The Virtuous?

We keep being told that the religious right are good people, righteous people, more ethical people than us godless (goddessless?) lefties. Hence I am always confused when I see evidence of something quite different amongst the faithful. Like this ad in the wingnutty Newsmax:

Does God Want YOU To Be a Success?

When God wants something done, He always gives it to ONE PERSON to do—a Moses, a Peter, a Paul, a David, a Gideon, a Mary. Had you noticed?

In Pray and Be Rich, Dr. Richard Gaylord Briley reveals a startling Biblical truth that has great implications for your life:

One person, committed to a goal, is all God needs to change the world.

He's done it many times. And if history turns many more pages, He'll surely do it again. At the very least, you and God together can change your world.

The new audio program – Pray and Be Rich – is about one person—YOU—and the success plans that God has for all who believe, pray and act on the message of the Bible.
...
It astonishes many that Jesus spoke more about wise use of our possessions (our wealth) than any other subject. Riches are extensions of whatever we make of ourselves. Wealth is extra power to use for good or evil.

All babies are born poor. But as you'll find out in Pray and Be Rich, five percent of them, in free societies, grow up to be richer than the rest.

This widely-ignored fact gives extra hope for success to anyone with a clear goal in life.

Pray and Be Rich reveals the Biblical secrets that will enable you to become a member of the five percent of people who rise to the top and succeed.

Funny that. I have read the Bible, more than once, and my impression is that on the whole it's not too hot on the chances of the rich to get into heaven. Blessed are the poor, for example. But never mind. The new wingnut religion is not exactly the same thing as Christianity, anyway. For one thing, the Republican party is not mentioned in the Bible (unless the pharisees remind you of our radical clerics).

Torture

Atrios links to Rude Pundit's post about an editorial in the wingnutty Newsmax which states that John McCain's experiences with being tortured proves that torture works:

Sen. John McCain is leading the charge against so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by U.S. interrogators, insisting that practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist suspects to give accurate information.

Nearly forty years ago, however - when McCain was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp - some of the same techniques were used on him. And - as McCain has publicly admitted at least twice - the torture worked!
...
He described the day Hanoi Hilton guards beat him "from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes."

"For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards . . . Finally, I reached the lowest point of my 5 1/2 years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide, because I saw that I was reaching the end of my rope."

McCain was taken to an interrogation room and ordered to sign a document confessing to war crimes. "I signed it," he recalled. "It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities."

"I had learned what we all learned over there," McCain said. "Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."

That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

There are two ongoing conversations about torture; the public one which states that the United States does not torture but reserves the right to define what isn't torture in the interrogation methods it uses, and the real one which is all about how torture was employed in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo and in Afghanistan. And probably elsewhere.

Torture has a long history of use among humans. It was employed by the Spanish Inquisition and in the European medieval witchhunts. Rulers routinely tortured most everyone they didn't like. It didn't really matter whether the victims were guilty or not; the idea was that something would always crop up when a person was stretched or chopped or burned or skinned. And something usually did crop up. But whether that something was the truth is much harder to judge. Note that what McCain signed was "generalities". I suspect that most victims of torture will tell a story, any story, to have the pain stop.

Torture has also been used to entertain the masses in the form of rather warped public festivals. Those accused of treason were publicly drawn and quartered, and the torture of animals was common entertainment for the masses. Something similar took place in Iraq when a group of American contractors were killed.

If there is such a thing as true evil in the human beings then this is where it emerges. Osama bin Laden's greatest victory may well be in the fact that articles like the Newsmax one are now being seriously discussed.

Help Wanted

The Council of Economic Advisers for the president has several vacancies, including the chair. I would have thought that conservative economists would all be fighting for the chance to steer the economy of this country in the rightward direction. I would have been mistaken:

The White House and Congress need as many as five academic economists of high caliber, and it's not obvious where they will come from. The Republican Party may be facing something of a shallow bench.

"Bush's reputation in at least the academic community is about as low as you can imagine," said William A. Niskanen, who was a member of the council during President Ronald Reagan's first term and is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group. "A lot of people would not be willing to give up a good tenured position for a position in the White House."

Back in 2003, the choice of N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor, to head the council initially provoked some wonderment from economists. He had condemned supporters of some Reagan-era tax cuts as "charlatans and cranks" in the first edition of his basic economics textbook, and he had suggested replacing part of the income tax with higher taxes on gasoline - a nonstarter in this White House. But it's possible that the administration had few other options.

There are several reasons for the wingnut economists' reluctance to serve on the Council or in the other currently vacant posts. But the major one surely is that Bush will not take advice from mere economists (perhaps because he is more used to talking to God), yet it would be the same economists who would be associated with any failures in Bush's economic policy.

Rats and the ship.

A Political Quiz

What do the following people have in common?

Randy "Duke" Cunningham
Tom DeLay
William Jefferson
Bob Ney
Bill Frist
"Scooter" Libby

It looks like a list of thug names to me, and that might not be a bad guess. But the correct answer is that all these men are either being investigated for various wrongdoings or have been found guilty of them. Some of them may turn out to be innocent, of course. But not Randy Cunningham who just pleaded guilty to accepting bribes of at least 2.4 million dollars.

All these men are also politicians, and with the exception of William Jefferson (who is a Democrat), wingnut politicians. As the Republicans are selling themselves as the moral party it is truly spectacular that the list also includes several of the top wingnuts in the country.

Misogyny

If you are interested in this topic, check out Jill's post on Feministe. Warning: It's really disgusting stuff.

Krugman's Latest Column

Talks about the lack of economic security in the United States:

American workers at big companies used to think they had made a deal. They would be loyal to their employers, and the companies in turn would be loyal to them, guaranteeing job security, health care and a dignified retirement.

Such deals were, in a real sense, the basis of America's postwar social order. We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book "The Divided Welfare State," if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that's about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.

The resulting system is imperfect: those who don't work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens. Still, the system more or less worked for several decades after World War II.

But it doesn't work now. Every year fewer and fewer firms offer health insurance or retirement benefits, and every year more and more jobs are outsourced to other countries. Firms get rid of workers whenever they feel like it and call it becoming efficient or lean-and-mean. And the government safety net is being gnawed by the little rats from the right.

What this all amounts to is a new age of uncertainty, a time when the foundations are shaky and nobody knows what the future might bring, a time when we need strong and positive leadership for the whole country. But instead we get fearmongering and finger-pointing and pointless wars abroad. I suspect that all this partly explains the recent increases in fundamentalism: people blindly groping for something that won't fail them. It may not be a coincidence that the party that promotes fundamentalist thinking is also the one causing all the insecurity.

Done My Blogging Duty

I went wading in the Wingnuttia blogs and columns, and I found out many interesting factoids about us liberals/progressives. Now I'm too scared of myself to fall asleep. Here is Ann Coulter's take on my people:

The Democrats are giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats' behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle.

They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors.

Let me see. How does this relate to the often heard argument that it is the lefties who are full of hate?

Nannannah, I Can't Hear You!

Your hair will stand up when you read this post, I swear. First, the New York Daily News writes this about the Bush administration:

Embattled White House aides have begun to believe President Bush must take the reins personally if his evaporating agenda and credibility are to be salvaged.

"We're just plodding along," admitted a senior Bush aide from deep within the West Wing bunker. "It's up to the President to turn things around now."

Even as his poll numbers tank, however, Bush is described by aides as still determined to stay the course. He resists advice from Republicans who fear disaster in next year's congressional elections, and rejects criticism from a media establishment he disdains.

