The Difficult Balancing Act Of Diplomacy

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Onwards, Christian Soldiers!

An interesting Salon article tells us about the conference entitled "War On Christians". The speeches were suitably warlike, and the enemy was painted large, frightening and inhuman. The enemy is us, by the way. If you didn't know this, what would you think this snippet from a speech describes?

"My friends," White said in a stentorian voice like burnished oak, "America is no longer good. Unrighteousness, evil, corruption, perversion and death are now standard operating procedure in the United States of America. If we do not put an end to it now, in this moment of divine destiny, then God will and God should judge America."

Rod Parsley is a newly-minted Ohio general of this Christian army. His speech did not discuss the blessedness of peacemakers:

"A spiritual invasion is taking place," Parsley roared to the packed banquet hall on Tuesday morning, drawing out the "a" in invasion. "The secular media never likes it when I say this, so let me say it twice. Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons!" He paused to take a preemptive jab at his critics, his voice going soft and scolding: "They say, 'his rhetoric is so inciting.'" Then he nearly screamed, "I came to incite a riot! Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! Lock and load!"

But the atmosphere of the conference was described as "sluggish". Now, why would that be the case? Could it have something to do with the fact that the Christian radical clerics have gotten most everything they want and are just feeling that odd depression that comes after a project is completed? Though we are still alive so I guess the weapons must be locked and loaded.

Were there any Christians at this conference who think differently? I wish I knew more about that.

Jill Carroll Is Free

Wonderful news!
---
Added later: Check out Think Progress on what the wingnuts say about it all. Warning: Not pleasant.

Giving Birth

Two stories on giving birth caught my snake-eye recently. One is the story about "The Monument for Pro-Life", a sculpture pretending to depict Britney Spears giving birth to her son, pretending, because the baby was actually delivered through an elective C-section, and pretending, because nobody gives birth in that position or with such a calm face.

The other story is about the pregnant Katie Holmes whose boyfriend is a Scientologist:

It appears that the rumors are true. No, not the rumors that Katie Holmes was impregnated by L. Ron Hubbard's frozen sperm, though we're still checking the Smoking Gun for that one every day. The rumors that according to the practice of Scientology -- of which her boyfriend, Dawson's Creep, is a devout follower -- Katie Holmes intends to give birth not only without drugs (as many mothers choose to do) but also in silence (to which many mothers who've given birth without drugs say, "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!"). That is, if you believe the Sun, which reports -- with photos! -- that Scientology "elders" have brought six-foot signs into the couple's Hollywood mansion bearing admonitions such as, "Be silent and make all physical movements slow and understandable."

These rumors might not be true, but then neither is the Britney Spears sculpture a realistic one.

Something bothered me about the near-simultaneous publication of two very odd views on giving birth and on the public interest the stories provoked. I'm pretty sure that the unease I feel is about the public appropriation of the process of delivery and about the passivity implied as proper for the two delivering mothers. They have become secondary by being mythologized in impossible ways.

Writing in Wingnuttia

Jane Hamsher must be a reincarnation of Dorothy Parker. I will never get on her wrong side however divine my powers might be, because Jane knows how to shoot those little darts with curare or some of its literary equivalent so precisely that the target thinks the pain was self-inflicted:

That tears it, Ramesh. Those philistines at Regnery have made you change the title of your book (edited by BEN DOMENECH) and forced you to say, like Peter did of Jesus, "I deny thee":

*Franke-Ruta mentions my forthcoming book The Party of Death, which she describes as a "book on Democrats." The book does have quite a bit to say about the Democrats, and it's tough on them. But the book is about more than that, and the title isn't meant as a pejorative term for the Democrats. I explain, mostly in the introduction, what I mean and don't mean by the phrase. I'm not saying this to complain about Franke-Ruta. It was nice of her to mention the book, and her assumption was an easy one to make, partly because the Amazon page on the book is a bit misleading. (I've tried to get Amazon to change it a few times.)*

Do they not understand that YOU ARE AN ARTIST, RAMESH? How could they force you to utter such pure gibberish? The cynical Digby has expressed the belief that you changed the title from "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life" to "The Party of Death: The Assault on The Sanctity of Life" because you "had second thoughts about spending every day for months defending that slanderous, scurrilous title." But I'm not buying it.

I smell the hand of Pat Sajak.

Even as we speak I am busy combating that big headed, pick-a-letter-motherfucker Sajak and his scurrilous attempts to appease the liberal media by making you change your title. Fear not, Ramesh! I see that after The American Prospect linked to Regnery this morning and your photo with the original title they have now pulled it. But you should always rest easy and know that I am in your corner, my brother, because I made sure to make screen grabs of EVERYTHING last night (including the Amazon cover) so that when we show up to support you at your book signings we can have flyers that will give testimony to your pure, original undying genius.

My vigilance against defamatory shit like this knows no bounds, Ramesh, no bounds:

Ramesh, just for the record: when I publish my upcoming book, The Party of Right-Wing War-Mongering Evangelical Bush-Worshipping Cocksuckers, please be aware that it is not about the Republican party.

My book does have quite a lot to say about Republicans, and I'm kind of tough on them, but the title does NOT refer to them.

Jane is one of Artemis's own. I raise my helmet to her.

Wingnuttia writing has been a hot blogging topic for some time now, what with Ben Domenech (the lying-and-stealing-one) getting a juicy job at the Washington Post for no good reason or at least for not his writing skills. He is also the editor of the book Jane defends in the above quote, the one about us being the party of death. Books like this are the bread-and-butter of wingnuttia. Just think of the names of Ann Coulter's tomes and of the latest O'Beirne which was something about the feminazis who ate Cincinnati and the rest of the universe.

These titles are an odd mixture of the long Victorian way of making up names for books (The Quaint Adventures of the Intrepid Sojourner; Being Also an Epistle of the Manners and Cannibalism of The Heathens) and of very crude name-calling. Why this combination would appeal to wingnut readers is hard to answer. I would have thought that the ones who want Victorian titles wouldn't want the smearwords and the other way round, but perhaps it's necessary to be extremely explicit and long-winded to get the Wingnuttia readers to open their pocket-books or wallets.

There are fewer good writers in Wingnuttia than on our side. I'm willing to defend this point ad infinitum, by the way. George Will, Ann Coulter and Charles Krauthammer can write (the last-mentioned only a little) but that's pretty much the totality of the wingnut talent. We, on the other hand, are drowning in a sea of unrewarded talent. Which may explain why Ben Domenech was offered a job with Major Political Influence and why it smells off. But think of the poor wingnut enforcers in the traditional media: they must hire more and more wingnuts and that means scraping the bottom of the barrel. I really feel sorry for them, having to do all this and then having to argue that it's not that their arms are being twisted to bring "balance", but only a reflection of earnest journalism and the search for impartial coverage of Truth.

The Wingnuttia blogs don't suffer from such ethical jitters. They don't want the media to be impartial; they want to take over the media. Like the cockroach that ate Cincinnati.

Microeconomics 101 by Our Dear Leader

Via Holden Caulfield of the blog First Draft, I learned of this fascinating summary of the free markets by George Bush:

The other big opportunity for democracy, of course, is China. President Hu Jintao is coming to our country, as you know. I will continue to remind him ours is a complex relationship and that we would hope that he would not fear a free society, just like it doesn't appear that he's fearing a free market. I happen to believe free markets eventually yield free societies. One of the most -- one of the most pure forms of democracy is the marketplace, where demand causes something to happen. Excess demand causes prices to -- the supply causes prices to go up, and vice versa. That stands in contrast to governments that felt like they could set price and control demand.

