As Rome Burns, The Freest Press Money Can Buy Fiddles

Posted by olvlzl.


In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

The last sentence in this excerpt from Paul Krugman is the theme.

But, never fear, Paula Zahn is keeping her eye on whether those Catholic Democrats are taking communion.

ZAHN: Do you take communion?

DODD: Yes, I do.

ZAHN: And you are a pro-choice candidate.

DODD: Mm-hmm.

ZAHN: The Catholic Church does not believe in abortion. It views it as murder. How do you reconcile that view with your Catholic upbringing?

DODD: Well, abortion isn't something that I take any great joy in occurring. I think it ought to be a rare, safe, and legal. That has been my position on it for years. And we ought to be working together on how we reduce the incidence of abortion. Why not do more to help out in terms of expanding the opportunities for adoption, giving people other choices.

We've been screaming at each other about abortion now for 34 years. It's about time, with the law being what it is, that we try and reduce the number of incidents of it, provide the kind of support for families and women so they're not confronted with only that choice.

That hasn't happened enough, in my view.

ZAHN: The pope was highly critical of some Mexican politicians who were taking Communion and basically wants them banned from taking Communion because of their view on abortion. They also happen to be pro-choice. How would you feel if you were told that you could no longer take Communion because of your views abortion?

While I can't fault Democrats from taking the lesson that this kind of thing has been forced on them, I'd seriously consider throwing my support behind the first one who tells a major media figure that what they do at the communion rail is none of their or the voters' damned business.

I was going to write about the separation of church and state today, you remember that quaint idea, don't you? A quote I was thinking of using turns out to be of questionable authenticity. But I think this more certain document is better, anyway.

This act is a true standard of Religious liberty: its principle the great barrier agst usurpations on the rights of conscience. As long as it is respected & no longer, these will be safe. Every provision for them short of this principle, will be found to leave crevices at least thro' which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster, that feeding & thriving on its own venom, gradually swells to a size and strength overwhelming all laws divine & human.

Dinosaurs and Noah's Ark

Have you ever wondered how creationists manage to squeeze the dinosaurs into the ark? This is the sort of research problem one faces when believing in the Bible as the literal explanation of creation. But the creationists are up to the challenge:

The Ark easily had room for the dinosaurs (as you can see in other articles in this issue). First, the Ark was the size of a huge cargo ship (at least 450 ft [137 m] long). Second, there weren't many different kinds of dinosaurs (only about 50 "kinds"). Third, God most likely brought the smaller juvenile dinosaurs, not the aging adults, because they would be better suited for the voyage and the responsibilities of reproducing rapidly after the Flood.

You can find much more about the alternative prehistory at the Creation Museum. (Charlie Pierce wrote about it for Esquire in 2005.) What you might not see there any longer is the video showing Adam. This is because the actor playing Adam turns out not to be a very wholesome person:

The man who plays Adam in a video aired at a Bible-based creationist museum has led a different life outside the Garden of Eden, flaunting his sexual exploits online and modeling for a clothing line that promotes free love.

After learning about his activities Thursday, the Creation Museum in Kentucky pulled the 40-second video in which he appears.

Why am I writing about this today? Because a recent USA Today poll found that 66 percent of the poll respondents think that God created human beings pretty much in their current form within the last 10,000 years. Confusingly, the same poll also finds that 53 percent of the respondents believe that human beings developed from "less developed" forms of live over millions of years.

Odd how seldom I read about the creation story as a metaphor in this country. While that treatment is fairly common among Christians in Europe, many American churches have decided to support a literal interpretation, come hell or high water. This is unfortunate, as a metaphoric interpretation could reconcile science and faith.
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Cross-Posted at the TAPPED blog.

Where The Girls Are

I have long intended to blog about political cartoonists and the percentage of women among them. That percentage is very small, and I want to study the reasons for that scarcity. But I have long intended to do about a million other things, too, and only about a hundred of those gets done every month. Which is not bad, really. But I would very much like to read that blog post about female political cartoonists. Could someone else write it, please?

This would be a good place to advertise Mikhaela Reid's new cartoon book: Attack of the 50 ft. Mikhaela.





Her book tour dates are here and you can buy the book here.

Where are the girls? Well, according to some they are going to take over the whole world and although female inferiority is but a natural biological fact this takeover attempt requires some serious testosterone injections to our national culture. If that sentence didn't make any sense to you, don't worry. I was just repeating the way wingnuts frame this issue.

But wingnuts have little to worry about. Even Mikhaela isn't really 50 feet tall.

And Shakespeare's Sister posted the logo of the blogs on the Atlantic Monthly:





Nice diversity of opinion there (click on the pic to see it better). But not much racial diversity. And none of those writers menstruate.

Friday Pippin Blogging

This is FeralLiberal's Pippin. Nice pictures and very relaxing to look at. I feel like having a nap now.

A Tummy Bug

President Bush is suffering from a stomach virus. When I read the story the picture attached to it was this one:





Weird.

On Blog Commenting

While I was writing my response to Joe Klein's post about blogging I started thinking about something else, and that is the selection bias in blog comments, including those that are submitted at the Time's own blogs.

A "selection bias" is my borrowing from the literature on surveys in statistics. One problem with sampling a group of people and then generalizing from their opinions to some wider group is that unless we are very careful the people in the sample might not look like the people in the wider group. For instance, if you ask about people's opinions in some suburban mall you are going to have only people who visit malls, only people who are well enough to go out and very few rural people. So your findings are not necessarily going to reflect what those omitted groups think.

Similar problems apply to all those Internet polls. People self-select to participate in them, and those who find the time worth wasting are those who feel most strongly on the issue that the poll asks about. In general the more extreme opinions will be overrepresented in such polls, and that is why they always come with that warning about not being scientific. Which means that they actually are pointless things to have.

Now, comments on blogs are not intended to be a random sample of opinions but too often they are treated that way. Yet for me to comment on someone else's blog requires that I'm interested enough in the topic of the post, that I have the time to spend writing a comment, that I think I know enough about the question and often my emotions also need to be engaged.

What does this mean in terms of, say, the anger of the blogs? The people who are the angriest are most likely to comment, I suspect, and mostly it will be comments which are critical of the post, because just saying "hear, hear!" doesn't seem quite as necessary to do as expressing an opposing viewpoint. After all, the post itself expressed what you agree with. More controversial topics and topics which have to do with something we all feel we know about are also going to get more comments than, say, a post on research findings concerning the efficacy of abstinence education.

Based on my estimates from my own readership figures, the number of blog readers who actually comment is a lot less than one in a hundred. Yet the blogosphere is often characterized by the types of comments that appear, and this is where the fact that the commenters are not a random sample should be stressed.

In short, the people who read, say, progressive blogs, are not necessarily like the people who comment on those blogs and the two should not be treated as the same.

The Mean, Mean Bloggers

Joe Klein wrote a piece on the meanness of some lefty bloggers. Here is the gist of Klein's complaint:

But the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable. Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics.

The revolution eats its children! See how big my maw is! No, you have to come closer to really see.

Klein gets at least three things wrong. The first one is the identification of angry bloggers with lefty bloggers. I'm not sure where the left is in this country, but many of the angry bloggers are quite moderate in their political ideology. The idea that anger=lefty here is incorrect. The Republicans have managed to drag the concept of center so much to the right that supporting progressive taxation stains you indelibly Maoist. In some ways "lefty" has no actual definition in the U.S.. Do you know a single well-known blogger, for example, who advocates socializing the means of production? Do you realize that the wingnuts think Hillary Clinton is a communist? It is all quite too much and Klein shouldn't really support the silly identification of everybody not wingnut as a commie.

