Bill Gates and Visas

Bill Gates, who is just like us except a little bit richer, wants to get rid of the upper limits on H1-B visas, the visas for importing goddesses and other smarties to the United States (I must come clean on this one: I rode in on one of those little visas). His companies need to hire more engineers and the U.S. market can't fill the need. So Gates wants to let more well-trained workers into the U.S..

Wouldn't foreign workers compete with American ones for scarce jobs? Not according to Gates:

Gates and other leading technology executives have pressed Congress aggressively to let them hire more foreign employees by raising visa limits, but Gates hasn't previously campaigned to abolish the immigration law entirely. Technology executives have argued they are unable to find qualified American workers, a contention disputed by U.S. labor groups and unemployed computer engineers.

"Anybody who's got good computer science training, they are not out there unemployed," Gates said. "We're just not seeing an available labor pool."

Is he correct? Not completely, for two reasons. First, the unemployment rate for information technology (IT) workers is not especially low:

Government figures showed 5.7 percent of information technology employees were out of work last year versus 5.5 percent of all workers.

In fact, the IT unemployment rates are higher than those for managers and professionals in general, too.


Second, there is evidence that many trained for the field are drifting out of it because of difficulties of finding a good job match. The major reason for this is in outsourcing of IT jobs.

In some ways Gates is advocating more choices for American firms at the expense of American workers. Under his scenario firms could outsource jobs or import workers, whichever turns out to be more profitable, and the U.S. workers would have to compete both at home and abroad with foreign workers.

Traditional economic analysis supports Gates's ideas. But we don't live in the kind of world which the traditional models apply. The markets are not really competitive, retraining is difficult and expensive and rules and regulations about workers' rights, the environment and business ethics all vary widely between countries.

In any case, Gates is pushing for an idea that would cost him or his firm nothing. Alternative ways of increasing the supply exist (educational scholarships, for example) but they have the liberal handicap that they actually require some resource sacrifices from the people who stand to benefit.

Tony Bliar Blair

I never understood the political calculus that must have been taking place inside Blair's head when he chose to be Bush's poodle. I used to live in the U.K. but that was when Labour was still Labour and the conservatives were old-fashioned conservatives. Now that Blair is teetering on the rightmost edge of the political spectrum the Conservative Party has no identity. What could they say or do that would distinguish them from Blairism? Be pals with the American wingnuts? Go the extreme cleric route? I doubt that would go down well in Britain, and in any case Blair has marked Christianity for his own self, too.

Tony Blair took his country to a war that its citizens did not want, and it seems that he knew very well how shaky the grounds were:

ony Blair was told by the government's most senior law officer in a confidential minute less than two weeks before the war that British participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq could be declared illegal.

Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, spelt out to Mr Blair the dangers of Britain going to war without a second resolution. It is understood that he then went on to warn that British soldiers could be hauled before the International Criminal Court.

He warned that while he could be able to argue a "reasonable case" in favour of military action, he was far from confident a court would agree. Indeed, he added, a court "might well conclude" that war would be found unlawful without a further UN resolution.

In a legal opinion which Mr Blair has repeatedly sought to conceal, the attorney warned the prime minister that Britain might be able argue it could go to war on the basis of past UN resolutions, but only if there were "strong factual grounds" that Iraq was still in breach of its disarmament obligations.

Does Blair stay up at night wondering if he got his money's worth? Well, we all will know the answer after the oncoming elections.

Embarrassing Confession Time

Because I have no other topic ready for blogging.

I find Kofi Annan's voice the sexiest one in the whole universe. This is a handicap in some ways. For example, I never hear a word of what he is saying because I go into an immediate bedroom swoon whenever he's on the television or radio (though it's the voice that has this effect, not Annan's looks).

His voice is like dark molasses, like a moist summer wind on a dark night after a hot day, like a glass of Guinness when one is parched, like feathers and velvet and cognac. No politician deserves a voice like that.

Bloggety Blogging

There is a season to everything and right now the season is to wonder what blogging is all about. The egotistical version of that one is of course what I might be doing with this blog if anything. I'm struggling against the siren calls of becoming an investigative blogger who finds out what JimJeff GannonGuckert was really doing in the White House during the overnight visits, and against the terrible ambitions of wanting to write so well that people drop their innards into my paypal collection basket (which I don't have, yet). Then some dark and windy nights I shed large tears over my inability to say anything at all and over my emptiness. Really, over my mediocrity. A mediocre goddess is a dreadful thing to be.

In other words, I'm completely normal! A leeetle bit schizoid but otherwise right at the median, mean and mode. Except for the qualifiers and the rigid little academic bits. Those I will get rid of, one day. But the question of blogging remains and it even has a wider importance.

The Google has started mixing blogs with newspapers on their news page. The problem is not with sites like Kos but with some other blogs that I have accessed through Google News. The writing is from an elementary school class and the information is wrong. How does the system determine which sources are deemed as worthy of inclusion? And if this sort of thing becomes more common what will it do to the already almost nonexistent respect people have towards blogs?

