O Could It Be?

Could it? Could Bush really appoint an abstinence-only freak with extremely odd views on science to oversee Title X funding? Title X is the federal program about family planning and reproductive health.

Added on Friday: Here are some of the opinions of the man who will be in charge of family planning:

In a 2003 presentation to the International Abstinence Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Keroack wrote in a PowerPoint item that "PRE-MARITAL SEX is really MODERN GERM WARFARE." The presentation outlined a purported scientific basis for how premarital sex ruins later relationships.

Keroack said teenage sexual activity blunts the brain's ability to develop emotional relationships. Comparing sex to drug use, he said the hormone produced by the brain after orgasm, oxytocin , will eventually diminish a person's ability to form emotional attachments. Keroack said premarital sex can lead to overproduction of oxytocin .

In the 2001 paper for Abstinence Medical Council that he co authored with Diggs, the two doctors concluded: "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual. . . . Just as in heroin addiction . . . the person involved will experience 'sex withdrawal' and will need to move on to a . . . new sex playmate."

Scientists involved with research into bonding called Keroack's theories, based on research on prairie voles, a type of rodent, an extreme reading of the data.

First it was a veterinarian who was deemed suitable to take care of matters relating to women's reproductive health. Now it's a guy who thinks women are prairie voles.

Political Correctness - Again!

A new study argues that fertility can explain all the differences in the career paths between male and female scientists after they have entered the field with PhDs. I have downloaded the study but have not read it yet, because I got sidetracked into writing about the reactions to it in two posts and the related comments threads.

One post is by Matthew Yglesias and the other by Tyler Cowen, and to see why this comparison will be fun you need to know that Cowen labeled his post the "Politically Incorrect Paper of the Month" and that Yglesias answered by labeling his "Incorrect?" Guys drawing their swords for us. So cute.

Now that was mean of me. I'm quite happy to see Yglesias stand up for people like me, and I don't mind Cowen not standing up for people like me. It's just that I'm terribly sick of the term "politically incorrect" as some sort of a label of great valor, of great truth-telling, of great honesty. People who proudly say they are politically incorrect never smear themselves or anybody powerful, you know, and it doesn't take great courage to bash someone everybody else is also already bashing.

And it isn't great truth-telling to read a post about a study which starts with a group of both male and female PhDs in science and then somehow end up fighting over whether Lawrence Summers, the ex-president of Harvard, was unfairly treated when he suggested that his young daughter's relative uninterest in trucks is something scientists should take into account before forcing him to try to dig up more female scientists.

On a more elemental level, what all the politically incorrect people are saying is something like this: Ah! We knew it all along! Women can't do science because they are...women! Never mind if it's their brain that is at fault or their uterus. In any case, it's nature, and to talk about nature is politically incorrect even though it's also very majestic and makes us bold and heroic.

Or so I imagine the monologue to proceed. In reality fertility gets all mixed up with the way societies are structured and the way the labor market rewards people and it's naive to argue that these things have no differential effect on women. Just take the example of the tenure clock in academia. It starts striking right around the same time when most women also want to have children if they are going to have them. There is no biological need to organize tenure in this way, but the societal decision to do so interacts with women's fertility in ways which have differential outcomes for men and women.

The way academia is organized was initially based on celibate professors working and living in colleges, you know. The reason why it worked, sort of, for a long time was that having a full-time wife at home also lets the professor pretty much live and work at the college. Most women professors don't have full-time wives.

This topic pisses me off right now, because I still desire more election gloating time but it's always open season for feminists. Sigh.

I was thinking about something quite different the other day. It will be interesting to see if I can make the connection from that topic to this fertility debate. The topic I mused over was the Evolutionary Psychology argument (the capitalization refers to the weird type of arguments, not the field on the whole) that men somehow have evolved to be more interested in traveling and all things not at home. This has been used to explain why men took over trade, for example, and why women ended up with fewer resources. The reason for women's lesser adventurousness is now posited to be in our genes, and the world out there is seen as neutral to today's men and women, so that if women travel less it's supposed to be because of some meme in our pink brains.

But suppose now that I could morph into two versions, one male and one female, but otherwise with the same interests. Which of those two versions would I send to take a trip to Iran or to Saudi Arabia or to many other similar countries? The guy version, of course. Because the world out there is NOT neutral to men and women. There are countries where women can't do anything much on their own, and in many places a woman traveling alone is fair game for rape and harassment. In a way the most fanatic Evolutionary Psychologists forget that the environment in which we live is not just the natural environment but also the human-made environment, and that for women the environment also consists of the way men behave. What is tricky about all this is that a man might never "see" the environment a woman sees, because he will not be treated in the same manner, and so he could quite sincerely not see the immediate problems women face.

And I haven't even pointed out the fact that the average woman has less money for traveling than the average man and that in many cultures women are not allowed to travel without permission from a father or a husband and so on.

This probably doesn't carry into the other topic. My intention is to point out that to talk about "fertility" as something purely biological and somehow outside our ability to incorporate into the way the society actually works is a cop-out.

ALS And The Military

A story I read last week suggests that the veterans of the First Gulf War suffer from ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, at about twice the rate of the general population. ALS is a horrible terminal disease with no established causes and no known treatments. Even with a doubled risk, veterans are quite unlikely to get ALS as it is a rare disease.

The golden lining in this small additional dark cloud hovering over the heads of war veterans is that we might now be able to find whether ALS is linked to the various kinds of toxins the military routinely handles. If this turns out to be true, the knowledge so gained could be of wider help.

A Week Later

I'm still smiling, because of the election results. Smiling uses more muscles than sitting there all sad and grumpy. But I'm being left behind in the new rush to start a circular firing squad among the progressives and liberals. Our new overladies and overlords, by the way. You might have to be reminded of that teensy-weensy fact, given the so-called liberal media's take of the election results as just further proof of the right-wing victories in America. Whatever, I say, while inhaling a freshly-opened chocolate bar.

I'm going to rejoin the fight, sure, but for a few more days or weeks I'm going to do stuff like washing the windows (almost done), learning a new difficult martial arts movement (not so done) and stocking up on necessities such as salt and toilet paper and red underwear. And I'm also going to continue the etching of my name in stone for all times to come. As soon as I've decided whether ofthesnakes is a last name or not.

We are a community now, medears. And what a community it is! No amount of bickering or in-fighting will change that. Or the fact that we won.

Statistics Primer. Part 6: Wrapping it All Up In A Nice Package

My series on a primer for statistics is pretty much done. I could go on a little bit longer about how confidence intervals can be improved when a poll uses cluster sampling, for example, but you can google "bootstrap confidence intervals" yourself. And it's worth reminding all you erudite and nice readers that no poll is better than the basic plan for collecting the data. If the researchers did not use random sampling and/or if the sampling frame was selected poorly, the results mean nothing outside the actual group that is being questioned. The crucial question to answer is whether the findings can be generalized to the population that we are interested in, for example, to all Americans, and a poor polling plan makes the answer always negative.

Even a random sample can always be erroneous because of the effect of pure luck, but the sampling error can be quantified as discussed in the last installment to this series. But when a sample is non-randomly drawn, it can also be biased, and we cannot quantify the bias. For instance, a study which tries to find out the health habits of Americans by only asking people at the emergency clinics of hospitals is going to be biased. That is a bad way of trying to get a random sample, because it will oversample people who are sick right now and it is also likely to oversample poor people who have no regular general practitioner to go to. A similar problem may be created in polls which use land-line telephones, if the individuals who only have a cell phone are different from those who have a land-line phone. It's possible that the group these polls reach is older, on average, and more likely to be at home. If being older and spending more time at home answering the phone makes ones opinions different from those of people who flit about with a cell phone in their belt, then the polls could be biased.

A further selection bias in polls may come from non-response bias. Lots of people refuse to answer polls altogether. If the people who refuse have different opinions, on average, than those who eagerly chat with pollsters, then the results are likely to be biased, i.e., not generalizable to the population we want to learn about, say, likely voters.

Then there is the way questions are framed in polls. It is well known that a certain answer can be elicited by just changing the question. Introducing clear judgemental components is one nifty trick to achieve this. Or one could use versions of the old "Have you started brushing your teeth yet?" One reason why polls on what to do about abortions get such different results is in the way the questions are framed.

