The Lefty Feminist Echidne

I was linked to on Slate:

Fair and balanced and … public? In the latest example of backlash against the allegedly liberal news media, CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson is "pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias," reports the New York Times. Among several controversial moves, Tomlinson reportedly hired an outside consultant to keep track of guests appearing on Now With Bill Moyers and urged public broadcasting officials to air a program hosted by the editor of the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page.

Needless to say, lefties are outraged. "It's funeral time for PBS," writes the feminist Echidne of the Snakes. The left-leaning Phonograph notes how people who allege bias among news organizations "tend to have a bias themselves." Linkmeister has some choice snippets from a recent New York Times Magazine interview with Ken Ferree, the interim president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

It's naturally proper for my divine opinions to gain wider readership (assuming someone reads the Slate), but my reaction to being defined as a lefty feminist was very odd. I had to go out and walk in the woods to think about it for a while and to ask the trees for some advice.

This lefty feminist Echidne of the Snakes is some other goddess, someone on the barricades with one breast showing, someone quoting from Mao's Little Red Book. Or so it seemed to me. You see, I am normal. I have the right opinions on everything which means that I must be in the center and others are too right or too left.

Likewise, to be defined as a feminist implies that others are not so. I refuse to think that very many people support unequal opportunities for or worth of men and women, though of course I know that this is the optimistic view. Still, the impression I get from the quote above is that my being a feminist is somehow marking me as an oddball. It could be that I'm just oversensitive and read too much into it all.

But it's the lefty bit that really troubled me. I have never even voted for a socialist candidate in any elections! I advocate a mixed economy! I like the idea of laws that protect workers and ban discrimination, but I have never argued for any banning of capitalist activities. Yes, I am indeed a lefty in the United States, but what does this say about the way we define the political dimensions? Attila the Hun is seen to be middle-of-the-road, that's what it says.

None of this is of any interest to anyone but me. Except that it shows how self-definition is not the same thing as societal definitions. It's the societal definitions that determine how others react to us, and usually certain groups have much more power in naming than others. The political correctness debacle was all about the right to name and the content of the labels that are given. The powerful won it by using ridicule (some of it earned) and the fear of hierarchies turned upside-down. Thus, they still have the right to name, not those on the lower ladders of the hierarchy.

The hegemony is not as total as it once was, and the blogosphere is a good example of the variations now possible. Many of us call the extreme right wingnuts, for example, at least among each other. As they are in power this is kind of exhilarating, cheeky and even a little dangerous. But the term has no mainstream relevance. On the other hand, the originally quite neutral term "liberal" is widely viewed as one of the worst things a politician in the U.S. can be called. This shows how strong the power of naming can be.

A Contest

This is something I had in my mailbox:

Hello,

Today marks the beginning of Chastity Awareness Week in Pennsylvania and NARAL Pro-Choice America has an activity for your readers to keep their minds sparkling clean.

President Bush has recently asked Congress to provide more funding for his abstinence-only until marriage programs. Despite the fact that study after study has shown that these very programs are ineffective and even harmful for our kids, Bush has decided to yet again offer us the latest in medieval birth control: Chastity!

What's in these "abstinence-only until marriage" curricula? Slogans like:

* Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date!
* Don't Be a Louse, Wait For Your Spouse!
* Would you want a cookie that someone had already taken a bite out of?

These slogans might be out-of-date but that hasn't stopped President Bush from providing federal funding – your tax dollars – to buy them to teach our kids.

I do hope you will participate in this contest - your chastity may very well be at stake! To enter, please send an email to GiveUsRealChoices@gmail.com. We will announce the contest winner on May 7th.


Sincerely,

Amelia Field
GiveUsRealChoices.org

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action comes from NARAL:

Next week, May 2-6, Members of Congress are high-tailing it out of Washington for a late spring recess. Will your senators join Tom DeLay for a "non-lobbyist-funded" trip to an exotic destination? Or will they actually come back to your state to meet with you - their constituents?

Maybe we're old-fashioned, but we believe that our elected officials should go back to their home states to meet with voters one-on-one. It seems that this group of senators disagrees. During last month's congressional recess we couldn't track many of them down - forget about locating a public town hall meeting! Perhaps these "missing in action" senators didn't want to be questioned on issues like the nuclear option.