Neither are liberal and lefty the same thing. In European usage, a liberal is pretty right-wing, actually. The American Democratic party would be viewed as moderately right of center in most European countries.

The second thing Klein gets wrong is the idea that the so-called lefty bloggers are copying Rush Limbaugh. They/we are not. What is happening is something a little different. Limbaugh has the support of capitalists with money and he has access to a microphone. So do people of the Ann Coulter type. Lefty bloggers don't have the support of the Democratic party or the financial backing of rich people. They are mostly single individuals who blog in their own time. Grassroots stuff. They are also much more likely to swear than Rush Limbaugh and much less likely to call people treasonists or to use racist and sexist language. Another difference is that the mainstream media has left Limbaugh pretty much alone, whereas the lefty bloggers have become a favorite complaint for all pundits, whatever their political affiliations might be.

The third mistake Klein makes is in his assumption that it is the "most radical" voices of the lefty blogs which keep everybody marching in lockstep. What actual institutional power do lefty blogs have? How can they force someone to march in lockstep?

Klein is right about the anger, of course. Many bloggers are very angry. There are several good columns waiting to be written about the real reasons for that anger. This post by Digby could give some of the details those need.

The Flavors of Justice

It's a funny old world. Paris Hilton was freed from prison after a day or so. Had she been a total unknown she would not have been and her sentence might have been longer, too, especially if she happened to be black, say. Though the whole case seems too trivial to comment on, the idea of justice as differentiated by money and fame is a dismal one. Yet we appear to be accustomed to that.

What is the lesson she learned from her experience? What is the lesson others learned? That it is possible to get away with pretty much anything if you have the right social signals. Well, this also suggests that it might be equally likely to be totally innocent, yet have the system fall on you like a ton of racist bricks if you lack those signals that are needed.

Remember the California case of the seventeen-year old who was taken to the hospital by some soccer players from a party where she supposedly wanted to have a train of young inebriated men? Remember how the DA decided that there was no case to prosecute anyone for sexual assault? Well, Jerry Brown is going to look into that case:

California Attorney General Jerry Brown will now look at the De Anza College rape case after the Santa Clara County District Attorney made the request.
A deputy in the office of DA Dolores Carr says she is confident Brown will reach the same conclusion, that there is insufficient evidence to file charges in the case.

In a move experts call unusual but not unprecedented, the Santa Clara County DA has asked the state attorney general to review her decision not to charge two De Anza baseball players in the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl.

The victim told deputies it happened at the South Buena Vista home of one of the players. The National Organization for Women, which rallies for and counseled the alleged victim, says it's a victory.

Mandy Benson, CA National Organization for Women: "I think it means that they really heard the victim. The victim has asked for this."

Jerry Brown, Calif. Attorney General: "Just got the request. We're going to take a very hard look at this case, make an independent review, and when we've completed that I'll make an announcement, either take some action or to validate what's been done"

Is this a step for the old dame justice? Or just another layer in the whitewashing? We'll see, I guess.

Greed And Abstinence

UPDATE: The subcommittee approved a 27.8 million increase for the program which does not work.
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Have you heard that giving more money to abstinence programs which have been shown not to work is the kewl thing these days? Indeed! Tomorrow the House Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Subcommittee is expected to increase the spending on abstinence-only programs by 20 to 27 million dollars (to a total of perhaps 150 million dollars) without adding any requirements for the programs to be more medically accurate. The full vote of the committee is expected the following Thursday.

The Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) programs that we as tax-payers are funding don't work. The most recent study (pdf), from April 2007, states this:

Findings indicate that the youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.

We have a program which does nothing, and we are going to give it 27 million bucks more? Is that prudent fiscal governance? Or is it an outrageous form of pork, going straight into the pockets of the fundamentalist base of the Republican party? Note that some of the programs offer false medical information, too.

Here is what you can do:
1. Contact Nancy Pelosi and urge her not to support the measure (increasing the CBAE funding) or at least ask for medical amendments.
2. Contact David Obey with the same two messages.
3. Contact other members of the subcommittee with these messages.

This is truly a total waste of money, and consists of a transfer of income to those who voted for George Bush without helping the teens at all.

Jessica Valenti on Colbert

Jessica Valenti was on Steven Colbert's show last night, talking about her book Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. She did wonderfully. You can watch the interview here if you missed it.

American Life League And Poverty

Jill at feministe posted about American Life League's press statement concerning poverty:

Abortion is an act that takes the life of an innocent human child," said Erik Whittington, American Life League's youth outreach director. "It is shameful that Christians would rally around the physical needs of the poor and ignore the deaths of untold millions of babies. Abortion is poverty and the number one priority of our day should be its demise."

This past weekend, Sojourners opened Pentecost 2007: Taking Vision to the Street, a conference aimed at placing "poverty at the top of our nation's agenda." Today, Sojourners will host a march that will run from National City Christian Church to the Upper Senate Park. American Life League, through its youth outreach project Rock for Life, will be there to present to conference attendees the importance of putting abortion, not poverty, at the top of the list of social concerns.

"Mother Teresa, the universal icon for fighting poverty once said, 'It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.' While we commend Christians for working towards eliminating poverty," said Whittington, "we must not forget that abortion kills a human person, and leaves the mother spiritually and psychologically broken. Abortion ends the lives of more than 3,500 American babies a day. This bloodshed dwarfs any other issue, including poverty."

So. As Jill points out, this has been a week of utterly astonishing comments from various wingnuts and anti-feminists. Mr. Whittington also has not thought this thing through: A major reason given for abortions is economic hardship. Thus, poverty relief should lead to fewer abortions.

I got curious about the American Life League. Their website states that they don't believe in abortion under any circumstances, even when the mother's life is threatened:

ALL is opposed to all abortion, contraception and other threats to the human person and the family. This total protection approach separates us from many of the other major groups. ALL will not support abortion-related legislation that contains exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother, fetal deformity or other such condition.

You can find the ALL associates in various states on the website. You can also find the best way of treating ectopic pregnancies, where the fetus will always die:

Using the Thomistic Principle of Totality (removal of a pathological part to preserve the life of the person) and the Doctrine of Double Effect, the only moral action in an ectopic pregnancy where a woman's life is directly threatened is the removal of the tube containing the human embryo. The death of the human embryo is unintended although foreseen. Put another way, if there were a way to save both lives, which, of course, are of equal value, one would be obliged morally to do so. At this time, this is not possible.

It is acknowledged that it has become commonplace even in Catholic hospitals to open the tube and "suction out the human embryo" or administer methotrexate either via mouth or laparoscopy. Both of these procedures directly attack an innocent human life and are intrinsically immoral and never can be justified. In fact, they violate the Fifth Commandment, which under all circumstances prohibits a direct attack on innocent human life. There are absolutely no exceptions to the 5th Commandment as described.

While removing the tube containing the human embryo results in the death of a human being as does suctioning out the human embryo or administration of methotrexate, one cannot ethically conclude that all the actions have the same intended end result. The reason for this is that the "means" used to accomplish the "end" are not the same.

Refusal to make this distinction results in a Machiavellian approach employing any "means" to the "end" including the direct assault on the human being intended to result in his death. While it is acknowledged that removal of the tube containing the human embryo may result in sterility, it is not morally justified to directly attack human life by suctioning out the human embryo or administering methotrexate even though fertility is preserved.

Fascinating. I like the way these guys view women's lives: no contraception and if you get pregnant nobody will care about your life unless the fetus is going to die anyway, but even in that case your future fertility can be sacrificed. Why do they bother calling their organization ALL? They should insert some sort of a qualification that the "ALL" doesn't refer to women's lives or health.

