The New Friedman Column

Is a good one. Friedman talks about the impotence of the American political system and suggests some of the reasons for it. Sadly, Viagra will not fix this performance problem:

Why is this happening? Clearly, the way voting districts have been gerrymandered in America, thanks to the Voting Rights Act and Tom DeLay-like political manipulations, is a big part of the problem. As a result of this gerrymandering, only a small fraction of the seats in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures are really contested anymore. Therefore, few candidates have to build cross-party coalitions around the middle.

Most seats are now reserved for one party or the other. And when that happens, it means that in each of these districts the real election is the primary, where Democrats run against Democrats and Republicans against Republicans. And when that happens, it produces candidates who appeal only to their party's base - so we end up with a Congress paralyzed between the far left and far right.

Add to this the fragmentation of the media, with the rising power of bloggers and podcasters, and the decline in authority of traditional centrist institutions - including this newspaper - and you have what the Foreign Policy magazine editor Moisés Naím rightly calls "the age of diffusion."

"Show me a democratically elected government today anywhere in the world with a popular mandate rooted in a landslide victory - there aren't many," said Mr. Naím, whose smart new book, "Illicit," is an absolute must-read about how small illicit players, using the tools of globalization, are now able to act very big on the world stage, weakening nations and the power of executives across the globe. "Everywhere you look in this age of diffusion, you see these veto centers emerging, which can derail, contain or stop any initiative. That is why so few governments today are able to generate a strong unifying mandate."

I agree in principle, except that the far left has been totally shut out of any political decision-making in this country. The far right has simultaneously become the mainstream right. This slip explains why people who are totally moderate goddesses get attacked for commie-pinko stuff. It isn't as much a slip in the actual opinions of voters towards the wingnut right as a media reframing of what constitutes an extreme opinion. Nowadays the flat-earthers would get their own talk-show on television, but people who advocate socialized medicine are seen as terrorists.

The reference to the rising powers of bloggers is a curious one. Are bloggers really becoming that much more powerful (I wish, of course) or is it, rather, that mainstream journalists have become too concerned with what the administration might do to them, too conciliatory, too ready to accept the "he-said-she-said" mode as neutrality, even when everybody knows that one side has all the facts?

The fact is that a very small minority of citizens reads blogs. Just ask your friends and family if they know what a blog is and you will find that most of them have never heard of it. - No, I don't believe that blogs were leading the divisiveness that Friedman writes about. It was there before, in the newspapers that people chose to read and even more clearly in the birth and success of Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads or the Fox News. Large numbers of Americans chose to tune out those news that they disliked as well as those opinions they hated. Separate worlds, even before the introduction of the right and left blogospheres.

This is not good for the country, but I can't see any immediate solution, partly for the reasons that Friedman mentions and partly for the simple reason that the wingnuts are waging a war against the other Americans. I have been called worse than a terrorist for being a liberal. Which is a really sad commentary on the political debate of this country.

Food For Thought

From Daily Kos, this quote struck my eye:

If the mid-terms were held today, Democrats would win both houses of Congress" ~ Larry Sabato, Republican analyst

But the mid-term elections are not going to be held until next year, and although certain developments will aid the Democrats (for example, Scooter Libby's court case will be held around then), it is time for the Democratic party to actually start working on the temporary advantage they have. It is time for a real opposition party in this country, a time to bring up the real and abiding values of the United States: fairness, opportunity and neighborliness, and it is time to show how they are the values of the Democratic party.

The wingnuts are probably praying for a miracle right now, one that would suddenly sort out the blood-and-guts mess in Iraq. But they are not going to get a miracle like that because the divine powers don't go around picking after us like some sort of heavenly nannies. No, it must be human beings who will do the cleaning, and it most likely will have to be the Democratic party in the U.S. who starts this. So they better figure out on what they are going to say and do.

Bush believes that some sort of a natural change in the war in Iraq is going to produce a temporary lull that looks like an improvement and he will grab that and declare victory. Rove is already back in business, spreading the lie that the Democrats who voted for the war in Iraq are to blame for everything that has gone wrong because they believed the administration. And illegal immigration is the next soundbite, the one we are all supposed to worry about now. Talk about framing! The Democrats must not fall for any of these silly traps. They must make their own talking points and make damn sure that they are the ones real people are worrying about.

Americans forget quickly. Even today's wingnut debacles will be forgotten in a few months when another shark attacks or something. So the Democrats must not let us forget, must get up and start working the grassroots. Like yesterday.

The end of my pep-speech for this Sunday.

Spiders

I have some political blogposts on American Street (link in the column on the right) this Saturday as on most. But for those of you who would like to talk about something nonpolitical, at least for humans, I'd like to propose spiders.

I have never been able to build a buddy relationship with spiders and I have tried. They don't seem to be very social creatures, though a couple overwinter in my kitchen most years. This year I have a very large and fat spider there, and it has spun the most wonderful web outside the window over my sink (like the one in my embroidery on the left). An excellent excuse not to wash the window yet. When the sun hits the silver strands in the web it looks like the most wonderful embroidery ever. A fatal one, but so beautiful.

Spiders need names. Otherwise it's far too easy to swat them dead while dusting or vacuuming. I call the big fat one Moriarty. Moriarty's sex is not immediately evident to me, though what it eats is far too so. It is not one of those nervous spiders that run in circles carrying an egg sack with them. They seem like a wingnut's dream of a family-friendly spider, always on the job of guarding the eggs. Moriarty looks more like a metrosexual spider to me, but so far I haven't seen it being friendly to anything.

Are spiders cuddly to touch? We would need to much smaller to know that, because our fingers are too large to stroke a spider's fur. But I believe that they are cuddly.

Saturday Fun

Sweden is a wonderful place, egalitarian, wealthy and with lots of good skiing. But then they have drunken moose near the residences for the elderly:

The moose -- a cow and her calf -- had become drunk over the weekend by eating fermented apples they found outside the home in Sibbhult, said employee Anna Karlsson.

Police managed to scare them off once, but the tipsy mammals returned to get more of the tempting fruits. This time the moose were drunk and aggressive, forcing police to send for a hunter with a dog to make them leave.

Police did not pursue the culprits, but made sure all apples were picked up from the area, police chief Bengt Hallberg said. No one was hurt.

So like human drunks. Except we would send the mother moose to prison for letting a minor get drunk.

I once saw a moose run. It looked psychedelic; each of the four legs was doing its own thing and it seemed a miracle the moose didn't collapse in a big heap. Maybe it had been at the crab apples.

The Voice Of Sanity

Katha Pollitt's new column on Maureen Dowd's new book (Are Men Necessary?) is a wonderful breeze of sanity. We all need it. Sometimes I get so tangled up in the pro- and anti-feminist struggles that I start looking for employment as an eremite. Reading Katha's column is much cheaper and more enjoyable as a way of disentangling all that stuff. And then you can keep on dating. And doing feminism.

Katha begins by stating the main problem I also had with Dowd's work: her lack of real sources:

Maureen Dowd doesn't read my column. I know this because in her new book, Are Men Necessary?, she uncritically cites virtually every fear-mongering, backlash-promoting study, survey, article and book I've debunked in this space. She falls for that 1986 Harvard-Yale study comparing women's chances of marrying after 40 to the likelihood of being killed by a terrorist, and for the half-baked theories of Sylvia Ann Hewlett (ambitious women stay single or childless), Lisa Belkin (mothers give up their careers), Louise Story (even undergraduates understand this now) and other purveyors of the view that achievement and romance/family are incompatible for women. To be fair, Dowd apparently doesn't read Susan Faludi or Susan Douglas either, or The American Prospect, Slate, Salon or even The New Republic, home of her friend Leon Wieseltier, much thanked for editorial help in her introduction--all of which have published persuasive critiques of these and other contributions to backlash lit. Still, it hurts. I read her, after all. We all do.

