Harriet Miers

Miers is a White House counsel whom Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court to take the place that Sandra O'Connor had. The wingnuts are not pleased, the Hispanics are not pleased and the pro-choice groups are not really pleased, either. So who is pleased? It's hard to say, because Miers' opinions are so far fairly unknown. Time is needed to dig up stuff on her.

But she is clearly not what the wingnuts wanted: a raving extreme radical cleric type. And she is a woman when there were perfectly qualified men available with the right stern values and true testicles. Or so David Frum says in his angry blog post:

The Senate would have confirmed Luttig, Alito, or McConnell. It certainly would have confirmed a Senator Mitch McConnell or a Senator Jon Kyl, had the president felt even a little nervous about the ultimate vote.

There was no reason for him to choose anyone but one of these outstanding conservatives. As for the diversity argument, it just seems incredible to imagine that anybody would have criticized this president of all people for his lack of devotion to that doctrine. He has appointed minorities and women to the highest offices in the land, relied on women as his closest advisers, and staffed his administration through and through with Americans of every race, sex, faith, and national origin. He had nothing to apologize for on that score. So the question must be asked, as Admiral Rickover once demanded of Jimmy Carter: Why not the best?

I worked with Harriet Miers. She's a lovely person: intelligent, honest, capable, loyal, discreet, dedicated ... I could pile on the praise all morning. But there is no reason at all to believe either that she is a legal conservative or--and more importantly--that she has the spine and steel necessary to resist the pressures that constantly bend the American legal system toward the left. This is a chance that may never occur again: a decisive vacancy on the court, a conservative president, a 55-seat Republican majority, a large bench of brilliant and superbly credentialed conservative jurists ... and what has been done with the opportunity?

If Frum is unhappy with this choice should I be happy? It is not that simple. Nothing ever is. So far all we know about Miers is that she adores Bush. And this whole thing just reminds me that we are far away from the time when a woman candidate is just going to be judged as a candidate.

Gossip

The blogger is finally co-operating and I can write down my ideas. Because I had to hold them for too long, though, some of the immediacy will have withered away. Too bad.

An interesting article on the Plame investigation suggests that the prosecutor in the case might have other ideas than trying to indict someone for outing Plame:

But a new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose.

Who knows? Nothing much may come out of this, but when you combine it with this:

Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC's This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb:

Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it's a manageable one for the White House especially if we don't know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions

Curiouser and curiouser. Would our president agree? Graphic Truth has a funny picture of him musing over all this:





Just to remind you: All this is is gossip right now. But a goddess can dream.

Katha on the Desperate Housewives of the Ivy League

I posted on the Louise Story New York Times article (about how "many" Ivy League female students supposedly plan to stay at home) when it appeared and so did many other bloggers. Katha Pollitt had to wait because her column only comes out once a week, but the wait was worth it for all of us:

With all that excellent insta-critiquing, I feared I'd lumber into print
too late to add a new pebble to the sling. But I did find one place
where the article is still Topic No. 1: Yale. "I sense that she had a
story to tell, and she only wanted to tell it one way," Mary Miller,
master of Saybrook, one of Story's targeted colleges, told me. Miller
said Story met with whole suites of students and weeded out the women
who didn't fit her thesis. Even among the ones she focused on, "I
haven't found that the students' views are as hard and fast as Story
portrayed them." (In a phone call Story defended her research methods,
which she said her critics misunderstood, and referred me to her
explanation on the web.) One supposed future homemaker of America posted
an anonymous dissection of Story's piece at www.mediabistro.com. Another
told me in an e-mail that while the article quoted her accurately, it
"definitely did not turn out the way I thought it would after numerous
conversations with Louise." That young person may be sadder but
wiser--she declined to let me interview her or use her name--but history
professor Cynthia Russett, quoted as saying that women are "turning
realistic," is happy to go public with her outrage. Says Russett, "I
may have used the word, but it was in the context of a harsh or forced
realism that I deplored. She made it sound like this was a trend of
which I approved. In fact, the first I heard of it was from Story, and
I'm not convinced it exists."

And this is how you do research that will be printed on page one of one of the most respectable newspapers in the world! I thought it took something more...scientific and objective, but I guess I was wrong. Such a waste, all these years of trying to learn, to study, to understand, to write more like a real human being! I could'ave been a contender!

Blogger is Bloggered

Posts disappear and change order dramatically. Something to do with recent maintenance of the data base? I have a longish post on the American Street (see column on the right for the link) in the meantime. When things have calmed down here there will be more.

The Bennett Slip

It's showing. You must have read or heard all about what Bill Bennett said recently but if you haven't here is the bit from Bennett's own show:

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Quite a few people are discussing Bennett's statement out of context but even within context it's fairly bad. He picks African-Americans as the group to use in his stupid example, and that is racist. Because if he had really wanted to make the point by picking a group with very high crime rates he should have suggested aborting all male fetuses. And don't you now go saying that I have advocated that, because I didn't. I just pointed out how one can see that Bennett uses an "out-group" for his example, and by doing that he others the members of that group.

Krugman

He has written such a true piece that it's a crime I can't just print it all here. But I can give you a sample, about "That's the way it is":

Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He sold all his stock in HCA, which his father helped found, just days before the stock plunged. Two years ago, Mr. Frist claimed that he did not even know if he owned HCA stock.

According to a new U.S. government index, the effect of greenhouse gases is up 20 percent since 1990.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a 33-year-old Wall Street insider with little experience in regulation but close ties to drug firms, was made a deputy commissioner at the F.D.A. in July. (This story, picked up by Time magazine, was originally reported by Alicia Mundy of The Seattle Times.)

The Artic ice cap is shrinking at an alarming rate.

Two of the three senior positions at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are vacant. The third is held by Jonathan Snare, a former lobbyist. Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog group, reports that he worked on efforts to keep ephedra, a dietary supplement that was banned by the F.D.A., legal.

And so it goes on, from yet another proof of criminality or incompetency in the Bush administration to something that is really worrying (avian flu, for example) for everyone else except this obsessive-compulsive government of ours. Never mind hurricane rescue preparadness, never mind dirty nuclear bombs, never mind the avian flu or global warming. What really matters is to dismantle the Social Security system, to fight brown people somewhere outside the U.S., and to gather as much money as possible into the neocon coffers. And to ban gay marriage and guarantee that women are in the kitchen with lots of children. - Not that Krugman said all of this; I just latched on to get my rant in as well.

But the point he makes is a very important one. This government is adrift in a hurricane of greed and ineptitude and we are all going to suffer for it.

Hank

Hank


Hank is under anesthesia right now. Her left front shoulder is being x-rayed. She should come home tonight.

Iraq. A Mess.

I don't write much about Iraq because it pains me far too much. I demonstrated against the war before it started because the whole plan was clearly hatched up by total lunatics and every scenario I tried out in my head ended up in too much blood flowing for no great results. And once the invasion started it was already too late for all practical purposes. To make a difference by writing about it, I mean, including a difference for the wingnuts. If they had followed my advice they'd be a lot better off today.

There is nothing I'd like better than to be proved wrong about Iraq, for the sake of all the innocent Iraqis, but this is very unlikely:

Sunni-led insurgents killed at least five people in a crowded vegetable market on Friday, the Muslim day of worship, police said. New information also emerged about coordinated suicide and mortar attacks the day before in another mostly Shiite city that left nearly 100 people dead.

Elsewhere, in the southern city of Basra, an Iraqi police convoy was ambushed late Thursday, killing four policemen and wounding one, said police Capt. Mushtaq Khazim.

The new surge of violence before an Oct. 15 referendum on Iraq's constitution has killed at least 190 people, including 13 U.S. service members, in the past five days.

The insurgents have vowed to wreck the referendum, whose passage is crucial to prospects for starting a withdrawal of American troops.