Politico Blogging

Politico is a political site, full of serious bloggers who know all about electoral politics. But they also have a gossip blog appropriately called "Shenanigans" and written by a woman. This alone has made my jawline freeze whenever I click on the site.

But today my jaw was unusually clenched, because of a post by Jessica Valenti on feministing.com with the title "Two Words for the Politico: FUCK YOU." And why did she write that? Well, Politico is running a series on bloggers and the most recent one to be profiled is Ann Althouse. The post about her asks her for her biggest dust-up, and this is what the answer turns out to be:

Biggest dust-up: "Let's take a closer look at those breasts," a post about a female blogger who posed for a photo in front of Bill Clinton. Jessica Valenti, who runs and blogs on feministing.com, is standing at an angle with a slight arch in her back, making the focal point of the photo, whether intentional or not, her breasts.

Valenti isn't shy about her body; she just published a book called "Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters." Althouse riffed on the relationship between accentuated breasts and feminism, and Valenti and the rest of the blogo-feminist world lashed back at her. "That's still going on. That started like last year. I still get stuff about that," said Althouse. "But I don't regret it."

I wonder how they fact-checked that "arch in her back" comment? Or the one about "isn't shy about her body"? Or "accentuated"? A lot of insinuations in two short paragraphs. Why isn't this guy writing the "Shenanigans" blog?

Obesity in China

The British Guardian has a story about obesity among Chinese children and what the government is doing about it:

Compulsory waltzing will be added to the Chinese national curriculum in September under a new campaign to reduce childhood obesity.

From the start of the new school year, teachers across the country will be expected to put hundreds of millions of pupils through their paces every day, the state-run China Daily said today.

In preparation, a team of pioneering ballroom and folk instructors started training this month and video demonstrations of the mandatory breaktime routines have been filmed for DVD distribution to regional education departments.

Waltz seems on odd thing to pick. Why not some traditional Chinese dances? But what I found more interesting about the article was this:

The routines - which will supplement rather than replace regular physical education classes - are reportedly aimed at turning a generation of chubby cheeks into twinkle toes. Student waistlines have expanded almost as fast as the Chinese economy. Studies suggest one in five children are obese. Rising affluence, reduced exercise and the growing popularity of fast food such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds have hit school fitness levels badly. The average pupil today is slower and weaker than 10 years ago.

The Chinese might be conducting a natural experiment on the impact of fast foods on obesity. I suspect that Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds are not available all over China. If this is true it could be possible to compare childhood obesity in the areas where they have been operating for a while and in the areas where they are not available, always taking into account other pertinent differences (in income and rates of urbanization, say). Doing a study like that would be most useful.

Mea Culpa

I recently wrote about the Bush administration's determination to keep a meatpacker from testing all its animals for BSE or the mad cow disease. My take on the story was based on an AP article which stated:

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.

This turns out to be incorrect. Hilzoy from the blog Obsidian Wings sent me the actual brief of the case and also a link to Stuart Buck's blog post on the same topic.

These show that the Department of Agriculture based its arguments not on the possibility of false positives (the test showing that the animal is diseased when it is not) but on false negatives (the test showing that the animal is healthy when it is not). Most tests have the likelihood of producing false negatives and/or positives. The BSE test kit the meatpacking firm wished to use was argued to produce a very large likelihood of false negatives for the following reasons (from the government's consolidated memorandum, via Obsidian Wings):

"As discussed previously, the vast majority of cattle that are processed into beef in the United States are less than 24 months old. See Ferguson Decl. ¶ 5. However, the average incubation period for the BSE disease is five years, meaning that on average it takes five years from the date a cow is infected with BSE for the cow to show any outward clinical signs of the disease, such as abnormal posture, inability to walk, or other impaired coordination. See id. Given that the earliest point at which current BSE testing methods can detect a positive case of BSE is only two to three months before a cow would demonstrate clinical signs of the disease, see id. ¶ 10; Rippke Decl. ¶ 9, testing all young normal-looking cattle for slaughter, as proposed by plaintiff, is not practical and offers no animal health or food safety value because testing a young infected animal with the current methodology would likely produce false negative results, Ferguson Decl. ¶ 10.23.

In short, if this argument is correct the use of the BSE kit in the manner the meatpacker wanted would not have provided useful information about the safety of its beef. Thus, the case is more akin to trying to prevent fraudulent advertising than to trying to stop a firm from offering additional services its competitors are not interested in offering.
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Cross-posted at the TAPPED.

Meanwhile, in Ghaza

A radical Islamic group is threatening women who work for the official Palestine television station:

All 15 women presenters reported for work at the official Palestine Television station in Gaza yesterday, in defiance of death threats by a radical Islamic group that is believed to have links with al-Qa'ida. The Righteous Swords of Islam warned that it would strike the women with "an iron fist and swords" for refusing to wear a veil on camera.

"It is disgraceful that the women working for the official Palestinian media are competing with each other to display their charms," it said in a leaflet distributed in Gaza at the weekend. "We will destroy their homes. We will blow up their work places. We have a lot of information about their addresses and we are following their movements."

The fringe group threatened to "slaughter" the women for corrupting Palestinian morals. "The management and workers at Palestine TV should know," it warned, "that we are much closer to them than they think. If necessary, we will behead and slaughter to preserve the spirit and morals of our people."

About half the women TV journalists wear the traditional hijab head covering, but all show their faces and wear makeup. They mounted a vigil yesterday outside the Gaza City office of the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, demanding protection and respect.

It is not quite clear from the story whether the radicals want the women to wear a niqab, a covering of the whole face except for the eyes. "If necessary, we will behead and slaughter to preserve the spirit and morals of our people." Just imagine.

How odd that it is the women who are responsible for spirit and morals. How odd that any amount of a woman visible is seen as displaying her "charms". She is an object on which meanings are placed, not a subject.

Although radical Islam is by far the worst in the attempts to make women "behave", all fundamentalist religions do the same to some degree. It's pretty much the first thing on their agenda: to subjugate women properly. I've sometimes wondered if it is really the desire to subjugate women that drives some men to those types of religions rather than the religions themselves causing the subjugation.

Idle Echidne Musings

These are my payment for blogging, the time at a cocktail party when I grab your shoulder and will not let you go while I tell you all about my sore tooth or what the bartender told me the other night or about how clever it was to put thumb tacks on the boss's chair while her back was turned.

So I was musing over the concept of "opinions" the other night. Opinions (in this post) are those spicy things one finds quite obviously true, whatever the facts might tell. They are a little bit like your beloved children who can do no wrong, while other people's opinions are the neighbor's spoiled brats. It's very odd that anybody would be interested in other people's opinions, actually. Much better to just read here and get only mine.

But more seriously, opinions are something that comes out when you mix half a pound of evidence, add some quasi-evidence and whip it all up with enormous amounts of childhood memories. Then you bake it and if you're brave enough you will serve it to a large party, asking for comments on how well the cake turned out.

And this is where things may turn out nasty, because loads of people will not like your opinions at all and will tell you so in no uncertain terms. Depending on what those childhood memories might be you might then fall apart and crawl back home crying or you might take out those fancy sharp kitchen knives and do a little dance around the room. Or you might just yell back, with your eyes bulging out and your veins popping.

I don't seem to be able to stick to seriousness in this post. What I really wanted to say that having opinions and expressing them publicly can be quite frightening, especially if you belong to one of the groups who are not supposed to have opinions but to mainly listen to other people's opinions while holding that adoring glazed look. That would be lots of women. Thus, for me to have Public Opinions required the disguise of a goddess. Goddesses can have opinions, even bad ones.