If the system uses readership figures to decide on inclusion it is bound to catch some sites which are really chatrooms or places where like-minded people meet, and some of those places can be pretty far off the mainstream. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it smells odd to have New York Times and a blog of this type ranked equally.

These questions could reflect the infancy stage of blogging or the anarchy of the blogosphere. Perhaps everything will be formalized and codified in the future. I'm not sure if I like that, either, because it will be those in power who end up determining these things. Still, we need something like a gigantic telephone catalog for all the blogs out there. The yellow pages equivalent at least.

Which brings me to my last musing on this topic: the impossibility of reading all the good blogs out there or even the good lefty blogs or the good feminist blogs. I can't do it anymore, not unless I quit working and eating and writing my own blog. This is a real loss and I have found no good solution to it.

John Altman on Cock Fighting and Domestic Violence

I'm sure that you have heard or read about how South Carolina decided to make cock fighting into a felony crime while tabling a similar attempt in regard to domestic violence, which remains a misdemeanor.

John Altman, the Representative who decided to give his reasons for supporting the cockfighting punishment while opposing the domestic violence one, has this to say about attempts to compare the two:

"People who compare the two are not very smart and if you don't understand the difference, Ms. Gormley, between trying to ban the savage practice of watching chickens trying to kill each other and protecting people rights in CDV statutes, I'll never be able to explain it to you in a 100 years ma'am."

Ms. Gormley is a tv reporter interviewing the Representative. He then goes on to call her "not very bright" for suggesting that the decisions reflect a higher value on the lives of fighting cocks than of women (unfortunate pun there).

Well, maybe the two bills should not have been compared. But Altman reveals much more about himself in the same interview than just his lack of manners:

Rep. Altman spoke about domestic violence, "There ought not to be a second offense. The woman ought to not be around the man. I mean you women want it one way and not another. Women want to punish the men, and I do not understand why women continue to go back around men who abuse them. And I've asked women that and they all tell me the same answer, John Graham you don't understand. And I say you're right, I don't understand".

(Bolds mine.)

And:

During the same interview, he responded to the reporter's question, "You seem to be drawn to this fixation that women have to go back. I don't think that speaks highly of women. I think women can think and be responsible for their own actions. Woman are not some toys out there, drawn back to the magnet of the man a lot of these men are bums and cretins and they have to be punished but I think women are independent enough to not go back to the men who beat them. And we have a lot of men who are abused by women, but they are too ashamed to admit it.

(Bolds mine.)

It's going to be fun to analyze Mr. Altman's real message. I suspect that he reads mensnewsdaily.com rather religiously but with very little scrutiny. Or else he has just decided that domestic violence is sort of the victims' fault, that having it treated as a real crime is insulting to women who are strong enough to kick back if need be. He would never go back if someone punched him in the nose even once! Of course he is not a person with possibly no income and several dependent children to worry about. He's probably not someone who grew up in a dysfunctional home, either. And he'd never be swayed by the idea that if he left his abuser the abuser might come after him and shoot him dead. It does happen, even if Mr. Altman can't quite imagine it.

Why doesn't he care about the men who are victims of domestic violence? His offhand comment about men being too ashamed to mention it implies that this somehow makes the misdemeanor status of domestic violence ok. Or am I misreading his ramblings here? Is he just really saying that if violence affects men, too, it doesn't have to be punished?

I should stop playing cat and mouse with Representative Altman. We all know what he is saying: that domestic violence is not really a special problem for women, that feminists exaggerate its importance and that stricter laws about domestic violence are unfair special interest pork. Everybody knows that it takes two to tango.

I actually agree with Mr. Altman on one point, and one point only. There are indeed men who are the victims of domestic violence. I even know one man in this situation, and he keeps on going back. He has also been completely isolated by his wife so that he no longer sees his birth family, his college friends or even his colleagues from work. When he goes out she sends him furious text messages. He gets his face clawed regularly, his paycheck appropriated, and he keeps going back.

Yes, domestic violence doesn't discriminate by gender. Where the differences arise are in the outcomes of domestic violence. The female sufferers tend to have worse physical damage from the attacks, and as more women are financially dependent on their spouses (due to our history of sexual division of labor), more women find it difficult to leave unassisted. There is also a difference in the prevalence of domestic violence by sex of the perpetrator and victim, and this reflects the social power structures and gender role expectations. But men can indeed become victims, too.

To understand why victims so often return just consider how you would feel if you had to leave everything in your life behind. It is a hard thing to do, and the harder the less resources you have. Then add to this all sorts of deeply ingrained beliefs about love conquering all, about giving people a second chance, about worrying what happens to the children without the other parent. And maybe you grew up in a family where beating was regarded as God's will (see my post below on some Christian child correction views). Finally, perhaps you are now convinced that the perpetrator will kill you if you try to leave. - It is easy for those of us who are outside to judge the victim, but then it's easy in general to make judgments from some high perch.

