What Are Your Political Non-Negotiables?

This may be relationship psycho-babble, but sometimes babble is good. I was once asked that question about non-negotiables in the context of getting advice on a relationship, and it turned out to be excellent advice. What ARE the beliefs and ideals which are so important for me that compromising about them makes me feel as if I've died and only move around because of some residual reflex action? Or taken in reverse: what are the many fields of life in which I can compromise and yet remain me? Answers to questions like these make for healthier relationships.

Compromise is a necessary art in all human interaction, but throwing away your innermost self will not work. I was thinking about this when I read Mark Kleiman's recent post on why Michael Mukasey might not be the best possible choice for the job of the Attorney General of the United States:

I understand Mukasey is supposed to be a reasonably good guy, by comparison with the run of Bush appointees. But if Mukasey won't say that waterboarding is torture and claims that the President has some undefined power to violate statute law — even criminal laws, such as the ban on torture and other war crimes — under his "Article II powers," then why should the Senate Judiciary Committee even bring his nomination to a vote? If he says he hasn't read the latest torture memos or decided whether waterboarding is torture, Sen. Leahy ought to tell him to read the memos and observe a waterboarding session and come back when he's done his homework.

Andrew Sullivan linked to Kleiman and pretty much agreed:

Don't people see that this is what Cheney is doing? He is setting precedent after precedent for totalist, secret executive power. And with each precedent for unchecked, uncontrollable executive power - including the power to detain and torture within the United States - the America we have known is being surrendered. This is the other war - a constitutional war at home against American liberty and the Constitution - as dangerous in a different way as Islamism. One attacks our freedom from the outside; the other hollows out our freedom from within. The fight against both is the calling of the time.

Hmm. But the point both of these writers are making is that it is indeed time to take a quick peek at those innermost value, just to make sure that they still exist, and it's also time to look at Mukasey's private values. For example, does he value executive power over habeas corpus?

Pragmatism can be taken too far, to a point where one forgets what the pragmatism was supposed to achieve in the first place.

This is what I have trouble with when watching some politicians or when reading some pundits. The trapeze work of both types can look exciting, agile and nimble, but I see no underlying pattern, no planned series of breathtaking stunts, no planned safe landing in support of those basic values. (What a terrible metaphor. But it's Friday.) The only real value I see in their work is: "Hey, look at me!"

And this is why I think we need a little bit more idealism in our political debates and a little less pragmatism, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle. I want to know what the non-negotiables of the politicians are, and I want them to care about the Constitution and other similar concepts. Otherwise they look like zombies to me.

Half A Million Deaths

This is the number of women who die each year in a way we summarize as maternal mortality:

Giving birth can be fatal for women in many countries of the world.

Around half a million women die annually before, during or shortly after giving birth - and almost all of these deaths occur in developing countries.

Campaigners argue that these deaths are both preventable and have repercussions that echo far beyond the woman's immediate family and community.

"We know exactly what needs to be done to save women's lives," the chief of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Thoraya Obaid told the BBC News website.

And yet, since 1990, the level of maternal mortality has decreased by less than 1% per year, far from enough to reach an internationally agreed goal of a 75% reduction by 2015.

The leading killers during pregnancy or childbirth include massive blood loss, high blood pressure, an unsafe abortion, an untreated infection and obstructed labour - where the woman's body is too small for the baby to pass through the birth canal.

But the reasons why these issues have not been tackled are political, rather than medical.

And what are these political reasons? The most important one is the unimportance of the women most at risk. They are poor and tend to live in societies where women have few rights. Even those who try to justify the use of greater resources to help these women must bring in arguments about the children or the family in general:

If a mother is ill or dies, the baby is less likely to survive and her other children less likely to be healthy and educated.

The second political reason has to do with the current United States policies in giving international aid. Anything containing the term "reproductive health" is seen as a codeword for abortion and shunned by the Bush administration. The money then tends to go into avenues which focus on abstinence, say, and women without many rights can't enforce their own abstinence.

Granted, these problems are mostly political and not medical. But the poorest countries do have limited health resources in general. I wonder if these resources are allocated in the best possible manner and if the low value of women (and of children, in countries with many children) is part of the explicit decision making in those allocations.
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Thanks to TheaLogie for the link.

Say "Cheese"

Pictures of politicians are interesting. Remember how good Nancy Pelosi used to look in most pictures on progressive and liberal blogs? Now the pictures I see of her make her look as if she is suffering from indigestion. Pictures of Reid are likewise suddenly of a grumpy guy. All this is obvious, but I'm not sure that the fact the pictures are selected to further a thesis is as clear to our brains when we click on a webpage. Has anyone studied the impact of these visual "disapproval/approval" devices?

Then there is this picture of Hillary Clinton:





It is attached to an article about how well she is polling, an article which implies that the people who like her like her for all the wrong reasons. Or in short: Only white men vote logically. Everyone else votes on illogical gender and race grounds and should probably not be allowed to vote at all.

Ann Coulter started that meme, but it has recently been taken up by Cliff May on Tucker Carlson's show. It's fascinating how all that goes: The arguments seeping slowly from the extreme fringe of the conservatives towards the mainstream conversation.

SCHIP Override Fails in The House

This was expected:

Supporters of a bill to provide health insurance for 10 million children failed this afternoon, as expected, to muster enough support in the House to override President Bush's veto.

The vote to override the veto was 273 to 156, or 13 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority of those present and voting; the bill was originally approved by a 265 to 159 vote on Sept. 25.

The main suspense before today's vote was over how many Republicans would side against President Bush. Forty-four House Republicans voted for the bill today, compared with 45 on Sept. 25.

The White House said President Bush was pleased with today's result. "As it is clear that this legislation lacks sufficient support to become law, now is the time for Congress to stop playing politics and to join the president in finding common ground to reauthorize this vital program," said Dana Perino, Mr. Bush's spokeswoman.

Democrats had anticipated defeat, and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, and Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, immediately offered angry comments.

Certain aspects of the SCHIP debate have not received the attention they deserve. For example, the fight is not just over expanding SCHIP to cover more children, but also about keeping the coverage for the children who have SCHIP right now. The president's veto means that the overall expense on the program is capped at the old level, even though prices of health care have risen. What this means is that several states will have to cut the number of children they currently insure. In short: the debate is not between the existing program and a larger one but between a larger program and a much smaller one.

Another aspect worth emphasizing is that the majority of those polled on the question of SCHIP want to see it expanded. Even 70% of Republican respondents wanted to see that, and three quarters of all those who want an expansion said that they'd be willing to pay higher taxes for it. In short: Bush is rowing against the current here.

A third aspect I find pretty astonishing is the inability of so many conservative commentators to grasp the simple fact that private health care insurance really is unaffordable for many people who might otherwise look almost middle-class. You can forget about an affordable insurance policy if your employer doesn't offer group health insurance, and you can also forget about it if you suffer from a pre-existing condition. The individual policies offered to groups like these look affordable only if they cover very little, which means that they don't protect the buyer against the truly catastrophic effects of many illnesses. Even people who do have good private health insurance find themselves owing lots of money to hospitals after a stay in intensive care or a complicated surgery.

George Will recently wrote:

SCHIP is described as serving "poor children" or children of "the working poor." Everyone agrees that it is for "low-income" people. Under the bill that Democrats hope to pass over the president's veto tomorrow, states could extend eligibility to households earning $61,950. But America's median household income is $48,201. How can people above the median income be eligible for a program serving lower-income people?

Imagine yourself living in New York City, earning $61,950, with, say, four children. Imagine that your employer doesn't offer group health insurance (most small firms do not). How much would you have to pay for an individual policy covering the whole family? How much is your rent? The point Will ignores here is that standard of living doesn't depend only on the income one earns but also on how much everything costs. It also depends on the number of people one supports out of that income. It's quite simple to imagine a particular income meaning an affluent lifestyle in some place such as India, whereas the same income in, say, London, would make you and your family destitute.

