Not Things

Arranged words on W. C. Williams’ Birthday last Week by Anthony McCarthy

James Watson once answered that he couldn’t lose what he didn’t have,
The callow questioner brought up gaining the world and losing his soul,
Candy taken by a famous self, his answer dutifully applauded by an audience not experienced in enthusiasm.
Watson is the kind of ass who could look in any optical instrument and see his pasty face in place of any universe.

And a university poet whines out his choice to not live,
inactual stasis, the convenience of faculty life, his pale blues not dead because not lived,
left with insipidly longing for a movie desideratum a billion ad men could have written.

But we here in love, would be ridiculous for watching.
Paltry to onlookers. No penetration, roles, danger, parallels to literature or criticism.
Undocumentable, needless to say, non-fungible.

Did people think about how their life looked before TV or movies?
Does the constantly sensed audience lead to how anxiously we face just life?
Always observed by the absent, the tacit audience always present,
and we, never so here as watching them, and so miss our own lives.
Even love the most Unexplainable and Entirely Sufficient Reason To Be at All,
a performance for the memory of our place in a bored or jaded or, worst of all, pleased audience? The loved as cast rival.

How could we ever consider this through an observer? Not an act but

There isn’t a word conceivable in any grammar.
Not for this, both now, together, pleasing by pleasure by pleasing.
Our bodies not symbols but incident to the deeper sex of coupled souls, beyond things.
It not beyond but essentially separate from transaction.
One at once both, not element’s of any Set subject to the properties of even addition.
No subjects or objects, no act or any other nouns, or transitive verbs, or conditional statements or Boolean scribbles, or geometry or political theory or praxis.

The very naming and saying a violation and nullification of even what happens in time,
Intending rigorous examination, virtuously hacking away the inaccurate words
you would be left with a nothing to explain what most is, of all and everything.
Mistaking your failure as confirmation of a nothing and for publication so turn to analyze the illusory audience’s imagined reaction to the residuum of your failure. Missing it all.

In no way describe, but meet it Both in silence. It beyond pronounness.
The love transfigures us together outside it and ourselves, this time, many others, many to come,
many as the times become the deepest sex of souls beyond transaction or distinction or time or words or even songs.

For the love of very being, why would anyone want it any other way?

Friday Critter Blogging: Lizard And Friends

Can you spot it? Picture by FeraLiberal.


The next picture is by Doug and of a cactus, but I see a desert god in it, a wild and old one.

Focusing on abortion (by Suzie)

          In all the talk about saving Roe vs. Wade, I’ve been thinking of how many times feminists, especially white ones, have been criticized for focusing too much on abortion.

          Flora Davis wrote: 

“… like other women of color, African-American women objected to white feminists’ single-minded focus on abortion.”

          Here's Maud Blair, Janet Holland and Sue Sheldon:

… the pro-abortion stance of the 1970s did not take into account the fact that many black women’s reproductive struggles were around the right to retain their fertility. For black women abortions, sterilizations and Depo-Provera were all-too-easily available, and were often administered without adequate consultation and/or under the shadow of economic repression. These are not experiences restricted to black women, but it was the intervention of black women which exposed the in fact narrow base of what seemed to be a universal demand, and transformed the campaign – which has subsequently focused on choice and reproductive rights.

         Pam Chamberlain and Jean Hardisty: 

The right has been extremely successful in keeping the primarily white and middle-class women of the pro-choice movement and their male allies pre-occupied with responding to the escalating strategies of the pro-life movement… Because the right, with the acquiescence of the voting public, has successfully shredded the social safety net, it is increasingly unlikely that women of color and poor women will be guaranteed the means to bear and raise children. Without that means - in other words, without control of their reproductive lives - even the preservation of legal abortion does not guarantee all women's reproductive rights and reproductive freedom.

          If these narratives are correct, middle-class white women have been selfish, perhaps even racist, to work so hard to keep abortion legal. But this oversimplifies women’s history. In eugenics, people could be condemned for other factors than race. As Victoria Nourse notes, many of the women who were sterilized because they were imprisoned, disabled, poor or otherwise deemed unfit were white. Here’s a brief history of sterilization.
            While many women were sterilized without consent, many others (white and not white) could not obtain sterilization, contraception or abortion easily or safely. Tonyaa Weathersbee wrote:

Because as bad as the bad old days were for white women … they were even worse for us.
           When abortion was illegal, botched abortions were a primary killer of black women. According to research by Loretta J. Ross, former program director for the National Black Women’s Health Project, between 1965 and 1967 the death rate of black women in Georgia from illegal abortion was 14 times higher than that of white women. Another study estimated that in the 1960s, black and Puerto Rican women made up 80 percent of the deaths from illegal abortions in New York.

          People of color have long been involved in the fight to protect women’s rights not to have children. This spring, I attended a Planned Parenthood luncheon honoring Dr. Kenneth Edelin, a black doctor who was convicted of manslaughter after performing a legal abortion soon after Roe. Sadly, the luncheon audience was almost all white.

         Lauren Bayne Anderson wrote about how abortion is framed as a white issue, even though “a Women of Color Reproductive Health Poll showed that 83 percent of African American women identify as pro-choice.” Of the women getting abortions, 37 percent are black, 34 percent are non-Hispanic whites and 22 percent are Hispanic.
          Have feminists focused too much on abortion and not enough on other issues? Sometimes I’ve thought so, but then again, who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t.
           In regard to reproductive freedom: It’s hard to imagine what that would look like, considering everything that influences our decisions. Nor do I know how many women choose not to have children because of a lack of social services. But I'm confident that many feminists will continue to support legal and accessible contraception and abortion, along with social services that assist families.

Telling feminists how to vote (by Suzie)

          Back in 2002, Katha Pollitt took Dennis Kucinich to task for opposing abortion rights.

That a solidly anti-choice politician could become a standard-bearer for progressivism, the subject of hagiographic profiles in The Nation and elsewhere, speaks volumes about the low priority of women's rights to the self-described economic left, forever chasing the white male working-class vote.

          She reported the reaction:

A surprising number of readers felt pro-choicers should shut up about their silly little issue and embrace Kucinich in the interests of progressive unity.

          Kucinich changed his position when he ran for president. Fast forward to the present, when feminists are told they must vote for Obama to preserve abortion rights. I’m voting for Obama because I dislike McCain’s positions on abortion and other issues that matter to me. I believe in coalition politics. But I may tear out the throat of the next hypocrite who cares little about abortion but wants to bludgeon me with it.

      Similar inconsistencies have arisen since the primary, when some feminists who supported Hillary Clinton were maligned for paying more attention to sexism than other injustices. An example would be Betsey Reed, executive editor of The Nation, who complained about women “confined” to feminism.

        Also in The Nation, Jessica Valenti criticized Clinton supporters who suggested that anyone who voted for Obama was less of a feminist. She said feminists should resist calls for solidarity, and recognize the differences among women. Now, some Obama supporters are telling feminists that, if they really cared about sexism, if they were true feminists, they would help elect him. Solidarity is good, as long as we are all backing Obama.

        I wish people would stop making support so distasteful.

        Note: I'm not slamming my colleagues on this site or any other who have remained consistent. I'm not trying to single out anyone. I'm just tired of being jerked around.

 

Fun in A Silly Way

The Best Book Ever:





I usually dream about the interviews I will get as a verrry famous old author. I could write the Best Ever Author Interviews.

The Memory Hole and McCain

We are not yet living in the world of Orwell's 1984 where all memory of past events could easily be erased. Too bad, from McCain's point of view:

In his latest attempt at a total makeover, John McCain said today that if he were president, he'd fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC, for keeping in place "trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino."

Never mind that the president can't actually fire the head of the SEC. Just think about McCain's assertion in the light of this:

McCain's former economic adviser is ex-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. On Dec. 15, 2000, hours before Congress was to leave for Christmas recess, Gramm had a 262-page amendment slipped into the appropriations bill. It forbade federal agencies to regulate the financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors.

Sorry, McCain. But this mess belongs to the policies your party has pursued and the policies you still insist on pursuing.