Al-Qaida in Iraq, the country's most feared insurgent group, has declared ``all-out war'' on the Shiite majority that dominates Iraq's government, and moderate Sunni Arab leaders have urged their community to reject the constitution, saying it will fragment Iraq and leave them weak compared to Shiites and Kurds.

And soon we may see the most awful of the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib. See why I don't want to write about it all?

Ahnuld's Veto Day in California

Arnold Schwartzenegger, the Governator of California, has today vetoed the bill to legalize gay marriage. He also vetoed several other bills:

On a day when the governor rejected 52 bills, he discarded proposals that would have helped consumers buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. He refused to expand punishments for employers that flout minimum wage laws, pay women less than men or resist paying workers' compensation claims.

He declined to protect nurses from being required to work overtime or having to lift patients on their own. And he vetoed legislation to allow workers locked out by employees during pay disputes to collect unemployment benefits.

The governor also vetoed a bill to create greater oversight of the state's $3-billion stem cell research program.

Schwarzenegger enjoys a solid 33% approval rating... But an e-mail from prochoiceamerica.org informs us that he also

signed a measure intended to ensure that pharmacists do not deny women emergency contraception. The bill by Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, was prompted by publicized cases in which pharmacists, refused to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception known as "morning after" pills, out of moral concerns."

Thus, I can't give Ahnuld a zero approval rating here.

Poor governator. He's not finding politics quite as much fun as he may have thought at the beginning. I almost feel guilty for adding this funny "California Dreaming" to the end of this post, courtesy of Little Sister:

Der New 2005 California State Employee Handbook

By Arnold Schwarzenegger

Sick Days

Ve vill no longer accept a doktor's shtatement as proof of sickness.
If you are able to go to the doktor, you are able to come to verk.

Personal Days

Each employee vill receive 104 personal days a year. Dey are called
Saturday and Sunday.

Lunch Break

Skinny people get 30 minutes for lunch as they need to eat more, so
that dey can look healthy. Normal size people get 15 minutes for lunch
to get balanced meal to maintain their average figure. Fat people get
5 minutes for lunch, because dat's all der time needed to drink der
Shlim Fast.

Dress Code

It is advised that you come to verk dressed according to your salary.
If ve see you vearing $350 Prada sneakers, and carrying a $600 Gucci
Bag, ve assume you are doing vell financially and derefore you do not
need a raise. If you dress poorly, you need to learn to manage your
money better, so dat you may buy nicer clothes, and derefore you do
not need a raise. If you dress in-betveen, you are right vere you need
to be and derefore you do not need a raise.

Bereavement Leave

Dis is no excuse for missing verk. Dere is notting you can do for dead
friends, relatives, or co-verkers. Every effort should be made to have
non-employees attend to da arranchments. In rare cases vere employee
involvement is necessary, da funeral should be scheduled in da late
afternoon. Ve vill be glad to allow you to vork troo your lunch hour
and subsequently leave vone hour early.

Restroom Use

Entirely too much time is being spent in da restroom. Dere is now a
shtricht 3-minute time limit in der shtalls. At der end of tree
minutes, an alarm vill sound, der toilet paper roll vill retract, the
shtall door vill open and a picture vill be taken. After your second
offense, your picture vill be posted on der company bulletin board
under da "Chronic Offenders" category.

Tank you for your loyalty to our great shtate. Ve are here to provide
a positive employment experience.

Tank You, Der Governater

The Friday Dump

It is usual for certain types of news to be released on Fridays, especially anything that the powers-that-be would prefer not widely discussed. So I am wondering if this is the reason that it is on a Friday that Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter imprisoned during the course of the Plame investigation, has agreed to testify after all.

Probably a red herring. The whole investigation has been full of red herrings, and I doubt that we have seen the end of them yet. But for what it's worth, here is what Miller herself says:

I am leaving jail today because my source has now voluntarily and personally released me from my promise of confidentiality regarding our conversations relating to the Wilson-Plame matter. My attorneys have also reached agreement with the Office of Special Counsel regarding the nature and scope of my testimony, which satisfies my obligation as a reporter to keep faith with my sources.

This enables me to appear before the Grand Jury tomorrow. I'll say nothing more until after my testimony. I do, however, want to thank The New York Times, and my husband, family and friends, for their unwavering support. I am also grateful to the many fellow journalists and citizens from the United States and around the world, who stood with me in fighting for the cause of the free flow of information. It was a source of strength through a difficult three months to know they understood what I did was to affirm one of my profession's highest principles.

If You Want To See A Funny Picture

go and visit the derenegade. This one makes me think all sorts of possible thought bubbles one could add to the president's head.

Haiku Time

Because I don't feel like writing anything serious right now. I can't write haikus in English yet, but I bet that you can! So write me one about some recent political event or whatever else has caught your attention using only three lines with five, seven and five syllables.

Mystery Man Confirmed

Nobody really knows what John Roberts will do on the bench. The wingnuts think that he will get rid of abortion and affirmative action and civil rights and otherwise make things pleasant for corporations and the radical religious right. The Democrats hope that he won't do those things, or at least not very vigorously, and even if he does he won't be any worse than Rehnquist was. It's the next nominee that will be important for the Democrats to fight. That seems to be the consensus on the left.

It was clear from the very beginning that Roberts would sail through. After all, he at least knows how to do law and that's about as good as any wingnut offer we will get. But he is very young to be the Chief Justice, and whatever he will turn out to be will affect us for a very long time. This and the next Supreme Court nomination may well turn out to be the most damaging parts of the Bush era and the very odd 2004 elections.

I hope that I am overly pessimistic here, naturally. So it is with some pleasure that I turn to the other mystery man confirmation, that of Roy Blunt to step into the pants of Tom DeLay. What happened to Dreier's nomination? The rumors are that he didn't get it because of his gayness. Could that possibly be true?

Gloating

That was my first reaction on reading David Brooks's most recent babble in the New York Times. But it was short-lived, I swear, and quickly passed into a study of what Brooks is saying about Tom DeLay's recent troubles, and this is that pretty much DeLay is over, and that the whole Bush administration is a mess. Heh. (Pardon me.)

Brooks uses sports metaphors in his column, calling DeLay "the designated hitter". He argues that DeLay is a good man who has done nothing for his own advancement. Instead, all he has done was for the team: the Republican party.

If Brooks is right (I have no way of knowing) it might be time to look at this team concept and the use of sports and war metaphors in general in political commenting. Feminists have long pointed out how this particular way of viewing politics makes it hard for women to run for elected office, because the concepts of war and sports are still fundamentally seen as masculine. But it is pretty clear that running politics like it was a war or a baseball game isn't ultimately good for the country, either.

Yes, I was gloating. It's a nice feeling, all warm and fuzzy and full of little lightning strikes of pure exhilaration. After all these years I'm allowed to feel warm and fuzzy for a few seconds. But Brooks doesn't really want that: he concludes his little piece by implying that the Democrats are not going to be any better at all:

Politics is a team sport. Nobody can get anything done alone. But in today's Washington, loyalty to the team displaces loyalty to the truth. Loyalty to the team explains why President Bush doesn't fire people who serve him poorly, and why, as a result, his policies are often not well executed.

Loyalty to the team is why I often leave meals with politicians thinking "reasonable in private," but then I see them ranting like cartoon characters on TV. Loyalty to the team is why someone like Chuck Hagel is despised in Republican ranks even though, whether you agree or not, he is courageously speaking his mind.

Will we learn from DeLay's fall about the self-destructive nature of the team mentality? Of course not. The Democrats have drawn the 10-years-out-of-date conclusion that in order to win, they need to be just like Tom DeLay. They need to rigidly hew to orthodoxy. They need Deaniac hyperpartisanship. They need to organize their hatreds around Bush the way the Republicans did around Clinton.

