Boobs

Things are getting interesting. First we had the health campaign which tried to shame women into breastfeeding by comparing not breastfeeding to trying to ride a deranged bull while pregnant. The old mother-guilt trigger there. Then comes this bit of news:

"I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine," one person wrote. "I immediately turned the magazine face down," wrote another. "Gross," said a third.

These readers weren't complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a wholesome parenting magazine _ yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains more support from the government and medical community.

Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo _ a baby and part of a woman's breast, in profile _ inappropriate.

One mother who didn't like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.

"I shredded it," said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. "A breast is a breast _ it's a sexual thing. He didn't need to see that."

It's the same reason that Ash, 41, who nursed all three of her children, is cautious about breast-feeding in public _ a subject of enormous debate among women, which has even spawned a new term: "lactivists," meaning those who advocate for a woman's right to nurse wherever she needs to.

"I'm totally supportive of it _ I just don't like the flashing," she says. "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see."

I actually think that this is a made-up story, at least partly. Most people don't mind women breastfeeding in public at all. But that there is even a need for a story like this tells reams about the culture and about the idea of the female breast as something purely sexual.

You might be astonished to hear that much of this is cultural. The United States is the promised land of the breast as a sexual irritant.

Divorce -- Preparing For Travels in Wingnuttia

Divorce, the breakup of a marriage. Images of abandoned children, selfish parents, the societal corruption created by me-first thinking and social causes such as feminism. Those are some of the flavors I taste when I dip my spoon into the divorce stew.

And a big stew it is, one that would take the rest of this blog's life to discuss properly. Hence my hesitancy in approaching the topic. What should I describe first? The fact that marriages in the past were not those happy ever-lasting affairs we somehow think they were? That the average marriage really didn't last that long, because of the much higher death rates in those olden-golden days? That if you study old embroidered family records from the 18th century America, for example, you find that many of them are about melded families, with more than one father or mother and with many step-siblings.

Or the fact that despite this, marriages these days do break up more often than in the past. Is this a bad thing? Here we come to the central question, which is about the welfare of the children. Most of us would argue that childless couples can do as they please about their marriages; it is the possibility that a divorce that helps parents may hurt their children that provokes the most questioning about our divorcing society.

Studies about divorce are rarely done well enough to determine the effects of a divorce on the children's well-being. This is because they often compare children whose parents have happy marriages to children whose parents have divorced, and we all know that this is not the proper comparison. The proper comparison is between children of divorced couples and children of couples who are unhappily married. Which of these causes the most harm to children? Then there is the further possibility that some people who divorce often may just have the kind of personality which leads to failed relationships and that they may pass this personality on to their children who then score poorly on all sorts of measures of life success.

Few would deem a marriage of hell better than a divorce, whatever its consequences, though. Most of the criticisms of divorce have to do with the fuzzy ideas that people get divorced too easily and that getting divorced is a selfish act if one has children. It's interesting that these criticisms have become common at the same time as the percentage of women initiating divorce has risen. In the past it was largely men who initiated divorce, and the stereotype was that they did this for a younger and sexier woman. The whole thing was deplorable, of course, but didn't attract much action or writing.

So is divorce a feminist question? Undoubtedly. Or at least an equal opportunity to divorce is. A woman without the ability to make an independent living is trapped in a bad marriage, and so are her children. Feminists have lobbied for better divorce laws, for better child maintenance and for alimony when it was necessary. An uneven arrangement of power in the nuclear family will always keep women down, and one way of keeping the power arrangement uneven is by making sure that women can't easily leave a bad marriage. Just think of the fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of divorce as something the man can do almost at will, whereas the woman must go to court and have very specific complaints before she can petition for a divorce. Even then she's likely to lose the custody of her children if the divorce is granted.

But that an equal opportunity to seek divorce and a fair distribution of assets after it are feminist issues does not mean that divorce itself would be something feminism desires. Or that the question of its influence on the children wouldn't be important to address. Or that the current system of child custody and alimony would somehow be optimal from a feminist or egalitarian angle. I'd even go as far to state that feminism would prefer all marriages to be blissfully happy, or as happy as would be humanly feasible in a world where future spouses are taught the skills of peaceful communication and where nobody expects marriage to be the equivalent of salvation in any sense.

These are my preparation statements about a later post on divorce in Wingnuttia. I found the unpacking-and-repacking stage to be necessary, to find out what I should take with me in addition to the toothbrush and the decontamination kit and such. For example, someone had snuck something into my suitcase, and I know that this is a no-no. That something was the idea that all feminists clamor for all marriages to fail, that they need the blood of divorced fathers to sustain them, that they take pleasure in the now-fatherless children of divorce. My ideas of divorce are much less exciting and more muddled, as you may have noticed.

One further thing to unpack: There is a widespread view of marriage in this country which sees "the family" as a sacred institution and expects real living people to mold themselves to fit this sacredness, even if it hurts like hell. If an alien read some of the rightwing blogs it/she/he would assume that the basic living unit on this planet is something called "the family", and that somehow wives and mothers don't count when the well-being of the family is measured. It/she/he would also learn that individuals must change their behavior to make "the family" thrive, but that "the family" itself can never change from a certain half-hidden ideal: a breadwinning father, a stay-at-home mother and several children, preferably homeschooled.

I'm going to leave this one behind, too. It's a good idea to make teenagers aware of the challenges of marriage and to train them to be better at compromising and communicating. But it's also a very good idea to ask marriage itself to behave better, to give its participants, all of them, as much of the things they need to thrive as is possible.

Shhh! Don't Call Me A Republican!

The right-wing has been excellent in its reframing campaign so that now honest feminist goddesses are treated like something with five-and-a-half bright red eyeballs and liberals are the next thing to be destroyed on the to-do lists of most wingnuts. But is it ever enjoyable to watch them score one in their own goal!

"Republican" is now a bad word:

How bad is the political environment for House Republicans? So bad, apparently, that even the party's leadership won't even admit that they are Republicans in their campaign ads this year, as The Hill's Jonathan E. Kaplan reports.

Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), who is in charge of keeping Congress in GOP hands this fall, surprised the political establishment yesterday by airing an early television advertisement that made no mention of his party affiliation.

...

In addition, Reynolds, a 30-year veteran of upstate New York politics and a former GOP minority leader in the state Assembly, is one of several House GOP leaders who do not mention their party affiliation on their campaign websites. In ads posted on their sites, Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Republican Conference Chairwoman Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) also do not state their Republican credentials.

The Republican party has done such a great job in destroying the institutions and the economy of this country that the only people who now revel in their Republicanity are the billionaires at Haliburton and Exxon. And they don't own enough votes, yet.

Instead, we are going to have a humongous number of candidates who have forgotten what party they belong to. Fun for all.

Back to the Middle Ages

I never had the yearning to live during that time period, but now I get a taste of how it must have been had they had television in those days, too:

With Kyra Phillips's discussion of the Apocalypse and the Middle East conflict with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg -- who share the view that the Rapture is nigh -- CNN has, for the second time in three days, featured a segment on the potential coming of the Apocalypse, as indicated by current conflicts in the Middle East.

For the second time in three days, CNN featured a segment on the potential coming of the Apocalypse, as indicated by current conflicts in the Middle East. The July 26 edition of CNN's Live From ... featured a nine-minute segment in which anchor Kyra Phillips discussed the Apocalypse and the Middle East with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg -- who share the view that the Rapture is nigh. At one point in the discussion, Phillips asked Rosenberg whether she needed "to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I'm sorry for all the evil things I've done," to which Rosenberg replied: "Well, that would be a good start." Throughout the segment, the onscreen text read: "Apocalypse Now?"

As Media Matters for America documented, the July 24 edition of CNN's Paula Zahn Now featured a segment examining what "the Book of Revelation tell[s] us about what's happening right now in the Middle East." CNN re-aired this segment the next day. Media Matters also noted that Rosenberg is just one of several conservative media figures who have identified and expounded upon the purported signs of the Apocalypse to be found in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. During his appearance on Live From ..., Rosenberg claimed that he had been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill, and the CIA to discuss the Rapture and the Middle East, and noted -- several times -- that the apocalyptic events described in his novels keep coming true.