We're hearing that Sen. Frist could launch the nuclear option as soon as the Senate returns from recess, making next week even more important for activists to speak out. The nuclear option would effectively eliminate the filibuster and end pro-choice senators' chances for blocking Bush's anti-choice nominees. The good news is that the vast majority of Americans stand with us - a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 66 percent of Americans oppose changing Senate rules.

This recess, don't let senators play hide and seek while President Bush and Sen. Frist have the future of the Supreme Court in their crosshairs!

Track down your senators!

* Let your senators know you're keeping an eye on them next week - and that you want them to talk with voters about the nuclear option.



* Visit your senators during the recess next week. Check your local newspaper or visit your senators' websites for dates and times of town hall meetings. Or call your senators' offices at 202.224.3121 to schedule a personal appointment with your senators for you and your pro-choice friends.

* If you can't catch up with your senators, get creative and have fun! Get your friends to write a brief, personal note opposing the nuclear option, then deliver your notes to the senators' office nearest you with a bag of atomic fire ball candy.

Thanks for taking today's action.

IOKIYAR

It's Ok If You Are Republican. Even possibly advocating the overturning of the American Constitution. Pat Robertson just did this, too. This one radical extremist cleric is taking over my blog. Help! Someone in the government, someone in the media, someone sane anywhere in the world, help! Notice that this lunatic is a lunatic and cut off his preferential treatment to all good media perks. No, Americans are not that fringey. No, you are not going to lose your cushy livelihood if you point out that he is raving mad:

Appearing on ABC's "This Week," Robertson — who founded the Christian Coalition — also said he would be wary of appointing Muslims to top positions in the U.S. government, including judgeships.
...
Robertson, who launched a brief presidential bid in 1988, said that if he were president he would not appoint Muslims to serve in his Cabinet and that he was not in favor of Muslims serving as judges.

"They have said in the Koran there's a war against all the infidels," he said. "Do you want somebody like that sitting as a judge? I wouldn't."

Note that Article 6. of the Constitution explicitly bans any kind of religious test for judges. But even if Robertson didn't mean to literally require that candidates should not be Muslims, his argument makes no sense. Remember that we are right now in the big wingnut push to have more religious judges in the Supreme Court? Well, wouldn't fundamentalist Muslim judges be just the sort of people Robertson is looking for? People of the book, interpreting things strictly on religious grounds and so on?

Gah. All he wants is a Robertsonian Gilead where everybody thinks just like Pat. Which is a world where nobody thinks at all.
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Via Americablog.

Another Reason to Emigrate...

The Reverend Pat Robertson:

Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists, the Rev. Pat Robertson claimed yesterday.

"Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that's held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings," Robertson said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

"I think we have controlled Al Qaeda," the 700 Club host said, but warned of "erosion at home" and said judges were creating a "tyranny of oligarchy."

Confronted by Stephanopoulos on his claims that an out-of-control liberal judiciary is the worst threat America has faced in 400 years - worse than Nazi Germany, Japan and the Civil War - Robertson didn't back down.

"Yes, I really believe that," he said. "I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together."

Is there something like Godwin's Law about whoever first mentions Al Qaeda in a net conversation? If there is, it wouldn't apply to truly lunatic cases like this extreme radical cleric. Funny how he can't see that he has more in common with bin Laden's ideas than those of most any ordinary American.

A Garden of A Sort

My garden was of air.
Do not come so near.
The children cannot hear
the arrival of the fear.

You are a bee, you sting.
I never learned to sing.
The children cannot flee
the stinging of the bee.

My garden was of air.
Yet I could not leave.
The children cannot bear
the adulthood of grief.

I never named this thing.
I never learned to sing.
The children cannot tell
their garden is a hell.

Fairer and Balanceder....The New PBS

The New York Times reports about the man behind the curtain at the new and improved Public Broadcasting Service, one Mr. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Mr. Tomlinson wants to make the PBS fairer and more balanced. I agree with him. It would be nice to have the same number of liberal and lefty interviewees as those from the wingnut side. But this is not where Mr. Tomlinson sees problems. Rather, he thinks the PBS is a vile left-wing plot, the beating heart of the so-called liberal media, the oppressor of all things right and wingnutty, and he wants to stop this horrible state of affairs.

Which he can handily do. He is in power. So what does Mr. Tomlinson plan? Here is a hint:

Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, "Now With Bill Moyers."

In late March, on the recommendation of administration officials, Mr. Tomlinson hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member, corporation officials said. While she was still on the White House staff, she helped draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.