But even ignoring that definitional problem in Will's article, I find that many conservative commentators suffer from an odd kind of blindness when talking about health insurance. It's not a product that you can buy in little snippets if you can't afford the big chunk you actually need, and that chunk can cost more than a middle-class person can afford. Add to that the ever-decreasing number of jobs which still offer health insurance, and the problem becomes something which not only the poor suffer from.

Self-Advertising

You can go and read my post at WIMN website on "The New Girl Order". It's a criticism of the fairly usual conservative attack against women. These people always worry about the educated and uppity gals, never about the majority of women. It's quite revealing.

Phill Kline And Abortion

Do you think Phill Kline might suffer from an unusual kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder? That would be a gentle explanation for his single-minded stalking of all abortion providers in Kansas.

He once was famous for trying to subpoena all medical records of the patients of a Planned Parenthood clinic. Now he is suing a clinic:

A Planned Parenthood clinic was charged Wednesday with providing unlawful abortions and other crimes by a county prosecutor who had engaged in a high-profile battle with the clinic when he was Kansas attorney general.

Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline charged the Overland Park, Kan., clinic with 107 counts, 23 of them felonies. Besides 29 misdemeanor counts of providing unlawful late-term abortions, the clinic is charged with multiple counts of making a false writing, failure to maintain records and failure to determine viability.

Case documents have been sealed, according to a court order. The first hearing is set for Nov. 16.

Kline's office did not immediately comment on the charges.

Read the whole linked article to get an idea why I call Mr. Kline obsessive.

The Chocolate Jesus Is Back

This is one of those art pieces which provoke strong reactions:

"My Sweet Lord," an anatomically correct milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ that infuriated Catholics before its April unveiling was canceled, returns Oct. 27 to a Chelsea art gallery, its creator said Tuesday.

This time, artist Cosimo Cavallaro said he expects the public exhibit to proceed without a problem.

"There is nothing offensive about this," Cavallaro said of his controversial confectionary work. "If my intentions were to offend, if I did do something wrong, I wouldn't be doing this. But I didn't do anything wrong."

Cavallaro, who received death threats before the April show was canceled, said the vast majority of his mail was in support of his six-foot piece.

"I got a lot of positive mail from people in the Catholic Church, people studying theology, people in monasteries — all kinds of letters and e-mails of support," he said.

I have no idea what Cavallaro wanted to achieve with his sculpture, whether he was ridiculing religion or trying to delve deeper into that sacrifice myth which is a fundamental piece of Christianity, but I found this part of the article incredibly touching:

The sculpture is actually a new version of "My Sweet Lord," created with 200 pounds of chocolate over three days. The original was stored in a Brooklyn facility where mice nibbled away at its hands, ears, nose and feet, forcing Cavallaro to toss the original and recast the sculpture.

Mice taking Holy Communion.

Niki Tsongas from Massachusetts

Niki Tsongas, the widow of Paul Tsongas, is going to go to the U.S. Congress. What is odd that she is the first woman to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress since 1983. That is 24 years of no female representatives at all. Very weird, especially considering the fairly liberal tone of this Sodom of America.

It's Not A Choice. It's A Child.

This is the message on an anti-abortion bumper sticker. I was reminded of it when reading what the National Review Online has to say about the family of Bethany Wilkerson, a two-year old who has received treatment under the SCHIP and whose story is used as an ad for expanding the program by TrueMajorityAction. Those who have followed the Graeme Frost debate probably know what the main conservative argument here is: What the Frosts and Wilkersons have experienced is mostly the fault of their own bad decisions, and those of us who don't make bad decisions shouldn't have to pay taxes that cover those who do.

The NRO article takes the bumper sticker message in my post's title and turns it upside down:

While USAction and a labyrinthine maze of leftist activist groups prepare to rally around images of Tampa Bay's Most Photogenic Baby holding up a crayon sign that says "Don't Veto Me," Dara and Brian Wilkerson are real poster children — for irresponsible decisions.

On the conference call, Dara admitted to me that she and Brian had been talking about having children since before they were married. She further admitted that after they were married she voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was "unmanageable." From there she took a job at a restaurant with no health insurance, and the couple went on to have a baby anyway, presuming that others would pay for it and certainly long before they knew their daughter would have a heart defect that probably cost the gross national product of Burkina Faso to fix. But not knowing about future health problems is the reason we have insurance in the first place.

Or in short: It's the choice that matters, not the child. And this child already exists.

The conservative arguments about fertility tend to be confusing. Contrast the above curmudgeony approach with the other common theme about the conservatives being the people who still want to have lots of children. David Brooks once famously wrote:

All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends.

They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling

And who are these pro-child people? Do they all have private health insurance for their children?

Brooks doesn't tell us that, but he defines them as social conservatives and notes that white natalists tend to be concentrated in the red states. They might even have voted for George Bush. They are Good People!

Yet the Wilkersons, with similar desires and struggles, are not. Instead, they are an example of the consequences of poor decision-making skills. Funny, that.


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Cross-posted at TAPPED.

The Nobel Economics Prizes

They went to three guys (Leo Hurwicz, Eric Maskin Roger Myerson) who are credited with the theory of mechanism design. You get an idea about the possible meaning of this when I tell you that at least two of the three have doctorates not in economics but in mathematics. Yup, it's math stuff.

But it is also a way to address markets in a more realistic form than the one you may remember from an introductory economics course. Real world markets don't have that nice fairy godmother of perfect information. She is usually supposed to wave a wand so that all buyers and sellers know everything relevant about the product, its quality, possible substitutes and so on. Perfect information makes economic modeling easier but of course it is an unrealistic assumption in all but the most trivial marketplaces.

So what happens if, say, the sellers know a lot more about something relevant (such as the quality of the product they sell) than the buyers do? What kind of contracts would we expect to find in such markets and why? Would we anticipate some type of government regulation, to correct for the informational asymmetry? What institutions best achieve the goals of the participants in the exchange?

Mechanism design is one way of approaching questions like these.

Advice, Please

I want to write a book, but I have no idea what to put between the covers. Suggestions would be welcome.

Yes, this is the wrong way around. Things usually are, for me. I even have several titles ready (My Life As An Old Man, Squishing Trolls And Other Hunting Mishaps, The Wondering Womb), but I'm not sure what to stuff in the middle. It's not that I don't have ideas. I have too many of them.

Who Cannot Be Raped?

According to Teresa Carr Deni, a Municipal Judge in Philadelphia, prostitutes cannot be raped. The most that might happen to a prostitute who is gang-raped at gunpoint is that her services have been stolen. That's how I interpret Deni's decision that the recent gang-rape case of a prostitute was about "theft of service".

Zuzu writes about this case and so do Shakes and Violet Socks, and their coverage hits most of the important points.

This case reminds me of that earlier discussion about when date rape is not really rape but just bad sex, and the general concept that some rapes are more heinous in their impact than others or at least look that way to an outsider. But we already have concepts such as aggravated rape to use to capture any nuances that might be desirable.

The case also makes me wonder what all the sins are that we collectively assign prostitutes. There is an assumption that prostitutes have somehow consented to be abused and perhaps even murdered and that therefore the society is not responsible for awarding them the same protection other citizens deserve.

The Silver Tsunami

The headline screams: First US Baby Boomer Applies for Social Security. The story begins:

Retired school teacher Kathleen Casey-Kirschling on Monday became the first ripple in a "silver tsunami" of retiring baby boomers applying for pension benefits that threatens to overwhelm U.S. government finances.