Just think about this for a second or two, or for an eternity, after you die of a shock-induced stroke. We have television news talking about this stuff SERIOUSLY!!!!

What happened to the Enlightenment? Did we ever even have it? And how do you live in a medieval society without going totally crazy?

Are There No Coat Hangers?

With apologies to Charles Dickens. This is what the legislative arm of our country spends its time and the taxpayers' money on:

Senate Approves Bill That Would Criminalize Assisting Minors To Circumvent State Parental Notification Laws

The Senate on Tuesday voted 65-34 to approve a bill (S 403) that would allow federal charges to be filed against any individual who transports minors across state lines for the purpose of evading state abortion parental notification or consent laws, the Washington Post reports (Babington, Washington Post, 7/26). Under the bill, sponsored by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), people who violate the measure would be subject to a fine or up to one year in prison. The measure includes an exception if an abortion is necessary to save the life of a pregnant minor (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 7/24). Senate leaders last week agreed to vote on a small list of amendments to the legislation before a final vote, CQ Today reports. Senators on Tuesday voted 98-0 to approve an amendment, sponsored by Ensign and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), that would bar a father who rapes his daughter from suing anyone who assists in her abortion, as well as bars anyone committing incest on a minor from transporting a minor to another state to obtain an abortion, according to CQ Today. Boxer said the amendment is an "improvement" on the legislation, but she added that the bill still allows parental consent rights to fathers who impregnate their daughters and does not ban the criminal prosecution of people who assist minors who became pregnant through incest (Perine/Stern, CQ Today, 7/25). According to National Right to Life Legislative Director Douglas Johnson, 26 states that have parental consent laws would be affected (Hulse, New York Times, 7/26). Minors or their parents could not be charged under the legislation (Washington Post, 7/26).

It's all about politics, the fundamentalist Christian type. All about who has the authority over young women. It's about closing every loophole so that young women can't have abortions unless their parents decide that they will. The sentence I bolded tells us all we need to know about the real intent of this law.

This message is brought back again here:

Supporters of the bill said it would prevent boyfriends and others from pressuring girls to have abortions, while opponents said the bill could harm girls' safety because some parents could beat their daughter if they found out she planned to undergo the procedure, the Post reports (Washington Post, 7/26). Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said that opponents of the legislation "want to strip the overwhelming majority of good parents of their rightful role and responsibility because of the misbehavior of a few" (AP/Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/26).

My bolding, again. That is such a vile statement, vile. The overwhelming majority of good parents will have good relationships with their children and can discuss the issue of abortion or its alternatives with them. It's the children without such parents that would try to avoid the parental notification requirement by going to another state, but now they will make anyone who would help them into a criminal.

Those teenagers are now all alone, unable to get help anywhere, except from their closets where the metal hangers still can be found.

Time To Bang Head Against Garage Door Again

If you don't have a garage door use the desktop instead. Or the floor. A new Harris poll just came out and found this interesting piece of news:

Half of Americans now say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003 -- up from 36 percent last year, a Harris poll finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both "substantial" and "surprising" in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.
The survey did not speculate on what caused the shift in opinion, which supports President Bush's original rationale for going to war. Respondents were questioned in early July after the release of a Defense Department intelligence report that revealed coalition forces recovered 500 aging chemical weapons containing mustard or sarin gas nerve agents in Iraq.
"Filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist," said Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, during a June 21 press conference detailing the newly declassified information.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who shared the podium, said, "Iraq was not a WMD-free zone."
In recent weeks, the Michigan Republican has recommended that more material confiscated since the invasion be declassified and made public, including a 1998 standing order to Iraqi officials to hide or destroy weapons and thus evade inspectors from the United Nations.

You can read more depressive findings in the poll here.

Why this sudden increase in the number of those who believe the original misdirections of the Bush administration? I can think of three reasons: First, there was that little Santorum-smelling campaign a few weeks before the poll was taken, and sadly, a very large number of Americans now get no neutral news at all. They might even think that politicians tell the truth. That kind man on the Fox News just told us... Second, the sample in the study may be unrepresentative of the general population. This can happen even in the best families, you know, just because. Third, American opinions may have but a tenuous connection to facts.

After you are done with the head banging try to remember the exact spot on the door you used so that next time you can bang on some other spot and won't have to replace the door so soon. The voice of experience speaking here.

Power Wears High Heels

It doesn't, of course, but that is as good a headline for this post as any I can think of. I've been spending time at Twisty's blog, and she has a long post on the phenomenon of Girl Power:

Irreparable damage, argues Carol Sarler in this article on the hollow promise of Girl Power, was wrought upon womandom by the Spice Girls. She connects various dots from vapid girl group worship to teen drunkenness to impoverished single motherhood:

It would be absurd, of course, to lay every teenage pregnancy, every inebriated ladette or every cheap tart sleeping with her sixth holiday 'romance' in a week at the feet of five barely competent girl singers. It would be fair, however, to recognise that [The Spice Girls] presided over a period that saw young womanhood spiral into a previously unimaginable decline; that they wrote its soundtrack, they sang its theme, they invited a generation to play along — and that altogether too many women sadly did.

Asserts Sarler, according to Girl Power you need only be hot and dumb to succeed as a woman.

It will come as no great shock that I concur with Sarler; women's liberation from the Sexy'n'Stupid Mandate appears to have taken enormous, mind-blowing strides backwards. These days young women wish to emulate America's spokes-ho Paris Hilton, whose glittering, anorexic, trust-funded blonde emptiness demonstrates the ample rewards awaiting those who agree to wear the nation's jizz on their faces. The fellatiolution will be televised.

But uh-oh, guess what. It's not your right to 'choose' to be a sexay layday. Making traditional, patriarchy-approved, feminine submissive 'choices' is like spitting in the eye of every woman who has ever been raped, humiliated, harassed, denied birth control, abandoned, passed over, or beaten. While you were poledancing for your patriarch in a maid's uniform, this tragic woman was so deranged by the blunt force trauma of patriarchy she thought ditching her 6-year-old kid at a Chicago food fair was a 'choice'.

An interesting take on Sarler's article which at times veers uncomfortably close to blaming feminism for the type of power that poledancing might bring a woman. We will soon get to hear lots more about the idea that feminism is somehow equal to the choice to become a delicious morsel available for general groping. I know this because Caitlin Flanagan is already furiously scribbling away on a book about the ruined teenage girls who find salvation in their facility at blowjobs. Hmm, perhaps I should state here that feminists will not take responsibility for such "power", never advocated it, though naturally will be blamed for it. Because power makes girls and women go bad. That's the central message in most anti-feminist writings. They never ask what power does to boys and men, though.

It's a great temptation at this point to go on to a deep pontification about the meaning of power, about the indoctrinated female fear of wielding it and similar fascinating issues. But I will not go there, except to point out that the lobster on your dinner plate may appear to wield a lot of power when you are really hungry, but its actual power to act is zero. Some, though not all, of the sex-positive power is of that type. Not all, though it can be tough to distinguish between the lobster example and real sexual freedoms for women.

Sigh. That would have been a fun post to write but not today, because today's urgent topic has to do with Twisty's questions about the nature of choice within a patriarchal system and about the responses to her post, which largely address the question whether the fishes swimming in the ocean can understand the essential nature of water. We are all little fishes swimming in systems which at best are post-patriarchal, and we are all affected by the water we cannot really analyze. Hence the need to analyze whether wearing high heels or make-up or engaging in poledancing is something women do voluntarily and autonomously, and hence also the impossibility of truly finding a solution to these questions.