Representative Altman managed to identify with the horror of chickens that are killed just for the fun of it. He should be able to identify with a domestic violence victim, too. All it takes is a little empathy.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action comes from NRDC:

Tell your senators not to prohibit filibusters of judicial nominees

Whenever a single political party controls both the White House and Congress --

as the Republicans do now -- the Senate "filibuster" (a nickname for

indefinitely extended debate) ensures that the dominant party cannot exert

undue control over the remaining branch of the federal government: the

judiciary. But Senate Majority Leader Frist (R-TN) is threatening to overturn

the longstanding Senate rule that enables 41 or more senators to use the

filibuster to prevent the confirmation of nominees to lifetime seats on the

federal courts.

The filibuster guarantees that a judicial nominee cannot win confirmation over

vehement minority opposition unless the nominee is supported by 60 or more

senators. This check on majority power is particularly important in the context

of judicial nominees, who receive lifetime tenure when confirmed.

Sen. Frist's attempt to eliminate the filibuster in the context of judicial

nominees is particularly unjustified, for two reasons. First, the Senate has

confirmed 205 of President Bush's 215 judicial nominees. Second, the seven

filibustered candidates subsequently renominated by President Bush have shown

that they would not decide cases impartially, but rather would use the federal

bench as a platform for advancing a political ideology that falls far outside

the mainstream.

NRDC opposes four of the renominated candidates on account of their extreme

anti-environment views and antipathy toward conservation and public health

groups. If the filibuster is eliminated, those nominees and others like them

would receive lifetime tenure on the courts that are responsible for enforcing

the laws that protect public health and the environment.

In addition, eliminating the filibuster for judicial nominations would create a

precedent that the current majority or a future one could use to eliminate the

filibuster for legislation as well. At that point, the Senate would cease to

play its unique, moderating role in our democracy.

== What to do ==

Tell your senators to vote "No" on any measure that would prohibit filibusters

of judicial nominees.

== Contact information ==

You can email or fax your representative directly from NRDC's Earth Action

Center at http://www.nrdc.org/action/. If you prefer to call your

representative, the Capitol switchboard number is 202-224-3121.

The Godly Habit of Child Correction

It has taken me a long time to decide that this article is not a hoax. I so wanted it to be a joke.

It is written by one Ronald E. Williams, an American Talibanist of an extreme kind, and it advocates corporeal punishment of children. No, it doesn't just advocate such punishment, it begs and pleads the parents (the father, obviously, but the mother can be delegated the duty to beat) to really revel in such beatings, to give them a chance to work by sticking at it, for hours if necessary. Why? Because the Bible tells him so. Also because children are inherently bad (why did God make them so?) and need to have their will broken, preferably before they turn twelve months old. No, I am not making this up.

Let me share some of what I have learned about Christian child correction:

The world and humanistically-trained minds are repelled in horror at the thought of a God who would deliberately order painful correction of a child and use words as strong as "beat" in ordering parents to carry out that correction. The Scriptures make it abundantly clear that such painful correction is the most loving, wise, and responsible procedure that a Godly parent can follow in developing obedience and character in his child. Therefore, when you hear someone object, "But that will hurt my child," you can answer, "Precisely, that is God's goal, that the child be hurt with the pain of the spanking during a session of correction."
...
Both my wife and I have often remarked that it is good that one of our children was not our firstborn. This particular child who came along later in our family was extremely willful and rebellious toward our authority and would often require sessions of correction lasting from one to two hours in length before the will would finally be broken! Had this child been our first, we may well have been tempted to despair of the grace of God.

Do not be discouraged, dear parent, when it appears that your Godly efforts to chastise your child with the rod of correction meet with total resistance towards your authority. This simply means that you have started on the right course and you must now pursue your objective of a broken will with great vigor until your mission is finally accomplished. This may require a great deal of self-discipline on your part but you can do it, since God requires you to do so.
...

My wife and I have a general goal of making sure that each of our children has his will broken by the time he reaches the age of one year. To do this, a child must receive correction when he is a small infant. Every parent recognizes that this self-will begins early as he has witnessed his child stiffen his back and boldly demonstrate his rebellion and self-will even though he has been fed, diapered, and cared for in every other physical way.

On what occasions should a child be corrected? Whenever a child directly disobeys authority or shows disrespect and rebellion toward authority, that child should receive correction. Lesser infractions of course would receive lesser forms of correction with the rod being reserved for the more serious infractions.

I have also learned that the proper tool for beating a child is a wooden rod big enough not to break in a heated hour or two of correcting, and that godly parents must limit the correcting to the privacy of their homes lest they get their children removed by the authorities who don't follow the Bible.

Fascinating stuff. Excuse while I go and vomit.

And who is the writer? At one point he tells us this about himself:

In my position as the director of a rehabilitation ministry for troubled teenage girls, I receive phone calls daily from desperate parents all across the United States. They have children for whom all hope seems to be gone because they did not start the use of the rod of correction while there was hope as the Scriptures mandated. I do not mean to discourage parents with older teenagers, who have suddenly been exposed to God's inspired instructions in this matter. As long as you have a child under your authority and your home where you can directly supervise and correct him, there still is hope that you may turn that child from his wicked ways and break his will. You may still teach him to submit to authority in his life.