Statistics is a very large field, and what I've touched in this short series of posts is just a very small square inch of the field. I linked to some internet courses on statistics earlier on and I encourage you to pursue more study on your own. Or you can ask me questions either by e-mail or in the comments threads, and if I know the answer I will let you know what it is. Statistics can be fun! Honest!

To finish off these meanderings, I want to talk about something that pisses me off: the way the term "statistically significant" is misused all over the place. First, this term is a technical one, and the "significant" part does NOT have its everyday meaning. If a finding is statistically significant it could be totally unimportant in everyday utility, not earth-shaking at all, even trivial and frivolous. And a statistically nonsignificant finding does NOT mean that the study found nothing of importance. Let me clarify all this a little.

We have talked about confidence intervals in this series. If you have taken a statistics intro course you may remember that the topic of confidence intervals is usually followed by the topic of hypothesis testing, and that is the application where statistical significance is commonly introduced. "Hypothesis" is just a guess or a theory you have about the likely magnitude of some number or relationship between numbers, and "testing" means that we use data we have collected to see how your guess fares.

The way this testing goes is by setting the theory you DON'T support as the one you try to disprove. The theory you don't support is usually the conventional knowledge you try to prove wrong or the idea that some new policy or treatment has no effect and so on, and it's called "the null hypothesis". The theory you secretly want to prove is then called the "alternative hypothesis". And yes, statisticians are terrible wordsmiths.

So your hypothesis testing tries to prove the null hypothesis wrong. If you can prove it wrong then the alternative hypothesis must be right. Of course for this to work you must frame the two hypotheses so that nothing falls outside them. An example might be useful here:

Suppose that you have a new treatment for the symptoms of some chronic disease. You run a study where you give the new treatment to some patients randomly and the old treatment to a similar group of patients, also randomly selected. You then measure the reduction in unpleasant symptoms in the two groups, and you use these data to determine if the new treatment is worth while. Now, the null hypothesis here could be that the new treatment is the same as the old treatment. The alternative hypothesis would then be that the new treatment is different; it could be either better or worse than the old treatment. If you decide to test this pair of hypotheses, you are said to do a two-sided test of hypotheses, because both large and small values in your experimental group might be evidence that the new treatment is different from the old one. It could be better or it could be worse.

It is more likely that you are interested in finding if the new treatment is better than the old one. This would be a one-sided test of hypotheses, and you would write the null hypothesis differently. It would be that the new treatment is either the same as the old treatment or worse. Then the alternative hypothesis would be that the new treatment is better than the old treatment. If fewer bad symptoms is what the test measures then only low values in the experimental group would support the idea that the new treatment works better.

Given that you are using sample data to do all this, you add something like the staple of the confidence intervals to your testing procedure, and you report the results in a form which tells the informed reader how likely the disproving of the null hypothesis is to work in the population rather than in the sample. The staple we use in the two-sided test of hypotheses is exactly the same as we used for confidence interval construction, except that we construct the interval for the way the world looks if the null hypothesis is true! Remember the 95% confidence interval? In a two-sided test of hypothesis, using this level of confidence translates into a 5% significance level of the results, meaning that the interval we have created around the possible mean under the null hypothesis is so long that it only omits the utmost 2.5% of the possible distribution of sample means at each end of the distribution.

Now suppose that the made-up study I have described here finds that the sample mean of bad symptoms in the experimental group is so low that the probability of such a value drawn from a population actually centering on the average symptoms from the old treatment is at most 2.5%. Then statisticians using the 5% level of significance would argue that the study disproves the null hypothesis that the old treatment is no different from the old one.

If the study had used a one-sided test of hypothesis, the story changes slightly. It's as if we are only going to look at the staple arrows missing the bull's eye when they do it on one side of the dartboard (read the earlier posts for this metaphor), and we are going to hone down the staple width appropriately to do that. Thus, a 90% confidence interval based on the null hypothesis would leave 5% in each end of the distribution uncovered, and in my example we'd only look at the lower end of the distribution to see if the experimental results fall into that area or not. If they do, we reject the null hypothesis at the same 5% level of significance (or at 0.05 level if you go all decimal on me). If the results fall elsewhere on the distribution, we keep the null hypothesis and find the results not statistically significant.

But of course finding that the new treatment is no better than the old one IS significant! And finding that something is "statistically significant" just means that the null hypothesis was rejected at the 0.05 or 5% level, that the researchers used either a 95% or a 90% confidence interval for the null hypothesis data, depending on whether the test was two-sided or one-sided.

Likewise, I could make up a silly study about something quite silly and find the results statistically significant without saying anything at all about their real-world relevance. Note also that we could find something to be statistically significant and that something could be such a minor effect in reality that it would hardly matter at all.

The convention is to call the results "statistically significant" if the null hypothesis is rejected at the 0.05 or 5% level. If the researchers used 0.01 or 1% level in their calculations, then any rejecting of the null hypothesis that takes place is "statistically very significant". That's all these terms mean.

Many studies now dispense with the terms altogether and instead report something called the p-values. These are the actual probabilities of getting the experimental sample result or one more extreme if the null hypothesis in fact was the correct one. The smaller the p-value is the less likely the null hypothesis looks. You can always compare the p-values in your head to the 0.05 and 0.01 conventional values if you so wish.

The end of this particular road. I hope that you have enjoyed the series and that you will now go out and learn the zillions of additional things in statistics.
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Part 1Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Chocolate News

About the wonderful health effects of chocolate:

A small amount of dark chocolate a day can thin the blood and cut the risk of clots in much the same way as taking aspirin, researchers have found.

Researchers carried out tests on 'chocoholics' who were disqualified from another study because they could not give up their habit.

Don't read the whole article as you will then find out about the horrors of the fat and sugar in chocolate and the usual recommendations that we should all chew more tree trunks for our health.

Don't you dare to make my major sin into something good for health! I want to revel in the evilness of this gushy and mellow love affair I have with chocolate. I want to think that my sinfulness qualifies me to be a blogger of some real serious calibre! If chocolate becomes a health food I will have to initiate some serious tree-chewing and my viper teeth will be dulled. And I have to take up some other serious drug habits which might affect the level of my writing. Downwards, I said, downwards! Stop laughing.

It's hard work being evil.

When Burning to Death Is Preferable To Life

This is so awful I almost didn't write about:

Increasing numbers of Afghan women are committing suicide by setting fire to themselves to escape difficult lives, according to NGOs based in the country.

They say women forced into marriage or suffering chronic abuse are killing themselves out of desperation.

Although estimates are difficult to calculate, one group says cases of self-immolation in the capital have doubled since last year.

Cases are said to be reported every day in the western city of Herat.

A system which allows women no other way out when things are bad is horrible to contemplate, but somehow this quote hit me even harder:

She said the choice of self-immolation may be influenced by the fact that many of the women sought shelter in Iran, where the practise is more common.

It's as if the article writes about shaving body hair or about hairstyles or something similar, but the topic is the best way to kill oneself in a world where women are pawns on the chessboard.

It's difficult to say how common this horror is, but it obviously exists. Imagine being a woman born into a family which doesn't value women, imagine not being able to read or write or really go out on your own safely, and then imagine that you are given to some totally unknown people as a payment for your father's debts. How is this not slavery?

Grrrl Power In The Senate

Sixteen women now in the United States Senate. Eek! They are everywhere! Hide!

Women are also around 51% of the American population, and the mismatch between this little fact and the male dominance of most of American politics is one of those topics which brings in the most extreme and unproven theories about why women are so rare in the corridors of power as to be, perversely, quite noticeable. All you need is one Hillary Clinton, talked about everywhere, to make it look to a misogynist as if the immediate takeover of the world by estrogen-crazed petticoat armies is already well advanced.

What isn't discussed quite as often is the way a two-party system with the winner-takes-all thingy makes it much harder for women to be elected, especially to the Senate, where a Senator represents the whole state. Now, women are fairly used to being represented by men but neither women nor men are quite as used to being represented by women, and all sorts of deeply hidden fears crop up when it looks like that lady with the mascara is going to be a stand-in for Joe Sixpack. Or Jane Sixpack, but note how we tend to think of the "man-in-the-street" in this context.

Countries with multi-party systems tend to have more women in politics. Also more representatives of various types of minority groups.

Statisticking

Think Progress links to a wingnut blog which talks about murder rates in Philadelphia and in Baghdad:

In a post this morning, Wizbang blogger Alexander K. McClure compared the homicide rate in Philadelphia to the situation in Iraq:

Without looking at the URL or the headline at the top, try to figure out which city this is. Each red dot represents a murder in the past year. Isn't that a quagmire? Isn't it time to consider pulling out?

