Friday Dog Blogging -Courtesy of Helga Fremlin

Kelly Chatting With the Water Hose


This is what dogs do in Australia!

Horror in Iran

Two teenagers have been whipped and executed in Iran, apparently for the crime of homosexuality. This is what happens when religion is interpreted literally, when two thousand years old social codes are forced on people today. This is horror.

O'Connor Coming Clean

Sandra O'Connor, the retiring Supreme Court Judge, is talking! She is not happy about the direction of the federal judiciary:

Speaking at a conference of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, O'Connor cited the role of Ukraine's highest court in resolving the crisis over last year's presidential election as a ``transforming moment'' in the promotion of an independent judiciary in other nations.

``In our country today we're seeing efforts to prevent that, a desire not to have an independent judiciary,'' she said. ``That worries me.''
...

O'Connor said efforts in Congress to restrict federal court jurisdiction to decide particular issues were ``a new approach that's worrisome.''

Legislation introduced earlier this year would bar the Supreme Court from reviewing any government official's ``acknowledgment of God'' as the source of law or government.

You know, this sounds like a filthy liberal! I think the fundies may have overplayed their hand with the judiciary. Well, I hope that they have.

Rove and Libby

Bloomberg has an interesting article on the Plame investigations:

July 22 (Bloomberg) -- Two top White House aides have given accounts to a special prosecutor about how reporters first told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to people familiar with the case.

Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, one person said. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn't tell Libby of Plame's identity, the person said.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, according a person familiar with the matter. Novak, who was first to report Plame's name and connection to Wilson, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor, the person said.

These discrepancies may be important because Fitzgerald is investigating whether Libby, Rove or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation. The Plame case has its genesis in whether any administration officials violated a 1982 law making it illegal to knowingly reveal the name of a covert intelligence agent.

Heh! Double the heh. We needed a little beam of sunshine and here it is. Have the popcorn and the beer out.

Bad Headlines on A Breast Cancer Study

The study in question followed women who had had biopsies on breast lumps which were found benign. What the study (covering 9,087 women) suggests is that most benign lumps are not correlated with higher breast cancer risk in the future:

About two-thirds of the women had benign lumps made up of cells that weren't actively growing. The good news is that this most common type of benign tissue didn't increase the risk of developing breast cancer much at all, over an average of ten years after diagnosis.

But, Senay points out, two other types of benign tissue did come with an increased risk. Thirty percent of the women had benign but actively growing cells, and about four percent had atypical, or abnormal-looking cells that were actively growing. Even though they're considered benign, these cells are important to identify because they do elevate the risk of developing breast cancer. They need to be monitored closely and preventive measures could be considered.

And what are the actual risk numbers? According to the study, the average risk is equal to five women in a hundred. The risk in the first of the two groups mentioned above (those with cysts), the one that two-thirds of the study subjects fell into, was six in a hundred.

The risks for two other groups: those where the cells were actively growing though not cancerous and those regarded as atypical were ten and nineteen women in a hundred, respectively. But remember that far fewer women fell into these two groups.

And what does this all mean in ordinary English? Essentially, most benign growths in breast are not associated with any greater likelihood of later breast cancer (the five in a hundred versus six in a hundred difference is most likely not statistically significant), but cancer risk can be higher for certain rarer types of benign growths. The risk factors are simply the relative numbers of women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer during the years that had passed from the benign biopsy in each of the three groups.

I scanned through the Google headlines on this topic, and found everything from:

Most benign breast lumps don't raise risk

which is correct, to many of this type:

Benign breast disease increases cancer risk

The way medical studies are reported in the popular press is often very bad. There really is no good excuse for it.

Another Attempt in London

From Washington Post:

Small explosions at three London subway stations and on a double-decker bus shut down part of the city's transportation system Thursday but caused no significant casualties or damage, and Prime Minister Tony Blair encouraged people to resume their normal activities.

London's police commissioner, Ian Blair, described the explosions as "attempts" to cause more serious damage. British news media reported that detonators had gone off, but not major bombs, possibly indicating that a terrorist attack meant to be similar to a devastating series of blasts two weeks ago had failed because of faulty explosives.

Dark Thought for the Night

I was reading a Washington Post article pointing out that it's unlikely Bush will nominate a woman when Rehnquist retires, either. The Supreme Court has diversity in the wingnut eyes if it has one black man, one Hispanic man, one woman and six white men. So we are going to get the Hispanic man next time.

This is really sad, especially as all the debate with respect to John G. Roberts's nomination has been about women's reproductive rights. Not only will we lose those rights, we will most likely lose ground in the Supreme Court, too. Never mind that we are the majority. - If you think of the judges in the Supreme Court as representing their race and sex, white men are overrepresented by a gigantic amount.

One might argue that this doesn't matter; a good judge is a good judge. Yes, but the wingnuts believe that women and men are inherently different. Shouldn't we then have women representing the "women's views"? And if the "inherent difference" idea is rejected, shouldn't women be represented in the same proportions as their numbers in the legal profession?

I have already heard defenses of the Roberts choice as valiant stance against "political correctness". The real political correctness means munching on the dingleberries of the wealthy and powerful, of course, but as usual everything is turned upside down. So being "politically correct" in their sense really means "picking an incompetent woman/Hispanic/black judge". White conservative men are by definition not incompetent, you see.

I know loads of very competitive women and minorities, but they are invisible to George Bush's beady eyes, I guess.

If you see nothing wrong with what is happening, try this thought experiment: The SCOTUS consists of seven women and two men. One man retires and the president replaces him with another woman. We'd never hear the end of the yelling and shouting and breast-beating.

Co-Co-Co-Coulterisms

Ann Coulter, the rabidest of al rabid wingnuts, may have committed the grave sin of plagiarism or at least the somewhat smaller sin of copying-and-pasting. According to Raw Story:

Much of Coulter's Jun. 29, 2005 column, "Thou Shall Not Commit Religion," bears a striking resemblance to pieces in magazines dating as far back as 1985—and a column written for the Boston Globe in 1995.

A RAW STORY examination found Coulter's work to be at worst plagiarism and at best a cut-and-paste repetition of points authored by conservative religious groups in the early 1990s. These groups sought to de-fund the National Endowment for the Arts, detailing projects paid for by the NEA they dubbed "obscene."

The campaign traces back to an assault on the NEA mounted by the American Family Association in 1989. After press conferences held by the group's leader Rev. Donald Wildon, then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) slipped an amendment into a Senate bill that would have axed federal funding for "obscene art." It never passed the House.

Coulter employs the same NEA talking points in her Jun. 29 column written in the wake of a ruling barring the Ten Commandments from public places. She lists various identical "obscene" projects she says taxpayers have funded. All of the excerpts below compare this column with earlier texts.

Check out the original Raw Story post for the examples. Then you can decide. I just report...

What is funny about this whole thing is that Coulter keeps saying the most atrocious things about groups which the mainstream media doesn't let defend themselves. She has also advocated hitting liberals with baseball bats and stated that she regards women to be more stupid than men. None of this can bite her back; all it does is fill her money bags. But plagiarism! Now that's a horse of a different color.

The reason is that ownership rights are tightly defined for various material things and ideas that can be sold, and anyone who violates these rights is a thief. But a person who smears you, belittles you or advocates violence against you is just an interesting and outspoken columnist. These things hurt at least as much as plagiarism does but we have no ownership rights to our emotional and mental well-being.

Which is a long way of saying that Ann Coulter is rubbish whether she copies or not.

Grrrr!

My local radio station which broadcasts Air America has the most awful commercials imaginable. It's probably a wingnut plot to get all liberal stuff off the airwaves.

There is this vacuum cleaner ad which consists of a letter from a satisfied buyer, a man, who starts by saying:

My wife is in heaven!

This is because his wife has this wonderful vacuum cleaner and when she thought that she had broken it the company sent a spare part in no time at all! So then the husband had to write how happy his wife is now.