A good illustration of this hope is found in the case of a mother who called me from a distant state about her troubled teenage daughter. This teenager had gotten into such continual mischief and wickedness that the desperate mother went to the local hardware store and purchased a lock and chain with which to lock the girl to her body. This unorthodox measure kept the girl in her home at night but fell far short of Scriptural methodology in changing the heart! I explained to the mother that we did not have room to receive the girl at the time because our beds were filled. However, I mentioned that I could give her a possible answer for her predicament. I also said, "But I doubt that you will follow through." The mother, hearing that there might be a solution to her crisis, desperately implored, "Yes, I will take your counsel. What is your solution?" I then proceeded to explain that the mother should get a stick that would not break and get after that daughter until the daughter asked for peace in their relationship. The mother hesitated in silence for a time on that long distance telephone call, and then seemingly made a firm commitment before me and the Lord that she would do so. She answered, "Alright, I will!" I then forgot about the mother and her call inasmuch as we receive several calls like this daily.

Three weeks later, I received a phone call from this same mother. I had forgotten who she was and was reminded of her identity only when she reminded me of the lock and chain she had purchased to secure her daughter. I remembered who she was at that point since that was a unique method of restraining the girl. I asked, "Well, what has happened since our last conversation?" The mother replied that she had taken my advice to secure a large stick that would not break, and to quote the mother, "I wore off her behind!" I chuckled at the mother's response and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the story.

This man rehabilitates troubled teenaged girls! He thoroughly enjoys stories about beating. He is a man of God. I want off this planet. Now!

To Cheer You Up!

Kidding!



Interesting cultural (or pseudo-macho?) differences in body language. Other pictures are funnier that way but this reminds me best of those who are in power in this world and why they are there.

Interesting...

Do you ever check the Google news page? If you do, do you scroll down to the health news, for example? I do this regularly, first with the U.S. Google, then with the Canadian and the U.K. ones. There are some major differences in which news are picked up in each. In general the U.S. news are more wingnutty, with lots of emphasis on dangers of drug addiction or sloth or greed (such as obesity studies or sermons about people not exercizing enough). The Canadian and the U.K. health news are somewhat less focused on this "moral" dimension.

The U.K. Google news even report findings such as this one:

Putting your baby in daycare in its first year could mean it is less likely to develop childhood leukaemia, researchers said yesterday.

Exposure to other childhood infections among other infants might prime the immune system and sometimes prevent the second half of the "double whammy" that scientists believe is needed for the cancer to develop.

A 15-year study of childhood cancers in Britain, said to be the biggest in the world, suggests that infants who have been to formal daycare in their first 12 months are half as likely as those with no socialising to succumb to acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, the most common form of leukaemia in the young.

The idea is that it may be good for babies to be exposed to germs early. Some supporting evidence for this comes from a comparison of childhood leukemia rates between West and East Germany before unification:

The former East Germany, where infants went into childcare at three months, had a leukaemia incidence a third lower than that in the former West Germany. But since reunification and the end of such universal care, the level had become the same across the whole country.

I have no idea whether these results are valid but I suspect that the U.S. Google will not report on them for a while. Because they are not of the "right" kind.

The Latest Crusade?

According to some, it started yesterday when a church was used to televize political propaganda. I may be a little slow on the uptake here, but isn't the tax-free status of the churches based on them not adopting a political role of this kind? I'm probably wrong. It must be something that used to be true but no longer is.

We heard several speakers in the "Justice Sunday", including

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, who said that putting more evangelicals on the court will mean rulings more in tune with the religious convictions of churchgoers.

"We are not asking for persons merely to be moral," Mohler said. "We want them to be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ."

And then there was Tony Perkins whose organization orchestrated the roadshow:

"Just because we believe the in the Bible as a guidepost for life does not disqualify us from participating in our government," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. "As American citizens, we should not have to choose between believing what is in this book and serving the public."

And Charles W. Pickering (of the sour grapes fame as he was turned down for a nomination to the Circuit Court of Appeals because of racism):

"If Christians don't stand up and don't participate, I cringe about the future."

The final touches were put on by James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on Family (a wingnut think tank) who has decided that threatening Republicans is the way to get to Gilead post-haste:

"Republicans are really good at trembling," Dobson told members of the audience. "Get a hold of them and tell them that you care and you will remember how you vote."

It's all very whiny and victimish. I thought that was our role in politics? The wingnuts are supposed to be the ones in power right now. So what are they complaining about? Nothing seems to be enough for them. The majority of Supreme Court Judges are Republicans but they are not wingnutty enough, it seems. Well, until Scalia can be cloned it's hard to do much better than the current bench. Sorry, Dobson.

Frist decided to step into this mess with only one foot. He sent a video of his statements which carefully avoided mentioning religion, yet equally carefully argued the same points as the extreme radical clerics mentioned above. This is the sort of problem you get when you habitually ride tigers and think that you can control them.