Hence the birth of Echidne.

Steve Gilliard, RIP

Steve died on Saturday morning. It should have rained all weekend. All he got was forty-one years.

Steve was a blogger. A passionate writer, a righteously angry writer, a writer with a large heart. He was smart, opinionated, well-read and capable of learning and growing. I crossed swords with him and traded jokes with him, all on the net. I wish I could have met him in real life.

At least we still have his writings. His piece "I'm a Fighting Liberal" is from 2003 but it is as fresh today:

You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Steve's range was wide, from predicting the current mess in Iraq to cutting straight through the crap on Giuliani's third wedding. His special metier was military history and he spelled out the problems with the Iraq occupation clearly and correctly. He also wrote about food and his beloved New York City.

He should have had more time. Bless him for the time he spent with us. Now pick up the job he left behind.
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Added later: Steve Gilliard's site has a donation button. For help with the funeral expenses.

Vomit in the Mouth

You may have read about this case:

April Grolle, Lauren Chief Elk and Lauren Breayans never expected to be called heroes. But they never expected to be called names either.

The three, all soccer players on the highly regarded De Anza College women's soccer team, were thrust into the national spotlight when they rushed in and rescued a 17-year-old girl who was, they say, being sexually assaulted at a March 3 party in San Jose. They say the victim was so intoxicated she appeared to be comatose, and that eight or more men stood around watching one of them sexually assault her.

The three broke in, grabbed the girl and carried her out. They took her to the hospital, notified authorities and volunteered to testify in any court proceedings. What more could you ask?

To keep their mouths shut. To butt out. To mind their own business.

That's the message the soccer players got from the men accused in the case.

"People I didn't even know were coming up to me and saying, 'Stop your lying. Shut your f -- mouth,' " Chief Elk said in an interview last week. "We'd be walking around, and people would actually come up and get in our face."

It reached the point where they felt threatened. Cmdr. John Hirokawa of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department confirms that deputies were called to the campus on a complaint of harassment.

The seventeen-year old was lying on the ground, with one man having intercourse with her and several others sitting around in the same room. Doing what? Watching? Waiting their turn? She had vomit in her mouth.

Lauren Chief Elk and April Grolle are 20-year old De Anza College students and teammates on the school's soccer squad. They were leaving a party at a house when they realized something wrong was going on in a back room where the doors were closed and the lights were off.
"We heard and saw a girl tapping on this door in the kitchen saying 'There is a girl in there with eight guys," explains Chief Elk.
They say they tried to get into the room, but were confronted by a baseball player.
"[He said] 'Mind your own business; she wants to be in here' and slams the door," says Grolle.
What they saw through a crack in the door horrified them.
"When I looked in, I saw about ten pairs of legs surrounding a girl, lying on the mattress on the floor and a guy on top of her with his pants down and his hips thrusting on top of her," recall Chief Elk. "And when I saw that I knew immediately something wasn't right. It just didn't look right."
"I saw that this young girl did not want to be in there, and that's when we just went 'We're getting this girl out of there,'" says Grolle.
April and Lauren -- along with a third soccer player named Lauren Breayans -- broke down the door and were shocked with what they found.
"This poor girl was not moving. She had vomit dribbling down her face. We had to scoop vomit out of her mouth [and] lift her up. Her pants were completely off her body," says Chief Elk. "She had her one shoe one, her jeans were wrapped around one of her ankles and her underwear was left around her ankles. To the left of the bed there was some condom thrown on the ground."
"When they lifted her head up, her eyes moved and she said 'I'm sorry,'" says Grolle. "One of the guys who was in the room said 'This is her fault. She got drunk and she did this to herself.'"
Lauren Chief Elk didn't believe him: "You have to be conscious to consent to something, and that was not the case at all."

But the vomit wasn't hers. The vomit in her mouth. It was not hers. This turns out to be very important among the justifications DA Dolores Carr gave for not prosecuting anyone for sexual assault:

Is it sexual assault when a victim is too intoxicated to consent to sex? Yes, but we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim was so impaired that she could not understand what she was doing. We must also prove that the defendant should have known that she was incapable of consenting. This can be very difficult when the defendant and witnesses offer competing versions of the victim's condition.
This case fits that mold. Many of the witnesses had been drinking, some heavily, and their stories were not always consistent. But most important, the victim told investigators that she did not remember anything that happened from shortly after the time she arrived at the party. The victim would be unable to counter claims that she had consented. The trial would be fought over differing versions of the victim's sobriety and behavior, with several witnesses and potential defendants motivated to paint her in an unfavorable light.
The result would be such a confusing and conflicting account of what happened that we would be unable to convince 12 jurors to convict. For example, the media reported that the victim vomited. But lab tests showed that the vomit did not come from her. The defense would challenge any account which depended upon the vomit to prove that the victim was too intoxicated to consent.

So let me get this right. According to California law having sex with someone who is too intoxicated to consent is a sexual assault. But somehow this seventeen-year old wasn't drunk enough to be considered intoxicated, because she was lying on the floor with someone else's vomit in her mouth? Somehow this seventeen-year old wasn't drunk enough to be considered intoxicated even though she stated that she remembered nothing of the events? Is it common for a person not under the influence of alcohol to remember nothing of the events like this? Why wasn't her blood tested for alcohol at the hospital?

It is very hard to read all this. Very hard. Even if this seventeen-year old, who was not intoxicated but just enjoyed having other people's vomit in her mouth, even if she lay down, spread her legs and invited the universe to fuck her, even so, how could the men in that room just sit there and not help her? Not even help her to the hospital when the soccer players arrived? That is what upsets me much more than the question whether the case should be prosecuted, for some reason.

Do you know what I think? I think that prosecutors everywhere are now scared of cases like this one, scared of ruining the perfectly good futures of upstanding young men, who just happen to sit around in a darkened room where a seventeen-year old lies with someone else's vomit in her mouth, with someone else on top of her. I think that prosecutors are afraid to touch cases like this one, because they remember the Duke lacrosse case and how it bit one of their own in the ass.

I also think that one day a woman will be gang-raped and she will not go to the police because what would be the point if all evidence must be absolutely clear and no witness statements can clash. This reminds me a little of the Islamic sharia rule of needing four male witnesses to prove that a rape has been committed. It always made me wonder what those four witnesses were doing not preventing the rape in the first place. But of course such rules as these will keep claims of rape down.

"What would I be doing in a lonely heart's club?"

The reason Mae West gave when she initially refused to give permission to use her picture on the Sgt. Pepper's cover.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The person I could swear used to be on that cover but who I can't find now.

What Happens When A Fool Won’t Learn In Experience’s School.

Posted by olvlzl.
Ezra Klein, a liberal, someone I agree with on a lot of things, recently said something that made my blood boil.
“Obviously I, like most coastal-bred elitists, don’t think voters make terribly good decisions.”
I cooled down considerably when I read on ...
“But I also don’t think economic actors are particularly rational.” But not entirely.

Going past the “coastal-bred elitist” phrase - guarantee to make me see red - it reminded me of one of the most disturbing lesson of reading the blogs, presumably the most democratic of all media. Democracy is not the universally assumed common ground of our politics anymore. While there is a lot of democratic talk and even some admirable examples of standing up for it, there is a lot more elitism and skepticism that democracy is possible or, perhaps desirable, among our allegedly educated class and on the left. Klein, I believe, doesn’t fall into that category so I don’t understand why he would associate himself with it even in jest.

This is a particularly disturbing article - book review by Christopher Hayes showing the growing overtly anti-democratic orthodoxy of the American academic and government establishment.