Where to begin? I'd need to do those dreaded supply-and-demand graphs to explain the mistakes thoroughly, but it is well known that nothing empties a blog as fast as seeing those scissor blades of the markets appear. Perhaps it's sufficient to point out that there is nothing inherently democratic about the marketplace of, say, crude oil, and that demand is not the only thing in the markets that causes something to happen. The sentence about excess demand started promisingly, but then at the double dashes something happened and supply astonishingly got mixed up with it. Whether this mess stands in contrast to governments who feel like they can set prices and control demand is an interesting and deep question. But the fact of the matter (as a troll always states it) is that prices are set in many markets by the supply side, albeit within the constraints of the demand conditions. Not that different from what governments do when they control prices.

What did they teach in that Harvard MBA degree George has got?

A Very Funny Con Letter

It made me giggle and that is an achievement this week, so I thought I'd share it with you, though I deleted the address and e-mail information, because this loot is MINE!


OFFICE OF REVD.FR FREDRICK NELSON
DIRECTOR SPECIAL DUTIES,UNITED NATIONS ORGANISATION
IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND
WORLD BANK FACT-FINDING & SPECIAL DUTIES OFFICE
DAKAR,SENEGAL.


Dear Friend.

I am Rev. Fr. Fredrick Nelson, a senior staff with the World Bank fact finding &special duties office. I am writing you this letter based on the fact that cool penny is better than millions of dollars means it's better for one to live and die poor honest man than a rich dishonest one.

I and the Chief security officer (CSO) of this organisation and have arranged
with an officer in the computer section in person of Engineer Peter Cliff to bring out part of your total pending payment with reference number (LM-05-371) amounting to US$10 million. Why we did this is because according to information gathered from the bank’s/security computer, you have been waiting for a long time to receive this payment without success. As I found out that you have almost met all the statutory requirements in respect of your pending payment.

The problem we feel you are having is that of interest groups. A lot of people are interested in your payment and those people are merely doing paper works with you and that explains why you receive different knds of untrue fax and phone messages from different people everyday. Also we found out that some of the officials
of the parastatals have been extorting a lot of money from you with the pretext
of helping you receive your money. I can assure you this will keep happening if you do not do away with those officers. For security reasons you do not have to tell anybody that your have your payment on the way until the payment gets to you.

The said payment is been arranged in a security-proof box weighing 75kg. In
order to get this box shipped to you I and the (CSO) Yesterday went to this four courier companies Dl, Ems, FedEx and Ups to make arrangements on how to get the box shipped to you by courier, but to no avail the above courier companies all made us to understand that they will have to open the box for inspection by the customs before shipment.

This is something we want to avoid because this box is been padded with synthetic nylon and to open it you will have to cut the pad before you will meet
th button that you will press to open the dial code-lock. There is no way you
can open the box and be able to close it again because it was padded with machine. We told the courier services that the box contained film materials and when open will spoil the materials. we did not delare money because courier does not carry money.

Today a friend of mine who is diplomat disclosed to me that there is a security
courier service company that is specialised in sending diplomatic materials and information from one country to another, which also has diplomatic immunity and consignment such as this cannot be checked by any customs anywhere in the world. I have therefore met the official of the security courier service and concluded shipping arrangement with them, which they will commence as soon as I have your go
ahead order.

The diplomat who will be bring in this consignment to you is an expact and has been
in this line of work for many years now so we have Notting to worry about. After
all arrangements w have concluded that you must donate Five Hundred Thousand United States dollars (US$500,000.00) to any charity organisation I designate as soon as you receive your money. To this effect, you will send to us a promissory note for the donation along with your address where you will like the box to be delivered to by courier. Please maintain topmost secrecy as it may cause a lot of problems if found out that we are using this way to help you. You are advised not inform anyone about this until you received your money. Am helping you on this because something
in me is tells me that you are an honest person. When you conclude this and you
send our promise, we will help to ship the final part of your money to you.

May God be with you as i wait for your response either through Email:
Feel free to call me if you will like us to discuses
more on this TEL:

Yours Faithfully
Revd. Fr. Fredrick Nelson
Director, Special Duties. UNO/WBF

Irony Is Still Dead

Could someone try to resuscitate her, please? Otherwise we will keep on reading stuff like this from Tom deLay:

Earlier, the former House majority leader told activists he agreed with their premise that there is a "war on Christianity.

"Our faith has always been in direct conflict with the values of the world," DeLay said. "We are, after all, a society that provides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage, and all but treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition."

DeLay was forced to abandon his job as majority leader while facing indictment on charges that he improperly funneled corporate donations to Republican candidates for the House and amid questions about his ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Must admit that deLay has chutzpah.

The bit about Christianity being treated like "some second-rate superstition" is probably what he means by a "war" on Christianity. Why do wingnuts see wars waged against ideas? The war on terror and now a "war" on Christianity. And how, exactly, is this religious war waged in a country where Christianity is the dominant religion?

I'm fed up with the wingnuts' redefinition of Christianity as something Uncle Scrooge would love before his conversion experience, and even more fed up with the redefinition of disagreement as war. But that's most likely because my religion, echidneism, is nothing more than a second-rate superstition.

The Mississippi Abortion Bill

Has run into some difficulties:

A bill to ban most abortions in Mississippi died tonight after House and Senate negotiators failed to reach a compromise before a deadline.

The lawmakers were trying to reach common ground on a House-passed bill that would ban abortions in the state except when a woman's life is at risk or she is the victim of rape or incest.

The Mississippi lawmakers will have to wait a while longer before they can decide on the woman's behalf. Not like State Senator Bill Napoli in South Dakota, who already has these powers.

Doesn't he look like the man to decide on these things? So sage and calm and friendly. We are so lucky not to have to bother our pretty little heads with stuff like that in South Dakota.

Spring Redecorating

When you really need a new kitchen but can't afford one it helps to buy new curtains for the windows and new dishtowels. If you are really short of money just hanging the old dishtowels in the windows and using the old curtains as towels makes a nice change.

This must be the thinking of George Bush who is doing some spring redecorating in the White House:

White House chief of staff Andy Card has resigned and will be replaced by budget director Josh Bolten, an administration official said Tuesday.

President Bush was expected to announce the shake up during a meeting with reporters later Tuesday morning in the Oval Office of the White House.

The move comes amid a sharp decline in Bush's approval ratings and calls from Republicans for the president to bring in new aides with fresh ideas and new energy.

This is not a major rehab of the administration. Whether it will satisfy those in the conservative base who want change remains to be seen, but Josh Bolten is another insider, like a set of dishtowels that has been hanging on a hook for years. Perhaps they will look fresh and diffferent in the windows.

Does Card have another appointment in mind? Or was he just worn out by all these "external" effects that have inexplicably haunted this administration: the Iraq invasion, the Katrina aftermath and the failed attempts to revamp Social Security and Medicare? Or might his resignation be the first of many cosmetic touches to come, touches, which will still leave the fundamental problems of the administration unchanged?

Thank You

Thank you for all the beautiful expressions of sympathy. Hank gave me a lot of joy. There are cats and dogs in shelters that have the same joy to give to others. Check them out.

Hank The Lab, 4/23/99 - 3/27/06, RIP

All I want is that you throw this yellow tennis ball for me to fetch. I'm not asking to be silken again, not shiny, not clear-eyed, not asking for all those years you thought I'd have. I'm not asking these cancerous lumps to go away. Just throw the ball, damnit.