"Cowardly Lion" Feminism

A recent column by Katha Pollitt on the late Andrea Dworkin has this important paragraph:

These days, feminism is all sexy uplift, a cross between a workout and a makeover. Go for it, girls--breast implants, botox, face-lifts, corsets, knitting, boxing, prostitution. Whatever floats your self-esteem! Meanwhile, the public face of organizational feminism is perched atop a power suit and frozen in a deferential smile. Perhaps some childcare? Insurance coverage for contraception? Legal abortion, tragic though it surely is? Or maybe not so much legal abortion--when I ran into Naomi Wolf the other day, she had just finished an article calling for the banning of abortion after the first trimester. Cream and sugar with that abortion ban, sir?

Feminism like the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz would practise it. Or feminism in the old-fashioned way women's power has been wielded for so long: by subterfuge, compromise and the application of personal charm. These are the ways the weak use power, of course, and have nothing inherently female about them. But Pollitt sure is right about their re-emergence in recent years.

I'm dreadfully drawn by the Cowardly Lion role model. It fits my basic desire to be seen as a sane, intelligent and kind goddess who never makes hurtful or unconsidered comments. Oh, how I want to be adored as the goddess in the best power suit, with the most frozen grin on my botox-fixed face! I want to go and drink with the boys. I do so like to be liked, yes. If I needed it I'd get artificial tits, too, probably. But us goddesses are rather well-endowed in some ways. In fact, now I feel guilty for not being a donor of breast tissue.

And why did I blurt out this horrible confession? Because there is truth in it. The coming-to-terms with oneself can be a slow and hard road for some of us, and for women it has its own very particular hurdles, many of them created by popular culture, others by church and yet others by tradition and general societal consensus. To be a Good Woman (in some universal sense) is impossible, but this is a secret most of us have to learn on our own, even in these communication times.

Once we get this basic enlightenment life is just as it was before, but none of it looks the same and it can take a lot of thinking to decide which values to use instead of the mad dogmas which make us chase physical beauty or the reputation of the most self-sacrificing martyr that ever lived or the honorable title of a Pseudo-Man. This thinking is hard work, so George Bush is lucky not to have to face it.

Because it is such hard work I often don my lion outfit and go around begging for approval. On better days I face the monsters in my head straight on and even tame a few of them. Some are still rampaging around fairly untamed, and one of them is the question of abortion.

I am pro-choice. Viscerally so. But every time I try to write about abortion I go into so many twists and turns that I give up on the attempt. The Cowardly Lion rears its ugly head. It rationalizes not writing about abortion by pointing out how tedious the debate always turns to be, how I have already heard every single argument there is to present about the topic and how unpleasant it would be to have lots of trolls on the blog. Or the Lion mutters that others do this stuff so much better, like Amanda on Pandagon or BitchPhD, so nothing is missed if one tiny voice is silenced, voluntarily.

All true. But I lose something by taking the cowardly way out. Thus, here is a very condensed take on my position on abortion:

First, I don't believe in the personhood of embryos or early fetuses. The pro-life view argues that a person is created at the point when the sperm fertilizes an egg. Why at this particular point and not earlier or later? Both the egg and the sperm are living things, after all, and roughly one half of fertilized eggs never attach to the uterine lining. They are flushed out of the woman's body and she never knows of their existence. Should the pro-lifers cry over all these deaths? Probably, if they are to be faithful to their beliefs. But all they are are beliefs, not something based on scientific facts.

At what point then would Echidne regard a fetus as a person, you might ask. I don't know the exact point and nobody else does, either. Many people have decided on one point or another but the truth is that the process of change is gradual. Right now some use the test of viability outside the woman's body to determine such a point. Something more precise may become available in the future but I doubt it. There will always be disagreement on this question.

Second, even if the fetus were regarded as a person as the pro-lifers do, it is still true that it is a person in another person's body. This is different from any other case where concepts such as murder are bandied about. The extreme pro-life view would give the woman no rights to abort a pregnancy, even in the case of rape or when the woman's own life is threatened. She is therefore accorded a lower value than the fetus, even a fetus which exists because of forceful violence. I find this repugnant.

Third, it is the pregnant woman whose body is being used to house the fetus, to feed it and to ultimately give it birth with some pain, discomfort and risk to her health and life. No other person is asked to make such sacrifices in order to avoid "murdering" someone. Even the parents of (after-birth) children are not asked to donate an organ to a child that needs it to live. We may disapprove of parents who refuse to give such a gift but we are not trying to make it illegal for them to refuse. It is only in the case of pregnant women that we use much more stringent criteria.

For these reasons I want to privilege the pregnant woman over other members of the society. It is her body that is being used, her life which is going to be affected and her value as a person which to me appears ultimately under questioning here.

It's still a cowardly stance, isn't it? I'm not saying much about men's rights in this case or the question whether abortion should have more limits than it does today. Maybe I gather more courage to tackle all that in the future. I might even talk about the interesting asymmetries involved in the abortion debate: how the role of men is pretty much ignored when it comes to getting someone pregnant, how the problem is framed as one about women alone and how, on the other hand, so many of the debaters on the pro-life side seem to be men who will never have the opportunity of facing the basic dilemmas in their own bodies. I might even write about that old tired saw: how better contraception would be a great idea, in some parallel universe with fewer wingnuts. Or goddess help, maybe I'll even write about how to make this society more child-friendly so that more people can afford to carry desired pregnancies to term. Nah, let's not go that far.