The city McClure pointed to is Philadelphia. It had 337 homicides between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31, 2006.

If you click on the link I gave to Think Progress you can see a map of Philadelphia with red dots for murders all over it. Horrendous, yes, but not comparable to Baghdad at all. Think Progress points out that the equivalent time period in Baghdad had at least 53,200 murders.

But even comparing the two cities with the same time period is insufficient as we also need to know how many people each city has, to figure out what the relative rate of murders is.

I'm not sure why all this is so hard for right-wing bloggers to get.

Suing Borat

The frat boys in the movie are trying to do that:

Two of Cohen's targets — fraternity boys who made drunken, insulting comments about women and minorities — are suing 20th Century Fox and three production companies. The lawsuit claims that a production crew took the students to a bar to "loosen up" before participating in what they were told would be a documentary to be shown outside of the United States, and that they signed waivers after drinking heavily. Studio spokesman Gregg Brilliant said the lawsuit "has no merit."

All sorts of interesting questions crop up on the basis of that quote about when a waiver is clearly understood, about whether what Cohen did with his unwilling co-actors was ethical and, most interestingly, whether you can sue someone because you have shown yourself to be a racist and sexist quite voluntarily, but only because you thought it would be some other people who will learn it, not your own homeboys.

I haven't seen the movie yet, and I'm still deciding on whether to see it or not. But I've viewed several YouTube cuts of Borat's humor, and I can guess what the movie will be like.

Cohen's M.O. is to take a joke to its very extreme, where it almost stops from being funny or indeed does stop, and the laughter is at least partly a response to the shock that he actually did go that far. An almost painful kind of laughter.

I don't mind that kind of humor too much, because it can even teach me something about my own ugly aspects. What I haven't liked in the short bits I've seen is the cruelty of some of Cohen's humor, the way it laughs at others, not at Cohen, and from a higher moral perch. Perhaps because the basic idea in the movie: to film people pretty unaware of the plot, is in itself a cruel idea.

Borat is still very funny, though.

Contraception Is Not The Answer

I somehow got on the mailing list of the people who keep saying that contraception is not the answer. I'd like to know what the question is, actually.

So far I've been told that oral contraceptives cause breast cancer and that it doesn't matter if they protect against other types of cancers and that the hormonal patch causes death. Nothing about how much death giving birth causes, of course.

There are days when I don't want to get out of bed because my calendar might show that the year is around 1000 C.E., and that there is no such thing as human rights. I thought the election would give me a few weeks of breathing space from this mad race back to patriarchy but I guess not.

The next logical stage is that I'll be put on the mailing list of someone who argues that modern medicine is not the answer because medications have side-effects, too. And then there will be a mailing list about how we shouldn't cut our fingernails because they grow for a purpose only gods can ascertain and who are we to argue back to gods.

Well, I guess I can argue back, given that I'm a goddess.

The Womb Wars II

It's like the Second World War, only it takes place in the uteri of women. In this frame the First Womb Wars are over abortion, and once the fundies and other nutcases win them, the Second Womb Wars will be about fertility, the banishing of contraception and very large families for white people.

The Nation has an article on the Biblically based movement called Quiverfulls. These are Christianist families who have decided that a literal reading of the Bible requires them to have as many children as possible. Contraception is evil and large families are needed as the arrows in the next Womb War, to be waged against the Muslims and also against liberals and progressives.

In the preparations for this war the men in the family are the commanders and women are the privates who are expected to make the children who are the weapons and ammunition. It's a breeding war, and for it to work the women privates must be willing to obey the orders of their commanders. You can guess how that comes about: by telling women that God is the only power who has a right to decide when they will have children and God works in mysterious ways, largely through the sex drives of their husbands. That's why it looks like the men are in charge of all fertility.

Breeding wars. How did we come back to this way of thinking? Almost all the recent rises in the standard of living in the West is attributable to greater education and women's increased participation in the labor market. Both of these depend on smaller family size. Think about what happens to a family with, say, ten children. First, such a family is very expensive to feed and clothe and house and educate. Second, at least one parent must take care of the children full-time, so only one parent can work for money. You'll be squeezed from both ends financially, and your children are very unlikely to end up as the decision-makers of the society. Unless, of course, the society steps in and funds some of the food and the housing and the education. But such a stepping in is part of the devilish liberal/progressive plan, the plan these warriors of fertility are supposed to fight. So what is a God-fearing fundamentalist going to do?

Suffer poverty, it seems to me. But the returns are great! A future filled with nothing but little tow-headed fundamentalist white Christianists everywhere! There will be no space for Muslims in that world! Or for animals or plants, either, but God will provide a new planet when this one is used up.

I'm not making this up. Read the article, if you dare. It's scary stuff, because the number one enemy of the Quiverfulls is....you guessed it, feminists. We are to blame for the downfall of religion and the Western culture and unhappy children and probably also my inability to find fresh yeast for my bread baking. We are so bloody powerful! It's astonishing that we have managed to get all that destruction done but still can't get paid maternity leave in this country or more than a small minority of women into the U.S. Congress or more than a token woman or two into the Supreme Court.

But attacking feminism in the Womb Wars is very rational, as feminism is the ideology which would stand in the way of this cunning plan to make every wife into a little breeding factory with the on-button firmly under the forefinger of the husband. I find it all terribly sad, to be honest. That people pick-and-choose isolated sentences from a book written nearly two thousand years ago by nomadic herders and then let these isolated sentences overrule their complete lives, at the cost of possibly great environmental degradation and personal poverty and subjugation for all women and girls, that is so sad. But then the Quiverfulls would think I'm sad and deluded and will roast nicely in their hell for an eternity. Except that goddesses don't go to hell, but I understand they wouldn't know anything about goddesses.

Where was I? Oh yes, breeding. The Evil Example of the consequences of feminism is Europe. The Quiverfulls see Europe's falling birth rates and increasing immigration as evidence of Eurabia, a place which soon will see the few remaining white women in burqas. The problem with this argument is that feminism has not been anywhere near as powerful in the European countries with the lowest birthrates (Italy, Spain) as it has been here in the United States, and that the countries in Europe with most vibrant feminist movements actually have higher birth rates than the more conservative/religious countries. And Japan, the country with one of the lowest birth rates of all, is quite patriarchal.

The Womb Wars are an odd military spectacle, because it is women who are supposed to do the fighting on both sides. Thus, not only the Quiverfulls try to make their women have many children but also some on the so-called secular side:

But how well are these arguments being received in the larger society? There are signs of denominations and churches picking up the Quiverfull philosophy, not least among these the statements made by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler last year, who wrote that deliberate childlessness among Christian couples is "moral rebellion" and "an absolute revolt against God's design." Meanwhile, Phillip Longman hardly offers a left-wing counterpoint. Instead, he's searching--at the request of the Democratic Leadership Council, which published his policy proposals in its Blueprint magazine--for a way to appeal to the same voters Carlson is organizing: a typically "radical middle" quest to figure out how Democrats can make nice with Kansas.

"Who are these evangelicals?" asks Longman. "Is there anything about them that makes them inherently prowar and for tax cuts for the rich?" No, he concludes. "What's irreducible about these religious voters is that they're for the family." Asked whether the absolutist position Quiverfull takes on birth control, let alone abortion, might interfere with his strategy, Longman admits that abortion rights would have to take a back seat but that, in politics, "nobody ever gets everything they need."

Aside from the centrist tax policies Longman is crafting to rival Carlson's, he urges a return to patriarchy--properly understood, he is careful to note, as not just male domination but also increased male responsibility as husbands and fathers--on more universal grounds. Taking a long view as unsettling in its way as Pastor Bartly Heneghan's rapture talk, Longman says that no society can survive to reproduce itself without following patriarchy. "As secular and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, people adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default," Longman argues, pointing to cyclical demographic upheavals from ancient Greece and Rome to the present day, when falling birthrates have consistently augured conservative, even reactionary comebacks, marked by increased nationalism, religious fundamentalism and deep societal conservatism. Presenting a thinly veiled ultimatum to moderates and liberals, Longman cites the political sea change in the Netherlands in recent years, where, he charges, a population decline led to a vacuum that "Muslim extremists came in to fill." Though individual, nonpatriarchal elements of society may die out, he says, societies as a whole will survive and, "through a process of cultural evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as patriarchy reemerge."