Also telling us, in various covert ways, that a) women are the ones meant to push vacuum cleaners around, b) that women are filled with joy and happiness when the vacuum cleaner works so well and c) that it is the husbands of the women who must write in to report on all these astonishing events.

I have never met anyone who is in rapture over a vacuum cleaner, but if I have to hear this commercial another thousand times I might start believing that all women dance in the streets with their vacuum cleaners and all the husbands sit indoors in the freshly cleaned house penning fan letters to sellers of these machines.

Rove! Plame! Iraq!

Let's not forget how many people die each day in Iraw. Let's not forget Karl Rove and Bush's troubles with the Plame Game. The wingnuts want us all to talk about John G. Roberts and to spend all our energy on that issue, while everybody forgets about what someone in this administration has done, what the nasty games are they play and what the loss of life looks like in Iraq. This is the worst administration the country has had and they stick to power like leeches, without caring about the human costs of their policies.

Let's not forget this.

Mr. Roberts's Neighborhood

Remember how the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by the radical cleric Pat Robertson, demanded that Bush not appoint a consensus candidate because that would mean compromising with us filthy lefties? Well, this is what the Center says about John G. Roberts:

Whether or not the Senate confirms the President's nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr. to the high court may actually be up to people like you and me. We must stand together and let our voices be heard! We must urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to do its work well - to strongly approve Judge Roberts and pass his nomination on quickly to the full Senate for a vote.

So they like him. Makes me queasy. And this is what Operation Rescue, the group of fanatics that demonstrates outside abortion clinics and worse, says about this nominee:

"A culture of life can never be built as long as Roe v. Wade is the law of the land," said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.

"We appreciate President Bush being a man of his word by appointing a judge that will respect the Right to Life acknowledged by our nation's founding documents," said Newman. "We pray that Roberts will be swiftly confirmed."

"Our nation has suffered enough under decades of liberal activist judges legislating from the bench," said OR spokesperson Cheryl Sullenger. "After 45 million dead children, we are guardedly optimistic that the confirmation of Judge Roberts will be a step toward restoring protections for the pre-born that were stolen from them in 1973."

"Protections for the pre-born"... What about protections for the pre-dead which would be us who have already been born?

This joy and celebrating tells me that John G. Roberts is every thinking woman's worst nightmare.
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Props to R.P.

Women in the Iraqi Constitution

The latest draft of a new constitution for Iraq has some bits which are worrisome for women's rights:

The draft chapter, circulated discreetly in recent days, has ignited outrage among women's groups, which held a protest on Tuesday morning in downtown Baghdad at the square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by American marines in April 2003.

One of the critical passages is in Article 14 of the chapter, a sweeping measure that would require court cases dealing with matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance to be judged according to the law practiced by the family's sect or religion.

Under that measure, Shiite women in Iraq, no matter what their age, generally could not marry without their families' permission. Under some interpretations of Shariah, men could attain a divorce simply by stating their intention three times in their wives' presence.

Article 14 would replace a body of Iraqi law that has for decades been considered one of the most progressive in the Middle East in protecting the rights of women, giving them the freedom to choose a husband and requiring divorce cases to be decided by a judge.

It's important to know that a Muslim cannot stop being one, as far as I understand. Thus, the rights a woman has would be completely based on the sect she happens to be born into.

Worryingly, the new draft also suggests to get rid of the one fourth quota for women in the parliament:

Ms. Arayess, the Shiite drafter, said some of the writers were considering keeping the quota for the next two terms of the parliament before allowing it to lapse. After that, she said, women should be able to stand on their own.

Right. And pigs do fly.

Nobody really cares about women's rights in Iraq, certainly not within the U.S. government. Bush wouldn't have attacked the country if he had cared about the rights of women. Iraq used to have one of the most egalitarian legal systems for women, and look what we have wrought! Oh, I forgot, no more rape rooms. Though, they don't matter much as many women don't dare to go out in any case, fearing kidnapping and rape.

The Supreme Nominee

Ta-ram-tam-tam! I give you....John G. Roberts Jr., who has been on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit since June 2003. Who is this guy? It seems that he actually knows lawyering which is a nice change. But his opinions are wingnutty, of course:

Advocacy groups on the right say that Roberts, a 50-year-old native of Buffalo, N.Y., who attended Harvard Law School, is a bright judge with strong conservative credentials he burnished in the administrations of former Presidents Bush and Reagan. While he has been a federal judge for just a little more than two years, legal experts say that whatever experience he lacks on the bench is offset by his many years arguing cases before the Supreme Court.

Liberal groups, however, say Roberts has taken positions in cases involving free speech and religious liberty that endanger those rights. Abortion rights groups allege that Roberts is hostile to women's reproductive freedom and cite a brief he co-wrote in 1990 that suggested the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 high court decision that legalized abortion.

"The court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion ... finds no support in the text, structure or history of the Constitution," the brief said.

Or, as an e-mail from NARAL states:

Some of the lowlights of Judge Robert's background include:

As Deputy Solicitor General, Roberts argued in a brief before the U.S. Supreme Court (in a case that did not implicate Roe v. Wade) that "[w]e continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled…. [T]he Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion… finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."

In Rust v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court considered whether Department of Health and Human Services regulations limiting the ability of Title X recipients to engage in abortion-related activities violated various constitutional provisions. Roberts, appearing on behalf of HHS as Deputy Solicitor General, argued that this domestic gag rule did not violate constitutional protections.

Roberts, again as Deputy Solicitor General, filed a "friend of the court" brief for the United States supporting Operation Rescue and six other individuals who routinely blocked access to reproductive health care clinics, arguing that the protesters' behavior did not amount to discrimination against women even though only women could exercise the right to seek an abortion.

The Court was so accustomed to the Solicitor General and the Deputy Solicitor General arguing for the overturn of Roe that during John Roberts's oral argument before the Supreme Court in Bray, a Justice Asked, "Mr. Roberts, in this case are you asking that Roe v. Wade be overruled?" He responded, "No, your honor, the issue doesn't even come up." To this the justice said, "Well, that hasn't prevented the Solicitor General from taking that position in prior cases."

I'm cutting and pasting like mad because I don't know anything about Mr. Roberts. Have to find out how corporate-friendly he is. Probably very.

Well, the wingnuts must dance happily tonight. They got their way and the number of women in the Supreme Court dropped by fifty percent.

More Harry Potter

I should be speculating on whom Bush will nominate to a perch among the Supremes but I don't want to. Though it might be Edith Jones if he has felt especially bad yearnings towards the bottle.

But let's talk about something more pleasant. I went out on Sunday night and bought all the Harry Potter books except for the latest one, and I have now read books 2-4 in addition to the first one I read years ago. I have to eat some of my earlier comments: The ideas about class and race do become more complicated and more interesting, and the black-and-whiteness of the thinking more realistic. And Rowling is very skilled in the way she shows the slow effects of more years on the main characters' world views. Not bad, at all, though reading all those books in a day or so (well, during the nights, actually) has left me a little muddled on the plot lines.

There are some fairly serious gaps in the plots, though. This isn't necessarily as bad as it might be in a different type of book because we are expected to suspend our disbelief about magic and so on to begin with. But the little slips are still annoying, and they affect the background, too. For example, the whole idea of Muggle technology being banned doesn't extend to anything older like newspapers or photographs or listening to the wireless, it seems, and it is not yet clear (at the end of book 4) what the wizards largely live on. The only employment seems to be the Ministry of Wizardry, but Harry's parents didn't work for it or did they? Where does all the gold in the goblin vaults come from? Alternatively, why don't the wizards just conjure everything they need, why is there money at all or servants? Perhaps these omissions are because children and teenagers don't care about the source of money or who makes their beds; they just want more money from their parents, usually, and someone else to make the beds, but as an economist goddess I'd like to know.