Remember the fun? The sun! So yellow and hot and the running. The running! And all the smell codes written in all the trees and the grass! Remember the food! Steak, shrimp, sausages, even a whole birthday cake once when I was a puppy, when I looked like a tiny velvet toy, if tiny velvet toys steal whole birthday cakes and gobble them up. Remember? Remember the other dogs! Catch-me-if-you-can I played with them and hahaha they could not! Could not catch me, me the nimble, me the quick, me with the biggest loving heart in all the dog world. And the biggest tongue, too, large enough to lick Canada in one go. And love bigger than Canada and so trusting, so kind. That was what I was, once. I was in your pack, and in the pack of my best dog, and I did good, didn't I? I loved as I was supposed to.

Then came the needles and the tubes and the pain and the suffering. Why? I asked but nobody answered and so I did what I had to: I fought it, fought to be in the pack, fought to run, fought to love. And I still wanted to fetch the yellow tennis ball, once, twice, ten times, a thousand times, to fetch it until it was not yellow but brown, not round but lumpy, chewed to shreds, wanted to leave your life torn with dog-shaped holes of sorrow every time you see a yellow tennis ball. Because I was worth it, damnit.

Just throw the ball for me one more time. But not too far. Just one more time.

A Truncated Book Review

Someone gave me The End of Faith, by Sam Harris. The blurb on the back cover goes like this:

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs - even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic.

Sounds interesting. Anything that bashes fundamentalism sounds interesting right now. But not interesting enough to get me past the fifth page of the first chapter which begins:

I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance - born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God - is one of the principal forces driving us towards the abyss.

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man.

Ok. This is Stud Lit, the male equivalent of Chick Lit. Harris is writing for men and only five pages into the book I know that women are not going to be subjects in this book but might appear as objects for the acts of others. A quick check of the index and the list of contents confirmed my first impression.

So I set the book aside. Not because of the stylistic choices Harris made, but because of the meaning of making these stylistic choices today, and what that meaning tells about the whole book.

Today's Deep Thought

Comes from the President of the United States. He is trying to calm the heated emotions about the proposed immigration bill:

Senators writing an immigration bill broke from the House's get-tough approach by refusing Monday to make criminals of humanitarian groups or individuals who help illegal immigrants with more than emergency assistance.

Catholic clergy, immigrants and other groups rallied over the weekend in Los Angeles and other cities and again Monday at the Capitol against a bill the House passed in December that would make such assistance a felony.

Meanwhile, President Bush used a naturalization ceremony swearing in 30 new citizens from 20 countries to warn critics of his proposal to let some illegal immigrants remain in the United State against stoking anti-immigrant feelings.

"The immigration debate should be conducted in a civil and dignified way," the president said as the Senate prepared to tackle the hot-button election issue of what to do with the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants this week.

The Senate Judiciary Committee rejected a proposal Monday from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to require humanitarian groups providing food, medical aid and advice to illegal immigrants to register with the Department of Homeland Security.

This is not the deep thought, not yet.

This is:

"No one should play on people's fears or try to pit neighbors against each other," Bush said.

An excellent piece of advice, though Bush only intended it to apply to the immigration controversy. Too bad that this is the very basis of most Republican policies in the last five years: playing on people's fears. Could it be that the fear-based administration is beginning to regret going down that road? This isn't the first consequence they might not have anticipated, this wave of demonstrations and protests across the country. We saw the first unintended result in the Portsgate where the fear of terror couldn't be switched off just on the president's say-so. Running a party political agenda on the basis of fear and loathing can be tricky.

Well, if you sleep with the dogs you are likely to wake up with fleas. Or so they say.

The New Downing Street Memo

Or is it an old memo? I get confused, because I also follow the British press. In any case, the American press is now reporting on another Downing Street memo:

US President George W. Bush made clear to British Prime Minister Tony Blair in January 2003 that he was determined to invade Iraq without a UN resolution and even if UN arms inspectors failed to find weapons of mass destruction in the country, The New York Times reported.

Citing a confidential British memorandum, the newspaper said the president was certain that war was inevitable and made his view known during a private two-hour meeting with Blair in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003.

...

The document indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable, the paper said.

Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq, The Times noted.

Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a US surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

The bolds are mine. If only there was a way of shouting out lines of text on the blogs I'd do it here, for the first time.

The Seminal Feminist Manifesto?

Check this one out.

The Afghan Christian Case

The court case against the Afghan man who had converted to Christianity sixteen years ago seems to be heading towards his release:

The Afghan government appeared ready to cave in to intense international pressure last night over the Christian convert who faces a likely death sentence for apostasy in the Afghan courts.

Afghan officials confirmed late in the day that Adbul Rahman, a 41-year-old who converted 16 years ago, would be released after the case against him was dismissed on what were described as "technical grounds".

The judge, Ansarullah Mawlavizada, told reporters that the case contained "legal flaws and shortcomings" and would be referred back to Afghanistan's attorney general. In the meantime, judicial officials said, he would be released.

Government officials cited a "lack of evidence" in the case, despite Rahman's frank admission in a court appearance that he was a Christian convert and had "no regrets" about his decision.

He probably faces a risk of lynching now, and I mean this quite seriously.

How odd that the Bush administration appeared surprised about the death sentence that this man was threatened with. I'm not in the administration and I knew about the punishment of converting away from Islam. Another detail to add to the large heap of details nobody here seems to have bothered to learn about the countries that we invaded, presumably to bring them the freedom to do whatever they want to.

Last Chance to Vote For Me

In the Koufax Awards category of Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. Which I am, of course. Go here and vote in the comments.

The Republican Agenda in 2006

Will be built on whatever lowest denominator they can find for populism. Immigration is a good one for that, because immigrants can't vote and because it taps into that deep vein of hatred towards outsiders.

This is why immigration is made into the big bugbear right now, so that all are properly sensitized to it by election time. Sadly, the wingnut PR campaign is not going too well. There are right-wingers who want illegal immigration because that is the way to get the cheapest possible workers, and then there are right-wingers who see illegal immigration as a drain on their tax payments and as competition for scarce jobs, not to mention the whole sensitive issue to do with the fact that the Republicans want to court the Latino voting bloc while attacking people who are almost all Latinos, too.

Well, it sure looks like the Latinos have been woken up:

About half a million activists have rallied in Los Angeles in the US state of California to protest against plans to criminalise undocumented workers.

Organiser Javier Rodriguez said demonstrators wanted an immigration system that was humane and not racist.

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would make it a felony for immigrants to be in the US illegally.

...

The new bill would also impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and allow for the erecting of fences along a third of the US-Mexican border.

The proposals have angered many Hispanic-Americans, a key voting bloc in November's mid-term elections.

Mr Rodriguez, of the March 25 Coalition, said he wanted to stop "the approval of anti-immigrant reforms" and demand "migration reform that is humane and fair, and not racist".

Affirmative Action for Men

This is what takes place in quite a few colleges these days, and the wingnuts have not been slow to explain that it's the fault of feminists, because it was feminists who got us affirmative action in the first place, and look who is benefiting from it now! The more interesting question these wingnuts have not asked or answered is naturally if affirmative action for white men isn't exactly what has been taking place for a few centuries already, and if that wasn't the original reason why affirmative action for the other groups was introduced. But I digress.

The topic of the day is not preferential treatment during the last few centuries, but preferential treatment today, and in only certain types of colleges: those which are not ranked at the top of the college hierarchies. It is these colleges that have trouble attracting enough male applicants to end up with something fairly gender-balanced. The top-ranked colleges don't have the same problem, and this should suggest that the gender imbalance is not about gender per se but about something that is linked to class and perhaps to ethnicity and race.

