Bush Buoys The Troops

He used a videoconference for this buoying, because it's not safe yet for him to go to Iraq. This from USAToday is interesting:

While polls show declining support for the war, Bush told the soldiers: "You've got to know, the American people are standing strong with you," Bush said.

The exchange was carefully choreographed.

Before it began, a Pentagon official coached the troops, telling them the president planned to ask questions on three topics: The overall security in Iraq, how they were preparing for the vote on Saturday and how much progress had been made in the training of Iraqi troops.

Allison Barber, a Pentagon official, said Bush would ask them specifically, "In the last 10 months, what kind of progress have we seen?"

She asked who was prepared to answer the question. "Master Sgt. Lombardo," one said.

After Bush asked just that question, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo responded: "Over the past 10 months, the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces are improving ... They continue to develop and grow into a sustainable force."

Are we supposed to know this? Good for the writer of this article.

Sex Dolls

A few days ago the Salon published an article on men who buy very expensive sex dolls (with three functioning orifices). I read it then but my thoughts on the topic were in such disarray that I didn't want to write down anything I might later regret. But I took down these quotes from the article for further thinking:

According to Davecat and many other Real Doll owners, sex with a Real Doll is quite good. "For the most part, it's just like sex with an organic woman ... who doesn't say anything and is brimful of Quaaludes," Davecat writes on Sidore's stylish Web site.
...
When asked how many times each week he has sex with his dolls, Kelly is quick to correct: He doesn't have sex with them, he masturbates with them. Twice a week. When I then ask Kelly how he prepares to masturbate with a doll, he says he pulls one from under his bed and applies makeup to her bare face. While he claims not to have a favorite among the triad, he notes that "Head 4 is very tight orally. It has a small mouth," adding that "if you've got a Head 4/Body 5, like Jazzi, you've pretty much got it covered. Tight as a drum." (Unlike Davecat and many other doll owners, Kelly refers to his dolls as "it" not "she.")
...
As with Davecat, I spoke and e-mailed many times with Everhard, who is 49 years old and lives in Britain. I learned that his doll Rebecca is old in doll years -- her nipple paint has long since worn off and her freckles need touch-ups -- but to Everhard, Rebecca is young, the 18-year-old daughter of his second doll, Caroline, who he imagines as about 34. In one photograph, the two sit together, both in hats, dressed as if for an English wedding and enjoying flutes of sparking water garnished with lemon. Some of Everhard's other photographic vignettes are downright peculiar: When was the last time you saw a naked 18-year-old girl straddling her naked mother in a pillow fight? Last winter, Louise, Caroline's sister, joined Caroline and Rebecca to round out what Everhard calls his harem. He thought of just ordering an extra face for Caroline's body -- it would have been much less expensive, just $500 -- but ultimately rejected the idea because without a third body, sisters Caroline and Louise would never meet except when disembodied.
...
Some of Fiero's [the doll-maker's] stories are the stuff of horror films. He once got an e-mail from two garbage collectors who found a Real Doll hacked to pieces in a dumpster. One owner sent Fiero a mutilated corpse of a doll. "The jaw in the doll was still in her skull, but behind her neck. Her hands were ripped off and fingers were missing. Her left breast was hanging on by a thread of skin, like your bra strap," he tells me, gesturing at my shoulder.

Another time, an Asian undergraduate student at a university in California dropped his 1-year-old doll off for repairs. Fiero says the young man told him that his parents bought him the doll so that he would stay at home and study rather than go out chasing women. Fiero's photographs of the damaged doll make me cringe: Her leg was torn off, revealing the steel hardware of her hip joints; an arm hung by an inch of silicone flesh; two fingers were severed; and the cleavage between her buttocks was torn into a ragged crevasse.

"Her vagina was so blown out," Fiero told me. "I was appalled. I couldn't believe someone could fuck something like that up so quickly. It blew me away. How could somebody be so callous?

"I was offended in so many ways," he continues. "He put her feet behind her head and reamed that doll with whatever cock he's got. He fucked her violently. She was achieving positions she shouldn't achieve or be forced to try. Her vagina and anus were a giant gaping hole."

These were picked to show the range of uses to which sex dolls are put. For example, Davecat appears to see the doll as a "better-behaved" girlfriend, while Kelly sees them as masturbation aids. Everhard has a more vivid imaginary world and does something which might be called playing with dolls. The unnamed undergraduate student may be acting out something violent about sex and women.

Amanda on Pandagon posted about the article right away and got hundreds of comments. The comment thread is well worth reading because it shows the enormous range of fairly strongly held opinions on whether sex dolls of this type are signs of misogyny and if so, whether the society is condoning such misogyny. Many other questions are explored, too, from sympathy towards the men whose lives are so painful that inanimate dolls are seen as a relationship to the correct definition of feminazism.

My own thoughts on this topic are fuzzy. I once attended a baseball game where during the seventh inning stretch some young men started throwing a female sex doll into the air and passing it from one row of seats to another. The doll was very white (and hence visible) and very naked, and as it was passed on its legs splayed out and its head was bent backwards at an awkward angle.

As the doll got nearer to my seat I scouted for the exits. On one level I knew exactly what the game consisted about: having a few beers and bringing out a sex doll as a great joke. On another level something very different and frightening was going through my mind: a symbol of a naked woman was being passed from one laughing man to another and the symbol looked like a dead rape victim. For dolls are symbols; they stand for something else, and in the case of female sex dolls they stand for women. And I am a woman, which means that the symbolic act applies to me, and its effect is to trigger all those hidden fears that a woman may carry about rape and sexual violence in general. But I never complained about the prank or even analyzed its effect on me at the time. The whole incident was trivial, after all, just a little fun, and whatever I felt was probably just the way I am.

Later I learned that the way I felt was most likely shared by at least some other women at that game. But I'm still not quite sure how many men can empathize with those feelings or how many are aware how frequent these sorts of incidents are.

Some of the differences by gender are very clear in the comments thread on Pandagon. It's like a conversation in a room where some people sit facing a door and some opposite them facing a window and where the debate is all about what the opposite wall looks like. Of course it looks different from the two sides of the room. The only way to resolve the debate is to let people move around, and something similar is needed for understanding the debate about misogyny and sex dolls. I'm not certain how it could be orchestrated, though.

Are sex dolls just masturbation aids, no different from the vibrators available for women? I don't think so, because the sex dolls reproduce the whole physical woman (with three orifices). The dolls even have wardrobes and wigs. Unless we view the whole physical woman as a masturbation aid something more is going on with these dolls than just masturbation. Games are going on, games with an imaginary woman or two. These games punch my feminist buttons because of comments like the very first one in this post, comments about the doll being just like an organic woman except for shutting up, really, and because of the dominance aspect that is fairly visible all through the article in the Salon. On the other hand dolls like these might well be therapeutic and even keep some men (like the undergraduate mentioned above) from committing actual violent acts against another human being. Or do they just prepare for such violent acts? Nobody seems to know.

The question I have arrived at in all this thinking is this: To what extent do men, some men at least, generalize from sex dolls or porn start or strip tease dancers to women in general? And if some do, what do they do as a consequence of this generalization. This is what I want to know, for this is the crucial feminist question.

Politics and Sex

E.J. Graff poses some interesting questions: Is the American media reporting properly on the sexual shenanigans of politicians? When should the voters be told about a politician's private sex life? When is talking about it irrelevant for the pursuit of better politics? She answers:

In theory, most of us agree: on the one hand, the media should never cover consensual and private adult behavior, even when it might seem unsavory. On the other, the media should always cover coercive or criminal behavior, especially when it abuses public power or reveals official hypocrisy. But in practice, for the last decade, the American media have been getting it backward.