A Postcard From Wingnuttia

I spent a few hours cleaning my kitchen trash bin (aren't you glad I shared that?) and the fridge and while doing that I listened to right-wing talk radio. Now that was fun.

Honest, try it sometimes (well, at least listening to the talk radio). The last program, for instance, started with a piece about how the Black Political Caucus is behind the takeover of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. Then there was stuff about how John Kerry never checked the boxes on his tax forms which would have made him pay more taxes, and then you could vote on the day's illegal immigrant quiz.

Earlier I heard Rush Limbaugh. YES! My future husband, Rush Limbaugh (he's gonna marry me because I will be the last woman in the world who'd have him and I'm hungry). He repeated that old joke about feminism being a social movement for ugly women who otherwise cannot thrive in this society, so either I was listening to an old show or his feminist principles have shed off him faster than -- well, you know what. And yes, of course Rush is a handsome hottie. We all know that.

It's really a whole other reality, the one in which those right-wing radio shows exist. But lots of people live in that one.

The Beginning of the Socialist States of the United States?

Some make jokes about all this "socialization" that's going on in the financial industry and perhaps even in the automobile industry, and it's true that "we the taxpayers" seem to be amassing a lot of previously private market "investments" recently.

But it's not socialism when the industries take over the government. That has a totally different label. And though the industries aren't exactly taking over the government neither is the government taking them over. It's just giving them money, hugs and kisses.

Not sure what to call that. Perhaps crony-capitalism.

VOTE!

The Feminist Majority Foundation has a message for you:





Do you know which group of women is especially likely not to vote? Single women. Now changing that would be change I could believe in....

Less Health Insurance

Bob Herbert has a good piece on McCain's health insurance policies, and you should read all of it. I have written about those policies earlier at the Nation site and that post is a good complement to what I'm going to write here.

Note that one of the biggies in McCain's proposed changes is to raise the price of health insurance. Yes, my dear reader, you read that right. The way this works in his program is as follows:

If you are lucky enough to have employer-offered health insurance your premia currently come out of pre-tax dollars, dollars on which you have not yet paid taxes. McCain wants the premia to come out of post-tax dollars, dollars on which you have already paid taxes.

Let's think of an example: Suppose that your current health insurance policy costs you 1000 dollars per month. You pay for it with 1000 dollars in pre-tax (or gross) income. If McCain had his way with you, the payment would come from your post-tax income which would be, say, 700 dollars (assuming a 30% tax rate). Clearly, you can't afford the same policy with these dollars, so you would have to chip in an extra 300 bucks from, say, your food budget.

Now, even McCain knows that voters wouldn't think this kind of a policy an improvement so what he would combine with it is a lump sum financial compensation which ideally would equal that extra 300 bucks you need. Ideally, because in practice it would only equal that sum to those who happen to be paying for the average policy right now. Others would either get a windfall gain or lose money. The latter group would include people who are paying a lot for their health insurance coverage. Some of those people are sicker than the average consumer so the policy would punish them for being sicker.

Why is McCain suggesting something like this? Well, partly he has been magically seduced by an economist who loves the world of Microeconomics 101, with its price effects and income effects. Partly he wants to make consumers really FEEL the pain of the costs of health insurance, to make all of us more alert and careful buyers of various health insurance policies. You know, we will all run around figuring out deductibles, co-payments, group vs. staff models, indemnities and so on. I'm sure all those terms are something you roll around in your mouth every morning before tooth brushing.

So we are back in that mythical world where unicorns swing off rainbows and free markets lower the health care costs for all, but only if there are no tax subsidies and nobody else worrying about the consumers except consumers themselves. Who are all busily comparing non-commensurate health insurance policies and carefully negotiating with various hospitals for the day when they might arrive somewhere unconscious and unable to shop around.

This would be hilarious if McCain hadn't himself admitted that he doesn't understand economics. Yet he would leave all consumers out there at the mercy of sellers whose business he can't understand.

What McCain's proposed changes boil down to is less health insurance and more uninsured people. Bob Herbert explains some parts of how that would work, but the major reason for it all is that McCain plans to make health insurance more expensive.

Wake Up And Smell The Estrogen

That sentence was on the cover of one of the old Ms. magazines I just put into the trade basket in my library, and it makes a very good kick-in-the-pants beginning for this rant. And a rant it will be.

To begin with the Bitch magazine is in financial trouble and it needs your dollars to continue. You can donate here.

Then you can go out and buy (yes, buy) the Summer Issue of the Ms. magazine, which includes the following topics:

We've got an exclusive story on medical neglect at the only federal prison hospital for women, dirt on anti-gay-marriage but prostitute-going Senator David Vitter, a look at misogyny within polygamous cults, and more …

Naturally, if you have no money don't give any. But supporting feminist media is not a bad way of spending your money, despite what Jezebel has to say about the financial difficulties of Bitch:

Maybe the reason why Bitch isn't succeeding is because, although it's trudged along for 12 years, it just isn't successful. Has anyone stopped to think that it's the content, and not the mean, evil corporate world that's costing them money? A lot of women don't really subscribe to the stilted rhetoric of first-year women's studies. And it would seem that a lot of women don't really subscribe to Bitch either.

That Bitch has a circulation of only 47,000 seems to support that argument, does it not? Until you start thinking what the circulation rates of political opinion journals are in general. Here is a picture for you showing the circulation rates of really important political opinion journals (click on it to make it bigger):





From the source of the graph:

As the BPA audit ending in June 2007 shows, counting the Hill-delivered copies allows the New Republic to keep its subscriber numbers up above the 65,000 mark (although just barely, at 65,779) . That is a critical point because it means the magazine, which has been losing circulation since 2000, can say that it has stemmed the losses. Keeping subscriptions up at the magazine is a priority for its new owner, CanWest.

You must have heard of the New Republic? It's a major opinion source in political debates and its circulation figures are rotten. Now, it could be that the reason is that no reader is interested in Political Science 101 and that the ads in the magazine are too boring for eyelid batting. It could even be that the New Republic is circling the drain.

But isn't it funny that we hardly ever read something similar to the opinion from Jezebel when it comes to these political opinion journals? Note that the National Review, the breeding site of All Things Conservative, isn't doing that well in the circulation races. Does it mean that the wingnuts write about how boring it is and how it should get better ads?

Of course not. And they don't write to wonder why the Washington Times is still in business, despite having made a loss in every single year of its existence. Because that's not the point of political opinion magazines. Their point is to get certain topics out there, to be discussed more generally. Their point is to influence opinions.

And that is ultimately the point of Bitch and Ms. and other feminist magazines, too. Once they stop existing (for being soooo boring), fewer feminist stories will crop up in the political discourse.

Have I made my point? It's closely related to the misconception that picking things in politics is just like choosing an ice-cream flavor. This misconception is astonishingly common and I blame the advertising culture for it. There's a difference between political choices and preferring chocolate ice-cream with extra chips to vanilla ice-cream: If the ice-cream parlor doesn't stock your favorite, you can just not buy and leave empty-handed. This is impossible in politics, because the choice for those who don't vote will be made for them.

Or perhaps a different parable would be clearer here: Suppose that you are stranded on a deserted island, running out of food and going mad with the solitude and the fear. Then you see a ship against the horizon, you scream and yell and light fires and jump up and down. And the ship sees you! It turns and comes to rescue you! YEAH!

But as it gets closer you see it's a dirty ship with bad paint and a torn sail and ugly sailors, so you decide not to get on the boat at all. You deserve a prettier and more interesting rescuer.

So I may have just fallen overboard the ship called My Rant. But feminists should support their opinion-making organs, just as the progressives support their and the conservatives support theirs, especially because those other journals have more institutional backing than feminism has, more angels covering up their losses.

And Let The Money Flow....

Looks like we just bought AIG (the American International Group):

In an extraordinary turn, the Federal Reserve agreed Tuesday night to take a nearly 80 percent stake in the troubled giant insurance company, the American International Group, in exchange for an $85 billion loan.

The decision, only two weeks after the Treasury took over the quasi-government mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank's history.