"The President has always been willing to make changes," the senior aide said, "but not because someone in this town tells him to - NEVER!"

For the moment, Bush has dismissed discreetly offered advice from friends and loyalists to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and bring back longtime confidant Karen Hughes from the State Department to shore up his personal White House staff.

"He thinks that would be an admission he's screwed up, and he can't bring himself to do that," a former senior staffer lamented.

So aides have circled the wagons as Bush's woes mount, partly hoping they can sell the President on a December blitz of media interviews to help turn the tide.

"The staff basically still has an unyielding belief in the wisdom of what they're doing," a close Bush confidant said. "They're talking to people who could help them, but they're not listening."

Second, this is what Seymour Hersh said in an interview with Wolf Blitzer (via this Daily Kos diary) about George Bush:

BLITZER: But this has become, your suggesting, a religious thing for him? HERSH: Some people think it is. Other people think he's absolutely committed, as I say, to the idea of democracy. He's been sold on this notion.

He's a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn't have all the facts and all the information he needs and isn't able to change.

I'll tell you, the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they're not sure how you get to this guy.

We have generals that do not like -- anymore -- they're worried about speaking truth to power. You know that. I mean that's -- Murtha in fact, John Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, which most people don't know, has tremendous contacts with the senior generals of the armies. He's a ranking old war horse in Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The generals know him and like him. His message to the White House was much more worrisome than maybe to the average person in the public. They know that generals are privately telling him things that they're not saying to them.

And if you're a general and you have a disagreement with this war, you cannot get that message into the White House. And that gets people unnerved.

BLITZER: Here's what you write. You write, "Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the president remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding."

Those are incredibly strong words, that the president basically doesn't want to hear alternative analysis of what is going on.

HERSH: You know, Wolf, there is people I've been talking to -- I've been a critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are suddenly saying something much more alarming.

They're beginning to talk about some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

I don't want to sound like I'm off the wall here. But the issue is, is this president going to be capable of responding to reality? Is he going to be able -- is he going to be capable if he going to get a bad assessment, is he going to accept it as a bad assessment or is he simply going to see it as something else that is just a little bit in the way as he marches on in his crusade that may not be judged for 10 or 20 years.

He talks about being judged in 20 years to his friends. And so it's a little alarming because that means that my and my colleagues in the press corps, we can't get to him maybe with our views. You and you can't get to him maybe with your interviews.

How do you get to a guy to convince him that perhaps he's not going the right way?

Jack Murtha certainly didn't do it. As I wrote, they were enraged at Murtha in the White House.

And so we have an election coming up -- Yes. I've had people talk to me about maybe Congress is going to have to cut off the budget for this war if it gets to that point. I don't think they're ready to do it now.

But I'm talking about sort of a crisis of management. That you have a management that's seen by some of the people closely involved as not being able to function in terms of getting information it doesn't want to receive.

Rumors always fly around in Washington, D.C., and I have been reluctant to write about those rumors which imply that Bush is out of touch with reality, that he will not listen to criticism or to any evidence which is negative. But too much has taken place recently which can't be explained in any other way except by assuming that several politicians are trying to get the president's attention via various public stunts simply because they can't get Bush's ear in any other way.

I believe that the American citizens have the right to know what is going on with their president. Bush could clear up any confusion by giving a few interviews in which he answers his critics and explains how he is taking the criticisms into account.

What A Coincidence!

And what a sudden change, too!

The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an
Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was "remarkably similar" to its own.

It also signaled its acceptance of a recent US Senate amendment designed to pave the way for a phased US military withdrawal from the violence-torn country.

The statement by White House spokesman Scott McClellan came in response to a commentary published in The Washington Post by Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he said US forces will begin leaving Iraq next year "in large numbers."

According to Biden, the United States will move about 50,000 servicemen out of the country by the end of 2006, and "a significant number" of the remaining 100,000 the year after.

The blueprint also calls for leaving only an unspecified "small force" either in Iraq or across the border to strike at concentrations of insurgents, if necessary.

Less than two weeks ago, McClellan blasted Democratic Representative John Murtha, saying that by calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the congressman was "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore," a stridently anti-war Hollywood filmmaker.

Biden's ideas, relayed first in a November 21 speech in New York, however, got a much friendlier reception.

It is all very surprising and oh, so sudden. I thought that the Bush administration doesn't pay any attention to polls. Biden does, probably.

But I still don't believe that the administration actually has a plan to withdraw.

Colonel Ted Westhusing

Arthur Silber has a very good post on Col. Westhusing's death. So many important questions, so few answers.

Christmas Trees

They are endangered by the horrible politically correct people. The PC brigade has exactly zero power these days, except in the case of Christmas which they are slowly erasing from our calendars. Or this is the wingnut take on the matters, anyway:

Boston set off a furor this week when it officially renamed a giant tree erected in a city park a "holiday tree" instead of a "Christmas tree."

The move drew an angry response from Christian conservatives, including evangelist Jerry Falwell who heckled Boston officials and pressed the city to change the name back.

"There's been a concerted effort to steal Christmas," Falwell told Fox Television.

The Nova Scotia logger who cut down the 48-foot (14-meter) tree was indignant and said he would not have donated the tree if he had known of the name change.

"I'd have cut it down and put it through the chipper," Donnie Hatt told a Canadian newspaper. "If they decide it should be a holiday tree, I'll tell them to send it back. If it was a holiday tree, you might as well put it up at Easter."

Falwell and the conservative Liberty Counsel led a campaign that threatened to sue anyone who spreads what they see as misinformation about Christmas celebrations in public spaces.

The controversy reflects the legal vulnerability of city and state governments over taxpayer-funded displays of religious icons and concern over crossing the line in the separation between church and state.

What does the Christmas tree symbolize in Christianity? Was Jesus found on one of its branches, for example? The answer is no, of course. The Christmas tree has a pagan origin:

Long before the advent of Christianity, plants and trees that remained green all year had a special meaning for people in the winter. Just as people today decorate their homes during the festive season with pine, spruce, and fir trees, ancient peoples hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows. In many countries it was believed that evergreens would keep away witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and illness.

In the Northern hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year falls on December 21 or December 22 and is called the winter solstice. Many ancient people believed that the sun was a god and that winter came every year because the sun god had become sick and weak. They celebrated the solstice because it meant that at last the sun god would begin to get well. Evergreen boughs reminded them of all the green plants that would grow again when the sun god was strong and summer would return.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped a god called Ra, who had the head of a hawk and wore the sun as a blazing disk in his crown. At the solstice, when Ra began to recover from the illness, the Egyptians filled their homes with green palm rushes which symbolized for them the triumph of life over death.

Early Romans marked the solstice with a feast called the Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Romans knew that the solstice meant that soon farms and orchards would be green and fruitful. To mark the occasion, they decorated their homes and temples with evergreen boughs.

In Northern Europe the mysterious Druids, the priests of the ancient Celts, also decorated their temples with evergreen boughs as a symbol of everlasting life. The fierce Vikings in Scandinavia thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god, Balder.

If Christmas is so endangered could someone ask Mr. Falwell why I hear nothing but Christmas songs in the stores?

An Honest Question

Why do the anti-feminist writers all write so muddily? The most recent example is Gelernter's column in the LA Times, which nowadays has an opinion page where wingnuts roll in mud to their hearts' content. Here is Gelernter on the reasons why college has gone all bad, with students only interested in greed and career preparation:

Why the big change between now and then? Many reasons. But there's one particular reason that students seem reluctant (some even scared) to talk or think about. In those long-ago days, more college women used to plan on staying home to rear children. Those women had other goals than careers in mind, by definition. They saw learning as worth having for its own sake; otherwise why bother with a college education, if you weren't planning on a big-deal career? (There were social reasons, of course — such as finding a husband. But social reasons don't explain why so many of those students who planned on being mothers rather than CEOs took hard courses, did well and wound up at the top of their classes.)