On one level the questions look trivial from a feminist angle. Who cares if the suffragettes wore those long cumbersome dresses? They got us the votes. From that angle I don't care if a feminist decides to walk around on stilts while wearing multiple neckrings. But that we seldom see feminists so attired suggests that there is a deeper significance in many of our seemingly-trivial (and not-so trivial) choices, and it's the deeper significance that's interesting: The messages we send about ourselves by these choices and the messages others receive and interpret; two processes which don't necessarily match. For example, a woman gyrating around the pole might feel sexually powerful, but a man watching her might see a lobster with parsley behind its ear.

So on another level all such choices, even personal grooming choices and clothing choices, are political statements. Even choosing not to make a political statement this way amounts to one. It's inescapable. But not all possible choices should be seen as feminist ones. The feminism-lite commercial versions sometimes seem to argue exactly that: that just making a choice in itself is a feminist act for women, that all choices should be celebrated, because they demonstrate that women now can choose, that somehow the act of apparently choosing means that the person has totally independently come to some conclusion.

My favorite counterexample to that is the one about a person being convicted to die and being offered the choice to die either by hanging or the guillotine. It's my favorite, because it's silly and because it's crystal-clear on the wider societal constraints.

This post isn't really going anywhere. I'm still swimming in the ocean.

God's Little Rebel

That's me. And probably you, too, if you are a feminist. I was reading this sad and depressing article about Mississippi's last abortion clinic, when I came across some statements by a rabid extremist wingnut preacher type:

Operation Save America has identified a whole host of things they call offensive to God. Their director, Pastor Phillip "Flip" Benham, told his congregation they had three choices with Muslims: kill them, be killed by them, or convert them. "Which is your choice?" he asked. "While not all Muslims are terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims," he said. "We destroy the Quran, not to desecrate their religion, but to set them free.

Pastor Flip has a special disdain for feminists as well. "Feminism is rebellion against God," he says. "They hate men. Gloria Steinem said, 'A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.' That'll help you to understand what feminists think of men." Pastor Flip believes feminists are angry, ugly white women who, for the most part, have been unable to find a male partner. And as they eschew having children, he says, they condemn themselves to a lonely and unhappy life, striving continually to be something they cannot be: men. "There is not a greater vocation in the world for a woman than to be a mother," says Pastor Flip.

So I'm a man-hating fish. I prefer God's little rebel. Martha Graham once called dancers God's acrobats. That was beautiful and accurate, and some of its beauty might stick to my definition of feminism as God-ordained rebellion against the sadly lacking pharisees.

Did you notice how this man uses extreme soundbites to "inform"? I'm tired of the strategy, from both sides. But there is one soundbite that applies to Pastor Flip exactly: an asshole.

Read the article I linked to on Mississippi's last abortion clinic for some more meaningful concerns.

I Believe in Tooth Fairy

I might as well, given that an article (via this Kos diary) about the Diebold voting machines having a back door that anyone could access elicited this comment:

Basically, Diebold included a "back door" in its software, allowing
anyone to change or modify the software. There are no technical safeguards in place to ensure that only authorized people can make
changes.

A malicious individual with access to a voting machine could rig the
software without being detected. Worse yet, if the attacker rigged the machine used to compute the totals for some precinct, he or she could alter the results of that precinct. The only fix the RABA authors suggested was to warn people that manipulating an election is against the law.

Typically, modern voting machines are delivered several days before an election and stored in people's homes or in insecure polling stations. A wide variety of poll workers, shippers, technicians, and others who have access to these voting machines could rig the software. Such software alterations could be difficult to impossible to detect.

Diebold spokesman David Bear admitted to the New York Times that the
back door was inserted intentionally so that election officials would be able to update their systems easily. Bear justified Diebold's actions by saying, "For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software... I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

My bolds. Such childlike faith in the goodness of human beings is charming in a four-year old. In Mr. Bear it's just horrible.

This is a serious matter. Without transparent elections democracy will die. Even if we squeeze our eyes shut really hard and hope for it to survive.

Waffling

I have a strong need to write a waffling post, but you don't have to read it. I'm working on a post on divorce in wingnuttia, and I'm bogged down with statistical problems. You'd think that someone, somewhere had done a proper study of divorce which looks at the effect of fundamentalist religions, and by "proper" I mean one which controls for income, education and all the other variables which affect divorce rates. I'm pretty sure that such a study exists, but it's not available for free on the Google. The only ones I find lump all types of religion today, from "go to church twice a year" to "go every night and twice on Sundays", and that confuses the issue, though I did find the abstract of one study which looks promising, but it's behind a pretty expensive paywall.

The nice thing about blogging is that I don't have to necessarily spend the rest of this existence looking for the facts or running my own regression analyses. But I don't like not knowing, and I don't like theorizing if the facts actually are out there.

Which brings me to my next complaint: Why am I, a generalist Renaissance goddess, the only one who seems to be blogging on these issues? Or, come to that, on so many other issues such as the so-called gender war in our schools? Where are all the liberal specialists? Now, I specialize in general babbling but most people do not. Why aren't they setting up specialist blogs so that I could just link to all their hard work and spend the rest of my day in pure enjoyment?

Is it for the same reason I held my trap shut for many a year? That I thought someone else knew better? It took a serious corruption of my low self-esteem genes to get going with this blog. If that's the reason, please join me gals and guys. If I can do it, anyone can.

Writing feminism sometimes feels almost as lonely, and if I couldn't read the wonderful blogs in my blogroll on this topic I'd feel like a lone wolf howling at the moon, wishing that there was a pack for me somewhere on the other side of the mountain. The establishment media caters for every kind of lunatic thinking these days, except for my type of lunacy. If I wrote more about the shaving of the pubic area and the best way to get married quickly I'd have it made. But I'm not hungry enough yet.

See how this turned out all about me? Sigh. I have many incarnations to go before I will come out of the chrysalis.

Choose Your Weapons, Gentlemen

We ladies are supposed to sit back under our umbrellas, sipping the iced tea so kindly provided, to enjoy a duel of refined politeness. The Democrats are going on warpath!

Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut on Sunday promised a bruising fight in the U.S. Senate against confirming John Bolton to be the country's ambassador to the United Nations.

President George W. Bush bypassed the Senate and installed Bolton into the position last year when lawmakers were on recess.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee scheduled a confirmation hearing on Bolton for Thursday after Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich, who previously opposed the nomination, expressed support for Bolton.

``This is going to be a bruising fight,'' Dodd said on CNN's ''Late Edition'' program. ``I'm sorry the administration wants to go forward with this.''

He argued that problems Democrats had raised last year were not resolved. They blocked the nomination amid accusations Bolton in his previous job as the top U.S. diplomat for arms control had bullied intelligence analysts.

``The problems still persist. Many ambassadors at the U.N. feel he hasn't done a good job there,'' said Dodd, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee. ``It's polarized the situation.''

Bolton's appointment expires in January when the current congressional session formally ends. While Bush could reappoint him, he would not be paid.

I wouldn't be shocked if Bolton decided to go on brawling at the U.N. even if he didn't get paid. He's going to go down in the history books as the Moustache of Male Aggression (not intended as sexist but moustaches go with males and there is no m-word for aggression). And the Democrats are going to offer a duel with rules over this nomination!

The time for such courtesy has long since passed. Bolton would just poke out the opponent's eyes while he's still turned to count to ten before shooting. Then Bolton would use the openings to dig out any brains still remaining in the Democrat's skull, and he would eat them, uncooked. Then there would be a press announcement about the perfidy of the liberals and how the United Nation stinks to high heavens.

Today's Action Alert

Has to do with drawing a line in the sand about how close this country will go towards a presidential dictatorship. Check it out.

Beautiful Tax Logic

If the government no longer wants the wealthy to pay much in taxes, why have tax auditors? Makes sense to me, and to our Dear Leader, too:

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.

The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency's 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days. Kevin Brown, an I.R.S. deputy commissioner, confirmed the cuts after The New York Times was given internal documents by people inside the I.R.S. who oppose them.