How does it go? Privatize the benefits, socialize the costs? Or "communism for the rich, capitalism for the poor"? In any case, note that the $85 billion loan has as collateral the very reason why the loan was given. It's so circular it makes my head turn a full 360 degrees.

It's hard to know what the government should do now, of course, because once firms are let to grow big enough in a very concentrated industry their downfall will hurt most everyone. That's why we used to have anti-trust regulations and such, but all those were diluted or ignored during the free-market decades.

I have written about the need for better regulations (or better rules of the game) for the financial markets before. This would be a good opportunity for the government to introduce them, would it not? In exchange for the help, I mean.

Sexism As A Joke

We've come a long way, baby. Sexism is now something Rush Limbaugh deplores in his programs. Sexism is now the quick come-back joke among the Liberal boyz. On the former:

Summary: Rush Limbaugh said of the investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin's dismissal of Alaska public safety commissioner Walter Monegan: "This is pure sexism in Alaska on the part of these old boys trying to get rid of Sarah Palin, and she didn't put up with it, and she didn't bend over and let them have their way."

This is the same Rush Limbaugh about whom I wrote a long researched piece some years ago on this blog. A snippet from that:

One of my fabulous routines concerns a San Francisco men's club which lost its battle to exclude women from membership. The courts ruled that they had to admit women on the basis that businesswomen were being unfairly denied opportunities to do business. This is specious. How much business did women think they were going to get as a result of forcing their way in?
Anyway, after one year, the female members demanded their own exercise room. They were probably tired of being ogled by a bunch of slobbering men while they pumped iron in leotards and spandex. The men offered to install the first three exercise machines in the women's new workout room. The ladies were thrilled. When they arrived on that first exciting day they found, to their stunned amazement, a washing machine, an ironing board, and a vacuum cleaner. Heh, heh, heh. (The Way Things Ought To Be, p.142-45 Jul 2, 1992)

I don't have to go back to 1992 to find a sexist comment from Rush Limbaugh, of course. But to find him using sexism as an accusation, well, that requires looking only at the last few days.

That's the first way sexism has become a joke. The second one has to do with the responses to the first one: When Rush Limbaugh suddenly pretends to think that sexism is a deplorable, deplorable thing, who do you think will find sexism quite funny? That's right, the Libral Boyz. Now, admittedly they are reacting to the wingnuts' arguments that any criticism of Sarah Palin, however justified, is mere sexism. But at the same time the two ridiculing uses of the word "sexism" are doing real damage. The word is transmuting into something different, something laughable. And all the time real women in this world are dying because of sexist customs or beliefs.

When I sit down to think about what to write on this here blog these days I have a lot of emotional trouble. It's like I had been making a cake from a complicated recipe with lots of expensive ingredients and lots of labor put into it, and when I had finally iced it on a glass platter the whole thing slipped and crashed on the hard tiles of my kitchen. There it sits now, a mess of broken cake, glass shards and whipped cream. What should I do with it? Just throw it all into the trash? But then I lose all that effort and money. Should I pick the glass out carefully and then try to rescue most of the cake for reshaping? But then I'll cut my hand.

So I sit at the keyboard and don't get anywhere. Of course it's not feminist causes that I liken to a dropped cake here but the discourse we are having over this election campaign and the preceding Democratic primaries. That discourse might ultimately turn out to be of benefit for the feminist movement but not in the shorter run. Unless better bakers come in and rescue it right now.

MILF

You may or may not have heard that acronym. It stands for "a mother I'd like to fuck" and is not uncommon in the blogosphere discussion threads. There's also GMILF but as far as I can tell, the only person who suggested FILF was me and it didn't take on.

What is it all about? Mostly bantering, with no evil intention behind it. But it's still fun to think about what calling someone a MILF really means: Either it points out that despite being mothers some women still retain their sexual appeal. Or it points out that among all those old, decrepit and wrinkled mothers (or older women in general) there are a few who still have that something which makes men think of black silk sheets in bedrooms.

But why is it that my suggestion of the term for "a father I'd like to fuck" didn't take on? Is it because women are not supposed to measure men up for that particular use? And why was my suggestion seen as a joke? Worth thinking about.

In any case, I'm writing about this trivial topic because I have read that there are men who say that they are going to vote for Sarah Palin because she is a MILF, and only for that reason. Yet I can't find all those articles about how unreasonable this behavior is. Yet the articles about the unreasonable Hillary voters have been many.

And Even More Funny Stuff

Some days are so full of sunshine and laughter:

On the September 15 edition of MSNBC Live, while assessing Sen. Joe Biden's speech on the economy, Reuters Washington correspondent Jon Decker said that Biden does not "help[] his case when he's making the argument on economic issues wearing French cuffs and dressed to the nines. I think that he's really got to connect with these voters." MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing agreed, asserting: "Yeah, it's about the message, but also about the perception. I guess ... I was a little surprised too that he didn't have that coat off and roll up his sleeves." Contrary to the notion that wearing French cuffs may interfere with Biden's ability to "connect with these voters," French cuff shirts can be found for $37.50 on the website of J.C. Penney, a national department-store chain that many voters can presumably "connect" with.

Love it, just love it. If we have to go to hell in a handbasket why not laugh all through the journey?

Let me see: When you discuss bad unemployment figures you should probably come to the studio wearing one of those sandwich boards which says "Will Work For Food." And when you discuss the Iraq occupation you should wear a helmet and carry a machine gun. Got it.

Likewise, you really shouldn't discuss bad news about the health care system looking all hale and hearty. At least strap yourself to an oxygen machine and wear some gray makeup.

George Bush used to do all that play-acting. Remember him holding a hammer in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina? Of course he held it all wrong but acting is not the same as actually doing something and appearance is all that counts.

Yeah, I know. Voters are supposed to vote on issues such as French cuffs.

Some Fun

If you haven't watched the SNL video spoof on Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, Shakes has it.

This is also very funny in a twisted way:

McCain, in a speech in Jacksonville, Florida, this morning, said, "You know that there's been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall St. And it is -- people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times."

Funny why? Because Herbert Hoover kept saying that "the fundamentals are strong" all the way into the Great Depression. I noticed George Bush saying that earlier but I thought nobody else would be quite that silly. I was wrong.

Wall Street's Troubles Are Yours, Too...

So goes the headline of an article about the Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy (after the firm managed to keep its boat afloat through the financial panic of 1907 and the Great Crash of the 1920's it was sunk by the Bush tidal wave) and about the equally troubled times of Merrill Lynch and AIG. And of course it's true that the troubles of Wall Street are our troubles, too, but not for quite the reason the author of that article intends.

No, we are not equally guilty of greed and short-sighted gambling with the loaded dice of the market-place. No, not all house buyers bought houses they couldn't afford for selfish and greedy reasons. And no, most of us ordinary folk did not benefit from the anything-goes decades in the financial markets, and among those who did benefit the culprits of the current crisis benefited the most of all.

Rather, those troubles are our troubles for two fairly obvious reasons:

First, the powerful in this society still have the power to make the less powerful suffer in their place, and while the trickle-down theory of economics appears not to work that well when times are good, it sure works great when times are bad. What the top layers rain down on top of the ordinary working people I leave to your imagination, but it translates to unemployment, loss of health insurance, retirement savings which are barely enough to buy a stamp and so on. Misery, in short.

And how to avoid that misery? Here is the second reason why we are fucked, my friends: The only way to avoid that wholesale misery is by accepting a slightly smaller (though still very unfair) degree of suffering, and that is by a taxpayer bailout of all the financial firms which fail. Or most of them. We ordinary people are expected to pay the piper either way. We can choose a deeper recession or we can choose to pay more taxes to perhaps avoid one.

But isn't it usually the case that who pays the piper calls the tune? What happened to that idea? For instance, when I read about the financial firms negotiating with the federal government the first image in my mind would not be the government representatives kissing the toenails of the CEOs who have come in for some more money. But that's how these negotiations appear to be going: The firms send in some tough guys who threaten to cut the throat of the market unless money is forthcoming and soon, and then the government gives them the money. Or rather, loans without any good collateral. Toenail clippings, old copies of the New York Times, perhaps even snake scales. All good collateral.