In the days when many college-trained women stayed home to rear children, the nation as a whole devoted a significant fraction of all its college-trained worker-hours to childrearing. This necessarily affected society's attitude toward money and careers. A society that applauds a highly educated woman's decision to rear children instead of making money obviously believes that, under some circumstances, childrearing is more important than moneymaking. No one thought women were incapable of earning money if they wanted or needed to: Childrearing versus moneymaking was a genuine choice.

In those days, liberals looked down on corporations and careerism. In fact, society at large did. "The Organization Man," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" were all about the silliness (or, to be less polite, the stupidity) of U.S. corporate culture. Deans pleaded with their students to treasure learning for its own sake.

But all that changed with feminism's decision to champion the powerful and successful working woman. Nowadays, feminists and many liberals are delighted when women make careers in large corporations, which are still the road to riches and power in this country.

Now I can add another notch to my feminist rifle butt: that of having ruined the college experience for all thinking men. I am especially sad for having produced Gelernter: a man who doesn't know his history and who can't write a coherent sentence. Also a man who tells us about the 1960's college experience while not graduating until the mid-1970's...

Gelernter's story about the past is a myth. It is a myth that the women in the 1960's would have had equal access to jobs and careers as men. Read the newspaper job announcements from that era: they were separated by sex and the girl jobs were low-paying pink collar jobs. It is also a myth that the society valued childrearing then any more than it does now. It was just assumed that women would take care of it, and I suspect that most women knew this: that they didn't have real access to the best jobs and that they'd be expected to take care of the children. Finally, it is a very odd myth that feminists just suddenly made a decision to "champion" the powerful and successful working woman.

Do you notice how nothing has a cause in Gelernter's view of history? People just decide things without any real cause and stuff happens. There is nothing here about women's rising employment rates from the 1940's onwards, nothing about legal obstacles that kept women from fully participating in higher education until the 1960's, nothing about the artificial economic circumstances of the 1950's which made single-earner families more feasible than they usually are, nothing about how the majority of women have always worked on either farms or in shops. Nothing about the reasons for the second wave of feminism. Nope, all these things were just choices, and the feminist choice was a really bad one, Gelernter believes, because it would have been so much more fun if the men in college could just enjoy learning for its own sake while the women prepared themselves...for what?

And here comes the really muddy part of the column: the tying together of the antifeminist arguments with why colleges are now all about greed and career preparation:

No doubt contempt for the corporation was overdone back then, just as corporation worship is today. In any event, college deans tell their students nowadays (especially women, but men can't help overhearing): Go out there and make money! Get power! Build those careers!

Maybe earplugs for men would take care of this problem, then.

Vatican: No Gay Priests

Or more precisely:

The Vatican says sexually active homosexuals and those who support "gay culture" are unwelcome in the priesthood unless the candidate has overcome homosexual tendencies for at least three years, according to a church document posted on the Internet by an Italian Catholic news agency.

The long-awaited document is scheduled to be released by the Vatican next Tuesday. A church official who has read the document confirmed the authenticity of the Internet posting by the Adista news agency.

The document said that "the Church, while deeply respecting the people in question, cannot admit to the seminary and the sacred orders those who practice homosexuality, present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or support so-called gay culture."

"Those people find themselves, in fact, in a situation that presents a grave obstacle to a correct relationship with men and women. One cannot ignore the negative consequences that can stem from the ordination of people with deeply rooted homosexual tendencies," it said.

This is not new; the Vatican has been opposed to gays in the priesthood for a long time, but it is possible that the more conservative bishops will now be given more power to weed out gays.

I wonder how many candidates for the priesthood this will leave? Women can't be priests, married heterosexual men can't be priests, and gay men can't be priests. That leaves just heterosexual men who are celibate. Is this the "correct relationship with men and women" that the quote refers to?

If the Catholic priest is a bridge between God and humanity then we are told that the only ones who are adequately pure and holy for this task are men who would like to go to bed with women but will not. Indeed, I suspect that all the bans have to do with female sexuality and the idea of its filthiness. That rules women out. It also rules out men who enter the dirty bodies of women. And it rules out men who take the female role in bed. So.

New York Times Lessons For Uppity Women

It is funny. The New York Times seems to have a new series, perhaps secretly entitled "Lessons For Uppity Women", and slated to run an article once a month. The September one was "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood," by Louise Story, the October one was "What's a Modern Girl to Do?" by Maureen Dowd, and the November one (on Thanksgiving day!) is "Forget the Career. My Parents Need Me at Home." by Jane Gross. Hmmm.

These all share certain odd things: they are all about women with careers, not jobs; they are all about how careers are not really what these women want unless they wish to be unhappy, they all use crummy or nonexistent data and they all look at the women in almost total isolation from men and the society in general. They also all regard everything these women do as "choices", meaning something very similar to picking chocolate ice-cream over vanilla, not choosing to be hanged rather than beheaded when found guilty for some crime that requires the death punishment. In other words, "choice" is viewed in isolation of all the factors that limit it. And this feminine choice is carried out as if women didn't have husbands or brothers. In the last article, the one about quitting careers (not jobs, mind you, but careers) to take care of ailing parents, the author notes the need for not only Mummy Tracks (for women who have children to mind) but Daughter Tracks (for women who have parents to mind). There seem to be no Daddy Tracks or Son Tracks in this world of voluntary choice, and nothing much is said about the way the labor markets are structured or about the societal assumption that it is the daughters who should take care of their parents.

I'm thinking how this all would look to a young teenaged girl who is smart and ambitious and wants to find the cure for cancer or something similar. What would she learn from reading the New York Times? First she would find out that she would probably be regarded as a bad mother if she didn't quit working while her children are young (September). This might make her decide to stay childless. Then she would find out that being successful would make her frightening to men and that she might never marry (October). If she was really ambitious she might then decide to stay single to be able to carry on with her professional plans. But this month, November, she is told that as a potential childless spinster she will probably be expected to take care of her parents one day. There is really no escape from the female gender roles, is there?

I actually believe that everybody should be allowed and expected to spend time with their children and their parents, and that the labor markets shouldn't punish those who do so as harshly as happens today. But the reality is that while the public sector roles of women and men have changed a lot in the last thirty years the private sector roles have not changed very much at all. It is still very much women who are held responsible for all the informal (and unpaid) caring that is needed.

But why does the New York Times only address this in the context of women with careers, of women who are highly educated, of women who are very close to positions of power in the society? What is the hidden message here? I think that it is one against us uppity women, and I am not alone in suspecting this.

The Moomin

One of my favorite hiding places as a child were Tove Jansson's moomin books. Jansson was a woman who knew how to live outside the society: she was the daughter of two bohemian artists, she was a Finn who spoke and wrote in Swedish and she was a Lesbian. Her books are very much about difference and how to live with it, about accepting people as they are, not as we would like them to be, and about compromise. But she never preaches.