Ok. Time to get into my pin-stripes and to paint a smile on. That is, if nobody minds?

Guess the Answers

What do the following two things have in common:

1. Getting a job on the K Street, the place where Washington lobbyists work.

and

2. Being sent as a US delegate to the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meeting (where telecommunication standards are discussed).

The answer: You have to be a Republican to qualify these positions. No, it's not enough to do your job well, and, no it doesn't matter that K Street jobs are private market jobs; you must also prove that you support Georgie Porgie.

3. What do you do if you work for the government and its own statistics show that you are doing poorly?

The answer: Order the statistics not to be published anymore. This is what Condoleezza Rice has just done. It's also what the old Soviet apparatus used to do quite routinely.

4. How many scandals can the Bush administration brag about so far?

The answer: At least thirty-four.

5. How many of these scandals have damaged the administration's credibility?

The answer: None

Justice Sunday

Welcome all brethren in Christ! This is a blog run on the literal interpretation of the Bible! Halleluyah! Now let us pray.

And now let us read this sentence from the Bible and let us harbor it in our minds and hearts:

Deuteronomy 22:11: Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woolen and linen together.

And what do we see when we look at the Nine Wicked Judges in the Supreme Court? Woolen gowns over linen shirts! Woolen suspenders over linen trousers! And who knows how much more wickedness there might be in the hidden underlayers! Fye!

Now, my brethren, be not disheartened. We are right and we shall win. The evil Democrat filibustering will end and the words of the Holy Book will be the Law of this land. The true believers will be victorious! Stores will be built separately for linen and for wool and all the faithful will be clad in justice!

Amen.

A Deep Thought for the Day

Madness is a renewable resource.

(Seen somewhere on the internets. It sounds like the truth right now.)

Scattered Comments

It's Saturday so you can get more of my political musings on the American Street (listed in the right column of this here blog).

Being a political blogger is a little like living in a pressure cooker. There are times when the steam starts overpowering everything else and you realize that your irrationality sensors are going "beepbeepPLONK", and you double-check what you have written yourself and go "Oy vey". Then it's time to take a step back and replenish the batteries with nonpolitical things. Think what we bloggers are suffering on your behalf! Just to bring you all the atrocities of the day so that you can feel equally bad and angry.

The nice thing about this all is that whatever won't kill you will make you stronger. Or perhaps more lunatic, I'm not sure. I still look fairly normal for a goddess. But it's time to read some poetry and take nice walks and have long arguments with Henrietta the Hound about the importance or not of clean ears on droopy-eared dogs.

She hates ear cleaning and thinks that it's just another form of torture humans have invented. My arguments to the contrary are refuted in the bared teeth and the raised hackles form. I win, usually, by raising the horrible spectre of the Vet!, and Henrietta will meekly surrender for exactly one ear's worth of cleaning per week.

She had a hard morning today. Several large puppies had to be turned upside down in the dog park and taught basic good dog manners. The next time we visit all these puppies will crawl on their stomachs to Henrietta and kiss her neck. Their owners hate us, though. They don't understand puppy-rearing principles at all and assume that my dog is attacking their poor little puppies. Which she is, sort of, but that's how a dog mother acts. - I have seen what happens when this correction does not take place: large adult dogs barging straight into Henrietta and then having most of their butthair removed by the same. Not pretty, not pretty at all.

Hank had a hard morning, too. It consisted mostly of carrying extremely large branches sideways and trying to get them through between the legs of various standing humans. She is not liked in the dogpark, either. I feel about the same there as I'd feel in a Southern Baptist service.

And then the snakes always want to sleep on the cool side of the bed!

I didn't plan to just complain here. The idea was to show how wonderful a non-political life could be, and it probably is wonderful. I just have to find it first.

About This Earth

We are completely and totally dependent on this planet for our survival. We need the earth under our feet, we need its ability to grow food for us and we need the air for breath in the atmosphere. Whether we like it or not, we are really just part of the ecosystem of the earth. We are not its rulers, no god ever gave us the right to just go and rape it at will, or if this happened it was one of those truly nasty divine jokes on us.

Yet it would be hard to see this in the many writings about what to do to keep oil flowing or how to best exploit the wilderness for more oil, more houses and more highways. Or even in the opposite writings about how to jiggle things around so that we can go on spreading and consuming for a few more generations by gently fucking mother earth here and there rather than gang-raping her as is the custom nowadays.

This is something humans do extraordinarily well: To believe that we are the kings of all that we can see. Remember how Jesus in the Bible turned down this offer from Satan? Well, fundamentalists have not turned down the same offer, no. They have grasped it with both hands. And by fundamentalists I refer to both the radical clerics and the radical market-lovers.