I've gone all critical again, and should add that I'm quite enjoying the books. But they don't have the same effect on me as Ursula LeGuin's series does, say. The kind of effect where your emotions, intellect and the spiritual bits get all going at the same time and transport you into some other place for a while. Or Sheri Tepper's The True Game and the other books relating to that field of chess pieces. Or Tolkien's books. Still, if lots of children read Harry Potter Rowling has succeeded in something very important, and I sincerely applaud her achievement. Though she could have made book 5 a little thinner. It will fall apart in the bath tonight, I fear.

Clinton in Aspen

Via American Prospect, we learn about Bill Clinton's words at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival, a gettogether for the Washington insiders but with a fairly liberal audience. Though perhaps "liberal" in a way that the so-called regular liberal on Fox News would appreciate. The idea of the Festival seems to be to say things which are usually said by the opposite side of politics, and to astonish everybody into great admiration for such unbiased and frank utterances.

Bill Clinton shows us how this is is done:

The great triangulator's point was that Democrats can't win the presidency if they don't campaign earnestly among churchgoing Christians—he noted that he got 75 percent more Evangelical votes in 1996 than John Kerry did in 2004. He suggested that Roe v. Wade was the unfortunate beginning of the end of civility between left and right. He said the Democrats are wrong to deny that malpractice suits don't drive up medical costs. And about the current war he said, "This is not Vietnam. I wouldn't set a deadline [for the withdrawal of troops]. I agree with the president." If anyone but him had said the same thing about Iraq, there would have been boos and hisses, as there had been the night Evan Thomas said he thought the administration had sincerely believed Saddam had WMD stockpiles.

Did he wet his finger first and stick it up in the air? He's probably working to place Hillary into the center for the next presidential campaign, though "center" these days is so far to the right that one can balance nothing on it.

Sadly for Bill, the things he confesses here are silly ones to confess. Take the malpractice suit effects on medical costs: Of course they increase medical costs. So does bandaging someone's finger or sending physicians to the Caribbean islands by pharmaceutical companies or advertising painkillers on television. The important question is the amount by which malpractice suits increase the costs, and here all studies are quite clear. Malpractice suits are not a major cause of higher health care costs. What is driving up those costs is high-technology medicine, especially in the end-of-life treatments which don't have a great succcess rate. Another important cause is the way medical markets don't function well in general: the firms can set prices quite high without causing any great drop in usage because patients are often insured and don't care about high prices and because there aren't that many choices for treatment when one is very ill.

George Bush attacks malpractice suits for two reasons, and neither one of them has anything to do with health care costs. The first one is his hatred of trial lawyers because they give more money to Democrats, and the second is his desire to make it harder and harder for ordinary workers and consumers to sue anyone on the business side for anything. And we pure rabble go along with it, as does Bill Clinton.

If political acumen depends on crossing the gaping chasm to the wingnut side this is probably a fairly easy way to do it. But I always said that Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had.

George and the Condoms

What does president Bush think about contraception? Is he for it or opposed to it? Will he find a Supreme Court nominee who will one day ban our access to condoms? This sounds fairly far-fetched, Echidne in the tinfoil hat again, you mutter. But is it really that far-fetched?

On May 26, 2005 reporters asked McClellan about the president's views on contraception. McClellan's answer:

Q There are news reports this morning that parents and children who were guests of the President, when they visited Congress, wore stickers with the wording, "I was an embryo." And my question is, since all of us were once embryos, and all of us were once part sperm and egg, is the President also opposed to contraception, which stops this union and kills both sperm and egg?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the President has made his views known on these issues, and his views known –

Q You know, but what I asked, is he opposed -- he's not opposed to contraception, is he?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, and you've made your views known, as well. The President –

Q No, no, but is he opposed to contraception, Scott? Could you just tell us yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, I think that this question is –

Q Well, is he? Does he oppose contraception?

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, I think the President's views are very clear when it comes to building a culture of life –

Q If they were clear, I wouldn't have asked.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and if you want to ask those questions, that's fine. I'm just not going to dignify them with a response.

Now I find this very scary. McClellan usually plays the clam when the answer is controversial or could cast Bush in a bad light. Why is the question of contraception controversial in the United States of America, anno Domini 2005?

A repetition of the same question today caused this exchange of informative comments:

Q I have one follow up. Nineteen members of Congress from seven states have written a letter to the President saying that they are still waiting for an answer to a May 26th question: Is the President opposed to contraception. And my question is, could they now have an answer to my question? Or do you regard them, too, as not to be dignified with a response?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I think we've talked about these issues before and these issues when it comes to the federal government and programs aimed at promoting abstinence and how those ought to be funded on at least equal footing with other programs, so I think we've addressed the President's views in that context.

I hate to say this but you might want to start stocking up not only on ducktape but also those little plastic penis bags. For the access to contraception is indeed a controversial topic for the wingnuts who run this country right now.
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Information via NARAL.

Today's Action Alert

This alert is from the National Women's Law Center:

Senate set to vote on estate tax before the end of July.
Tell your senators to reject more tax breaks for millionaires!

Say NO to yet another reckless tax cut! The Senate is planning to vote in the next two weeks on a proposal to permanently repeal the estate tax and/or a proposal to drastically reduce the estate tax. Repealing the estate tax will cost nearly $1 trillion over the first ten years of full repeal, and some proposals to "reform" the estate tax cost almost as much. At the same time, Congress is considering cuts to vital supports for women and their families.

TAKE ACTION NOW! Click here to email your Senators! Tell them to vote NO on permanently repealing the estate tax and on so-called "reform" proposals that would lose hundreds of billions of dollars in federal revenue. And call your Senators at 202-224-3121 or find their D.C. office numbers here on the NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY on WEDNESDAY, JULY 20th.

BACKGROUND:

The federal estate tax currently affects only estates larger than $1.5 million for an individual, $3 million for a couple; only the largest one percent of estates pay any estate tax at all. The estate tax is scheduled to be completely repealed in 2010 and then reinstated in 2011.

While the Senate is considering making repeal of the estate tax permanent - granting the very wealthiest Americans yet another costly tax cut - it is also debating cutting Social Security benefits. Yet, with just part of the revenues from preserving the estate tax, we could close 25 to 50 percent of the long-term shortfall in Social Security.

Meanwhile, the Senate is looking to cut billions of dollars from Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other vital supports in the budget reconciliation bill this fall. The Senate is also beginning to vote on its annual spending bills which grossly underfund critical priorities such as education and child care. Eliminating or significantly shrinking the estate tax for the wealthiest individuals while proposing to take basic supports away from those Americans who need help the most is unfair and irresponsible.

Bush Redefines

His language! He earlier said that he'd fire anyone who outed a covert CIA agent. Now he says that he meant something different:

President George W. Bush said he would fire any member of his administration who broke the law as prosecutors focus on White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in their investigation of the disclosure of a covert intelligence agent to reporters.

``If somebody committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration,'' Bush said today during a White House news conference with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. ``It's best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions.''

Bush's statement offers more protection for administration officials who may have discussed agent Valerie Plame with reporters, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University. On June 10, 2004, Bush answered ``Yes'' when asked whether he would fire anyone who leaked Plame's name.

``He's certainly backing off,'' Gillers said. ``Before it didn't seem to matter whether or not the revelation would be a crime.''

That's significant because the parameters for breaking the 1982 law about exposing an undercover agent are very narrow, Gillers said. A person would have had to reveal the name knowingly and with the awareness that the government was trying to conceal it. And it's only illegal if the agent worked overseas in the past five years; Plame has lived in the U.S. since 1997.

So did the leakers wait until exactly five years would be gone since Plame's last foreing assignment? The whole mess smells to high heavens.

But of course the wingnuts find the smell on the other side:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert sent out a press release assailing Democratic leaders such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for failing to focus on policy.

``The Democratic leadership has revealed that their agenda is a cynical playbook of partisan politics, which only poisons the well for members who are working together this week in a bipartisan way to move America forward,'' Hastert said.

Ha ha ha. Laughs she in a cold and hollow voice. Turn the mirror at your own face, Dennis. And do tell me where you have been acting in a bipartisan way. Unless you mean the Republicans and the Republicans.