The moomin books, like most really good children's books, are as much fun to read in adulthood. The moomin family: Moominmamma, Moominpappa and Moomintroll, their son, live in the Moominvalley in a house shaped like a round tower. The valley is a place of wonder and safety, but it is surrounded by the Lonely Mountains on one side and the frightening yet appealing ocean on the other. The moomins are trolls and their friends and neighbors take various animal forms but the characters and feelings of all of them are human. Even the Groke, the frightening monster who kills everything she touches and who leaves the earth frozen wherever she has sat, is sad and lonely at the same time. The Hemulens (like cows walking upright) are really good at organizing and hale and hearty. They like multiplication tables and cold showers. The Mymbles, especially the smallest of them, the little My, are honest to the point of rudeness, adventurous and selfish but with ultimately good hearts. The Snufkin is a wonderer who must fight his desire to be alone with his desire not to hurt his friend, the Moomintroll, by leaving him. And the Moomins themselves love home and raspberry juice and pancakes but they also love adventure and pine for something beyond the horizon. Here is a picture of the Moomintroll:




Horrible things happen in the moomin books: a comet threatens the Moominvalley, Moominpappa gets a midlife crisis and decides to take the whole family to live on a far-away island in a lighthouse where Moominmamma finally gets her midlife crisis and the family comes back. But the horror is in the background, never wins, and is ultimately seen as not just horrible but something more like the moomins, like ourselves: neither all good or all bad but something muddled and capable of improvement, especially when loved.

The later books in the moomin series are more complex than the earlier ones, but even the first one can be read as a parable of the human society, including its gender relations. Here is a snippet from Finn Family Moomintroll: The family is going to have a picnic on the beach (where they will have to cope with the Hobgoblins scary hat) and is preparing to leave:

Moominmamma hurried off to pack. She collected blankets, sauce-pans, birch-bark, a coffee-pot, masses of food, suntan-oil, matches, and everything you can eat out of, on or with. She packed it all with an umbrella, warm clothes, tummy-ache medicine, an egg-whisk, cushions, a mosquito-net, bathing-drawers and a table cloth in her bag. She bustled to and fro racking her brains for anything she had forgotten, and at last she said: "Now, it's ready! Oh, how lovely it will be to have a rest by the sea!"

Moominpappa packed his pipe and fishing-rod.

"Well, are you all ready?" he asked, "and are you sure you haven't forgotten anything? All right, let's start!"

My personal favorites among Jansson's books are her short story collections. One story (as I remember it) is about an old Hemulen who has spent his whole life guarding the gate to an amusement park, clipping the tickets of the children coming in, and hating the loud noises and laughter, hating the clipping, hating even the children. So he closes the park down. But the children are unhappy with this and keep quietly pestering him, pleading with him, to open it again. He doesn't want to do it, but now he also feels guilty. Jansson's solution is typical of her thinking: ultimately the Hemulen opens up the amusement park but only at night and nobody is allowed to make a noise (except for some giggling here and there). The children agree to maintain the equipment, and there is no clipping of tickets.

No Girls Allowed

In the treehouse of the boys, you know. It seems that Samuel Alito felt a little this way when he was in college. According to the Nation magazine:

Campus newspapers aren't generally known for making waves inside the Beltway. Recently, however, the Daily Princetonian published a story that merits attention from senators gearing up for the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, George W. Bush's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. As Chanakya Sethi reported in a November 18 article for the paper, in 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of "a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds." Lamented Cullom Davis: "I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed." Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that "the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse" in recent years--Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969--and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a "sex-blind" policy "removing limits on the number of women." In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, "Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy."

It is quite possible that Alito belonged to CAP because of its other conservative goals, that he wasn't very deeply involved in its activities and that he didn't support the views expressed in the articles quoted above. But such views clearly didn't make him resign his membership or even feel ashamed of it.

Digging up things from thirty years ago seems a little silly but may be necessary if we ever want to know the exact colors of Alito's wingnut stripes. At a minimum, I'd like to hear Alito's responses to questions about his CAP membership.

Just A Note

To tell you, my sweet and erudite and powerful readers (must hedge bets), that my approach to blogging during the rest of this week will be a little more fluid than usual. If something interesting happens I will blog on that, of course, but I'm also planning to write about books, my third most favorite things, and on various themes related to the awfulness of candied sweet potatoes, turkey legs and, worst of all, the monstrosity of a pumpkin pie. Now shoot me.

A Ripple Effect

Creationism is spreading in this country. From the classrooms of Dover, Pennsylvania to the whole school system of Kansas, and now it has evolved (!) into something that affects the arts industry:

An exhibition celebrating the life of Charles Darwin, which is slated for the National Museum of Australia later this decade, has failed to find a corporate sponsor in the United States because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution.

The entire $US3 million ($1.7 million) cost of Darwin, which opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York at the weekend, is instead being borne by wealthy individuals and private donations.

The failure of American companies to back the exhibition reflects the growing influence of fundamentalist Christians, who are among President George Bush's most vocal supporters, in all walks of life in the US.

While the Darwin exhibition, which features a live Galapagos tortoise, has been unable to find a business backer, the Creationist Museum near Cincinnati, Ohio, which takes literally the Bible's account of creation, has recently raised $7 million in donations.

Isn't that hilarious? I wonder what good old Charles would have thought about it.

I never realized that business people are such cowards. Aren't they supposed to be the brave creative force of our capitalist economy?

Angela Merkel and Kathleen Uhl

These two have nothing to do with each other except that they both got promoted today and I don't want to put up two posts about promotions.

Angela Merkel was elected to become the chancellor of Germany:

In a ceremony mixing solemnity with a bit of humor, Germany's parliament today elected the conservative party leader Angela Merkel to the post of chancellor, making her the first woman to head a German government and the first chancellor to grow up under the Communist regime of the former East Germany.

The German election results were unusual in that neither candidate for the chancellor got a clear majority. The government will now be based on a grand coalition; the American equivalent would be an administration of both Democrats and Republicans. I predict that Merkel will not have a fun time trying to govern Germany under these circumstances.

Kathleen Uhl is the new director of the Office of Women's Health in the Food and Drug Administration:

Kathleen brings a breadth of professional experience, as well as a strong science background and passion for women's health, to her new position," acting FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach said in a statement.

A family physician and clinical pharmacologist by training, Uhl joined the FDA in 1988 and has held a variety of jobs reviewing the safety of drugs, devices and other products. Most recently, she has been leading an office that is trying to improve warning labels for women who are pregnant or lactating.

At least she is not a veterinarian like one of the earlier appointments to this post.

Another Leaked Memo?

Is this authentic? I can't make up my mind about that but the story is reported by quite a few of the U.K. papers:

There were calls for Downing Street to publish the transcript of a conversation between Tony Blair and US President George Bush, amid claims that the Prime Minister persuaded Mr Bush not to launch a military strike on a TV station in a friendly Arab state.

According to unnamed sources quoted in the Daily Mirror, the memo - stamped Top Secret - records Mr Bush suggesting that he might order the bombing of Al-Jazeera's studios in Qatar.

And it allegedly details how Mr Blair argued against an attack on the station's buildings in the business district of Doha, the capital city of Qatar, which is a key ally of the West in the Persian Gulf.

Al-Jazeera had sparked the anger of the US administration by broadcasting video messages from al Qaida head Osama bin Laden and leaders of the insurgency in Iraq, as well as showing footage of the bodies of US servicemen and Iraqi civilians killed in fighting.

If there is any truth to this I will not sleep for the next three years.

Asking For It

Wouldn't it be interesting to conduct a survey about mugging victims' culpability in their muggings? If I was creating one of these surveys I'd ask whether driving an expensive car makes the victim partly responsible for the crime of carjacking or if checking the time with ones Rolex in plain view contributes to the arm being cut off when the watch is stolen. Such things are incitements to mug, aren't they? And then there is the usual question about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Victims really should be more responsible.