Ampersand posted about this some time ago, and the study that he linked to is still relevant:





It shows that the dearth of men does not apply to white well-heeled applicants. It is the poorer men which don't apply to go to college, and especially the poorer black and Hispanic men. Or put the other way round: it is the poorer women in minority groups who are especially determined to go to college. This way of posing the problem gives us different answers, answers having to do with the cultural values of the men who don't try to go to college, and answers having to do with questions about what kind of jobs are available for poor black women who don't have college degrees. Did you know that the average earnings of men with nothing but a high school degree equal the average earnings of women with college degrees? This alone offers a fairly good explanation for girls' determination to get a college degree.

But these are not the answers that the wingnuts want to hear. They want answers which will let them segregate the sexes in education, answers that have to do with setting up jungle gyms for boys and nothing much for girls. John Tierney proposes these solutions, because schools, as we all know, were designed for girls and not for boys. I'm not sure why this argument is presented over and over again, given that girls were not even allowed to go to school at first, so the way schools were designed certainly had nothing to do with what girls wanted.

Is affirmative action for men a good thing in college admissions? Majikthese addresses this question in some detail. What I'd like to know is if it is the poor and minority men that benefit from this affirmative action, because it is these groups who are underrepresented in colleges. I'd also like to know if the argument that men are necessary for a properly diverse college experience was ever used in the mirror form when women were scarcer than hens' teeth in colleges.

Madeleine Albright: Advice That Will Be Ignored by The Bush Administration

Nevertheless, it's good advice:

Although this is not an administration known for taking advice, I offer three suggestions. The first is to understand that although we all want to "end tyranny in this world," that is a fantasy unless we begin to solve hard problems. Iraq is increasingly a gang war that can be solved in one of two ways: by one side imposing its will or by all the legitimate players having a piece of the power. The U.S. is no longer able to control events in Iraq, but it can be useful as a referee.

Second, the Bush administration should disavow any plan for regime change in Iran — not because the regime should not be changed but because U.S. endorsement of that goal only makes it less likely. In today's warped political environment, nothing strengthens a radical government more than Washington's overt antagonism. It also is common sense to presume that Iran will be less willing to cooperate in Iraq and to compromise on nuclear issues if it is being threatened with destruction. As for Iran's choleric and anti-Semitic new president, he will be swallowed up by internal rivals if he is not unwittingly propped up by external foes.

Third, the administration must stop playing solitaire while Middle East and Persian Gulf leaders play poker. Bush's "march of freedom" is not the big story in the Muslim world, where Shiite Muslims suddenly have more power than they have had in 1,000 years; it is not the big story in Lebanon, where Iran is filling the vacuum left by Syria; it is not the story among Palestinians, who voted — in Western eyes — freely, and wrongly; it is not even the big story in Iraq, where the top three factions in the recent elections were all supported by decidedly undemocratic militias.

The Iraq Civil War

According to the British Observer, it has already begun:

The battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims for control of Baghdad has already started, say Iraqi political leaders who predict fierce street fighting will break out as each community takes over districts in which it is strongest.

"The fighting will only stop when a new balance of power has emerged," Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, said. "Sunni and Shia will each take control of their own area." He said sectarian cleansing had already begun.

Many Iraqi leaders now believe that civil war is inevitable but it will be confined, at least at first, to the capital and surrounding provinces where the population is mixed. "The real battle will be the battle for Baghdad where the Shia have increasing control," said one senior official who did not want his name published. "The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the war because the soldiers are loyal to the Shia, Sunni or Kurdish communities and not to the government." He expected the Americans to stay largely on the sidelines.

...

Iraqi officials and ministers are increasingly in despair at the failure to put together an effective administration in Baghdad. A senior Arab minister, who asked not to be named, said: "The government could end up being only a few buildings in the Green Zone."

The mood among Iraqi leaders, both Arabs and Kurds, is far gloomier in private than the public declarations of the US and British governments. The US President George W Bush called this week for a national unity government in Iraq but Iraqi observers do not expect this to be any more effective than the present government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. One said this week: "The real problem is that the Shia and Sunni hate each other and not that we haven't been able to form a government."

The Shia and Sunni hate each other over there and the wingnuts and moonbats hate each other over here. So it goes. And I'm not repeating what I always say: that anyone with any knowledge of the history of Iraq could have predicted this outcome. But such people don't get government jobs in the U.S..

Freedom From

In Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale Offred, a woman in the Taliban-like Republic of Gilead, muses on her past, much like our present, and on her present, a fundamentalist era with veiled women going out only in pairs:

Women were not protected then.

I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don't stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to look. Don't go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night.

I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.

Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Freedom to and freedom from. Which type is the freedom espoused in this Red State blog post addressed to us, the liberals?

And while they put all their energy and venom into this campaign, it is worth remembering that for all the noise – they have yet to present a real alternative to an America that rests on the foundation of freedom, free markets and family. Against that, the only answer they have is yet another personal attack.

What is the freedom the conservatives desire? It is not freedom from family, clearly, or certainly not freedom for all the members of that family. It is not freedom from want, given the emphasis on the markets being free to exploit whomever they wish. Is it the freedom-from that Atwood discusses? Or is it that kind of "freedom" for some of us, perhaps the women, the poor the disadvantaged, and another kind of freedom, freedom-to, for others, perhaps the wealthy, the white, the patriarchs?

What is freedom for the conservatives? Is it the absence of government? But that would be anarchy. Is it freedom in the markets and none at home? And where does one person's freedom end and another one's start? If you have the freedom to preach, do I have the freedom to cover my ears and not hear, not listen?

Freedom, free markets and family. The three Fs. Who wouldn't like the idea of freedom, in a totally abstract sense at least? Who wouldn't like the idea of family, especially if it is not defined they way the patriarchs do? Even the concept of free markets sounds jolly and light-hearted, something to explore on a Saturday morning while shopping for fresh vegetables.

But all these are emotional signals, terms, which mean nothing and everything, terms which are not explained because explaining them would leave nothing but empty air. Freedom from.

The Problem with Freedom's March

Is excellently laid out in this blog post. Democracy alone is not adequate. Without the laws and institutions it needs democracy is nothing more but majority power, and if the majority decides that a member of the society should die then that is what happens if majority rule is all we go by.

And that is why democracy can't be exported and handed out wrapped in a pretty bow. That's why Russia has trouble with democracy, right now, too. Learning to run a democracy takes years of practice and nothing much will come out of it until the necessary laws and institutions are not only in place but acknowledged to be in place by most of the citizens. Even then democracy means nothing unless the citizens are willing it to work.

Read the histories of democracies. They almost all had a bloody beginning and then a long stage when democracy meant that only some people could vote. Slowly, very slowly, the concept of democracy has been stretched and reworked to cover previously disfranchised groups such as women and racial minorities, and this stretching has coincided with reworkings of the laws and institutions that are necessary for democracy. We can't just take a cookie cutter and punch out democracies in the Middle East. It doesn't work.

Irony Is Dead, Again

I posted about the idea of a good old-fashioned liberal war against Easter a few posts down, but the wingnuts have alredy started a real one. Must not scream in frustration.

And here is some real irony for you: My human incarnation has decided to start writing on her own! How dare she! This is goddess bidness. (My Friday dump...)
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Thanks to Phila in the comments for the World Net Daily link.

What Now?

So Ben Domenech has resigned and Jim Brady doesn't have to fire him, after all. Move on, ladies and gentlemen, nothing to see here now. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming at the Washington Post, which means finding another wingnut but one who doesn't plagiarize, to match routine (nonliberal) reporting. This is balance.

And what is the story the media and the blogosphere are following now? To me it looks like a war story. Just check out these quotes:

And just as this was about to be posted, word comes that Domenech has indeed resigned from The Post.com. The liberal blogosphere will now have its scalp and the MSM has yet one more black eye that it didn't need.