There are lots of blog posts on the details of the Plame Game, discussions on Ari Fleischer and Colin Powell, on whether Matthew Cooper's statement is now that Rove was the outer and on this memorandum that might have been the source of the outing information, and on and on. I just don't want to follow all the ins and outs. My interest in the legal game is deficient, something to do with having lived on the Olympus where there were no laws, I guess. I agree with Billmon that we might as well play our own Plame Games.

The New Wife

Ms. musings has an excellent post about a Today Show on the "new wife". It turns out that this is the old 1950's stereotype of a wife: one who desires to stay at home while the husband brings in the bacon. Astonishingly, it turns out that the new one is highly educated and has decided that feminism didn't work, that it is impossible to have both a career and a family, and that the family must come first.

The show was really a way for Susan Barash to sell her book about this topic, and as far as I can ascertain there is no real evidence on the prevalence of this "new wife". But talking about a return to the 1950's is a popular thing these days, like it has been repeatedly during the last thirty years. As celebrated as the repeated funerals of feminism. The most recent trumpet blower of the stay-at-home engineers, lawyers and physicians before Barash was Lisa Belking in 2003. But talking about this has been going on almost continuously as far back as I remember.

Thus, it is hard to judge how real the most recent trend is, or if it exists at all. The female labor market participation rate (the percentage of adult women who work outside the home) has been rising for the last thirty years, and may now have peaked. This means that the relative number of women with jobs may not change very much in the future. It doesn't necessarily, or even probably, mean that the percentages would start going down. For one thing, the vast majority of people can't afford to have just one breadwinner in the family.

Maybe this is why these shows and books always focus on the small number of families who indeed can afford to live on one salary. This is pretty elitist, as the ruminations and doubts and happiness or boredom presented in these scenarios is unattainable for most. It is also dangerous: if educated women stop working outside the home who is going to be out there demanding that work is made more suitable for people with families, for two-earner families or for single parents? If educated women stop working outside the home, how long will it take before we will read demands about limiting the number of women in higher education, in medical, law and business schools? Will we, once again, hear laments about all those societal dollars spent educating girls who will just then stay at home? Will we, once again, decide that it is safer not to promote women because they will leave soon anyway? There were reasons why the 1950's stereotypes died a relatively quick death, and one important one is that equality of men and women is unlikely to be realized under this scenario.* Another one is, as I already mentioned, that having just one breadwinner in a family has historically been an anomaly, not something that has been routinely practised.

How to take care of children is truly complicated in this country. The societal options are extremely limited except for the wealthy, and the labor markets punish career interruptions mercilessly. This is at least partly because of the prevailing cultural norm that it is the mothers, and pretty much the mothers alone, who are responsible for hands-on childcare. And many mothers want to do exactly that. Others may be forced into making a Solomon's choice because of external constraints, and in all these cases the costs are borne by the mother and her family, not the rest of the society. Maybe this is why the whole job-family balance is viewed as a women's issue, and tends to cause sleepiness in all the powers-that-be (with the exception of people like Rick Santorum who prefer to tell women to get themselves back into the kitchens and fast). So for educated women with well-earning husbands the choice is between their brain and their uterus. Other women have no choices at all, really. But this is just girl stuff.

Bitter. I am bitter. I truly thought that we would have solved this all by now. But there is no willingness to go there. "There" being the need for not a "new wife" but a "new society" and a "new husband"**, all new in the sense that they feel the same draw and pull as the educated mothers appear to do today. The books and programs about the "new wife" say pretty much nothing about the ("old"?) husbands of these women and not much more about the society's role in all this. No, the problem is a women's issue. Oops, make it educated women's issue. No, what I meant to say that there is no problem here at all! So.
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*An erudite article on this is in the works!
**I know that there are men already who feel these effects, that there are men who take time off to stay with their children. These (relatively few) men suffer from the same cost consequences as the women who made the same choices, though, and that is not the answer we are looking for.

On Harry Potter

I must start by confessing that I have only read the very first Harry Potter. It wasn't interesting enough for me to try to acquire the others but I may yet do so, if that will let me understand why these books are so very popular. They have made their author, J.K. Rowling, a billionaire, and perfectly sane (and adult!) people into mad fans willing to stay in line in the middle of the night just to get the newest book a few hours earlier.

Maybe I'm deficient in some deep and substantive way for not getting the Potter appeal. Or maybe my reaction is the normal one for someone who has read cartloads of books in this particular genre. From that angle the Potter book I read was well-written and plotted but not earth-shatteringly different or new. It isn't as good as Tolkien's The Hobbit, for example, and the female characters in it are few and tokenishly good. The later Potter books may be lots better, but the craze began with the very first one. Hence, any explanation of it should be possible by using information only from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

This is my try at such an explanation: Harry Potter is a wizard, a boy with magical powers. His parents are conveniently dead and he is brought up by his extremely nasty aunt and uncle, both nonmagical. He must constantly battle their own son who gets privileged treatment while Harry is given nothing but scolding, old clothes and a bed in a closet under the stairs.

Suddenly all this is over, and in a male-Cinderella-goes-to-the-party reversal Harry gets a place in a school of magic, run along the lines of a very genteel British boarding school. There he makes both enemies and friends, turns out to be excellent in sports and by the end of the book has had adventures which have made him into a hero.

This is almost any child's secret nasty dream: to be able to openly hate the adults in the house for being unfair, ungenerous and unloving, to be able to openly hate all those siblings that compete for the same scarce resources. But such hatred can't be openly admitted, for children love their parents and siblings, too. Walt Disney knew the solution a long time ago when he had Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse take care of nephews. Hating someone not-parent is acceptable for most mothers and fathers, as Rowling appears to know.

Add to this the dream of being better than others, of having secret powers while the others are nothing but common nonmagical rabble! And then to be allowed into a school of magic with wonderful unending food and games played in the air on broomsticks! And to be the best player of the whole lot! It isn't even really necessary for Harry to have any further adventures. If I were eleven years old I'd love this book, too.

But it's not only the eleven year old that love the Potter books. A large number of adults adore them, too, which suggests either that we don't mature quite as much as I used to think or that the later books are more interesting for mature readers than the one I read. Or both.

Whatever the reason, there is something about the first Harry Potter book that I intensely disliked: the sense of an accepted hierarcy which places wizards and witches above the ordinary people, called Muggles. Not only that, the wizards and witches live in an essentially segregated society from that inhabited by the Muggles. Given the recent questions about the impact of alienation on Muslim youth in Europe I wonder how wise it is to depict segregated societies of this kind as unproblematic. The whole two-tier imaginary world just might encourage some sort of racist thinking.

The other thing that makes me less than happy about these books is the fact (and I don't believe you if you argue otherwise here) that if the hero had been called Harriet Potter the Potter craze would never have materialized. This is not the author's fault, but I'd be remiss as an angry feminazi not to make a note of it.

I feel a little guilty for such a negative review of a phenomenom based on reading but one of the books, and also because I seem to be on the same side as Pope Ratzo with this. The latter is only an illusion, of course, I strongly recommend everyone to take an interest in witchcraft and wizardry, whereas the Pope wants people not to read these books at all. But to atone for these and any other criticisms I might provoke I promise to read the other Potter books during this week.

Go Read Frank Rich

Instead of a scathing attack on that silly David Brooks I want to be cheerful and jolly today, and the way to do that, though perhaps in a slightly morbid form, is to read Frank Rich's most recent NYT column:

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

Not mincing his words, is he? That's what cheered me up, that, and the good and sharp writing. The column gets better and better, and I don't want to give away all of it, but this must be included here:

Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."

Delicious. Also very sad and worrying, of course, but that is every day in the faith-based reality.

Re-Minder

That I'm blogging on American Street today. This is a funny one even if I say so myself. Who else would say it?

I tried something new with the title. A rethinking of a word. This is always interesting, because we usually don't pay attention to familiar words. But paying attention can be strangely satisfying. Like in this case: re-minder tells us what we really do when we remind someone about something; we rewind the videos in their heads, we make them mind again. This way of looking at the word doesn't make me feel so annoyed. In the real world the word "reminder" is about things like forgotten dental appointments or deworming the cats or about promises one made in the first flush of feeling beneficient and which one would now love to forget.