Mr. Tomlinson also encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast "The Journal Editorial Report," whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. And while a search firm has been retained to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox, the corporation's president and chief executive, whose contract was not renewed last month, Mr. Tomlinson has made clear to the board that his choice is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.

The article I quote from is full of references to people who no longer work for the PBS. I think that Mr. Tomlinson is doing some spring cleaning... You might be interested in learning that the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has only three non-Republican members out of a total nine. Why is this seen as fairly balanced?

But of course it is. Mr. Tomlinson's idea of balance is to get rid of voices like Bill Moyers' and to make sure that no anti-government investigative journalism will be performed in the future. And this clarifies his views even further:

Last November, members of the Association of Public Television Stations met in Baltimore along with officials from the corporation and PBS. Mr. Tomlinson told them they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate.

It's funeral time for PBS. Every program will now be toothcombed for liberal nits, except for the wholly wingnut programs which will be assumed to be fair and balanced by their very nature. Tomlinson will pay for secret studies to see if Sesame Street advocates homosexuality or contains too little praying and so on. And people like bow-tie Tucker Carlson and the Wall Street capitalists will roam around freely.

The New York Times article doesn't say this, of course. It is oh-so-polite and advocates a wait-and-see attitude in the hope that the wingnuts will be friendly and fair and balanced. But we all know what will really happen. The Fox news are not enough for the wingnuts, Scarborough Country does not suffice. No, what is needed is a totally wingnut media without a single breathing hole left for those of us who actually think.

Of course, the PBS has never been especially left-wing. Only extreme wingnuts think so. But it has covered controversial issues and it has offered more thoughtful coverage than the average corporate-controlled newsmill. I think that all this will now be in the past. Limbaugh will be so pleased.

Spring is Coming!

Spring is Coming!


This is a Southern hemisphere garden, so it's not really a Spring garden. But it is lovely. My bulb gardens this May turned into squirrel buffets as usual. In return the squirrels plant a lot of horse chestnut trees around my small house. If you have seen a horse chestnut tree you know that it's very important to weed out the seedlings. Otherwise there will be no space for the car or the dogs or anything else.

I had a good April, though. Blue muscaris peeking from under the frothy hems of yellow forsythias. The bluest of blue scillas flowering everywhere! Now the scillas are rotting in the same places, and I can't cover up the rotting if I want the blue next year, too. What to do, what to do. Gardening consists almost totally of what-to-dos interspersed with moments of utter pain (poison ivy) and utter ecstasy (the scent of honeysuckles drifting above white rose garlands in a June night).

But I doubt the readers of this blog are into gardening. I think I will write about gardening when I turn into Olive the Omnivorous Ovary. She wants her own blog. She could always write about the delirious mating orgy that we usually call a flowerbed.

From the Barricades

Did you know that you are a survivor of the abortion holocaust? This is the language of some pro-lifers. Imagine us as embryos: darting about, fleeing the evil abortionist or whatever, somehow miraculously surviving to the point after which pro-lifers no longer care about us: the birth. Pro-lifers seem to view women as aquaria: some empty, but with water that must be kept clear for future fishes, some with fish already in them and some all dry and dusty, no longer useful at all.

A thirteen-year old in state custody in Florida is one of those aquaria with fish. She is more than thirteen weeks pregnant. She got pregnant after running away from the state home. The girl herself wants an abortion and her state-appointed custodian was helping her to get one until higher powers-that-be decided to intervene. The pro-life plot is to keep the case in court until abortion is too late.

Giving birth is considerably more dangerous for a girl of this age than getting an abortion, but the case isn't about her, of course; it's about the rights of the fetus. Even though this can be clothed as a desire to properly punish the girl and whoever she had sex with:

A spokesman for Florida Right to Life said: 'There is a rush to abort. To get rid of the evidence. Who impregnated her? You do not consent to sex at the age of 13.'

The argument that this girl is too immature to make a decision about abortion is an odd one. She is supposedly mature enough to give birth and possibly to mother a child. And in court she sounded pretty mature to me:

"Why can't I make my own decision?"

That was the blunt question to a judge from a pregnant 13-year-old girl ensnared in a Palm Beach County court fight over whether she can have an abortion.

"I don't know," Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez replied, according to a recording of the closed hearing obtained Friday.

"You don't know?" replied the girl, who is a ward of the state. "Aren't you the judge?"

and

L.G., who told Alvarez she had run away at least five times from her youth shelter, maintained, "It would make no sense to have the baby."