"The liberal blogosphere will now have its scalp". Ok. The Red State blog which Domenech part-founded agrees with the idea that this is a war:

Redstate is not deterred. We are emboldened. We stand together, bound by ideology and a desire to advance the conservative movement. The movement is bigger than me, you, or Redstate.

And Atrios appears to agree, too:

The Redstaters have to be pissed, as they don't just see themselves as a blog, but as the nexus of the conservative political movement online.

Then there are the opinions of Jeff Goldstein:

What is most distateful about this episode from the perspective of the blogosphere, on the other hand, is the palpable glee with which many on the left set out after Ben and are now luxuriating in his resignation. And, of course, they have taught the WaPo the lesson they wished to teach it: that rightwing commentary will be scrutinized in direct inverse to the acceptance they give to the obvious biases of leftwing media figures.

And of Michelle Malkin:

Michelle Malkin, a prominent conservative blogger, wrote before the resignation that Domenech had edited one of her books and she had been cheering for him. "But now the determined moonbat hordes have exposed multiple instances of what clearly appear to me to be blatant lifting of entire, unique passages by Ben from other writers." That, Malkin said, is "unacceptable . . . And, painfully, Domenech's detractors, are right. He should own up to it and step down. Then, the Left should cease its sick gloating and leave him and his family alone."

"Sick gloating", "palpable glee", and elsewhere "Schadenfreude". Stuff we shrieking denizens of the extreme left are engaging in right now. All bad, though perhaps not as bad as lying and stealing.

The new story is about a war. A war between the two blogospheres and also a war between the traditional media and the lefty blogs. Surprisingly enough, there seems to be no war between the wingnut blogs and the media, surprisingly, because that is the old myth we have all absorbed for years. Perhaps the media has already been taken over by the wingnuts and all that remains is to wipe the cybernet clean of those shrieking hordes of the left. Who in the rest of this world might be called moderates or even independents, by the way. And yes, I was insulted by Domenech's virgin blog using the term "shrieking denizens" about people like me.

The war storyline is an unfortunate one. It allows the reframing of serious questions about the roles of the media to remain unanswered. It lets everything be twisted into "us-against-them" anecdotes, and it is a real hindrance to substantive political discussions. All you need to do now is to label someone as a moonbat or a wingnut and then there will be no discussion. And yes, I know I've done that myself all the time.

It may be impossible for humans to frame the situation in any other ways. The war storyline releases all sorts of primitive emotions: the evil ones, the good ones, the righteous message, the stinking lies, the good community, the satanic community, and so on. A couple of decades of right-wing hammering on the nails that are our reputations and our human worth on the liberal side of this society have also had their impact. Yes, we are gleeful right now, and yes, we have raised our uncouth voices to scream and ridicule the conservatives. But this response didn't come out of nowhere. Ask our good avuncular friend, Rush Limbaugh. Or our dear auntie, Ann Coulter.

No, we have been well trained by the very people who now decry our hostility and our horde-like tendencies of going for the lowest common denomination. They should be proud of the impact they have had on political debate in this country.

I started this post with a vague idea of handing out an olive leaf or a pigeon or some such thing. Seems I'm still too angry to do that.

Stealing And Lying

Stealing is a sin in Christianity, and plagiarism is stealing. Ben Domenech, the Washington Post's new conservative blogger, tells us that he takes pride in his fundamentalist Christianity, including in a literal belief in the Genesis. This makes me think that he would also take pride in following the ten commandments of Christianity which include the command "Thou Shalt Not Steal".

If this is true he must feel pretty bad right now, given that he has been found to have plagiarized countless pieces of writing, including work that he has published since college years.

Plagiarizing is stealing. It is also lying, because a plagiarist pretends to have written or produced something that is someone else's work. Thus, Domenech appears guilty of both stealing and lying. He believes that his party is the party of moral and ethical values. Well, I guess we have found out what these values mean to him.

Enough sermonizing about this young wingnut. It's time to sermonize about the Washington Post who hired him without using the miraculous Googling tool. Either wingnuts get a free pass in the Post or whoever was supposed to have checked Domenech out was sleeping on the job. Or perhaps the whole thing was designed as a great revenge against the horrible liberal blogosphere. Whatever the explanation, the Post is not smelling very good right now.
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There are loads of examples on Domenech's plagiarizations on Eschaton today, both in the posts and in the comments threads. It wasn't a very hard job to find them...

A War Against Easter

How about it, moonbats*? Fox News has nothing to talk about, because we have been lax on our recent culture war efforts. I propose a strong offensive against Easter, especially the little yellow chickens. They should not be displayed prominently in the public sphere, not even if it is established that the Founding Fathers loved them. We are adamantly and defiantly opposed to little yellow chickens, and we are ready to spend money and time to fight them. Or anyone who likes them.

I'm trying to help Bill O'Reilly. The War Against Christmas is a seasonal thing, after all. I'm also trying to turn the public attention away from the question whether the Washington Post has hired a plagiarist as its newest wingnut blogger or not. And I'm having fun.
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*being the shrieking denizens of the extreme far left

The Abstinence Scam?

How much money can you spend telling students: "Don't Do It!"? A lot, it seems:

For years, conservatives have complained about what they saw as the liberal tilt of federal grant money. Taxpayer funds went to abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood to promote birth control, and groups closely aligned with the AFL-CIO got Labor Department grants to run worker-training programs.

In the Bush administration, conservatives are discovering that turnabout is fair play: Millions of dollars in taxpayer funds have flowed to groups that support President Bush's agenda on abortion and other social issues.

Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and other federal programs, the administration has funneled at least $157 million in grants to organizations run by political and ideological allies, according to federal grant documents and interviews.

An example is Heritage Community Services in Charleston, S.C. A decade ago, Heritage was a tiny organization with deeply conservative social philosophy but not much muscle to promote it. An offshoot of an antiabortion pregnancy crisis center, Heritage promoted abstinence education at the county fair, local schools and the local Navy base. The budget was $51,288.

By 2004, Heritage Community Services had become a major player in the booming business of abstinence education. Its budget passed $3 million -- much of it in federal grants distributed by Bush's Department of Health and Human Services -- supporting programs for students in middle school and high school in South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.

One way of looking at this giveaway is as political payback. You give money to those who gave you votes, and if the Democrats got the money in the past now it is time for the social conservatives to milk the taxpayers. But another and a more ethical way would be to ask what is actually being done with all this money. What effect does abstinence education have? What are all these other faith-based programs achieving? Anything at all? Remember that this bonanza for the wingnuts is taking place at the same time as the administration is cutting funding for such proven programs as screening for cervical cancer among poor women.

And Even More on Ben Domenech

The newest hotshot wingnut penning a blog for the august Washington Post while equally religious and also homeschooled (sort of) goddesses get no offers from them has now been accused of plagiarism.

May I give a gentle hint to the people who do the hiring at the Post? Google is your friend.
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Also check this one out. Via Eschaton.

Greetings from Karl Rove

This is good to know:

By most accounts inside and outside the administration, Mr. Rove is relentlessly cheerful, presenting himself as an optimistic face in a gloomy White House. One person who met Mr. Rove said he attributed Mr. Bush's problems more to external events, in particular Hurricane Katrina and Iraq, than to anything the White House did wrong.

Relentlessly optimistic, our Mr. Rove, but he does have an interesting definition of "external events". The Iraq war just "happened", I guess, and the failures after Katrina were all caused by some outside force.

What on earth is he plotting now, hmm.

Mom, Don't Read This One

Because the post will be on the topic of sex. Ann at feministing.com has listed ten reasons why liberal men are better in bed. It's a funny list, but I don't actually believe that sexual prowess goes with ones political views with one exception: I have a hard time seeing how a fundamentalist misogynist could be of any enjoyment in bed.