Yes. We all read Dowd. We all read thirstily the few female political columnists we have, and we listen to what they have to say about women. That is why what Dowd has to say about women troubled me. Not the "trends" she created or the anecdotes she told. These things do happen, I am sure. But I am fairly definite that they are not a trend in the statistical sense. Not yet at least. And here is where Katha's next message is important:

"You're always so glass-half-full in public," my editor says at this point. "But in private you're as down as Dowd." Well, not quite that down. But yes, I thought we'd be further along by now. I feel for young women today--somehow, between the irony and the knowingness and the 24/7 bath in pop celebrity culture and its repulsive values, it can be harder for them than it was for us to call a sexist spade a spade. They've been bombarded from birth with consumerism and Republicanism and hyperindividualism, and told in every possible way that feminism is deeply uncool and unhot. Dowd is such a credulous audience for backlash propaganda it doesn't occur to her that she is promoting, not reporting, the problem she describes. I'm amazed, actually, that feminism is still around, given the press it gets.

That is it, in a nutshell. Maureen promotes what she pretends to deplore. She is in the trend-making business.

This business has been around a long time. Feminism has been declared dead every two or three years since the late 1970s. It is one of those beasts that just will not die, but never mind, if the announcement is made often enough people will finally believe in it and pack away their Birkenstocks and turtlenecks (to borrow from Dowd's idea of what would be in a feminist toolkit) and run out to buy some feminine razors.

Then the next writer coming up with a feminism-is-dead article will make a killing. Or that is how I gather the trend-making logic would go. And yes, it's amazing that feminism is still around, given the press it gets.

Friday Dog Blogging

This is Helga's dog Kelly in the Australian spring. My dogs, Hank and Henrietta, are both doing pretty well. Though Henrietta has decided to adopt an all-absorbing interest in food begging which is getting old fast. She also ran after some squirrels in the woods and nearly brought one back. Hank found something disgusting to roll in and was happy for the half-hour it took to get her home and in the bathtub.

Hank's cancer treatment is going quite well. Her quality of life is good and she is currently enjoying some pastrami. Henrietta, too, naturally.

Bush Speaks...

Today is the Veterans' Day. President Bush gave a speech to honor the veterans and to also guard his own back. What he said is this:

President Bush lashed out today at critics of his Iraq policy, accusing them of trying to rewrite history about the decision to go to war and saying their criticism is undercutting American forces in battle.

"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said in a Veterans Day speech in Pennsylvania.

Deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began? Ok, I won't rewrite anything. The way I remember the beginning of that war was that we had a real problem in Afghanistan, and suddenly a fall advertizing campaign said that we must now attack Iraq instead of focusing on international terrorism. Because Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, which he was told to have had for a very long time. But suddenly it was imperative to go after Saddam Hussein, because of the weapons of mass destruction, which might or might not exist. At least the UN inspectors couldn't find any.

I remember thinking that the whole thing was like someone practising heart surgery and deciding to leave it unfinished because an interesting wart was calling hard from the next operation room. So I marched against this idiotic war. Me! A goddess, marching! Had no effect.

So Bush went to war because of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Or possibly because the neoconservatives had decided to attack Iraq long before Bush even got elected and the whole terrorist scare was an unfortunate delay to their real plans?

This history is somehow a rewrite? I am asking who it is who is rewriting the history here. I think it is George Bush.

His second message to all us Doubting Thomasinas and Toms is this:

The president spoke at the Tobyhanna Army Depot near Wilkes-Barre. He talked not only about why Americans are at war - "the terrorists are as brutal an enemy as we've ever faced, unconstrained by any notion of our common humanity or by the rules of warfare" - something he has mentioned in almost every speech, but turned on his critics more directly than he usually does.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," he said. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."

Before going to war, Mr. Bush said, Democrats and Republicans alike were privy to the same intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The wrong signal thing again. America's will seems to be the will of George Bush.

Eternal Sayings From Recent Times

First, our dear friend, the conservative Christian televangelist and arch-wingnut Pat Robertson prophesies the future of the Dover school district in Pennsylvania where the most recent school board started a war for creationism and where the voters promptly got rid of them:

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

See! God's feelings are very easily hurt and Mr. Robertson is that go-between in all this.

And then Arnold Schwartzenegger had a serious bout of introspection after having all his propositions soundly rejected by California voters:

In a reference to his famous movie role, he said at a news conference: "If I were to do another Terminator movie, I would have the Terminator travel back in time to tell Arnold not to have a special election."

Too sad reality doesn't have retakes, and too sad that voters must learn not to elect people who have no experience with real politics by first electing them.

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty dumpty had a great fall

(Two important developments today point to the Bush administration's collapse of support on Capitol Hill. The first involves the House dropping ANWR from their spending reconciliation bill because 22 moderate Republicans refused to support the measure on the floor if included (no telling yet whether it will pass even w/ ANWR dropped bc of food stamp and child support collection cuts)

All the King's horses

And all the King's men

(The next involves the postponement of the tax reconciliation mark up in the Senate Finance Committee, where Olympia Snowe (generally prone to caving after getting the call from Andy Card) refused to buckle and support extension of the capital gains and dividend tax cuts – a signature WH priority)

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

(House Republican leaders scuttled a vote Thursday on a $51 billion budget-cut package in the face of a revolt by lawmakers over scaling back Medicaid, food stamp and student loan programs.

The development was a major setback for the GOP on Capitol Hill and for President Bush, who has made cuts to benefit programs a central pillar in his budget plan.

The decision by GOP leaders came despite a big concession to moderates Wednesday, when the leaders dropped provisions to open the Arctic National Refuge to oil and gas exploration, as well as a plan allowing states to lift a moratorium on oil drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

"We weren't quite ready to go to the floor," Majority Leader Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said five hours after recessing the House for closed-door meetings aimed a picking up votes from wavering Republicans.)

I Thought They Took Ethics Classes

Maybe they haven't had time to work quite yet. That's the only explanation I can think of for why the leaking of the secret detention centers shouldn't necessarily be investigated:

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said he was willing to undertake the inquiry but acknowledged that leak investigations were notoriously difficult.

Another Republican member of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, indicated skepticism at such an inquiry. Mr. Lott noted that accounts of a private discussion on detainee policy between Mr. Cheney and Senate Republicans last week had also leaked to the press.

"When you get into investigations around here, where does it end?" he said. "Who is going to investigate who?"

Democrats, meanwhile, said that if Republicans wanted to pursue an inquiry, it should go beyond any leak related to secret detention facilities and cover a range of other issues that Democrats say are ripe for investigation.

"That includes the possible manipulation of prewar intelligence on Iraq, and the disclosure for political purposes of classified information involving the identity of the C.I.A. officer," said the House minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California.

But the Senate voted, 55 to 43, to reject an outside commission to examine detainee abuse. The measure, introduced by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan as an amendment to a broader military policy bill, was opposed by 54 Republicans and 1 Democrat, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Detainee abuse can't be investigated. Leaking the possibility of detainee abuse can't be investigated. We can't get uninterested people to look into anything anymore? Is that how transparent government works?

The Chick Vote

Via Atrios I learned that it was the women in New Jersey who assured Corzine's victory in the governatorial elections:

But in the end, the real women's issue in the Governor's race was that Senator Corzine won because women favored him over Forrester by 20 points. He lost narrowly among men.

So, another lesson for Democrats to take to heart today: women are key voters who can help us win elections, not a special interest group.

Atrios had this to say about the results:

The Chick Vote

It's important. People tend to focus on the marginal chick vote on the issue of the week ("security moms!") but it makes a lot more sense to focus on bringing this rather large segment of the population into the party full time.

This is probably irony. Because women are the majority. It's odd that neither political party thinks of that very much in the way they promote their policies except when they try to fine-tune some mostly imaginary marginal group as Atrios points out. Women are pretty much taken for granted, and so are black voters by the Democratic party.

The comments on Atrios's post had a lot of discussion on whether calling women chicks is now acceptable and not sexist. My solution is simple: from now on it will be the chick vote and the dick vote. Fair and balanced.

Judith Miller Retires from the Times

We will probably never know whether she wanted to retire or whether the Times wanted to retire her or both. But whatever the case, there is now one empty office at the Times and I'm all packed and willing to move. The snakes look forward to the city, too.

Sadly, the diversity requirements of the Times rule me out. I'm a liberal-cum-progressive goddess and I can write. What we will probably get instead is another wingnut columnist in the mold of Brooks and Tierney.