“If people are rational as consumers and irrational as voters,” Caplan writes, “it is a good idea to rely more on markets and less on politics.’

The first and most obvious problem with Caplan’s argument is that it quickly leads to some very dark places. He notes, enthusiastically, that education makes people think more like economists and that, luckily, the highly educated vote at higher rates than the less educated. But why leave it to chance? You could instead give more votes to businessmen and university graduates, as Caplan comes close to proposing, or simply require people to “pass a test of economic literacy to vote.?
---
And the book’ s manifest elitism is not fringe. It is blurbed by economist Alan Blinder, who advised President Clinton, and N. Gregory Mankiw, who headed the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush. Over the last 30 years, conservatives have made political hay by railing against liberal ‘elitists’ who want to substitute the judgment of faceless bureaucrats, activist judges and pointy-headed intellectuals for that of the common man. Yet if you got some prominent conservatives off the record - after plying them with a few drinks -I bet more than a few would agree with Caplan: Voters are fools.

Good thing our campaign donors are the ones who really run things.

Anyone on the left who doesn’t believe in government of, by and for The People should ask themselves why they’re bothering. If the left isn’t fundamentally for democracy, insuring that The People have the information they need to cast informed votes for the purpose of benefitting the world at large and ensuring that their votes are cast and counted, it has no reason to exist. We’ve already got a political persuasion that is all about the interests of the elite, they’re the ones who were in power for the past six years and who have too much influence even within the Democratic Party. Caplan and his supporters seem to think they’re smarter than the Great Unwashed.

Experience keeps a dear school but a fool will learn in no other, said that most democratic of all our Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin. We’ve had the experience of government under conservatives for most of the past thirty years. Franklin should have told us what to call people who don’t learn from the hard lessons of experience. Then we’d know what to call Caplan and his supporters.

What Roger Said.

Cracks In The Lyin’ Curtain?

Posted by olvlzl.
Corporate media, at least those with any clue as to what the past sixty years have been like, can’t go on denying that Bush is not only entirely nuts but also as ignorant as your average Cabbage Patch Doll, can they?

Bush saying that the going on sixty year old Korean standoff is something like what he’s got in mind for Iraq is nuts on a Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenbashi level. Or maybe Kim Il Sung at his loopiest. Anyone in the Republican Party, the allegedly respectable media or any other branch of the American establishment who can read about Bush’s latest thinking on how to solve the disaster he set off and goes along with the tragic farce is criminally irresponsible, at best.

We, my friends, are witnessing the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the decline of the Roman Empire come horrifically to life. Remeber the school of thought that Cheney was the (self-selected) “adult” in the Bush II regime? Read this and weep.

If we survive with anything like representative democracy’s ruins intact, we are going to have to face the lessons of what happens to a democracy that allows its public information system to be corrupted to the extent ours is. It can’t be left to chance, it certainly can’t be a matter of laissez faire. Freedom of the press means that they are free to publish the facts needed by The People to cast a vote and to bring down would be tyrants. Ours has failed in both of these most vital reasons for them to exist. Six years into the Bush regime and just the smallest hints of what was clear from the start. Democracy can’t live with that situation.

P.S. Reading V.D. Hanson the other day, thinking about the Hellenic fad among the "intellectuals" of the American Right, how much do you want to bet that they were addicted to gladiator movies from the 50s?

After the Storm: Back On Line On My Own Computer

When a man is sitting before the fire on the hearth, he says,
"Nature is a simple affair."
Then he looks out the window and sees a hailstorm, and begins to think that
"Nature can't be so eas'ly disposed of."

Charles Ives

Saturday Emily Dickinson Blogging As The Thunder Approaches

The Wind begun to knead the Grass—
As Women do a Dough—
He flung a Hand full at the Plain—
A Hand full at the Sky—
The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees—
And started all abroad—
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands—
And throw away the Road—
The Wagons—quickened on the Street—
The Thunders gossiped low—
The Lightning showed a Yellow Head—
And then a livid Toe—
The Birds put up the Bars to Nests—
The Cattle flung to Barns—
Then came one drop of Giant Rain—
And then, as if the Hands
That held the Dams—had parted hold—
The Waters Wrecked the Sky—
But overlooked my Father's House—
Just Quartering a Tree—

Bob Kerrey, What a Shame.

Posted by olvlzl.
Did you hear Bob Kerrey on Moyer’s last night? It wasn’t a surprise to find out that the man from Nebraska who had started out as a fairly reasonable if moderate guy had transformed into a conservative. That was on display in his erratic performance on the 9-11 Commission. I’m beginning to think that the contrarian shtick should stand as evidence of a mind in decline. Last night I listened to his non-coherent mix of factoids and what I can only think of now as logicoids unable to figure out what the guy is getting at. His “ending the occupation without withdrawal” blather is about the most bizarre thing I’ve heard a Democrat of his stature say, ever. It was on the same level as Bush II or Reagan in free fall. And this is the guy who heads The New School these days? If he was the best of the presidential search I’d make sure my name was permanently kept off the list of also rans.

But nothing he said last night would have disqualified him from a position on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Coherence will keep someone off of that sheet but not the sad spectacle of what was on Moyers. Bob, check out Zell Miller, that’s where this kind of thing untreated ends up. When Limbaugh starts praising a Democrat, that’s time to check in for some rational emotive therapy or to ask your nearest and dearest if you’ve lost it.

For more, read about what Kissinger is up to these days. He’s the pioneer who discovered that spouting the most obviously self-serving lies and nonsense is no bar to a career as a sage in a declining empire. It’s a job requirement.

I'd Love You To Turn Yourself On And To Choose The Stations

Posted by olvlzl.
I didn’t own a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, my brother did but like most other people my age I can sing every song on it. Allowing for getting the order of verses mixed up a bit. As I reminded myself here last week, I’m not quite 64 yet but it’s getting closer all the time.

The Beatles weren’t my favorites. I’m one of the minority of geezers who has never owned one of their albums, at least not yet. They were better than the Rolling Stones who I have always loathed. The Beatles did try new things and didn’t just rip off the blues and revel in racist stereotypes and male supremacy.

It was nice to find out the other day that some of the things I’d always believed they’d done with very sophisticated manipulation of tape were actually done live with session musicians in the Abby Road Studio. And they’d provided beer. Everyone knew that the Beatles had hired some of the best classical musicians in the world for their albums, Ray Premru, the very great trombonist, being just one. But I’d always figured that “A Day In The Life” was more the product of tape splicing and effects, in the end. Someone in The Beatles were listening to the avant guard of the time. Penderecki's Threnody, the tape music of Ussachevsky and a number of others must have figured into the listening of at least John and Paul and most likely all of them. George, of course was studying Indian classical music as well.

Hearing the album played on the 40th anniversary of its release brought back an atmosphere of freer thought. People seemed a lot less dogmatic about things back then. At least the ones I knew were. You could believe anything you wanted to as long as you didn’t hurt anyone in the process. Diversity, even eccentricity is as desirable in the intellectual life of the world as it is in the biosphere. It’s the free exercise in diversity that seems to be what was really lost over the years. Maybe it’s the constant pressures to conform to one of the several recognized ideologies that makes people so much more ill tempered than they were back then too. Maybe it’s what happens from the Stones still being around. I’m feeling nostalgic for a time when you could count on not being jumped on by thought police when you suggested alternative ideas.

It’s all right if young people never listen to their grandparents’ music, times change. But it would be nice if they could know what it feels like to be comfortable with thinking for themselves in an atmosphere of less hostility and violence. I’d rather see them getting by with a little help from their friends than from the culture of commerce and propaganda, the only flavors of thought allowed in today’s media.