Funny. Didn't Brooks quite recently write that the Democrats are all scattered and confused because they never had this wonderful era of ideological purification that the Republicans went through? Or was it Tierney? In any case I have no doubt that there are corrupt Democrats. There are even corrupt priests, I've been told. But the danger of excessive party discipline on the left is very distant, to be anticipated around the time when the Devil opens the skating rinks in Hell.

And the Enron Era Continues

Now in trailers:

Four hundred squat white trailers sat on train cars in the Norfolk Southern rail yard Tuesday, waiting for the long trip to the Gulf of Mexico. In Nappanee, 15 miles away, 200 or more are produced each day.

This is what $521 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency contracts looks like: Gulf Stream Coach Inc.'s bare bones Cavalier trailers. They have a steel chassis, a wood frame and white aluminum siding. There's a couch, a kitchen table, a three-burner stove, a double sink and a refrigerator. Each has an adult-size bed and a set of bunk beds, and they can be hooked up to air conditioning and sewer and water lines. A toilet, a shower, and a place to wash your face complete the unit.

Demand couldn't be greater.

"As fast as we can put them on there, they're moving them down there," said Gulf Stream marketing director Steven Lidy, watching the company's trailers being hitched for the ride to the rail yard Tuesday.

The giant award to Gulf Stream for 50,000 housing units is part of unprecedented federal spending to answer one of the basic needs caused by the hurricane disasters of Katrina and Rita: providing an estimated 600,000 displaced people with housing.

The trailers are emblematic of the scale and scope of the federal effort in the region. The spending is a window into the urgent, sometimes haphazard contracting process, much of it done with little or no competitive bidding, like Gulf Stream's contract.
(Bolds mine.)

Little or no competitive bidding. This is because of the urgency, you see. It's also a lot easier to just look up who has already gotten federal money and to hand out more to the same companies.

But it would be very interesting to see what the actual contracts look like. For example, it isn't too hard to find out how much a trailer like the ones supplied by Gulf Stream would retail. Then one could compare that price to the prices in this contract, to get a starting point.

DeLay in the Enron Era

I'm listening to Al Franken's show on Air America and he is just telling how Tom DeLay has stepped down as the House Majority Leader because he has been indicted in a criminal investigation. Maybe times are finally changing; I remember writing about one of DeLay's schemes about a year ago and even then it seemed not quite ethical (channeling donations to the Republican party via something that looked like it was funding children's welfare).

Add DeLay to what is happening to Frist. Then stir in a little bit of Karl Rove's problems. Sprinkle liberally with Michael Brown and FEMA. If desired, add a little bit of alcohol use by the president...

The Enron Stew.
-----
Here are more details on DeLay's current dilemma, via Atrios:

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, prompting the Sugar Land Republican to give up his leadership post in Congress.

"I have notified (House Speaker Dennis Hastert) that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference and the actions of the Travis County District Attorney today," DeLay said in a statement.

The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.

John Conyers Writes Letters

With apologies to Atrios from whom I stole this nifty little title. Here is an example of a letter by Representative Conyers on the treatment of arrested peace protesters:

September 27, 2005

Office of the Chief

United States Park Police

Dwight E. Pettiford

1100 Ohio Drive S.W.

Washington, D. C. 20242

Dear Chief Pettiford:

I am writing to request information regarding the treatment of individuals arrested on September 26, 2005 in front of the White House and processed at the United States Park Police Anacostia Station.

Yesterday 384 protestors, including peace activist Cindy Sheehan, were arrested outside the White House and were brought to United States Park Police Anacostia Station. I was very surprised to learn that many of those arrested were kept handcuffed in vans and buses for up to 12 hours before they were charged and released. Some of those were released at 4:30 in the morning after being arrested at 4:00 the previous afternoon. Many of those held captive the longest were grandmothers and senior citizens. Those released after midnight were unfamiliar with Washington, DC and had no means to travel back to their hotels once the metro had closed. Anacostia is not frequented by taxicabs after midnight.

I have the following questions regarding the treatment of those arrested yesterday:

1. Why was the Anacostia Station chosen as the sole location to process all 384 arrestees when there were several other Park Police stations in the greater Washington, DC area?

2. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police for periods exceeding twelve hours before being charged with a crime?

3. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police, and kept handcuffed on buses for periods exceeding ten hours?

4. What is the established U.S. Park Police procedure for processing large numbers of arrestees in the Washington, DC area?

Please respond to the Judiciary Committee Minority Office at 2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, telephone number 202-225-6504, fax number 202-225-4423.

Sincerely,


John Conyers, Jr.

Ranking Member

House Committee on the Judiciary

Sodom and Gomorrh

Rorschach has a post about an interesting study which argues that the more religious countries may in fact be the more sinful ones:

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from " uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

The implication is that religion may not be that helpful as an aid towards a more ethical or moral society. Or is it? The problem with correlational studies like this one is that they tell us nothing about causality. In this particular study, for example, we find out that the United States appears to be both more religious and more "sinful" than most Western European countries. But we can't actually conclude that it's the religiousness which causes the sin. It could be the other way round: the sin might drive people to religion, or it could be that there is something else about religious people that makes them both pious and sinful at the same time, or countries which have large religious majorities might have small very sinful minorities who are not religious, or the correlation might be just a historical coincidence.

If we could get data from many time periods and if we could establish that the religiosity was first and then the sinfulness followed we'd have a stronger case for arguing that it's the Bible-thumping which causes extramarital humping and so on.

Despite all these academic and uninteresting reservations I do agree that the study shows us that the Christian Right in the United States is full of baloney when it portrays this country as the last shining and virtuous one among the Sodom and Gomorrh of the corrupt west.

The Best Bumper Sticker Ever

Rapture Is Not An Exit Strategy

The Short and the Sweet

News about the Bush administration, very condensed because I have to go somewhere.

First, Michael Brown (the one who is going to study his own incompetence and get paid for it) has given us a statement about why he did so poorly as the head of FEMA. It has to do with Democrats.

Second, the Enron era of the administration continues. Curioser and curioser.

Third, via Hesiod, Laura Bush will be participating in reality tv! Because that is what the focus groups show will work to make the president look better, even though the president doesn't listen to focus groups.

The idea is for you to read each of the articles I have linked to. There will be a quiz later on...

Only In Wingnuttia!

Raw Story reports that FEMA has rehired Michael Brown, the guy who used to run FEMA (to ground) as a consultant. Guess what his job description is? To evaluate the FEMA response to hurricane Katrina!

Then Osama bin Laden should be the judge in the international court on terrorism.

Pardon me while I go and bang my head against the garage door.

Cindy Sheehan

has been arrested outside the White House. At least according to MSNBC. And here is more:

Sheehan and several dozen other protesters sat down on the sidewalk after marching along the pedestrian walkway on Pennsylvania Avenue. Police warned them three times that they were breaking the law by failing to move along, then began making arrests.

Sheehan, 48, was the first taken into custody. She stood up and was led to a police vehicle while protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching."

Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed in an ambush in Sadr City, Iraq, last year. She attracted worldwide attention last month with her 26-day vigil outside
President Bush's Texas ranch.

More Enron Era

The Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (aka the catkiller) may be in trouble, perhaps of the type that bothered Martha Stewart (of the iron-your-underwear fame). It is a story of blind trusts and what a blind trust means. Blind trusts are used to absolve federal politicians who own stock from accusations of conflict of interest: if they don't know what stocks they own they can't be accused of conflict of interest with respect to the involved companies. The idea is to hand over the day-to-day running of the portfolio to an outsider who will then take care of it without informing the owner as to its contents. This can't work completely as the politicians do know what they had in their portfolios to begin with. Like, say, shares in a family-owned company:

Blind trusts are designed to keep an arm's-length distance between federal officials and their investments, to avoid conflicts of interest. But documents show that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist knew quite a bit about his accounts from nearly two dozen letters from the trust administrators.