What happened to the idea of demanding concessions from the firms before they are offered any help? I have this crazy idea: Suppose that the federal government told the industry that it would not bail out any firms unless the whole industry agreed to new government regulations which would stop this crisis from happening again in the near future? Now wouldn't that be something? It would take us back to the way things were before the Reagan revolution, back to the times when unregulated markets weren't regarded as the greatest thing since the invention of the zipper. It would let us say in public that wholly unregulated financial markets sometimes look exactly the way the U.S. financial markets look today. Markets Gone Berserk.

Of course today's picture isn't quite right, either, because wholly unregulated markets aren't supposed to get bailed out by the evil, evil government at all.

Batman vs. Penguin

This YouTube, found by commenter Richard on Eschaton, is not about the current American political campaigns. It's not. I swear. It's about Batman and the Penguin.
Enjoy.

Impromptu Political Poem by Anthony McCarthy

Life isn't perfect, pure
or permanently secure,
sorry.

Interior Monologue of the Conscious: While Stacking Wood With The Radio On by Anthony McCarthy

Why not Romeo and Juliette in a New York tough guy accent? They’re just a bunch of thugs talking in iambic verse. What else is the play about but two gangs of street toughs? Wonder what C would say if she heard me said that? She’s the one who brought up the “Shakespear question”. All I said is that the evidence for any of the attributions was flimsy. Didn’t even mention Oxford. Doubt the Bard of Avon bilge and you’ve immediately put yourself beyond the pale of respectability. Couldn’t say anything right after that. Well, it was all of them, really. It finally got off that damned board.

All’s Well that Ends Well in a Down East accent, now that might work too. No, West Paris. Yeah, West Paris.

---------------------

I’d have voted to give the Oscar to “Crash” too. Better movie than the horse opera. Dumb thing. Hall Mark Theater. Wonder what would happen if I said that?

Malevolent Gay Far-Right Republican Men, Why Not Look At That Phenomenon? by Anthony McCarthy

Trying to listen to the more gentle angel of my nature, I’d intended to entirely forego my tradition of mocking the “Insights from the Social Sciences” the morning paper brings me. I started writing this in that intention but Izzy, my leftist hell-raiser angel, won out over Nat. Nat’s my annoying liberal niceness angel. I’ve complained about Nat before, I think.

This Sunday, Evo-psych tells us that homosexuality, in the form of queer genes, persist because having sex with members of your gender has a reproductive advantage. And here I always figured that was the one risk being gay didn’t include. As the tricky Boston Globe Soc-Sci columnist has taken to doing so often lately, the “study” his report is based on is forthcoming so I can’t go look to see what is being passed off as science. But being suspicious as well as naughty, Izzy asks, “Why study something like that to begin with? Aren’t there other gay issues more pressing to the business of the world?”

As an old gay man, one of the things that has always carried a morbid fascination for me is the phenomenon of the evil gay Republican power broker. There are certainly a lot of them to look at, and just about to a person they are truly rotten. If you ever wanted to identify a truly malevolent bunch, it’s the right-wing, gay male Republican. Roy Cohn, who was universally known to be gay from the beginning of his public career, was about as rotten as they come. He regularly worked on behalf of the most repressive gay bashers in the New York scene and beyond, some of them, like Francis Cardinal Spelman, were specimens of the type themselves. There are those who claim Joe McCarthy - no relation worth considering - belongs among them. Literally everyone knew Cohn was having sex with men during the decades he was around. Yet he flourished within the political milieu that would have destroyed him had he not been one of them. Near the end of his life, as it became just as widely known that he was dying of AIDS, the New York elite helped him in his psychotically futile public denial of what was clear to anyone who looked at him.

After McCain selected Palin, I was curious to see how the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Club stood on the McCain-Palin ticket. Needless to say, they were lying, saying that they were no danger to the rights and lives of gay people. Kiss of the Spider Woman would seem to have gotten that kind of dishonest, self-centered gay man* just about right. Despising them for the hypocrites and traitors they are, I usually call them Future Capos of Amerika. I’m not giving a link and risk aiding the more uninformed of our Republican blog boy monitors in their networking.

Gore Vidal, in one of his essays, cast doubt on the existence of a category “gay”. Other than having sex with other men, what does Vidal have in common with Roy Cohn, Karl Rove or Mark Drier? What did Walt Whitman have in common with James Buchanan? He also points out that the entire idea of someone as being a “homosexual” hardly describes the reality as shown through experience. Some people have sex with one gender, many have sex with both. More are probably sexually attracted to members of their own gender at times than act on their desires. It’s apparently tempting for some to wonder which category those people belong in, if you’re the kind of person interested in putting people into categories. But that’s the problem. People in real life are too complex and varied to categorize like that. And why would you feel it was a useful thing to do? From the history of the 20th century, we know that kind of putting people into categories can be dangerous to their existence. I use the term “gay” purely as a political description without pretending it has scientific meaning.

I’m no beauty and certainly have not been mistaken as such in my lifetime. I’m also someone with sexual interest only in adult men. Being very fussy and having put up with more immaturity than you can shake a stick at, I’m only attracted to adult men who act like adults. So you can see, there’s not a lot for me to have chosen from.

In my life I’ve had several married men come on to me. Two were men who I’ve known most of my life. In a small town like the one I still live it, its likely that a history of having sex with other men would be known within the gay population. Anyone who is part of a small town’s gay population will know about straight men who also have sex with men. I had no reason to suspect that the two men I’m talking about had sex with other men. Were they gay? I don’t know. I don’t know why they came on to me, I don’t even know how they would have reacted if I’d accepted their advances, which I didn’t. Married men are a species I am totally uninterested in having sex with. Perhaps unfortunately, it would seem that further opportunities to collect data have dried up for me. Nothing like that has happened in quite a while now.

I don’t have much in common with most of the men who identify themselves as being “gay”. The stereotypes don’t fit many of the gay men I know. We don’t constitute a cohesive community. Other than the discrimination and threats of violence we face, there is pretty much only the fact that we are sexually attracted to some members of our own gender in common. I don’t believe that diversity results from a common genetic expression. My experience leads me to believe that Vidal got it more right than the social scientists ever can.

Oh.... I can’t resist. Those “gay genes”, which I doubt exist, probably couldn’t account for an increased reproductive activity in men who had sex with men. Maybe the researchers might ask if it might not be gay jeans that did it. At least you can see those.

* I’m trying to recall an example of a similarly rotten Republican lesbian and can’t think of a single example. There are certainly not as many obvious ones as there are FCA’s.

What? Losing Roe Isn’t Enough To Make You Shake Hands And Fight Together? by Anthony McCarthy

There is a temptation among those of us with the leisure time to read and write blogs, to concentrate on absurdly small matters instead of what’s truly apocalyptic. At times we can match the corporate media in ignoring what’s important in favor of, literally, nothing.

It was no neat trick to predict that if Obama was the Democratic nominee that the Republican’s dirty tricks machine would use the divisive Spring campaign for the nomination against him. Anyone who couldn’t have foreseen that has to be too dense to be reading this blog. What we are seeing now in the Republican dirty tricks campaign against Obama, would have been used in reverse if Hillary Clinton was the nominee. Again, if you can’t see that, you are not reading these words or are probably a Republican monitor.

I almost got dragged into a comparison of the words, hurtful and those pretended to be hurtful, on both sides of that grudge match, but I’m not going to become part of the McCain-Palin campaign.

Having reviewed both lists, continuing to talk about them is absolutely stupid and exactly the kind of thing that has won Republicans the right to overturn everything that was gained with so much struggle and bloodshed over the past hundred-fifty years.

Somewhere in the media, one of the alleged “Hillary holdouts” was quoted as saying that she didn’t care about Roe because she was beyond having to worry about being pregnant. I very much doubt that this was a supporter of Hillary Clinton. Certainly it’s nothing a supporter of her policies would ever say. For the rest of us, maybe it needs saying again. Here, from an op-ed by Cass Sunstein

It is relevant here that many people, including McCain running mate Sarah Palin, believe that abortion is unacceptable even in cases of rape and incest, and there is little doubt that if Roe is overruled, some states will enact that belief into law.