* Rubber Soul and Revolver still seem more innovative to me, something I was stunned to hear Dan Damon of the BBC and I agree on. We don’t agree on much else. Day Tripper or Baby You Can Drive My Car are more likely to go through my head than anything from Sgt. Pepper. Something of a mixed blessing.

I also enjoyed the parody elements of Frank Zappa’s “We’re Only In It For The Money” too, though Zappa’s facile cynicism doesn’t wear as well for me as the more complex Beatles album. I’d rather end up making a fool of myself for the right reasons than to start out being one for the wrong reason.

Where the He-Men Meet

You might like a post I wrote on Tweety and the boys on the TAPPED blog.

Friday Cat Blogging

This lovely cat is FeralLiberal's Emma, enjoying the bounty of nature. The way cats do.





And this lovely cat is FeralLiberal's PippinEmma again, enjoying nature in a way cats normally don't.

Photography thanks to FeralLiberal.

Labiaplasty

That is surgery on the labia, the lips of the vulva. There are two sets of lips there, surprisingly, called labia majora and labia minora. Get it? Heh.

Anyways, given that women always need fixing it is now fashionable to have cosmetic surgery done on those lower lips. I wonder if they could insert some dentures in the vagina itself, to satisfy those who like the idea of a vagina dentata? Or to scare those who fear it?

Before I go and inquire about those dentures I listened to this audio. Did you know that labiaplasty can mess with the nerves leading to the clitoris? Nasty stuff.

Freewayblogger's Take

On how he would resign from the Peace Movement, not that he is planning to do so.

Meanwhile, in Montana

A forty-nine year old woman who is unable to conceive but who uses the birth control pill as a medical treatment for some complaint goes to a pharmacy, Snyder Drugs, to get her prescription refilled. Instead of the pills she receives a note saying that the pharmacy will no longer dispense birth control pills.

The pharmacy has new owners, see, and these new owners believe that birth control pills are abortion. Even when taken by women who can't conceive, it seems. The new owners also signed onto an ad running in the Great Falls Tribune on Mother's Day:

"The sanctity of human life has always been one of our most cherished heritages. The family unit is the foundation of our society. The devotion and sacrifice of mothers over the years and the continual care and concern for their unborn has been the cornerstone of the family. On this Mother's Day 2007, we wish to express our gratitude to all mothers for their unselfishness in our behalf. As health-care professionals, we call upon the American people to once again reaffirm the right to life for future generations of the unborn and join with us in our efforts to restore respect, dignity and value to each human life—born or unborn."

What a fascinating piece of ideology that ad is. Note how it places family as the foundation of the society and then places the "unselfish" mother caring for the babies as the cornerstone of this family concept. If the mother stops being "unselfish" (the quotes are because having children might be quite selfish, too, based on enjoying the children) the family unit will fall down the tree of civilization and all will be lost. Hence, women can't have the pill, because then they might not carry out the needed selfless toil. What a sad view of life this is in some ways.

But what is even sadder is the fact that when I wrote about the radical right's tendency to equate birth control pills with abortion the first time the response was one of shock and outrage. Now we are used to this way of thinking, the faith-based one where medical evidence doesn't matter and where the needs of the patients count very little.
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The source is a Planned Parenthood e-mail. See also this Montana blog.

Mad Cows And Free Markets

Now this is hilarious:

The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.

Did you get it? This administration which worships at the altar of free markets doesn't want to let a firm offer better guarantees than other firms offer! It is like telling a firm which wants to raise the quality of its products or their longevity that it can't do that because the other firms will cry.

The last paragraph is especially interesting. A "false positive" means that the test identifies a sample as tainted when it is not. The way this would harm the meat industry would be by making consumers of beef scared for no good reason. They might even stop eating cows. Now consider what happens under the system of minimal testing. There will be hardly any false positives and also hardly any true positives (cases where the tainted meat was actually tested), because hardly any meat will be tested. Should the mad cow disease then appear, well, consumers will soon enough show that this happened, by going mad and by dying.

The whole thing is backwards. There is no law which would require other firms to follow Creekstone's voluntary testing initiative. It is offering consumers something they might want. Usually this is what the conservatives laud the marketplace for. But suddenly more competition is a bad thing and must be stopped. By the government, even.

On the FDA

The Food and Drug Administration is weak, toothless. It's a tired old institution and it's scared of the conservative administration. It cares about the firms, these days, more than it cares about the American citizens.

The origins of the modern food safety laws in the United States are in a 1938 law. This law, in turn, was pushed through by the horrible events the year before: Over one hundred people died, many of them children, after taking a form of sulfa (then the newest wonder drug) which contained a lethal ingredient: diethylene glycol. Nobody had tested its suitability, and that is why we got a law requiring testing of new medications.

In 2006 over one hundred people died in Panama, for the very same reason: diethylene glycol. It was used as a substitute for glycerine, a more expensive but safe ingredient, by a Chinese manufacturer. The story recounting the sad chain of deceit leading in those deaths also mentioned that a wholesaler in the United States caught one shipment of diethylene glycol just in time as recently as 1995!

Given this background, you might be interested in learning that the FDA doesn't REQUIRE American firms to test the glycerine they buy from abroad; it just recommends such testing.

We need to buy the FDA new dentures, with lots of sharp canines.
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For the links go to my article in the American Prospect.

Women in the Public Eye

Are irritants. Rinsing doesn't really work, but a good bashing just might flush them out.

Take Cindy Sheehan. She is quitting as the National Monument of the anti-war movement. It was an impossible job and one that the media initially assigned her, although she ran with it later. I call it an impossible job, because National Monuments of this sort are walking myths and they attract not only adulators and flowers but also dogs lifting their legs nearby, and once the myth is embodied in one person it's pretty easy to pull it down. All Sheehan had to do was to step outside the myth of the bereaved mourning mother and she was toast.

Sheehan's case is almost a total opposite of the case of Hillary Clinton. Where critic saw Sheehan as too emotional and too prone to stunts Clinton is seen as not emotional enough, too iceberg-like and too calculating. Too tame. She almost seems to try to live so as to provoke no negative comment, but negative comments she gets in any case. Indeed, three critical books have just come out on her life, politics and future. Bay Buchanan (yes, the sister of THAT Buchanan) even diagnoses her (from a distance and without any qualifications) as suffering from the narcissistic personality disorder!

The avalanche of anti-Hillary books should be a surprise, given that the other presidential candidates haven't gotten anywhere near the attention. But then Hillary Clinton is much more interesting to bash, and not only because she is married to Bill Clinton. She is also an uppity woman, an embodiment of all the hidden fears that suggest castration to many conservative men.

To learn that about the worst the three books could find on Hillary is that she is ambitious makes for a bit of an anti-climax. Do people really think that all those men running for the job of the president of the United States of America are NOT ambitious? Who the hell would apply for that job without lots of ambition? It's just that women aren't supposed to be ambitious for themselves.

It isn't the fact that both Sheehan and Clinton get so much criticism that bothers me. It is the way they are made into something bigger, something more frightening, something more mythical than any human being can be, and the way the criticism is framed and tinted with all sorts of little misogynistic seasonings. The critics are mostly not just trying to take Sheehan or Clinton down. They are trying to take down a myth, to kill it. Before it gets them.

Off With His Head

I recently wrote about the problem with the overburdened Food and Drug Administration and in particular about the worrisome tainted produce coming from China. In that article I pointed out the relative lethargy of the Chinese government.

Well, now they have acted. They are going to execute the country's top food inspector:

The former head of China's food and drug administration was sentenced to death Tuesday for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines - including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths.