This leaves out the hypocricy factor. Is it proper to out gay politicians, say, if they consistently pursue anti-gay policies? Or should we be told that a pro-life politician or the girlfriend or wife of one is having an abortion? I'm not sure, and would probably judge each case separately.

As an example of the media's failing to run with a story about sex that does seem relevant to talk about Graff mentions the Nation article by Ayelish McGarvey on Dr. David Hager who was then on Bush's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs:

Consider the appalling fact that only The Nation has given real coverage to serious allegations against Dr. David Hager, President Bush's controversial appointee to the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. According to the reporter Ayelish McGarvey, in October 2004 Hager took the pulpit at Kentucky's Asbury College chapel and told churchgoers that he had been persecuted for standing up on "moral and ethical issues in this country," persecution that was part of "a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians."

Here's what he meant: many people had opposed his appointment as the panel's chairman because he had worked with Concerned Women for America to block distribution of RU-486, the "morning after" birth control pill. While Hager did not become chairman, he was appointed to the committee, where, he boasted from the same pulpit, he had been influential in blocking over-the-counter distribution of RU-486. In May 2005, The Nation published McGarvey's article, in which Hager's ex-wife, Linda Carruth Davis, alleged that, during the years that he had been crusading to restrict women's medical choices, he had been raping her repeatedly, anally and painfully, often while she was drugged into sleep by prescriptions for a neurological problem. When McGarvey contacted him, Hager would not deny the allegations.

No other media outlet ran with this story. Yet anyone -- especially any public official -- who cannot respect another human being's bodily integrity can and must be called to account. Such acts matter still more when there's an intellectual link between the public figure's attitudes and behaviors and the public policies he promotes. That's precisely the case for Hager, who -- if the allegations are true -- publicly worked to deny women the right to make choices in their medical lives, while privately denying his wife choices about her physical life.

Were the allegations true? Ex-spouses say terrible things, and she wasn't under oath, both of which any editor must consider. But fact by fact, McGarvey constructs a careful story, not a casual he-said/she-said shocker. According to her lawyer and longtime friends, Davis's charges were consistent with what she'd told them at the time, as was her explanation that the reason she didn't go to court was that she had wanted to spare her sons the humiliation of a public airing. Very few women report marital rape, which, as McGarvey notes, is notoriously difficult to prosecute.

Yet this story, sensational enough, gained no further publicity (except on blogs). Partly this could be because Dr. Hager resigned right after the publication of the story, but such resignations have not kept the media quiet in the past. And clearly the story contained relevant information for judging Dr. Hager's suitability for the role he had in the administration. What made this story unappetizing for the usual media treatment of sexual peccadillos?

Could it be that it was criticizing an administration which has been very quick to take offense and revenge? Or is a story about a wife's private anguish not titillating enough to make money?

The Concrete Trampoline

Via Atrios, I learned about the most recent poll on the popularity of the Bush administration. It doesn't look good, and as one of the people interviewed in the story said, it's unlikely that the numbers will spring up anytime soon. Hence the concrete trampoline. Ouch.

Here is the gist of the results:

For the first time in the poll, Bush's approval rating has sunk below 40 percent, while the percentage believing the country is heading in the right direction has dipped below 30 percent. In addition, a sizable plurality prefers a Democratic-controlled Congress, and just 29 percent think Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is qualified to serve on the nation's highest court.

A sizeable plurality prefers a Democratic-controlled Congress? May I remind this plurality that the elections were last November. Or were they? Hmmmm.

The majority of those interviewed also believe that DeLay's and Frist's legal troubles are not politically motivated. I don't know if they asked about Rove's possible chances of getting indicted here. The who's who of the Republican party is beginning to look like a rogue's gallery, isn't it?

So it comes as a bit of a letdown that the Democrats have not taken advantage of the situation, nor appear to plan such a move in the foreseeable future:

But Hart argues that Democrats aren't necessarily responsible for this margin. "It is not that Democrats have done so well," he said. "It is that people are disgusted." McInturff puts it this way: "People are very turned off and unhappy with the state of play in American politics."

Yes, people are very turned off and unhappy. And what are they going to get for that?

Laura Ingraham on the Plame Affair

Laura Ingraham has the honor of having written the worst book I actually forced myself to read to the very end, the one on Hilary Clinton. It has a chapter about what Hilary would say about New Age religions if she was a New Ager! In the same vein, Ingraham has made some weighty comments on who it was who outed Valerie Plame. According to our Laura it was Valerie Plame herself! Yes, indeed:

INGRAHAM: I don't necessarily think they're changing the goal posts. But I can probably talk about why [special prosecutor] Patrick Fitzgerald might be calling him back. I mean, he might be calling Karl Rove back because Fitzgerald has learned more information that might either conflict with something that Rove said to him earlier or might add to something Rove said, and he wants to ask him about it.

That's how grand juries operate. And I don't think it's necessarily good news for Karl Rove that he's been called back for a fourth time. But I don't think you conclude anything from that, either.

I think for Kirsten to say he's outed Valerie Plame -- Valerie Plame, the last time I checked out with her, she was on the -- in Valerie -- in Vanity Fair with her scarf and her sunglasses on.

[laughter]

HANNITY: All right, Laura, by the way --

INGRAHAM: That was a great picture.
HANNITY: -- welcome back. We're glad you're feeling better.

As Media Matters for America notes the Novak article which outed Plame was published on July 14, 2003. The photograph of Valerie Plame in Vanity Fair was published in January, 2004.

But I am glad that Ingraham is feeling better. And probably she was just joking here, but once she feels better she is a fair target for my desperate search for something interesting to write.

Deep Thought for the Day

From Bill O'Reilly! This is what he has said about what might happen if Karl Rove got indicted in the Plame investigation:

And if Rove gets indicted, that could bring down the Bush administration, I think.

Be still, my heart. Be still!

Funny Maureen

Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist, and I have a sort of love-hate relationship with the added twist that she knows nothing about it. She writes really well but ever so often what she writes about makes me run screaming around the house, frightening the snakes and making the dogs think this is the Last Squirrel War Recreated. But then she suddenly writes something really good and funny again, like in her last column which is a spoof on Harriet Miers's girly adulation of George:

April 2004 "There is no other president who would have had the courage to allow torture, dude! (It's only too bad that Abu Ghraib rules out Alberto's chances of getting on the Supreme Court.) You are the best torturer ever!! xo, H."

June 2005 "Make sure you take a good, long vacation this summer! Last year, you only took two weeks. You are pushing yourself way too hard, Sir!!"

August 2005 "I've half a mind to come down there myself and chase that witch, Cindy Sheehan, off your property with an injunction!! Yours, with you in Christ, Harriet."

September 2005 "In all this fuss about that bad-girl buttinsky Katrina, no one else seems to have noticed - not even Karen - that you've achieved your bold vision of losing that seven pounds. That extra week of mountain biking was so much more important than people realize. You're the most chiseled commander in chief ever, and the most rad guitar player ever!!"

October 2005 "How can I thank you, Sir? I never, ever expected the Supreme Court. Phat! I hope Clarence doesn't make me watch 'Debbie Does Dallas' again. That movie is so anti-Texas! I miss you already!!

The Harriet Miers blog is funny, too, though probably not written by Dowd (or Miers, either). All these teach us how to be a yes-woman most excellently. Too bad that I know real people who speak like that at ages past the teenage years, because it is accepted behavior in some circles. For women, at least.

On the Plame Investigations

I collected lots of material on this but specialization really does matter sometimes and there are bloggers out there who follow these events in great detail and have managed to digest it all so as to spew it out clear and brilliant. So go read them on the topic of Judy Miller and the wingnuts. Firedoglake is excellent.

Our President At Work

He needs some advice on how to hold the hammer.