Echidne is no tree-hugger, though. I have far too much real respect for the nature to assume that it cares about my hugs. No, I'm approaching this question analytically and from that stance we humans are no different from cockroaches or bacteria in most important aspects. We are all dependent on this planet for our continued survival. The only difference between "us" (set apart, somehow, by being the winners in the evolutionary race) and "them" (all those "also-rans") is that we can consciously decide to commit collective murder and suicide of ourselves and everything else on this earth. We really should be called the suicide bombers, all of us. That's how smart we are.

Yet, the fundamentalist market-lovers and clerics do have a point: None of the trends scientists have observed are really bad enough to worry over if the worrying is about the survival of the planet. They are correct: the planet will survive. What won't is us. But of course the wingnuts believe that they will be harvested in the Rapture and resettled somewhere to sing eternal psalms in white nightgowns. And the wingnuts don't really care about anyone else but themselves and their rigid nightmares.

I'm no wingnut, thank all the goddesses and gods that might exist. I don't really believe that this planet is just the training wheels for humans, something to be discarded when we have memorized the Bible. That is one of the most egotistical beliefs I have ever met and I have met many. But because far too many are willing to accept the training wheels theory I must fight them. Not because I would hug trees or worship the earth but because there is no other alternative if you are interested in seeing the next installment in the history of this earth.

My garden notes tell me about the changes that are happening. Spring flowers cropping up so early that their pollinators are not awake yet. The neigboring gardens becoming areas of death, with not one single worm or spider in them, because of the miracle poisons that clear up everything. Then the plants wither and die, and the gardeners add more stuff to force them back. I see the birds on their migrations and the only lawn they land on is mine, the only one without poisons. All the neighborhood squirrels store their nuts in my flower beds, the only ones without poisons. And I, the only poisonless gardening goddess, stomp my feet in frustrated anger, because what I can do is too little and too late. And leaves me with all the work.

But there is no alternative. So get going on whatever small strip of earth you have control over. Hug the trees if you have to, they can tell you a thing or to. And then start pestering the politicians and chasing the wingnuts around the blog or block and so on. For the sake of not this earth but all of us on it.

Friday Embroidery Blogging

liberty

This is something I embroidered after 9/11 events. I took the picture a long time ago and the flash hit the Lady Liberty's forehead (because of glass on top). But since then I dropped the camera on Hank and I don't want to test if it still works.

The techniques are pretty primitive: straight stitch, cross stitches and some chain stitches. The black linen background was once a summer party dress! Lots of happy memories though the theme isn't very happy.

Happy Earth Day!

Others can comment on this one for me:

Six wild horses rounded up on federal land in the West and sold to a private owner have been slaughtered - four months after Congress did away with protection for wild mustangs, a government official said Thursday.

``This is something we regret and are very disappointed'' about, said Celia Boddington, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Washington, D.C. ``We make every possible effort when the horses are sold to make sure the animals are placed in good homes for long-term care.''

In December, Congress replaced a 34-year-old ban on slaughtering any mustang with a law that allows the sale of older and unwanted horses. But the Bureau of Land Management says it is trying to prevent sales of horses for their meat.

The animals up for sale are captured during periodic government roundups aimed at reducing the wild population. About 37,000 wild horses and burros roam the Western range, about 9,000 more than the BLM has said the natural forage can sustain.

BLM has sold and delivered nearly 1,000 horses since the new law passed. Some 950 more have been sold and are awaiting delivery.

And here is our president honoring the earth:

President Bush canceled an Earth Day visit to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Friday because of bad weather.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the threat of hail and thunder storms was keeping the president from visiting the park, but Air Force One still was making a brief stop at an airport outside Knoxville, Tenn., so Bush could make remarks near the park on Earth Day.

Bush then planned to fly on to Texas, where he was spending the weekend at his ranch and then hosting Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Monday.

"W" is For Women. Gag.

In fact, George Bush and his wingnuts care so much for the women of this world that they are prepared to have as many as 68,000 more of them dead:

The US government is trying to block the World Health Organisation from endorsing two abortion pills which could save the lives of some of the 68,000 women who die from unsafe practices in poor countries every year.

The WHO wants to put the pills on its essential medicines list, which constitutes official advice to all governments on the basic drugs their doctors should have available.

Last month, an expert committee met to consider a number of new drugs for inclusion on the list. They approved for the first time two pills, to be used in combination for the termination of early pregnancy, called mifepristone and misoprostol. In poor countries where abortion is legal, doctors currently have no alternative to surgery.

The Guardian understands that the US department of health and human services has been lobbying the director general's office at the WHO to block approval of the pills, in line with President George Bush's neoconservative stance on abortion.

While the availability of pills might make abortion easier and could increase the number choosing it, the experts want them listed to reduce the deaths and damage caused by surgery. Every year, 19 million women have unsafe abortions - 18.5 million of those take place in developing countries. An estimated 68,000 women die as a result of botched or unhygienic surgery, while many others suffer long-term damage, including sterility.