Seeking to address broadening concerns over food, the government also announced plans for its first recall system for unsafe products.

The developments are among the most dramatic steps Beijing has publicly taken to address domestic and international alarm over shoddy and unsafe Chinese goods - from pet food ingredients and toothpaste mixed with industrial chemicals to tainted antibiotics.

...

According to the official magazine Outlook Weekly, a survey by the quality inspection administration found that a third of China's 450,000 food producers had no licenses, and 60 percent did not conduct safety tests or have the capability to do so.

Did you know that 80% of the ascorbic acid (a common preservative) comes from China?

The Squeaking In The Wall

That's the wingnut mice you are hearing, gnawing away at the last hundred years of progressive legislation, trying to get through the joists. Much of this work is done in silence, outside the limelight of the media (where's that white woman eaten by the sharks?). Little mice they may be, but there are many of them. Some even wear judicial gowns:

Court Protects Gender Discrimintion
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg notes, the evidence of gender discrimination in the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear, decided today by the Supreme Court, is unambiguous:

Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at Goodyear Tire and Rubber's plant in Gadsden, Alabama, from 1979 until her retirement in 1998. For most of those years, she worked as an area manager, a position largely occupied by men. Initially, Ledbetter's salary was in line with the salaries of men performing substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236.


Despite this, and contrary to the judgment of the EEOC, the Court by a bare 5-4 majority threw out the discrimination claim she brought under the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Court--in an opinion, natch, written by its arch-reactionary newest member--argued that Ledbetter failed to challenge the initial discriminatory pay decision within the required 180 days, and the ongoing pay discrimination did not constitute an "unlawful employment practice."

So you, a possible victim of discrimination, have 180 days to act. That is half a year. I hope you know all the facts within that time. I hope you realize that you might have been discriminated against. On the other hand, if you happen to have discriminated against some folks in the past you can now relax.

Of course this decision was expected in the general sense, of course. The clearing out of all non-wingnuts in the Supreme Court was not something unimportant in the blueprints of the conservatives, and it was not just about abortion. It's also important to make sure that women and minorities don't cause a fuss in the labor markets or in the universities. For the proper functioning of the status quo, that is. From the point of view of those who run things. And their mice.

Thank You, Guest Bloggers

I've come to the conclusion that my vacation was very good for the blog. Lots of interesting posts. My heartfelt thanks to blue lily, hybrid, olvlzl and skylanda (in alphabetical order).

Still, I'm back. I think.

On the AIDS Anniversary

Well, ok, a little belated, but nevertheless. I'm referring to olvlzl's post, because it gives me an opportunity to show you a few pictures the French have used in a campaign to prevent HIV infections (via Phila). Like these:





I get the point they are trying to make. I do. But I think they are also making some points that aren't quite so good. Such as thinking of sex as something to do with yucky creatures. You know, like your sexual partners. But perhaps the net effect is beneficial, as in reminding people to be careful. What do you think? (See how I'm engaging the readers here!)

Guest post by Blue Lily --Race as disability

Back in March the story of the Andrews family of Long Island came to public attention. The NY Daily News announced "What a mess, baby: Parents say fertility clinic botched in-vitro & girl's got the wrong dad":

A Long Island woman and her husband are suing a Park Ave. fertility clinic for allegedly inseminating her with the wrong man's sperm.

After struggling to conceive their second child, Nancy Andrews and her husband, Thomas, turned to New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine for in-vitro fertilization treatments, according to a lawsuit.

Andrews soon became pregnant and the couple was overjoyed. They only discovered the clinic's "colossal blunder" after Andrews gave birth to her daughter Jessica, court papers charge.

"While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her," the Commack couple said in documents filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. "It is simply impossible to ignore."

Thomas Andrews is white and his wife is Dominican. But Jessica, who was born Oct. 19, 2004, has darker skin than either of them as well as "characteristics more typical of African or African-American descent," the lawsuit states.

The couple tested their daughter's DNA using a home kit and later with two more sophisticated methods. All three of the tests confirmed their suspicions - the tot has a different father.

The story came to public notice in March because a judge ruled the couple can precede with their medical malpractice lawsuit but disallowed the claims of mental suffering -- the parents' suffering and baby Jessica's suffering for being a different race than her parents. There's a lot to unpack here and The Nation's Patricia Williams took a stab at it:

What's distinctive about the Andrews case is that the parents... tried to cite... Jessica's pain and suffering for having to endure life as a black person. The Andrewses expressed concern that Jessica "may be subjected to physical and emotional illness as a result of not being the same race as her parents and siblings." They are "distressed" that she is "not even the same race, nationality, color...as they are." They describe Jessica's conception as a "mishap" so "unimaginable" that they have not told many of their relatives. (Telling the tabloids all about it must have come easier.) "We fear that our daughter will be the object of scorn and ridicule by other children," the couple said, because Jessica has "characteristics more typical of African or African-American descent." So "while we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her...each and every time we appear in public."

Since the claim of mental distress of their child hinges on appearance and public perceptions of skin color, Williams comments on the family's photo:

The picture underscores the embedded cultural oddities of this case, the invisibly shifting boundaries of how we see race, extend intimacy, name "difference." According to the Post, Mrs. Andrews is "Hispanic" and apparently, by the paper's calculations, one Hispanic woman plus one white man equals "a white pair." The mother is "a light-skinned native of the Dominican Republic," seeming to indicate that while she may not be "white," she's also not "black." Each narrative implies that if the correct sperm had been used, the Andrewses would have been guaranteed a lighter-skinned child. But as most Dominicans trace their heritage to some mixture of African slaves, indigenous islanders and European settlers, and as dark skin color is a dominant trait, it could be that the true sperm donor is as "white" as Mr. Andrews. But that possibility is exiled from the word boxes that contain this child. Not only is Jessica viewed as being of a race apart from either of her parents; she is even designated a different nationality--this latter most startling for its blood-line configuration of citizenship itself.

Paul Butler at BlackProf discusses the race issue as well.

If I understand the legal situation correctly, the parents' claim of mental suffering is essentially a "wrongful conception" or "wrongful birth" claim and their suit on behalf of Baby Jessica's mental suffering is a "wrongful life" claim. New York state, where the case resides, has precedence in these situations, which Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Sheila Abdus-Salaam cited in her ruling. Regarding the "wrongful birth" claim:

By logical extension of the principles enunciated by the courts in New York that the birth of an unwanted but otherwise healthy and normal child does not constitute an injury to the child's parents, and that even parents of a child with a serious disease cannot recover for emotional injury for the birth of that child, plaintiffs in this case cannot recover for mental distress arising from having a child who is not Mr. Andrews' biological offspring.... Plaintiffs cannot recover damages based upon their claim that they were deprived of the opportunity to have a child of their own genetic makeup. The Court of Appeals has rejected as too speculative a claim that is " . . . based essentially on "wrongful nonbirth", the deprivation of an opportunity by a woman to have a child by her husband.

While these types of lawsuits were originally an additional claim for malpractice issues like failed vasectomies or lack of medical information provided by doctors, much of the case law centers around the distinction of whether or not a child with disabilities is involved. And, of course, that determination hinges on the ability to diagnose that there's "something wrong" with a child at the time a suit is filed. In the Andrewses case, if Jessica had not been perceived as looking physically different from her parents, her genetic differences (in this case, the fact that her father was not a biological parent) may have gone forever unnoticed.

And because the wrongful life suit (rejected by the judge) on Jessica's behalf claims she will suffer physical and emotional stress from having darker skin than her family, race is made here to be a kind of disability. Disability, after all, is not only about actual impairments, but also perceived impairments -- the ADA recognizes this fact of the social stigma of disability.