Run for yer lives!

It is not the Iraq war that threatens to overwhelm the government finances. Nope. It is the darned baby boomers daring to get old. Perhaps the government should offer them some short-cut option to that terminal sleep?

Speaking of sleep, my local public radio station has a program about -- the horror! -- children not getting enough sleep. Why this provokes a whole program with experts and all I'm not sure. I don't think schools run 20 hours a day by law, say. Neither do I think that parents are in general unaware of how much sleep children need.

Well, I do know what the point of stories like these are: to press our worry and fear and guilt buttons so that we will attend to the stories and either the advertisements attached to them or the fund-raising needs of the public radio.

The way the baby boomer story is written also serves to make us more open to, say, the privatization of Social Security than we would be if the story didn't call the aging baby boomers "a silver tsunami". It is a tasteless phrase, given the death toll of the most recent tsunami.

And yes, I'm having one of those dark nights of the soul when it comes to political blogging. Thank you for noticing. Add a fanged smiley here.

Political Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are underused in political writing. I have experimented with that medium in the past, once in a rewrite of the "Little Red Riding-Hood" and once with "The Emperor's New Clothes", but the mythology is so deep and colorful that I could probably do a blog on nothing but fairy tales. Puss-In-The-Boots, anyone? Heh.

Fairy tales are a wonderful field to harvest for the images of what a good woman is and what a bad woman is as well as for those sage pieces of advice which girls were given about how to get on in life. Marry a prince. Wait quietly, tied up in the dragon's lair, and the hero will come and save you. Be good but don't blow your own horn.

Though fairy tales also told about young women who were proactive and had agency! (See how I throw in a few fancy words there.) Who were able to perform three impossible feats in order to save the life of their brothers or who were willing to love the beast to whom they had been promised by a rash father, thus turning the beast into the prince, after all. I'm not sure if the moral of "The Beauty and The Beast" is a healthy one, but at least Beauty had agency. More than today's Democratic Party, at least.

A Follow-Up on Project: Bring Miracle

Over $3,000 dollars were donated in just one day after the blogs wrote about the New Orleans family which lost their house twice, first in Katrina and then in a fire. Thank you so much!

If you have not yet donated you can do so now. It's not too late, and the children in that family need hope. More on the First Draft.

Monday Henrietta the Hound Blogging

I finally got a picture of her. She is not enjoying the car very much these days, and her eyes are running in this picture, but she has recovered from her idiopathic vestibular syndrome quite well and back to running the world.

P.O.V. or Terrier Meditation Posted by olvlzl

“You’re right, he’s a nice puppy”. I said. “He’s very affectionate and he’s got short hair so the allergies shouldn’t be a problem. And he’s so small, I’ve never had a small dog before, he’ll be easy to handle. No problem, ” I said. “Ok, I’ll take him off your hands if you can’t keep him”.

And the terrier puppy wasn’t so bad. House training wasn’t that difficult, mostly getting him used to my schedule. Very intelligent, he picked up on it within a week. Few problem messes after that. He loved the children, though not while they were toddlers. He growled and bared his teeth as they wobbled around, even when they weren’t anywhere near his food dish. My brother thought it was an attempt to establish dominance order. He had to spend time in his kennel when toddlers came to visit. Kennel, never used one of those before. Never had a small dog before. Never had a terrier before.

“Oh, how much different could it be, I’ve handled all kinds of big dogs for fifty years, ” I said. But never one so territorial, so fanatical about keeping joggers, walkers, cyclists, wild turkeys, hens, blue jays, squirrels, moths, katydids, pictures on kibble boxes, dogs in newspapers, .... out of his territory. And he noticed everything, cyclists three minutes before they came into sight. Barking, helping in high pitched, frenzied yelps, tearing around the house from door to window to window to see. Launching himself from chairs and the couch, using whoever was sitting there as a foot hold. Leaving gouge marks. I said lots of things then. Never had a dog I couldn’t keep off the furniture before.

Now, thinking of it from his point of view, his people are all alive, no one’s had their throats torn out. No one’s been attacked by bicycles or squirrels. His pack is all alive and the food cache is safe. It must be working. He must be doing what he’s supposed to be doing. It’s as it should be. By his lights. Somehow, it makes it easier to live with. By his lights he’s doing what’s right, even if his pack is so ungrateful.

The Buddha said that patience was the highest asceticism. I’m keeping the terrier dog. It’s good for me. I say. At 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon. A terrier is a different kind of dog with their own ways. But he’s still no boarder collie.

Michael Medved Conservative Morality Maven Posted by olvlzl.

Since today seems to be developing into a catalog of conservative moral depravity, it would be wrong to leave out Michael Medved, recent BuzzFlash Media Putz of the Week honoree.

Read about his recent piece about the great benefits that African-americans have reaped due to the enslavement of their ancestors. Here is an example of his thinking.

"as with their horses and cows, slave owners took pride and care in breeding as many new slaves as possible. Rather than eliminating the slave population, profit-oriented masters wanted to produce as many new, young slaves as they could." (sick)

Least you think he paints an entirely rosy picture, he did admit there were some down sides to enslavement.

Oh, did I say his thinking? Medved, please, don’t tell us what you think of other genocides. But since you liked Gibson's Jesus snuff flick, maybe you have.

For those of you who want to read him at length, here is his Clown Hall post.

Stop What You're Doing For The Least Among You And Spread Em' ! Posted by olvlzl.

Before Ronald Reagan came to power and began to destroy traditional American morals homelessness and hunger used to be considered a national shame. During the 80s he, other conservatives, their media, think tanks, university based flacks and other venues of propaganda began to turn the destitute into a nuisance, something to cleanse from wherever people were affluent enough to be able to enforce their exclusion.

After a quarter of a century of conservative dominance, it's not just the destitute who are forbidden, those who feed them are being arrested and put on trial.

The stake-out was almost comical in its absurdity: On April 4, 2007, undercover police counted how many times Eric Montanez, a 22-year-old volunteer with Food Not Bombs, dipped a serving ladle into a pot and handed stew to hungry people.

Once Montanez had dished up 30 bowls, the police moved in, collecting a vial of the stew for evidence as they arrested him for violating an Orlando, Fla., city ordinance: feeding a large group. Two days into his trial yesterday, Montanez was acquitted by a jury of the misdemeanor charge, but was cautioned to obey the law.

As activists celebrate the verdict, the Orlando Police Department has said it will continue to ordinance, making the fight for the free flow of food in the city far from over.

This is going way past what conservatives have dared to do by way of moral depravity. It turns the poor into vermin

“It’s essentially saying that homeless people are not worthy of attention or respect and they’re nothing more than pigeons who should be fed some place else so they’re not a bother to mainstream society,” says FNB Co-founder Keith McHenry.

McHenry says feeding the homeless is part of a larger social justice agenda.

“There’s a broader principle in America that we’re trying to address, and that is, food is a human right, not to be relegated to being a commodity,” McHenry says. “People who are hungry in this country deserve good, nutritious food without having to go through a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to get that food, and without having to be demeaned.”

You could well imagine that most of these laws are passed by conservatives who make a big deal out of their "christianity" at campaign time. As with their devotion to the flag and that to which it stands, their support of these laws have the ironic effect of, in reality, outlawing the practice of Christianity, Judaisim and Islam, not to mention Buddhism and any other religion or secular ethical system which not only permits feeding the destitute, it requires it. Just as their devotion to the flag is part of their ripping up the Bill of Rights their ethical practices rip up what is supposed to be the very basis of their pretended ethics.

Obama’s Flag Pin Posted by olvlzl.