Frist, R-Tennessee, received regular updates of transfers of assets to his blind trusts and sales of assets. He also was able to initiate a stock sale of a hospital chain founded by his family with perfect timing. Shortly after the sale this summer, the stock price dived.

A possible presidential contender in 2008, Frist now faces dual investigations by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission into his stock sales.

Think Progress presents a history of the events in this little scandal. And a little scandal it is, nothing to compare to the big scandals that this administration is busy organizing. It is not even comparable to the hiring scandal my previous Enron era post referred to. But it's a sign of the times, a sign of the Republican strong values and ethics.

Today's Quiz

You know how liberal the Hollywood establishment is? The wingnuts moan and groan about it daily, and this moaning and groaning may have had an effect on the new batch of movies just coming out. Does "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" support the theory of Intelligent Design? Is "Just Like Heaven" a retake of the Theresa Schiavo case?

I don't know, but a recent movie review in the New York Times suggests that this might be the case, and that more generally the new movies slant slightly to the right. This quote is on "Just Like Heaven" where the heroine, Elizabeth, lies in coma:

Would I have been happier if Elizabeth died? The very absurdity of the question - what kind of romantic comedy would that be? - is evidence of the film's ingenuity. Who could possibly take the side of medical judgment when love, family, supernatural forces and the very laws of genre are on the other side? And who would bother to notice that the villainous, materialistic doctor, despite having the religiously neutral last name Rushton, is played by Ben Shenkman, a bit of casting that suggests a faint, deniable whiff of anti-Semitism? Similarly, it can't mean much that Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman, is sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home-mom sister. Or that the last word you hear (uttered by Jon Heder, first seen in "Napoleon Dynamite") is "righteous."

What caught my eye was the little sentence about "Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman" being "sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home sister", and I tried to recall at least one movie in the last ten years which would have depicted an ambitious career woman as happier and more fulfilled than a stay-at-home wife. I can't think of a single movie like that. Can you?

For more points, mention the name of at least one movie where a mother holding a job outside the home is portrayed as happy and fulfilled.


For bonus points, mention a movie in which the ambitious career man is portrayed as sad and unfulfilled in comparison to his less ambitious and more relaxed peers.

The Enron Era

Frank Rich is excellent in his latest New York Times column about the Bush administration's hiring choices:

As recently as 10 days ago, when he resigned before his arrest, Mr. Safavian was the man who set purchasing policy for the entire federal government, including that related to Hurricane Katrina relief. The White House might as well have appointed a contestant from "The Apprentice." Before entering public service, Mr. Safavian's main claim to fame was as a lobbyist whose clients included Indian gaming interests and thuggish African regimes. Mr. Safavian now faces charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff, the Tom DeLay-Ralph Reed-Grover Norquist pal who is being investigated by more agencies than looked into 9/11. Mr. Abramoff's greasy K Street influence-peddling network makes the Warren Harding gang, which operated out of its own infamous "little green house on K Street," look like selfless stewards of the public good.

You know that the arrest of Mr. Safavian, one of three known Abramoff alumni to migrate into the administration, is the start of something big. Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department announced it only after Mr. Safavian had appeared in court and had been released without bail. The gambit was clearly intended to keep the story off television, and it worked.

It won't for long. The Enron odor emanating from Mr. Safavian is of a piece with the rest of the cronyism in the Katrina preparedness package. The handing off of FEMA from President Bush's 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to Mr. Allbaugh's even less qualified buddy, Michael Brown, in 2003 is now notorious. (The two men have been friends for 25 years but were not college roommates, as I wrote here last week.) But that's only the beginning: the placement of hacks like "Brownie" and Mr. Safavian in crucial jobs hasn't been slowed one whit by what went down on their watch in New Orleans.

Witness the nomination of Julie Myers as the new head of immigration and customs enforcement at the Homeland Security Department. Though the White House attacked the diplomat Joseph Wilson for nepotism because he undertook a single pro bono intelligence mission while his wife was at the C.I.A., it thought nothing of handing this huge job to a nepotistic twofer: Ms. Myers is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers and has just married the chief of staff for the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff. Her qualifications for running an agency with more than 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget include serving as an associate counsel under Kenneth Starr; in that job, she helped mastermind the costly and doomed prosecution of Susan McDougal, and was outwitted at every turn by the defense lawyer Mark Geragos.

Rich goes on to list example after example of very similar hiring choices. Did you know that the Iraq reconstruction process was largely in the hands of inexperienced twenty-somethings whose only relevant experience was being an avid wingnut? Or that being a fundraiser for Bush or his cronies will get you almost any job in this administration, never mind what your actual qualifications might be?

All this might be logical, of course. A party which doesn't believe in the government might well try to run it to ground by appointing lots of really unsuitable people to run things, including FEMA and the reconstruction of Iraq. And friends will always be rewarded, naturally.

But this leaves us taxpayers paying for a party which we were not invited to attend. Even worse, we are expected to pay for the after-party clean-up, too.
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Sadly, the Rich column is now available only in exchange for payment or from the paper edition. But Google is your friend.

Fall Garden Blogging

Poppies


My garden looks like shit, so I'm showing a nice picture from a European poppy garden instead. These are not opium poppies; if you want those scatter the seeds from your poppy seed bagel on some fallow ground. Though of course this would be illegal and not very useful as the poppies themselves do nothing much except look ravishing. And then the police will come and burn down your garden.

My actual garden right now consists of lots of six-foot tall plants that have fallen on top of each other. Hank and Henrietta (my dogs) crawl around in the tunnels that are created this way, seeking for good pooping spots. All this is my fault: I Did Not Stake! Always stake. That is the second commandment of the gardener's bible.

The first commandment is: Work The Garden Hard In April and May. I didn't do that, either. I was here blogging away, and enormous waves of guilt are flooding over me right now. But not enormous enough to send me out with a machete and thick gloves, and that's what is needed to clear the garden.

Does George Bush feel similar waves of guilt for ignoring his allotted garden spot for so long?

Pictures from the Anti-War Rally

Here and here. The next best thing to actually having been there.

The Anti-War Rally

It is held today in Washington, D.C. and in other cities around the world. The early media coverage is, as usual, interesting in the way it grasps for "balance". Like giving thousands of anti-war protesters roughly the same number of quotes as a handful of pro-war protesters in the same place. Here is an example.

Enjoy!

Hmj sent these to me. They are really funny:

Insurance Claims

Below are actual insurance claim form gaffes found by a UK insurance
company:

"I started to turn and it was at this point I noticed a camel and an
elephant tethered at the verge. This distraction caused me to lose
concentration and hit a bollard."

"On the M6 motorway I moved from the center lane to the fast lane but
the other car didn't give way."

"On approach to the traffic lights the car in front suddenly broke."

"Three men approached me from the minibus. I thought they were coming
to apologize. Two of the men grabbed hold of me by the arms, and the
first slapped me several times across the face. I knee'd the man in
the groin, but didn't connect properly, so I kicked him in the shin."

"I didn't think the speed limit applied after midnight."

"I was on my way to see an unconscious patient who had convulsions and
was blocked by a tanker."

"Mr. X is in hospital and says I can use his car and take his wife
while he is there. What shall I do about it?"

"No witnesses would admit having seen the mishap until after it
happened."

"I knew the dog was possessive about the car but I would not have
asked her to drive it if I had thought there was any risk."

"Windscreen broken. Cause unknown. Probably Voodoo."

"The car in front hit the pedestrian but he got up so I hit him
again."

"We had completed the turn and had just straightened the car when Miss
X put her foot down hard and headed for the ladies' loo."

"I had been driving for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and
had an accident. I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at
my mother-in- law and headed over the embankment."

"Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I
don't have."

"The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its
intention."