To anyone who has forgotten, John McCain is the oldest person ever nominated by one of the two national parties for president, he has had serious health problems including cancer. The prospect of Sarah Palin becoming president during the next term are probably better than her not becoming succeeding a President McCain. Even if he didn’t die, he caved in to the ultra-right to choose his VP, do you think he wouldn’t for his Supreme Court nominees?

For anyone freed from having to worry about their own unwanted pregnancy and too self absorbed to worry about other women’s rights, Sunstein points out that literally everything is in danger of being lost to exactly the kind of Supreme Court nominees that both McCain and Palin have announced they will appoint.

For the future of constitutional rights, there is a broader point, which involves the fragility of many constitutional principles. Of course the Supreme Court tends to move slowly, but some conservatives who speak of "strict construction," and of "legislating from the bench," have something quite radical in mind.

For them, these are code words. They seek to appoint judges who will overturn not merely Roe, but dozens of other past decisions. For example, they want judges to impose flat bans on affirmative action, to invalidate environmental regulations, to increase presidential power, and to reduce the separation of church and state. Some Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have already called for significant changes in constitutional law in these domains.

McCain-Palin not only would deny women the ownership of their bodies, they’d brick over the glass ceiling once and for all. Maybe younger people don’t remember but within living memory it was legal for a man to tell a woman “Sorry, honey, but all our girls start out in the typing pool”.

Would a rational person risk, literally, undoing all the advances of the Civil Rights amendments over the piddling list of Freudian fantasy wrongs?

No.

Down at the Balinese (by Suzie)

        I've got that ZZ Top song stuck in my head, after hearing that Ike destroyed the Balinese Room in Galveston. The Houston Chronicle's web site has updates on all the damage. 

McCain/Palin on Reproductive Choice

The Third Party Delusion And How It Props Up The Corporate Establishment by Anthony McCarthy

In the past month there have been a few mentions of a revival of the disastrous “Nader trader” idea of 2000 on the blogs. I thought it might be worth looking at what the Greens are saying this time. Not much has changed since the last time I looked. Though its interesting that since the last time I wrote about their record of electoral “success” it’s harder to find that information. You get the feeling that they’re trying to hide something they’re not proud of.

After a quarter of a century of getting a lot of attention and the devotion of more people on the left than they deserve, the Greens of the United States need to be looked at in the harsh light of day.

Anyone who believes that they can become a viable national party, supplanting the Democrats, has had a long period of time to evaluate their effectiveness. It is a record without a single positive accomplishment on the national level and, as has been pointed out before, it has had a grand total of exactly one person elected to any of the 50 state legislatures.

I’ve said here before that I liked the Green who has achieved the highest office in his parties history, John Eder, the FORMER legislative representative from his district in Portland Maine. Former because he lost his seat as the Maine Greens gave their all for the fourth place finish of their candidate for Governor that year. In typical Green fashion, the national Greens lauded her fourth place finish, behind an independent candidate who managed to get a decisive third place without having the advantage of a party to back her. Fourth place in the Maine Governorship as a great success, that could serve as a dictionary example of the word “failure”, if not “fraud”, if not “nuts”.

And even on the local level their record is pitiful for a party that has had the publicity, financial and volunteer resources it has had for more than two decades. Many of its touted successes were in non-partisan races. The one and only third party which has succeeded in the history of the United States, the Republicans, had already been governing the country for about two decades by that point in its existence.

And yet their website absurdly talks about their prospects on the national level this fall. Let me propose an experiment to you, one which will just about certainly have a 100% success rate. Look at a group of people you just happen to see, point to one of them. That person will have exactly the same chance as Cynthia McKinney to become President of the United States in January. January of this year or any other. Running a candidate for president who has no chance of winning is pointless and self-indulgent. After one of your previous candidates helped put a man in office who made real the opposite of everything you support, running another in a close race is an act of grotesque irresponsibility. It is a total and fundamental betrayal of your principles and your supporters. In a tight race, as the one this year is looking to become, it is dangerous, reckless and pathologically narcissistic .

Symbolism has no rational place in how serious people vote. If you vote symbolically, “to send a message” or “to teach a lesson”, no one in the entire world but you will care about what your intended symbolic vote stood for.* They will be too busy dealing with the results in the real world. Voting is a serious thing, it has a profound potential to change how the world works, how people live. Voting is a life or death matter, it isn’t the equivalent of trying to interpret the vague game you think an author might be playing. Serious people know the difference. Voting for a Green on the presidential ballot is a vote for McCain-Palin and the policies they will put into effect.

Greens record on the national level has been a disaster. The Greens get trotted out nationally every four years in hopes that they can again play the spoiler and put a Republican in the White House. In some states they are used by the Republican establishment in the same way, mine for instance. They have no function in the left other than to discredit us with more successful progressives, we should marginalize them as often as necessary.

Libertarians, perhaps even more a failure in electoral politics, exercise massively more political influence than the Greens do through the influential guess pool, The Cato Institute. Their ‘research’ is constantly promoted on NPR and other media venues, though they never say a thing you couldn’t guess before their place on the guest lineup is announced. As an aside, I wonder, if it always and inevitably ends up supporting the pre-existing Cato ideology, how can anyone keep pretending that what they do is research? Through their constant appearances as a part of the respectable spectrum of opinion, the libertarians have been able to make the most absurd and easily contradicted assertions function as if they were real ideas in our politics.

The difference is in the purpose they serve for the corporate establishment. Greens are used as spoilers, libertarians as a means of keeping conservatives with kinky personal tastes attached to the overtly fascist wing of the Republican movement, though they would destroy libertarians ability to do what they want to if they ever really achieved power. In order for that ruse to work they have to be kept voting for Republicans. Their use of the Greens is to keep Democrats out of office, which they have shown they can do. They’ve been useful for nothing else in our national politics.

* The same goes for “principled non-voting”.

Vaginas, and what women have in common (by Suzie)

         

         I’ve held off writing about my vagina as long as I could.
        Although I can’t find evidence of the etymology, I blame the Vagina Monologues for inspiring "Vagina Americans" and related jokes. A recent Daily Show sketch ridicules the idea that women would (or should or might) vote for someone just because she’s a woman, without considering other issues. As one commenter put it: "Please women, don’t be, as Samantha Bee called it, a Vagina-American. Vote for the best person, the one who is part of the party that you are loyal to. Don’t vote with your vagina."
         Some people use the phrase to chastise women who consider gender at all. I still have guys trying to get me to ’fess up that I wouldn’t have liked Hillary as much if she were a man, as if I should not have considered gender at all.
         (People don't talk about Penis Americans, or voting with the penis, nearly as much.)

          Jokes about Vagina Americans may imply that women have nothing in common other than vaginas. This is a corruption of feminist theory that questions the category of “woman.” I don’t believe that all women are essentially the same, not do I think we all have the same experiences. But I do think a lot of us share similar experiences. For me, shared experiences count for something, even though they may translate into different views and policies.

            The synecdoche of vagina = woman troubles me because, once again, it reduces women to a body part, and it assumes all women have that part. We don’t. In 2002, I was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer that arose in my vagina (although it can appear throughout the body). Most of my vagina was removed, along with my uterus and ovaries. Other women have had vaginas removed due to cancer. Who does or does not have a vagina also can be an issue for intersexed or transgendered people.
            I don’t mean to stifle all vaginal humor; I have quite a repertoire of jokes. I just wish people made fewer assumptions about what they have in common -- and how they differ.

Learn some history (by Suzie)

          Writing in the NYT, Hannah Seligson says she never saw any gender bias until she got into the workplace. Now, she advises women to play the game like men. There's a lot to critique, but I just want to look at her first sentence:

I was born in 1982 — about 20 years after the women’s rights movement began.

         People make this mistake frequently, thinking that feminism was invented in the 1960s. But, for Goddess's sake, this is the New York Times! Where are the editors?