The conservative flag cult reminds us once again that for them the flag symbolizes a Disunited States, divisible (the better to conquer) without liberty and certainly without justice for anyone but themselves and those who can pay for the privilege. And the God it is under is Mammon, the only God that conservatives have ever worshiped. Coerced reverence for a symbol and its use to divide The People is against everything good that the United States is supposed to be.

From the conservatives sweatshop where they manufacture imitation, shirt sleeve ready, outrage comes the rage over Barack Obama deciding to stop wearing a flag lapel pin. I’m not sure if this product is selling or not but it is interesting. Obama’s reasoned and entirely respectful reasons for foregoing the conventionalized and entirely meaningless symbolism won’t matter except to those who are reasonable and reflective. We don’t know yet what the political effect will be, though I’ve got to say, it was gutsy and courageous for a presidential candidate to tell, almost certainly, too much of the truth on a non-issue like a lapel pin.

The American flag is most used by conservatives and they have put it to some of the worst use that a symbol has been put to in the post WWII period. Like all bullies everywhere, they think they own it. Considering their political program that is uniformly opposed to the good of the majority and pretty much anything that is decent and good, their effective use of the flag to cover their piracy is a lesson in the uses of very effective deception. Maybe they listened to George M. Cohan who once pointed out that the show biz use of the flag had saved “many a bum show”. Few shows are more bum than the corporate stinker the conservatives have given us today.

If you are curious about the amazingly baroque rules laying out the real, right way to use an American Flag you might want to look at the Betsy Ross Homepage Flag Rules and Regulations. I think they are largely the ones taught in my infancy, adopted by some congressional action or other. If you do I’d call your attention to two items in the Flag Code Violations in the News. One was about some entertainer using one as a poncho which was a violation. “Section 8d. reads, "The flag should never be used as wearing apparel." The other is right below reminding us that George W. Bush was violating the flag when he autographed it to tacit outrage from the conservative outrage industry*.

Was it wise for Obama to let this become an issue in his political career? I don’t know. What he said was certainly true and it should be said by someone. I’d never put it high on the list of important issues. Symbols are malleable and can mean different things. He might have continued wearing it and talked about what it meant when he used it to good political effect. But he has the right to make that decision for himself. Never having much liked symbolism to start with, he certainly climbed higher in my personal regard. But politics is the art of the possible and the practical. A large part of the practical is weighing the importance of issues, what those issues will cost for any gain and in politics always keeping in mind that someone out of office has no chance to make law and to change bad ones. We will see if it was worth it politically.

*UPDATE: How could I have missed this clear abuse of the flag? Didn't Bush or any of his lackies attend 4th grade? Maybe they didn't teach flag etiquette in the schools that rich boys and girls went to.

September 11, 2006, President Bush and first lady Laura Bush stand on a carpet of the American flag at Ground Zero in Manhattan, the site of the September 11, 2001 attack. Section 8b of the Flag Code reads, " The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground..." Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed

Mitch McConnell Should Be HoundedFor Being The Slime He Is. Posted by olvlzl.

The demonstrated power of the Democratic Leadership in the House and Senate has been disappointing, though anyone who realized the tiny margin of their majorities in both houses couldn’t have expected anything else. The Republicans could be expected to largely stick together no matter how putrid the side they were supporting, they’ve been doing it for years even as it was clear they were sending the country and the world into disaster. For Republicans politics, and power in the interest of their real goal, plunder, is literally more important than the viability of the species. And, in passing, aren’t they pulling out all the stops on the cabloids to try and smear Al Gore over the Peace Prize.

Instead of raging at Reid and Pelosi it would be good to remember what they’re up against. If you want an example, look at the minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, a man without a shred of morality or human decency. If you haven’t heard yet, look at how low the Republican’s leader is willing to go to support Bush’s veto of SCHIP.

First, ABC News reported earlier this week that a staffer in Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) office received an email that was not intended for him. The email from a “Senate Republican leadership aideö showed the minority leader’s office was intently tracking the smear campaign well before it had gained widespread attention:

“This is a perverse distraction from the issue at hand,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, D-Nev. “Instead of debating the merits of providing health care to children, some in GOP leadership and their right-wing friends would rather attack a 12-year-old boy and his sister who were in a horrific car accident.”

The story points out, now that his office has been outed it’s for that next line of offensiveness, the Republican slime pots on the blogs to take up the task of smearing injured children in the interest of the insurance industry. If the cabloids hold to their typical form, after the lies have been spread on the lying Republogs, they can then be supported as “being said” on behalf of the Republican party. That's known as news these days.

So, that’s what Reid and Pelosi are up against, people who control the media, have no morals and who will smear injured children to defeat the majority.

There’s No Sexist Fool Like An Old Sexist Fool Posted by olvlzl

Or Yes, Comment Please.

The famous scientist James Watson is on a book tour with his memoire to much acclaim from his adoring fan, though there are those scientists and especially women in the sciences who might not be inclined to hero worship. One biologist who I asked to comment said, “He’s known for being one of the biggest assholes in the world,”.

Much of his “other” reputation stems from how he used another scientist, Rosalind Franklin and the, “perhaps”, less than honest way he got hold of her work without which he and Francis Crick might have been in the footnotes of another scientist’s book tour today.

Crick and Watson relied on two key pieces of information that were due to Franklin but obtained without her knowledge. One was her DNA Photograph 51, which Maurice Wilkins showed to Watson in January 1953. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race," Watson writes in The Double Helix, for he recognized immediately its tell-tale helical signature. It was psychologically the key event that inspired him to drop everything to search for the DNA structure.

The other piece of information used was Franklin's measurements of a DNA unit cell, which she included in a report to the Medical Research Council. When Max Perutz passed this non-confidential but not really public report to Crick in February 1953, Crick realized that the two strands of the helix run in opposite directions.

... In the Nature paper of April 1953 in which Crick and Watson announced their discovery, they acknowledged being "stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr M H F Wilkins, Dr R E Franklin and their co-workers at King's College". This sentence was carefully crafted so that Franklin would not realize just how effectively Crick and Watson had used her data. She would die five years later without ever knowing that Watson and Crick had seen Photograph 51 and her unit-cell measurements, although Maddox says that she must have suspected. Neither Crick nor Watson mentioned her in their Nobel speeches.

Rosalind Franklin died in 1958. Some of those who knew Franklin were outraged by the frankly sexist and dismissive treatment of her in Watson’s “The Double Helix” which led some of them to urge Anne Sayre to write her biography Rosalind Franklin and DNA.

But, back to today. What did the great scientist whose fame and glory almost certainly stands on Rosalind Franklin’s shoulders learn in his long life in the pursuit of objective reality?

"Men evolved to compete with other men...I guess it would be good if men acted like women, but then they become girly-men, afraid to offend everyone. I don't think you can be a man and be politically correct...I like women to succeed in science, I just want them to work 80 hours a week."

Maybe Wilkins told him that’s how much time Franklin put in at the lab. If she hadn’t done that, who knows if we would have ever heard of Watson and Crick.

Note: On his book tour Watson has some nasty comments for the safely dead and unable to respond, Crick too. But Watson’s moral philosophy seems to be summed up in this:

Victor McElheny notes how relentless Crick and Watson were, quoting Watson as saying: " 'Nice' is what you do when you have nothing else to offer."

The Hunting of the Snark

Lewis Carroll coined the term "snark". Of course the "snark" of the blogs is a very different animal. It's a form of sarcasm or irony, a fairly vigorous one, sometimes approaching hostility, and it can be lots of fun, especially after years of the milquetoast writing that most of the liberal/progressive mainstream pundits have offered us.

But I'm beginning to suffer from snark fatigue. In the past reading a good chunk of snark gave me that little belly tickle and the laugh that follows it. It was warming, heartening, enlivening. Take that! I'd mutter into my beard, while reading some especially nice piece taking down some puffed-up conservative writer. Finally someone was standing up for us meek who never inherited the earth.