The Enron Era Continues

You know, there is market space for a blog just on the legal problems of major Republicans. No one blogger can cover it on top of all the other interesting Wingnuttia news.

Today's example of these legal problems concerns Bill (the catkiller) Frist. Remember that he put his stocks into a blind trust so that his ownership of certain firms' shares wouldn't affect his policy-making? That's the theory about blind trusts, anyway. Then last June Frist sold his shares in HCA Inc., a hospital chain that Frist's brother controls, and soon after the value of these shares dropped significantly. These shares were supposed to have been in the blind trust and Bill Frist wasn't supposed to be able to order their sale. Otherwise it's hard to see what "blind" would mean here.

The June transaction started a federal investigation into Frist's financial holdings. Now it seems that not all Frist's HCA shares were held in a blind trust:

In that case, the HCA stock was accumulated by a family investment partnership started by the senator's late parents and later overseen by his brother, Thomas Frist. The brother served as president of the partnership's management company and as a top officer of HCA. Sen. Frist holds no position with the company.

The senator's share of the partnership was placed in a Tennessee blind trust between 1998 and 2002 that was separate from those governed by Senate ethics rules. Frist reported Bowling Avenue Partners, made up mostly of non-public HCA stock, earned him $265,495 in dividends and other income over the four years.

Edmond M. Ianni, a former Wilmington, Del., bank executive who established blind trusts for corporate executives, questioned why the senator's brother was able to manage assets "when the whole purpose of a blind trust is to ensure lack of not only conflict of interest but appearance of conflict of interest?"

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, said she doesn't believe the Senate trusts or the Tennessee trust insulated Frist from a conflict because the senator or his brother were advised of transactions and could influence decisions.

"What I find most appalling is the Senate calls it a qualified blind trust when it's not blind," Clark said. "Since the Senate says it's OK, the Senate has made it a political question. It's up to the voter. But there's no doubt it's a conflict of interest."

Now I should ask myself if I am criminalizing politics. This is the new wingnut soundbite about all the legal problems of Republicans: that these problems exist means that someone is criminalizing politics. As if anything at all goes if it is called politics. The weakness of this soundbite is the best example I've seen yet of the real trouble Republicans are facing.

Sex

I should write more about sex. Sex sells. Sex with sea shells. Sex.

I actually am curious about women's sexuality, but not in a titillating sense, sadly. When I read anything that smacks of real research into this topic I always shake my head, because researching sexual desires is so very hard to do. The best we get are some simple laboratory tests of the effect of watching something sexual on the study subjects, and this is so very removed of what sex really is like and what turns us on or doesn't turn us on at all. And asking people questions about their sexuality is extremely unlikely to produce truthful results for people lie, to sound more like whatever they think is expected from them. Some studies have shown that if the infidelity figures people report are correct then there are some invisible women out there, because men give too many infidelity experiences compared to the ones women in the same society give. This is all about heterosexuals, of course.

There are generalizations out there, of course. We hear that men are more visual about sex and that women are more likely to want sex in a loving relationship than men do, and that men are about sex for the penis and women want it for the whole body and on and on. I'm skeptical about much of this because having sex is like eating in many ways, and the customs about food definitely affect what and how we eat. The same thing applies to sexual desires, too. If we have sexual desires that are not in accordance with what the society appears to expect, are we going to tell about them in these studies? Surely it depends on the society in which the studies are done, but also surely this is more of a problem for women than for men in societies where women don't have as much power in general.

Even arguments such as men's greater dependency on visual arousal are fraught with similar problems. How do we know that this is true in a society which has more visual arousal cues for men than for women? It could be that these cues exist because men are more visual in the first place, but it could also be that men get more of these cues because men have traditionally had more power to determine what is displayed.

Then move from desires to actual behavior and things get even more complicated. There is the pregnancy angle for women, for one thing. You can still get killed for becoming pregnant outside the marriage in some parts of this world and in many others you will be subjected to a lot of societal shunning and disapproval, and everywhere you will be stuck with the consequences of having the baby or aborting the pregnancy. As men don't get pregnant this alone might have a differentially dampening effect on the joys of one-night sexual encounters for the two sexes.

Add to this the fear of violence from going to have sex with someone you don't know. This fear is more realistic for women than for men, and if you don't believe me just read the rape and sexual violence statistics.

Given all this, I'd be very surprised if women acted just like men in actual sexual encounters, even if they had identical sexual desires, and therefore I don't believe that we can deduce women's sexual daydreams from their actual behavior when it comes to sex.

Gossip?

Raw Story has a curious headline on the front page:

Cheney's chief spokesman leaves country as leak investigation wraps up... Developing...

This has to do with the Plame investigation. It could be that the country leaving is just a vacation trip or something.
---
Added: Here is the Raw Story post about this gossip. I'm not sure what it all means but it's an odd time for Cheney's spokesman to be out of contact.

Laura Bush Talks

She was interviewed, together with George, by Matt Lauer on the NBC's Today Show. Among other topics she opined on the troubles of the Harriet Miers nomination:

Q Some are suggesting there's a little possible sexism in the criticism of Judge Miers. How do you feel about that?

MRS. BUSH: That's possible. I think that's possible. I think she is so accomplished, and I think people are not looking at her accomplishments and not realizing that she was the first elected woman to be the head of the Texas Bar Association, for instance, and all the other things. She was the first woman managing partner of a major law firm. She was the first woman hired by a major law firm, her law firm.

This is not going to sound well in Wingnuttia, not well at all. In fact, the Wingnuttia are all about making accusations of sexism totally impossible because they are politically correct and politically correct is BAD. And ungodly and in case equality of the sexes would be totally against the plans of the wingnut god. So I think Laura made a mistake.

But a different question is whether sexism indeed has some role to play in the Miers debacle. I have sort of answered that earlier when I wrote about how hard it is for your average incompetent woman to get to the places where your average incompetent man is frequently found, wielding power that he is not able to, and later on many rightwing blogs showed quite clearly that they are unhappy with Miers not because she has never been a judge or because she is not known as a writer of great legal treatises or because she is a crony of the president but because she doesn't have testicles. So yes, sexism is still around.

But not all the opposition to Miers is about her sex, or even most of it. Maybe we have advanced a little bit in this respect?

Bad Poetry - The Wingnut Kind

According to a post on Slate:

Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who lost his job because he wouldn't remove a granite monument to the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building, is running for governor of Alabama.

So far he isn't polling very well which may be because he has adventured into another career at the same time, that of creating bad poetry. I love bad poetry, even bad poetry written by wingnuts, and I want to share the enjoyment of Moore's poetry with you:

Babies piled in Dumpsters,
Abortion on demand,
Oh, sweet land of liberty;
your house is on the sand.

...
We've voted in a government
that's rotting at the core,
Appointing Godless Judges
who throw reason out the door.

Too soft to place a killer
in a well-deserved tomb,
But brave enough to kill a baby
before he leaves the womb.

You think that God's not angry,
that our land's a moral slum?
How much longer will He wait
before His judgment comes?

Unusually bad, I'd say. Nothing much rhymes and fetuses are boys exclusively. I also thought that the religious right looks forward to Rapture which would mean the last judgment, wouldn't it? But this might work as a jogging song.

What Does Not Work When E-Mailing Me

Giving your e-mail a heading that says "Greetings" or "Help Me With My Nigerian Inheritance". I don't read those because there aren't enough hours in my day.

What also doesn't work is sending me an urgent alert request which tells me to ask my wife or girlfriend to abstain from exercizing at Curves. Yes, I know that the owner of Curves is a wingnut and should be stopped from funding wingnuttery, but the request should not imply that people in the wife or girlfriend category (widely interpreted) don't read these alerts.