The Coattails Effect

Republicans seem to have suffered from the coattails effect this year. Bush is going down rapidly and anybody holding on to his coattails goes down with him. In Virginia the Republican candidate for the governor had Bush come in to urge the voters go to the polls. He succeeded, but with the anti-Bush crowd, it seems:

Mr. Bush's 11th-hour appearance was clearly intended to energize the loyal campaign workers who ran the Republicans' 72-hour operation, so called because it swung into motion on the final weekend of the race, to urge casual as well as dedicated Republicans to vote for Mr. Kilgore.

In a speech to thousands of Republicans at the Richmond airport on Monday night, Mr. Bush praised Mr. Kilgore as a son of rural Virginia, a man who "doesn't have a lot of fancy airs" and who is a guardian of conservative values.

"I hope you'll work hard tomorrow to call up your friends and neighbors," Mr. Bush said. "Tell them if they want good government - good, solid, sound conservative government - to put this good man in the governor's chair in Richmond."

Mark Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said it was a "high risk" move for Mr. Bush and Mr. Kilgore to have the president campaign in Virginia with his approval ratings low and Mr. Kilgore's ability to win in doubt. Mr. Bush's appearance, Professor Rozell said, could have caused a "countersurge" of Democrats and "angry at Bush" independent voters.

It's a Typhoid Mary thing for poor George. Or leprosy thing, if you like that one better.

But Bush's low approval ratings are not the only explanation for the poor showings of Republicans in many elections (though not all, Texas, for one, seems wedded to wingnuttery come hell or high water). The Republicans are running everything right now and they are also making a mess of that everything. It's hard not to notice and voters have finally noticed. I just hope that they stay alert for another year.

Boob Wars, Part II

The Part I would be the Jackson breast episode. In Part II, we move onto other areas of breast baring: demonstrations:

Police arrested two members of an organization called Breasts Not Bombs after they removed their tops during a protest on the steps of the state Capitol on Monday afternoon.

The women, who were protesting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ballot measures for today's special election, took off their shirts despite warnings from the California Highway Patrol last week that doing so would lead to their arrests — and possibly their inclusion on the state's list of sex offenders. A federal judge Friday refused to grant a request from Breasts Not Bombs to block the police from arresting topless protesters.

Officials at the Sacramento County district attorney's office said they have not decided whether to prosecute the protesters, and if they do, whether to seek to have them listed as sex offenders.

The poll attached to the article took the following form:

Do you believe female members of the group Breasts Not Bombs should be allowed to go topless in public protests?
Yes. It's free expression.
No. It's offensive.

Notice the language in the poll: "No. It's offensive." When the group that is discussed here calls itself "Breasts Not Bombs", calling their bare breasts offensive is hilarious.

The boob wars are about the meaning of the female breasts. Are female breasts largely for sex, and therefore something like penises and vulvas, something that should be covered in public? Or are female breasts not largely for sex, and therefore exposable (is there such a word?) whenever deemed necessary, such as for breastfeeding? And what about the argument that men can show their breasts because they are punier but women can't? Don't women go wild at the mere glimpse of a male nipple?

All this is made trickier by the sexual marketing of breasts: the more we tell people that breasts are sexy the more people will find nonsexy barings of breasts offensive. This causes problems for breastfeeding women and also additional bans on women's bodies about nudity, bans that don't apply to male bodies. Maybe we do have something in common with the bin Laden brigades, after all? Hmmm.

The eroticization of female body parts is heavily dependent on social norms. Thighs were the big thing in Elizabethan England, buttocks in some parts of the Caribbean even today and the nape of the neck in Japan. And the Victorians eroticized and covered up most everything as do the bin Ladenites. Though breasts are probably always going to have an erotic effect on most of us the American obsession with the boobs is unusual in its intensity. I should know, having goddessed all over the world.

So it should be possible to give the breasts a break, to leave them alone a little, to let them hang out without always being stared at or poked at. Which is a very long way of saying that bare breasts are not offensive.

Governors' Races And Other Stuff

The Democrats appear to have won both in New Jersey and in Virginia. I am pleased. And Texans voted against same-sex marriage... I am not pleased.

But in Dover, the home of one of those Intelligent Design fights, the schoolboard was totally cleaned out of the believers in creationism. Too bad that it is not in Kansas where the creationists still have the upper hand.

The Fox Sex Discrimination Case

Fox has one of those. Couldn't happen to a better company. Fox's defence is that

The lewd language of Fox News Channel vice president Joe Chillemi -- however tasteless -- doesn't constitute sexual harassment or discrimination, says a lawyer for the network. A discrimination suit against the network filed Monday by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accuses Chillemi of routinely using gross obscenities and vulgarities when describing women or their body parts.

This is from the actual discrimination suit:

. Defendant Fox, including through its Vice President Joe Chillemi ("Chillemi"),
sexually harassed and subjected Weiler and a class of similarly situated female
employees to a hostile work environment because of their sex. Chillemi routinely
used gross obscenities and vulgarities when describing women or their body parts
(referring, for example, to women's breasts as "tits" and declaring that something
was "as useless as tits on a bull"). He routinely used obscenities and vulgarities
with women employees that he did not use with male employees (such as telling
women that they had put his "cock" or "dick" "on the chopping block"). Chillemi
routinely cursed at and otherwise denigrated women employees and treated them
in a demeaning way (including telling women not to be a "pussy" but to "be a
man", and referring to women as being a "bitch"). He made a number of
derogatory comments about pregnant women (such as regularly stating that a
pregnant woman had "tits" that were "fucking huge" and like "cannons" or
"melons" and the on-air talent's breasts needed to be "covered" or not shown
when the pregnant woman was being filmed). In addition, at a department
discussion about a segment on sexism in the workplace, Chillemi said that in
choosing who to hire "if it came down between a man or a woman, of course I'd
pick the man. The woman would most likely get pregnant and leave." Women in
the Fox Advertising and Promotions departments supervised by Chillemi were
also referred to in a derogatory way by a supervisor as his "Promo Girls."

What part of "of course I'd pick the man" "doesn't constitute sexual harassment or discrimination"? The rest of the guy's language isn't as much lewd as it is sexist.

Thy Own Worst Enemy!

Frightening, and right after Halloween. Digby reports on today's Trent Lott comment:

Wow. CNN is reporting that Trent Lott just said that the Washington Post leak was probably perpetrated by a Republican Senator! Apparently, the gulag was discussed at the Republican-Senator-only meeting last week in which Cheney begged them to back-off the anti-torture policy.

Lott said, "we have met the enemy and he is us." Man a majority leader scorned is fearsome creature, ain't he?

So does this diary on Kos. I do love me some Digby. And I find it a great honor to be allowed to witness the confusion in the wingnut talking points. Lott didn't check his little earwire this morning.

It's so hard to goosestep at the exact same rate, even when you can clearly hear the guy yelling "AnTI AmurriCAN!" Then imagine what happens when there is a mishap like this. Pass the popcorn, please.

Willy Pete

This is the soldier slang term for white phosphorus. It is used to illuminate a fighting field but it also has extremely unpleasant destructive effects on the human body. Now an Italian documentary has argued that the American troops used white phosphorus in Fallujah in the second sense:

Italian state TV, Rai, has broadcast a documentary accusing the US military of using white phosphorus bombs against civilians in the Iraqi city of Falluja.

Rai says this amounts to the illegal use of chemical arms, though the bombs are considered incendiary devices.

Eyewitnesses and ex-US soldiers say the weapon was used in built-up areas in the insurgent-held city.

The US military denies this, but admits using white phosphorus bombs in Iraq to illuminate battlefields.

Washington is not a signatory of an international treaty restricting the use of white phosphorus devices.

I don't know if this accusation is true or not, of course, but a thorough examination is certainly called for. Because of this:

Jeff Englehart, described as a former US soldier who served in Falluja, tells of how he heard orders for white phosphorus to be deployed over military radio - and saw the results.

"Burned bodies, burned women, burned children; white phosphorus kills indiscriminately... When it makes contact with skin, then it's absolutely irreversible damage, burning flesh to the bone," he says.

On Snot

This is the hazard of having a blog with no editorial powers. Stuff like this seeps through!