I'm sure you got the gist of Longman's argument: It doesn't matter which side of the ideological fence a woman might find herself; she must breed. Well, that makes the choice ever so simple for those of us who prefer to decide on the number of children we wish to have without Longman butting in. We are going to stay out of this war, because it offers us nothing. Except for the return of patriarchy, that is something Longman does offer. If I understand him correctly, liberalism is only for men, because women are the privates in the breeding wars in that army, too.

It's hard to know which is the chicken and which is the egg in the breeding wars thinking and in the great pining for more patriarchy to return. My guess is that the causes and effects are intertwined, but both racism and sexism are strong drives in those who write about this shit. But as an idea the breeding wars is about as clever as the idea of a global nuclear war.
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The thread on Pandagon on Amanda's post about this shows how the discussion on this always becomes one about cultures.

An Election Map

This map is a fun way of studying the results of the midterm elections.

Investor's Business Daily

This conservative business publication has decided to take a rather ugly stance against the newly elected Democratic majority in the Congress. First, an editorial about the elections began like this:

War On Terror: Aside from the Democrats and their media allies, the only people happy about the election results are the terrorists who want to kill us. They got the Congress they were hoping for.

Then another editorial argued that Congressman John Conyers aids and abets terrorists:

Congress: The likely new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says he's just fighting bigotry in leading a Democrat jihad to deny law enforcement key terror-fighting tools. But he is in the pocket of Islamists.

John Conyers, son of a leftist Detroit union activist, represents the largest Arab population in the country. His district includes Dearborn, Mich., nicknamed "Dearbornistan" by locals fed up with cultural encroachment and terror fears from a steady influx of Mideast immigrants.

Conyers, who runs an Arabic version of his official Web site, does the bidding of these new constituents and the militant Islamist activists who feed off them. They want to kill the Patriot Act and prevent the FBI from profiling Muslim suspects in terror investigations. They also want to end the use of undisclosed evidence against suspected Arab terrorists in deportation proceedings.

Now, this is not fact-based or terribly civil, either. It sounds a lot more like some of the most extreme wingnut blogs than a respectable business magazine. So times change...

But these editorials do offer a useful example of the post-traumatic stress disorder which seems to affect so many right-wingers in this country: Everything, but everything is about the Islamists who wish to kill us and nothing suffices in fighting them, even if we then also kill hundreds of thousands of totally innocent people.

But why these people believe so strongly that a Democratic control of the Congress would stop the hunting of terrorists is a mystery. Well, not really. Didn't Cheney himself only recently warn us that a Democratic victory is a victory for the terrorists?

So You Ask Me, What I Think of Sting's Dowland Album.

Posted by olvlz in response to an e-mail request.

They’ve played large swaths of Sting’s John Dowland album on the radio, looking at the song list at Amazon I was surprised to see that I’ve heard most of it without having bought it. It’s the state of classical music programming on public radio these days that this is probably more exposure than Dowland’s vocal music has gotten throughout the previous decade. Believing that Dowland’s songs are probably the best body of English language songs by a single composer in the classical repertory I should welcome this unexpected development. Someone asked me what I thought about it.

First, if you like this disc, there is nothing wrong with that. Much as some might like to make musical taste a moral issue, the fact is it isn’t one. At least not outside of a given musical context and most non-musicians don’t seem to care about that. And despite the defects in this album there are actually some good things about it. At his best Sting has a sort of mitigated innocent quality that reminds me of Peter Pears, somewhere between his recordings of Peter Grimes and Billy Budd. Though not Pear’s singing of Dowland. Sting has talent. And it is wonderful to hear again how far lute playing has come during the past forty years. It’s gone from being a restoration project to real artistry. Edin Karamazov is a fine player. So what comes below is keeping these things in mind.

Sting’s voice is not up to singing the music, it is shot. He sounds like a someone twenty years older than he is. I’m not familiar with his other work but guess that is where he shot it. If he is interested in singing this kind of music Sting should go to a competent vocal coach who specializes in repairing damaged voices*. Love and intelligence, both there, aren’t any substitute for what’s missing. While he is doing that he might also consult someone who can help him with his diction. Dowland’s songs are great, truly great, settings of words that mean something. His texts are often very high quality and a lot more subtle than sung by sting. Obscuring that meaning through misconception would be bad enough but the words do have to be understood to mean anything in the first place. Studying the texts, finding the deeper meaning of them should be the beginning of learning a song, not an optional extra.

Some of the praise for Sting’s Dowland singing have mentioned the “world weary” quality of it. That’s good as far as it goes. Dowland did indulge in the full flow of late 16th, early 17th century melancholy, the most fashionable emotion of the time. The famous pun on his last name, translating something like “Always Dowland, always suffering,” has pigeon holed him rather badly. Dowland was a much deeper and broader composer than that. Both his instrumental music and his songs prove so. World weariness is attractive for a little while but then, enough already. For a rock singer, Sting’s delivery of some of these songs is quite shockingly lacking in edginess, they sound tired.

The best thing about Sting having produced this album will be if some of his fans go on to try some of the real thing. If he manages that it would be a real service to music. I would particularly recommend Dowland’s part-songs, for several voices. Many of the Lute Song renditions are actually reductions of those. While the solo versions are masterpieces, those are even greater examples of composition. There are a lot of albums available and I’m not going to make specific recommendations. I hope you get to experience how much more these songs can be.

Dare I hope that some will actually look at the music and perform it with friends**? If Sting really likes this music maybe that’s what he should do. Surely in his neighborhood in Britain there are enough amateur singers to form a group to sing at home for their own pleasure and edification.

* The long out of print How To Improve Your Speaking Voice by Dr. Georgiana Peacher has some fine advice about restoring and preserving your voice. The advice applies to singing as well as speaking. Someone really should republish that book.

** Dover Publications has reprinted a lot of Dowland’s vocal music, with guitar transcriptions for those who don’t have access to a lute. Almost any university with a music department should have Dowland’s music in the library.

Found Art? or Dada is not Dead.

What the spam filter left behind

Posted by olvlzl

Subject: in cartilaginous as mainline

There are no Facts; only interpretations of Facts. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: Why pay for the cow when the milk is free? Never eat the yellow snow. A Frank Zappa song. Little enemies and little wounds must not be despised.
The best things in life are free. Possible Interpretation: Women do not like the nice guys. People who live in glass houses have to answer the door.

Where Does The Left Turn Now?

Not where the media is trying to point us.

Posted by olvlzl.

Something enormous changed with the defeat of George Allen, something that changes everything. We’ve got our foot in the door. We’ve even got a few seats at the table. We are part of a broad coalition that can actually do something if it stays together and acts like adults. There are so many problems to address and we’ve only got two years guaranteed to do it in. Choices have to be made because that’s how politics work. I’ve got my wish list but most of it is not achievable for the present time. I think it would shock some of you how far to the left that list would place me. It certainly wouldn’t get me an invitation to go on a talk show. I, dear friends, am far enough left that my kind is never asked on chat shows even once. It places me firmly to the left of Barney Frank, it even places me just to the left of the wonderful Bernie Sanders. Unlike last Monday, today I can start work on it.

But enough of me. What can we do to keep people from getting killed, to keep the environment alive, to feed, house, clothe and educate The People? Second, how can we push the victory of last week forward to prevent the Republicans and their media shills from destroying the prospects of this victory and overturning it through lies and propaganda? They are already hard at work as you read this.

One of my goals in blogging is to try to figure out how a politician has to deal with the diverse agendas of their constituents, to present the limits of the possible as well as the real possibilities. Those posts have been controversial but I don’t think they are that far off the mark. No politician in their right mind will try to do the impossible if it means that they will lose the next election to someone worse than they are. No political activist should waste their limited time and resources trying to push them to do so. It is sheerest and most irresponsible idiocy to do it. While often mistaken as a means of pushing change, for the left in the United States of today, it is an invitation to be ignored.

Every day wasted on futility counts as a wasted week for the left. Our enemies have more money than God and they own the media. You can have the most brilliant case for your cause but without the consent of The People pushing any part of that prematurely is a waste of time. Even the clearest causes, Abolition, Woman’s Suffrage, Workers Rights, Civil Rights took decades of work in the face of a public that was not there yet. Looking back it all seems so easy. Reading the writings of the activists themselves it is clear that it was not instant progress, it was incremental and hard and there were setbacks along with the progress.