Amnesty International just published a similar survey about the British public's views on rape, and found that one third of the public (or that proportion of those surveyed, anyway) believes that acting in a flirtatious manner makes the woman totally or partially responsible for her own rape. This really worries me because I'm not quite sure what counts as flirtatious. Does smiling count? Or looking the rapist in the eyes?

The survey also found that

...more than a quarter (26%) of those asked said that they thought a women was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was wearing sexy or revealing clothing, and more than one in five (22%) held the same view if a woman had had many sexual partners.

Around one in 12 people (8%) believed that a woman was totally responsible for being raped if she'd had many sexual partners.

Similarly, more than a quarter of people (30%) said that a woman was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was drunk, and more than a third (37%) held the same view if the woman had failed to clearly say "no" to the man.

I'm speechless. Well, not really, but I'm sitting here wondering how Americans would answer a similar survey if they didn't already know that certain answers would be frowned upon.

My comparison to mugging surveys has a problem, of course, and that is the absence of anything like mugging which would be mutually voluntary and which could be used as a defense by the person accused of mugging, although I guess the mugger could always argue that the guy wanted to give him or her the Rolex so much that he hacked off his arm to speed up the process. But on the whole the defense in rape cases is that the sexual contact was a voluntary one, and this survey shows that a worrisome number of Brits seem to think that a woman has entered such an agreement by perhaps smiling or by drinking too much or by having entered many similar agreements in the past. Or by dressing seductively. To be absolutely sure of her safety a woman should probably wrap herself in a blanket, drink nothing but water and say NO in a gruff tone whenever a man walks by. Which is my way of pointing out that the scope for some dangerous communication problems here is enormous.

Though I also think that the respondents who chose to find fault with a rape victim for being flirtatious or drunk or promiscuous did so because they want to think that rape can be avoided by avoiding whatever "slutty" behaviors they mention.

Then there is the really frightening possibility that the respondents attributing responsibility to the rape victim based on her clothes or drinking or past sexual history actually think that certain types of women deserve to be raped. But this one is too horrible to contemplate.

Framing Questions

Think Progress caught Dick Cheney framing a question in an interesting way:

Vice President Cheney made a striking claim a few minutes ago at the American Enterprise Institute:

Those who advocate a sudden withdraw from Iraq should answer a couple simple questions. Would the United States and other free nations be better off or worse off with Zarqawi, Bin Laden and Zawahiri in control Iraq? Would we be safer or less safe with Iraq ruled by men intent upon the destruction of our country.

This reminds me of the standard wingnut response to any criticism of the Iraq occupation, the one where you are asked if you would prefer having Saddam in power instead.

The crucial missing part in this approach to framing questions is: Compared to what, exactly? "Is the world better off without Saddam Hussein?" is not the complete question. Of course the world would be better off without Saddam if he could have been removed by just pressing the delete button on some divine computer. But the real questions should include the costs of taking Saddam out, both in lives and reputations lost and in the creation of what amounts to a civil war in Iraq.


Likewise, Cheney's new question is not a complete one, because it fails to point out that the terrorists are in Iraq to a large part because of the American occupation. They are not going to go away if the American troops stay. Not that I am necessarily advocating immediate withdrawal (a few days at least would be required for packing up...).

Politics and Commercial Thinking

The "Feminists To The Rescue" post that follows this one has an interesting comments thread. One comment notes that its writer is neither a feminist nor an anti-feminist. I found this very confusing because I cant see how this is possible if we apply the political definition of feminism here: equality of opportunity and equal esteem of the traditionally male and female spheres of activity. One either believes in the desirability of this kind of equality or one does not. So how does one hover at the edge of doing neither? Or is this one of those angels-and-the-head-of-a-pin questions?

I believe that this statement reflects the successful inculcation of a commercial way of thinking in most citizens of this country. We look at practically every idea or principle as if it was a new car or a new DVD or a new brand of wine, and we try to decide if the price is reasonable and the product attractive enough. If the price is too high or the product of shoddy quality we refuse the purchase. But this way of thinking doesn't work in politics.

Some years ago a friend and I were complaining about some political outcomes in the state. She said that she had not voted, so none of the deplorable events were her fault. I found this way of thinking shocking; she seemed to view political participation like it was, say, a shopping trip to buy a dress: if you don't find one you like you go home empty-handed.

The difference between politicians and dresses is pretty obvious: you get the politician whether you vote or not, and the very act of my friend not voting may have gotten the worst candidate in. Well, probably not, but the point is an important one: Political regimes are public goods or bads: you will be affected by them whether you vote or not. They are not like private goods and services which you can return to the store if they prove less than optimal.

Since I first encountered the commercial approach to political thinking I have spotted it many times. Sometimes I think that there are people in this country who would rather stay on a deserted island after a shipwreck and starve than to get on any ship that is less than a luxury liner, for this is how they seem to judge the political organizations which are trying to help their causes. It seems that these organizations shouldn't do just politics but they should also be entertaining and amusing and charge very little. Commercial thinking.

Feminists To The Rescue

A few days ago Ann Althouse, a fairly conservative blogger, had some trouble with the boys of Little Green Footballs, a wingnut site. They called her names and such, and Ann wasn't very happy about it:

Remember back last February when Kevin Drum wrote about why there are so few women in political blogging? He guessed that "men are more comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing — both writing it and reading it." I had occasion to think about that yesterday. One thing Kevin failed to note is that male attacks on women are not so much of a food fight as a sex fight. Blogosphere-strength fighting with a woman takes on an outrageous sexual tone, aggressively declaring that that this is a boy's game. Are there any feminists around to see when it's happening and say a little something?

It's like calling in the plumber, isn't it? Or like something you might hear in a supermarket: "A feminist is needed in Aisle Eight to fix some spilled self-esteem."

Maureen Dowd's recent writings about feminism are really very similar: feminists are this weird group of deranged women and no self-respecting fashionista would want to be one of them. But they should have fixed everything for women anyway, and if they tried to fix something and the society refused to pay attention, well, then it was clearly the fault of feminism!

Why does all of this make me think of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition?

It's pretty fucking awful to be a feminist, actually. You get called names by Rush Limbaugh and friends, you get to be ridiculed in the mainstream media and if the wingnut sources are anything to come by you are responsible for white women disappearing in Aruba, for the falling birthrate, for every divorce that has taken place and the demise of the Western civilization. You are even responsible for increased alcohol use among young women and male depression. In fact, you are pretty goddamnawful.

At the same time, you are responsible for anything that still affects women negatively. Because you haven't fixed it yet. Women like Althouse and Dowd will not risk anything for feminism, it seems, even if they have been clear beneficiaries of it. But they still think that a feminist might be called to Aisle Eight whenever needed.

Today's Action Alert

This is an opportunity to protest Samuel J. Alito's nomination. Go here to contact your elected representatives.

Cutting Spending, Cutting Taxes

The Republican controlled House has passed a spending bill:

House Republican leaders scored a narrow, hard-fought victory by passing a sweeping bill to reduce federal spending over the next five years early Friday morning without the support of one Democrat.

Remember that not a single Democrat was needed to support the bill. This is what a one-party government implies. Some of the spending cuts come from changes in food stamp rules, reimbursement of Medicaid expenses and student loan programs; all programs which affect the less wealthy among us.