"I don't think I should have the baby because I'm 13, I'm in a shelter and I can't get a job," the girl said as Alvarez and her guardian ad litem, assigned to shepherd her in the legal system, questioned her.

L.G. laid out different reasons for wanting an abortion.

"DCF would take the baby anyway," she said, but later added: "If I do have it, I'm not going to let them take it."

She also questioned the health risk of carrying the fetus to term.

"Since you guys are supposedly here for the best interest of me, then wouldn't you all look at that fact that it'd be more dangerous for me to have the baby than to have an abortion?" she asked. Alvarez called that "a good point."

Writing about this case makes me feel nauseous. This thirteen-year old child should be protected, should be allowed to have a childhood, should never have been in a situation where she got pregnant in the first place. We didn't care enough about her until she got pregnant. Then some of us care an enormous amount about her uterus but not at all about the rest of her.
---
Second link originally from Feministing.

Quote of the Day

This is a verry interesting one, by Laura Bush at the White House correspondents' annual dinner on Saturday:

Laura Bush, who is often seen smiling sweetly at her husband's side, stood up just in time to rescue the audience of political heavyweights and Hollywood celebrities from Bush's retelling of a joke about steel rail "cattle guards" that bombed before a Montana town meeting in March.

"Not that old joke -- not again," Laura Bush said, as her husband willingly relinquished the stage.

"I've been attending these dinners for years and just quietly sitting there," the First Lady told the audience. "Well, I've got a few things I want to say for a change."

One of her main targets was the president's bed time.

"I said to him the other day, 'George, if you really want to end tyranny in this world, you're going to have to stay up later,"' Laura Bush said. "Nine o'clock and Mr. Excitement here is in bed, and I am watching 'Desperate Housewives' -- with Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife."

A joke, of course. What else could it possibly be?

A Reminder

I blog on the American Street on Saturdays. Today's topics include G. Gordon Liddy and female orgasms, though pretty obviously not in the same post. Ugh.

On Flannel Knickers and Feminism

The Concerned Women of America is a group of anti-feminists, a little like the Independent Women's Forum except that the latter group would wear G-strings and the Concerned Women long flannel knickers. And the Concerned Women have a male as their spokesperson. Otherwise the two wingnut organizations are pretty much in agreement about what has caused all the problems of this country: feminism. Except when feminism has been totally ignored and ridiculed and proven faulty. But even in those cases all that is wrong in the world (abortions, latchkey children, women with beards, impotent men, messy houses, divorces, the decline of America's military power and so on and on) is the fault of feminism. Though it has also been totally defeated and was ridiculous to begin with.

This short summary may explain why I don't write about these groups' ideas very much. To criticize them I have to chase an idea around a circle, leap over cooked-up evidence and turn around a corner just to find that the idea has morphed into its opposite. And everything they propose is covered with this slippery slime of emotional references to mom and apple-pie and how much better times were when women didn't have the vote.

To be fair to these ladies, it's hard to write an article bashing women while at the same time trying to convince them of how good that bashing is for them. I wouldn't be very good at that sort of thing myself. It reminds me far too much of a black person writing a treatise advocating a return to slavery because weren't those plantations cool places after all? And wasn't it true that there was so much less crime then when the massa took care of us? And no need to work hard! Isn't it really true that the blacks are different from whites, that the black soul pines towards all the benefits of the glorious past?

See how insulting all this is? But we read the Concerned Women's writings without seeing that what they say is roughly the same thing though in a different context.

Now enter Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, a Senior Fellow at the Concerned Women of America. Note how she is a woman with two last names. The horror of it! Note how she is a doctor! And she is employed! Never mind, maybe she is in the process of packing it all in, because this is what she is saying about working women:

Nobody mentioned in the mid-70s that "having it all" would not include marriage and children. Many young women, now that it is too late, are lamenting the cost of careerism and promiscuity as they discover that marriage and children are not likely in their future. So-called sexual freedom, loudly touted by libertines and radical feminists, has brought soaring rates of sexually transmitted diseases and plummeting rates of marriage. Abortion has eliminated 45 million pregnancies and left behind a host of problems: heartbreak, as well as physical and emotional distress.

Millions of women are finding, through bitter experience, that while the wonders of modern communication technology can distract much of the time, at the end of the day –– when the iPod and cellphone sit in their chargers, when the television's relentless barrage is finally silent –– there is no hand to hold and no baby to cuddle.