The history of the human species is largely a record of the powerful having their foot firmly on the neck of the powerless. Democracy, equality, justice, these are still novel innovations. Even here, where they constitute our rightful civic religion, we can see that fact demonstrated by the struggle to retain them. Insisting on issues whose time is clearly not here is worse than folly, it is damaging to what is possible. It helped give us Bush, it certainly reelected him and extended the Republicans’ control in 2004. Children, Women and Men will die today because he is in office. They would have been alive tomorrow if Gore had won Florida big enough so it couldn’t have been stolen.

After the past six years anyone on the left who cannot see that it is essential to win elections, to take office, to work to do what is possible to improve things, is hopeless. If six years of Bush II can’t teach you that lesson then you are ineducable. The left has to ignore anyone who refuses to face that all-important fact. We can’t bother with them anymore, we don’t have the time to indulge their personal luxury.

Getting the United States out of Iraq is the most important thing, not because getting out will make the situation better, it’s not going to be better. We have to get out because staying will make things worse than leaving will make them. That will be hard and dangerous enough for starters. It will probably take a lot longer than any of us wants but it is essential.

Securing the Vote, it is going to be tempting for that to be swept aside but it is essential that it be fixed too and now. Without a secured Vote there is every possibility that the Republicans will steal another Presidential election. Paperless voting has to be made illegal. Any method of voting that requires an unrealistic knowledge of advanced technology has to be made illegal. The method of electing the four federal offices, those which give us the federal government, has to be made uniform across the entire country. Both how it is cast and how it is counted. That one system has to be as familiar to Voters as using a toothbrush. The idiocy of the system we have now is clear and you are never going to have a better chance of fixing that than you do now. There will be court challenges and the partisan Republican judges who infest our judicial system will do whatever they can to prevent democracy, it’s what they do. We will have to roll over them somehow to get anything done.

Along with the Vote media reform, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, Equal time provisions and mandated, required community service requirements are exactly as important as securing The Vote. Democrats owe nothing to the corporate media, the media are our enemies. A democracy needs a real news media because an uninformed population can’t have a democracy. We don’t have a real news media, we have a corporate propaganda machine. Start with Public Radio and Televison. They should not get a single cent until Steve Inskeep and Jim Lehrer have to present the news as fact, not as Republican spin. But until the entire broadcast and cabloid media are forced to do the job of the media in a democracy they will be a danger to it. They sold the country the Bush putsch and the Iraq war. Any questions?

In one of the old Dr. Who episodes, the Cybermen are about to destroy the Earth by crashing a space ship into it. Control of the ship by the Dr. and his friends is prevented by a lock with three logic code keys. One of the good guys says that it’s impossible to solve them in time. Adrick, the math wiz, says “Then I suggest we start immediately”. Good advice when the job is all important and the time is so short.

What I Learned This Past Hour

The funny pages are funnier when you know the Republicans won't have a free hand next year.

Someone, Please, Ask Bush to Define "Nexus" At His Next News Conference

Posted by olvlzl.

W.House brands Iran, Hezbollah as terror "nexus"

Having been among those predicting that Bush would try to start a third war during his last days in office, this doesn't bode well. Looks like they're still thinking about attacking Iran. What is it about these Republicans? Did they think that things could just go back to the way they were last week?

Ending the Bush Wars is the first priority of the Democratic Majority, exposing the lies that got us into Iraq and the media that sold the American People those lies should play a prominent role in the earliest days of the new Congress. Nothing else can be done until that is stopped. We had better forget about "cleaning up the mess" because there is absolutely no way that the mess can be cleaned up. Once Bush invaded, toppled the standing government that was the only thing holding Iraq together and putting idiots from the Republican establishment in charge - Paul Bremer belongs in the dock at the Hague - the bloodbath was guranteed and unavoidable.

Americans need to learn a lesson before these foreign adventures destroy us. We have limited ability to control what happens in other countries around the world. Yes, we can overthrow a government, yes we can destabilize a country but we seldom can control what comes afterwards. That was the real lesson of Vietnam, Cambodia,... and now Iraq. It all looks so simple when it's abstracted by those with slight knowledge, the neo-cons and other university based fantasists. It's all so much more complicated than they have time to think about between meetings, luncheons and speaking engagements. The blood spilled has a way of being just too real.

Without a Name

for my parents, olvlzl

All of the dead, some in uniform, parents, old, children too young.
Holes in families, empty houses. Shadows on people. A name in rock.

A person remembers someone. A town, a life.
Countries give speeches. Speeches about speeches.
Speeches about people. Too far away to know.

And I can't tell you. You had to see them. In their towns. Both sides.

Troubled Youth, The Green Party At the Age Of Majority

Posted by olvlzl.

John Eder, the only Green State Legislator in Maine is listed in Wikipedia as the highest office holder in the history of the Green Party of the United States*. I was truly sorry to read that he had lost his reelection bid. I like John. He’s smart and daring and has a future in practical politics. The Greens should have a presence in the Maine Legislature, more than just one person. I would love to see a Green caucus that could hold the balance of power in coalition with progressive Democrats and such independents as might constitute a leftist block. This time John Eder’s constituents in Portland didn’t see it that way, electing a Democrat to replace him. But his loss and his position as the Green holding the highest office after twenty-one years of dedication, hard work and great expense by Green Party members all with wildly disproportionate publicity forces a number of questions.

Why would rank-and-file Greens continue allowing the show candidacies favored by their leadership when it has proven to be counter-productive? Nader in 2000 was certainly enough for any sane person to learn that a Green Presidential candidate can only serve to put the worst president in the history of the country into place. That is the only political result that Greens have achieved in a presidential election, certainly not what they hoped for.


This year’s Green candidate for the Senate in Pennsylvania, Carl Romanelli, with the clear and gloating financial help of Republican fat-cats, came one court ruling away from risking the return of Rick Santorum to the Senate. As we have seen that would have made Dick Cheney the deciding vote in a dead-locked Senate. Instead of Leahy running the Judiciary Committee it would have been Arlen “Rubber Stamp for Roberts and Alito” Specter again. And that’s only one committee in the Senate. It’s time for Green Party Members to force their leadership to stop playing pretend before it contributes to the extension of Republican control of the United States.

In the election just concluded, two Greens who ran for governor are listed on the national party’s website as their great successes. Rich Whitney in Illinois got 11% of the vote, Pat LaMarche, again in Maine, got just under 10% of the vote. Clearly neither came close to being elected.

In Maine, my home state, it seemed for a time that Pat LaMarche and the two other “third- party” candidates on the ballot could have succeeded in only one thing, insuring a victory by the paleo-Republican, Chandler Woodcock over the Democrat, Governor John Baldacci. Along with the certain negative direction for the environment and possible overturning of recently passed gay rights legislation, that a Woodcock administration would bring; his victory would have brought the end of Dirigo Health, Baldacci’s attempt at expanding health care to all uninsured Mainers. I wonder how many Greens are uninsured. I wonder how many of them are not fully-covered, white-collar workers who aren’t dependent on the minimum wage. That certainly wouldn’t have been raised by a Chandler Woodcock with a veto pen anymore than a Republican controlled Congress would have. And to top it off, LaMarch wasn’t even the top vote getter among the not-a-chance, “third-party” candidates in the race, Barbara Merrill getting much more than double her percentage of the vote. Though she did swamp People's Hero Phillip Morris NaPier** who got about one-percent.

While I would never downplay the honorable, very important and often thankless job of serving in local government, the Greens have not even had much success on that level. In the figures available for this election they have had a grand total of 38 wins listed on their national web-site.

Greens who look at the glossed over election figures touted as such a great success by the parties leadership should really ask themselves if they are getting their time and money’s worth. Clearly not. I don’t see that they have ever gotten close to a thousand office holders nationwide, thought I haven’t had much luck finding those figures. Why not trumpet the success by the numbers? Non-Greens should look at the Green’s seldom mentioned electoral record to see what the twenty-one years of struggle by Greens in the United States has built. Those who hope for a national third party should seriously consider, with all that work and hype and the history of failed third-parties here, if that is anything but a romantic pipe-dream.

Am I suggesting that Greens give up? Not at all. After twenty-one years they should grow up. Greens are not a national party, there is no chance that they will win national office without a lot of ground work taking decades. They should stop wasting their supporters’ time, money and hope on these stupid, counter-productive, show candidacies. Getting on the ballot doesn’t matter much when there is no chance that it’s going to win you any elections. Study the electoral history of those states where Greens have been on the ballot if you doubt that is true. One, only one state legislative seat in one of the Greenest states in the country and that in one of the greenest cities in the country, now lost.