An Ode To Snot

Snot is wonderful stuff. It leaks out of every human nose without any discrimination or preferential treatment for the rich, it sometimes has lovely colors ranging from apple green to dark burgundy and it is absolutely free! When it dries naturally it makes intriguing little balls that nestle in the nose hairs and can be gently detached and played with during boring conferences or while waiting for a dental appointment. They can also be squashed between the pages of a library book (as I have found, to my horror) or attached to the bottoms of people you like.

Yet we hardly ever talk about snot. If it could be saved and processed, we might be able to build our own brick-and-snot houses! Artists could create snot murals by saving all that flu snot for the brightly colored patches. Talk about a deep symbolism! And some people could save their snot in beautiful rooms and exhibit it in the old age to curious schoolchildren.

Instead, we pretend that we don't produce snot. We are taught never to just blow it out, never to use our sleeve (so handily provided) for snot-wiping, never to taste it. Snot is supposed to be Disgusting. Yet it is part of our immunity system, an automatic nose-cleaning system which works, an essential part of being alive. Corpses don't produce snot.

The Next War?

According to Raw Story, the U.S. is in the process of cutting diplomatic connections to Syria:

The United States has cut off nearly all contact with the Syrian government as the Bush administration steps up a campaign to weaken and isolate President Bashar al-Assad's regime, according to US and Syrian officials, the Boston Globe will report in Tuesday editions, RAW STORY has learned.

If true, this would be a bully strategy. Will it work? Or will we end up embroiled in another pointless war when we don't have the troops we need even now? And if we are to police all of the Middle East, why do we do nothing about Saudi Arabia? It's oil, of course, but the hypocricy smells to high heavens.

On Health Insurance

Paul Krugman's recent column in the New York Times is on the American system of providing health insurance through largely two sources: employment-tied private policies and various government programs. Both of these base their premia on large groups which offers savings compared to what you'd have to pay for a private policy outside the labor market. Which means that if your employer doesn't offer health insurance and if you don't qualify for one of the government programs (say, you are not old enough for Medicare, haven't been in the military for the VA program and aren't poor enough with enough children for Medicaid) your insurance policy will be very expensive. Hence the many uninsured working people in this country.

What we have is a patchwork quilt of coverage. If you happen to snooze under one of the cushy and thick patches you are ok. If you turn around in your sleep you may find yourself outside the quilt altogether or trying to cope under a frayed and thin patch, and what happens to you is almost completely outside your hands.

This is why we have around forty million uninsured Americans. Not all of them are poor. Some of them are too chronically ill to find affordable coverage and some are young and unable to find cheap enough coverage to reflect their beliefs that they won't fall ill any time soon. But whatever the reason for the uninsured state of these people, when they do become ill they will either suffer alone, wait too long for treatment (and then require more expensive treatments) or try to get it at hospital emergency rooms which mostly don't turn people away. All these outcomes are undesirable and the use of hospital emergency rooms as primary care is extremely wasteful and doesn't offer the continuity of care that is deemed optimal.

Note also that someone ultimately pays for the care of those who can't or won't pay for it, and that someone is largely those of us who are insured. The unpaid care is rolled into the next year's health insurance premia. So the important question isn't about paying for this care; it will get paid in any case, the question is making the health insurance system more rational so that we don't give the uninsured incentives to become even sicker or to cost us even more.

As Krugman points out, most industrialized countries do better in this respect than we do. Not that this makes any difference to the decision-makers here; I have been told more times than I can remember that the United States of America has nothing to learn from the rest of the world. Because we are, like, better. Mention that to the young woman with lupus I know whose choices today are either to go on welfare so as to qualify for a state health insurance program for the indigent or to let her parents spend all their old-age savings on her.

Two Years Old Today!

This will be the last post on my birthday celebrations (which are extensive here at the Snakepit Inc.), but you can still donate money for broadband if you wish. I blog via telephone! The button is in the right column, and everybody who gives gets good snake magic as a reward. It can be used to slither away from any awkward situation without bad consequences.

My very first blogpost was this one:

I am echidne of the snakes, a minor Greek goddess. You don't have to believe in me. Most days I don't believe in me, and most days I don't believe in any 'you' out there either.

It is the time for darkness. Today's blog will reflect that.

On politics, or the manner in which we decide on our common concerns: We don't seem to have common concerns. What you hate, I need to survive and vice versa. I hear that some states are becoming ever more Republican, other ever more Democrat. I hear that this means we are getting more polarized: on one side the damned liberals, on the other the funnymentalists. No middle ground can be yielded. I feel very lonely sometimes.

Then, at other times, I feel as if the two main parties here are nothing but Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Where's the actual difference? Like in chocolate brownies with and without nuts? Or in donations by the oil industry and the trial lawyers?

This paradox is real, of course, and yet it isn't. Each party is captive to its basic constituency: for the Republicans the business wallets and the fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament; for the Democrats the business wallets and the political correctness (whatever that might mean; nobody else seems to care what it means, so I won't define it either).
When election time approaches, the parties start oozing, imperceptibly at first, towards the center. This oozing speeds up, the topics suddenly stop being extremist nightmare proposals, and, lo and behold, by the date of election the remaining candidates look so similar that I'd swear they have been cloned. After the election, of course, back come the extremists and another round of the merry-go-round resumes.

Which shows a) that I am a melancholic and b) a politically moderate goddess. It also shows that I blogged politics from day one even though I didn't think I was doing so.

Hank, my chocolate Labrador retriever who has cancer, is doing fairly well. Her palliative radiation has helped. Yesterday we were wrestling and she got a really mean headbump into my jaw which is now all sorts of lovely colors. Henrietta, my black-and-white pointer, is writing a long thesis provisionally entitled The Liberation Of Dogs And Butt Biting Refined. She is as revolutionary as she always was and age has done nothing to relieve it. So I am hopeful for my own future.

This blog will have another year, I have decided. By then I should be a household word in this country and most of the rest of the world, too.

Funny...

The Vatican wants large families:

An Italian mother who raised 11 children moved ahead on the road to possible sainthood Sunday amid a Vatican campaign in favor of large families.

Eurosia Fabris, known as "Mamma Rosa," raised two children whose mother died while they were little, then married their father and had nine children with him.

The virtues of Fabris, who died in 1932, were honored Sunday in a beatification ceremony in Vicenza, near her native farming village in northern Italy. Beatification is the last formal step before possible sainthood.

On Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI praised large families and called for countries to approve legislation and other incentives to help them. The pontiff has said there is no future without children.

Isn't it funny that celibate men believe they can affect these things? What has Pope Benedict XVI done to help with the baby dearth? The least these guys could do would be to offer free daycare. A more reasonable offer would be to support the children during their very expensive upbringing.

I also find it funny that Mr. Mamma Rosa isn't even mentioned, that being a father to eleven children doesn't get you beatification. But that's because it's us women who are expected to manipulate our fertility to whatever direction the powers that be would like: Breed more in Europe! Breed less in Africa! Naughty women! You never get it right.

My Blog Birthday

If you don't know what to do with all that extra money that is floating around, you could donate some to me (there is a handy donate button in the right column, though it's stuck at ten dollars, but you could donate lots of times...). For the purpose of getting broadband and as a birthday present for the blog. But if you don't have much money don't donate anything. Also don't if you have already done so. Or if you hate my guts and so on. I'm not very good at begging.

I have spent the donations so far on buying subscriptions to the Salon and to the New York Times Select. The rest I'm saving towards broadband.

On the French Riots

The best short reading of these riots is that they are like the 1960's race riots in the U.S., as Atrios suggested. The main cause for the riots is in unemployment, poverty and marginalization of the French immigrants and their descendants. The religious angle complicates things, naturally, and makes the chasms in the French society (as well as in the societies of quite a few other European countries) more dangerous to navigate. And as usual, the actual violence also has other elements, from accusations that the police are egging it on to hints that some of the arson is manufactured by drug overlords.

For these reasons I wouldn't read the events as a clash of religions or civilizations as so many right-wing bloggers do. I think that they are plugging into their own fears and add to that a lot of ignorance about the French political system. For example, it's the conservatives who are in power in France right now, not some socialists as I have read on the wingnut net.