        The organized women's rights movement in the United States is generally considered to have begun in 1848, when a convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY. In July, the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls celebrated the convention's 160th anniversary. The park's web site has much information, including the story of Charlotte Woodward. She was a teenager when she signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the convention, and she was the only one who signed who lived to see the 19th Amendment passed in 1920. Stories like that remind me that I am in this struggle for the long term. 

       

Odetta

Love her voice.

Some Straight Talk, My Friends

I borrowed that title from the Great Maverick, John McCain, the guy who is so extremely aware of women's issues that he ummed and ahhed through a video on health insurance not covering contraception because he quite clearly couldn't be bothered to have learned even one political soundbite on the issues. Or rather, he was put between the rock and the hard place by the questions because his wingnut puppet-masters don't like women to have any access to contraception but the mainstream voters think contraception is a good thing. What to say, my friends? Well, McCain said "errr" and rubbed his nose as you can see here:






That's not the straight talk bit, although McCain is not a feminist and never has been one. And neither is the Republican Party a party of women's rights. Goddess help me. Did I actually have to write that down? And is the sky now purple in this reality?

What got me going was this:

Quinn & Rose's Rose, whose co-host referred to NOW as the "National Organization for Whores," called Obama a "sexist pig"

Summary: On the Quinn & Rose radio show, co-host Rose Tennent claimed that Sen. Barack Obama's remark regarding Sen. John McCain's policies, "[Y]ou can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig," was directed at Gov. Sarah Palin. After saying she was "offended" and "appalled" by Obama's remark, Tennent stated, "You know what, you're a pig, you're a chauvinist pig is what you are, Barack." On previous shows, Tennent's co-host Jim Quinn introduced a segment about Sen. Hillary Clinton by playing the song "The Bitch Is Back" and referred to the National Organization for Women as the "National Organization for Whores."

Feminism is being used in this election campaign. It's a weapon, it's something to ridicule, it's a way of getting votes from both those who admire Osama bin Laden for his views on women and from disgruntled Hillary voters. Now you can become a feminist just by saying so or by calling someone a chauvinist pig (where did she find that expression? in some archeological dig?) You are a feminist now on just your say-so, even if behind you lies a career of bashing women and fighting against any rights for them. The Republican fundies are now feminists! Though just for the duration of this election campaign, that must be understood. Once the elections are over everything will return back to normality which means that the Republicans will hammer women who pop out of their allotted slots down with that large family-values hammer. And what will the Democrats do?

Here's the part where I go all straight talk. My view for a long time has been that choosing between the two parties on several grounds means choosing whether you want a terminal case of cancer (the Republicans) or a permanent case of mumps and measles (the Democrats). I choose the latter but I'm not necessarily happy with the choice and make it largely on the basis that real people will die and suffer because of that difference. Yes, the Democrats are better on the issues that I care about. No, the Democrats have no spines and far too often advertise themselves as the almost-Republicans. But other options don't truly exist in this two-party system. The Founding Guys made sure of that. They were astonishingly frightened of the power of the people, by the way.

So to me the Democratic Party is the better choice, because it might keep the world and this country going for a little longer. But I was not happy with what the Democratic primaries revealed to me about the sexism within that party. I was not happy to realize that I was suddenly (and unintentionally) making a mental list of people I knew on the net and in real life who suddenly came out as sexists with blood-dripping fangs. I was not happy to find some writers who had always come across feminist on that odd list in my head, and I was not happy to find so many women on that list. No. I wasn't happy. I felt like a mule had just kicked me in my guts and people told me not just to breathe but to smile and to support the party.

My first reaction to all this was enormous anger and bitterness. I had worked for these folks myself and now they ridiculed my cause and the group I belong to by birth. I chewed over that anger in private, because it didn't seem to me to be a suitable weapon for writing. It was personal anger, anger born out of my naivete and my unrealistic expectations, perhaps. Anger at how much more sexist this world was than I had hoped or thought.

It was also anger which set me apart from others in the feminist movement, from the way they saw the cause and the best means to forward the cause. Instead of writing about my anger I chose to try to understand those rifts, to write about the different ways we see the world and to try to sew together those rips in the fabric of the movement. Silly arrogant goddess that I am. It didn't work, of course, but it served to put my own anger into my tool kit as something that can be used for more fruitful writing. Like this piece.

The reason I wrote about my own anger is to explain that I understand the anger of those women who are disappointed in the Democratic Party and in the sexism that truly flowered like ragweed during the Democratic primaries. That anger is kept aflame by the continuing refusal of so many people to acknowledge the legitimacy of that anger, to acknowledge that people who feel like that are not just sore losers. Rather, to call women who have woken up to the sexism in their own party "sore losers" is just more of the same anger-causing belittlement.

Where I diverge from many with the same anger is in what to do about it. To vote for McCain/Palin would be a protest vote for someone who would have otherwise voted for a Democratic candidate, sure. But as Gloria Steinem said, it is also like deciding to amputate your legs because someone stole your shoes. Or like choosing cancer over mumps and measles. Or perhaps choosing things like that for other people. In any case, a protest vote of that kind will work only if many people do it and if it's clearly an organized movement with power behind it.

We don't have such an organized movement in large enough numbers right now, and if we had such a movement the Democratic party would listen to us more carefully and the open sexism of the primaries would not have happened in the same way. These are my reasons for thinking that the best response to the anger is to go back to the basics and to work more on feminism and the issues of sexism directly, and to go and work on the sexism among the progressives and liberals even more directly. But I'm not telling anyone else how to vote or how to act. I would if I could, of course, but I'm a goddess only on the net.
------
Make sure that you read Katha Pollitt's take on the Sarah Palin nomination and how it is playing out in the media conversations.

Worth Reading

Cathy G. writes about the criticism of Sarah Palin as a mother and the double standard of applying that measure for female politicians and not for male politicians. I have often wondered what would have been said about John Edwards' candidacy had his name been Jane Edwards but all the other facts had been unchanged: a very ill spouse, two small children at home and so on.

So I agree with Cathy's main point about the double standard perhaps gaining the Democrats something in the short run but most likely harming women in politics in the longer run. (In a purely theoretical sense it might be possible to practice a different kind of feminism where the double standards are acceptable. But that would be feasible only in a theoretically very different kind of world, one in which the power is held by mothers and grandmothers, and my thoughts on how such a feminism would look like are still embryos. Heh.)

On Lipstick. Sigh.

Sometimes our political conversation is really stupid, and the lipstick thing is one of those. It started with Sarah Palin asking at the Republican convention what the difference between a hockey mom and pitbull might be. The answer was "lipstick".

That's quite funny, except that a religious wingnut guy wrote a book about the proper way to subjugate women with a version of that joke: "What's the difference between a Doberman pincher and a woman with PMS?" Answer: "Lipstick."

That's not quite so funny now, is it?

Now scroll forward to the present time and the discussion about Obama criticizing McCain's economic policies by calling them more of the same and by noting that if you put lipstick on a pig it's still a pig:

"I'm assuming you guys heard this watching the news. I'm talking about John McCain's economic policies and I said here's more of the same, 'You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Suddenly, they say, `Oh you must be talking about the governor of Alaska!' "

As Atrios pointed out, McCain himself used the lipstick-on-a-pig comment in 2007:

McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's health-care plan, he said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the early 1990s.

"I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said of her proposal.

All kinds of people use that saying. It's just a saying. At the same time avoiding that particular saying at the present time would seem to be a good policy for the Obama campaign, just so that McCain doesn't get to grab the public conversation again. Maybe they should hire me to read through the speeches beforehand?

500 Billion Dollars

Sadly, it's not how much I make out of this here blog. It's the predicted size of the federal budget deficit when the next president takes over the reins. Gee, I wonder who spent all that money in the last eight years and how? The spend-and-owe Republican administration. To actually pay for the spending in Iraq was not the done thing because it would mean more taxes.

If you read the article I linked to a little further you will find those she-said-he-said impartial statements which drive me crazy:

A deficit of that magnitude could severely constrain the next administration's agenda, regardless of whether Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican candidate, or Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), his Democratic opponent, wins in November. Each has promised billions in new tax cuts or new spending.