When they first started in my state I was hoping that Greens would present a real alternative to the, then, failing Democrats. Tip O’Neill, Tom Foley and a host of other ineffectual leaders had me tearing my hair too. The Greens’ decision to have a radically decentralized structure gave me hope that they were going to build from the grass roots, though even I knew that any leftist political meeting that ran on the basis of consensus wouldn’t work.

How did such an allegedly decentralized party start down the path of nominating that black hole of ego, Ralph Nader? Someone too conceited to even join the party that honored him with its nomination? Who was responsible for encouraging Romanelli in his Republican financed, Republican enabling spoiler campaign? Anyone in the leadership of the party who was enthusiastic about those is just too stupid to listen to, they should be replaced with people who have a clear head.

Greens, look at where you have actually had some success on the local level. Build in those places, get more than one person on the local bodies and make certain that they do a good job. That is where your resources and time will get you the success you deserve. Work with progressive Democrats and independents to form an effective power base. Get the people their money’s worth of vital services, educate their children, make their streets safe and then you can ask them to trust you with larger responsibilities. If you have built strong bridges with the Democrats in your area they might sometimes agree to not run a weaker candidate against a stronger Green one. They might also nominate a Green who looks like a safer bet. It’s certainly worth trying. Look at Sanders in Vermont. What has the present strategy gotten you?

A state legislature is the logical next step but only if your candidates can win. Don’t run against anyone if the results will be an even worse candidate has a good chance to win the race. That is the Nader-spoiler model, it will only win you enemies who could have been your allies.

I began this by praising the daring of John Eder. I should have said intelligent daring. In their wrap up of the elections the U.S. Greens include this statement:

Strong antiwar vote in favor of warhawk Democrats shows a disconnect in U.S. politics; only Greens offered an antiwar platform; Greens warn that Democrats in Congress will do little to reverse Bush's foreign policy

Democrats? Since it was the Green candidate Nader who helped put Bush in place to wage his war of conquest this prediction presented in the form fact isn’t daring, it’s intolerable arrogance. It is dishonesty of Rovian proportions. There would be no Iraq war if Bush had not squeaked out a stolen election with the aid of the Green candidate that year.

You’re not going to be forgiven another spoiler on the national level or even on the State level. One more of those, the now strained friendship is over. On their website the U.S. Greens anticipate their presidential bid in 2008, for crying out loud. Read the links to their own web site paying attention to the numbers of successful candidates, many of those winners of non-partisan elections. You’ll see what I mean.


* Here is the election summary for the year 2002 on the Green’s national website.

Greens Continue Growth in 2002.

The Green Party had a successful Nov 5 election day and elected more Greens in 2002 than any previous year. With some results still coming in, we have elected at least 71 people this year and have a new officeholder count of 170. We achieved our main goal of electing someone to a state house - John Eder in Maine. We elected our first people in Texas and North Carolina. Tuesday's election was a defeat for the Democratic Party, but not for the progressive values that they hide from. Nonetheless, our government has moved to the right and our challenges are greater than ever. This country needs a political party that confronts those challenges directly and the Green Party is ready to stand up to the challenge.

Notice the hostility is directed towards Democrats and not Republicans, that is a continuing feature of Green discourse. After six years of Bush II it’s gotten absurdly old. Also notice the number of office holders and people elected.

** His legal name, I kid you not. Actually he was both entertaining and not as crazy as this sounds. His being on the ballot shows how easy it is to get on here, however.

Isn't This Worse Than Having That Justin Timberlake Creep Rip Your Blouse?

Are there any laws that Laura Ingraham encouraged her listeners to break?

Full transcript:

DEAN (recorded): We have a hotline — 1 888 DEM VOTE — anybody can call that. If they feel like there are voting irregularities, we’ll send some folks over to the polling place in a matter of minutes.

(Phone ringing) OPERATOR: Leave a message with your question or press pound to be transferred at no extra charge to your local election protection team or the state Democratic Party. (Dialing) Your call cannot be completed at this time. Please try your call again later.

INGRAHAM: Wait a second! So — (Laughter) you call 1 888 DEM VOTE — otherwise ‘Dim Bulb Vote’ or ‘Dumb Vote’ — and all you do is get tranferred to muzak, then they cut you off. This is what I’m thinking. Tell me if you think I’m crazy. This is what I’m thinking. I think we all need to call 1 888 DEM VOTE all at the same time. And, by the way, when you call, when you call the number — and remember, it’s ‘Dem Vote’ not ‘Dumb Vote’ — when you call the number, as we did, and we got transferred, transferred, then we just got hung up upon. You know, we’re supposed to have these election teams within a matter of minutes, they’re supposed to be coming to the polls. Can you imagine what those people look like? Halloween all over again. So if you have trouble with the poll, you’re supposed to call, via 1 888 ‘Dumb Vote,’ and this is what you get.

OPERATOR: Thank you for calling 1 888 DEM VOTE. To continue in English, press 1. Para continuar in Espanol, oprima el dos.

INGRAHAM: Oh, and if you’re Saddam Hussein, no problem. Vote absentee, in Maryland or Ohio.

If you want to hear one of the quality folk who took Ingraham's advice you can hear one here.

So, there it is. Laura Ingraham was encouraging crank phone calls for the purpose of covering up problems Voters had in exercising not only their rights but their responsiblitites as citizens. Shouldn't there be a criminal investegation in those places where it might be illegal to encourage this kind of behavior? And shouldn't the FCC fine any station that carried this? Cancel the questionmark. This should be grounds for loss of a broadcasting license.

We Need What Works, Not Nice Sounding Words

Posted by olvlzl.

"Berger's approach to politics flowed from his understanding that there was no immediate prospect for a transition to socialism in the United States -- or, for that matter, in any other part of the world. That led him to take the long view, and to seek alliances with other reformers. Among other things he was a leader of the Milwaukee local of the International Typographical Union and editor of the Milwaukee Federated Trades council's official publication. This approach led his detractors to call Berger a "sewer socialist" -- a reference to the Milwaukee local's promise to build a sewage system designed to last fifty years. In fact, the sewer was built, and it was only a part of the local reforms and stable electoral organizations that Berger championed -- all of which helped to make him the party's most successful politician." [James Weinstein: 2003 The Long Detour]

Of course, in the America of those days sewage and safe drinking water were life or death issues. Having bad water meant serious illness or a horrible and rapid death. No antibiotics. Often the purity of the water improved with income, sometimes not. A good sewage system meant life. While his more ideologically pure contemporaries might have scoffed at these reforms, perhaps believing that they were unworthy of their lofty goals, or for their exalted persons, Victor Berger helped get the sewer built. One assumes that this action saved lives, improved lives, perhaps made people stronger to fight for their rights. One of the most important political results would have been that it provided a tangible example of what the left could do for people. Nothing impresses people like not having to worry that the water is going to kill their children. Avoiding such vulgar projects, the pure of heart felt a higher calling. Which produced talk.

Victor Berger might have failed to enter the pantheon of the more legendary leftists, he was not a failure with the voters. Milwaukee sent him to the congress in 1910, the first Socialist to be elected to the congress and seated. It elected him again in 1920, though by then he had been convicted of essentially opposing the First World War and was not allowed to take the seat. Eventually his constituents kept electing him and he did serve in Congress for three more terms. But even that first time he did serve in congress he racked up a record that betters most of the more remembered leftists in our history. And after winning the right to his seat in court he was reelected twice in the 1920s.

What does this mean for us a hundred years later? Berger's practicality, of facing the situation without wishful thinking and working with the means possible to produce real improvements for people is the model we need to follow. Nothing contained in the most brilliant minds with the highest ideals with the greatest daring and the most solid commitment to the cause is as radical as a bill voted on and made into a law that overturns a bad law. No brilliant idea, rigorous in its logic and comprehensive in its supporting facts is as good as a small civil service project that improves living conditions for people. It is only when the idea is made into law by people who hold elected office that the truly radical can happen, lives improve. Words, true and well chosen, only matter when they are put into effect and change material reality. It is simply a fact that political change relies on politicians who are dependent on the consent of the governed. If the governed see results they will support the politicians who deliver them. These days sewage and safe drinking water are still life or death issues.