This is the kind of hidden sexism that goes on all the time. Like I'm the invisible elephant sitting on the living-room couch.

A New Orleans Video

Available on Crooks and Liars. It portrays the police beating a drunken man and apparently also attacking a journalist.

Frank Rich Talks

His latest column in the New York Times is all hard-hitting and sounds true to me. He puts together all the things in which the Bush administration is failing, not for ideological reasons but for pure incompetence, and then he points out one of the main reasons for this: Bush is out of touch. Or as Rich puts it:

Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush's press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundant evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn. The president seemed genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his claim that his friend is the best-qualified candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were leading the attack on Ms. Miers. "The decision as to whether or not there will be a fight is up to the Democrats," he said, confusing his antagonists this time much as he has Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Such naked presidential isolation from reality was a replay of his response to Hurricane Katrina. When your main "objective sources" for news are members of your own staff, you can actually believe that the most pressing tragedy of the storm is the rebuilding of Trent Lott's second home. You can even believe that Brownie will fix it. The truth only began to penetrate four days after the storm's arrival - and only then, according to Newsweek, because an adviser, Dan Bartlett, asked the president to turn away from his usual "objective sources" and instead watch a DVD compilation of actual evening news reports.

This is an old problem, the one about the ruler being surrounded by sycophants who tell him or her only nice things. It was the downfall of the last Russian czar, for example. But if one doesn't read very much one is unlikely to read history books. And then this "one" will not know about repeating old problems.

Happy Hour!

Let's have one. Do what makes you happy for sixty minutes. Whatever it takes, as long as it's not hurting anyone else. And none of that count-your-blessings crap now, just pure, unadulterated, raw, primitive happiness. Masturbate or have wild sex or eat a chocolate cake or smear your lips with raspberry jelly and then kiss your butt. Take a picture of the result for genealogical record. Tickle yourself. Make a horrible face at your dog or cat and then let them chase you. Tell your loved one that you want to take them or be taken by them in the cleaning cupboard and then do it. Paint your face bright green and pretend that you are the Heroic Pea. Then go and ring your neighbor's doorbell.

Or have a drink, of course, if that is what makes you happy.'

More On Harriet Miers

It's becoming quite a farce, this latest Bush nomination to the Supreme Court. The religious wingnuts don't like her because they want blood and fear that Miers has too tiny teeth for that, and other conservatives don't like her, either, because she is fairly mediocre and that is not acceptable in women who are nominated for something. It could be that the wingnuts of all types just don't like George Bush anymore, especially as he might not be the second coming of Christ as was rumored, and he also spends money like the biblical prodigal son.

And the Democrats don't like Miers, either, because she is a Bush crony. Poor Harriet, most nobody wants her and the suspicion is that she is not really Harriet Miers at all but a Trojan horse who is hiding something awful: that she is a wingnut or that she isn't, depending on what you want.

It could be hilarious if the nomination wasn't for the Supreme Court of this country and if the outcome didn't matter. But what is hilarious is this sudden turnaround of many of the wingnuts. It was only a week or two ago that they told us how no nominee should answer questions about how they will decide, say, Roe vs. Wade -related cases. Now the very same wingnuts want guarantees that Miers would decide them the way the wingnuts want. It's the way little children argue.

But I do agree with this statement from tomorrow's Washington Post:

Specter and Vermont Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the committee's ranking Democrat, said they intend to follow up on a comment by Focus on the Family founder and chairman James C. Dobson that, based on conversations with White House adviser Karl Rove, he believes she opposes abortion and would be a good justice.

"This is a lifetime appointment," Specter said. "If there are backroom assurances and there are backroom deals and if there is something which bears upon a precondition as to how a nominee is going to vote, I think that's a matter that ought to be known by the Judiciary Committee and the American people."

If we are going to keep up the pretense that this country still is a democracy, yes, we should be told what is told to the radical clerics of the wingnut party.

Media In The Age Of Wingnuts

Two interesting stories have surfaced today in the lefty blogosphere, one on Steve Gilliard's blog about the treatment of an Irish journalist by the Bush cabal and another one on Left Coaster about the CBS news initially planning to air a Sixty Minutes episode consisting solely of smears against Bill Clinton with no rebuttal. A weak rebuttal has supposedly been added, but the program still consists of largely wingnut anti-Clinton propaganda.

Carole Coleman, the Irish journalist who interviewed George Bush, has written about the experience in a book soon-to-be-published. She was shocked to find out that the Bush administration didn't at all approve of a real interview with the president. She should have been less assertive, she was told. In this excerpt she tells us of a phone call she had from Bush's administration, a person she calls MC:

She estimated that I had interrupted the president eight times and added that I had upset him. I was upset too, I told her. The line started to break up; I was in a basement with a bad phone signal. I took her number and agreed to call her back. I dialled the White House number and she was on the line again.

"I'm here with Colby," she indicated.

"Right."

"You were given an opportunity to interview the leader of the free world and you blew it," she began.

I was beginning to feel as if I might be dreaming. I had naively believed the American president was referred to as the "leader of the free world" only in an unofficial tongue-in-cheek sort of way by outsiders, and not among his closest staff.

"You were more vicious than any of the White House press corps or even some of them up on Capitol Hill . . .The president leads the interview," she said.

"I don't agree," I replied, my initial worry now turning to frustration. "It's the journalist's job to lead the interview."

Indeed it is, in countries like Ireland and Great Britain. But not, it seems, in the United States. Or if you try you probably never get another opening to the inner circles. So you better stay nice.

Maybe this is the lesson Sixty Minutes has learned? For why else would they let Louis Freeh, a former FBI director, peddle a book that has many controversial arguments without adding a real critic of the work to the program? Let me guess: Because Freeh says things which are pleasing in the ears of this administration.

Let me hasten to add that many in the media are doing a good job and are not caving in at the demands of the Bush administration. We should and do support those voices, and all voices which refuse to run a Pravda-type government news service.

The Reporter in the Office With a Notebook

Did you ever play that game? Who did the murder, where and with what weapon? The whole Judith Miller story sounds like something that would make a good parlor game, if only we'd find where the notebook was that she has suddenly unearthed. Maybe the New York Times had it all the time:

If its recent track record is any guide, The New York Times, later today or tomorrow, will get around to confirming Michael Isikoff's Newsweek revelation late Saturday that the missing notes Judith Miller suddenly found and turned over to the federal prosecutor on Friday in the Plame case were located in a notebook in the newspaper's Washington, D.C. bureau. The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has now scheduled another meeting with Miller on Tuesday.

Besides the ongoing mystery of why the Times is always a step or two behind its competition in reporting on its own reporter, this latest twist raises several tantalizing issues. If anyone at the Times objects to raising the following questions: It's your own fault for not disclosing more about this case yourself.

Before getting to The Case of the Missing Notebook: What's with the Times, which long supported Miller going to jail for 85 days, purportedly to stand up for a journalistic principle (protecting a source), now willingly turning over a reporter's notes to the prosecutor? And did Miller turn over the notes herself, or did the Times locate them and do the honors?

The notes in question, we now know, cover a Miller discussion with I. Lewis Libby on June 25, 2003, two weeks before Joseph Wilson's WMD op-ed that was thought to have set the Bush backlash in motion. These notes, the Times has disclosed, do mention Joseph Wilson. Isikoff observes that the notebook is "significant because Wilson's identity was not yet public."

Why are these notes so important? This article summarizes the reason:

One source involved in the investigation said Miller's notes could help Fitzgerald show a long-running and orchestrated campaign to discredit Wilson, which could help form the basis for a conspiracy charge.

Fitzgerald has yet to indicate whether or not he intends to bring indictments, but lawyers close to the investigation said there were signs he may be moving in that direction.

Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, plans to make a fourth appearance before the grand jury next week and prosecutors have told him they can make no guarantees he won't be indicted.

The outcome could shake up an administration reeling from criticism over its response to Hurricane Katrina and the indictment of House of Representatives Republican leader Tom DeLay of Texas on charges related to campaign financing.

The White House had long maintained Rove and Libby had nothing to do with the leak, but reporters have since named them as sources.

It can be a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative.

I should stop pasting things in, but this whole investigation is getting so complicated that trying any other way of writing about it would take me hours and then nobody would read the results anyway. But a short summary might be useful:

The wingnut power centers are reeling. Even the Gray Lady is shivering. Pass the popcorn.

Your First Kiss

For something completely different and silly, I want to know the place, time and partner in your first romantic kiss. I go first:

I was six years old, and my partner-in-crime was five. He was sort of kissing me behind the school building and I was kissing him back, sort of, because I don't think we ever made actual contact. Which is probably as well as the guy grew up to be a gyneocologist.

But we were spotted by a couple of older girls who said that they would tell the teacher about this obscenity! And they did tell the teacher who laughed. Which was extremely disappointing, because I expected wild notoriety from this deed.

War-Porn

The website that has been exchanging porn for pictures of dead Iraqis is in trouble, or at least the man who runs it is in trouble:

Polk County officials arrested a Lakeland man on obscenity charges Friday after investigating his graphic Web site, which has gained international attention for allowing U.S. soldiers to post pictures of war dead on the Internet.

The charges against Christopher Michael Wilson, a former police officer, are likely to reignite the debate about obscene material in the Internet age. It also raises questions about whether the federal government played a part in motivating the prosecution.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said late Friday that the 300 obscenity-related charges against Wilson all involve sexual content on his Web site -- and not graphic war-scene images posted by soldiers.

"It is the most horrific, vile, perverted sexual conduct," Judd said. "It is as vile, as perverted, as non-normal sexual conduct, which rises to the level of obscenity, as we've ever investigated."

Late last week, U.S. Army officials said they could not confirm whether photographs on Wilson's Web site, presumably showing Iraqi and Afghan war dead, were actually posted by U.S. soldiers.

An Islamic civil-rights group was disappointed that the Army did not pursue criminal charges. Last week, Ibrahim Hooper, a Council on American-Islamic Relations spokesman, said: "For this to be treated in a manner that suggests the Army does not take this seriously is only going to further harm our nation's image and interests around the world, particularly in the Muslim world."

Wilson, 27, was letting soldiers access normally paid portions of his site in exchange for graphic war-scene shots or proof that they were fighting in the Middle East, for instance. Late Friday, Wilson's site, which the Orlando Sentinel will not name, still had grisly images of war dead.

Judd said none of the 20 films and 80 photos that brought about the charges involves pictures of war dead. But Judd confirmed that his detectives did speak with officials with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division before arresting Wilson on Friday.

Disgusting stuff. The reactions (in the comments sections) to these news both on Americablog and on Eschaton are worth reading. The consensus appears to be that the display of dead Iraqis is horrible and that for Wilson to be arrested on obscenity charges for the ordinary porn part of the site is hypocritical. Also, many point out that porn is legal and all over the internet, that the authorities in this case seem to be arguing that sex is dirty and showing dead corpses is not. I can see the truth in these arguments.

It certainly is hypocritical to behave as if dead corpses are somehow ok to view and porn is not. But it might be enlightening to ask why a website trades in both kinds of pictures. What is it that the two might share, at least in the case of some types of "ordinary" depictions of porn? Could it be the pleasure of observing how violence works? The pleasure of humiliation, of making a person into a thing? The pleasure of the ultimate power of unmaking a human being?

Not all porn is like this, of course, and not even the majority of porn, but there is a narrow edge to pornography which definitely serves the same kinds of instinct as come into play with those who enjoy watching torture, for example. I have not visited the war-porn website, so I don't know if any of my guesses are correct. But the feelings of disgust and fear I have experienced from seeing violent pornography are not really any different from those I experience when I come across a really horrible picture of a war victim, except that I try to persuade myself in the former case of it all being play-acting.

The point I am making in this piece is not the central one that the war-porn website elicits, and I don't pretend that it is. But it's a point worth making, I think.
----
Added on Sunday, thanks to mark from ireland in the comments, who pointed me to some blogs who have worked on this topic for a long time and who do talk about the central point in this sordid story: Go to Nur Al-Cubicle and Just World News to find out how this story is unfolding both in foreign media and possibly even in our own so-called liberal media. And to find out how horrible it all is.

Waiting

Warning! This is a personal piece and quite gloomy. American Street has some political blogging by me today as on all Saturdays.

Dentists' waiting rooms are dreary places. Waiting for a sentence is horrible. Waiting for a medical test result can be desolation. Waiting is hard, but it is especially hard when what you wait for is fierce knowledge, knowledge that will turn the page in the book of your life and you may find out that it was the very last page. Or then perhaps not.

I have done a lot of this kind of waiting in the last months, not on my own behalf but on the behalf of people very close to me and now on the behalf of my dog. It is possible to get used to waiting for bad news. I was surprised to learn this but clearly we humans have the ability to get used to almost anything. So I got used to thinking about an alternative future, one without someone whom I love in it, I got used to imagining the pain and the slow withering-away of a loved one, I got used to thinking how fragile our lives are, how easily one short sentence turns everything upside-down. I got used to being powerless to affect events, to speed them up or to endure them better. I got used to waiting.

Nothing moves as slowly as the time when one waits. Nothing permeates ones life quite the same way: everything that happens happens within this slowly moving molasses of time, everything serves to remind about the time that is not passing while passing all too fast. It is the waiting itself that does the living and everything else becomes peripheral, unimportant, a faint distant echo of life as it used to be. Food is like wood, air is a smell, nothing moves, nothing feels, except for the one question for which you have no answers, except to wait, when you want to do violence to those who are holding back the answers, when you want to walk them by their necks back into the laboratories in the middle of the night, when you want to put a curse on their families, and all this because they have stopped you.

Waiting means stopping completely.

The Influential Bloggers

The big boys are talking about this, because the wingnut blogs are supposedly moaning and groaning that they don't get the attention they deserve from the wingnut establishment. Atrios points out that the wingnut blogs don't add anything new to the wingnut stew and Kos adds that they are not very good at gathering donations which is all the powers-that-be really care about.

So are the lefty bloggers given more attention by the Democratic party, say? I wouldn't know, of course, as I am not given the attention I deserve. Yet, anyway. I even e-mailed someone offering to cover the treatment of women in the Democratic campaigns and got no adulation in return. None whatsoever.

But once in a while I hear something on the radio or read something in a newspaper that I had said on my blog. It could be that someone else thought the very same idea independently and probably is, but I like to think that I sowed a few tiny seeds or laid a few tiny eggs on this here blog. It is also very clear to me that what is truly important about the whole blogging community is not the bloggers but the readers and commenters. That's where the next political wave is born and blogs really just give all these insightful and energetic people a place to gather. I have learned an enormous amount reading comments threads and not all of it has been about sexual customs I didn't know existed.

As a female god (=goddess) blogger I also feel the responsibility to think about blogging influence from a feminist angle, and this time not from the angle whether we women bloggers exist or matter at all but from a different kind of angle: how to relate to being influential. Not that I am, especially, but how would I relate to being influential if I were?

I would love it. Give me all the influence you can gather and I will revel in it. For a long time I was a modest goddess, one who looked for someone else smarter and more aggressive to lead the fight, but I have decided that those who are smarter are not very aggressive and those who are aggressive are not very smart, with the exception of all those other great feminist bloggers, and therefore I should just charge in and throw punches with great abandon. And I invite all of you modest people out there to do the same. That's the way things get done and then we will all be influential.