The Bush administration has passed measures that reduce the number of Americans who are subject to the estate tax — which opponents refer to as the "death tax" — but has failed in its efforts to eliminate the tax entirely. Mr. Brown said in a telephone interview Friday that he had ordered the staff cuts because far fewer people were obliged to pay estate taxes under President Bush's legislation.

But six I.R.S. estate tax lawyers whose jobs are likely to be eliminated said in interviews that the cuts were just the latest moves behind the scenes at the I.R.S. to shield people with political connections and complex tax-avoidance devices from thorough audits.

Sharyn Phillips, a veteran I.R.S. estate tax lawyer in Manhattan, called the cuts a "back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax."

It's so simple, so circular, so beautiful. Now we are going to get the simple tax system so many clamor for, and the wealthy don't have to bother their beatiful minds with it.

But remember that if someone saves a million in taxes because of this "simplification", either someone else (or a whole lot of someone elses) must pay that million to the government or a lot of someone elses will not be given the services they received in the past: health care, roads, education. Ah, so complicated...

The Contraceptive Pill in the News

A medical study points out that the pill may have saved lives:

The contraceptive pill saves the lives of up to 3,000 women a year in the UK and Europe, according to new medical research.

A number of studies now suggest that the Pill reduces the risk of ovarian cancer significantly. One study, reported in the British Journal of Cancer this week, found a protective effect of up to 50 per cent for Pill users, while another, reported in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, found a similar effect after analysing data on the use of the Pill since its introduction.

According to the studies, women who use the contraceptive pill reduce their risk of developing ovarian cancer by more than a third, and the longer they take it for, the greater the protection.

Carlo La Vecchia of the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche in Milan, one of the world's leading experts on cancer, says that ovarian cancer cases have dropped in recent years: "Ovarian cancer incidence and mortality for younger generations have been declining in most developed countries, and the decline has been greatest in countries where oral contraceptive use had spread earlier.''

Although early forms of the Pill have been linked to some health problems, there is increasing evidence that it prevents others. The report says women who used the Pill at some time are 30 per cent less likely to develop the cancer. The protection increases with the length of time a woman takes the Pill by around 5 per cent a year, to about 50 per cent protection for long-term use. The reduced risk was seen in women both with and without a family history or genetic predisposition to ovarian cancer.

"The favourable effect against ovarian cancer risk persists for years after Pill use has ceased, and it is not confined to any particular type of Pill,'' says Dr La Vecchia. "Since the incidence of ovarian cancer is already appreciable in middle age, and survival from the disease is unsatisfactory, the protection of Pill use corresponds to the avoidance of 3,000 to 5,000 ovarian cancer cases, and consequently 2,000 to 3,000 deaths a year in Europe." He added that similar numbers were benefiting from taking the Pill in the US.

I'm not sure if these results are based on simple correlations between the availability of the pill and the incidence of ovarian cancer or if they are actual comparisons between women who have been on the pill and women who have not, but I'd guess it's the latter. If so, the results are important. Ovarian cancer has very high death rates and anything that can reduce those rates is good news.

This should be kept in mind when the next wave of pro-life attacks against the contraceptive pill as an abortifacient starts.

Foxes and Chicken Coops

This makes sense from a wingnut point of view. If you can't get rid of a division you hate, just fill it with people who hate it every bit as much as you do:

The Bush administration is quietly remaking the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights, according to job application materials obtained by the Globe.

The documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds.

In an acknowledgment of the department's special need to be politically neutral, hiring for career jobs in the Civil Rights Division under all recent administrations, Democratic and Republican, had been handled by civil servants -- not political appointees.

But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the procedures. The Civil Rights Division disbanded the hiring committees made up of veteran career lawyers.

For decades, such committees had screened thousands of resumes, interviewed candidates, and made recommendations that were only rarely rejected.

Now, hiring is closely overseen by Bush administration political appointees to Justice, effectively turning hundreds of career jobs into politically appointed positions.

The profile of the lawyers being hired has since changed dramatically, according to the resumes of successful applicants to the voting rights, employment litigation, and appellate sections. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Globe obtained the resumes among hundreds of pages of hiring data from 2001 to 2006.

Hires with traditional civil rights backgrounds -- either civil rights litigators or members of civil rights groups -- have plunged. Only 19 of the 45 lawyers hired since 2003 in those three sections were experienced in civil rights law, and of those, nine gained their experience either by defending employers against discrimination lawsuits or by fighting against race-conscious policies.

...

Many lawyers in the division, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe a clear shift in agenda accompanying the new hires. As The Washington Post reported last year, division supervisors overruled the recommendations of longtime career voting-rights attorneys in several high-profile cases, including whether to approve a Texas redistricting plan and whether to approve a Georgia law requiring voters to show photographic identification.

In addition, many experienced civil rights lawyers have been assigned to spend much of their time defending deportation orders rather than pursuing discrimination claims. Justice officials defend that practice, saying that attorneys throughout the department are sharing the burden of a deportation case backlog.

As a result, staffers say, morale has plunged and experienced lawyers are leaving the division. Last year, the administration offered longtime civil rights attorneys a buyout. Department figures show that 63 division attorneys left in 2005 -- nearly twice the average annual number of departures since the late 1990s.

At a recent NAACP hearing on the state of the Civil Rights Division, David Becker , who was a voting-rights section attorney for seven years before accepting the buyout offer, warned that the personnel changes threatened to permanently damage the nation's most important civil rights watchdog.

``Even during other administrations that were perceived as being hostile to civil rights enforcement, career staff did not leave in numbers approaching this level," Becker said. ``In the place of these experienced litigators and investigators, this administration has, all too often, hired inexperienced ideologues, virtually none of which have any civil rights or voting rights experiences."

A civil rights watchdog? More like hiring foxes to mind the chickens. All in a day's work for the wingnuts, because the Civil Rights worth defending belong to the government. Or to Christian white men with property.

Sunday Funnies

We must have David Brooks for that section, don't we? He has written a column about the multiculturalism of the wingnuts; how all sorts of different types of lunatics all fit neatly under the same patriarchal roof, but how some types of lunatics, his own type, for example, aren't given the honor and kowtowing that's just their proper due. His type is called a neoincrementalist, by the way, the type that moves forwards very slowly and imperceptibly, in the middle of bombs and such.

Here is a delicious morsel from that column:

In short, the administration approach embodies a few principles we neoincrementalists hold dear. First, you create policies in accord with your basic values while fully understanding the downside risks — the downside risk in this case being that terrorists may have developed methods that make it nearly impossible for superior military forces to uproot them given the global media environment.

Second, you go to war with the world you have. Right now unilateral actions are politically unsustainable, so everything has to be done through a coalition. And third, statecraft is soulcraft. If you can create circumstances in which democrats win, you can change perceptions and create the momentum for future victories — incrementally.

Slowlee, slowlee, catchee monkey. Or something similar. But spend a moment with that sentence I have bolded. Do you, too, wonder if it's nostalgia about those far-gone days when killing lots of people could be done discreetly?

From now on I'm going to call the incrementalist neocons the inchworms.

News From The Alternative Dimension

This is a screenshot from Fox News...

Female Suicide Bombers

The Salon has an odd and interesting article about women who become suicide bombers; odd, because the article starts like this:

Though these fledgling female armies may surprise many in the West, a much bigger line was crossed in 2002, when Wafa' Idris, a resident of al-Ama'ari Refugee Camp in the West Bank, became the first Palestinian female suicide bomber. Idris had been forced into an arranged marriage by her elder brother. Like most other Palestinian women, she was dependent almost entirely on male relatives for her economic well-being and survival and had no choice but to accede to her brother's decision. In her heart, however, she remained defiant and never accepted the marriage or her new husband, a first cousin. When she became pregnant against her will, she secretly aborted the child. On top of her unhappy marriage, abortion, and subsequent divorce, Idris was further traumatized by her weekly exposure to blood and death in her work as a paramedic for the Red Crescent, where she volunteered every Friday, caring for large numbers of Palestinians wounded during the second intifada.