Post Script:
Bernie Sanders became the first Socialist elected to the Senate last Tuesday. He represents the position farthest left in the coalition that just barely dominates the Senate. This coalition is what we’ve got to work with we’ve got no other one. The alternative is what we’ve had for the past six years. In our coalition there are lots of competing viewpoints and needs. We’ve got to choose our issues and concentrate on the most important ones that can be achieved now.

There are voices on the left who were trying to promote a situation which would lead to nothing getting done, holding out on principle for the glorious future that we never seem to get closer to. I’ve gone on and on here about how it seems that strict adherence to some principles is getting us nowhere on the left. Maybe we’ve got to choose among our principles too, those which will lead to the coalition falling apart before it even takes over are the first to toss.

Increase Your Volume In Just Days

I thought this e-mail I got today was about how to get bouffant Southern-style hair:

It is possible today with excellent formula
It's the best thing you had ever seen!
Any man wants to last longer and make his partner happy with that. Try it now!

Until I caught that word "man" and that verb "last".

What I really want to know is this: Will the volume stay increased all the time? And how does one accommodate that? Will all the jeans have to be re-tailored? Are wheelbarrows perhaps necessary?

More seriously, this stuff is a little like the continuous pressure on women to sprout bigger breasts.

From the Peerless Molly Ivins

She is so good:

The sheer pleasure of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone after Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, not to mention the trashing of both Clinton and his wife -- accused of everything from selling drugs to murder -- all orchestrated by that paragon of manners, Tom DeLay.

Media Matters collected some gems of fairness. For instance, Monica Crowley with MSNBC, in the wake of John Kerry's botched program, astutely observed "how lucky we are that he was not elected president. ... The Republicans remain the grown-ups, the responsible ones on national security."

How many dead Americans has this grown-up war resulted in?

And how darling of Fox's Juan Williams, upon learning polls show the people favor Democrats on taxes, to say, "To me, that's crazy."

And how many times did Chris Matthews use the Republican talking points about Nancy Pelosi? Extremist, uncooperative, incapable, unwilling to work with the president.

So after 12 years of tolerating lying, cheating and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave with bipartisan manners.

And just a small reminder how bipartisanship worked under the wingnut rule in 2003:

The morning began routinely enough. The 41-member Ways and Means Committee convened in 1100 Longworth to consider a bipartisan bill that would revise the nation's pension and retirement-saving system.

Democrats objected when the panel's acerbic chairman, Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), brought up a 90-page substitute measure that had been released shortly before midnight the night before. Democrats said they needed more time to read it. Thomas disagreed.

In response, Democrats objected to a normally perfunctory motion to dispense with the reading of the dense legislation. A clerk obligingly began reading it line by line, pausing only when Thomas interrupted to announce: "In the House, the minority can delay. They cannot deny."

As the reading resumed, the Democrats departed to a library just off the main hearing room, leaving only Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark (D-Calif.) to prevent the Republicans from obtaining unanimous consent to skip the reading. After a few minutes, Thomas asked again for the unanimous consent, and instantly brought down his gavel. Stark told reporters he had objected, but Thomas had replied, "You're too late."

Even before Thomas gaveled the reading to an end, he had dispatched the Capitol Police to remove the Democrats from the ornate library. Two officers arrived and, realizing they wanted no part of arresting House members for milling in a library, called a watch commander.

Now, none of this means that I'm urging the Democrats to behave as badly. But why is the media whipping the ones who indeed have behaved fairly well?

Front Page News

In Washington Post is the name of Pelosi's tailor (or what would be called a tailor if Pelosi was a man). The associated article states:

But what does a woman of great power look like? Does she choose her own version of camouflage and, as Hillary Rodham Clinton famously did during her first campaign for the Senate, wear a black pantsuit as a personal uniform? Does she wear stiffly tailored suits and a lapel festooned with patriotic brooches in the manner of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright? Or, like current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, does she mix professorial reserve with a hint of confident sex appeal?

Pelosi had to decide how a woman who will be second in line of succession to the presidency should look. And what she came up with is someone who wears a neutral-colored, softly tailored power suit. One that is accessorized with style rather than rote references to love of country. She looks dignified and serious. And in this case, she also happens to look quite good.

And yes, the article is in the fashion section, and yes, it is true that we really don't have a clear dress language for powerful women who are powerful because of their own professional achievements. But isn't it interesting how quickly we have decided to talk about clothes?

Oh, and just for comparison: The current Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert (on the left):

The Sensible Center

I've got this thing in my throat. I keep gagging and it will NOT come up. Mostly because the traditional media keeps poking it back down there, "it" being the new myth that is being created right now: The Democrats MUST go to the center because Americans are conservatives. This is the only sensible approach to the horrible and negative victory the Democratic party somehow accidentally gained. Otherwise disaster will follow as surely as night follows day.

Do you remember a similar campaign telling the wingnuts that all will be lost if they choose to rule from the extreme right wing of their base? Neither do I.

Of course the Democrats must try to engage moderate Republicans, of course. But the same urgings were not applied in reverse. The wingnuts were allowed to stomp and reap wherever they wanted. Why are different rules applied to the Democrats?

I'm grumpy, because I'm not allowed to enjoy this honeymoon we have all so vastly deserved in peace.

Added later: Come to think of it, where are the exhortations to the Republicans to move more towards the center? They lost, after all.

The Natural Next Stage

After victory comes a certain period of gloating and rest. So while I'm engaged in that (having my muse Erato pop grapes into my mouth) I decided to Write A Book. Wonkette did that and look what happened! She transmogrified into two guys and got herself a studious job.

Not that I want to get a job (too much work), but a book would be very nice. The covers could be made of simulated snakeskin with a facsimile of my fangs for a bookmark. The only question that remains to be answered is what it should be all about. Any suggestions are received with eager arms.

Though I do have a tentative name for the book: My Life As An Old Man. Note that I don't plan the title to have anything to do with the contents; it's just too good a title not to use.

On Social Conservatism

Is social conservatism less distasteful to liberals and progressives than economic conservatism? Or does it matter less, in the grand scheme of things?

The answer may depend on whom you ask. For white heterosexual men social conservatism is something which is annoying and may be harmful when children are taught religion in biology classes, but it's not going to impinge on their own lives that much. For the rest of us social conservatism is much more painful. In its extreme form it puts women and gays into tiny little boxes, puts the lid on those boxes and throws the keys away. And it keeps blacks at the bottom of the society.

For that reason it's hard for me to see certain liberals and progressives suggest that we should welcome social conservatives with open arms, without at least checking what they mean by being a "social" or "cultural" conservative. I'm not going to be in a big tent with someone who plans to put me into a box, sorry.

Today's Funny Pic

From Glenn Greenwald's blog, this picture of George Bush with Nancy Pelosi speaks volumes to me. Heh.

A Wild Thought For The Day

This is really extreme stuff: But do you think we might have come to a point where the word "liberal" could take its old meaning and be differentiated from "communist", "extremist" and "radical"?

Nah.

Digesting the Election Results

It's quite difficult to do, this getting used to the world being turned upside down in a minor way, and I see a fairly desperate attempt to explain that nothing has really changed even though everything has changed. The truth is something in the middle, of course. We still live in the Bush reign, he is still going to decide on the foreign policy of this country, but it will now be more difficult to stomp on the Constitution, and the general brakes of this country have been fixed. And those brakes are certainly needed, because we need accountability and oversight and real debates in the Congress. The Republicans refused to have the Democrats in any of these debates, refused bipartisanship. So we had one party in power everywhere, and within that party its extreme wing ran most things, trying to make wild and impossible delusions into reality.

That was the faith-based reality. The real reality wasn't budged by any of those wishes, and the consequences were very bad. The reason I'm elated with the election results is not because they would be good for people who think like I do (which they may or may not be), but because they are good for the country and for the world at least in a band-aid sense, and this sense is not to be belittled. A band-aid stuck in at the right time can staunch a bleeding which unattended can kill a civilization.

That's how far I've managed to digest the results.

Purity Balls

Amanda has a video of the Father-Daughter Purity Balls. Watch at your own risk.

Tweety Has A Large Yellow Head

So some minor Greek goddesses say, Tweety being Chris Matthews. Those same goddesses add that a large yellow head is not among the first ten items on the list of things that make men hawt.