I want that feeling back. Right now I'm overdosed on snark, and much of it skates dangerously close to the kind of writing the Michelle Malkins of this world do. And yet, I don't quite agree with Kevin Drum when he approves of this quote from Nordhaus and Shellenberger:

In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That's because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.

Isn't resentment a human emotion, not just limited to conservatives? And does it have to make a person smaller and less generous? I can imagine resentment based on real injustices done in the past, injustices which are not corrected because the person or the group who suffered from them is powerless. Such a resentment looks pretty justified to me.

Likewise, if you have been mugged or raped you are a victim of a crime. You don't "victimize" yourself on some sort of a pretext in these examples, although of course people do use the victim status in some cases where they are pretty obviously not victims. The prime example of the latter is the argument that Christians are oppressed in the United States.

Isn't the real question here twofold: First, are the feelings the quote describe justifed, and, second, what does one do in consequence of those feelings?

In any case, liberals and progressives don't come with angel wings already attached.

Not sure what I'm trying to say here. Just thinking aloud.

On Nobels

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. I have a longer post on her writing and what it meant for ideas about women, but it has to wait until Monday.

And Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize together with some U.N. folk. He seems much more comfortable at doing this work than he ever was in electoral politics, and I don't think that he will run again.

Friday Snakelet Blogging

Picture courtesy of Mr. French:





Lovely.

Today's Shallow Thoughts

These are by me. The first one has to do with Turkey recalling its ambassador for the reason that the U.S. Congress has declared the Armenian genocide a genocide, and it is about the need for countries to grow up, just as people must grow up. No country is perfect, no country has a history with nothing but noble and shining moments, and no country has been picked by some god or goddess to be the special favorite. I'm sick and tired of that type of thinking, because it is also the background for the beliefs that some countries are allowed to have more stuff, not because they managed to get it, but because they are morally justified in having more stuff. And from all this also comes the justification of war as something good.

Having said all that, I will also add (tut-tutting ever so gently) that this moment wasn't a good one for the Congress to point out that the genocide that took place nearly a century ago indeed was a genocide. Because the U.S. needs the Turks to act in a particular way, and angering them isn't the best preparation for that.

I forgot the second shallow thought I had. It must have been very shallow indeed to so easily escape the iron gates of my mind. - Oh yes! It's about the politicization of the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prizes in general, and it concerns the fact that the process in picking the candidates isn't very different from the process that elite colleges use to pick their students: The first round of pruning essentially guarantees that all remaining applicants are good enough to attend. The second round picks among those based on various reasons. In short, sure, the Nobel Prizes are political in one sense, but in another sense they are not. How's that for shallow?

Today's Action Alert

Scout Prime sent me an e-mail about a family in New Orleans who lost their home twice:

Kellie Joseph and her 6 children lost their home to Katrina. They had nearly completed rebuilding when someone abandoned a stolen car in their backyard and lit it aflame to destroy evidence. The flames engulfed the home.

A group of Tulane University medical students who heard of this devastating news decided to help the family rebuild again and started a website named Hope in Grace for what is called *Project: Bring Miracle*.

Recently the students contacted me. The online donation effort has reached a standstill after some initial local media attention. It is their hope to reach a wider audience through the Internet. They are asking for online donations to a rebuilding fund specifically restricted for use only in reconstruction.

If you can afford a donation, this family would appreciate it very much. You can donate via the Hope in Grace website and also send the family a message encouragement. It's hard to have your home destroyed twice.

The Elephant In The Living-Room

Almost every horrible school shooting brings out the nasty underbelly (crawling with worms) of some commentators. John Gibson, for example, decided that the recent Cleveland high school shooter must be a white teenager because he nobly shot himself at the end:

Summary: On his radio show, while discussing an incident in which a student shot four people at his Cleveland high school before killing himself, John Gibson asserted that "I know the shooter was white. I knew it as soon as he shot himself. Hip-hoppers don't do that. They shoot and move on to shoot again."

Of course these school shootings have almost invariably been carried out by white men.

And what is the elephant in the living-room? Figure it out yourself. What aspect of these shooters is never discussed, even though it is the one universally common factor?

Then ask yourself why we have conferences on the little brains of women and how the sexes differ (the answer: we must face the truths sternly, even if they are unpleasant for as little ladies), but such conferences don't get organized on this particular elephant in the living-room.

What Teen Boys Want?

Jezebel writes about a recent issue of Cosmo Girl which asks seven teenage boys what they want from girls. Or so I understand the answers the boys give. They must have been asked something to come up with this:

OMG the Heidi Montag issue of Cosmo Girl! keeps giving, like a full heaving bosom full of saline and strawberry Quik. And like, where would a Heidi Montag-lionizing issue be without a story on breast implants? Specifically, how boys your age really feel about them. The magazine finds seven guys to dish. "I consider myself a boob guy over a butt guy, so obviously I'd prefer bigger boobs," says 22-year-old Jay of Syracuse. But Brad, 19, of Philadelphia, feels differently! "I'd definitely date a girl with fake breasts," he says, "as long as they weren't too big." Elaborates Joe, 20, of Hawthorne, N.J.: silicone knockers that are "proportional" are okay, but only if they "help her" to "hold herself with just the right amount of self-confidence." Which is to say, not too much. Because there are all sorts of little reasons he might dump you anyway: among them, "Period Talk."

Snooty little buggers, aren't they? But of course this is not a random sample of teenage boys. We don't really know what most of them would think about false tits and periods and so on. Only what the seven selected ones say.

What strikes me much sadder than the opinions of these boys is that a girls' magazine thinks it is important to ask those kinds of questions. A boys' magazine would not ask girls how they'd like their guy dates served. It is this imbalance which is telling and which makes me very sad.

I think all this has something to do with porn. It has "liberated" men to expect silicone breasts, perfectly symmetrical labia and bleached anuses, and it has "liberated" lots of women to think of sex as servicing a guy.

Depreciating Assets

This odd story about a husband-seeking ad on Craigslist is a teaching moment for feminists:

Last month on Craigslist.com, someone who described herself as a "spectacularly beautiful" 25-year-old placed a personal ad seeking a husband who made at least $500,000 a year, because "$250,000 won't get me to Central Park West."

As her post hit the blogs, it received a scathing response from a man who said he fit her description and told her that her proposition was a bad business deal. "In economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset," he wrote, because "your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity."

Last week, this exchange spilled over into the e-mail world, where the it turned into a popular item to send to friends as a joke. The difference between this and other outrageous share-mail messages, however, was that instead of remaining anonymous, its ostensible author signed his name and the company where he worked, which happened to be the investment banking division of JPMorgan Chase.

This detail, which may have provoked nearly as much mirth as the contents of the exchange, made the correspondence either more or less credible. Would someone with a big job at a prestigious company really have linked his name to a message that read in part: "You're 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!"

Never mind if any of this exchange was meant to be taken seriously. The feminist point is an obvious one:

This is how patriarchy views marriage and the "war of the sexes" (an idiotic label for many reasons worthy a separate post). All women have is their youth and beauty and a smart woman will sell that to the highest bidder. Too bad that the potential bidders find the idea of "buying" her insulting enough to hit back with comments about "depreciating assets."

There will always be gold-diggers of both sexes. But a feminist world which allows women to earn money directly, say, reduces the pressure for these types of commercial transactions. Indeed, a man might actually find a woman who loves him not for his money but for what he is. And a woman might not have to have her breasts redone every five years to keep that well-paying trophy wife job.

Malkinized

The story of Graeme Frost has been Malkinized on the conservative blogs. What this term (which I think I just invented?) means is that the point of the story has been turned from what it initially was into something else, and this was done in ways which are morally shaky. Or at least they look shaky to me.