It has never been clear whether Wafa' Idris intentionally blew herself up with the 22-pound bomb she was carrying or whether she was simply a courier, but she died in the blast, killing one Israeli and wounding a hundred more. Idris' brother, for his part, said that her decision to become a suicide bomber was due to her work at the Red Crescent and that she was a hero.

Two years later, Hamas sent out its own female suicide bomber -- a 22-year-old woman from a wealthy family in the Gaza Strip and the mother of two young children, one of whom, reportedly, was not yet weaned. Pretending to be crippled, Reem Riyashi arrived at an Israeli checkpoint and requested a personal security check so that she would not have to go through a metal detector. Minutes later, she blew herself up, killing four Israelis. Seven more Israelis and four Palestinians were also injured in the explosion, which was so powerful that it blew the roof off the building and scattered human remains to such a degree that the bomber's body parts could not be distinguished from those of her victims.

Like Idris before her, Riyashi had a secret. She reportedly had had an affair initiated by a Hamas operative, and when she was offered the chance to redeem herself by carrying out a suicide bombing, she took it. Her husband, Palestinian security forces assert, drove her to the checkpoint. Hamas leader Ahmad Yasin had stipulated that a female suicide bomber must be chaperoned by a male.

See how the female suicide bombers' reasons are dissected and analyzed in an almost Freudian way? Yet the same article then says this:

Once a woman from each of the two major Palestinian factions had carried out a suicide bombing, it was inevitable that others would follow. Yet even as their numbers grow, what is most remarkable about these women is the way in which their stories are presented, particularly in the Western media. The usual motives cited for carrying out a suicide bombing -- humiliation, despair, revenge, hate, fame, money, religion, nationalism, the occupation and combinations thereof -- are deemed insufficient to explain female bombers. Male suicide bombers, of course, often have their own unofficial motivations, but they are rarely the focus of a report. In contrast, the innermost recesses of a woman's psyche, her most shameful secrets -- almost invariably sexual in nature -- are displayed to a world eager for such an unveiling, eager to be shown that women do not truly relish the job of dying and killing.

Whatever. Perhaps all this is a way of proving the point that women's motives are assumed to be somehow related to some man in their lives, not just the same sort of fanaticism that grabs men. Or perhaps men's motives really are about some woman in their lives, but nobody wants to find out. - Either I'm very muddled in my thinking today or the article is muddled. You take your pick, but don't tell me if you decide it's me who is the most muddled.

My confusion even extends to the picture attached to the story, the picture of Um al-Abed, a mother of eight, who has declared herself willing to become a suicide bomber. The article says this about the picture:

Palestinian female suicide bombers, unlike some of their male counterparts, are not sex symbols but rather icons of purity, sacrifice and honor -- and this holds true both for the Islamists and the nationalists, if to varying degrees. Whereas the Syrian Social Nationalist Mouhaidli adorned herself in a snazzy red Falangist beret and, later, in a white bridal gown and veil symbolizing her deathly post-bomb wedding, Um al-Abed appeared before the cameras in Gaza wearing a conservative Saudi-style hijab, or head covering, and a niqab, or face covering, with a small slot through which she looked out at the world. Despite her moment of fame, this new bride of Palestine was already faceless and invisible -- as if foreshadowing her death -- while the institution whose birth she announced promised to produce many more like her.

Right. She's pure and not a sex symbol. Well, here is the picture:





Notice the bare knee or thigh? I don't get how this is a picture of purity.

Snowflakes Or Crisply Grilled?

Which is the death that we should lament? The death of frozen embryos, left over from fertility treatments? Or the death of Israeli and Lebanese children, burnt to a crisp in the demented fires of war? Which types of children matter most: those which have not yet been born and are not going to be born, or those which were born, were loved, had names, just yesterday played outside with their friends? Which types of children does George Bush lose sleep over? Which death does he try to stop?

Which is the death that our rabid right-wing Christian clerics worry over? Which is the death they find a sin and which is the death they interpret as a hopeful sign of the coming Rapture?

Friday Dog Blogging

The top two pictures are of Hank. She was a wonderful dog. The bottom is of Henrietta. I may have shown it before, but it's a nice one for summertime.

Income Inequality in The United States

A recent Kevin Drum post posed the question of the vanishing middle class in this country:

Over at The Corner, even John Derbyshire thinks there's some evidence that the middle class isn't doing too well these days:

If the rich get richer while the middle class thrives, and some decent provision is made for the poor, I'm a happy man, living in a society I consider healthy and am proud of. If, however, the rich get richer while the middle class is struggling, or actually declining, I am not a happy man. There are some reasons to think that is happening, and you don't have to be a socialist to worry about this.

It is, perhaps, telling that Derbyshire's post sparked not a single response from his fellow conservatives. Even the neo-Lafferians at NRO seem a little too embarrassed by the whole thing to go through their usual exercise of digging up a few pseudo-statistics to demonstrate that, really, the middle class is going great guns under today's Republican leadership.

Kevin Drum then quotes another piece of news which doesn't really have anything to do with the middle class but is interesting anyway:

....No amount of chaff can hide the failure of our remarkable productivity surge (and the accompanying robust growth of the overall economy) to meaningfully boost average wages, which have barely grown with inflation. Separated by income level, the picture is more dismal. From 2000 to 2005, for example, average weekly wages for the bottom 10% dropped by 2.7% (after adjustment for inflation), while those of the top 10% rose by 5.3%.

In short, the rich are getting richer, as would be expected when the Party of the Rich is in power. But what is happening to the rest of the income distribution? And is it ok that the very poor are getting poorer if the middle class can somehow hang on? But is the middle class hanging on or not?

To answer these and similar questions requires delving into statistics. But before I do that I want to say a few short words on the reasons why we should be concerned about increasing income inequality, even in a capitalistic society.

The traditional arguments for allowing incomes to be unequal are two, one ethical and one efficiency-related. The ethical argument simply states that those who work harder or smarter should get to keep the fruits of their labors and should have the right to will those fruits to their heirs, even if this creates a society where money concentrates in few hands. The efficiency argument states that what drives economic progress and innovations is the chance to make money out of it, to make more money than the rest of the pack, and that economic progress and innovations will ultimately make everybody better off. It's a choice between having low equal incomes and higher average incomes in a system which has some people earning more than others do.

The equally traditional arguments against greater income inequality are also both ethical and efficiency-related. The ethical argument points out that greater incomes are not only a consequence of greater effort or smarts. They can also accrue from illegal activities or from gaming the system, and even when they don't they are helped on by the society and its government, because it is the government which makes markets possible and which guarantees the infrastructure that the money-makers can use. Thus, the society deserves a cut in the greater incomes of some. The ethical argument also stresses the horror of the no-safety-nets form of capitalism where the ones who don't thrive are allowed to suffer and die. The efficiency-related arguments point out that a society which is very unequal in income becomes a dangerous place to live in. Just think of life in the so-called banana republics to get an idea of the problems that income inequality causes. And even a less extreme income inequality causes a society where it will be very difficult to arrive at agreements about public policy, because the income differences will make different outcomes desirable.

In short, extreme inequality in incomes may destroy a country. It kills the markets for the products that the rich built their riches from, and it creates an angry and violent underclass. The vanishing middle class is something that speeds up this development, as the middle class is usually the part of the society which cares about the political choices its government makes and which tends to invest in stability. It is also the source of most of the educated labor force.

Given all this, where is the United States going in terms of income inequality? The general consensus is that income inequality is growing, and that this is true whatever the measures we select to use for it.

Now comes the part where I go all economist. But trust me, you will learn a lot from it. For example, you will meet the Lorentz curve and the Gini coefficient. They are really not that horrible creatures. The Lorentz curve is a picture of income inequality, like this one:






The horizontal axis (direction to the right) is all the families of a country standing side by side, arranged so that the poorest family is closest to the left edge and then the next poorest family and so on, until the richest family is the last one on the right. The axis is then standardized so that when all the families are lined up the total length is 100% or 1.