"I thought my window was down, but I found out it wasn't when I put my
head through it."

"I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way."

"A truck backed through my windshield into my wife's face."

"A pedestrian hit me and went under my car."

"The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times
before I hit him."

"In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole."

"I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home. As I
reached an intersection a hedge sprang up obscuring my vision and I
did not see the other car."

"I was on my way to the doctor with rear end trouble when my universal
joint gave way causing me to have an accident."

"To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front I struck the
pedestrian."

"My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle."

"An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car and vanished."

"I am sure the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the
road when I struck him."

"The pedestrian had no idea which way to run, so I ran over him."

"I saw a slow-moving, sad faced old gentleman, as he bounced off the
roof of my car."

"The indirect cause of the accident was a little guy in a small car
with a big mouth."

"I was thrown from the car as it left the road. I was later found in a
ditch by some stray cows."

Friday Dog Blogging

Henrietta


This is a few years old. Henrietta no longer wears a flea collar and her eyes are a lot more visible now that her cheeks are silver-colored. But otherwise she looks the same.

Today's Deep Thought

From res ipsa loquitur:

1873 dead Americans, $144 billion wasted tax dollars, and an entire country's credibility and goodwill blown to bits around the planet and all they got was another lousy Islamic republic.

They might get a civil war first. Discuss.

Operation Offset

This is the Republican Study Committee's proposal as to how to fund the reconstruction necessary after hurricane Katrina by cutting other federal spending. The real objective is to save the tax cuts for the wealthy and the abolition of the federal estate tax on the inheritances the ultra-wealthy leave behind.

And who is to make the sacrifices instead of Bush's rich base? The elderly, on the whole. The Committee proposes delaying the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill by one year but making the elderly pay for it already by raising the premia as well as by more cost-sharing by the elderly who are unfortunate enough to be ill. Though to be fair to the wingnuts on this committee, they also propose eliminating and/or reducing everything else they happen to hate: The poor will pay more for their federally subsidized Medicaid program (but not the elderly whose nursing-home care is covered by Medicaid, too, as there are too many Republicans with a mom or a dad enjoying these benefits), foreing aid will be cut, including aid to the African continent (have you checked recently what percentage foreign aid is of the federal budget?), and naturally nothing should be given to the National Foundations of the Arts or the Humanities (girlyman stuff) or the Public Broadcasting System (commies!). Read the rest yourselves.

What I found intriguing were the reasons given for various cuts. The most common was the argument that a particular program duplicates the same services available elsewhere, but in several cases the justification was simply that the funding doesn't belong to the federal government. This one, for example, is funny:

Level Funding to Community Health Centers.

This reform would level funding for these federal grants to help medically underserved populations. These programs should be funded locally, not with federal dollars.

Hmm. Medically underserved populations live in inner-city ghettoes are far out in poor rural areas. Local funding?

Other funny justifications abound. Many programs trying to keep illegal drugs away from children are cut or offered reduced funding because studies do not support their efficacy. Yet I see no cuts in the abstinence programs which have been proven to be of very questionable efficacy. And the Legal Services Corporation should be eliminated because, among other things, it has provided "resources for individuals to sue the government for more generous federal benefits".

The problem in trying to pay for the reconstruction effort this way is that those who are going to pay are predominantly the elderly, the poor and various groups who don't carry enough votes to affect the next election. But this isn't a problem for the wingnuts on the Republican Study Committee; instead, it's another chance to forward the wingnut ideology. Operation Upset.

For an alternative proposal that might suit the Democrats, see Think Progress.

Some Fun...

Go to Crooks and Liars and watch a video of Phil Donahue making Bill O'Reilly sad.

What Is News?

Molly Ivins has, as usual, an excellent new column, this time on the ten most important topics not covered very well in the American media. She says:

I have long been persuaded that the news media collectively will be sent to hell not for our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. The real scandal in the media is not bias, it is laziness. Laziness and bad news judgment. Our failure is what we miss, what we fail to cover, what we let slip by, what we don't give enough attention to - because, after all, we have to cover Jennifer and Brad, and Scott and Laci, and Whosit who disappeared in Aruba without whom the world can scarce carry on.

The number one not-covered item is how the Bush administration moves to eliminate open government. Molly points out that this item has been hard to cover because the process has been in little drips and drops and at no one point in time has there been a clear major step towards an authoritarian government. But the results are all there for any journalist to see:

Gene Robertson, a great news editor, says we tend to miss the stories that seep and creep, the ones whose effects are cumulative, not abrupt. This administration has drastically changed the rules on Freedom of Information Act requests; has changed laws that restrict public access to federal records, mostly by expanding the national security classification; operates in secret under the Patriot Act; and consistently refuses to provide information to Congress and the Government Accountability Office. The cumulative total effect is horrifying.

The whole list is worth reading.

Another way of looking at the question in my title is by following foreign news sources. There are days when I think that the British, for example, live in a different world from the one we inhabit here; so different are the news that are discussed and the slant the discussion takes. If you can access news from several other countries you start getting a better understanding of what is omitted in any one of them, including the U.S..

Hurricanes

If you live anywhere along the probable route of Rita, please leave. Take your family, friends, pets and neighbors and leave. If you have two cars lend the keys of the second one to someone who doesn't have a car. Then leave. If you can't leave find a high place. My blessings on all of you.

There are still uncollected corpses in New Orleans.

How Democrats Voted on Roberts

From LATimes:

By a vote of 13-5, the Senate Judiciary Committee today recommended that the Senate confirm the nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to be chief justice of the United States.

Three Democrats joined all 10 Republicans supporting the nomination. The full Senate is expected to vote on the nomination next week, with little doubt that Roberts will be confirmed, and in time to take his seat on the high court bench in time for its first session of the term, on Oct. 3.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, was among the last whose vote was in question to disclose her decision, as the committee began its final pre-vote debate on Roberts. She voted against confirmation.

She was joined by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Joseph Biden of Delaware, and Richard Durbin of Illinois, all Democrats. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the panel, and fellow Democratic Sens. Russell D. Feingold and Herbert Kohl, both of Wisconsin, voted in favor of confirmation.

Explaining her decision, Feinstein, a California Democrat who has at times aligned herself with the party's moderates, said she had been disappointed with answers Roberts had provided during committee hearings. She said he had had the opportunity to distance himself from particularly conservative approaches he had taken to social policy ad legal issues as young aide in the Reagan administration's Justice Department and White House.

She also said that when asked about abortion, he had answered that he had used language much like that of Justice Clarence Thomas, when Thomas was confirmed, indicating that he had no quarrel with the precedents the court had established.

"I became concerned that the phrase 'I have no quarrel' is a term of art of equivocation," Feinstein said, adding: "I'm the only woman on this committee and when I started I said that would be my bar, and he didn't cross that bar."

I still would have liked to see what Roberts said on those cases the Bush administration refused to release to the committee members. Next time even more information might be withheld and the Democrats would have a tough time arguing that it should be offered given that they surrendered on Roberts.

News From Penisland

A joke courtesy of the Heretik about some recent events in the liberal blogosphere: First a group of feminist bloggers (smart ones, too) published a letter about John Roberts and then Armando on Daily Kos sort of gave an answer to it. The gist of the interaction has to do with the importance of the pro-choice stance in the Democratic Party. Armando thinks that the party should be a big tent, with room for people who don't believe in the woman's right to choose but who are otherwise in agreement with Armando. The idea is to use them to get into power and then somehow ignore them on all the so-called social issues. This is probably easier said than done, and the pro-life Democrats are quite likely to vote with the wingnuts on any women's rights issue. Which of course makes the whole big tent strategy meaningless for anyone whose first priority is the rights of women: the tent will collapse on them.