Another interesting word to be dissected this way is "handsome": "hand" "some", please. Get it?

Saturday Hank Blogging

Cheese, please!


Here is Hank again, from a very odd angle. Her whiskers have gone gray even though she's not that old. In my experience different breeds go gray at different times in their lives, just like people.

And for all who worry about how I treat my begging dogs, Hank and Henrietta just had some nice yoghurt! Then they went out for an early morning pee and then they expect to be taken for a one hour run. I'm allowed to have about five more minutes on the computer before I get my butt bitten. So you know who runs the Snakepit Inc..

The New Tierney Crap Column

Such careful writing, for a change. But what he writes about is hilarious:

So far Karl Rove appears guilty of telling reporters something he had heard, that Valerie Wilson, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, worked for the C.I.A. But because of several exceptions in the 1982 law forbidding disclosure of a covert operative's identity, virtually no one thinks anymore that he violated it. The law doesn't seem to apply to Ms. Wilson because she apparently hadn't been posted abroad during the five previous years.

The endangered spies Ms. Wilson was compared to James Bond in the early days of the scandal, but it turns out she had been working for years at C.I.A. headquarters, not exactly a deep-cover position. Since being outed, she's hardly been acting like a spy who's worried that her former contacts are in danger.

At the time her name was printed, her face was still not that familiar even to most Washington veterans, but that soon changed. When her husband received a "truth-telling" award at a Nation magazine luncheon, he wept as he told of his sorrow at his wife's loss of anonymity. Then he introduced her to the crowd.

And then, for any enemy agents who missed seeing her face at the luncheon but had an Internet connection, she posed with her husband for a photograph in Vanity Fair.

Here is the picture, by the way:





Tierney believes that it doesn't matter if some covert agent is outed, as long as the letter of the law may not have been violated, as long as she doesn't really look terribly covert to him and so on. Everything that the administration has done is small fry stuff, not important, not to worry about. Nothing here matters. Look over there!

And what do we see over there? We see Tierney write about the behavior of Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson after the revelation of her identity. After the revelation. Now, this is important to consider! We should always consider the behavior of suspected crime victims after the deed has been done! Yes, that is where truth will be found. And how dare Wilson pose for a photograph with his wife! Without this picture nobody could ever have figured out what she looks like. We only knew her identity and where she lived and stuff...

Blame the victim, please! The only allowed victims in this country are conservative Christians and the current administration. Everyone else is "fair game" as Rove said.

Friday Echidne Blogging

Possibly me?


No embroidery blogging today; I can't find any pictures right now. And the dogs looked at me scornfully when I suggested they blog. Henrietta went back into the air-conditioned coolness of the living-room and Hank splayed her legs around the fan here. She looks very funny, with her pink belly sticking up in the air and her snout in reverse looking like the snout of a platypus. But she's very comfortable. Both dogs are still shedding like mad. They will be completely bald by the time we get snow again.

It has been quite a week in my private (=human) life. One of those weeks when Life looks at you and mutters:"Oh, I forgot about you.." and gives you a kick to the kidneys. Then, just to make sure, you get another one into the liver. And Life goes on.

But the nice thing about weeks like this is that the next one is bound to be better! Always look for the silver lining, I say, while chewing on some chocolate truffles.

The picture above was sent by one of my readers. Sadly, I didn't make a note of who it was but thank you very much in any case. Though I don't actually have six arms, I'm pretty good with the sword. Also with knives and sticks and baseball bats.

A nice hug and a bowl of ice-cream really works wonders in most of Life's troubled times. Well, as much as anything does. Try it first. If it fails you can then try the swords.

The TGssIF Rove Edition

Murkier and murkier in the Plame Game. A very odd and poorly written article in the New York Times presents the Rove countergame for us. I had to read it umpteen times and I'm still not sure what the article is saying. This is very odd, given that the Times can pick the best of all the political writers (though it doesn't, of course, as Tierney and Brooks are in its stable). In any case, it seems, perhaps, that Rove's defense is that he didn't actually give the information about Plane to Novak but just agreed to whatever Novak told him already. This I do not believe. Rove is an excellent political operative, and he would never slip like that unless it was for purpose. Wheels within wheels.

Add to all that the legal questions about hairsplitting and so on, and I really don't know what to say. The Washington Post published an article which tries to clarify the Times message, but it's based on the same information so doesn't help very much. Or maybe I'm just a little bit tired of all this maneuvring.

I mentioned earlier that the Downing Street Memo affair is linked to the Plame Game through all sorts of unethical connections. Juan Cole notes that these connections can go even deeper and may have caused incredible harm:

The question is whether Bush played politics with terror around the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, 2004. Jim Lobe reminded us at the time that ' The New Republic weekly quoted Pakistani intelligence officials as saying the White House had asked them to announce the arrest or killing of any "high-value [al-Qaeda] target" any time between July 26 and 28, the first three days of the Democratic Convention. At the time, former CIA officer Robert Baer said the announcement made "no sense." "To keep these guys off-balance, a lot of this stuff should be kept in secret. You get no benefit from announcing an arrest like this." '

In response to White House pressure, the Pakistanis were in fact able to make an arrest, which was announced during the Democratic National Convention. That arrest, of a Tanzanian named Ahmad Khalfan Gheilani, in turn led to the capture of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a young computer expert who had old al-Qaeda documents on his laptop as well as a more recent archive of email correspondence with al-Qaeda in the UK. Among the old data were pre-9/11 plans for attacks in New York and elsewhere.
...
The announcement set off a frenzy of press interest in the basis for then Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge's alarm. Either from a Bush administration source or from a Pakistani one (each government blames the other), they came up with the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a recently arrested al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan, and published it. But it turns out that the Pakistanis and the UK had "turned" Khan and were having him be in active email contact with the al-Qaeda network in the UK so as to track them down.

On August 3, the Bush administration released the name of Abu Eisa Khan, a suspected al-Qaeda operative in the UK who had been arrested. The motive for this shocking lapse in security procedure appears to have been the desire to trumpet a specific arrest.

All of these public pronouncements by the Americans infuriated the Pakistani and British police.

For the sake of three year old intelligence, the Bush administration had helped blow the first inside double agent the Pakistanis and the British had ever developed. The British had been preparing a set of indictments and pursuing the investigation, in part by using Khan. They were forced to move before they were ready. Some suspects escaped on hearing Naeem Noor Khan's in the media. Of those who were arrested, several had to be released for lack of evidence against them.

Muhammad Sadique Khan, one of the July 7 bombers, was apparently connected to one of the suspects under surveillance in early August, 2004.

If politics indeed was played here the pattern is the same as in the Plame Game. But it isn't a game, of course. Not for us ordinary people who just might end up dead in a subway car or an airplane because of such games.

Raisins - What Are They Good For?

I have always disliked raisins, those things which look like bloated fly corpses in food. I used to think that raisins are added to foods to make them less appetizing. Because eating isn't supposed to be that much fun.

But it seems that there are people who love those little crinkly things which call to mind rabbit droppings. What can I say? We have Bush and Rove, too, but it doesn't make them appetizing.

The CPB and Tomlinson; Reading Between the Lions

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB, has a new chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, and he is at least as frightening as the lions in the PBS's children's reading program "Reading Between the Lions", who will shortly be reading Bible stories if Tomlinson has his way.

The whole story is absolutely fantastic, from the very beginning when Tomlinson got the power to really make the PBS "fair and balanced", worthy of being made into a fairy tale for children. Tomlinson started by hiring, in secret, a wingnut researcher to do a study of the possible political bias in public broadcasting. This researcher, one Frederick W. Mann, then charged us all almost 15,000 dollars for a study of four programs in which he categorized the program guests by such deep and meaningful labels as "liberal", "conservative" or "neutral", or by their being "pro-Bush", "anti-Bush", "in support of the administration" or "opposing the adminstration". Without ever really explaining how he came up with these classifications. As examples of "liberal" and "anti-administration" guests can be mentioned Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and former congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.)!!!
This because these stalwarts of the pro-Bush camp said something in the interviews that wasn't completely uncritical of the government.