But the civilizations of many of the recent immigrants to Europe do differ from the average European customs, and this is so especially when it comes to the treatment of women and to the cultural definition of prostitution and what is considered as sexually permitted in women. It is not unsurprising that people migrating to a new country would take with them all their cultural baggage, of course. But it does create problems, especially when immigration happens in large numbers and the incoming groups are not properly absorbed by the receiving country.

France clearly has a lot of work ahead.

Vintage Krauthammer

Krauthammer has a very excellent thirteenth century mind and I collect a lot of his columns for historical reasons. He once did a film review which praised a film for not having sex because it didn't have any women. Women in a movie = sex, see?

Now he has deigned to explain to us why Alito's argument about spousal notification in abortion cases doesn't smack at all of condescending towards women as property of men or as minor children:

Pop quiz: Which of the following abortion regulations is more restrictive, more burdensome, more likely to lead more women to forgo abortion?

(a) Requiring a minor to get the informed consent of her parents, or to get a judge to approve the abortion.

(b) Requiring a married woman to sign a form saying that she notified her husband.

Can any reasonable person have any doubt? A minor is intrinsically far more subject to the whims, anger, punishment, economic control and retribution of a parent. And the minor is required to get both parents involved in the process and to get them to agree to the abortion.

The married woman just has to inform her husband. Even less than that. She just has to sign a form saying that she informed him. No one checks. Moreover, under the Pennsylvania law I draw my example from, she could even forgo notification if she claimed that (1) he was not the father, (2) he could not be found, (3) he raped her or (4) she had reason to believe he might physically harm her. What prosecutor would subsequently dare try to prove to a jury that, say, she actually had no such fear of harm?

Remember: The question is not whether (a) or (b) is the wiser restriction. The only relevant question is which is more likely to discourage the woman from getting an abortion.

The answer is obvious.

Why is this the relevant question? Because when, in 1991, Judge Samuel Alito was asked to rule in Planned Parenthood v. Cas ey on the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's spousal notification requirement, Supreme Court precedents on abortion had held that "two-parent consent requirements" for a juvenile with "a judicial bypass option" do not constitute an "undue burden" and thus were constitutional. By any logic, therefore, spousal notification, which is far less burdensome, must also be constitutional -- based not on Alito's own preferences but on the Supreme Court's own precedents.

The situation of a married woman = the situation of a minor child, see?

"To krauthammer" should from hereon be a verb denoting the equaling of two totally unlike options to prove the angelic quality of any wingnut in trouble. And yes, Krauthammer is a sexist.

From My Mailbag

NARAL Pro-Choice America reminds us that the Plan B emergency contraception is still unavailable over-the-counter:

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called on Congress to pass new legislation introduced today by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) that would require the Food and Drug Administration to end two years of delay and make a decision on whether women may have over-the-counter access to emergency contraception.

The legislation, the "Plan B for Plan B Act," would give FDA 30 days to approve or deny the application for the Plan B emergency contraceptive, often referred to as the "morning-after pill." If the agency continues to drag its feet, the application is assumed to be approved - and women will finally have easier access to this important means of preventing unintended pregnancy.

If you live near Queens, New York, you can go and attend a show about Afghan women photographers and their photographs.

The National Women's Law Center tells you how you can legally fight sex segregation in education (a pdf file).

And Rorschach, who has an excellent taste in blogspot templates, has a story about breasts and bombs. Which is more frightening?

The Terrible Twos

My blog will be two years old on Monday. Will it start acting up and throwing temper tantrums? I'm not sure. Reading some of my early posts shows that I had no idea what I was going to do with this here blog, and some days it feels that the blog is a house, like an old beer-smelling pub, full of loud voices and even laughter. It has nothing to do with me, then. I don't explain this very well, but it is clear to me that the blog has decided to have its own life, to do its own thing, pretty much.

I started the blog for two reasons. One was the desire to force myself to write a little, the other the feeling of suffocating silence I experienced when I couldn't read enough voices like my own (booming, goddessy, correct). Both these goals have now been met, quite amply, and the internet today is rich in much better feminist writers than I can ever be. But I have developed a third reason for the blog, and that is the fun of having one, the great joy I have in the discussions that go on in the comments threads, getting to know so many intelligent and charming people. Also the adulation, of course...

The title of this post does have a point: Where should the blog go next? Will it develop a clearer personality, a deeper expertise? I love being a renaissance goddess, flittering here and there, depending on whatever gives me that inner beep that tells I want to write about it. But this is not a good marketing angle. I should specialize and give more in-depth analyses of economics (the field I know most about, but then it's boring) or I should make this into a group blog so that there is something fresh and interesting every day. Or the blog should become a real political blog, talking tactics and strategy. Or I could just ignore the marketing angles altogether, which is pretty much what I have done so far.

This is a selfish post. It is selfish to have a blog and to dare to assume that one has something worthy to blog about. The other half of me finds this post deplorable, but then that is the half that stays home when I go carousing, too, and the half that does the cleaning and vacuuming. Good old dull Echidne. Too bad that she has to be dragged through all this.

Friday Night For Bush

It's hard work being a prezdent. Hard work to get the approval ratings in the U.S. down to 35%. Hard work:

Nearly six in 10 Americans, 58%, said they had doubts about the president's honesty, a 13% rise in 18 months. Only 32% believed Mr Bush was handling ethical issues well, a significantly worse score than Bill Clinton achieved in his last scandal-besmirched year in office. His overall popularity has plunged to 39%, a new low for the Washington Post/ABC survey.

Mr Bush is no more popular in Argentina, where a protest by several thousand demonstrators turned ugly. In the coastal city of Mar del Plata, where he is attending a regional summit, protesters set fire to a bank, looted stores and battled riot police.

Earlier, the tone was struck by the former football star Diego Maradona, who wore a "Stop Bush" T-shirt to an anti-Bush "counter-summit" that drew some 4,000 protesters from around the world and easily eclipsed the official summit in the public's attention. "I'm proud as an Argentine to repudiate the presence of this human trash, George Bush," said Maradona.

Ouch!

The Friday Dump

Courtesy of Washington Post and Dan Froomkin:

Another shocking accusation by former administration insider Lawrence Wilkerson appears to be going under the media radar today.

On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.

Here's the audio of Wilkerson's interview with Steve Inskeep. The transcript is not publicly available, but here are the relevant excerpts:

"INSKEEP: While in the government, he says he was assigned to gather documents. He traced just how Americans came to be accused of abusing prisoners. In 2002, a presidential memo had ordered that detainees be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions that forbid torture. Wilkerson says the vice president's office pushed for a more expansive policy.

"Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president's office, began to create an environment -- and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we've seen.

"INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they've investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president's office, which is where you're placing it?

"Mr. WILKERSON: I'm privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms -- I'll give you that -- that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

"You just -- if you're a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn't matter whether it's actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you've just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur."

Get it? A visible audit trail, like the slime snails leave when they crawl across your hosta leaves in the last darkness of the night.

Added at dusk: Cheney has now officially asked for a torture exemption. He's too weak to do effective torturing. I guess he will just watch, though his 19% approval rating must feel like torture, right now.

T-Shirts For Tits

Abercrombie&Fitch used to be this weird store with stuffed rhinoceroses and toys for very rich middle-aged men, all served on antique mahogany counters. Now they sell to the teenagers. What they have recently tried to sell is t-shirts which make fun of Asians, but that didn't work out so brilliantly, so they decided instead to focus on making fun of women, mostly. This should do well as women are the ones buying most stuff.

An example of these t-shirts, which I have stolen from Amanda's post on Pandagon (where you can go to see the whole spread of available jokes) is this:





A deep statement. It could be taken at face value (in which case the breasts should be a lot bigger and preferably false) or it could be seen as a satirical joke on the society and its way of assessing women. Then there is the totally different question: How will it be taken by others who see the t-shirt around a real live wearer? That's the really important question, and I bet that most of those others will take it at face value. Or tit value.

Some of the other offerings in this line are worse, a lot worse, and some are better. But all of them are peddled by a firm for money. Abercrombie&Fitch doesn't care about women's rights as long as those include some pocket money for teenage girls.
---
A Post-Script: A&F have pulled the shirts off the market because of the protests linked to above.