Friday Aussie Dog Blogging

Kelly Dreaming


This is Helga's dog Kelly in Australia, so she is sleeping when you are awake and walks upside down and all that funny stuff. Doesn't her repose make you envious? Why can't humans sleep so peacefully?

God and George

Does God talk to George? Does George talk to God? Are they on first name basis? We don't know for sure but a new documentary argues that the answer to all these questions is yes:

A senior White House official has denied that the US president, George Bush, said God ordered him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

A spokesman for Mr Bush, Scott McClellan, said the claims, to be broadcast in a TV documentary later this month, were "absurd".

In the BBC film, a former Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, says that Mr Bush told a Palestinian delegation in 2003 that God spoke to him and said: "George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan" and also "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq".

Scott McClellan argues that these allegations are "absurd". I want to know what exactly he finds absurd in them: that God would speak to George or that George would actually listen and get the message right or that George would believe God had spoken to him when it might have been the Devil or what? Or maybe he just meant that it was absurd to think that God takes the time to personally chat with George when otherwise he or she or they applies or apply a hands-off policy to most everything that is happening on this earth. Or maybe it's absurd that George hears voices in the first place.

This example is a good one about the logical outcome of all this religion talk in politics. It will and must lead to a point where various people are going to say that they are acting for one god or another, on direct orders, and there is no way we can refute this argument in a faith-based reality. And then we get faith-based wars and Gileads and small secret societies of echidneites busily eating chocolate ice-cream until they burst because I said they should.

My Cup Runneth Over

So many articles on Republican fraud cases, so little blogging time! Representative John Conyers sent me this in an e-mail:

"First, we believe that the circumstances surrounding the November 2002 demotion of former Acting United States Attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, Frederick A. Black give rise to the appointment of a special counsel. The fact that he was demoted just one day after he obtained a subpoena into Jack Abramoff's lobbying activities in Guam, and was replaced by an individual recommended by the Guam Republican Party through Karl Rove, certainly raises cause for concern.

Second, we believe that the circumstances surrounding Jack Abramoff and his access to a classified, DOJ review of loopholes in Guam and Mariana Island immigration laws, are problematic. Mr. Black had ordered the review in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, but they were apparently jettisoned after Mr. Abramoff obtained a confidential copy of the review.

The appointment of a special counsel is clearly called for by the regulations - a criminal investigation is warranted; a conflict of interest exists; and it would be in the public interest have an independent, non-partisan review.

The Jack Abramoff mentioned in the e-mail is the very same Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff who was recently charged in a federal corruption and fraud investigation, and Tom DeLay and Roy Blunt may enter into it, too:

Much of the money — including one donation to Blunt from an Abramoff client accused of running a "sweatshop" garment factory in the Northern Mariana Islands — changed hands in the spring of 2000, a period of keen interest to federal prosecutors.

During that same time, Abramoff arranged for DeLay to use a concert skybox for donors and to take a golfing trip to Scotland and England that was partly underwritten by some of the lobbyist's clients. Prosecutors are investigating whether the source of some of the money was disguised, and whether some of DeLay's expenses were originally put on the lobbyist's credit card in violation of House rules.

Both DeLay and Blunt and their aides also met with Abramoff's lobbying team several times in 2000 and 2001 on the Marianas issues, according to law firm billing records obtained by AP under an open records request. DeLay was instrumental in blocking legislation opposed by some of Abramoff's clients.

Noble said investigators should examine whether the pattern of disguising the original source of money might have been an effort to hide the leaders' simultaneous financial and legislative dealings with Abramoff and his clients.

"You see Abramoff involved and see the meetings that were held and one gets the sense Abramoff is helping this along in order to get access and push his clients' interest," he said. "And at the same time, you see Delay and Blunt trying to hide the root of their funding.

"All of these transactions may have strings attached to them. ... I think you would want to look, if you aren't already looking, at the question of a quid pro quo," Noble said.

This is most likely not very clear. I'm inebriated from this cup of schandals, but you can read the linksh.

Rove

Karl Rove, the mastermind of the Bush administration, is going to testify again in the Plame investigation:

Federal prosecutors have accepted an offer from presidential adviser Karl Rove to give 11th hour testimony in the case of a CIA officer's leaked identity but have warned they cannot guarantee he won't be indicted, according to people directly familiar with the investigation.

The persons, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, said Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has not made any decision yet on whether to file criminal charges against the longtime confidant of President Bush or others.

The U.S. attorney's manual requires prosecutors not to bring witnesses before a grand jury if there is a possibility of future criminal charges unless they are notified in advance that their grand jury testimony can be used against them in a later indictment.

Rove has already made at least three grand jury appearances and his return at this late stage in the investigation is unusual.

The prosecutor did not give Rove similar warnings before his earlier grand jury appearances.

What does this mean? All sorts of explanations abound in the many and varied internets but the only real answer will be obtained when we learn what Fitzgerald will do. The suspense, it is killing me!

If that won't do it maybe the terrorists will. New York has been put on special alert for possible bombs in the subway system. This and Bush's speech and Rove's troubles all on the same day...

Be Afraid!

George Bush has given as a speech that should make us tremble and shake with fear:

All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness. Innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train or worked in the wrong building or checked into the wrong hotel.

And while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil but not insane.
….

With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people and to blackmail our government into isolation.

….

No act of ours invited the rage of the killers, and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

….
In truth, they have endless ambitions of imperial domination and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves…They seek to end dissent in every form and to control every aspect of life and to rule the soul itself.

The psychology in all this is obvious: make us afraid and make George Bush appear to be the only thing that keeps the murderous chaos out of our lives, make us forget that Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and that he has served as the best hiring tool of the terrorists, make us forget that some of the things he is supporting are also trying to control "every aspect of life and to rule the soul itself". We are presented two choices: George Bush or utter catastrophe.

But these are false choices, because in reality we do have other choices than these two, and in reality George Bush can't keep us safe or protect us against the terrorists, at least without destroying what he says he tries to protect: freedom and human rights.

From the very beginning of Bush's dominion I believed that terrorism should have been attacked as a task for law maintenance, not as a war, because the idea of a war makes the other side look legitimate and contributes to the halo that bin Laden wears in some Muslim countries. The idea of a war on terror also veers dangerously close to the edge of a religious war, something ready to sprout and spread and gain legitimacy among Muslims who are not extremists yet. I wonder how this speech reads among those groups?

A Spy in the White House

The first one ever. But the Bush administration has been an administration of firsts: the first non-journalist with a murky past posing as a journalist and getting the best seats and access to the White House, the first administration which has bought journalists fairly openly with tax money and so on. Of course all this quite pales in comparison with the Clinton years, for a penis is a penis after all.

Apocalypse Now?

For the Republican party, that is. A Salon article, well worth sitting through an ad if you don't subscribe, suggests that the Republican party is dancing at the edge of a precipice. Why? Because of all the different fraud scandals that have cropped up at the same time. The writer of the article, Sidney Blumenthal, has a theory about the way the Republicans do politics:

For 30 years, beginning with the Nixon presidency, advanced under Reagan, stalled with the elder Bush, a new political economy struggled to be born. The idea was pure and simple: centralization of power in the hands of the Republican Party would ensure that it never lost it again. Under George W. Bush, this new system reached its apotheosis. It is a radically novel social, political and economic formation that deserves study alongside capitalism and socialism. Neither Adam Smith nor Vladimir Lenin captures its essence, though it has far more elements of Leninist democratic-centralism than Smithian free markets. Some have referred to this model as crony capitalism; others compare the waste, extravagance and greed to the Gilded Age. Call it 21st century Republicanism.