Is it really true that there is no difference between the sizes of the deficits the two candidates would cause? No difference in how they'd spend the money, for what benefit and in what amounts?

I understand the point of that paragraph in an article which mainly discusses the meaning of the federal budget deficit. But the reader still goes away with the idea that it doesn't really matter which candidate gets elected, because they are both going to make the deficit worse.

The Animal House

Working for the Bush administration has its perks for some:

Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them, federal investigators said Wednesday.

The alleged transgressions involve 13 Interior Department employees in Denver and Washington. Their alleged improprieties include rigging contracts, working part-time as private oil consultants, and having sexual relationships with — and accepting golf and ski trips and dinners from — oil company employees, according to three reports released Wednesday by the Interior Department's inspector general.

The investigations reveal a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" by a small group of individuals "wholly lacking in acceptance of or adherence to government ethical standards," wrote Inspector General Earl E. Devaney.

The reports describe a fraternity house atmosphere inside the Denver Minerals Management Service office responsible for marketing the oil and gas that energy companies barter to the government instead of making cash royalty payments for drilling on federal lands. The government received $4.3 billion in such Royalty-in-Kind payments last year. The oil is then resold to energy companies or put in the nation's emergency stockpile.

Between 2002 and 2006, nearly a third of the 55-person staff in the Denver office received gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies, the investigators found.

Devaney said the former head of the Denver Royalty-in-Kind office, Gregory W. Smith, used illegal drugs and had sex with subordinates. The report said Smith also steered government contracts to a consulting business that was employing him part-time.

It has sex in it! It might have legs as a news story!

It does remind me of a frat house atmosphere. It's also a good approximate example of the incestuous relationship that the U.S. political system sometimes enables between the regulators and the regulated. The word "incestuous" is used to point out that often the people who work for the regulators end up working for the regulated and vice versa, sometimes even switching sides several times. This is not desirable if the objective is to keep the industry properly regulated. If the objective is to skim off the most money and sex, well, it works until you get caught.

This case is not quite the same as it's more about government marketing than regulation but the disadvantages of extreme closeness and poor oversight are pretty similar.

So how much did all this cost to us taxpayers?

What's This All About?

The Blogger has a blog called womenagainstsarahpalin. Erin PDX noted that something odd was going on with the blog. I clicked on it and got first this page:

Possible Blogger Terms of Service Violations

This blog is currently under review due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations.

If you're a regular reader of this blog and are confident that the content is appropriate, feel free to click "Proceed" to proceed to the blog. We apologize for the inconvenience.

If you're an author of this blog, please follow the instructions on your dashboard for removing this warning page.


What would those violations be? And who has complained about them? I'm confused.

John Tierney: A Martian.

I used to write about John Tierney's sexism a lot but then the New York Times removed him from the political stable and put him in the science stable and I read him less often, partly because I pretended that he would somehow have less scope for sexism there. Yes, I knew better. After all, he specializes in pseudoscience findings which are all about how women are inherently the way he would like them to be. Or something like that.

Anyway, he has written a piece about sex differences which starts like this:

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

What's not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary psychologists contend that these are innate traits inherited from ancient hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists asserts that both sexes' personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that personality differences will shrink as women spend less time nurturing children and more time in jobs outside the home.

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.

So a science piece can start with talking about the Men-Are-From-Mars idea, as if it was something serious science had produced and not a part of general pseudo-psychological pop literature? That's a great way to increase my trust in what's to come next.

Do you know how I think John Tierney writes his articles? I think that he begins with the conclusions he wishes to reach, the ones about inherent sex differences acquired in some mystical and unknown prehistoric era. Then he goes and digs in research files until he finds pieces which support his beliefs. Then he upends the whole thing and pretends that he first read the science pieces and then came up with his findings. Such innocence, such purity! Such honesty!

And why would I think so? Because his findings are always biased in one direction. David Brooks does something similar in his opinion pieces, or that's how they strike me.

The job of responding to such pieces is difficult, because ideally the responder should know the all of the relevant field. But people who actually work in those fields tend not to get rewarded (with tenure or pay raises in academia) for responding to biased popularizations of science or pseudo-science. Instead, some of the odd fields of research have created their own walled enclaves within which all people seem to have the same biases, and the rest of the scientist try to ignore what they are doing.

That leaves the discussion to few brave amateurs (cough) who mostly don't have enough time to be educated in all the research going on in all the different relevant fields.

All that prelude is to explain why I address Tierney's piece on this blog, and the reason is largely so that someone will address it. At the same time, I do not have the resources that someone who actually works in the field would have and, once again, I plead for the professionals to step in.

So here we go: Tierney's thesis is that the more gender-equal a society is the more men look like they are from Mars and the more women look like they are from Venus. Men are competitive, aggressive, emotionally flat, and women are cooperative, timid and emotionally curved I guess. Yet the reason for these differences is not our different planetary roots but our different roots in prehistory!

And that prehistory must have had a division of labor between men and women though we don't have any direct fossil evidence from it. And that division of labor must have meant that women gathered and men hunted though we don't know if that's actually the whole truth. And somehow gathering required cooperation and hunting did not though it's fairly easy to imagine how finding a really good spot for juicy roots would be something you'd keep hidden from the other gatherers and though it's also fairly easy to imagine how hunting for big game would actually require cooperation between the hunters.

In short, I fail to see how cooperation would have become the selected-for characteristic more often in women than in men, and I also fail to see how it wouldn't have benefited both sexes to be able to be both cooperative and competitive, depending on the situation. In any case, only a guy who keeps his distance from women altogether could assume that women are not intensely competitive when needed.

What about the research that Tierney uses to back up his conclusions? I need to read all of it and then I need to read alternative research on international comparisons and what that research finds and then I need to compare the methodologies of those studies and so on. See how rigged this game is?

Who Should Pay For Rape Kits? More On Palin and Feminism.

In the year 2000 a little town in Alaska called Wasilla charged the rape victims for the cost of the kits used in collecting evidence so that the taxpayers wouldn't have to ante up. Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002.

Does this matter? Was it Palin's responsibility to know about the (to me atrocious) practice of charging rape victims for the forensic work? But this is the sort of news snippet that the conservatives use all the time: picking up news snippets and forming them into albatrosses to drape over Democrats in politics.

More importantly, this item also tells me that Palin isn't keeping an eye out for other women and most likely would not support feminist policies in general. Well, I know the latter from just reading about her ideas in general.

Are there any feminist benefits from having Palin as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate? Perhaps. Even Margaret Thatcher brought some such benefits with her reign, because people got used to the idea of a woman in power and that may have changed some prejudices. At the same time, a different woman might not have stated that she owes nothing to feminists (when she owed the very right to run for office to them not to mention the right to vote herself) and a different woman would not have created a cabinet in which she was the only female member. A different woman might have changed the society for the better in more obvious ways, too.

But having more woman-friendly policies is not a benefit I expect from Palin in the White House or near it, rather the reverse. She would not revoke the Global Gag Rule. She would not fight for reproductive choice. She would not keep the Supreme Court from becoming a permanent extreme right wing of the Republican Party, with all that means to the rights of women and people in general.

Tell Me How To Herd Cats

I've heard that trying to get liberals/progressives organized behind one large concept is like trying to herd cats. But we need some way of doing that, because we have no message discipline on the left side of the aisle, no way of making sure that the day's talking points are actually talked about.

The conservatives do that all the time, and naturally the way they do it is jack-booted and unpleasant to watch. But it works, just as repetition and focusing on only a few items at a time works at school. We, my dear friends, are all over the place and this makes us less efficient.

It's not at all necessary or desirable to go to the ugly other opposite end, but it would be nice if the liberal/progressive side had more think tanks and more jobs with money for people who are good at making liberal/progressive points. It would be nice if there were more pulpits for liberals and progressives, pulpits which actually can be seen above the roar of Republican soundbites. It would not only be nice; it would be very important. And Rachel Maddow is great, but she doesn't have to be the only liberal political pundit with her own television show, you know.

I was thinking these thoughts when reading the opinion columns in some newspapers today. When something truly silly or disgusting crops up we appear to have no mechanism for answering that. None.