DeLay and Abramoff

The odd e-mails between the two of them are now public:

Representative Tom DeLay asked the lobbyist Jack Abramoff to raise money for him through a private charity controlled by Mr. Abramoff, an unusual request that led the lobbyist to try to gather at least $150,000 from his Indian tribe clients and their gambling operations, according to newly disclosed e-mail from the lobbyist's files.

The electronic messages from 2002, which refer to "Tom" and "Tom's requests," appear to be the clearest evidence to date of an effort by Mr. DeLay, a Texas Republican, to pressure Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying partners to raise money for him. The e-mail messages do not specify why Mr. DeLay wanted the money, how it was to be used or why he would want money raised through the auspices of a private charity.

"Did you get the message from the guys that Tom wants us to raise some bucks from Capital Athletic Foundation?" Mr. Abramoff asked a colleague in a message on June 6, 2002, referring to the charity. "I have six clients in for $25K. I recommend we hit everyone who cares about Tom's requests. I have another few to hit still."

The e-mail was addressed to Tony Rudy, who had been Mr. DeLay's chief of staff in the House before joining Mr. Abramoff's lobbying firm. Mr. Abramoff said it would be good "if we can do $200K" for Mr. DeLay.

It was the Indian tribes who were supposed to hand out this money. For what purposes is not clear, but not for anything that would have benefited the tribes.

I have no idea if any of this is illegal but it sure looks unethical to me.

Bye, Bye Tomlinson

Bert and Ernie waving together, looking out of a Sesame Street window? Waving goodbye to Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who has resigned his post on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The resignation, though very welcome to us rabid lefties, is largely symbolic as Tomlinson's term was to run out next January anyway.

Tomlinson was in charge of the planned wingnut takeover of the Public Broadcasting System, and as part of this venture he commissioned a study which was hilarious in its incompetency. He also carried on in other odd ways:

Despite Tomlinson's high-profile campaign, it was his behind-the-scenes moves that apparently contributed to his departure.

The CPB's inspector general has been investigating Tomlinson's practice of using agency money to hire consultants and lobbyists without notifying the agency's board. Tomlinson last year hired a little-known Indiana consultant to study the political leanings of guests on such programs as "Now With Bill Moyers" and "The Diane Rehm Show" on National Public Radio. He also hired lobbyists to defeat legislation that would have changed how CPB's board is structured.

The inspector, Kenneth Konz, also had been looking into whether Tomlinson violated agency procedures in his recruiting of former Republican National Committee co-chairman Patricia de Stacy Harrison to be CPB's chief executive, and into possible White House influence in the hiring of two in-house ombudsmen to critique news programs on NPR and PBS.

Konz delivered his preliminary findings to CPB's board Tuesday night, but the report will not be made public until midmonth.

In announcing Tomlinson's departure yesterday, the CPB added a curious addendum: "The board does not believe that Mr. Tomlinson acted maliciously or with any intent to harm CPB or public broadcasting, and the board recognizes that Mr. Tomlinson strongly disputes the findings in the soon-to-be-released Inspector General's report. The board expresses its disappointment in the performance of former key staff whose responsibility it was to advise the board and its members."

Mysterious, isn't it?

It may be too late to save the PBS. At least my local station has been taken over fairly completely. I recently listened to an evening of solid wingnuttery. I can get this from any commercial network without the pretense of erudition. And the CPB is still firmly in the claws of wingnuts: the new chairwoman, Cheryl F. Halpern, is a long-time contributor to the Republicans.

Alitoisms

Think Progress has put together some of Alito's colleagues criticisms of him. For example:

"[Judge Alito's] position would immunize an employer from the reach of Title VII if the employer's belief that it had selected the 'best' candidate, was the result of conscious racial bias. . . . Title VII would be eviscerated if our analysis were to halt where [Judge Alito's] dissent suggests." (Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 1997) (Judge Theodore McKee)

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is all we have on the federal level to stop employers from being bigots in hiring and firing if they so wish. Title VII applies both to race and gender. That the soft-spoken and gentle Alito doesn't think much of it should send shivers down your spine.

Biographies of Women

Last time I visited a brick bookstore I bought two biographies to read, one on Lucrezia Borgia (Sarah Bradford: Lucrezia Borgia) and one on Florence Nightingale (Gillian Gill: Nightingales). They have now both been read as can be seen from the wrinkled shape of the books (I read in the bath).

Biographies are not my favorite reading because the endings are always so sad, but there is something to learn from studying individual famous lives and especially so when the individual in question is a woman. This is because only by reading lots of biographies of famous vomen does it become clear why there are so few of them. Talk about being a sheet going through the mangle!

The juxtaposition of Lucrezia and Florence is interesting in its own right. Here we have two famous women from the opposite edges of the customary moral dimension: a murderess/sexual devourer/hapless victim of male power (Lucrezia) and the lady with the lamp/angel/asexual prude (Florence). These are myths, of course, and myths very much conditioned on the femaleness of the subjects. What the truth was will probably never be known for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that Florence and Lucrezia were both much more complicated human beings than that.

These biographies reveal some of those complications. Take Lucrezia, for example. It is true that she was a member of the infamous Borgia family and that Cesare Borgia, her brother, really was quite a monster who, among other things, traded her sister off for various political reasons. But Lucrezia was not a bad politician herself. Macchiavelli in The Prince praised Cesare Borgia's political skills to heavens. What he didn't point out much was the fact that Cesare ended up being totally demolished, imprisoned and dead fairly young. Lucrezia outlived him and died in power (though still young while giving birth). She was at least as able at playing the diplomatic games as her brother. And not a single murder can be attributed to her.

Florence was a mathematician, a statistician and a formidable intelligence. She knew how hard it was for a woman with these skills to succeed during the Victorian era, and she did what was necessary to do it. Hence the nursing career, the focus on helping others and the asexual lifestyle, though her desire to help others was certainly real enough, given her religious views.

What struck me after finishing the books was how similar the two stories really were. The major theme in both of them is the strength of the societal straightjacket that was fitted on these women and their cleverness in re-tailoring it here and there to get more freedom. When we remember that these are the stories of the rare women who were born into wealthy families and received an education, well, it becomes stunningly obvious why the Lucrezias and Florences of the history are so rare.

Biographies are not the stories of the person portrayed, though. They tell us at least as much about the biographer and the available sources, and whether we get a new biography of some famous person depends on the fashions of the time. But even with these warnings in mind it's not a bad way to spend a bathing hour with Lucrezia or Florence.

No Filibuster for Scalito?

Ben Nelson thinks Alito is just a dandy guy. Nelson is one of those so-called moderate Democrats (wingnuts-on-a-diet). He is part of the 'Gang of Fourteen', the people in the middle who decide if a filibuster would work or not. Of course, Nelson will never need to worry about whether he will need an abortion or whether he will be regarded as property of his wife.

So will Scalito be filibustered? It all depends on what the politicians think the consequences are. Politicians are one of the most frightened species on earth, especially the Democratic type, and they will not do anything that might make the mythical undecided voter angry. This is in sharp contrast to the wingnut variant of the species: they are also very afraid but this time of their base. Who would blame them, really. We, the Democratic base, are kind and intelligent people who would never torture someone. They, the Republican base, are...wingnuts.

But I do think that the Democratic base has been ignored for far too long, and if we don't get some attention soon we might just not turn up to vote in 2006.

Cousin Anger Came To Tea

A long time ago I wrote an excellent bad poem about anger. It goes something like this:

Cousin Anger came to tea
She is petrified
She speaks of violence
in my silence
She makes me terrified

She makes me cry
(Papa knows why)
I cannot force her
to use a saucer
She is so undignified

I wish she'd end her visit
And let me close the room
Her lineage is illicit
Her manners spell my doom
She must be made to go
without my telling so.

Well, it seems that cousin Anger might have had the goods, after all. A new study (to be viewed with the same scepticism as all such studies) suggests that anger is a healthier reaction to stress than fear:

People who respond to stressful situations with short-term anger or indignation have a sense of control and optimism that lacks in those who respond with fear.

"These are the most exciting data I've ever collected," Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner told a gathering of science writers here last month.

Lerner harassed 92 UCLA students by having experimenters ask subjects to count backward on camera by 13s starting with an odd number like 6,233, telling them it was an intelligence test and then telling them they weren't counting fast enough and to speed it up as they went along.