The real question is whether the woman's right to reproductive choice is one of the tentpoles or not, among ideals such as economic and racial justice, gay and lesbian rights and environmental protection. If it no longer has this role then the big tent might end up spacious indeed as most pro-choice women stop bothering to vote.

The political game question is quite different. It has to do with the idea of getting into power and winning with the idea of grabbing all those independents who hover in the middle and would be Democrats if only the Democrats were more like the wingnuts. This might make sense if there indeed are many such independents, all "single-issue" voters on abortion which I very much doubt. Those voters are already voting for Republicans.
The costs of such an unlikely victory are fairly high if you happen to be a feminist, for "social conservatives" are not just against abortion. They are pretty much against the whole idea of equal rights for women (and gays and lesbians). They are opposed to mothers in the labor force and gender equality in education. They are opposed to same-sex marriage and to a military consisting of anything but heterosexual males. And so on.

Then there is the "single-issue" voter argument. Should the Democrats cater to those who vote on the basis of a single issue such as abortion? Armando would say no. I always find it interesting to read comments threads about the care and feeding of the single-issue voter. The single-issue pro-lifer is taken seriously, explained carefully and seen as eminently wooable. The single-issue pro-choicer is often asked to make the necessary mature compromises for common good, and then many of these pro-choicers try to explain why they can't make thse compromises, why certain issues are like water and bread for them, necessary for anything else even to register much. Some use examples such as whether a white supremacist would be welcomed with open arms into the Democratic big tent. The answers this elicits explain carefully how this country now agrees that racism is bad but the question of women's rights is still debated. The point this misses (among others) is the way pro-choice women feel when their political opponents are embraced by those they thought were on the same side. Betrayal might a be a good summary of this feeling.

Politics does involve compromising and some things are best done holding ones nose. But it is hard to see what remains of the Democratic ideas if compromising means letting go of the idea of equal opportunity, and that is what I believe social conservatism ultimately means. For women, at least.

Ares and Friends?

I haven't talked much about my divine pals recently, largely because I've been hiding from them. There was this little incident at a cocktail party on Olympus having to do with snakes and underpants, and I'm not popular these days. But Ares dropped by. Did I tell you that he is still HAWT! And thick as a board.

I made the mistake of telling him all my blogging woes, especially my current frustration that silly right-wingers get things published in the New York Times and I can't even get an answer to the angry and educational e-mails I send them. Ares offered to toss a few thunderbolts on the newspaper's headquarters which I nixed.

Talking about blogging with him was a humongous mistake, because he suddenly decided that what this world needs is a Greek guygod blogger called Ares, and that the cushiest way of getting there would be for him to co-blog with me. With me. On my blog. Which would be renamed "Ares and Friends".

I made excuses. My blog was too puny for his greatness, too wimpy, too snakey. He waved them all aside (with most of my good china on the dining-room table), he would fix all these problems, he would insert the sorely needed humorous and upbeat element, he would post lots of pictures of naked women with Ares in action, he would become a billionaire and so on. He would write long posts on baseball (about which he knows nothing).

There was only one thing to do. I told him about the war in Iraq and urged him to go and see George Bush for an advice-giving session. It almost worked, but he's still sleeping off the nectar in my spare bedroom.

Sexism Hurts Men, Too?

Well, I happen to think that this is true, but I recently read it in a different context, a medical one:

In a somewhat unexpected finding, societal male dominance over women -- patriarchy -- may help explain why men have a lower life expectancy than women worldwide.

British researchers analyzed rates of female murders and male death rates from all causes in 51 countries in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. The prevalence of violence against women was used to indicate the extent of patriarchal control in each of the countries. Socioeconomic factors were also taken into consideration.

The study found that women lived longer than men in all 51 countries. The study also found that those countries with higher rates of female murders (indicating higher levels of patriarchy) also had higher rates for male death and shorter male life expectancies, compared to countries with lower female murder rates, the researchers said.

In fact, statistical analysis showed that variations between countries in rates of violence against women accounted for close to half (49 percent) of the variation in male death rates, the researchers noted.

Lots of examples here about the difficulties of studying something that doesn't have an easy measurable equivalent (patriarchy) and of the use of data outside laboratory conditions. Most social science studies use such data, of course, and it is almost always possible to argue that a study may not have taken into account all possible explanatory causes or controlled for them adequately. For example, the study I'm discussing here seems to have taken into account poverty rates and such, but did they also check to see if the male mortality rates correlated with male murder rates? And what about female mortality rates in general? Did they show the same pattern as the male rates?

Perhaps they did all these things. Which means that I should dig up the original study and look at it. Sigh. Maybe I will if I feel especially good.

Funny....

It looks like a Democrat accidentally got a Republican memo on the soundbites to be used on immigration. See Raw Story.

The Mrs. Degree

The New York Times gives us a little article with the title: Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. These types of articles are a recurring event, happening every few years since the 1970's: the story how highly educated women are deciding not to work, after all, or not to work full-time. The story is also always written as a purely private decision, astonishingly pristine in having nothing to do with the way the labor market is structured or the fact that it is women who are expected to care for the children, or indeed having nothing to do with anything else except the young women themselves. They just wake up one morning having decided that they don't want to be lawyers or physicians or economists, after all.

It is very hard to judge the relevancy or validity of such stories because of this recurrent appearance. It can't always be true that suddenly women are acting differently than they have just done, and mostly these stories appear to be planted to have the newspaper's circulation go up.

So I am hesitant to interpret this newest wave of the same story as indicative of actual change. In fact, if you read the article carefully the fact that this is not a change in actual behavior is fairly obvious. For example:

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.

Then contrast this to the survey results the article talks about, a survey about two Ivy League colleges, which found that sixty percent of the interviewed freshmen and seniors (all women) planned to take at least some time off or to work part-time. Exactly the same percentage as with the mothers' cohort!

Then you might point out, if you are a sharp-eyed reader, that this means that forty percent of those interviewed don't plan to take any time off at all, and that the time others plan to take off may not amount to much more than a few years. In fact, if you read the article really carefully you will find that seventy percent plan to continue working either full-time or part-time, and that among the remaining thirty percent some, at least, are only planning a short career-interruption.

Just think about this. Then think about the title of the piece: Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. Hmmmmmm.

And then think about this bit:

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

I can almost hear the gently purring threat there: We should weed out those applicants who plan to take any time off during their working lives, because they are going to waste the education and our investments in it. Because this would be hard to do based on what naive eighteen-year old students say, let's just use sex as a proxy and weed out most women.

This is an argument that was once used to set maximum quotas on women in medical schools. It was believed that the expensive training, federally subsidized to boot, should be only available for a few women because allowing women to enter freely would fritter away the expensive education on people who will never wield the scalpel. Similar arguments are brought out all the time to "explain" why there are so few women in whatever area of the society you might look at.

We don't do this with men. Men are brought up to expect that they work full-time all their lives, that they are somehow not capable of taking breaks and staying with their children, and we don't even ask young men entering college about their home-family balance plans. Because it is not seen as their problem. Or their choice, but it is a choice with a very large price tag in terms of lost retirement income, for example.

I probably shouldn't have written about this story, given that it is a nonstory as I have demonstrated above. But I find it annoying how these stories are written, the woman deciding on her very own or at most thinking about her mother's role in the family and wondering if she should replicate it or not. The writer could have mentioned how the media has been full of articles and books discouraging women by writing about the horrible difficulties of combining career and family (but only for women) and of articles and books about the solution of opting out (but only for women). The writer could have mentioned how the maternity leave is still about three months long and how very few companies allow highly educated people to work less than eighty hours a week. Or stressed a little more the 24/7 upbringing of girls into the care-giving role in this country and the almost total lack of societal support for this.