Now the Malkinized version has entered the mainstream via the lap of the Gray Lady, New York Times:

There have been moments when the fight between Congressional Democrats and President Bush over the State Children's Health Insurance Program seemed to devolve into a shouting match about who loves children more.

So when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush's weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.

Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.

In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats' plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family's income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.

But what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud, all the nastier because a child is at the center of it, actually cuts to the most substantive debate around S-chip. Democrats say it is crucially needed to help the working poor — Medicaid already helps the impoverished — but many Republicans say it now helps too many people with the means to help themselves.

The feud also illustrates what can happen when politicians showcase real people to make a point, a popular but often perilous technique. And in this case, the discourse has been anything but polite.

The critics accused Graeme's father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family's home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.

One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme's mother, Bonnie, warned: "Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas." As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family's home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.

For the record, what I found morally shaky was the way Michelle Malkin personally went to scout out the family's house, firm and to question their neighbors. And who gave these "critics" the family's e-mail address?

Thers has lots more on this process of Malkinization.

When I read all the different takes on this saga in the blogosphere I felt increasingly frustrated. Yes, the whole Malkinization process is nasty and sordid and the story has all the right buttons to push: attacking children, invading privacy, snooping and making up facts and so on. But note that the conversation we are now having is not about Bush vetoing the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Instead, we talk about the use of children in political campaigning and whether the Frosts are rich, middle-class or poor and how much we could sell their house for. This does not hurt the Bush administration at all. Keeping the limelight on Bush vetoing SCHIP a little longer would have.

Fear As A Political Weapon

John B. Judis's article in the August number of The New Republic has a hair-raising title: "How Political Psychology Explains Bush's Ghastly Success. Death Grip." The gist of the psychological arguments Judis describes is a phenomenon psychologists call mortality salience: When people are reminded about death (or events they associate with death, such as the massacres that took place on 9/11/2001), they turn not only more frightened but more politically conservative. Judis notes that George Bush's popularity may have been based on this psychological reaction and its exploitation by the Bush administration.

But it isn't just George Bush who may have benefited from the political uses of fear; it is the Republican Party in general. What a handly little tool fear turns out to be: All a conservative political speech needs to do is to add a little reminder about "timor mortis conturbat me" in the shorthand of 9/11 and -- presto -- the audience for the speech is suddenly more favorably attuned towards its conservative proposals, even if those proposals concern a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage or the general curbing of civil liberties or something else not directly associated with the underlying fear.

Fear is a powerful political weapon. The terrorists know this well, and it appears that so does the Bush administration. To understand how fear can be manipulated, ask yourself what it is that you really fear. That is what the political uses of fear will exploit, too. They will describe a mortal threat of a particular type. It will consist of an invisible yet omnipresent enemy ("hiding in the shadows" as Dick Cheney put it), impossible to quantify or to name in detail, impossible to fight on your own. The enemy is pure evil, but the signs of its presence are so unclear that almost anything could mean it has arrived: It is the monster under your bed, the muttering man who passes you by on the street, the funny smell in the subway carriage, the unattended piece of luggage at the airport. This enemy is something called "global terrorism", and it is out to kill you, personally. Never mind that your chances of dying in a car accident are higher than your chances of dying in a terrorist attack. It is the latter that you must fear.

If this nebulous fear is not enough to catch you in its grip, images of apocalypse might work. Their use is common in today's conservative political debates. As an example, George Bush once compared the jihadists to Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, individuals who are responsible for millions of deaths. This comparison does not tell us anything about the dangers that the jihadists present. It simply suggests that the danger is apocalyptic, worthy of great fear. It also prepares the audience to accept any and all parts of George Bush's "war on terror" because that is the way to keep fear at bay.

No wonder the political uses of fear have been so successful for the Republican Party. The massacres of 9/11 were televised, repeatedly, allowing the whole nation a chance to partake in a generalized form of post-traumatic stress disorder and turning the term "911" into a simple button to press whenever a fear-reaction was desired in politics. At the same time, preaching fear has few drawbacks. Should another large-scale terrorist attack occur the Republicans can say they warned us. Conversely, the absence of another such attack can be argued to prove that it was the Republican policies which have kept us safe. It is a win-win situation for the conservatives.

Or is it? Judis ends his article on the uses of fear by noting that this political tool may have outlived its usefulness. Time has passed and the "911" trigger has lost some of its potency. Problems with the Iraq occupation, the bungled aftermath of Katrina and the many Republican scandals are more recent memories in voters' minds than the image of George Bush standing with his foghorn on the ruins of the World Trade Towers, ready to defend us all against the bogeymen of global terrorism. Perhaps the new Republican candidates for the presidency of the United States will find some other tools in their kits than just having Americans feel frightened all the time?

Judis thinks so, barring another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil and excluding Rudy Giuliani who appears to campaign solely on the massacres of 911. I'm not as convinced on this. It is indeed true that Giuliani has firmly adopted the fear platform. He explains his apocalyptic views on global terrorism in a recent volume of Foreign Affairs:

"Full recognition of the first great challenge of the twenty-first century came with the attacks of September 11, 2001, even though Islamist terrorists had begun their assault on world order decades before. Confronted with an act of war on American soil, our old assumptions about conflict between nation-states fell away. Civilization itself, and the international system, had come under attack by a ruthless and radical Islamist enemy."

Giuliani gave a more colloquial version of those same views and of the Democrats' inability to defend us against the fear of death on a recent "The Sean Hannity Show" (a syndicated conservative radio program):

"They do not seem to get the fact that there are people, terrorists in this world, really dangerous people that want to come here and kill us. That in fact they did come here and kill us twice and they got away with it because we were on defense because we weren't alert enough to the dangers and the risks."

At first glance this latter statement looks almost childish. It has no facts about the terrorists Giuliani describes. Their groups and allegiances are not named; their goals are simply to "come here and kill us." But the crucial message in the statement is not a factual one. It is an emotional plea for fear and an insistence that the Democrats will not be strong enough to fight this frightening bedtime bogieman.

But Giuliani does not stand alone on the Republican fear platform. Mitt Romney has also adopted the political uses of fear from the Bush administration. In a speech given at The Young Republican National Convention he elaborates on these uses:

"The new generation of challenges we face today includes challenges to our national security as well. Violent Jihadists are intent on replacing moderate Muslim governments with a Caliphate or Imam. And they seek the collapse of our economy, our government, and our military.... Theirs is a face of evil not seen in the civilized world since the gas chambers of Hitler's horror."

The enemy in Romney's view is undefined but powerful enough to destroy the United States as a country. What is the number of these violent jihadists? What are their capabilities of carrying out attacks of such magnitude? Romney never tells us but he doesn't forget to provide a connection to images of millions of deaths by using Hitler's gas chambers as a comparison.

What connects all these quotes is the emotional underpinnings of fear. The most recent entrant to the Republican presidential race, Fred Thompson, joins Giuliani and Romney in copying this Bush administration tactic. In a recent speech at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Thompson argued that the nation is in denial about terrorism. He said: "I don't think that yet as a nation we have come to terms with the nature and the extent of the threat facing this country."

A nation in denial about the threat of terrorism? Where does Mr. Thompson live, I wonder. His campaign blog, Imwithfred, offers further evidence of Thompson's fear platform:

We're not having the kind of conversations we need to have on a range of issues, particularly the kind of threat we're facing, on a global scale from radical Muslim fundamentalists who want to bring our nation to its knees and destroy our way of life.

This is yet another take of the terrorist menace as a vague but nevertheless all-powerful enemy intent on our total destruction. Yet the best solution Thompson appears to offer in our defense is to continue the surge policy in Iraq. This is a puny defense indeed against something as frightening as the fears his blog post describes.