All this goes tenfold for feminists. Whenever women are attacked with some spurious pseudoscience, for example, we should have an organization which can quickly get hold of people who can respond. We don't have those organizations.

For Your Reading Pleasure

Bob Herbert is very good on the liberals' fear of fighting for their cause.

Mood: Irritated

I'm not happy with the political chatter these days, because it is orchestrated by the Republicans. What is it about the Democrats which makes it so hard for them to pick their own topics for discussion? And yes, I'm including myself in that criticism.

Not sure. But there's something odd about the so-called liberal media which doesn't allow any actual liberals in its programs, never mind actual left-wingers. And there's something odd about the way wingnut soundbites become the topic of conversation in the media even if they're nasty and pointless and have nothing to do with the politicians they are used to attack. Yet the reverse appears not to happen. Just compare the attention Obama's minister got and the attention Palin's church and its rather weird policies get. Or rather don't get. It should be easier for the media to discuss Palin's religious views, too, given that she thinks God is her personal political backer.

We're all supposed to view the election of the president of the still-strongest country in the world as a soap opera. We're supposed to rate the people on such bases as whether we'd like to have a beer with them or whether we rate them as fuckable or whether they make us feel good because they are as ignorant or as stupid as we are.

It's all theater or ballet, and the only criticism one is allowed to make is about the performance of the players, not what they'd actually do when in power. If you try to discuss that latter bit (of some importance, really) then you are very very boring.

Four. More. Years.

My Suggestion For The Republican Election Slogan

McCain is trying to steal Obama's message of change with no change in any of the policies he advocates. We should steal the old Republican slogan:


FOUR MORE YEARS!


And remind the voters that this is exactly what would happen with McCain in the White House. Four more years of the bog of pointless and killing wars. Four more years of bad economy, jobs slipping abroad while voters are told they are whiners. Four more years of increasing theocracy of the kind Osama bin Laden would love to have. Four more years of diminishment, downfall, destruction and disease for this great country.

Too Opinionated

Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are too opinionated for NBC. Glenn Greenwald notes that "opinionated" never hurt a Republican yet:

This has been going on for years. As I wrote in response to the uproar generated at places like The New Republic over the fact that MSNBC has now given an actual liberal, Rachel Maddow, her own show and is thereby jeopardizing non-partisan, objective, high-minded journalism:

Over the past seven years, the following people have hosted prime-time cable news shows: Joe Scarborough (MSNBC), Michael Savage (MSNBC), Glenn Beck (CNN), Tucker Carlson (MSNBC), Nancy Grace (CNN), Bill O'Reilly (Fox) and Sean Hannity (Fox). None of that seemed to bother the likes of [TNR's Sacha] Zimmerman. None of that was depicted as the downfall of objective journalism or the destruction of civil, elevated, high-minded discourse.

Several of those hosts had and continue to have atrocious ratings (Carlson, Beck, Scarborough), yet were kept for years.

Beyond that, network and cable shows routinely convene panels filled with right-wing views and devoid of anything remotely approaching liberalism, and that creates no controversy.

Not that Chris Matthews is especially liberal. But I find the power of the conservatives over the media astonishing. However much we wrote about Matthews' misogyny in his coverage of women in politics, all we got was a quasi-apology. The wingnuts get him for their dinner.

"Girl fight!" (by Suzie)

           Ugh. That's the headline on a CNN commentary about the Obama campaign using Clinton to fight Palin.

McCain has a strong woman? Well, the Obama campaign wants voters to know they’ve got one, too, and they’re going to deploy her to crush the moose hunting hockey mom from Alaska. In a strange twist of logic, the Obama campaign is touting the woman they passed over as the woman they need to beat the woman the other guy picked. 

          Clinton is speaking on behalf of Obama in my town tomorrow, but I'm not going. I'm hiding under the bed until the election and the hurricane season are over.

As The Fall Campaign Continues, Candidates Have To Get Votes Where They Can, Voters Force Them To Make Those Decisions by Anthony McCarthy

A lot has been made about the selection of Sarah Palin theoretically attracting self-defined diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton to vote for everything Clinton stands against and against everything she stands for. How can that latter assumption be anything but ingrained sexist stereotyping, an insult to the reasoning ability and seriousness of women who voted for her? Isn’t it a manifestation of the exact complaint continually repeated against the Obama campaign? I doubt these Clinton -> McCain-Palin voters are anywhere near as great in number as the media push-polls state. But I’ll resist the temptation to go into the fraud of opinion polling again. Quite frankly, after hearing them out and thinking about what they’re saying, I don’t think anything can be said to appeal to anyone holding that position now, in September of 2008. If anyone can tell us what Obama can say to them to get their votes it might be useful.

But voter blocks don’t exist in a vacuum. Other groups are also out there and can be won over. There is also an important opportunity for the Obama campaign in Sarah Palin’s extremism and McCain’s cynical use of her. A lot of marginal supporters among Republicans can be appealed to by the Obama campaign on the basis of the real dangers a very possible Palin administration. The idea that pro-justice, pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-healthcare, pro-economic sanity voters of any party affiliation would just fall in line and vote for McCain-Palin is just as strange as the speculation that Hillary Clinton’s former supporters would vote against her enthusiastically endorsed candidate this fall, in favor of her political enemies*.

As the election grows closer candidates will have to cut their losses as well as go for blocks of possible voters. They have to do that, they can’t spend time on people who aren’t going to vote for them. If you lose one group you have to look for votes from another group. Being intransigent cuts you out of consideration. Obama’s best hope for countering the cynical Palin gambit is by appealing to moderate independents and even Republicans who can be persuaded of the clear dangers of having her as McCain’s Vice President. Their possible support in November, when it counts, puts them in play. McCain might have made winning them to his side much more difficult when he tied his political fate to Palin.

Obama will be forced to put his attention where he might get votes. Groups that remove themselves from play in September will find themselves out of the focus of the campaigns. That is the way that electoral government works.

* It is well known that John McCain repeatedly told what passes as a joke in the Republican right during the 1990s, to the effect that Chelsea Clinton was so ugly because Janet Reno was her father. Many people have reported hearing him say it. McCain has certainly shown no respect to Hillary Clinton except when it’s convenient for him. His support for women's rights is, likewise, a matter of his political convenience. Palin dismissed just the complaints that those angry at Obama are giving as their reason to support the Republican ticket as “whining” and playing the female card.

By the way, I’d put Chelsea Clinton up against any combination of right wing Republican political brats any day. She’s better than all of them put together. That’s what counts.

Update: Response to an item just found in my hate mail file. No, I’m not going to going down the bottomless pit of competitive correctness here.

I’ll just say that Chelsea Clinton shows early promise of sharing many of the same qualities that made Eleanor Roosevelt among the most beautiful people of any time.

Recap by Anthony McCarthy

McCain’s Palin gamble benefits from his age and health problems. It’s appeal is based on the fact that her voters, the James Dobson allies and fans, will be hoping for him to kick the bucket as soon as possible after they’re sworn in. Short of dying, their bet would also pay off if McCain remains alive but in bad enough health for him to not be able to stay in office. Between the two of those possibilities, their gamble takes on even better odds. His age and health are some of the most obvious issues in his biography. There is no way that his campaign couldn’t have realized the part they’d play in this choice and its appeal to voters who weren’t enthusiastic supporters of McCain.

The good chance that he’ll not remain in office is an intrinsic part of the appeal to the Republican far-right who are the real target audience of the Palin selection. Those guys don’t want McCain, a lot of them would have stayed home on election day. Their gamble is that McCain WON’T remain in office for the next four years. They are also counting on at least the two or three Supreme Court vacancies which are all but certain in the next four years being filled by one of their own.

That makes his age and health a far greater issue than it was in the beginning. The attempts to put those topics off-limit by his campaign and the media are part of an attempt to put the most radically right-wing person in the presidency since the 19th century.

This is the most cynical presidential campaign gambit in our history. One whose chances are enhanced by the probability of the presidential candidate dying in office. This, friends, is what the death of democracy looks like, I thought it was worth saying again.