What an idiotic way of trying to define bias. A real study would have tried to see whether a particular topic for discussion elicits all the relevant facts from both sides of the political aisle. But such a study might not have been able to establish the great prevalence of liberals in public broadcasting. Funny, if one of those programs had contained a clip of Bush saying something self-derogatory, Mann would have labeled him "anti-Bush".

Tomlinson has not been discouraged by the hilarity his little study has provoked, or the recent questions in the U.S. Senate about how Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee was chosen to be the new CPB president. Maybe he knows that the wingnuts are firmly behind him and that they really don't care if the PBS dies or becomes a wingnut echo chamber. In both cases they have won. Right now they seem more intent to cut PBS's budget than to support Tomlinson's efforts to make it into a clone of Fox News, but things may change in the future, so Tomlinson continues to lead the charge against all and any thing liberal.

His new frontier might be the Voice of America, which Tomlinson also supervises. In any case he has ordered all sorts of management studies to be carried out about the practices of Voice of America. If there is also a study about any potential anti-U.S. bias, well, we wouldn't know about that yet, would we?
----
A postscript:
In today's news we learn that Tomlinson will be replaced, when his term runs out, by a major Republican fundraiser, Cheryl F. Halpern, who believes this

At the Senate confirmation hearing on her nomination to the CPB board in 2003, Halpern expressed agreement with Lott after he questioned the objectivity of PBS journalist and commentator Bill Moyers.

"There has to be recognition that an objective, balanced code of journalistic ethics has got to prevail across the board, and there needs to be accountability," she said at the hearing. She agreed with Lott that penalties were justified when balance fails, although she acknowledged that CPB rules prohibit interfering with programming decisions. Neither she nor Lott elaborated on what sort of penalties they favored.

She contrasted that lack of authority to her role on the federal Broadcast Board of Governors. "Going back to my BBG days, we were able to remove physically somebody who had engaged in editorialization of the news," she said, according to an account in Current, the public broadcasting newspaper.

It would seem that the gloves are off.

Your Daily Dose of Karl Rove

Like "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" I hope that a post on Karl Rove every day will keep him at bay. I hope, but I don't have much real optimism about it. Why can't Rove go for a run or something so that he would look less like the white grubs I dig up in my garden, by the way? This was very mean-spirited of me, true, but Rove is a very mean-spirited little grub.

His major strategy has always been to smear the political opponent, to question the opponent's values, ethics and ability. To hint and imply that the opponent is lying, or breaking the law, or eating little babies for breakfast. Note the crucial words "to hint", "to imply". Evidence is not necessary for all this, and if it is needed it will be created.

This is how Rove has always played the political game and he has been extremely successful. Rove is behind the rise of George Bush and the wingnut revolution in this country, and his success has depended on smearing and not finding legal questions overly interesting.

And as this opinion piece in the Salon points out, this very fact may turn out to be Rove's downfall. (It is a good piece on the whole Plame affair, so if you want background information it's worth sitting through an ad if you don't subscribe.) He knows how to do politics in the media but this particular game is now in the courts and his strategies may not work very well with the judiciary, especially not with Fitzgerald who seems to take the law quite seriously.

But notice how the right-wing defense campaign is using the very Rove tricks I mentioned above: they question Joseph Wilson's competency, they imply that Valerie Plame wasn't undercover at all, wasn't important, was, in fact, a traitor to the American cause and Rove a hero for revealing her plots. All this is aimed at us, the consumers of media soundbites, and the countercampaign already seems to have some effect. The snag for the wingnuts is, of course, that who they should convince is the prosecutor of the case, and he is unlikely to be taken in by all these irrelevancies.

For irrelevancies they are. It doesn't matter one whit whether Wilson was incompetent or Plame unimportant. The question for the courts is whether an undercover CIA agent was outed, and all this other stuff is noise.

The case itself is intriguing enough. Why did Miller choose to go to prison? What, exactly, is she protecting? Greg Palast has some theories on that, though so do many others. Reading the various reports on Miller has made me see layers upon layers of subterfuge, and I no longer feel willing to make any kind of guess on her motives. Though it would be verrry interesting to know what she knows. Without lying on the floor of a prison cell with the cockroaches, naturally.

What is going to happen with the Rove debacle? We'll see, but this is something to keep in mind:

"Bush cannot function without Rove. And the GOP is equally invested in his skills. I expect that, if the pressure gets too great, the president will move Rove out of the White House so he can continue to use his brain on congressional matters like Social Security and tort reform while not having to suffer quite as much politically with Rove still sitting in the West Wing. But I don't think Bush will make such a move, if he can avoid it. His Achilles heel is his loyalty to his friends and it always has been. Bush will stick with Rove long past the point that he ought to have cut his losses and he will endure significant political harm."

-- James Moore, Co-Author of "Bush's Brain" and Author of "Bush's War for Reelection"

Goddesses Have No Sense of Humor

I say it first so that nobody else needs to: I do understand what is supposed to be funny in what follows, but the unfunny bits swamp it totally. This is the Bud Light advertisement that didn't make me giggle:

Some men flip through a catalog looking for furniture
You look through a catalog looking for someone to clean the furniture

Background: *i don't do windows* (in vaguely stereotypical Asian accent)

Nothing says i will love you forever like a quick swipe of the credit card at the altar
Women wait their whole lives for a man to say "I do"
In your case "I do... agree to pay the sum of 3000 American dollars"
So crack open a bottle of Bud Light oh Catalog Casanova
Your spouse may be full price
But you'll always be our better half

It should have had a crack about how the Bud Light will come handy when the guy is digging the grave for this bride while waiting to order the next one. But I like the definition of marriage: someone to clean the furniture.

You can listen to the ad by going to http://www.budlight.com, clicking on Men of Genius, then Radio Ads, and then Mr. Mail Order Bride Orderer.
----
Props to Allie

Ship Deserting the Rats?

Looks like Rove might become a faded memory:

President Bush said on Wednesday he would withhold judgment for now on the role of his top political adviser, Karl Rove, in a brewing controversy over who leaked a CIA agent's identity

I may be too optimistic, but usually Bush is very firm in support of his henchmen and henchwomen, so this looks like he's dropping Rove. On the other hand, the wingnut countercampaign has started. Still, keep the popcorn out.

Asking for Advice on O'Connor's Replacement

The White House is eager to consult about who the best new Supreme might be. The Democrats want a moderate, the wingnuts want Attila the Hun:

While Democrats were clamoring for a nominee who could draw broad support, a leading conservative group came out against the idea of such a "consensus" pick.

"In this case, 'consensus' would mean compromise," said an e-mail message distributed Tuesday by Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and one of four conservative leaders who met with Mr. Card to discuss support for the president's eventual nominee. Mr. Sekulow encouraged recipients to sign an Internet petition against a consensus candidate.

Of course, Jerry Falwell is also being consulted. After all, he was the first one to tell us that it was the fault of the ACLU and the feminists that 9/11 happened. So his sage opinion is eagerly sought:

It is not just Democrats that the White House is seeking out for ideas. The Bush administration has also been consulting with its political allies outside the Congress.

"Someone from the White House called me yesterday, asking for any input I might have," said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority and chancellor of Liberty University in Virginia.

Mr. Falwell said he declined to offer advice, telling the White House staff member that, because of Mr. Bush's track record appointing conservative judges, "I am willing to sit back and trust him and pray for him."

And of course women are consulted! In the person of Laura Bush who is just the right woman to give a wifely angle to all this.

The Further Adventures of Walrus-Face

The new symbol of the United State in the U.N., if John Bolton gets his way:

Two months ago, while his confirmation was in trouble, Bolton began efforts to double the office space reserved within the State Department for the ambassador to the United Nations, according to three senior department officials who were involved in handling the request.