The vertical axis measures the earnings of the same people, added into a pile of earnings. So the vertical dimension initially measures zero because there are no people or earnings yet. Then the poorest family takes its place and its earnings are measured on the vertical axis at that point. Next the second poorest takes its place and its earnings are added to the poorest family's earnings. And so on. When the richest family enters the lineup its earnings are dumped on top of the vertical dimension. The vertical axis is then standardized so that incomes are shown as fractions of the total. So the highest point is 100% or 1.

The green mountain shape shows the way total earnings have been piled up in this process of adding one family's share at a time. The mountain rises slowly at first, because the first families are poor ones, then more rapidly as wealthier families are added to the lineup. The shape of the green area's edge can give us a good visual grasp of income inequality. The more convex* that edge looks the more unequal incomes are.

If you think about this a little it becomes clear that the straight diagonal line in the picture would show how the earnings pile rises in a society where every single person has the same income. Deviations from that line show increasing inequality. For example, think about a country where one guy owns everything. Then the cumulative earnings line would hug the horizontal axis until the richest guy enters the lineup. At that point, the earnings pile would suddenly appear as a vertical line.

So the two extremes the picture shows are full equality: the diagonal line, and total inequality: a reverse L-shape. To show something inbetween the two we get the kinds of curves that are shown in the graph above. The more convex the curve is the more income inequality the country has. Also, a curve that becomes more convex over time shows that income inequality has increased.

The Lorentz curve is a good way of analyzing income inequality. It can be shown for both pre-tax incomes and for after-tax incomes, for example. But it's not one number. If you want one number to describe income inequality the most common candidate is the Gini coefficient. Luckily, it is derived from the Lorentz curve! Just take the area between the diagonal line and the curve (the pink area) and divide it by the total area under the diagonal line! If there is no income inequality at all, the Gini coefficient is zero. If the income inequality is total, so that one person has all the earnings in the society, the value of the Gini coefficient is 100 (we've moved back to percentages here).

Now we are ready to look at the United States income inequality. The Gini coefficient gives the U.S. a value of 46 according to one source, a value around 40 according to another source. The values for West European countries tend to be in the thirties or lower, the values for South American countries tend to be in the fifties or higher. The U.S. value places it slightly apart from other post-industrial countries and closer to the South American countries.

What about changes in the United States over time? Look at the statistics on this site (scroll down). The increase in inequality is very evident in the growth of the Gini coefficient year after year. That is not good news.

I selected the Gini coefficient and the Lorentz curve for discussion not only for their simplicity (yeah!) but also because the Lorentz curve actually stresses changes in the middle of the distribution, in the area where the middle class has hunkered down, and so the changes we observe are quite likely to affect the middle class position. But if this is not sufficient for you, you could also look at income changes by deciles (groups consisting of ten percent of income earners, arranged in increasing order) or quintiles (groups consisting of twenty percent of income earners, arranged in increasing order). That's what we are talking about when we compare the top ten percent of income earners to the bottom ten percent and so on. Here is one summary of what has happened to the quintiles:

So, the top quintile is making more. That means by definition, the bottom three [sic] quintiles are making less. Again according to the Census bureau for the years 1969 - 1999 the fourth highest quintile saw its percentage of national compensation income drop from 23.6% in 1968 to 22.8% in 1999. This is a 3% drop. The third quintile saw its percentage drop from 17.3% to 15.3% or a 11.56% decrease. The second lowest quintile saw its percentage drop from 12.1% to 9.8% or a drop of 19%. The bottom quintile saw its percentage decrease from 5.7% to 4.1% or a drop of 28%.


In other words, the lower you are, the larger share of national income you have lost over the time period.

What has caused this increased income inequality? Have some people become smarter and harder working while others have just decided to rely on the teats of the welfare state sow? That would be the wingnut interpretation, I guess. A more realistic one would look at the changes over time in outsourcing and international competition in general, the failure of education to respond to the changed needs in the labor force after those changes, and the way taxes have been "simplified" to fall less on the very wealthy and more on the middle class. And we don't yet know the impact of the repeal of estate taxes on income inequality.

Time to end this post. You might do worse than by re-reading the bit about why increasing income inequality is not exactly good news, unless you like the idea of gated communities surrounded by acres of misery.
----
*Convexity: Imagine yourself standing on the horizontal axis and looking up towards the curve. The more it bulges towards you the more convex it is.

From The Queue

Some weeks are so full of events that I get only a small fraction of them into posts. Then other weeks nothing happens, but I can't write about the old events because nobody wants to talk about anything not oven-hot. That's the bad thing about blogs and also the good thing about blogs. I really want to write about income inequality and about the Bible belt failing and dropping the pants of marriage (divorce!), but the news won't sit still for long enough. You might point out here that I shouldn't try to write about everything under the sun because it just shows off the depth of my ignorance, but I like to write about everything under the sun and unless I get paid to shut up I will continue to do that. And call this blog a feminist one, too. The idea is to show that feminists are just like regular people and talk about other things, too. The real idea is for me to have fun writing, of course.

Then to the item from the queue of topics, the backlog that I'm trying to clear out. It's about a court case:

A substitute judge hearing the case of an illegal immigrant seeking a restraining order against her husband threatened to turn her over to immigration officials if she didn't leave his courtroom.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Pro Tem Bruce R. Fink told Aurora Gonzalez during last week's hearing that he was going to count to 20 and that if she was still in his courtroom when he finished, he would have her arrested and deported to Mexico.

The judge didn't want to make the woman's life any more difficult, you see. She is in the country illegally, and that is worse than any husband she might fear. Or that's how I interpreted the story at first. But then I read further:

"I'm going to count to 20, and if you people have left this courtroom and disappeared, she isn't going to Mexico forthwith," Fink said, according to the court transcript. "One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. When I get to 20, she gets arrested and goes to Mexico."

After Gonzalez left the courtroom, Fink asked Salgado if he wanted to stay, and he said yes.

Fink then dismissed the case: "Well, she brought the proceedings, and if she's not here to go forward, I guess all of the requests are denied."

On Wednesday, Fink, who has been a family law attorney for 35 years, insisted he was seeking what he thought was an agreeable solution for both parties.

"What I saw was nothing more than some yelling and screaming between a husband and wife," he said.

"I also saw that they really didn't want to not be together anymore."

If he had issued the restraining order, Fink said, "we'd wind up with exactly the opposite of what these people wanted."

"The cure could be far worse than the illness," he said.

I'm trying to decide if Fink would have diagnosed a case in a similar manner if it was the man who appealed for a restraining order. It's hard to tell, but only because there is a common sexist assumption that men don't need restraining orders against women, women being too weak to threaten anyone successfully or men being too brave to be bothered by such fears. If you set that consideration aside I'd say that Fink engaged in patriarchal thinking here. He decided that he knew what the woman appealing for a restraining order really needs, and that this was not a restraining order at all but a return to the marital union. And he did this on the basis of some mind-reading.

The Rapture President

This Washington Post article, via Atrios, comes as close to telling that the reason Bush is twiddling his thumbs about the Israel-Hezbullah conflict is Rapture:

One former senior administration official said Bush is only emboldened by the pressure from U.N. officials and European leaders to lead a call for a cease-fire. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan demanded yesterday that the fighting in Lebanon stop.

"He thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians," said the former official, who spoke anonymously so he could discuss his views candidly. "The tacticians would say: 'Get an immediate cease-fire. Deal first with the humanitarian factors.' The president would say: 'You have an opportunity to really grind down Hezbollah. Let's take it, even if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed.' "

...

Those who know Bush say his view of the conflict was shaped by several formative experiences -- in particular the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which made fighting terrorism the central mission of his presidency. Another formative experience was a helicopter ride over the West Bank with Ariel Sharon in 1998, when Bush was Texas governor -- a ride he later said showed him Israel's vulnerability. The cause of Israel has been championed by many of the evangelical Christians who make up a significant chunk of the president's political base.