This is the old conservative monster in the closet: the idea that a woman can't get a man or a baby if she has a job that pays her money. It's something to do with the uterus migrating to the head and turning into lots of facial hair and nervous breakdowns. Of course, in reality women who have jobs or careers also get married and have babies. The wingnuts would prefer that this not be the case, so they massage their statistics to go with their preferences. In reality, there are also women who don't want to get married or at least not to a man, and there are even women who don't want to have babies. All this is now much more possible than it was during the plantation era.

And what is the dear doctor's evidence on the "heartbreak, as well as physical and emotional distress" that the forty-five million abortions she quotes have caused? There is no evidence cited, just her say-so. Abortions can indeed cause physical and emotional distress but so can unintended pregnancies brought to term. So can zillions of other things, such as domestic violence. DV was something quite accepted during the golden pre-feminist times, but Dr. Crouse isn't sorry for the pain and heartbreak of the women who were victims then. No, because feminists can't be blamed for that particular heartbreak it doesn't count.

Our dear Dr. Crouse is approaching the crescendo of her message next. Here it comes:

Today in America, we are beginning to reckon with the bitter harvest from the scourge of self-centered "me-ism." The moral relativism of post-modernism has resulted in a culture that scorns marriage, casually embraces cohabitation, and dismisses divorce; such values have decimated the family for the last 50 years.

Drinking from the springs of a false ideology can steal priceless, irreplaceable elements of life for years before its tragic consequences are evident and its true nature revealed for all to see. For instance, the millions of deaths from Hitler's Nazi horror or in Stalin's Gulags, or the bloody massacres of today's suicidal terrorists, reveal all too clearly the true character and the threat of counterfeit creeds. But for the victims, the exposé comes too late.

Who gave this woman a licence to write? See how somehow the modern woman's dilemma is compared to Nazism, Stalinism and suicide terrorism? Where is the chain of evidence leading us to these horror chambers? It doesn't exist, of course. Women are just supposed to leap from the idea of their own selfishness in wanting to be full persons to the idea of the whole world falling apart.

Dr. Crouse makes the leap with nary a flannel knicker-leg showing. She points out that women are beginning to learn that nature cannot be resisted! We are flocking back to where we belong, finally. Indeed, feminism was all wrong and ridiculous as well. Though it's also like Nazism, Stalinism and Osama bin Laden.

I feel so tired. Do you see now why I don't normally address these wingnut women's writings? But just to round off my vituperous tearing-apart of this rubbish, let me tell you what is wrong with the feminist concern about equal pay for women and men:

Meanwhile, as today's women remake the shape of this next century, crafting out their own life-course and blazing new trails, in the finest tradition of American exploration and creativity, today's feminist groups remain mired in the last century, spinning their wheels over old ground. The feminist's celebration of Equal Pay Day last week is a perfect example. Senator Hillary Clinton strode to the microphones to decry discrimination against women. And the National Organization of (Some) Women issued their same-old tired press release. "Eradicating the current wage gap," it read, "that exists between the sexes is part of NOW's longstanding commitment to women's equality."

The statistical mantra that the feminist groups cite – that women make 76 cents for every male dollar – compares the average full-time working male to the average full-time working woman. Ironically, the NOW materials refuse to recognize the validity of the career choices women make to spend more time with their young children, which differs from most men's choices.

See how something Dr. Crouse can't really argue is skipped over by calling it old-fashioned? It's so old-fashioned to always talk about how women should be treated as full human beings! Why can't those boring feminazis shut up already! The fashion has moved to being a wingnut and a Stepford wife. Who cares about equal pay anymore? Besides, 76 cents is really much cuter than a dollar.

Then to the final argument from Dr. Crouse: the gender gap doesn't matter because it compares full-time workers of both sex! How exactly is this a counterargument? What should we use in calculating the gender gap instead of full-time earners? The gender gap becomes an enormous gaping chasm if we include part-time workers in the calculations because most of them are women.

No, what this Concerned Woman is doing here is Orwellian DoubleThink. Almost the whole article aims at scaring women away from having good jobs in the labor market by explaining how good jobs leave you all alone with your iPod. But this uncomfortable piece of evidence actually points out that the jobs women have are not that good, on average, and the reason is both in discrimination by gender and in the fact that women take more time off for family reasons than men do. So if women actually followed the Crousean urgings of the article the average gender gap would look even worse for women. Hence the totally illogical and pointless ending of the article.