However did I get so nasty? I do that in defense only, and the reason is this:

Discussing the victory speeches of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (CA) during MSNBC's special election coverage on November 7, co-anchor Chris Matthews told Republican pollster Frank Luntz that Clinton gave a "barn-burner speech, which is harder to give for a woman; it can grate on some men when they listen to it -- fingernails on a blackboard." Matthews then noted that Pelosi, who will likely be elected House speaker now that the Democrats have gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, will "have to do the good fight with the president over issues" such as the minimum wage and prescription drugs. He then asked: "How does she do it without screaming? How does she do it without becoming grating?" Matthews later returned to criticizing Clinton, when, during a conversation with co-anchor Keith Olbermann and with a clip of Clinton's victory event playing in the background, Matthews stated that Clinton's "clapping" was "not appealing" and that "it's Chinese or something," as Salon.com's weblog The War Room noted. Matthews added that former President Bill Clinton, who was standing behind Sen. Clinton at the podium, was a "gigantic guy behind her and he's just there," adding: "It's a strange sight."

Bolds mine.

Many thanks, Tweety (the one with the large yellow head), for just making it a lot harder for women in politics.

Echidne Puts On A Pundit Helmet

After staying up all night following the election results and eating far too many chocolate M&Ms I turned on my radio to hear what the local Nice, Polite Republicans have to say on the elections. And I found out that I know no-o-o-thing! Nothing. So.

This is what I learned, seriously: The Congress is becoming more conservative, because moderate Republicans were thrown out but dyed-in-the-wool extreme wingnuts retained their seats. AND the new Democrats are more conservative than, say, Noam Chomsky, which means, by simple arithmetic, that Americans are becoming more right-wing. So this was a victory for conservatism. (Just to keep a small ray of sanity in this game, might I remind the experts at the NPR that the Democrats just took the House and probably the Senate, too. FROM the Republican party.)

I need a new radio, by the way, which is sad but I was also elated by the sudden realization that Echidne, too, could be a pundit in the media. Though I need some training in how to explain why a conservative Democrat is to the right of a moderate Republican in every single case.

Ezra Klein posted about a somewhat more refined version of the same myth:

It's nice to finally write one of these election wrap-ups that doesn't have to account for a massive Democratic disappointment. Change is good, right? What it does have to do is punch back against the remarkably coordinated and quick campaign from the right (and sometimes the right includes the left) seeking to paint this election as some sort of victory for ... conservatism.

The ideological spectrum is a tricky thing. Take Heath Schuler, exhibit A in the rightwing Democrats meme. He's a cultural conservative, no doubt. But however far right he drifts on those issues -- which, under a Democratic Congress, he won't be voting on because they won't be brought to floor -- he's notably left on economic issues. Today, for instance, he's giving a press conference under the auspices of the United Steelworkers with Great Liberal Hope Sherrod Brown, where they'll discuss the need for new trade policies and their success in making active opposition to NAFTA a winning issue. That's not centrist Democrat. It's not moderate liberal. That's populism, kids, and it's leftier than polite company has allowed for quite some time.

See how quickly the so-called liberal media functions to rearrange our memories and understanding? We are becoming more conservative.....more conservative....your eyes are closing....more conservative....you're feeling sleepy...

If you are one of the group which can't be hypnotized perhaps you'd care for a nice plateful of the sensible center? That's the other new meme, eagerly disseminated by pundits in the know:

In private talks before the election, Emanuel and other top Democrats told their members they cannot allow the party's liberal wing to dominate the agenda next year. Democrats will hold 30 or 35 seats that went for Bush in the past, meaning that Democratic candidates such as Brad Ellsworth in rural Indiana are likely to face competitive races again in 2008. Still, their interests are likely to collide with those of veteran liberals such as Reps. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) and John Conyers Jr., (Mich.), who will chair committees.

Now this is fascinating, especially when you compare it to this quote from the very same article:

The loss provoked the start of what could be a painful period of self-examination among Republicans eager to find answers, or place blame. With moderates in the Northeast falling, the Republican conference will grow more conservative. Some said they expect Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) to step aside as party leader after the fallout from the page scandal and a new younger generation vowing to return to the promise and principles of the Gingrich revolution hopes to take the reins. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), one of several younger conservatives who has lashed out at his party's veering from core fiscal and social principles, is planning to run for leadership.

So the wingnuts will move out towards the most extreme wing, the one that just gently tickles Attila the Hun's tinfoil helmet, and the Democrats crawl behind them towards the mythical middle. Ok.

Here comes the Echidne-in-a-serious-pundit-suit bit: The election was mostly a loud scream of rage at the Bush administration and at the corruption and the twisted sexuality scandals of the wingnut party. A tsunami of screams, if you like, and in some areas the tsunami took away moderate Republicans because there was a less moderate non-Republican alternative, and in other areas it took away more conservative Republicans and let the somewhat less conservative Democrats stay alive. In some places the conservatism was too ingrained to move with the tsunami. And that's why the landscape looks like it does today.

This didn't cost you anything, either, though you could send me some chocolate for my blogiversary if you so desire. Or money for it...

Just a Second, Before You Go Getting All Palsy Across the Aisle

Posted by olvlzl

I want to know who stole the money, how much they stole and I want it back in the American People’s Treasury where it belongs.

There is probably going to be a real downturn in the economy with the new year, the Democrats in the House and maybe in the Senate need to document the full scale theft of everything the Republicans stole over the past six years. They need to be able to hold up the guilty and the evidence of their guilt for the People to see. We need to document it and get it back. From Haliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, wherever . We need to prosecute where possible and nail the hides of those corporations to the fence as a warning to others who would try to rob the American People.

We also need to be able to explain how this wholesale theft happened and who was holding the door open for the crooks to come in and steal everything, including the credit cards.

Democrats have won control of the congress, they have to fulfill their obligations for oversight as specified by the Constitution. They should be happy to do their duty, they asked for the responsibility.

Another thing, The Voters. The Voters have to be taken care of. We have to get rid of those stinking, vote stealing machines and replace them with a National Ballot for the four federal Constitutional offices. All across the country, one form of ballot, one way to mark it, one way to count it. The United States will never be a safe democracy without that. We have to spend more on the most important part of government, THE ROOTS than we do on the frills and perks of the Executive branch and the Courts.

The People, The Vote, they should always be capitalized. The People are the supreme power in the government. Their Vote is the supreme act of government. Never again should a Supreme Court “justice” have the ability to say that The People have no right to vote. No judge, no “justice” no “chief justice” no one, holds their office with any legitimacy except that derived from the results of The People’s Vote. Never again should any court or corrupt Secretary of State have the ability to steal an election for their party. And yes, that means the Republican Party in all its corrupt infamy.

And in the culture at large, nothing, no joke no entertainment should ever belittle The People or The Vote. Nothing that discourages the vote should be allowed to go unchallenged. We have had the benefit of the cynical belittling of both over the past six years. That isn’t a job for The Congress, that is a job for all of us. Democracy dies in a cess pool of cynicism. It can’t survive in the filthy spew of Murdoch style entertainment. We need a new birth of clear-eyed, strong-willed, idealism free of lying sentimentality and wishful thinking. We need to change the culture of cynicism. Democracy, decency and our lives depend on it.

Listening to Bush's Press Conference

I can't help wondering why he can't cover up his grumpiness just a little better. He is the president, after all, not some undergraduate student who got a D- on an exam paper. Though of course an undergraduate can't get rid of the blame by firing Donald Rumsfeld.

Hugs And Kisses

To you, my lovely and talented readers. Thank you for these three years. Have lots of fun today and lots of chocolate always.

Good News For All Women

The South Dakota abortion ban was voted down. In Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline lost his re-election bid. Kline is famous for his extreme anti-choice stance. These are very good news for women.

Chirpy, Chirpy, Chip, Chip

Which is nonsense, but sounds happy. This is a good site for seeing the overall votes.

Women did quite well in gubernatorial races, "well" being interpreted in comparison to the modest past base.

A proper post on the feminist implications of the elections must await until some sleep. I'm still celebrating...

O Happy, Happy Day!

O Joy! O Happiness! O Chocolaty Cuddliness Everywhere! Orgasms! Enlightenment! Windows which clean themselves! Your heart's deepest desires satisfied at no cost!

And why is this the happiest of all days? Two good reasons: First, we are slightly less likely to slide into WWIII now that the Democrats took a majority in the House at least. Second, this blog is THREE today!

So is the blog of my good friend Mustang Bobby. We were separated at birth.