But it is more fun to just make up a story and go and interview some people (mostly those who are not planning to work full-time) and then to suggest that this is a really severe problem for the elite colleges, one having its roots in the young women themselves. Though it's not really a problem at all because the young women themselves don't see it that way, perhaps because at eighteen thirty is really, really old and most of ones life will take place before that age! Perhaps because they are mostly eighteen and have not spent very much time thinking about the issues and absolutely no time at all trying to live them. Maybe next time they should interview those fifty-something educated women who have actually lived through this all, or even some women who don't have the luxury of deciding on anything but full-time work without any career considerations. Though naturally this would be a lot less fun and interesting to debate.
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Thanks to sb for the link.

President at a Precipice

Say that very fast a few times. Then apologize to anyone who happened to be within your saliva range. The title comes from one description of yet another bad poll for George Bush.

The USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll suggests that George is not the likeable president the so-called liberal media likes to tell us. In fact, his disapproval rating is at a new high of 58%, and he is doing poorly even in the category of boldness: for the first time the majority doesn't find him that strong or decisive as a leader.

And

The survey shows signs of friction between the two most pressing concerns on Bush's agenda: the Iraq war and Katrina recovery.

A 54% majority says the best way for the government to pay for hurricane relief is by cutting spending for the war. Just 6% support spending cuts in domestic programs, as Bush has suggested.

Nearly two-thirds of those polled, 63%, say some or all of the U.S. troops in Iraq should be withdrawn. A record-high 59% say it was a mistake to invade.

Those polled also want an independent panel to study what went wrong with the Katrina unrescue efforts, not the kind of Republican panel we are going to have. This by a four-to-one margin. Hmmm.

But Bush doesn't care about focus groups. He told us so.

The Value of Blogging

"To blog" is an unfortunate term, like the sound one hears when someone is trying to swear at you with a hot potato in her mouth. It's not elegant, not like "write" or "pen". So well suited for what I try to do.

Some days I like blogging a lot less, though. For example, today the New York Times has decided to start charging a fee for its opinion columns. This means that if I want to choke and vomit over Tierney or Brooks I have to pay for it. That may sound fair to some of you, but then you can't read my masterful dissections of the same vomit. (Hint: You can donate me ten bucks by pressing that little symbol in the right column, below the hurricane one. Of course after you have donated all your other disposable income to the hurricane rescue operations. Don't do this if you are poor!)

This may be the beginning of a trend of charging, and the final outcome is to lock all amateurs and goddesses out of the sources of evidence. I'm sure someone would like to do exactly this.

One reason why I think so is this excellent article. It discusses the purpose of political blogs, the need to triangulate between the blogs, the political machinery and the traditional media, and it tells us how much better the wingnut blogs are doing in all this, largely because they are marching to the commands of the top of their hierarchy and feeding on the soundbites sent down by Hannity and Limbaugh and so on. The lefty-liberal bloggers, sadly, are like cats walking on their own and about as easily herded together. But as the article says we really must learn to do better to have more influence on the public discussion.

Where I differ from Daou Report is explained by the place where I sit. Though I'm a fairly widely-read feminist blogger, I'm but a tiny speck as a political one. Well, not so very tiny but you get my point. I'm not one of the big boys and neither the Democratic establishment nor the traditional media is likely to check out what I say every morning. Nothing much is getting triangulated here, but I hope that something else is happening, perhaps a debate, a discussion about the need to include women's points of views more, a discussion to start finding the political machinery that we need and the access to the traditional media we simply don't have.

That's when I feel like a really ambitious and powerful divine, which isn't often. The reality is much more limited, but still useful: to at least join the conversation, to name things which may not yet have names so that the phenomena they are attached to can be discussed. This is what we all smaller bloggers are doing, and I believe that it is useful or at least fun.

For a feminist blogger this quote from the Daou Report article is also a point of divergence:

After a year of my life spent at the intersection of pre-blog and post-blog political thinking, and with Bush getting the second term he craved, one question has preoccupied me since last November: What is the scope of netroots power? Put differently: How influential are bloggers?

It's a difficult question to answer. First, there's no consensus on metrics. Second, blogs serve many purposes, some of which are more social than political. Third, the use of the Internet in political campaigns cuts across so many areas that it's easy to confuse netroots influence in the communications and messaging realm with other Internet-based political applications such as organizing and fundraising. Fourth, 'influence' is a hazy term. (Bolding by Echidne)

For us feminists the borderline between "social" and "political" is much hazier than it is in the mainstream (malestream?) conversation. Much which really is political avoids the limelight of the big liberal blogs because it appears to be social, and feminist blogs can point this out. This also means that writing about our everyday lives, about what happened in the streets, in the kitchens, in the bedrooms or in the boardrooms can be deeply political and may ultimately convert more people to a certain political view than the discussions about the campaign promises of the next Democratic candidate. It is this wider sense of political that many feminist bloggers employ, and if what they do is not seen as political blogging then we are defining the term too narrowly.

The Big Dawg Barks

I never really liked Bill Clinton but at least he had the necessary skills to run a country. On most days. Now he has opened his mouth and out came some not-so-nice statements about the current administration:

Former President Bill Clinton, asked by President Bush to help raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, offered harsh criticism of the administration's disaster-relief effort on Sunday, saying "you can't have an emergency plan that works if it only affects middle-class people up."
...
"It's like when they issued the evacuation order," he said. "That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn't have cars, so they couldn't take them out."

"This is a matter of public policy," he said. "And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the 80's; that's what they've done in this decade. In the middle, we had a different policy."

This after having cavorted around in the company of Bush The Elder, mind you. Bill always knew how to polish both sides of the apple. In many ways he truly was the best Republican president we have had.

Now I await for all sorts of angry comments from my faithful readers...

A Little Sunday Sermon

The United States is a predominantly Christian country. Most people believe in a god and the majority appear to believe in angels, too. The religious right tells us that the politics and the laws of this country should reflect its Christianity, and the natural inference to draw is that these should somehow follow the tenets of this religion.

But things get confusing when we hear (via Bobo's World) that most American Christians don't know their own religion very well:

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.

This isn't that astonishing. Most religious people in this world appear not to know the tenets of their own religion or what its leaders might be doing. - I remember listening to a radio interview to do with Aceh during the time when various Islamist policies were attempted there. One of them was the use of shariah law in place of a secular legal code. The ordinary people interviewed in the program were happy to hear about the possible use of shariah; they expressed a strong need to do something about the lawlessness on the streets, the rapists and the muggers. But the religious expert also interviewed stated that the use of shariah would ban playing cards, alcohol and would punish adulterers more harshly. And indeed, these would have been the major changes to the laws already in force in Aceh, with the exception of extra whippings etcetera.

This may not be astonishing, but it is very worrying. It means that the voices of authority within the religious sphere have the power to misinform. There are few built-in safeguards to correct anything that is said from the pulpit or its equivalence in other faiths. Still, the very act of uttering something in this context makes it more weighty, more to be trusted, than the statements the same people might make in their private roles. Or in their political roles.

It is also difficult to debate a religious authority if all that the outsiders can use are the written tenets of the religion, yet these tenets are not widely known or perhaps even followed. This pretty much makes real debate impossible, should it not already be so by the unspoken code that religions must not be criticized.

As the article I quote points out, the Christianity of many Americans is better seen as an identity than actual adherence to Christian teachings. Such an identity is moldable, and the religious right has effectively molded the idea of Christianity into something that requires, among other things, that the faithful always vote Republican. Religion has entered politics, yes, but even more it is the politics that have entered religiosity. What to make out of this all is unclear to my divine eyes.

On Toe Rings

I have bought two in Europe. They cost about four Euros each, and are covered with lovely little "emerald flowers". It takes time to get used to having rings on ones toes but I like to look at my bare feet under the desk and see the glitter in the semi-darkness.

Of such things is the human self-decoration made. Sometimes we just like to play with our bodies and the impact they have on the world. Other times it is the world that tries to tell us how to present or not to present ourselves, and here we step into much darker areas of debate and feminist analysis. But my toe rings are wholly innocent of any attempt by anybody else to influence me and nobody else even sees them. They are just fun.