While the specific circumstances (of botched reproductive technology leading to wrongful birth and life claims due to skin color) may be new, positing race or gender or ethnicity as a disability is not historically new. Disability is and has frequently been used as a method of demonizing or oppressing other minority populations. That goes back at least as far as Aristotle claiming that women are mutilated (read impaired) males. The medical definition of "hysteria" linked femaleness with mental instability. Irrespective of diagnosed intellectual impairments, black male schoolchildren in U.S. public schools are much more likely than other kids to be placed in special ed classes or considered behavioral problems. There are innumerable examples of oppressed minority identities having their identifying biological difference labelled as a disabling condition.

But culturally, we find it challenging to look at the dynamic from the other direction. Sandel's book (discussed briefly in an earlier, May 26, 2007, post) on the ethics of striving for genetic perfection asks:

Is it wrong to make a child deaf by design? If so, what makes it wrong -- the deafness or the design? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that deafness is not a disability but a distinctive identity. Is there still something wrong with the idea of parents picking and choosing the kind of child they will have? Or do parents do that all the time, in their choice of mate and, these days, in their use of new reproductive technologies?

What if, with an understanding of how elusive and intersecting categories of ability and identity are, that paragraph were rewritten to more closely discuss the Andrewses court case?

Is it wrong to make a child dark-skinned by design? If so, what makes it wrong -- the dark skin or the design? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that dark skin is not a disability but a distinctive identity. Is there still something wrong with the idea of parents picking and choosing the kind of child they will have? Or do parents do that all the time, in their choice of mate and, these days, in their use of new reproductive technologies?

Intersections between identities are never perfect, and matching women's oppression to racial oppression to disability oppression is never a perfect fit of history and experience, but the Andrewses case does beg the above questions about race. The references to "dark skin" could easily be changed to "light skin" to reflect the family's presumption of genetic whiteness, but the "problem" of skin color difference remains.

I confess that I don't know exactly how this court case illuminates the debates over prenatal screening and genetic engineering to avoid children with disabilities. But they are fundamentally related.


Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

“The 26th Wedding Anniversary does not have any traditional materials or Symbols associated with it.”

First posted on olvlzl, June 06, 2006 as SILVER ANNIVERSARY
You have heard the announcements, it was 25 years ago that they figured out that a new health disaster was beginning. With time they would name it AIDS and learn that it was caused by HIV but in the beginning they just knew that a uniformly fatal disease had emerged. Twenty-five years is long enough for the anniversary to seem dowright nostalgic with old names and faces appearing on TV. Researchers and doctors who haven't been seen since Donahue was on daytimes. Progress is reported on many fronts though at best some of the worst symptoms can be kept down for a while. I won't go into the details of the side effects and expense of the drugs required. Even "Secrets of the Dead" had an interesting piece about genetic immunity to the virus. I won't watch cable anymore so am not sure if the maudlin parade of name victims has been a staple of the coverage.

Twenty-five years into a pandemic with effective uniform mortality and there are still 40,000 people contracting HIV infections in the United States every year. For the love of God, there are still babies being born here with HIV infection. Teenagers are often mentioned as a group at major risk of new infection.

Twenty-five years and there isn't real condom education on TV. The medium that uses a third of every hour to sell everything else in the world with sex with programs to reinforce the ads for the other two thirds. You can sell anything with sex in the United States except responsibility and life.

In the same years that health scientists were begging the United States to begin comprehensive promotion of effective condom use, there has been an effective veto on condom advertisements and education by the clergy, their allies in the conservative movement and the Republican Party. They have kept condom education out of TV in the United States. And while they were doing that they made Rupert Murdoch a citizen of the United States. The "dirty digger" of the infamous "Sun" tabloid, the Aussie T&A peddler was put on fast track for citizenship in the Reagan years so he could start buying media companies and plying his trade in low grade smut and right wing politics. I've got to eat breakfast or I'd go into his being installed as a Papal Knight of St. Gregory during the same period. So it's not the sex they won't let on TV. Mr. Page Three, yes. Condom education? You willing to bet your life on seeing it here?

It is twenty-five years past the time when the United States should have ditched the faith based tire biters and put real education about condoms in the mass media. And mass media is the only effective means of mass education we have. How many people can tell you who this fifteen minutes' American Idol is as compared to the number who can tell you where Athens has been for the past 2,500 years? Every week that clergymen or Concerned Bottle Blonds of America delay the airing of real, effective, science based AIDS education thousands will die. They are the angels of preventable death. Completely informed and totally unconcerned, they are worse than the ignorant Moslem clergy who are responsible for polio outbreaks in Nigeria. There is no question that their veto of condom education and the full index of lies and distortions they replace it with are responsible for many times more dead Americans than the attacks of Sept. 11th. And that's just here. The bodies they've left lie around the world.

Condoms are the most effective way to prevent new HIV infections. They are safe, inexpensive, simple to use and when used consistently, people live. But they will not be used without a massive education and public relations campaign. They have to be made acceptable, even fashionable. Their use has to be made as every day and habitual as brushing your teeth and using deodorant before you go out on a date. Our media could do that. They can sell anything. If they can get Americans to try sushi they can get them to save their lives. Think of the possibilities, think of what those geniuses behind the Geico ads could do on the subject.

Will it ever be done? Will it be done in time for your children or grand children to learn how to save their lives? Twenty-five years and they're still talking in generalities and nice words that Michael Powell would have approved. The TV discussion I've heard is worse than it was during the Reagan years. Clearly, the conservative establishment and their corporate media are going for gold.

Note: It’s close to a year since this was first posted. I’m not certain that there are 40,000 more new infections, though I expect there have been. I’m sure we are no closer to having a rational and so moral AIDS policy in this country than we were then.

Another Good Use Of Time

Posted by olvlzl.
Read about the new perfume brand, Aroma of Sanctity put out by the house of Gingrich. As Seen On TV and endorsed by H.H. James Dobson.

Randi Rhodes Interview at Buzzflash.com

Posted by olvlzl.
I was tempted to complain about something NPR had on this morning but reading this interview is definitely a more productive use of your time.

It’s Fine With The “Patriots” When It’s a Republican Ripping Up The Constitution

Posted by olvlzl.
When Bill Clinton was president the airwaves and cabloids were awash with drooling, clearly marginal personalities of the right to far right warning of black helicopters and directives to destroy constitutional government. And I’m not just talking about FOX. Nutcases on the payroll of some second generation Bircher billionaire were more common than dysfunctional E channel celebs.

Now, we have the spectacle of a failed regime issuing a “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive” to almost no attention. We’ve seen that with the Bush family before, they seem to have a quite special relationship with the American media.


This is a developing story. I’ve looked at what we’ve been allowed to see of the “Directive” and it looks to me that this is a good short version.

When the President determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the President can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an "enduring constitutional government."

Translated into layman's terms, when the President determines a national emergency has occurred, the President can declare to the office of the presidency powers usually assumed by dictators to direct any and all government and business activities until the emergency is declared over.

Ironically, the directive sees no contradiction in the assumption of dictatorial powers by the President with the goal of maintaining constitutional continuity through an emergency.

We’d better deal with this now before, um, events catch up with us and we suddenly find ourselves with a Constitution in name only. The Rexal rangers and “patriot” militias will be taken off of black helicopter watch, deputized and rounding us up. Last month you that might have thought that was a slightly more fantastic scenario than you might after reading what the Bush regime has released. Who knows what might have been classifed behind the national security smoke screen.

Connecticut's War Dead

Via Crooks&Liars