At its heart the system is plagued by corruption, an often unpleasant peripheral expense that greases its wheels. But now multiple scandals engulfing Republicans -- from suspended House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff to White House political overlord Karl Rove -- threaten to upend the system. Because it is organized by politics it can be undone by politics. Politics has been the greatest strength of Republicanism, but it has become its greatest vulnerability.

The party runs the state. Politics drives economics. Important party officials are also economic operators. They thrive off their connections and rise in the party apparatus as a result of their self-enrichment. The past three chairmen of the Republican National Committee have all been Washington lobbyists.

An oligarchy atop the party allocates favors. Behind the ideological slogans about the "free market" and "liberty," the oligarchy creates oligopolies. Businesses must pay to play. They must kick back contributions to the party, hire its key people and support its program. Only if they give do they receive tax breaks, loosening of regulations and helpful treatment from government professionals.

Those professionals in the agencies and departments who insist on adhering to standards other than those imposed by the party are fired, demoted and blackballed. The oligarchy wars against these professionals to bend government purely into an instrument of oligopolies.

Corporations pay fixed costs in the form of legal graft to the party in order to suppress the market, drastically limiting competitive pressure. Then they collude to control prices, create cartels and reduce planning primarily to the political game. The larger consequences are of no concern whatsoever to the corporate players so long as they maintain access to the political players.

This smells true. Many confusing historical events are explained by applying Blumenthal's simple scenario. And clearly the money in politics comes largely from corporations which makes them more important than the vast faceless voter masses.

Consider these sums:

The sums every industry, from financial services to computers, spends on lobbying are staggering. Broadcast media firms spent $35.88 million in 2004 alone on lobbyists in Washington, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Telephone companies spent $71.97 million; cable and satellite TV corporations, $20.22 million. The drug industry during the same period shelled out $123 million to pay 1,291 lobbyists, 52 percent of them former government officials. The results have been direct: The Food and Drug Administration has been reduced to a hollow shell, and Medicare can't negotiate lower drug costs with pharmaceutical companies. In the 2004 election cycle, the drug industry paid out $87 million in campaign contributions for federal officials, 69 percent of them flowing to Republicans.

Whereas almost all lobbying before the Bush era was confined to Capitol Hill, now one in five lobbyists approaches the White House directly. Consider the success story of one Kirk Blalock, a former aide to Karl Rove as deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, where he coordinated political links to the business community. Now, one year out of the White House, he's a senior partner in the lobbying firm of Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock, boasting 33 major clients, 22 for whom he lobbies his former colleagues in the White House. Indeed, the Bush White House boasts 12 former lobbyists in responsible positions, from chief of staff Andrew Card (American Automobile Association Manufacturers) on down.

"The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750," reports the Washington Post, "while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent."

The lobbyists and the companies they represent might be our real masters. Hence the nomination of John Roberts to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Hence the nomination of Harriet Miers to the same court. But why would the current scandals damage the Republican system? Blumenthal suggests a reason:

The Republican system is fundamentally unstable. Bush has no economic policy other than Republicanism. As the economic currents run toward an indefinable reckoning, the ship of state drifts downstream.

In stable systems, individuals are replaceable parts. Republicanism as constructed under Bush is a juggernaut that cannot afford to scrape an iceberg.

The Republican scandals converge on operators who are the center of the oligarchy. Their own relationships are complicated and tangled. But the outcome of the scandals affecting these major actors will inevitably unravel the Republican project.

Maybe. Or this view could be an overly optimistic one. What do you think?

Today's Zen Moment

Brought to you by Al Gore, via Eschaton:

The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.

Harriet Miers - The Originalist

Miers appears to believe in the Constitution as a dead (as opposed to a living) document. Except for the later amendments, only what the Founding Fathers would have intended when the Constitution was written matters. I can't quite get this way of thinking, because the right to bear arms would then have to be limited to those types of guns that were available in the eighteenth century. We have, after all, no information about the Founding Fathers' opinions on later models. This may be flippant but the point of it is not.

Miers is also a very fundamentalist type of Christian. Molly Ivins writes:

Uh-oh. Now we are in trouble. Doesn't take much to read the tea leaves on the Harriet Miers nomination. First, it's Bunker Time at the White House. Miers' chief qualification for this job is loyalty to George W. Bush and the team. What the nomination means in larger terms for both law and society is the fifth vote on the court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Aside from that bothersome little matter, the Miers appointment is like that of John Roberts -- could've been worse. Not as bad as Edith Jones, not as bad as Priscilla Owen -- and you should see some of our boy judges from Texas.

Miers, like Bush himself, is classic Texas conservative Establishment, with the addition of Christian fundamentalism. What I mean by fundamentalist is one who believes in both biblical inerrancy and salvation by faith alone.
...
Miers' church states on its website that it believes in biblical inerrancy, full immersion baptism, original sin and salvation dependent entirely upon accepting Jesus Christ. Everyone else is going to hell.

I have said for years about people in public life, "I don't write about sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll." If I had my druthers, I wouldn't write about the religion of those in public life, either, as I consider it a most private matter. Separation of church and state is in the Constitution because this country was founded by people who had experienced both religious persecution and state-supported religions. I think John F. Kennedy's 1960 statement to the Baptist ministers should stand as a model of how public servants should handle the relation between religious belief and public service.

Nevertheless, we are now beset by people who insist on dragging religion into governance -- and who themselves believe they are beset by people determined to "drive God from the public square."

This division has been in part created by and certainly aggravated by those seeking political advantage. It is a recipe for an incredibly damaging and serious split in this country, and I believe we all need to think long and carefully before doing anything to make it worse.

As an 1803 quote attributed to James Madison goes: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

Some good points there, but it is already too late. Ms. Miers will be the fifth vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade, and she will add to the full quiver of holy arrows on the Supreme Court. Gilead and all that.

By the way, an excellent source of left and right opinions on the Miers nomination can be found here.

Every Sperm Is Sacred

In Indiana*, perhaps, and also in the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. But Indiana has the advantage of being nonfiction. According to Amanda of Pandagon:

Indiana's legislature is considering a law mandating that a man better get laid if a baby is being made. Seriously, that's pretty much how the bill is worded.

Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana, including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant "by means other than sexual intercourse."

What the proposal would do is make it illegal for unmarried people to use artificial reproduction (surrogates, donated egg and/or sperm). Only married people could do so legally, and even then they would have to fill umpteen million forms about their wholesomeness, income, emotional problems and hobbies, including faith-based activities. And their homes would be checked. Sort of like adopting a child.

The Kos diary Amanda links to has more information on this proposal. Its sponsor is Patricia Miller:

Republican Senator Patricia Miller is both the Health Finance
Commission Chair and the sponsor of the bill. She believes the new
law will protect children in the state of Indiana and make parenting
laws more explicit.

According to Sen. Miller, the laws prohibiting surrogacy in the
state of Indiana are currently too vague and unenforceable, and that
is the purpose of the new legislation.

"But it's not just surrogacy," Miller told NUVO. " The law is vague
on all types of extraordinary types of infertility treatment, and we
wanted to address that as well."

"Ordinary treatment would be the mother's egg and the father's
sperm. But now there are a lot of extraordinary thing s that raise
issues of who has legal rights as parents," she explained when asked
what she considers "extraordinary" infertility treatment.

Sen. Miller believes the requirement of marriage for parenting is
for the benefit of the children that result from infertility
treatments.

"We did want to address the issue of whether or not the law should
allow single people to be parents. Studies have shown that a child
raised by both parents - a mother and a father - do better. So, we
do want to have laws that protect the children," she explained.

When asked specifically if she believes marriage should be a
requirement for motherhood, and if that is part of the bill's
intention, Sen. Miller responded, "Yes. Yes, I do."