Previous ambassadors have kept a small staff in Washington in a modest suite. Bolton told several colleagues he needs more space and a larger staff in Washington because, if confirmed, he intends to spend more time here than his predecessors did.

"Bolton isn't going to sit in New York while policy gets made in Washington," the administration source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the source lacks authorization to discuss this on the record. But Bolton's efforts to obtain more space have encountered resistance. Two colleagues said Bolton's request was inappropriate because he had not been confirmed.

And there are rumors that Bush will make a recess appointment of Bolton, sometime after July 30. That's the way to unite the nation, it seems.

Women's Review of Books

Christine at ms. musings (another excellent feminist blog on culture) reports that Women's Review of Books will be back in January. I'm glad to hear that. I miss its intelligence and erudition.

In recent years many feminist publications have ceased to exist. The main reason is probably in the fact that the mainstream sources have included some of the arguments that feminists have made and that the coverage of women's issues and women in general has increased from what it was thirty years ago. (Though it's still possible for Umberto Eco to write books in which women don't exist, much, and to have them generously praised. Ehem.).

The alternative explanation for the death of feminist presses and magazines is that the Second Wave of feminism is over and that we are now living in the Backlash Years. Such years have always followed a feminist surge in history, and today is no different. Both my explanations are probably true: the world is a little bit fairer to women and feminism is now a four-letter word. So.

"I'm not a feminist, but..." is the new flavor of the month, both here in the U.S. and in Europe. The trick is to call feminism something else, like womanism or humanism, and to hope that nobody catches on that you're really defending the equal rights of women. Because if you get caught you will be doomed to an eternity of armpit hair, combat boots and nobody ever loving you again. This is a sad commentary on how far we still have to go, isn't it?

In any case, magazines like the Women's Review of Books are still needed. The mainstream literary magazines are not going to publish a feminist article more than once a year, at most, if even that, and then they are going to seek balance by publishing four or five or seven articles condemning political correctness. For this reason it is refreshing and restful to read something that is wholly dedicated to feminism, even if the arguments with anti-feminists are replaced by bickerings between types of feminists. It is a way of learning, of honing ones own ideas and of adopting new ones.

If you fancy doing that, make sure to subscribe to the Review as well as other feminist magazines.

A Timeline of Rove's Career

I had high hopes when I saw this AP article about Karl Rove's life, but it turns out to be almost totally whitewashed. Nothing about what he did as a college student to cause trouble for an opposing candidate, and though the bugging-his-own-office-to-cast-aspersions-to-his-opponents was mentioned, nothing about all the other people he destroyed in Texas. For those you need to go and see Bush's Brain.

Still, the last bits of the timelime are interesting:

--Sept 29, 2003: The White House dismisses as "ridiculous" the suggestion Rove was involved in disclosing the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

--June 10, 2004: Bush pledges to fire anyone in his administration found to have been a leaker in the Plame case.

--Oct. 16, 2004: Rove testifies before grand jury investigating the leak. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, says prosecutors have assured Rove he is not a target of the criminal probe.

--Nov. 3, 2004: Bush wins re-election with Rove as his chief political adviser.

--July 10, 2005: Newsweek reports that in 2003 Rove talked to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Plame, but did not identify her by name. Cooper later writes a story in which he uses Plame's name.

--July 11: Under intense questioning from reporters, White House spokesman Scott McClellan refuses to repeat claims that Rove had nothing to do with the leak.

--July 12: Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., say Rove should be fired. McClellan says Bush still has confidence in Rove.

Tying Threads Together

Like a spider making a web. The threads I'm going to link are the Plame Game and the Downing Street Memos (DSM). And this is better than Umberto Eco's theories in Foucault's Pendulum. For one thing, I'm probably completely correct.

What are the wonderful hidden connections, you might ask? They are not that wonderful or not that hidden, but they are very basic. Like the way one ties a simple knot:

First, there is the stonewalling and the denials. Nothing was wrong with the way the White House decided to go to war in Iraq, nothing. So the White House says. Never mind the Downing Street Memo which indicates that the U.S. was determined to use military force; didn't the U.S. go to the U.N. first? Never mind that they did that exactly because the British wouldn't otherwise go along with the military force option, the very thing that is apparent from the DSM. Nothing to see here, move along, please. And look! There is a white woman over there being bitten by a shark.

The same approach is now being taken in the Plame Game. Nobody knows anything whatsoever, and the White House has complete confidence in Karl Rove:

After two days of questions, the White House said Tuesday that President Bush continues to have confidence in Karl Rove, the presidential adviser at the center of the investigation into the leak identifying a female CIA officer. Meanwhile, prominent Democrats are calling for Rove to be fired.

Bush did not respond to a reporter's question Tuesday about whether he would fire Rove, in keeping with a June 2004 pledge to dismiss any leakers of Valerie Plame's identity.

At a White House briefing afterward, spokesman Scott McClellan was pressed about Rove's future.

"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the president's confidence," McClellan said.

Second, there is the fact that the Niger expedition Joseph Wilson was leading, the one that found no evidence on Saddam Hussein having tried to purchase uranium from Niger, led directly to the Plame Game. The Bush administration chose to pretend that the Niger link was a real one and used this as "evidence" for the urgent need to go to war against Saddam. That Wilson then stated the lack of any such "evidence" created the need to punish him by outing his wife. Hence, the DSM and the Plame Game are telling us different pieces about the dishonesties of this administration in the pre-Iraq phase.

Third, but certainly not the least important, is the way both these scandals tell us something about the ethics of this administration. The only real crime seems to be getting caught.

A Few Blogs to Visit on Feminism

Amanda on Pandagon is always fun to read. She has written recently on beauty pageants, but this post on anti-abortion activists is the one I link to. You can then read the rest of Pandagon, Jesse too.

Ampersand is discussing hidden affirmative action for men in colleges. Quotas, really, but this time around we don't hear anything about Quota Kings. I wonder why.

Lauren at Feministe has an interesting post on naked women and what nudity means, and feministing.com is the place to go for hard-hitting news about misogyny and such.

Things like showing us that these t-shirts are available:





(The model is totally innocent here, by the way).

There are so many feminist blogs these days and I can't do all of them justice in one post. I will pick more blogs in the future, but you can go adventuring right today by going to these and then following their links to new heights of wonders in feminism.

More Roving

This is a good summary of the Plame game right now, and the questions are good, too:

But let's look at what we can conclude from all this:

· The latest news reports indicate that Rove is the source who Cooper was trying to protect until last week -- and that Rove tipped Cooper about Plame three days before Robert Novak published his now-famous column exposing Plame's identity.

· Fitzgerald has asserted in his court filings that testimony from Cooper and now-jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller is all he needs to wrap up his investigation into whether a crime was committed. So what Rove said about Plame would therefore appear to be either one of two things -- or the only thing -- that Fitzgerald is still trying to nail down.

· Rove and his lawyer's denials that he was involved in telling reporters about Plame now appear to be at best based on Clintonian hairsplitting about whether he literally used her name and identified her as covert or he simply described her as the CIA-employed wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the administration critic that White House was eager to discredit at the time.

· President Bush and press secretary Scott McClellan's denials that Rove was involved in the Plame matter now appear to be at best based on the position that their responses to broad questions about Rove and Plame were met with narrowly constructed responses specifically about whether Rove leaked "classified information." Or is it possible Rove lied to them?

· And McClellan's frequent implication that, if Rove talked to reporters about Plame it was only after Novak's column had already come out, now appears suspect.

If Karl Rove, Bush's top political strategist, longtime friend and deputy chief of staff is actually indicted by Fitzgerald -- which now appears to be a possibility -- it would be an enormous blow to Bush's second term. Until Fitzgerald wraps up his highly secretive investigation, however, that's all just speculation.

So let's ask ourselves some more practical questions instead:

· Does Rove's current position pass the smell test?

· Taking into account Bush's previous statements about leaks, does this mean he now has no choice but to fire Rove?

