that gives a concentration of Republicans in the Gallup polls. It would be interesting to know why various pollsters pick the filters they do, but it would also be interesting to know if Gallup's outlier status has something to do with this:

...James Clifton who bought the Gallup organization is a big Republican donor. He gave thousands to Right Wing Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herman Cain. Cain ran as a huge backer of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans. This is essentially the same tax position supported with vigor by the Bush-Cheney ticket.

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Link to Steve Soto's blog The Left Coaster via Kos.

Feminism Ultra-Lite

I read about Naomi Wolf's most recent missive from the feminism-is-elective school of thought on Amanda's wonderful blog, and I'm hereby declaring that I have stolen the topic from her.

Wolf has written an article about the many ways in which feminism and presidential campaigns interact. Or rather, the two ways that she sees them as interacting, and they are: 1. The Republicans have successfully stolen the feminist message. 2. Teresa Heinz Kerry is the deathknell for the Democratic campaign for presidency.

Naomi is famous for writing about the "beauty myth", and she is a bona fide feminist, or at least was one. But this particular article makes me wonder how elastic we can make the definition of a feminist before everything slips out and flips and flops all over the place. Though her points about Karen Hughes' impact on the Republican campaigning style are interesting:

So they devised a deliberate strategy that went unnoticed by Democratic strategists, most of whom are white guys over 50: to showcase a moderate, mainstream feminist makeover for the Bush brand. Everyone fell for it, including the press. Bush's speeches are routinely cast before the eye, I am convinced, of Karen Hughes, who spins tax cuts as a boon to women entrepreneurs, like the one Laura Bush mentioned in her convention speech (Carmella Chaifos, "the only woman to own a tow-truck company in all of Iowa"). The fallen heroes of Iraq are "moms and dads." Afghanistan was the first time U.S. troops were deployed for a feminist goal, "so Afghan girls could go to school."
Abortion is an issue not of Ms. Magazine–style fanaticism or suicidal Republican religious reaction, but a complex issue on which "good people can disagree." (W. mimicked his father's trick of catering to his religious base while leaking the fact that his wife is pro-choice.)
Look at the language. Starting in 2000, every Republican-male dinosaur on TV began to sound like Oprah. Suddenly they all used the words—sensitive, comfort (or comfortable), and appreciate. George Bush is "comfortable in his skin." Laura Bush and her husband want to "comfort" the bereaved families of dead soldiers. Republicans would speak of Bush as "sensitive" to the complexity of issues and as being someone "appreciative" of working moms. It worked frighteningly well: The words "changed the tone" of Washington Republicans from that of the losing old boys' club of 1992 and 1996.

Yes, this is interesting, but Wolf is wrong in arguing that this is co-opting feminism, unless feminism is redefined as something so lite, so diaphanous that it becomes meaningless. After all, beneath all these words the Republican approach to women's issues has been nothing short of an undeclared war against all uppity women. I think that Naomi is confusing PR with real beliefs here as well as in the whole article. Still, she does us a favor by pointing out the little bit of feminist rouge on the cheeks of George Bush.

Where I disagree more strongly with Wolf is in her discussion of Teresa Heinz Kerry's disastrous effect on Kerry's campaign. Here is what Wolf says about it:

The charges are sticking because of Teresa Heinz Kerry. Let's start with "Heinz." By retaining her dead husband's name—there is no genteel way to put this—she is publicly, subliminally cuckolding Kerry with the power of another man—a dead Republican man, at that. Add to that the fact that her first husband was (as she is herself now) vastly more wealthy than her second husband. Throw into all of this her penchant for black, a color that no woman wears in the heartland, and you have a recipe for just what Kerry is struggling with now: charges of elitism, unstable family relationships, and an unmanned candidate.

So it's all about images? Wearing black is elitist and makes men unmanned? I don't know. I would think that something a little more is required to unman someone. I would also think that Teresa might have kept her previous name because it is part of who she is and because she has children with that name. Removing the name you share with your children smacks of unstable family relationship in the image world, doesn't it?

And if Kerry's masculinity was so frail that it had to be preserved by turning Teresa into some sort of a billion dollar Taliban-wife, wouldn't that really give us an image the opposite of what was intended? Right now I think that Kerry is a man fully up to the challenge of being married to a woman who is powerful on her own right, opinionated and interesting. Passionate, even. Isn't that a good image, too?

Not according to Wolf. Wolf argues that though she's a feminist, the hard truth is that politicans become imagery for the rest of us and so do their wives or husbands. Teresa should act in ways that prop up John's alpha-male image, or even better, Teresa should be kept under wraps and Elizabeth Edwards brought out to go on Oprah and talk about "mom-messenger" things, because she's a good antidote to all the things that are wrong with Teresa Heinz Kerry.

This is a brand new type of feminism to me, if it's a real type. I don't think that it is, because Naomi would get into some difficulties with applying this double-think to cases where it is a woman running for office and her husband acting the role of the supportive spouse. The images that she wants to use would guarantee that no female candidate would ever be elected.

I understand the need to pretend in politics, and I even understand the need to hide certain ideologies from the conservative eyes of some voters. What I don't understand is why Wolf pretends that this has something to do with feminism or why 'feminism ultra-lite' is good for the Republicans but bad for the Democrats.

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.
----
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?