Meanwhile, the Republican controlled Senate extended expiring tax cuts. The energy industry seems to be doing especially well out of this bill:

Senate Republicans beat back Democratic attempts to use the bill to pinch oil and energy companies that have been reporting record profits while consumers pay high gasoline prices, efforts that reflected sensitivity on Capitol Hill to high gasoline prices and fears of skyrocketing home heating costs this winter.

The largest oil companies, nevertheless, would be hit with about $4.3 billion in taxes through a change in accounting methods. That provision drew a veto threat from the White House and upset some Western Republicans, who deemed it an unfair and political attack on the energy industry.

"Is it a windfall tax by another name?" said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho.

The Senate defeated a Democratic effort to impose a temporary windfall profits tax, 50 percent on the sale of oil over $40 a barrel, on profits not reinvested in increasing domestic oil and gas supplies. The money would have been returned to energy consumers through an income tax rebate. A 64-35 procedural vote defeated the effort.

'Who has all the pain?'
"The major integrated oil companies have all of the gain. Who has all the pain?" asked Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who then answered his own question: "All the American people who are trying to pay for the price of a tankful of gas or trying to figure out how they are going to heat their home in the winter."

The Senate also defeated an amendment to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use the money to fund a low-income heating assistance program.

The hurricane Katrina is weirdly involved in all this. Paying for the post-Katrina reconstruction presumably necessitates the cuts in the programs for the poor. At the same time, Katrina caused at least some of the price increases of oil and gasoline.

Johnny-Come-Lately

John Kerry now says that his vote authorizing Bush to use military force was a mistake. Had he known then what he knows now and so on... He also expressed interest in the job of the president of the United States:

Senator John Kerry says losing last year's election hasn't soured him on wanting to be president.
Asked if he wanted to run again in 2008, Kerry says it's too early to say. But he added: (quote) "Would I like to be president? Yes, obviously."

I'm not sure if it is a very good idea for the Democratic party, but I am willing to listen to other opinions.

Feminist Nitpicking

I'm in the mood today. Last night Atrios posted a piece on Amy Alexander's opinions about bloggers and blogging. Alexander doesn't think much of us because we don't have editors to keep us on the straight-and-narrow and because we write for free, or if we don't we are totally under the sway of our advertisers (hear that SSquirrel?). And because we tell the readers trivial stuff like the fact that right now I have a horrible hacking cough attack.

Today Steve Gilliard wrote about this post, too, quite a nice answer. He titled his post

Stupid, smug woman comments on blogs

I instantly did the reversal thing and asked myself if such a post would ever be titled

Stupid, smug man comments on blogs

The answer might be yes, if the focus in on the "man" part. If the point of the post is that it is a man who was stupid and smug. Something I might do here?

On the other hand, you could just argue that the title is simply factual. Amy Alexander is a woman. Yes. But if the commenter had been Andy Alexander I doubt that the title would have referred to a man. Maybe to "stupid, smug Andy", but not to a "stupid, smug man". So why wasn't the title

Stupid, smug Amy comments on blogs?

All this is nitpicking. But nitpicking is fun, because there is so much in that invisible layer of our culture to work on.

From My Mailbag

This is an e-mail I received today. I thought I'd share it with you, just in case some of you might think that feminism is no longer needed:

> If you're female and...
>
> ...you can vote, thank a feminist.

And be sure to also thank her for the nanny-state laws that
increasingly enfold us every day, which are always voted for by women.

> ...you get paid as much as men doing the same job, thank a feminist.

Particularly when, as a woman, you spend half your day talking to your
friends, and regularly oblige the company to pay you for several
months-long periods when you don't work at all ("maternity leave"),
and force your male coworkers to put up with monthly periods of
insanity ("PMS"), and furthermore they're not allowed to officially
consider that as a negative when comparing your performance with that
of a man.

> ...you went to college instead of being expected to quit after
high school so your brothers could go because "You'll just get married
anyway", thank a feminist.

And did you get your MRS degree while there? Once you did get
married, did you keep working and put that higher education to good
use? If you did, where are you finding the time to give your kids the
proper attention?

> ...you can apply for any job, not just "women's work", thank a
feminist.

No objections here. Equality of opportunity is not a problem.
Equality of results is.

> ...you can get or give birth control information without going to
jail, thank a feminist.

No objections on a personal level, but it is worth pointing out that
the demographic declne of the west must at least partly be due to
this. Birth control assists the suicide of a culture.

> ...your doctor, lawyer, pastor judge or legislator is a woman,
thank a feminist.

And what exactly makes a woman better at any of these things than a
man, and thus preferable to a man?

> ...you play an organized sport, thank a feminist.

Yeah, that's SO important.

> ...you can wear slacks without being excommunicated from your
church or run out of town, thank a feminist.

Men who wear dresses are odd and unmasculine. Yet it is so important
for a woman to wear men's clothing - because ... ?

> ...your boss isn't allowed to pressure you to sleep with him,
thank a feminist.

However, if you spend a lot of time wearing low-cut blouses and
leaning over his desk to talk to him, and he sleeps with you, it is
obviously all his fault and you have a right to a lot of money.

> ...you get raped and the trial isn't about your hemline or your
previous boyfriends, thank a feminist.

It is, however, about the fact that the guy wasn't paranoid enough to
have a witness along to testify to the fact that she said 'yes', not
'no', so when she changes her mind after the fact and decides she
doesn't like him enough for casual sex, he's now (both literally and
figuratively) screwed.

> ...you start a small business and can get a loan using only your
name and credit history, thank a feminist
> ...you are on trial and are allowed to testify in your own
defense, thank a feminist.
> ...you own property that is solely yours, thank a feminist.
> ...you have the right to your own salary even if you are married
or have a male relative, thank a feminist.

These seem odd to me. I am not convinced based on my knowledge of
history that they did not exist before the feminist movement. If
there is proof of such, I would be interested in seeing it. In any
case I do agree that these are worthy items.

> ...you get custody of your children following divorce or
separation, thank a feminist.

And the house. And the car. And most of the guy's current bank
account. And half his future income. Oh yeah, let's thank the
feminists. With a pump-action shotgun.

> ...you get a voice in the raising and care of your children
instead of them being completely controlled by the husband/father,
thank a feminist.

Where "a voice" means "take them off to some other part of the country
to live with you and your current fuckbuddy and never let the father
see them again". Again, sure, let's thank the feminists.

> ...your husband beats you and it is illegal and the police stop
him instead of lecturing you on better wifely behavior, thank a feminist.

Whereas when the wife assaults the husband, the police just laugh.
And when he defends himself, they arrest him for beating his wife.

> ...you are granted a degree after attending college instead of a
certificate of completion, thank a feminist.

The trick is to make sure that those who are granted degrees actually
deserve them. Instead we get grade inflation, because equality of
results has been mandated, and as whatsisname from Harvard started to
say, women are experimentally not as good at the very highest reaches
of math and science as men. Why that is and whether it is fair or not
has no bearing on the phenomenon's existence.

> ...you can breastfeed your baby discreetly in a public place and
not be arrested, thank a feminist.
> ...you marry and your civil human rights do not disappear into
your husband's rights, thank a feminist.
> ...you have the right to refuse sex with a diseased husband [or
just "husband"], thank a feminist.
> ...you have the right to keep your medical records confidential
from the men in your family, thank a feminist.
> ...you have the right to read the books you want, thank a feminist.

I don't see these as explicitly feminism. They are more along the
lines of "being reasonable".

> ...you can testify in court about crimes or wrongs your husband
has committed, thank a feminist.

And yet, "Law & Order" has told me often enough that husbands and
wives cannot testify in court against each other. I saw it on TeeVee,
so it must be true.