But nowhere in the draft do I see anything which would make it illegal to have a baby while unmarried, as long as penis-in-vagina is used. It's only artificial aids to reproduction which are disallowed for those not married. I think this is all about trying to make it impossible for lesbians and gays to have children.

But note that in the section discussing surrogate mothers the proposal explicitly states that not only would the gestational mother have to sign an explicit contract with the intended parents (who must be married) but also her husband would have to sign it, and he would also have the right to dissolve the contract before the surrogate mother becomes pregnant. Thus, he would have a right to determine what his wife does with her body. There is nothing comparable about sperm donations, or is there? If a married man donates sperm does his wife have to agree and does she have the right to terminate the contract? I don't know, but all this smells funny to me.

It smells like the Handmaid's Tale, actually.


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You can read the proposal here: http://www.in.gov/legislative/interim/committee/prelim/HFCO04.pdf

Is Harriet Miers Pro-Life?

Does the Pope poop in the woods? At least a piece in the Salon suggests that she is:

While everyone else is reading tea leaves about Harriet Miers, a woman named Lorlee Bartos says she doesn't have to. Bartos ran Miers' first and only political campaign back in 1989, and she tells the Dallas Morning News that she knows firsthand about Miers' political views.

"She is on the extreme end of the anti-choice movement," Bartos says of her former client. "I think Harriet's belief was pretty strongly felt. I suspect she is of the same cloth as the president."

If this is true Miers will be no O'Connor. So why are the radical clerics all up in arms about her? Though it still is funny that pro-life-like-Bush would mean executing lots and lots of people in Texas.

Bush and the Bird Flu

I have been waiting a long time to hear what the president of the United States is going to do about the possible future pandemic of avian flu. What stockpiles of antivirals is he creating? What research into vaccinations is he funding? What is he doing with the health care system to prepare it for this type of a catastrophe? How is the United States cooperating with the World Health Organization?

Now I have received my answer: quarantine:

President George W. Bush suggested using the military to contain any epidemic of avian influenza on Tuesday, saying Congress needs to consider the possibility.

He said the military, perhaps the National Guard, might be needed to enforce quarantines if the feared H5N1 bird flu virus changes enough to cause widespread human infection.

"If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?" Bush asked at a news conference.

"It's one thing to shut down airplanes. It's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu. And who best to be able to effect a quarantine?" Bush added.

"One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move. So that's why I put it on the table. I think it's an important debate for Congress to have."

Clucking in Wingnuttia

I keep thinking of chickens getting all hot and angry, though probably nobody else has the same metaphors. The wingnuts don't like Harriet Miers because she is not wingnutty enough for them:

Bush's choice of Miers has drawn criticism from some conservative activists. Manuel Miranda, executive director of the Third Branch Conference, a Washington-based conservative advocacy group, yesterday called Miers's nomination a ``significant failure.'' Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, urged ``American families to wait and see if the confidence we have always placed in the president's commitment is justified by his selection.''

They want someone like Priscilla Owens. But no worries, George Bush has reassured all his radical cleric friends about Ms. Miers ideological purity and rigidity:

I'm interested in people who will be strict constructionists. . . . There should be no doubt in anyone's mind what I believe," Bush said. "Harriet Miers shares that philosophy."

"I know her well enough to be able to say she's not going to change. . . . Twenty years from now. . . . her philosophy won't change."

That, he said, "is important to me."

"I don't want to put someone on the bench who's this way today and changes. . . . I'm interested in someone who shares my philosophy today and will share it 20 years from now."

He was asked if he was referring to Justice David Souter, appointed by his father, George H.W. Bush, as a conservative but whose votes on the court have often disappointed conservatives.

"You're trying to get me in trouble with my father," he responded.

Asked if he and Miers had discussed Roe v. Wade , the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, he said he had no "litmus test." Asked again, he said he could not recall "sitting down with her" and discussing abortion.

Do you want to know what I think? Most likely not but I will tell you anyway. I do believe that Miers would be another Souter, because Bush is not really a pro-life born-again president, he is a corporate oil president and he doesn't want to be written up in the history books as the president who ushered in the second Dark Ages.

But all of this I think only in the same sense as trying to figure out the next installment in some television series, with no evidence to back it up at all. It's quite possible that Miers really is born-again and firmly pro-life these days, though it would not work to the advantage of the Republican party. For once Roe vs. Wade is overturned the party will have lost its most important populist bait and might be heading for obscurity.

DeLay's Laundry Day

Tom DeLay's troubles are not getting any less. Today he was indicted for money laundering. That makes two indictments against him. And no, I am not gloating...

On Nominating Women

If Harriet Miers becomes a Supreme Court Judge she will be the third female on the bench ever. Women are the majority of Americans but almost as rare as hen's teeth in positions of great societal power. To many on the right this is quite acceptable, and any attempt to change it amounts to affirmative action, interpreted as appointing someone incompetent just because the person is not a white Christian male. White Christian males are assumed to be competent because they are the default option: almost all past Supreme Court justices were white and Christian and male, so these characteristics are fine. On the other hand, someone who is not white, Christian or male is automatically under suspicion as a "diversity hire". That this person might be competent must be proven, and proven separately for each case.

Virginia Valian's Why So Slow discusses the reasons for this. One type of study gives research subjects imaginary resumes of job applicants and asks the subjects to rank them in terms of competence. Some resumes are randomly assigned male names and some female names, and this is done so that on average the applicants of either sex have equally good resumes. What these studies show is interesting: When the proportion of women in the applicant pool is large enough (say, thirty percent), the sex of the applicant has no effect on the ranking, but when women are a small percentage of the total the research subjects appear to focus on their gender and this has a negative effect on the ratings the women receive. Remember that there is no actual difference between the imaginary male and female applicants in these studies. Thus the effect is solely one based on one sex being "unusual".

Now apply this to the nomination of women to the Supreme Court, and it's possible to see why the sex of the applicant would be important even if the wingnuts didn't make it so by their affirmative action argument: women are "unusual" candidates and their gender therefore becomes noticeable. Feminists have known about this for a long time, and the solution to the problem has been to find extraordinary women for the first "unusual" appointments, women so good that they can't be rejected even if their sex is "wrong". The same strategy was applied in the early integration of professional baseball. The black players selected to be the first in the previously all-white teams were hand-picked not only for their skill and talent in the game but also for their other characteristics.

This strategy doesn't work when the people doing the selecting are not really interested in, say, integrating the Supreme Court but on something else, which is a long and arid way of saying that George Bush nominates people for his own reasons, not for the reasons that I would like him to have. He doesn't necessarily carefully pick the most brilliant legal scholars who just happen to be female, for example. But his choices still have an impact on women in law and on women in general.

The rare woman in some traditionally male position of power is judged not just as an individual but as a woman, and many of us with two x-chromosomes hold our breaths watching her walk that tightrope. Because if she falls we all fall with her, and this makes us sometimes even harsher critics of a failing woman than those who really don't think much of women on the whole. We know about the results from the studies Valian reports and we know that a man can fail and not bring down the future opportunities of other men, but this is not true for women as long as we are seen as part of the homogeneous mass of "womanhood" and not as individuals. And we are not seen as individuals when the token women are few and novel.

Much has changed since the early years of the second wave of feminism, and in many areas women are now common enough to be seen as individuals. But this is not true of the top posts in the society, such as the seats in the Supreme Court. There the old problem still remains, the one Bella Abzug meant when she pointed out that it's not enough for us to pave the roads to the top for the exceptional and brilliant women. We need to pave the roads for the average woman so that she will not be treated any worse than a man who is as average as she. We are not there yet, and the Miers nomination gives you all the evidence you might need on that.

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!