On Hating George Bush

I heard some talking head on the radio this morning discuss the need to get over hating Bush. According to this man the democratic base (or us extreme moonbats, really) is too wound up in the Bush-hating to practise good political moves. We should all look ahead to the next Republican president, House and Senate, and ignore Bush whose reign is already essentially over.

This is a misperception. The base hates what Bush is doing to this country and what the wingnuts are planning to do in the future. The so-called Bush-hating is not some odd psychological tic which makes people scream because of the way Bush pretends to have a Texan twang or because of the way he pretends to be a fireman or a working stiff or because he appears to have no brain whatsoever. True, all these little bits of Bush are annoying, but they are not the reason just naming the guy causes rashes in so many of us. The reasons are in the policies the Bush administration has pursued, is pursuing and will pursue. Getting rid of Bush will not get rid of these policies, and all us Bush-haters (so-called) know this.

Besides, I really hate being lectured to by some talking head whose information may be acquired in inside-the-beltway cocktail parties. I hate being othered in this way, and I hate the fact that there was no response to this man's assertions. Maybe I suffer from the "hates-the-talking-heads" syndrome? Yet another reason to ignore all I write.

On Animals, Men and Women's Health

Remember that the last director of the Office of Women's Health, Susan Wood, quit in protest of the decision not to let the morning-after pill be available over the counter? Now her place has been filled. By a man whose experience is on veterinarian science:

Wood's acting replacement is Norris Alderson. Alderson has a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry from the University of Tennessee and graduate degrees from the University of Kentucky. He has worked at the FDA for more than 30 years, more than 20 of which he spent in the agency's Bureau of Veterinary Medicine.

Foot-in-the-mouth disease.
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ADDENDUM on Saturday:
This decision has been changed. Maybe the publicity helped with the change? Nah. Thanks to dancinfool in the comments.

The America Haters

The radical right calls me an America-hater almost every day. The idea that anyone criticizing this administration hates America and plots treason is spread all over the net and the traditional media. The intention is to make us critics ashamed and fearful of saying anything. The intention is approving silence, the only love that is acceptable to the most extremists on the right.

But it is we, the noisy and complaining ones, who really love America, love her as she is, a gangly teenager with acne and furious dreams and occasional bad mistakes which she then corrects. Love her beautiful mountains and rivers and prairies and wetlands and deserts and cities and all the people that inhabit these, even the ones who think differently. It is we who love what America was, what she had grown to, her promises and her frailties, her ability to learn from errors, to become better, to promise to try, her genius, her optimism, her determination to follow the arc of justice, ultimately.

Yes, we would complain about her teenage fads, about her shallowness, about the serious problems which she didn't know how to correct: the role of race, the role of poverty and the role of violence in a society. But she tried, however unclearly sometimes, and all the voices, even the conservative ones, participated in this trying and made the country ultimately better, closer to maturity, without any loss in the optimism and sunniness that we all prized.

This is the America that was and still is, at least partly, and this is the America that the current administration and the radical right want to destroy. We love her too much to want to see this young country clad in a burkha, to want to see her bent over to carry the heavy moneybags of a few greedy capitalists. We love her too much to want to see her poisoned by mercury and arsenic in her beautiful oceans and lovely lakes. We want her to learn and to grow, not to be forced to sit in a solitary silence, reading over and over the same "thou-shalt-nots" of the conservative bibles.

We critics don't want our America to rampage across this globe, grabbing money and power and leaving behind destitution and death. It is not good for the world and it is terrible for the young country we still are. We are like the parents who love their children, yet see clearly where their frailties lie, and as good parents we tell how to fix those frailties and how to grow stronger while retaining the essential greatness of the child, the teenager, this glorious country of many songs.
How to be mature.

The radical right wants none of this. It wants a country with no kindness, no shelter, no common squares where people can meet. It wants a country in perpetual war, a country where mercenaries and corporations are cared for, where America is but their feeding ground, the silent congregation in some monsterous church for money.

We critics are needed, because we indeed love this country. Our tough love is needed, because it sees with clear eyes. Our patriotism is needed, because it is untainted with false beliefs and childish assertions of how much greater America is than the rest of this earth. We are needed for the very love that makes us named the haters of America.

Friday Dog Blogging

Hank and the Loch Ness Monster


These are quite lovely pictures. I hope they come across the same on the blog. Hank is enjoying the early morning sunrise in one, and in the other one it looks like she has just spotted the Loch Ness Monster in the waters. Though it's the dog on the beach she spotted, and then went to play with the same dog who bumped into her and caused her bad leg. But the Monster story is better.

The Bush Speech

I'm not going to write about it. You can hear the wingnut interpretations all over the so-called liberal media. The wingnuts like George when he has taken his tie off and rolled up his sleeve to look just like one of them, like someone who works with his hands. Oh, were it only true.

But one thing I will say. Watch the money. Keep an eagle's eye on it. Because what this will be is a big feast for all Bush's friends, unless we all watch and count and remember.

Today's Action Alert

This comes from the National Women's Law Center, and you can find out what to do about John Roberts by clicking on their action page.

The current progressive/liberal near-consensus on Roberts seems to be that he is as good a candidate as we can expect from Attila the Hun, and that with the exception of abortion (which he will help to outlaw) he is actually quite a charming man. Naturally only some of us can view the question in this "cool and detached" way, but then some of us are lumbered with uteri and so on. Sigh. I haven't slept enough.

This is a summary of Roberts's views on those of use saddled with wombs:

Title IX -- John Roberts has repeatedly argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX, but his testimony today attempted to hide the ball on his real positions. For example, in a 1982 Supreme Court case (Franklin v. Gwinnett County), he filed a brief arguing that no victim of sexual harassment should be allowed to sue for damages under Title IX. His response to the committee did not acknowledge that his interpretation of the law would have left students without any remedy for sex discrimination. Roberts also denied any responsibility for his "strong agreement" with recommendations to restrict the coverage of Title IX. According to Roberts, he was merely parroting administration positions on this issue – an assertion at odds with the very language of his recommendations.

Gender Discrimination -- John Roberts wrote in a 1980s memo of a "perceived problem" of gender discrimination. When asked about this memo, he responded that gender discrimination is "a particular concern of mine and always has been." But the question is not whether he cares about gender equity. It is whether he will apply the laws of this country to provide effective protection against discrimination. His past record and his testimony provide no reassurance.

Equal Protection -- In another memo, John Roberts wrote that sex discrimination is not subject to "heightened scrutiny" under the Constitution. He told members of the Judiciary Committee that he actually meant "strict scrutiny," a standard that applies to racial discrimination – not gender. It's hard to believe a lawyer of Roberts's caliber would misuse legal terms in this way. And this is no mere semantic dispute -- levels of scrutiny affect how the Supreme Court reviews discriminatory policies and often make the difference between condoning or invalidating discrimination.

Roe v. Wade -- As Deputy Solicitor General, John Roberts asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. During the hearings, he has refused to give senators straightforward answers about his views on whether the Constitution protects a woman's right to choose and whether he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. For example, when he was asked whether the right to choose embodied in Roe v. Wade is sufficiently embedded in our national culture that it should not be eliminated, he flatly declined to answer. When he was asked for his comments on Justice Ginsburg's confirmation testimony that a prohibition on abortion is unconstitutional, he would not respond. And when asked whether the right to privacy applies to the beginning of life and the end of life, John Roberts again refused to answer.

Roving to New Orleans

Froomkin:

All you really need to know about the White House's post-Katrina strategy -- and Bush's carefully choreographed address on national television tonight -- is this little tidbit from the ninth paragraph of Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson 's story in the New York Times this morning:

"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

My most eloquent post ever.