Bush and his team were also deeply skeptical of the Middle East policy of the previous administration, and of what they see as an excessive devotion to a peace process in which one of the protagonists, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, was not seriously invested. Explaining the reluctance to push quickly for a cease-fire, one senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record indicated a belief that premature diplomacy might leave Hezbollah in a position of strength.

"We don't want the kind of truce that will lead to another conflict," said this official, who added that, when the time comes, "you will see plenty of diplomacy."

Fred S. Zeidman, a Texas venture capitalist who is active in Jewish affairs and has been close to the president for years, said the current crisis shows the depth of the president's support for Israel. "He will not bow to international pressure to pressure Israel," Zeidman said. "I have never seen a man more committed to Israel."

That last sentence reminds me of the joke about a breakfast of bacon and eggs: That the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. Not that the joke probably has anything at all to do with the topic of this post. Or perhaps it does. You decide.

If my choices are to believe that we have a president whose bags are packed for Rapture or a president who waits until enough children have been exploded or burned before acting for a ceasefire, which of the two would I pick? Choices, choices. But the alternative explanation for Bush's lethargy is that he's giving Israel a chance to destroy Hezbullah before acting. The idea is that this would reduce future levels of terrorism. That idea has not worked very well during earlier rounds of history.

First A Neck Rub, Then A Playful Slap

Explanation:

U.S. President George W. Bush playfully slaps U.S. Congressman Al Green (D-TX) as he greets delegates following his remarks at the annual convention at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

What will it be next? Snapping the bra strap of Gloria Steinem?

The Ocean

It is calling. Can you hear it? I can, and will be gone until later tonight. Here is a good piece for you to read in the meanwhile. Or here.

This article on women and science deserves a separate post but at this rate I might never get to it.

Now I need to find my snorkeling gear and my flippers and my rubber duckies...

A Naive Look At Power

The Washington Post has two articles on the U.S. foreign policies today, both of them asking what George Bush should do about the Israel-Hezbullah conflict. Oddly, they both advocate a more decisive grip than the one Bush has recently been showing (except for that bit about Angela Merkel's shoulders); oddly, because they express the views of two political opposites. First, the fairly liberal/centrist David Ignatius says this:

Given the American stakes in this crisis, the Bush administration's passivity is inexplicable. Hezbollah and Israel have been tossing lighted matches back and forth in a region soaked with gasoline, and the world is waiting for robust American diplomacy. Instead we see a tongue-tied superpower, led by a president who grumbles into an open mike in St. Petersburg that Kofi Annan should get on the phone to Syria and make it all go away, or maybe Condoleezza Rice should get on a plane to the Middle East.

At first glance this is not so different from the anger of the neocons at Bush's hands-off (heh) policy, discussed here in an article about the reactions from the right-wing of the Republican party:

Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency. They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies. They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon.

And this part is really, really funny:

Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan administration arms-control official who is close to Vice President Cheney, said he believes foreign policy innovation for White House ended with Bush's second inaugural address, a call to spread democracy throughout the world.

"What they are doing on North Korea or Iran is what [Sen. John F.] Kerry would do, what a normal middle-of-the-road president would do," he said. "This administration prided itself on molding history, not just reacting to events. Its a normal foreign policy right now. It's the triumph of Kerryism."

Mr. Adelman, no way could George Bush ever be described as a middle-of-the-road president. I'm laughing so hard that my tummy hurts. - Never mind.

This article is fascinating in terminology. The words "tough" and "toughness" appear at least three times in the various quotes. It seems that to be a wingnut is to be tough, even if one happens to be comfortably located in the peaceful part of the world. It's all about perceptions, methinks. What I call penis-measuring games (though women can participate in this version, too).

The naive look at power I want to take has to do with this, but also with something else: the results from the use of aggression, and the naive way of characterizing these is to divide them into increased danger or decreased danger. If you do a similar naive division of the ways of using power into diplomacy and military intervention you get a nice two-by-two cell table which I'm not going to reproduce here. But what the cells would contain are these four possibilities:

1. Diplomacy used; increased danger results.
2. Diplomacy used; decreased danger results.
3. Military intervention used; increased danger results.
4. Military intervention used; decreased danger results.

If you are less naive than I am you could add "no change in danger" and various other policies but the point I'm trying to make wouldn't change. And the point is that the toughness or thrustiness or whatever of the policy used should not be determined by the flavor of the policy but by its results. Sometimes military intervention is the right thing to do, sometimes diplomacy is the right thing to do. Given the large human suffering wars cause one might be justified in leaning towards peaceful diplomacy, but exceptions do exist.

Consider the wingnut discourse in this context. They seem to argue that points 3. and 4. in my list are "molding" history, and I guess they're right in that, though perhaps not in the way they intended. Remember how the oracle of Delphi told Croesus that if he attacked Persia a great country would be destroyed? And it was destroyed. Sadly, it was his own country.

Likewise, wingnuts view points 1. and 2. on my list as always effete, cowardly and pointless. Even if they work. And this is why I call the wingnut strategies penis-length competitions.

All of which is to point out that even though the two articles have similar-sounding recommendations their underpinnings are quite different.

The Three Rs

Are no longer writing, reading and arithmetics. Perhaps we should upgrade them to rabid, reactionary and Republican? I'm not sure.

But this is very funny: First read this earlier post of mine and then come back to compare the message to this one:

The Bush administration and Republican legislators yesterday proposed a $100 million national plan to offer low-income students private-school vouchers to escape low-performing public schools. The plan was immediately assailed by Democrats, unions and liberal advocacy groups.

The proposal comes four days after the independent research arm of the Department of Education issued a report showing that public schools are performing as well as or better than private schools, with the exception of eighth-grade reading, in which private schools excelled. The results prompted questions from foes of vouchers about why taxpayer money should go toward private schools instead of toward improving public schools.

The National Center for Education Statistics compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores from about 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools. Private-school students historically score higher, but the NCES made adjustments to account for student background -- such as socioeconomic factors and race -- which leveled the playing field.

The report also found that conservative Christian schools -- a constituency that supports vouchers -- lagged significantly behind public schools in eighth-grade math. The report supported similar findings from a University of Illinois study on math.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told reporters yesterday that she hadn't yet read the report and made references to the report's "modest sample." The report itself cautioned that because schools are all very different, overall comparisons of the two types of schools may be of "modest utility."

"It was not an evaluation of how school vouchers, how scholarship programs, how additional resources work for low-income families trapped in chronically low-performing schools," she said. "I do see them as . . . apples and oranges issues."

Grover "Russ" J. Whitehurst, director of the Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences, said this was the first time NCES used student variables. He said that while the report shows that considering the variables did change scores, it is of limited value because it's just a snapshot in time -- with no long-term reference points.

Spellings, flanked by Senate and House leaders on Capitol Hill, said the "opportunity scholarship" plan would be aimed at helping low-income students "trapped" in poor schools by offering them transfers to other public schools, tutoring, and scholarships to private schools, up to $4,000 per student. The secretary said the plan would cover 28,000 students.

See how Spellings was conspicuous in her absence on Friday but is now flanked by Senate and House leaders? My, my.

It's possible that the students who would be given these vouchers indeed attend very poor public schools. But the earlier study suggests that these schools could work well if they were better funded. The choice then seems to be between giving students money to attend private schools (of undetermined quality) or to give the money to improve the current schools of the students. It could be that the voucher scheme is better, but this is a question to be answered by actually studying it. The Republicans don't want to study it. They want to kill the public schools and to replace the system with a patchwork of private schools as the first step towards ending all public funding of education. Really. I'm not making this up.

Guess Whose Rights Don't Matter?

Those of Afghan women. Phila on Bouphonia blogs about a recent move by Hamid Karzai to bring back the "Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the body which the Taliban used to enforce its extreme religious doctrine":

Western diplomats have reacted with unease to the proposal. However, several told The Independent that they believed the move was partly designed to defuse Taliban propaganda which accuses the Karzai government of being un-Islamic.