Wrong answers meant subjects had to start all over again.

Another test involved counting backwards by sevens from 9,095.

So angry …

The video cameras caught subjects' facial expressions during the tests, ranging from deer-in-the-headlights to seriously upset. The researchers identified fear, anger and disgust using a psychologist's coding system that considers the flexing of particular sets of small muscles in the face.

The researchers also recorded people's blood pressure, pulse and secretion of a high-stress hormone called cortisol, which can be measured in the saliva and collected with a cotton swab.

The people whose faces showed more fear during the had higher blood pressure and higher levels of the hormone. The findings were the same for men and women.

Lerner previously studied Americans' emotional response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks two months afterward and found that anger triggers feelings of certainty and control. People who reacted with anger were more optimistic about risk and more likely to favor an aggressive response to terrorism.

The snag is, of course, that we are not really easily able to decide if we should feel anger over fear or not. But I have decided that these news give me the permission to be angry at weird wingnuts.

Trophy Husbands

Trophy wives are common as dirt and not interesting to write about. I am going to start a new trend: that of collecting trophy husbands. Not even eBay knows about it yet. Personally, I like to keep mine lined up on the mantelpiece, especially right around the Christmas time when they can serve double-duty as Christmas stocking holder.

But I really should write about this new trend in the way of the great columnists of the New York Times. That is the way to become famous. Let's see it it works:


Jolanda Matriarcha, a 26-year old corporate stylist clad in Prada and a vintage bikini, shrugs her golden shoulders when I ask her if keeping trophy husbands ruins the Western Civilization: "Duh. Everybody knows that women have multiple orgasms and need multiple penises. It's in our genes." She gets into her SUV, full of young, handsome men and drives off.

I turn around and think about the research of O. Gasp, a famous evolutionary psychologist who has spent a lifetime on the theory of Multiple Orgasms as the reason why women can't keep their fingers off all those male bodies. Dr. Gasp, well known in the cocktail circuit, tells me this: "Women are gatherers. They gather in multiples: turnips, diamonds, men. Sad, of course, but we must be brave and accept these scientific findings."

Stud Pippins, a 30-year old stockbroker, is working out at Hulks Are Us, a popular mid-Manhattan health club for Trophy Men. His Rolex is steamed over with the testosterone-laden air of the place and Stud's hundredth smooth push-up leaves his torso gleaming. He wipes it dry with a Ralph Lauren teatowel as he muses on his life as the Fourth Trophy of Gloria X: "Gloria is really good to me. I have my own room and I can go out with the guys whenever I want to. And we Trophies have all that male bonding in the house and more time to watch football and drink beer. It's a good life."

What would Stud's father say about his son's life? Would he wonder if he shouldn't have given Stud the book "Every Seventh Night of Your Wife" to his thirteen-year old son? Did he think that the Men's Rights movement of the 1990's would make Stud's life different? Would let him be the Only Husband? Or did he know better than all that?

I shrug my Chanel-covered shoulders as I walk past all the three-million dollar McManors in which male trophy orgies are right now taking place. The rain falls down gently as I ask myself: "What was the point?"

Scalito and the Polls

Americans polled about Alito don't know very much about him yet (wait until we bloggers get going), but they do know one thing:

If it becomes clear Alito would vote to reverse Roe v. Wade, Americans would not want the Senate to confirm him, by 53% to 37%.

Rose Alito, Samuel's mother, has told us all we need to know then:

Rose Alito, the mother of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, told the Associated Press that "of course" her son is "against abortion."

Closed Session

The Democrats have forced the Senate into a closed session to question the Iraq intelligence that was used before Bush initiated the war:

"They have repeatedly chosen to protect the Republican administration rather than get to the bottom of what happened and why," Democratic leader Harry Reid said.

Taken by surprise, Republicans derided the move as a political stunt.

"The United States Senate has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership," said Majority Leader Bill Frist. "They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas," the Republican leader said.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Reid demanded the Senate go into closed session. The public was ordered out of the chamber, the lights were dimmed, and the doors were closed. No vote is required in such circumstances.

Reid's move shone a spotlight on the continuing controversy over intelligence that President Bush cited in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Despite prewar claims, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and some Democrats have accused the administration of manipulating the information that was in their possession.

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted last Friday in an investigation that touched on the war, the leak of the identity of a CIA official married to a critic of the administration's Iraq policy.

"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions," Reid said before invoking Senate rules that led to the closed session.

This is the sort of thing one does in a one-party system in order to get any kind of scrutiny going. It was about time for the Democrats to do something, and this has the additional advantage of being enjoyable to watch. Did you see Frist's temper tantrum?

What An Odd Coincidence

Gilead, the wingnut world of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, is also the name of a company which owns the rights to Tamiflu. Tamiflu may be one of the only treatments for any avian flu pandemic; may be, because the virus could mutate into a form that is not amenable to Tamiflu. But right now many people are hoarding the medication, in the hope that they are safe from dying when/if the pandemic strikes. This hoarding causes shortages for those people who get the run-of-the-mill flu this winter.

But it has also raised the value of Gilead stock. Donald Rumsfeld owns lots of this stock:

Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005.

Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson.

Interesting, and it puts Rumsfeld into a tricky (though affluent) situation:

What's more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world's biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to be about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004.

Just coincidences, and Rumsfeld has done nothing wrong here. But it's odd to see the other side of a possible global health crisis. Someone will benefit from it.
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Link from smalfish

Bush's Gift to Women

The longer my thoughts linger over the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court the more aghast I become at what this tells about our president and his views on women:

Remember that the vacant seat belonged to the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court. Now that symbolic seat is offered to a man whose judicial past indicates that he would not only be willing to strike down women's rights for reproductive choice but also reduce the government's ability to keep sex discrimination in employment illegal:

You'll hear a lot about some of Alito's other decisions in the coming days, including his vote to limit Congress' power to ban even machine-gun possession, and his ruling that broadened police search powers to include the right to strip-search a drug dealer's wife and 10-year-old daughter—although they were not mentioned in the search warrant. He upheld a Christmas display against an Establishment Clause challenge. His prior rulings show that he would raise the barriers for victims of sex discrimination to seek redress in the courts. He would change the standard for analyzing race discrimination claims to such an extent that his colleagues on the court of appeals fretted that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, would be "eviscerated" under his view of the law. He sought to narrow the Family and Medical Leave Act such that states would be immune from suit—a position the Supreme Court later rejected. In an antitrust case involving the Scotch tape giant 3M, he took a position described by a colleague as likely to weaken a provision of the Sherman Antitrust Act to "the point of impotence."

And he has indicated that his view of women and children is at least partly as property of men:

In Doe v. Groody, Alito agued that police officers had not violated constitutional rights when they strip searched a mother and her ten-year-old daughter while carrying out a search warrant that authorized only the search of a man and his home. [Doe v. Groody, 2004]

This is outrageous. This is an insult against all American women, even the ones who are pro-life. Women have just been treated like dirt by the president of this country. While he kowtows to the radical cleric wing of his base (what wing? they are his base) he is making this country a worse place for all women, not only his own wife and daughters.
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Read this Kos diary to see what Alito might mean for young women in this country. Or this diary. Then remember that similar diaries could be written about the women who might be denied employment or promotions on discriminatory grounds, yet have little access to judicial remedies.

Now This Is What We Should Talk About

Matthew Cooper, one of the journalists involved in the Plame affair has said this today:

"There is no question. I first learned about Valerie Plame working at the CIA from Karl Rove," Cooper said.

Libby has since claimed that he heard the Plame rumors from other reporters. Cooper disputed that version of events. "I don't remember it happening that way," he said. "I was taking notes at the time and I feel confident."

If a trial goes ahead, Cooper said he would name Rove as his source of the information.

Bush doesn't want us to talk about this, though. He wants us to talk about Alito and illegal immigration. I wonder why...

Happy Halloween!

BOOOOO!

No Joy in Mudville?