Though I must admit that my liberal trophy husbands are much nicer than the few conservatives someone gave me as Christmas presents. It's something to do with the meaning of the word "liberal".

Cecilia Fire Thunder

She is the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe at Pine Ridge, SD, and she doesn't like the South Dakota ban on all abortions except to save the life of the mother:

According to an Native American Times article by Tim Giago, Ms. Fire Thunder was "incensed...that a body made up of mostly white males would make such a stupid law against women."

"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty," she said to [Tim] last week. "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

A Public Service Announcement

This time in statistics. Some days ago Atrios posted a link to Rush Limbaugh's website where this picture was prominently displayed (it isn't there now).

The point of the picture is to make the Iraq fatality numbers look tiny. The error in the picture? That the risk of death is not related to the population at risk. There are far fewer Americans in Iraq than in this country, yet Limbaugh ignores the difference in these base numbers. To make the terms comparable, we'd need to make the bases comparable. If the American military dies in Iraq at the rate of 2,300 out of the, let's say, 130,000 currently there, then this rate applied to the general American population would give us about 5.3 million war dead.

Limbaugh lies with statistics, a common hobby for some writers on the Iraq war.

If you still doubt me, consider this: That the number of people who have died trying to climb Mt. Everest is not in the thousands must mean that mountain climbing is every bit as safe as just staying in bed all day long.

A similar attempt at using absolute numbers to make arguments about rates of war deaths is taking place today in the right blogosphere. It's not too hard to see what is wrong with it if you remember to check what the base is.

Conservatives Don't Believe In Social Engineering?

Never thought that this one would resurface after years of the administration giving money to abstinence-only education and the patriarchal traditional marriage movement. I thought that soundbite was one for the history books, given that the current wingnuts are firmly trying to do social engineering, including trying to influence what science reports. But Derbyshire argues the old chestnut:

Conservatives are the people who do not believe in social engineering. I don't merely doubt that we can transform Iraqi society; I believe that to think we can, is a preposterous fantasy. A gyroscope has only two moving parts; yet if you try to push it in direction A, it confounds you by moving in direction B, at right angles to A. A human society has a trillion moving parts. If you try to push it in any direction, all sorts of things might happen, but the probability that what happens is the thing you wanted to happen, is very tiny.

How can he be so clear-eyed about it in Iraq but not at home? And not only is he clear-eyed, he is also cold-hearted, chillingly rational and horrifyingly honest:

One doesn't want to be accused of inhuman callousness; but I am willing to confess, and believe I speak for a lot of THWTHs (and a lot of other Americans, too) that the spectacle of Middle Eastern Muslims slaughtering each other is one that I find I can contemplate with calm composure.

Does Derbyshire calmly contemplate the death of little Muslim children in this slaughter?

It's interesting to learn what makes wingnuts tick.

More on Domenech

Sorry if you don't want to hear more about him. I want to write more about him, because we have been finally told what you need to do to get one of the plum jobs in political writing. All that is necessary is to be home-schooled, twenty-four years old and a blogger. And a wingnut, of course. People with this combination of credentials know what the majority of Americans think. They provide a substantial contribution to the national debate. They are also probably appointed to stick one in the eyes of the rabid lefty blogosphere. You know, the people who are uncouth and rude and call others names. Not like Domenech ( who called us shrieking denizens).

Atrios has a Domenech day if you want to learn more about this newest sage.

Welcoming Ben Domenech

He is Washington Post's newest blogger, a very conservative political writer. He is supposed to balance the neutral journalists in their stable. When the Post was questioned about this odd choice they answered like this:

I noted below that I'd asked the Post for its official explanation of the hiring of Domenech.

Now WashingtonPost.com's Opinions editor, Hal Straus, has sent some answers to our questions via a spokesman, Eric Easter. For your edification and enjoyment, here are the questions, followed by Straus's answers:

Question 1: Was the hiring of Ben Domenech motivated by a desire to placate right-wing critics upset with Dan Froomkin's frequent criticism of George Bush or upset with the recent Dana Milbank appearance poking fun at the shooting episode involving the vice president?

Straus: "When WP.com launched Opinions we said we wanted this new area to be about a variety of voices across a broad spectrum of political and cultural thought. Ben Domenech's Red America is simply another reflection of that effort.

"Ben Domenech brings an original and authentically conservative voice to the site's Opinions area, where we're committed to presenting the most provocative, informed and ideologically diverse policy debate on the web.

"He's an Internet pioneer, an accomplished writer and someone who is willing to challenge sloppy thinking even if, occasionally, he finds it on the GOP side of the aisle."

Question 2: Does WashingtonPost.com have any liberal bloggers who can act as a counterpart to Mr. Domenech?

Straus: "Washingtonpost.com hires writers for their ability to add something substantive to the national conversation. As best as possible, we look for that ability regardless of political labels."

Neat, isn't it? What a liberal blogger might add is not substantive enough?

Let's see what Domenech contributes to the national conversation:

This is a blog for the majority of Americans.

Since the election of 1992, the extreme political left has fought a losing battle. Their views on the economy, marriage, abortion, guns, the death penalty, health care, welfare, taxes, and a dozen other major domestic policy issues have been exposed as unpopular, unmarketable and unquestioned losers at the ballot box.

Democrats who have won major elections since 1992 have, with very few exceptions, been the ones who distanced themselves from the shrieking denizens of their increasingly extreme base, soft-pedaled their positions on divisive issues and adopted the rhetoric and positions of the right -- pro-free market, pro-business, pro-faith, tough on crime and strongly in favor of family values.

...

While the mainstream media has been slow to recognize the growth in conservative America, smart Democrats have not. Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner and Hillary Clinton are not alone in recognizing that the unhinged elements of their base, motivated by partisan rage, Michael Moore conspiracies and a pronounced feeling of victimhood have dragged down the Democratic Party for far too long. It's a political anchor apotheosized by the founders of leftist websites Daily Kos and MyDD, whose recently published book on political strategy and the Internet (an odd publication when one considers that DKos endorsed candidates are 0-19 in elections) opens with the sentence "Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means." Smart Democrats read this kind of rhetoric and recognize that if they continue to be the party of Howard Dean, the floor may be nonexistent.

I love this balance shit.
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Added later: Check out what Domenech used to write a little earlier. Via Eschaton. This is getting very hilarious. Substantive addition, indeed. How does a twenty-four year old without any real experience get a plum appointment like that, hmmm?

War is a Job for Men

So says Kate O'Beirne, the wingnuts' answer to feminism:

On American Family Radio's Today's Issues, National Review Washington editor Kate O'Beirne asserted that "fighting our wars, engaging the enemy in this uncivilized thing we call war is a job for men, not women," then suggested that having women serve in the military was the equivalent of "a man send[ing] his wife or daughter to check out" a noise that "sounds like a break-in."

Interesting how she assumes that the women in the military should be viewed in their patriarchal family roles. But more importantly, it doesn't seem that O'Beirne's people are succeeding very well in keeping the war a male business:

Also among the dead were son Walid's wife, Asma, 32, who was shot in the head, and their son Abdullah, 4, who was shot in the chest, Rsayef and Hamza said.

Walid's 8-year-old daughter, Iman, and his 6-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman, were wounded and U.S. troops took them to Baghdad for treatment. The only person who escaped unharmed was Walid's 5-month-old daughter, Asia. The three children now live with their maternal grandparents, Rsayef and Hamza said.