Note that it makes no difference that these drugs would only be available in countries where abortion is legal already. Would such availability increase the number of abortions? Probably. Would it also decrease the number of women who die from abortions? Definitely. The Bush administration calculus of values is clear: The loss of fetuses counts for more than the loss of already existing lives. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't another hidden value judgment in operation: Punish those women who don't wish to be pregnant.

Similar sentiments hold sway here in the U.S.. The pro-life movement has expanded its definition of abortion to cover certain types of contraceptives, especially the contraceptive pill. Pharmacists now wish to decide if the contraceptive pill is an abortifacient and they want to have the right not to dispense it. Given this, it is not surprising that the most recent pro-life attack is against "the morning after" pill, also called Plan B, a high dose of progesterone taken soon after unprotected intercourse.

The wingnuts don't like this pill. It encourages promiscuity, omits the necessary punishment for sexual activity and so on:

Plan B's most outspoken critic, the right-wing Concerned Women for America, insists it is actually worried about safety, given the lack of studies on the pill's long-term effects. But the vast majority of medical experts say Plan B is completely safe, in part because birth-control pills have such a well-established safety record themselves. According to the Guttmacher Institute, Plan B was available in 2002 without a prescription in 26 countries, including Switzerland, Israel, and Congo.

A less flimsy argument against Plan B is that it is tantamount to abortion. While science has demonstrated that Plan B works, it has not shown definitively how Plan B works. And, although most researchers believe that it acts by postponing ovulation or preventing fertilization, it could also prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus--which, according to some pro-life groups, is murder. That's a perfectly respectable, intellectually consistent position for people who believe life begins at the instant when sperm meets egg. But it's also a very severe standard, given that fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant 40 to 60 percent of the time. This is one reason that the medical establishment defines pregnancy as beginning only when a fertilized egg has implanted.

The other serious argument against Plan B is that it will increase risky sexual activity by young people. But peerreviewed studies published in mainstream medical publications (like one just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association) have repeatedly found no such link. Of course, conservatives argue that making emergency contraception available sends a broader cultural message about the acceptability of premarital sex. But, even if that were true, there are the likely benefits of Plan B to consider. James Trussell, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, has estimated that, if emergency contraceptives were widely available in this country, they could reduce the approximately 1.3 million abortions that take place yearly in this country by half. If a culture of life is so sacrosanct, shouldn't that trump the issue of premarital sex?

How to answer that last question? There are specifications to the "culture of life" in wingnuttia and these exclude most anything that promotes better lives for already existing people. "Life" in the wingnut jargon usually refers to fetuses and to people who are brain-dead. Some already existing lives (such as those of Iraqis or Afghanis) don't matter much. Women's lives are valued as equipment for making future wingnuts but don't seem to possess much intrinsic worth. And in general wingnuts lose all interest in the saving of any lives if it costs them something. Hence the eagerness to ban abortions and the reluctance to fund anything that would make bringing up children easier.

The "W", by the way, stands for "wingnut".

Coulter-tainment

FAIR has just published a response to the Ann Coulter interview in Time. Well worth reading if you are one of the few people not blessed with a far too intimate knowledge of the lunacies that Coulter spouts. Here's a taste:

Throughout the article, Cloud presented instances where Coulter was
allegedly misunderstood or underappreciated. And in each case, Cloud
either gave Coulter a pass, or concluded that her opponents were wrong.
Cloud generously wrote that Coulter "likes to shock reporters by
wondering
aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to
vote"-- as if she writes or speaks such things on national television
only
to get a rise out of journalists. Cloud also argued that Coulter can
"write about gender issues with particular sensitivity," an odd trait
to
attribute to someone who recently claimed that women are "not that
bright"
(Fox News, 9/23/04).

Cloud also recalled a TV debate over environmentalism where Coulter
offered her typical hyperbole: "God gave us the earth. We have dominion
over the plants, the animals, the seas.... God said, 'Earth is yours. Take
it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

And so on. It's entertainment, of course, or Coulter-tainment. The idea is to make politics into something a knuckledragger would enjoy watching, and the reason is in advertising revenues. If you make political debates into fights between wackoes (or better still, into wingnut wackoes beating up whiny Democrats) the folks who normally watch wrestling might be lured over! Hence a woman who advocates killing and violence routinely is portrayed as an Important Player in Politics.

That's probably pretty much the only kind of woman who could be famous in politics, though I think talking about blowjobs all the time would work, too. Whether Coulter is all an act or whether she is seriously deranged is irrelevant (though ethically the first alternative is worse). What matters is that this is the new entertainment of our era: politics as reality television.

Some argue that people like Coulter should be engaged in debate, not ignored or ridiculed. That is wonderful advice. How exactly would you do that? Just pick that statement above about raping the earth. How would you respond to that? And what would Coulter say then? It's impossible to debate someone who has no intention of actually debating back, who intends to yell and scream and call you names at every opportunity and who will simply talk more loudly if you try to interject an argument.

Coulter is a rabid extremist and should be regarded as one. That the Time magazine gave her inches and inches of positive column space tells poorly on the magazine. There is such a thing as responsible journalism. Too bad that Time has decided to have nothing to do with it.