Billmon is excellent on Alito's judicial history. A snippet:

True, there are no "gotcha" lines -- Little Scalia apparently doesn't share Big Scalia's tendency to showboat -- but his legal reasoning in Casey can easily be reduced to a few viscerally offensive points, suitable for 30-second ads:

* Scalito equates Pennsylvania's spousal notification laws with the parental notification requirements upheld by the O'Connor court. Women are children, in other words, and stand in relationship to their husbands as minors stand to their legal guardians:

Justice O'Connor has also suggested on more than one occasion that no undue burden was created by the statute upheld in H.L. v. Matheson . . . which required parental notice prior to any abortion on an unemancipated minor . . .These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209 (the PA spousal notification requirement.)

* Because the vast majority of married women tell their husbands before they have an abortion, those who don't are not worthy of the law's protection:

In the trial testimony on which the district court relied, the plaintiffs' witness stated that in her experience 95% of married women notify their husbands. Second, the overwhelming majority of abortions are sought by unmarried women. Thus, it is immediately apparent that Section 3209 cannot affect more than about 5% of married women seeking abortions or an even smaller percentage of all women desiring abortions.

* The risk that a husband might retaliate against a wife with psychological torment -- or by hurting her children -- is too insignificant to qualify as an "undue burden," even though plaintiffs established that such behavior is frequent in spousal abuse cases:

The plaintiffs . . . do not appear to have offered any evidence showing how many (or indeed that any actual women) would be affected by this asserted imperfection in the statute.

Excuse me while I go and take a shower.

Totally unrelatedly, doesn't the term "judicial restraint" make you think of black velvet chains attached to the posts of a Scaliasque four-poster?

Samuel A. Alito, Jr.

So this is the next step in the game: a hardcore wingnut, ready to hunt down the uppity women. Pretty much. He is also otherwise a wet dream for the radical cleric wing of the Republican party. Here are some of his opinions:

Samuel Alito's record reveals troubling elements that place him well outside the American mainstream:

* Alito took pains to distant himself from the longstanding constitutional requirement that abortion restrictions must have exceptions when a woman's health is in jeopardy. He did so when ruling on a law that effectively banned abortion as early as the 12th week of pregnancy and lacked an exception to protect women's health. The health exception is a fundamental tenet of Roe v. Wade, and the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments about the need for the health exception this fall. Should Alito's vote replace that of Sandra Day O'Connor, a fundamental right will likely be lost by next summer.

* Alito has argued that significant restrictions on a woman's right to choose are constitutional. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Alito argued that all of the proposed law's restrictions on a woman's right to choose – including a spousal notification provision struck down by the Third Circuit and, later, the Supreme Court – were constitutional. Alito dissented in part because he would have gone even further than the rest of the court.

* Alito would uphold state laws that place significant roadblocks in the way of women seeking abortion care. Alito concurred with the majority's opinion in Casey that concluded that "time delay, higher cost, reduced availability, and forcing the woman to receive information she has not sought," although admittedly "potential burdens," could not "be characterized as an undue burden." This opinion practically ensures that he would never find any burden to be undue.

This is naturally why he has been nominated. He is one of those legal scholars which regard the definition of a woman as the life support system around the uterus. But he is bad news in many other ways, too. For example, here is his opinion on the federally required family leave:

In 2000, Alito authored an opinion in which he ruled that the FMLA was an instance of unconstitutional congressional overreach. In particular, he said that the FMLA was unconstitutional because there was no evidence for the notion that women are disadvantaged in the workplace when they are not allowed to take family leave. Furthermore, he argued, the requirement that everyone be guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid family leave was a disproportionately strong remedy:

Notably absent [from the FMLA] is any finding concerning the existence, much less the prevalence, in public employment of personal sick leave practices that amounted to intentional gender discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

...Moreover, even if there were relevant findings or evidence, the FMLA provisions at issue here would not be congruent or proportional.

Family values a la Attila the Hun.

Then the political games can begin. We can ask what it means that Sandra O'Connors is replaced by this particular testiculated wingnut at this particular moment, leaving Ruth Ginsburgh the last representative of the majority of Americans on the bench. Or this would be what I would do, but the rule is to argue that the bench is deficient in wingnuts only, and Alito is sorely needed to increase the power of the Scalia contingency. Lots of possible Opus Dei boys here? Hmmmm. I better not touch that one.

But I can talk about the other game, which is to try to figure out if Alito is meant to be the second nominee to appease the wingnuts before the third and final one will be brought out. This would mean that a Big Fight is expected and that the Democrats are supposed to hammer Alito back into the underground with their stern little hammers, to help Bush, so that he doesn't get stuck with this wingnut who would make even his daughters' lives harder.

A Satisfying Film

It isn't really a film but a story shown like a film. About assholes.
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Stolen from S.E.

Some Straight Talk from Bill Clinton

Listen to Bill (via this Kos diary) on how the Democrats should do politics against the wingnuts:

"You can't say, 'Please don't be mean to me. Please let me win sometimes.' Give me a break here," Clinton said. "If you don't want to fight for the future and you can't figure out how to beat these people then find something else to do."
...
Clinton attributed Republicans' control of Congress to Democratic candidates' inability or unwillingness to "stand up and be heard" on issues that matter to people. For example, he said, Democrats too often are unwilling to talk about abortion because they're afraid of virulent reactions from anti-abortion groups.

"So how come we can't talk about it?" he asked. "Because we basically let political ads turn every player in this drama into a two-dimensional cartoon instead of a three-dimensional person."

Clinton also criticized political reporters and authors for failing to use reason and common sense in their writing and failing to dig deeply into stories. Instead, he said, reporters let officials get away with saying things that aren't true so stories include comment from both sides.

True, very true. The Democrats in Washington, D.C. lack the fire and will that is needed, with only a few exceptions. And so do too many of us grass roots. No rain without thunder, remember? And there will be no real political change without the fight for it.

Supposedly the Chinese use "May you live in interesting times" as a curse, because interesting times are always times of restlessness and discord. It is too late for us to avoid that specific threat. But what would be an even greater curse is to have lived in interesting times and done nothing to make things better. At least we still have an opportunity to avoid that one.

From My Archives

This is a piece I wrote in the 1990's. It's outdated now but still worth reading for the point it makes.


On Babies and Puppies

If you had to choose between a birth as a puppy in the United States or as a baby girl in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, which would you go for? I know that this is a tough one. Perhaps it would help to compare the options in some detail:


Both are cute, for starters. Both are also often unwanted. The Afghan girls are likely to live longer than puppies, although American puppies may have better access to medical care. Neither puppies nor Afghan girls are required to seek an education. Puppies may, however, go to school if their owners so desire, while the Afghan parents have no such rights over their daughter's education.

Both are powerless in affecting their own lives and equally vulnerable to random strikes of bad luck. Their fates are firmly in the hands of others: those of owners for the puppies and those of fathers (and later of husbands) for the Afghan girls. If these others are kind, the lives of both puppies and girls can be fairly enjoyable. If these others are cruel, both lives can be hell.

Still undediced? Neither puppies nor older Afghan girls are allowed to go out unchaperoned. Puppies must also wear identification tags and be leashed at all times, except in specially designated areas and on the property of their owners. Older Afghan girls must wear a body wrap that leaves no part uncovered, including their faces. It should be noted, though, that they don't have to wear leashes or identity tags. Yet, anyway.

Puppies are routinely banned from many public buildings as well as restaurants and grocery stores. Afghan girls are routinely banned from most public life.

See, I told you that the choice would be difficult. What is not so difficult to see is the incredibly poor taste I am exhibiting in even posing the question. But this is nothing compared to the poor taste the world has exhibited in providing me with the raw materials for this story.

Sunday Reading

You could do a lot worse than reading Amanda today on our old dear friend, Leon Kass. As you may remember, someone has decided to republish Leon Kass's expert opinions on the meaning of being a woman, from 1997, and I earlier blogged about the first installment. Now a second one has come out and Amanda says pretty much everything that needs to be said about it.

It is fun to imagine a reversal of Kass's writings. What would happen if some woman pontificated on the natural role of men and how their sperm defines them? What would happen if men were told that they are the incubators of their sperm and should base their ethics on what happens to each and every one of those little tailed critters? No more toilet bowls as a destiny, for any of them! Must worry about the quality of the wombs around here, and so on.

But such reversals don't happen, and that tells us much more about who has the power in this society than anything else. Leon Kass still has the right to try to define women, but I can't think of a single woman who would have the right to define Leon Kass.