Rsayef said those killed in the second house were his brother Younis, 43, who was shot in the stomach and chest, the brother's wife Aida, 40, who was shot in the neck and chest while still in bed where she was recuperating from bladder surgery. Their 8-year-old son Mohammed bled to death after being shot in the right arm, Rsayef said.

Also killed were Younis's daughters, Nour, 14, who was shot in the head; Seba, 10, who was hit in the chest; Zeinab, 5, shot in the chest and stomach; and Aisha, 3, who was shot in the chest. Hoda Yassin, a visiting relative, was also killed, Rsayef and Hamza said.

The only survivor from Younis's family was his 15-year-old daughter Safa, who pretended she was dead. She is living with her grandparents, Rsayef said.

Deserves More Recognition

This blog does. If you agree, you can vote for it in the Koufax awards. We have made the finalist round.

Talking to Fundamentalists

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan I realized how impossible it would be to debate a Taliban cleric. It just can't be done. There is nothing that we could say to a person who believes that he knows the exact word of god, who believes that carrying out the meaning of that word will result in an eternal happy life. Now this is a real difficulty for those of us who believe in debate and democracy.

So how do you talk to fundamentalists? Take the old example of the Taliban banning women's shoes that make a noise. Why would they do something like that? The reason can be found in the writings about Mohammed's era. It seems that prostitutes wore bells around their ankles in those days, and there is most likely something in the writings that says good women don't make a noise when they walk. Hence the need for soft shoes centuries later. Did someone try to explain this to the Taliban clerics? I'm sure that they would have appreciated such a clarification of the religion they study all the time...

Everything is absolute to literalist fundamentalists, and it is the very absoluteness that they value. Consider the recent court case in Afghanistan:

An Afghan man is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death on a charge of converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime under this country's Islamic laws, a judge said Sunday. The trial is believed to be the first of its kind in Afghanistan and highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape Islam should take here four years after the ouster of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime. During the one-day hearing, the defendant confessed that he converted from Islam to Christianity 16 years ago while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Mawlavezada said.

"We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law," the judge said. "It is an attack on Islam." . . . Afghanistan's constitution is based on Shariah law, which is interpreted by many Muslims to require that any Muslim who rejects Islam be sentenced to death, said Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

If you have found the true god it is a grievous sin to then leave him, and there is only one correct avenue to faith.

Our own fundamentalists have exactly the same attitude. Here is an example of it:

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and host of the daily Christian radio show The Albert Mohler Program, defended Pat Robertson's recent claim that Muslims are "motivated by demonic power," and expanded on Robertson's comments, saying: "Well, I would have to say as a Christian that I believe any belief system, any world view, whether it's Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or dialectical materialism for that matter, Marxism, that keeps persons captive and keeps them from coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, yes, is a demonstration of satanic power."

I don't believe that we can talk to the fundamentalists, and I am very worried about this, not only because the fundamentalists always believe in the inferiority of women (as their truths are based on writings from an era when women were universally acknowledged to be inferior), but more generally, too. We have fundamentalists wielding power right now, and they have their own agendas about how to wield it, agendas that have to do with the end of the world and the Rapture. All this is worrying and makes communicating even more urgent. But how to do it? I really can't see a way.

Microeconomics 101 by John Snow

Billmon quotes a gem from John Snow:

Confronting critics of the Bush administration's economic record, Treasury Secretary John Snow said the widening gap between high-paid and low-paid Americans reflects a labor market efficiently rewarding more productive people . . . Mr. Snow said the same phenominon explains why compensation for corporate chief executives has climbed so sharply.

"In an aggregate sense, it reflects the marginal productivity of CEOs. Do I trust the market for CEOs to work efficiently? Yes. Until we can find a better way to compensate CEOs, I'm going to trust the marketplace."

A little morality tale, there. The productive people are getting the money, the lazy good-for-nothings are getting very little of it. And it's all just economics, marginal productivity and so on.

How exactly are the "more productive" people found to be more productive? How does Snow separate their labor input from the labor inputs of the lazy ones, given that most production is a combined effort where the actual contribution of, say, one manager is really indistinguishable from the work of this manager's staff, all of whom get paid a lot less? And what about the impact of outsourcing so many jobs on the pay of those supposedly lazy ones?

I don't know why I bother. Someone seriously arguing that "marginal productivity of CEOs" justifies their humongously enormous pay packets... The marginal productivity refers to the first derivative of the production function with respect to an infinitesimally small change in the labor input of the CEO, holding all other inputs constant. How does Snow measure this concept in practice? And does he really believe his own twaddle? Never mind the lack of empathy that it reveals; it also reveals someone who fell in love with Microeconomics 101 and never grew up.

The Manly New York Times

It's an odd thing for the Gray Lady to do, this catering to the wingnut men. They must have carried out a marketing study which proves that they make more money by pissing off every single thinking woman if only they can get a few wingnut guys to subscribe. Who am I to argue that this might not be the best strategy to follow? I don't have thymos.

According to David Brooks, thymos is the secret ingredient in men, the thing that makes them tick. Not the puppydogs' tails, after all. Had there ever been a female Freud she might have had her question about what men want answered easily: men want to be recognized:

Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.

Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important.

Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.

Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.

Brooks is trying to hedge his bets about whether women might want similar things, too. On the one hand, he has just read a really fun and supportive book about Manliness. On the other hand, he wants recognition from women as the kind of guy who might not bash them on the head and drag them back to the cave for some... recognition.

I smell patriarchy in the air at the New York Times. So does Garance Franke-Ruta. Her long piece on the number of women writing on abortion in the Times is depressing reading:

... the officially pro-choice New York Times has hosted a conversation about abortion on its op-ed page that consisted almost entirely of the views of pro-life or abortion-ambivalent men, male scholars of the right, and men with strong, usually Catholic, religious affiliations. In fact, a stunning 83 percent of the pieces appearing on the page that discussed abortion were written by men.

Probably because these men want recognition and women don't.

Wingnut Disarray

According to Washington Post:

Republican efforts to craft a policy and political agenda to carry the party into the midterm elections have stumbled repeatedly as GOP leaders face widespread disaffection and disagreement within the ranks.

Anxiety over President Bush's Iraq policy, internal clashes over such divisive issues as immigration, and rising complaints that the party has abandoned conservative principles on spending restraint have all hobbled the effort to devise an election-year message, said several lawmakers involved in the effort.

While it is a Republican refrain that Democrats criticize Bush but have no positive vision, for now the governing party also has no national platform around which lawmakers are prepared to rally.

Every effort so far to produce such a platform has stumbled.

Interesting, because usually it is the Democrats who are portrayed as being in disarray. Now everybody gets to be in disarray. So the question is, what will the wingnuts offer to get their base mobilized so that they miraculously win again in November? Could it be wedge issues? You know, stuff like banning same-sex marriage and women outside kitchens and bedrooms. Yes:

In the absence of a positive national message, Republicans also hope to use long-standing "wedge issues" to galvanize their own base and try to put Democrats on record with unpopular votes. Congressional leaders, for instance, plan to push a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The meme about Bush being a big spender on domestic issues is also going strong. Too bad that it's an incorrect one. He is spending money, true, but it's in Iraq, not at home. At home poor people get preventive cancer screening cut. The Republicans would like to see more those types of savings, I guess.

License Plates and Free Speech

A federal appeals court has allowed the state of Tennessee to offer pro-life license plates while at the same time refusing to offer pro-choice license plates:

Federal appeals courts have been divided over whether such license plate programs are constitutional. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower-court ruling that said similar South Carolina license plates violated the First Amendment.

Drivers will be able to pay an extra fee in Tennessee for the "Choose Life" plate, and some of the proceeds will go to New Life Resources, an anti-abortion group.

But drivers in Tennessee are not able to pay an extra fee for a pro-choice plate.