> ...you can choose to be a mother or not a mother in you own time
not at the dictates of a husband or rapist, thank a feminist.

On an individual basis, this is clearly good. On a cultural and
society-wide basis, it leads inevitably to women being, effectively,
selfish and not having enough children to maintain a stable
population. Feminism thus contains the seeds of its own destruction;
any society that adopts it will write itself out of human experience
and be replaced by one that rejects feminism.

> ...you can look forward to a lifespan of 80 years instead of
dying in your 20s from unlimited childbirth, thank a feminist.

More of what I just said. Choosing your own individuality is good, up
until the day you die. Then the consequences show up. Actually, in
practice they show up far earlier - around retirement age, as the
looming social security crises across the West are making clear.
Feminism, in the long term, is doomed. In the meantime it will help
annihilate the best civilization this planet has seen. Those of us
who do have lots of kids will remember, and teach our children - and
their mothers will, by definition, not be feminists. Non-feminists
inherit the earth. (Longman's "The Empty Cradle" has much more on
this - particularly on the birthrate disparity between blue and red
states.)

> ...you can see yourself as a full, adult human being instead of a
minor who needs to be controlled by a man, thank a feminist.

A full, adult woman. Not a full, adult man. There are major
differences, and although we do not know for certain what all those
differences are, trying to treat one as if it were the other is simple
fallacy. In many ways the Victorians had a better grasp of the matter.

More on Pornography

Arthur Silber on the Power of Narrative blog has written a long post which partly started from a discussion we had. It is well worth reading.

Oh Sweet Irony

Raw Story reports that:

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA officer, attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials tell RAW STORY.

So delicious if true. Imagine a National Security Adviser going around revealing who the covert agents are in the CIA!

The Sexiest Man...

People magazine has named Matthew McConaughey as the sexiest man of the year, presumably only in the U.S.. Here is a picture so that you can judge for yourself:





A fixed image doesn't tell me very much. I'd like to see him move and talk before making any kind of judgement on his sexiness. Whatever that might be. Most of my friends find very different things sexy in men (and in women), and the explanation often lies somewhere in their personal histories.

Is this an exploitative post? I'm not sure...

Dan Savage on the Privacy Amendment to the Constitution

This is pie-in-the-sky stuff in the current faith-based America, but Savage has some interesting things to say about the right to privacy:

WILL Estelle Griswold ever be able to rest in peace? Although she died in 1981, the poor woman gets kicked up and down the block whenever someone is nominated to a seat on the United States Supreme Court. But few people remember who Griswold was or what she did.

In 1961, Griswold, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, opened a birth-control clinic in New Haven. She was promptly arrested for dispensing contraceptives to a married couple and was eventually convicted and fined $100. She appealed, and when her case reached the Supreme Court in 1965, seven of nine justices voted to overturn the conviction, striking down Connecticut's law against selling birth control (effectively overturning similar laws in other states). Americans, the court ruled, had a fundamental right to privacy.

Much of American jurisprudence since then flows from Griswold - including Roe v. Wade, which found that women had a right to abortion, and Lawrence v. Texas of 2003, which found that the right to privacy prevents the government from banning sodomy, gay and straight.

Problematically, however, a right to privacy is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. The majority in Griswold held that it was among the unenumerated rights implied by the Constitution's "penumbras" (which sound like something a sodomy law might keep you away from). The Griswold case didn't settle the matter, and the right to privacy quickly became the Tinkerbell of constitutional rights: clap your hands if you believe.

Savage makes an important point here: Roe was decided on the precedent of Griswold, and if Roe goes Griswold might go, too. Then we would be back in a world where contraceptives are smuggled in plain brown wrappers past the curious and angry faces of wingnuts.

Savage's solution is to go for a constitutional privacy amendment. Sort of like the wingnuts and their constitutional ban on same-sex marriage:

If the Republicans can propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, why can't the Democrats propose a right to privacy amendment? Making this implicit right explicit would forever end the debate about whether there is a right to privacy. And the debate over the bill would force Republicans who opposed it to explain why they don't think Americans deserve a right to privacy - which would alienate not only moderates, but also those libertarian, small-government conservatives who survive only in isolated pockets on the Eastern Seaboard and the American West.

Of course, passing a right to privacy amendment wouldn't end the debate over abortion - that argument would shift to the question of whether abortion fell under the amendment. But given the precedent of Roe, abortion rights would be on firmer ground than they are now.

My personal opinion on the proper basis of abortion rights is that they should have been based on arguments about equality, not privacy. But what is done is done. It would be fun to start a move for the privacy amendment, though.

Smears, Lies and Videotapes

Think Progress has put together a videotape which gives a quick overview of the whole Plamegate. This is useful if you haven't eagerly read every single thing bloggers and the media have written on the topic.

The Carnival of Feminists

This is a collection of blogwritings in the feminist vein. Sour Duck brings out the third issue. It has several most interesting posts. And my piece on Maureen Dowd's book is there, too.

Bob Woodward and The Plame Investigation

This is very mysterious: Bob Woodward of the Washington Post has been very critical of the Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's case in the Plame investigations. Now it seems that Woodward himself was involved in the Plame debacle from the very beginning:

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

Fitzgerald interviewed Woodward about the previously undisclosed conversation after the official alerted the prosecutor to it on Nov. 3 -- one week after Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted in the investigation.

Citing a confidentiality agreement in which the source freed Woodward to testify but would not allow him to discuss their conversations publicly, Woodward and Post editors refused to disclose the official's name or provide crucial details about the testimony. Woodward did not share the information with Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. until last month, and the only Post reporter whom Woodward said he remembers telling in the summer of 2003 does not recall the conversation taking place.

Why did this unnamed official alert the prosecutor only after Libby's indictment? What is the subplot here? To cast doubt on Fitzgerald's competency? I don't see how any of this can help Libby directly as he wasn't indicted for revealing Plame's covert agent status but for lying to the court.

But in the light of all this it is most interesting that Woodward has belittled the importance of the whole investigation:

Woodward, who is preparing a third book on the Bush administration, has called Fitzgerald "a junkyard-dog prosecutor" who turns over every rock looking for evidence. The night before Fitzgerald announced Libby's indictment, Woodward said he did not see evidence of criminal intent or of a substantial crime behind the leak.

"When the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter," he told CNN's Larry King.

Woodward also said in interviews this summer and fall that the damage done by Plame's name being revealed in the media was "quite minimal."

"When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great," he told National Public Radio this summer.

Laughable? Hmmm.
---
Via Josh Marshall.

A Deep Thought from the Land of Head Colds

Achoo! Sniff!

Plan C?

The morning-after pill, or Plan B, is not going to be available over-the-counter any time soon. The reasons are weird and wondrous and have a lot more to do with faith than with science:

Top federal drug officials decided to reject an application to allow over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill months before a government scientific review of the application was completed, according to accounts given to Congressional investigators.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, concluded in a report released Monday that the Food and Drug Administration's May 2004 rejection of the morning-after pill, or emergency contraceptive, application was unusual in several respects.

Top agency officials were deeply involved in the decision, which was "very, very rare," a top F.D.A. review official told investigators. The officials' decision to ignore the recommendation of an independent advisory committee as well as the agency's own scientific review staff was unprecedented, the report found. And a top official's "novel" rationale for rejecting the application contradicted past agency practices, it concluded.

The pill, called Plan B, is a flashpoint in the debate over abortion, in part because some abortion opponents consider the pill tantamount to ending a pregnancy. In scientific reviews, the F.D.A. has concluded that it is a contraceptive.