"This is an Islamic republic and sharia is a part of the constitution," one diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "If it is constitutional and within the framework of the International Convention on Human Rights [to which Afghanistan is a signatory] then it could represent a public information victory for the government."

With the Taliban making considerable gains in the south the Karzai government has been keen to establish a more conservative Islamic profile and to appear more critical of Western military operations.

Make no mistake about the purpose of this move. It's aimed directly at the ever-so-slightly increased freedoms of some women in Afghanistan. The role of women is always something that's up for sale to the highest bidder, it seems. In the U.S. the fundamentalists have been given all the positions in this administration which relate to women's issues. Which is a kinder and gentler form of the same phenomenom.

Now when are we going to hear Laura Bush give another feminist speech to celebrate this additional step in the liberation of that country's women by the U.S. occupation?

Counting Horror

Can't really be done. But there are days when I wish that the Iraq occupation could be ended when a sufficient number of Iraqis have been killed. The impetus for the initial approval of Bush's Iraq war was the fuzzy and incorrect connecting of the deaths of 911 to Saddam Hussein, and the outcome was a revenge raid on some people that resembled the ones who actually committed the crimes. All this was ethically wrong. But I still wish that those who demanded blood as revenge would now be satisfied.

For according to the United Nations:

Nearly 6,000 civilians were slain across
Iraq in May and June, a spike in deaths that coincided with rising sectarian attacks across the country, the
United Nations said Tuesday.

...

The report from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq describes a wave of lawlessness and crime, including assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, torture and intimidation.

Hundreds of teachers, judges, religious leaders and doctors have been targeted for death, and thousands of people have fled, the report said. Evidence suggests militants also have begun to target homosexuals, it said.

"While welcoming recent positive steps by the government to promote national reconciliation, the report raises alarm at the growing number of casualties among the civilian population killed or wounded during indiscriminate or targeted attacks by terrorists or insurgents," the U.N. said in a note accompanying the report.

Isn't this enough? Of course it would be if we used such crude comparisons of bloodshed. Instead, more blood will be shed in the next few years in Iraq. The country is a pressure-cooker and we took off the lid that was Saddam Hussein. The killings will continue until some section of radical Islamists take over and make the country into a new Taliban. After that the killings will be more institutionalized.

I naturally want to be proven wrong in this prediction. But I doubt that I will be.

News From The Uterus Wars

First, Cecilia Fire Thunder got into trouble for suggesting that she might open a Planned Parenthood clinic on tribal land in South Dakota, to offer abortions to victims of rape and incest. South Dakota has a new law which would ban all abortions except those that are necessitated by danger to the woman's life, and this law would come in force when/if Roe v. Wade is overturned:

A tribal president who was ousted for proposing an abortion clinic on the reservation has been reinstated at least through next week.

Council members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe removed Cecelia Fire Thunder from office June 29 for proposing the clinic on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that would be beyond the reach of South Dakota's strict new abortion ban.

A tribal judge reinstalled her temporarily Monday after she argued that council members didn't follow procedure when voting to remove her from office. A tribal court is scheduled July 28 to consider making the order permanent.

Such are the rewards for sticking up for women.

Then there are the happy news that our tax money is used to lie to pregnant women:

NARAL Pro-Choice America is renewing its call for Congress to step in and stop the Bush administration from funneling millions of taxpayer dollars into so-called "crisis pregnancy centers" (CPCs) that, as a new congressional report documents, are blatantly misleading women regarding medical issues.

Today Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, released the investigative report, False and Misleading Health Information Provided by Federally Funded Pregnancy Resource Centers. The report outlines how 20 CPCs in 15 states that received federal tax dollars misled or provided false information to investigators who called asking about their services.

An example about the misleading information these crisis pregnancy centers provide is the one about abortions causing breast cancer. They don't.

These are the bad news, I guess. But it's also true that South Dakotans launched a movement to overturn the rapists' fatherhood initiative.

Atrios in LA Times

Duncan Black, the blogger Atrios, has written an oped piece for the Los Angeles Times on why the left is furious at Joe Lieberman. He touches on most of the reasons for our unhappiness with Lieberman's policies:

For too long he has defined his image by distancing himself from other Democrats, cozying up to right-wing media figures and, at key moments, directing his criticisms at members of his own party instead of at the Republicans in power.

Late last year, after President Bush's job approval ratings hit record lows, Lieberman decided to lash out at the administration's critics, writing in the ultraconservative Wall Street Journal editorial pages that "we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril." In this he echoed the most toxic of Republican talking points — that criticizing the conduct of the war is actually damaging to national security.

Lieberman has a long history of providing cover for the worst of Republican actions while enthusiastically serving as his own party's scold. After the Senate acquitted President Clinton on all impeachment charges, Lieberman called for his censure. More recently, he rejected a call by Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) to censure Bush over the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, calling the attempt "divisive."

The usual defense of Lieberman's actions is that he is a centrist, someone who is willing to be bipartisan, someone who is not blindly following party discipline. The problem with this defense is that it's hard to see why a Democratic centrist would be willing to be the cheerleading team for the most extreme right-wing policies of the Republican party. And this has been Lieberman's role in the last few years.

I agree with Atrios when he states that "Lieberman's relationship with the Democratic Party has been one of convenience, not principle". Lieberman is a Democrat because you need to be one to be elected in Connecticut, but the inner Lieberman has slowly grown into a wingnut. The crucial question for the voters in Connecticut is whether they accept this combination.

Atrios also notes the way the real news about Lamont's challenge to Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primaries has been the power of bloggers:

Much of the interest in this race is not because of Lamont but rather his perceived base of support from bloggers, including me. One prominent pundit claimed that Lamont's online backers were practitioners of "blogofascism"; another called the campaign an "inquisition." Online political discourse can indeed be caustic and combative, like talk radio. But too many in the Lieberman wing of the party have elevated civility and the illusion of bipartisan comity over challenging Republicans' failed policies. In the process, they have echoed GOP jargon in dismissing critics as "angry" and "hate-filled."

Politics is a contact sport. Those who would paper it over with a veneer of false propriety are pretending it's something that it is not. More than that, loud and raucous debate is a healthy part of our democracy.

There probably wasn't enough space for further words about the pretend civility of the GOP covering up very nasty threats, usually presented by the pet pundits but seldom protested by the wingnut establishment. The left blogs may allow nasty language but the right blogs also allow witchhunts and free-wheeling debate on the best way to execute New York Times editors. Yet somehow this is not newsworthy in the establishment media.

I'm not convinced that we should think of politics as a contact sport, though. You don't have to know how to take out a person wielding a knife in thirty-seven different ways to be able to kick ass in politics, and sports metaphors tend to discourage women from getting interested in the solving of shared problems. At the same time, I can see the point of that little paragraph. We on the liberal/progressive side have far too long taken the veneer of politeness as something more genuine than it has ever been, and we are still suffering the consequences.

All in all, Atrios has done a good job of summarizing both the reasons why Lieberman is disliked and the way the media has misrepresented these reasons. Now let's see how the establishment media responds to him.

A Movie Idea

Yours to grab freely. I think this would make a great movie: Suppose there is a planet with lots of history and all sorts of international treaties and many possible problem areas. International diplomacy is carried out in various ways but is largely based on tradition and code of behavior. Then suppose that the most powerful country on this planet elects a fraternity boy to run it, a guy with no interest in world affairs, no education, no real experience. He's just out to have fun, to have a few beers, to goose a few world leaders, to trample on a few cultural sensitivities.

Wouldn't that be a fun premise for a movie? And then we could have him get faith of a particularly rigid type. Imagine all the possible plot variations! This would be so hilarious. In a movie.

Very Funny: Bush Loves Merkel

Click on this site and then choose Video. You won't regret it. Via docstrangelove.com.

International diplomacy...