Blogging Feminism

One reason the top of this blog says "opinions of" is to let me escape writing only about feminism. Escape, because it's a tough life to be a warrior for a cause which is among the most ridiculed, belittled and misunderstood. Or so it seems, on certain days, particularly after I've surfed in some really vile places.

Today was one of those days, mostly because of my dog Hank's illness, but also because I innocently skipped over to a website which should have health warnings for women. Why do I never learn how to prepare myself for misogyny? Why do I still feel that women should be accepted into the human race by even those men who have some serious psychological problems with sexuality or the female sex? Maybe Freud could tell me.

A whiny soldier I am. Which explains why I don't write on every single nasty article I come across, or even the majority of them. There are other feminist bloggers who take on topics that need to be addressed, others who know more than I do and who wield the keyboard better than I do. But ultimately I can only take so much of the shit without losing my ability to sleep or my appetite.

All this is a long way of unnecessarily explaining why this blog is neither one thing nor another, although I also believe that feminism is more than just addressing topics of sexual or gender equality. It's a part of a larger outlook on the world, a way of seeing it and the creatures in it from an angle of equality or respect or even humility, of believing that each creature matters in some sense, and not just as a tool for some other creature. And this is an approach which makes life interesting and rich and meaningful, the listening and the learning and the odd connections it allows us to make, the sharing of the universe and its wonders and then finding this same universe inside ourselves, connecting the selves to yet another selves and back again.

If that makes any sense. I'm tired today and grumpy.

Avoiding Cognitive Dissonance

Wingnut style. Krugman talks about how this is done now that George Bush no longer looks like the second coming of Christ, even to the wingnut base. That everything about the combined neoconservative-fundamentalist administration is a mess is the truth. To reconcile this with the neoconservative-fundamentalist ideology still being the correct one requires some clever work, and Krugman points out that this work consists of painting Bush as a big domestic spender. Which he isn't, according to Krugman:

So what's left? Well, it's safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There's only one problem with this criticism: it's not true.

It's true that federal spending as a percentage of G.D.P. rose between 2001 and 2005. But the great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq war, and by rising health care costs.

Conservatives aren't criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since the Medicare drug program didn't start until 2006, the Bush administration can't be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. Whatever other fiscal excesses took place weren't large enough to play more than a marginal role in spending growth.

So where does the notion of Bush the big spender come from? In a direct sense it comes largely from Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who issued a report last fall alleging that government spending was out of control. Mr. Riedl is very good at his job; his report shifts artfully back and forth among various measures of spending (nominal, real, total, domestic, discretionary, domestic discretionary), managing to convey the false impression that soaring spending on domestic social programs is a major cause of the federal budget deficit without literally lying.

But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can't admit that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes — starting an unnecessary war, and using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts — they were cheering him on.

This isn't an uncommon thing. When something happens that clashes with a person's worldview it's usually the evidence that will be reinterpreted so that the worldview can stay. Fixing worldviews is a major psychological undertaking, and few of us want to do it. Ultimately, though, a false worldview bumps against conflicting evidence so often that the alternatives are either to accept the need to rethink the whole ideology or to start drinking heavily. I wonder which will be more popular among the wingnuts.


Nah, I don't wonder. The wingnuts will find their way back into the lap of wingnuttery. They will regroup and come back with another hairbrained scheme, but probably only after someone else fixes the country so that it's worth wrecking again.

The American Theocracy

Kevin Phillips who is either a recovering Republican or a maverick one has written yet another book critical of the Republicans. This time it is the administration that he focuses on, according to a NYT book review by Alan Brinkley.

From this review:

Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.

...

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

It sounds like a really good science fiction novel. Too bad it's reality.

Clift Notes

I often like what Eleanor Clift writes, but her recent piece on Russ Feingold and the censure strategy is really off the cliff (you knew I couldn't resist that). She begins by explaining why Feingold has just single-handedly destroyed the Democrats' chances of getting the House back in 2006:

Republicans finally had something to celebrate this week when Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold called for censuring George W. Bush. Democrats must have a death wish. Just when the momentum was going against the president, Feingold pops up to toss the GOP a life raft.
It's brilliant strategy for him, a dark horse presidential candidate carving out a niche to the left of Hillary Clinton. The junior senator from New York is under attack for being too soft on Bush and the war, and most of the non-Hillarys are to her right. There is a vacuum in the heart of the party's base that Feingold fills, but at what cost? His censure proposal looks like a stunt, "the equivalent of calling for a filibuster from Davos," says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. To win in '06, he says, "Democrats need to take the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm."

Just as John Kerry's belated effort to stop Judge Samuel Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court failed to rally his fellow Democrats, Feingold's move toward censure has been received like a foul odor, sending Democrats scurrying for the exits. Only two of his colleagues, Iowa's Tom Harkin and California's Barbara Boxer, signed on as cosponsors. And for good reason. The broader public sees it as political extremism. Just when the Republicans looked like they were coming unhinged, the Democrats serve up a refresher course on why they can't be trusted with the keys to the country. Nor could it have come at a better time for a Republican Party still battered by bad news in the polls. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC survey, released earlier this week, shows that Bush's job approval rating at its lowest ever—37 percent—as a majority of Americans lose confidence that the Iraq war will end successfully. The same poll shows a significant uptick in the country's willingness to accept a Democratic Congress, with 50 percent of those questioned saying they would prefer the party to control Congress. Thirty-seven percent say they want it controlled by Republicans.

I like the image of "Democrats scurrying for the exits". They might as well, for the amount of good they are doing right now.

I also like the idea of the Hippocratic Oath in this context: first, do no harm. Or in slightly different terms: softly, softly, catchee monkey. Except that this is neither medicine nor catching wild animals but politics, and the Democrats were voted in by people who, you know, expected them to do stuff. Not to wait very quietly in a corner to see if they will then look like a better option than the foaming-at-the-mouth wingnuts. How do you like them choices: either Attila the Hun or someone cowering in the corner, waiting, waiting.

Clift's argument is that Feingold has energized the Republican base by this stunt, and that the Republican base will, once again, somehow turn up to vote in numbers much greater than their actual numbers are, and then the Republicans win again. And all because of one Russ Feingold.

Well, not just because of him. We (the Democratic base of rabid latte sipping limousine-riding welfare-sucking feminazi types) are also to blame here:

The Democrats' dilemma is how to satisfy a restive and angry base without losing the rest of the country. "If someone proposed stringing up Bush like they did Mussolini, that would have a lot of support in the base of the party, too," says a Democratic strategist. "But it's not smart." Democrats want the November election to be a plebiscite on Bush's job performance, not a personal vendetta. "Republicans will rally round him if they think it's a personal attack just like we did with Clinton," warns the strategist.

Do you notice something very interesting here? The Republican base is dangerous and must be treated hush-hush carefully, but the Democratic base is a nuisance, something that is a hindrance to the Democratic party. It is always dangerous to placate us, always. We are good for one thing only, and that is to provide money for the party.

What is odd about this asymmetry of the bases is that what worked for the wingnuts could work for the Democratic party, too. If Bush gets votes because he manages to energize his base, why isn't Feingold's move a good way to energize the liberal base and to get these voters to vote?

And note the whole positioning of the middle so that people who think Bush's illegal wiretapping is illegal are now rabid extremists. Never mind that most opinion polls suggest that the rabid extremists who dislike Bush a lot are now the majority.

It's an interesting form of political debate, the Democrat bashing. Either they don't have any clear alternative proposal to Attila the Hun and friends (so they cower in the corner) or if they act they benefit Attila the Hun and friends (Feingold's censure proposal). You can't win if you're a Democrat.