· Did Rove keep all this from Bush?

· Or did Bush know, but chose to keep silent and do nothing?

I still can't quite believe that Rove would have been this stupid. Some cunning plan should crop up any day now, one about how all this is a forgery, how it's the so-called liberal media's fault or something along more Maffia lines. All that I have spotted on the wingnut blogs are true tinfoil theories: that Joe Wilson outed his own wife or that the outing doesn't count because everybody knew the name of Wilson's wife already.

Added: Billmon asks the same question about Rove's possible stupidity, and suggests that either Rove is hundred percent certain that he has covered his back or the whole thing is falling apart because Fitzgerald is more serious than the wingnuts thought.

Conspiracies!

Have you read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? I just finished it. Mostly I was bored, but his idea of making wingnut-flavored theories about history appealed to me. The basic idea is to use accidental connections and pure happenstance to make up impressive edifices of deep conspiracy theories.

It immediately occurred to me that there is something Eco-like fishy in the fact that the wingnuts are all reading a series of books called Left Behind, in which the head of the United Nations turns out to be the Devil and so on, and that the Bush administration named its education program No Child Left Behind. See what I mean?

Clearly, the intent of the administration is to make sure that all children are given the values that would make them first to be vacuumed up by the Heavenly Hoover. And what are we going to do about it? Hmh?
----
Just in case I failed miserably, this is intended as satire. But I think that my smart readers could make up lots of similar and more interesting theories to explain everything in our current faith-based society.

Zell Miller and Money

David Sirota has a nifty little piece on this ex-Democrat and current foaming-at-the-mouth wingnut:

Georgia political analyst Bill Shipp reports that former Sen. Zell Miller - the guy who piously brags about his own integrity - essentially stole $80,000 from Georgia taxpayers upon leaving office when he was governor.

According to Shipp, who was quoting a WSB-TV investigation, Miller "pocketed more than $60,000 in taxpayer funds earmarked for entertainment and other expenses at the Governor's Mansion." Miller "also picked up a check for more than $20,000 for 'unused leave' - a sum to which he was not entitled as a constitutional officer."

Hilariously, Zell explained himself by "say[ing] that he was technically eligible to take the mansion money as his own because no one said he could not."

That's wingnuts ethics in a nutshell: some technical manual, somewhere, must tell them what is wrong. Otherwise it's ok to go ahead. I have had several righties explain that we need to have religion and holy books such as the Bible, because if there is no fear of hell people will just do whatever they wish, including mass murder. This makes me scared of the righties. If all that keeps them from mass murder is religion... In any case, the most recent mass murders in Iraq and in London were elicited by religion, not the other way round.

But to get back to Miller, I think that he just may have gone nuts.

White House Refuses To Comment On Rove

Scott McClelland went into pretzels in today's White House Press Briefing (the "Gaggle") to avoid saying anything whatsoever about Karl Rove's possible involvement in the Plame affair. It is really funny, as you can see by reading the transcript at Think Progress. Or check out the video highlights at Crooks & Liars.

I suggest some beer and a bag of popcorn, too!
And you might enjoy this photoshopped image courtesy of Morgaine while you read and watch the Gaggle:



Dare One Hope?

The Plame Game - Getting Funnier

Karl Rove:

I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name

That's true, in a literal sense. He called Valerie Plame "Wilson's wife".

Check out Billmon on this topic, also this recent New York Times article.

Silly Thought of the Day

Since there is a Bible Belt, are Bible Suspenders unnecessary?


I'm going to be on the road on Monday, so I leave this really deeply philosophical question for you to think about until Tuesday morning. Take care!

Feminism 101?

I recently heard a radio interview with people who commuted to work. In my anally compulsive way I automatically added up the number of men and women interviewed. The totals interviewed were six men and one woman. This is unlikely to reflect the actual numbers of men and women who commuted that day, but it's not uncommon to find in the media. There is something about us women that suffices in rather small doses to give the impression of gender balance. If you watch television sitcoms you frequently find similar gender ratios.

What was odd about this interview is that afterwards I remembered what the one woman had said extremely well and couldn't really separate the men's comments from each other. The woman stood out as a representative of a large group "women"; the men were interviewed as individuals and so what they said somehow didn't stick to my memory. It's easy to see how something like this could turn into a belief that "women" are fairly represented in all sorts of fields, perhaps even overrepresented, while the reality could be the very opposite, unless ones view of fair representation is to have one woman to stand for all.

I think this is what happens when a few women become famous in some field with lots of famous men. The few are now memorable as "women", whereas none of the men is specifically there as a representative of "men". The effect is that there are people who truly believe that women have the lion's share in all sorts of fields where they actually are rarer than hen's teeth. Or almost as rare.

Add to this the attempts to include more women in some reporting in the media. It's easiest to just keep on asking the same women to come to the shows and, presto, it looks like women are everywhere because their names become memorable and the names of the many men are harder to remember. But it's in reality a sign of the rarity of women in the public sector and our token status. Think of Hillary Clinton and how she is marshalled out all the time as an example of a successful female politician. Not that many others exist, actually, but the incessant bickering about Hillary makes it seem as if the world of politics is full of uppity women.

If my theory (which might well belong to someone else first, of course) is correct it would explain why so many anti-feminists are seriously convinced that we women are taking over the world and wrecking the Western Civilization. Counting the actual numbers here would be helpful. This theory also means that we don't have actual gender balance in a field until the gender of the women in it isn't the first thing we notice.

All this is part of a more general explanation I have about how women are viewed as an almost undifferentiated mass of "womanness" and how this makes women and men behave. Women are still defined by how they differ from men, on average, and a woman in any place where women are rare stands, first and foremost, for all women. Her behavior will be judged not as that of an individual but as representative of "womanness" consisting of fairly interchangeable parts.

This also explains why the mommy wars can be so vicious: if all mothers really are part of the same "motherness", then there is only one correct way to do the mothering and everyone not using it is failing.

I can't think of any examples outside the literary genre of romance where men are treated as specks of an amorphous mass. Women are treated this way much more often, even by other women, and the consequences are mostly not pretty. If we are all part of the total whole of "womanness", then whatever one of does will have an effect on the others. Hence the desire to police our sisters and the anger we feel when they appear to misbehave. And we are not wholly wrong in doing this: the media tends to see the deeds of individual women as applicable to all of us, and this is most common in cases where the individual woman did something wrong.

I believe similar patterns apply to some minorities in this country, though I haven't subjected my theory to a test with that data. What do you think about this? Am I ready to publish and become the successor of the famous feminist voices of the last thirty years or should I just stick to goddessing?

The "Roo"

Many happy returns to Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo! He's trying to reach a million visits to his blog on this day, so if you can, click on it and read.

Fun!

Google this:
worst president ever

Bush's Judges

All the focus on SCOTUS makes us forget that Bush has been appointing judges all along to the appeals courts. The two hundred judges he has added to these benches are "solid" conservatives. Their decisions will slowly start affecting our lives. For example, NARAL points out that Bush nominated judges have been four times as likely to decide cases for the pro-life side than judges nominated by other presidents. And this is interesting:

On another matter, two of Bush's nominees to the D.C. Circuit are poised to have significant impact on a pair of cases involving challenges to the U.S. military's detention of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Janice Rogers Brown and Thomas B. Griffith, both just placed on the bench last month, were picked at random to sit on a three-judge panel that will hear the cases this fall.

Let me try to predict what they will find...

Political writing tends too often to focus on the very top. Hence, much is written about the Supremes while all the time, slowly and silently, the whole edifice below them turns wingnut. This matters.

The Plame Game Continues...

Today's Newsweek tells us that Matthew Cooper's source was Karl Rove. But the writing is carefully contrived so as to not accuse Rove of having done anything illegal:

In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "

Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.

The crucial bit here is in the last paragraph: "that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared". Earlier it was said that he only commented on the issue after the Novak column, which would then have been his source.

So much depends on the prosecutor's guts in this case. We'll see.