I hate having to analyze crappy writing. Grrr. Hope that some of you actually read my analysis.
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I got the link from Welcome to Gilead. Read her take, too.

A Contest

Kelly the Aussie


This is an extra dogblogging treat for you, because there aren't enough of them in this Friday's blogosphere. Kelly belongs to Helga Fremlin from Down Under. The picture looks perfect for one of those "What is she thinking?" contests.

I think that Kelly is thinking what dumbsnuts we Americans are for agreeing to let George Bush pee on us.

Friday Embroidery Blogging

Snakelet


This is a tiny embroidery. I might start using it as an icon for this blog. I think of it as the tiny snake who could!

Bush's Popularity

The Salon has a long article about Bush's unpopularity. It even asks the question whether Bush will pull the Republican party down with him. It asserts that the average American doesn't like Bush's far-right ideas at all, and that even some Republicans are beginning to oppose him now that the polls seem to give them license to do so.

The article is an interesting read, although I'd argue that Bush has always been hugely unpopular with a sizeable number of Americans. You should supplement reading it with Billmon's brilliant book review on Shadia Drury's book Leo Strauss and the American Right, about the Straussian ideology that fuels the neoconservatives, to see why the administration cares nothing for poll outcomes or for the thoughts of some average American. I read that book some years ago and it truly opened my political eyes. Before this reading experience I was like a cute kitten gamboling around blind. Afterwards...Well, you know what happened.

The Republican party today governs with two ideas: One, there is a knowing elite which cynically manipulates the rest of us by feeding us "morals" and "old-time religion". Two, this knowing elite uses the populist value of social conservatism to capture enough rabid voting groups (such as the fundamentalists) to stay in power. I would add to these two my own suspicion that our current president migh as well be called president Diebold. In other words, votes are determined by the one who counts them, not by the ones who vote. But then of course I have been covered in tin foil for years, so pretend that you didn't read these last few lines. Even pretend that I haven't given you umpteen statistical studies which prove that the impossible took place in last November's elections. It's more comfortable that way, to pretend.

Billmon points out what Drury emphasizes in her treatise: that the Straussian philosophy has a strong Feudalist flavor. The whole world must be arranged into rigid hierarchies, with the top layers consisting of the haves who are really atheistic and cynical and manipulative, and the bottom layers of the have-nots who are fed the milk of piety and the soft porn at the same time. For someone with these values polls are naturally meaningless; with only the value that they tell what to manipulate next in the system. What the masses might actually think is unimportant.

Even Bush himself is unimportant. He is a front man, picked for his old-boy mannerisms, his wealth and his connections. The true power is in someone else's hands, and this someone else doesn't care if Bush falls. There will always be some other "old boy" puppet with Karen Hughes and Karl Rove behind the curtain directing the show. Thus, my answer to the question the Salon article posed is that the Republican party will not go down with Bush, not if everything goes along the Straussian plans.

But as I've pointed out many times on this here blog, riding tigers is an uncomfortable leisure occupation. It's hard to get off the saddle, for one thing. And the fundamentalist wingnuts do resemble tigers, they are large and fierce and hungry for some non-Christian blood, and recently they have started rearing on their hind legs and turning their giant slobbering mouths backwards towards the cynical elitist riders. If they don't get some raw meat soon the riders may be in trouble.

The Straussians know this, surely. But whether they are too cocky to prepare adequately is unclear. I'm ready for almost anything, right now, though I predict that first our invisible leaders will try to starve the tigers a little longer, at least until the next elections. Whether the tigers will go along with that is not at all guaranteed.

Towards Gilead, Chapter 2309.76

Jdt told me about this post on First Draft. It links to a Denver Post article with some mind-boggling things in it:

Imagine two rape victims taken to the same hospital emergency room. Imagine them put in adjoining examination rooms.

Let's say they have identical injuries.

Presume everything about them is the same except for where they are in their menstrual cycles.

Do they deserve access to the same medical treatment?

At most Catholic hospitals in Colorado, they can't get it.

The protocol of six Catholic hospitals run by Centura calls for rape victims to undergo an ovulation test.

If they have not ovulated, said Centura corporate spokeswoman Dana Berry, doctors tell the victims about emergency contraception and write prescriptions for it if the patient asks.