It is not just Rudy Giuliani, then, who plans to use fear in his political campaigning. Given that both Romney and Thompson have also adopted the language of fear, the Democratic presidential candidates will have to learn to counter this tactic. Fear will be used to invoke mortality salience, to make voters more defensive of their worldview and more conservative. Fear will be used to paint the Democratic candidates as too weak to provide the protection the fearful need, as too blind to see the true threat of apocalyptic proportions and as too naive to see what the terrorists really plan for this country.

What is the proper Democratic response to all this? Clearly it is not to belittle or to minimize the risks that terrorism causes, but neither is it to try to outfrighten the conservatives in this game. Judis points out one potential remedy for the paralysis of fear and its conservative advantages: Psychological studies have found that the fear-inducing strength of the mortality triggers can be reduced by urging study subjects to consider their answer carefully and not to surrender to instantaneous "gut-reactions". This is not unlike the way the first rays of morning sun dispel the monster under children's beds. Information on the threats and detailed plans on how to defend against them could work as a counter-tactic to fear.

And so do articles such as the one Judis has written. The more we understand how fear works the less we need to be manipulated by it.

Spineless, II

Did you know that hedge fund managers pay only 15% income tax? What is your tax percentage? Well, if you happen to be a hedge fund manager earning loads of money and paying only 15% taxes on it, don't worry. The Democrats won't take your tax advantages away:

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told private equity funds that they need not worry about Congress taking away their special tax breaks this year.

Just to remind folks, the equity and hedge funds benefit from two special tax breaks. Some funds operate as partnerships that have all the privileges of corporate status, including being publicly traded on stock exchanges, but don't pay any corporate income tax. In addition, fund managers, some of whom are paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year, only pay taxes at the low 15 percent capital gains rate, instead of the 35 percent rate that other high income workers pay. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that these two tax breaks together may cost the government as much as $6 billion a year in lost revenue, almost enough to pay for the S-CHIP expansion now being pushed by Congress.

The Democrats got donations to soothe that guilty conscience, I guess.

Even extreme right-wingers usually think that a regressive tax system is unfair. That would be a system where those who earn less pay a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes than those who earn more. But this is exactly what is happening in this specific case. The real problem is naturally that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than income from work. This provides the incentive to argue that income from work is actually capital gains.

Let me see. Could I argue that all my working is really just observing the returns to my intellectual capital growing? Worth a try?

Spineless

That would be the Democrats. They are being held up by the corsets that corporate donations provide. Of course, they are also the pragmatists. But I agree with Ruth Rosen:

When I opened The New York Times today, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. The headline of the lead story announced that "The Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers."

What, I asked myself, won't they deny the Bush administration?

I'm hardly naive. I realize that most of them are worried about being viewed as soft on terror and getting re-elected. But they are complicit in creating an authoritarian infrastructure that could one day be used against any and all of us. That, of course,is the long view, which is not the way they think. For them, it's the short-term goal of getting re-elected and damn our democratic traditions.

Well, I am naive in hope. I get reborn a virgin in hope every morning, with a desperate desire to believe in human wisdom and the long arc of justice and all that other shit. This doesn't mean that I wouldn't know how the game is being played. All it means is that I remember it is a game, and that its only justification has to do with the values underlying it. If there are no values then what is the game all about?

The game the Democrats play is over the votes of the Independents. They know that the liberals and progressives have nowhere to go in a two-party system where the other party would love to eat them for morning roughage. Thus, what those dirty fucking hippies want can be ignored. Even what middle-of-the-road Democrats want can be ignored. What matters is the people who are not actually Democrats. It is those people who decide what the Democratic Party will do. Weird.

What is even weirder is this: The Republican base is all-important for the Republicans. The Democratic base is completely unimportant for the Democrats.

Riddle me that.

The Trap. A Book Review

Why are all the new books on politics equipped with those Victorian style subtitles: End of World. Being the First-Person Memoir From the End of the Earth by The Last Survivor With Access to A Keyboard?. That kind of thing.

Anyway. Daniel Brook's (fairly) new book The Trap actually has a meaningful subtitle, because it tells us who it is that is falling into the trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. A more precise subtitle would have added something like: Advice to the Young and Smart Progressive Crowd, because that is the problem Brook addresses: How to stay faithful to your progressive dream while also achieving the American dream of family, house and health insurance. Or rather, how to work for a progressive cause without being on food stamps.

The problem is a real one. It may not be the most devastatingly important question right now, but it's a sign of something else, and that something else is the "winner-take-all" economy Brook discusses. Or the slow death of the middle class in a country with an income distribution which is beginning to look like those we usually associate with Banana Republics. Here the reason has to do with Banana Republicanism, or the unleashing of all market forces in a headway plunge into bad capitalism, the successful throttling of the Trade Unions and the successful export of many previously middle-income jobs out of the country. Add to that all the "tax relief" we have recently given to the super-rich and the removal of much of the regulation that used to weigh corporations down by demanding that they actually pay living wages to their workers, and we are in a society where lots of young and smart progressives decide that they'd rather sell out their principles in exchange for a seat in that private box for the winners who take all.

One might argue that public service has never paid very much and that "selling out" is what you do when you have a family to feed. But Brook points out that something has changed in how much one needs to sacrifice from income to do work of ones heart. Take the example of law. Brook tells us what happened in the late 1960s when many new lawyers preferred public service to corporate law:

In 1967, the Wall Street megafirm Cravath, Swaine and Moore pushed its starting salary up to then unheard of sum of $15,000 a year. Many top firms matched it. Soon the large firms had opened up a modest salary gap with the public and nonprofit sectors: by 1972, starting salaries at Manhattan firms were up to $16,000 while the federal government offered its newly minted lawyers $13,300 and Legal Aid of New York paid $12,500. Since then, the salary gap has widened, accelerating more rapidly in the 1980s and '90s. Today, it is not uncommon for top law firms to pay recent grads $100,000 more than public interest employers pay theirs.

What happened to make the salary gap so wide? The Reagan years happened, together with a change in the values Americans accepted as mainstream. The "markets" were supposed to fix everything, and Reagan explicitly wanted the best minds to work for profit-making enterprises and not the government. Globalization became a codeword for ignoring the plight of the poor or the blue collar industries in this country, "trickle down economics" ruled much of the thinking, even though what trickled down the societal ladders was mostly pretty unpleasant.

The part of Brook's book where all that is discussed was the most interesting one for me. That, and some of the hints he gives about the impact of all this on women. For instance, the majority of teachers have been women for a very long time, but the number of men in the teaching profession is dropping even further. Why? Because one can't support a family on a teacher's salary in many regions of this country. And what are the women to do who make their living from teaching? Answer: Better look for a wealthy husband. Hence the slide towards 1950s values.

No one book is going to be the Secret Truth about the American politics and society in the last three decades. But Brook makes a fairly good case for understanding one aspect of the changes that have taken place. What to do about those changes? Brook's answer is to provide a basic middle-class security net in this country: good education, affordable to all and universal health care. Hmm.

Smart Cars

Will they make it in the U.S.? They look awfully small compared to the monster SUVs with darkened windows which usually block me in on all sides at intersections, cutting out all visual information a driver might need when the light changes to green and someone decides to do a U-turn right in front of you. Yes, this has happened, more than once. The joys of driving.

I have often dreamt about a car with extendible stork's legs. You'd press a button and the legs would shoot out and then you'd just step sideways out of the traffic jam. The ideal car would also deflate for parking purposes, and it would be covered by unbreakable balloons on the outside, to keep those SUVs at a polite distance.

Would you buy a Smart Car? Where does one put the large dogs in one of those?