The report suggested that it quickly became apparent that the agency was not going to follow its usual path when it came to the pill. "For example," it said, "F.D.A. review staff told us that they were told early in the review process that the decision would be made by high-level management."

More faith than science, because inexplicable things keep happening: e-mails get deleted so that they can't be examined, for example, and rules get changed in the middle of the process.

But there is a very clear explanation to all this: the religious right does not want something on the market which would allow women not to be punished for "poorly-chosen" sex, including rape, presumably, and the religious right is calling the shots. Scientists don't have enough votes to affect what is happening.

Bush's Nominees

They are an interesting bunch of people, always changing like chameleons, slippery like snakes (no offense to mine). They are neither wingnuts, except when they are, nor moonbats (what liberals are called in the right-wing circles), except that they might one day grow wings for the purpose of circling the moon. We just never know what we are getting, or so it seems to the mainstream media.

Now Samuel Alito has eaten his words about being anti-abortion. It was all such a long time ago, in 1985, and, besides, he was just applying for a job:

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said Alito told him in a 20-minute meeting that he should not be judged on the basis of the job application he wrote in 1985 to become deputy assistant to then-Attorney General Ed Meese.

"He said that was 20 years ago and that was a job application and that since then he's written many cases, or several cases that involve the issue and that he thinks to the extent that people are judging him on his views on that issue, they ought to do it on the basis of those decisions he's written since he's been on the court," said Bingaman.

So let me get this clear: It's ok to change ones mind when it is about job applications? Hmmm. And what is it that Alito is doing right now? Applying for a job?

Nah, he is a wingnut, even if wrapped up in a pretty legal paper.

You might remember that I recently blogged on another Bush nominee, Ellen Sauerbrey. She is an anti-abortionist with no experience in running offices for refugees but that is what she will do if appointed:

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes this week on the confirmation of Ellen Sauerbrey to head the state department program on population, refugees, and migration. She's another Republican hack/Bush crony in the mold of Michael Brown, and the office is essentially FEMA on an international scale. If Sauerbrey's nomination is confirmed, the consequences will be disastrous, particularly for the fight against AIDS in Africa. On the positive side, Sauerbrey is so obviously and grossly unqualified that there's real ammunition to block her confirmation...if we raise enough hell.

You can take action against the Sauerbrey appointment by clicking on this link.

The Harmfulness of Porn

An article in the Salon discusses the current administration's attempts to attack the pornography industry. Senator Sam Brownback has now run a hearing on porn:

"I think most Americans agree and know that pornography is bad. They know that it involves exploitive images of men and women, and that it is morally repugnant and offensive," Brownback said, kicking off a hearing of the Senate's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, which he chairs. "What most Americans don't know is how harmful pornography is to its users and their families."

What is most curious about this article and the hearing it describes is that the harmfulness of pornography is given a novel interpretation: it is not the children, or the women in violent pornography that are the victims here, or those women who are, say, raped, because the rapist got the idea from violent porn. Nope. The victims are families and the men who use pornography:

She went on to explain that the experience of masturbation activates about 14 neurotransmitters and hormones, causing a quick chain reaction of brain activity. "There have been some experts who have even argued that, in and of itself, overrides informed consent when encountering this material," she said, apparently suggesting that an adult's own sexual self-stimulation can lead to a loss of judgment. Pornography, she continued, had been shown to increase the risk of divorce, decrease marital intimacy and cause misunderstandings about the prevalence of less common sex practices like group sex, bestiality and sadomasochistic activity. Men are not the only victims. Women, she said, make up about 30 percent of the audience for online pornography.

The problems caused by porn can strike at the heart of a marriage. Another panelist, Pamela Paul, who recently wrote a book about the role of explicit sexual material in American culture, spoke of a fateful decision faced by some married men every day after work: They must choose between masturbating at a computer and finding sexual satisfaction with their wives. "If they go to their wives, well, just practically speaking, they have to make sure they have done all of the chores around the house they were supposed to do. They need to have a half-an-hour conversation about what they did that day," said Paul. This courtship could take up to an hour and a half. By contrast, she said, it takes "five minutes to go online."

So men are the main victims of pornography. And especially married men who now realize that they have been working far too hard for some sex! Interesting that Pamela Paul knows so much about the negotiations supposedly ongoing between spouses before sex. Isn't there a single wife out there who tears her husband's clothes off when he gets out of the car after a long day at the office? And if there is, did she watch porn before this heinous act?

The whole thing is so warped. Which is quite sad because there are some real concerns about pornography and its effects that the hearing could have addressed.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

Barring something truly odd Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf will be the new president of Liberia, the first elected female head of state on the African continent. She ran on a platform of education, jobs and no government corruption. Given Liberia's war-torn state, her tasks will be immense.

Johnson-Sirleaf was educated at Harvard University. She is a career politician and an economist. This is likely to give her some of the expertise needed to address Liberia's problems. On the other hand, she was once a supporter of Charles Taylor, and some have questioned whether her economic approach (which is close to that of the World Bank) is the best possible one in Liberia's current situation.

I am not sure if anyone can solve Liberia's problems within one presidential term, but I wish Johnson-Sirleaf the best of luck in trying this.

Scalito's Skeleton in the Cupboard

Via Atrios, we learn that Samuel Alito is indeed a wingnut. Well, this isn't new or even shocking, but the details now available should make Senator Biden and others like him to admit what they are approving if they approve Scalito. The Washington Times, a right-wing newspaper unable to make a profit but somehow always surviving in the supposedly free marketplace, is reassuring its readers that Alito is the package they paid for about twenty years ago. The demise of Roe is finally being delivered:

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion" in a 1985 document obtained by The Washington Times.
"I personally believe very strongly" in this legal position, Mr. Alito wrote on his application to become deputy assistant to Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III.
The document, which is likely to inflame liberals who oppose Judge Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, is among many that the White House will release today from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
In direct, unambiguous language, the young career lawyer who served as assistant to Solicitor General Rex E. Lee, demonstrated his conservative bona fides as he sought to become a political appointee in the Reagan administration.
"I am and always have been a conservative," he wrote in an attachment to the noncareer appointment form that he sent to the Presidential Personnel Office. "I am a lifelong registered Republican."
But his statements against abortion and affirmative action might cause him headaches from Democrats and liberals as he prepares for confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, scheduled for January.
"It has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan's administration and to help to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly," he wrote.
"I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

A proud man, our Samuel. I wonder what his opinions would be on religious quotas. For example, how many Opus Dei judges can we have on the Supreme Court of the United States?

The use of the word "quotas" in Alito's text deserves further commenting. The wingnuts tend to see any attempt at racial or ethnic balance as quota-mongering but rarely note that there were actual enforced maximum quotas on the numbers of women and minorities in lots of places in the past, including medical and law schools. Even today hiring one woman or person belonging to a minority group to some prominent position is seen as ample evidence of their acceptability, whereas I tend to smell a maximum quota of one in quite a few of those cases. But the wingnuts only worry about minimum quotas. The idea is that there should be no set floor on the numbers of minorities or women in positions of power. This naturally translates to the argument that there should be no set ceiling for the numbers of white men.

Your Pin-Up For The Day

This is Christopher Hitchens among his new friends: the happy wingnuts. He seems to have given a speech for the Family Research Council which researches ways to keep the family patriarchal and heterosexual.

The fall and rise of Hitchens is weird stuff. I have no opinion about what happened to him, but the picture shows him not quite comfortable, don't you think? Body language and all that.

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.