If, however, the urine test suggests that a rape victim has ovulated, Berry continued, doctors at Centura's Catholic hospitals are not to mention emergency contraception. That means the victim can end up pregnant by her rapist.

It's very much like testing for bacterial pneumonia in a patient and prescribing antibiotics only if the patient doesn't have the disease yet! Those that test positive can just go and suffer. It makes no medical sense.

On the other hand, pope Ratzo would probably argue that it makes excellent doctrinal sense. The potential life of a rapist's child takes precedence over some woman who has merely been mauled and impregnated against her will. You know, "every sperm is sacred".

But it really is stupid. And it is two-faced: the hospitals are pretending that they go along with the recommendation of telling patients about emergency contraception when all the time they hide this information from those rape victims who need it most.

Speaking Bush

"Bush" is my shorthand term for the language that our president uses. It takes some translating and decoding into plain English. We got another load of Bush tonight when the president gave what one news source called "one of his rare prime time news conferences". They are rare for a very good reason, and that is to save all of us the torture of listening to a full hour of Bush. My head swims.


A nice make-up job, isn't it?


Bush spent the time selling two of his projects: the energy bill and the idea that Social Security needs to be all changed around. On the energy bill he forgot to mention that most of it consists of big paybacks to his faithful donors in the energy industry. On the proposal to change Social Security he decided to appropriate a Democratic proposal which would let the retirement incomes of the poorest rise faster than those of the other earners:

Bush said a system in which benefits for low-income workers "grow faster than for people who are better off would solve much of the solvency problem" facing the government retirement program.

"I propose that future generations receive benefits equal to or greater than the benefits today's seniors get," he said. But a White House fact sheet suggested changes that include lower benefits than currently planned for all but lower-income future retirees.

Everything that was wrong with these projects is still wrong after Bush's news conference. For example, he exaggerated the problems in the Social Security system by giving statements like this one:

And to compound the problem, there are fewer people paying into the system. In 1950, there were 16 workers for every beneficiary; today there are 3.3 workers for every beneficiary. Soon there will be two workers for every beneficiary.

Indeed, but worker productivity has risen so much that the real burdens on workers don't correspond to the numbers given here.

He also refused to consider making payroll taxes payable on incomes above the current annual 90,000 dollar limit; the rich must be protected. But not the middle classes: the progressive indexation proposal would give them lower rates of return than the ones from the current system.

Then he went on to say this:

In a reformed Social System, voluntary personal retirement accounts would offer workers a number of investment options that are simple and easy to understand. I know some Americans have reservations about investing in the stock market, so I propose that one investment option consist entirely of treasury bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.

Remember that only a few weeks ago he argued these bonds to be worthless pieces of paper, held in a filing cabinet somewhere in Virginia? Which is it?

Most of the other things the president said in Bush were either already known or waffle-waffle. Though it is interesting that he seemed to make faces at the religious right:

Bush disagreed with the contention of the conservative Family Research Council that his judicial appointments were being held up in the Senate because of their religious faith. "I think people are opposing my nominees because they don't like the judicial philosophy of the people I've nominated," he said.

This was either a lapse on his parts or an indication that he has no need to pander to them now that he won't need their votes.

Bobo's World

The title refers to a series of posts* on Eschaton about what the New York Times wingnut columnist David Brooks calls the mainstream America: the fundamentalists and people with "family values" in general. "Bobo" is Atrios's affectionate term for Brooks.

This series shows the nasty underside of the fundie America. Now a new blog with the same name, Bobo's World, has taken up the task of following the more unsavory aspects of Brooks' family values people. Which pissed me off as I have been gathering these snippets myself for later condension into a gigantic blogosphere expose! Alas, it will not be now. Hence, I might as well show you what I have collected so far, in a time span of only about a month.

First, there was the case of Douglas B. Smith:

Boy Scouts of America's National Director of Programs Douglas B. Smith will appear in a Dallas courtroom tomorrow to face charges of distributing child pornography, according to reports by NBC News.

Then this little bit:

An Allen Superior Court judge denied a sentence reduction request by a 34-year-old man convicted of having sex with a teenager whom he mentored through church and who had baby-sit his children.
...
A jury convicted him last year of having sex with a 14-year-old girl between June and August 2000 while he was a volunteer minister at a Fort Wayne church. He knew the girl's family and mentored her in church activities.