Meanwhile, in Nicaragua

New laws make abortion a crime even if a woman's life is at risk. I think the U.S. anti-choice movement should make study trips there to learn how their paradise will work.

The Guardian gives as a progress report:

María de Jesús González was a practical woman. A very poor single mother, the 28-year-old's home was a shack on a mountain near the town of Ocotal in Nicaragua. She made the best of it. The shack was spotless, the children scrubbed. She earned money by washing clothes in the river and making and selling tortillas.

That was not quite enough to feed her four young children and her elderly mother, so every few months González caught a bus to Managua, the capital, and slaved for a week washing and ironing clothes. The pay was three times better, about £2.60 a day, and by staying with two aunts she cut her costs. She would return to her hamlet with a little nest-egg in her purse. She bought herself one treat - a pair of red shoes - but she would leave them with her family in Managua, as they were no good on the mountain trails she had to go up to get home.

During a visit to Managua in February she felt unwell and visited a hospital. The news was devastating. She was pregnant - and it was ectopic, meaning the foetus was growing outside the womb and not viable. The longer González remained pregnant, the greater the risk of rupture, haemorrhaging and death.

What González did next was - when you understand what life in Nicaragua is like these days - utterly rational. She walked out of the hospital, past the obstetrics and gynaecological ward, past the clinics and pharmacies lining the avenues, packed her bag, kissed her aunts goodbye, and caught a bus back to her village. She summoned two neighbouring women - traditional healers - and requested that they terminate the pregnancy in her shack. Without anaesthetic or proper instruments it was more akin to mutilation than surgery, but González insisted. The haemhorraging was intense, and the agony can only be imagined. It was in vain. Maria died. "We heard there was a lot of blood, a lot of pain," says Esperanza Zeledon, 52, one of the Managua aunts.

González was not stupid and did not want to die. She knew her chance of surviving the butchery was small. But being a practical woman, she recognised it was her only chance, and took it. The story of why it was her only chance is an unfolding drama of religion, politics and power that has made Nicaragua a crucible in the global battle over abortion rights. This central American country has become the third country in the world, after Chile and El Salvador, to criminalise all abortions. It is a blanket ban. There are no exceptions for rape, incest, or life- or health-threatening pregnancies.

González was told at the hospital that any doctor who terminated her pregnancy would face two to three years in jail and she, for consenting, would face one to two years. "Nicaraguan doctors are now afraid of going to trial or jail and losing their licence," says Leonel Arguello, president of the Nicaraguan Society of General Medicine. "Many are thinking that instead of taking the risk, it is better to let a woman die."

Why did I suggest study trips for our pro-life friends? Because most of their ideas about how to ban abortion in this country consist of something very similar to the Nicaraguan law which makes the physicians into criminals. That way the woman has no other recourse but coat hangers or traditional healers or various types of poisons.

The life and death of María de Jesús González. An extreme story, you might mutter. Of course it is. But her story was picked on purpose, because it shows what is wrong with the Nicaraguan laws. It shows how a woman whose whole life has been about caring for her children can become the one human sacrifice which is needed for the sake of the children (as seen by those priests and those rich lawmakers). She was poor. Nobody was willing to risk going to jail on her behalf, except for the traditional healers in her village. So she died, because she couldn't get an abortion for a pregnancy that would never have produced anything but a dead woman in the first place, an ectopic pregnancy.

Think about it: An embryo, destined to die in any case, is more important than the María de Jesús Gonzálezes of this world in the hearts and minds of the extreme anti-choice people. Any "unborn child" is more important in their hearts and minds than an already born woman. This breaks my heart.
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Link thanks to Jules.

Supporting the Troops

A clever way of doing so is something like this: You write their orders for 729 days when 730 days would give them extra benefits. Then you send them to Iraq for 22 months and save all that extra benefit money:

When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush's surge.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill.

"It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership... once again failing the soldiers."

Anderson's orders, and the orders of 1,161 other Minnesota guard members, were written for 729 days.

Had they been written for 730 days, just one day more, the soldiers would receive those benefits to pay for school.

"Which would be allowing the soldiers an extra $500 to $800 a month," Anderson said.

That money would help him pay for his master's degree in public administration. It would help Anderson's fellow platoon leader, John Hobot, pay for a degree in law enforcement.

"I would assume, and I would hope, that when I get back from a deployment of 22 months, my senior leadership in Washington, the leadership that extended us in the first place, would take care of us once we got home," Hobot said.

Both Hobot and Anderson believe the Pentagon deliberately wrote orders for 729 days instead of 730. Now, six of Minnesota's members of the House of Representatives have asked the Secretary of the Army to look into it -- So have Senators Amy Klobuchar and Norm Coleman.

On the other hand, this way of writing the orders does save the hard-working taxpayer some of that money the government is not supposed to get. It turns out that 1,162 troops are affected and that the number of days their orders fall short of getting the higher benefits is from one to twelve. Wow! So close, yet no cigar.

Army Secretary Pete Geren is working hard on fixing the problem, though.

Warner Bros and Girls

It looks like Warner Bros doesn't like girls. They might just ban girls altogether from starring in their movies:

This comes to me from three different producers, so I know it's real: Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a new decree that "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead". This Neanderthal thinking comes after both Jodie Foster's The Brave One (even though she's had big recent hits with Flightplan and Panic Room) and Nicole Kidman's The Invasion (as if three different directors didn't have something to do with the awfulness of the gross receipts) under-performed at the box office recently. "Can you imagine when Gloria Allred gets hold of this? It's going to be like World War III," one producer just told me. (I put in a call to Glo, who comments below.) Of course, Warner Bros has always been male-centric in its movies. But now the official policy as expressly articulated by Robinov is that a male has to be the lead of every pic made. I'm told he doesn't even want to see a script with a woman in the primary position (which now is apparently missionary at WB).

This might not be true, of course. But if it is, imagine what a recipe it gives us for solving all sorts of problems! Like the one about crime. Let's just make it illegal for men to go out and soon enough the streets out there will be safe at all times of the day.

I'm sure that you thought I was being tasteless in that paragraph, even though I was just suggesting that we apply the Robinov solution more generally. If it's good enough for a business firm it surely is good enough for a country run along the lines of a business firm. Right?

As I mentioned, perhaps this rumor turns out to be untrue. I sure hope so, because the consequences otherwise will not be pretty. I'm thinking of a general boycott of Warner Bros to begin with, and I would certainly work for such a boycott. Robinov should be happy, because he is not interested in any girly money.

Come to think of it, I haven't spent enough feminist column inches on the movie industry...

From My Monday Mailbag

1. Feminist Review writes about something that is astonishingly called consensual rape.

2. WAM 2008 (Women, Action and the Media conference) is seeking proposals for session topics.

3. And if you are in New York City you could attend this panel discussion:

WORKING MOTHERS: WHO'S OPTING OUT?
Tuesday, October 16, 7 p.m., $8 admission
The New School, New York City
Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)

You've read the articles--and gotten angry at the debate. Are vast numbers of working mothers bolting the career track--or dreaming of doing so? Are elite women betraying feminism by staying home with their children? Or do the Opt-Out stories rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence--while shoving aside actual labor statistics and working families' needs?

JOIN US as some of the KEY THINKERS and CRITICS of the "opt-out" storyline DISCUSS & DEBATE the real state of working motherhood in America today.

Moderated by E.J. Graff, senior researcher, Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University, collaborator on Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It. The panel includes Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It; Linda Hirshman, lawyer, professor emeritus Brandeis University and author of Get to Work; Heather Boushey, senior economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research, and co-author of Hardships in America and The Real Story of Working Families; and Ellen Bravo, author of Taking On the Big Boys: Why Feminism Is Good for Families and Business and the Nation.

For further information, go here.