And then:

A former East Texas principal was convicted of sexually assaulting seven girls and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A jury on Thursday sentenced Russell Thomas Hirner, 43, after deliberating for about four hours. He was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child earlier in the day.

"I accept responsibility," Hirner, the former principal of the Longview Baptist Christian Academy, testified. "I couldn't bring myself to tell and I vowed to God that after it came out I'd make a disclosure."

And finally, today:

A self-described Internet evangelist who has preached about everything from morality to spirituality on his family's Web site was arrested Wednesday and charged with raping a child younger than 12.

Charles Michael Balfe, 60, was picked up at his job site at 84 Lumber in DeLand, DeLand Police Cmdr. Randel Henderson said. He is being held at the Volusia County Branch Jail without bail.

Balfe, married and the father of three, is accused in three warrants of raping a child younger than 12, Henderson said. The remaining counts accuse him of sexual battery, lewd and lascivious molestation and domestic violence.

And I didn't even make any special efforts to dig these cases up! They are probably just the tip of the iceberg. It would be useful and interesting to do a proper study about any relationship between strongly expressed fundamentalist beliefs and various types of sexual abuse. Note that I'm not arguing that only wingnuts commit these acts or even that they would be unusually likely to commit them (though that could be the case, of course). But it seems very odd that the people who are most vociferous about family values and the horrible lewdness of the liberals and progressives crop up so frequently in these kinds of news. And I have not seen Bobo write anything about this trend, no explanation, no clarification, no ethical condemnation. Hmmm.
----
*As Raznor points out in the comments, it is also the name of a book by David Brooks.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action Comes from Act for Change:

Whether you have taken action once, twice or many times before, it's crucial that you take action again TODAY to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.

The special interests that desperately want to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have now included language in the Federal budget that would allow for drilling. Both versions of the budget are in conference committee to be reconciled, providing us with our last chance to get the drilling provision removed.

Steps 1 & 2
Call each of your senators via the congressional switchboard at 202/224-3121 and urge them to vote against any budget conference report that includes reconciliation instructions that could lead to Arctic Refuge oil drilling.



Step 3
Next, call your representative via the congressional switchboard at 202/225-3121 and urge them to vote against any budget conference report that includes reconciliation instructions that could lead to Arctic Refuge oil drilling.



Step 4
Finally, send an e-mail to your senators and representative asking them to oppose any and all efforts to open any part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration and drilling by oil and gas interests.



Thanks for taking today's action.

Appropriate...

The wingnut war against privacy rights and the separation of state and church is hard to laugh at. We are slouching towards Gilead day by day. But sometimes laughing is the only alternative. That's why I'm putting here the immortal words of Monty Python:


Every Sperm Is Sacred Lyrics
Artist: Monty Python
Album: The Meaning Of Life



DAD:
There are Jews in the world.
There are Buddhists.
There are Hindus and Mormons, and then
There are those that follow Mohammed, but
I've never been one of them.

I'm a Roman Catholic,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:
They'll take you as soon as you're warm.

You don't have to be a six-footer.
You don't have to have a great brain.
You don't have to have any clothes on. You're
A Catholic the moment Dad came,

Because

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

CHILDREN:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.




GIRL:
Let the heathen spill theirs
On the dusty ground.
God shall make them pay for
Each sperm that can't be found.

CHILDREN:
Every sperm is wanted.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.

MUM:
Hindu, Taoist, Mormon,
Spill theirs just anywhere,
But God loves those who treat their
Semen with more care.

MEN:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
WOMEN:
If a sperm is wasted,...
CHILDREN:
...God get quite irate.

PRIEST:
Every sperm is sacred.
BRIDE and GROOM:
Every sperm is good.
NANNIES:
Every sperm is needed...
CARDINALS:
...In your neighbourhood!

CHILDREN:
Every sperm is useful.
Every sperm is fine.
FUNERAL CORTEGE:
God needs everybody's.
MOURNER #1:
Mine!
MOURNER #2:
And mine!
CORPSE:
And mine!

NUN:
Let the Pagan spill theirs
O'er mountain, hill, and plain.
HOLY STATUES:
God shall strike them down for
Each sperm that's spilt in vain.

EVERYONE:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite iraaaaaate!


Not that I'm aiming anything at the Catholics (though pope Ratzo is another thing altogether). The whole thing just seems to go so well with today's extreme clerical wingnuttery. Now I hope that you will keep humming this at all sorts of inappropriate moments...