Listen to Bill Moyers

He has written a deeply feeling article on the current state of the American politics, on the Rapture gang, and on the impact of all this on the environment. The conclusion he comes to is stark and scarey: A large number of Americans don't care about warfare or about the slow dying of the trees and the animals because they believe that all this will help to expedite the end of the world, the Rapture, and that God sees this all and finds it pleasing.

More frighteningly still, this is the part of America that is in power. We are ruled by Talibanish values by people who have interpreted the last U.S. election results as support and approval of policies that include attacking one country after another and letting the nature slowly wither away.

Moyers is appealing to the one emotion that might work to counteract the rapturous mindset: our love for our children and grandchildren. Will this be enough? If a grandfather believes that he will Raptured up into the heavens when the mercury poisoning takes over his grandchildren, will he care? If a mother sees the war in Iraq as a step towards Heaven, will she care that it is someone's children that are killed in this war?

I so hope that Moyers is overly pessimistic in his piece. So does he.

The Freedom Loving Young Americans

U.S. teenagers appear not to care about the First Amendment. A study analyzing their opinions showed that:

The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

Other findings of the study suggest that the teachers are more willing to allow others to express unpopular views (97%) than their students are (83%), and that many students don't know what the Bill of Rights guarantees.

The reaction to these findings has been moaning and whining about the indifference of students and about the lack of teaching on these issues in schools. Yes, all that is necessary and important to do, but I wonder what earlier studies would have shown about the students of earlier generations. Were the teenagers of the 1980's and 1990's any better informed or any more passionate?

I don't know the answer to this, but I suspect that the vast majority of teenagers has always been fairly uninformed and fairly uninterested in anything that doesn't affect their personal lives very directly. It's always the minorities who start change and initiate revolutions, and the real question is whether today's active and informed minorities are smaller than those in the past.
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The study covered more than 100,000 students and was carried out early in 2004.

Vacation...

I haven't had one for over a year. So I'm having one now, starting tomorrow morning and lasting for one week. My blogging will be reduced from its usual levels, though I won't stop altogether. Time to recharge the batteries and all that. Americans take far too few vacations. Maybe that's why we are so belligerent? My vacation will be a nice study on that!

Check out my blogroll if you need to have a bigger fix than this blog will provide.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action:

She's not always on the side of justice and light, but Maria Cantwell has been consistently one of the strongest voices in the Senate on the issue of energy market manipulation of the sort that rocked California and Washington State. She's introduced a bill -- S.22, Electricity Needs Rules and Oversight Now (ENRON) -- that will amend the Federal Power Act to broaden prohibitions on so-called "round trip" trades. Round Tripping was one of the schemes that Enron used to jack up prices. Cantwell recently explained that schemes such as Round Tripping cost the West an estimated $35 billion in domestic economic product and a loss of 589,000 jobs.

Write a letter to the editor of your newpaper and explain that this country doesn't need any more Enrons. No energy traders should be allowed to engage in Round Tripping or other schemes designed just to jack up the price of an essential service such as electricity. S.22 ought to be passed this session.

Thanks for taking today's action.

More on the Iraq Elections

I am no expert on this topic, so I wish to draw your attention to someone who is: Juan Cole. He has a good post on the meaning of these elections in terms of the politics of tomorrow. He also links to a study by Zogby which showed that

The survey, to be released at 5 p.m. ET on Abu Dhabi Television, found three-quarters (76%) of Sunni Arabs say they definitely will not vote in the January 30 elections, while just 9% say they are likely to vote. A majority of Shiites (80%) say they are likely to vote or definitely will vote, as are a smaller majority of Kurds (57%).

Majorities of both Sunni Arabs (82%) and Shiites (69%) also favor U.S. forces withdrawing either immediately or after an elected government is in place.

The poll also found that of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups, only the Kurds believe the U.S. will "help" Iraq over the next five years, while half (49%) of Shiites and a majority (64%) of Sunni Arabs believe the U.S. will "hurt" Iraq.

The election was in the nature of a referendum on various parties as individual candidates' names were not known to the voters beforehand (and in some cases the candidates themselves had not known that they were on a list). It's hard to see what the voters were voting for, exactly. Maybe it was just for the idea of voting?

I'm glad and relieved that casualties were kept to a minimum, and I'm happy for the Iraqis who could vote for the first time in decades. But the meaning of this election will not be clear for some time. The day of voting is not all there is to democracy, and most of the real tests lie ahead. To be quite honest, I'm not more optimistic than I was before the elections. Although maybe Bush can now withdraw the troops honorably, pretending that everything has been fixed. That would be something to cheer about.

Open Thread?

I'm cleaning house today. Dustclouds in the horizon and lots of snakes hiding in the closets. The dogs are not allowed to shake for a day because no more dog hairs are allowed.

I'm going to have an important visitor and the house must be spotless. So I won't have time to blog right now. Besides, I need cleaning advice and recipes and general whining about the state of the world and anything else you might want to contribute.

In other words, this is an open thread. Yes, I know that I'm not a big blog with good reasons for open threads, but I'm having one anyway.

Voting in Iraq

This is not a proper analysis of the Iraqi elections or whether anybody voted today or what the insurgents have accomplished in blood and suffering. That must wait until later. For now, my feminist side is ascendant and immediately noticed this interesting aspect of Iraqi democracy in action:

Al-Yawer was among the first to cast his ballot, voting alongside his wife at election headquarters in the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad. As poll workers watched, he marked two ballots and dropped them into boxes, and then walked away with an Iraqi flag given to him by a poll worker.

''I'm very proud and happy this morning,'' al-Yawer told reporters. ''I congratulate all the Iraqi people and call them to vote for Iraq.''

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A Postscript: The link I give above now leads you to a different article than the one from which I took the quote. However, if you put my quote into Google and Google the news you get the link I gave you. Does this mean that the article was changed? I don't know. I was unable to find another link to the original article, though the second paragraph of the above quote was also used here.

A Second Postscript: Jay Sundahl in the comments points out that I may have misread this piece. There are two ballots, so Mr. al-Yawer may have been just filling his own two ballots. If so, I'm very glad. It's very good sometimes to be mistaken, if the reality is better than what one thought.

My First Job for the Administration

I'm trying to find a way to share in all this loot that the administration gives to journalists who are willing to spout their messages. Granted, I'm only a humble blogger, but there seems to be lots of money available and every little bit helps. So how about it, administration?

I present, for your consideration, Echidne's song about family planning:


Condoms fail you;
Diaphragms slip.
Jellies stain you;
And coils can nip.

Withdrawal's willful;
Flesh is weak.
The pill is sinful;
You might as well breed.

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With sincere apologies to Dorothy Parker.

Talon News and Jeff Gannon

This may be the age of conservative journalists being in trouble. Not only are Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus all a little bit in trouble right now, but Media Matters for America has a series of articles on Jeff Gannon, the Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent of Talon News. Talon News is a wingnut media corporation. According to Media Matters, Gannon is well known for asking loaded pro-Republican questions at White House press briefings. Like these:

"McClellan: I think we've been through this issue. [Nod to Gannon] Go ahead.

"Gannon: Scott, when you talk about the unemployment -- or the jobs being created, is that based on the payroll survey, or the household survey? Because there's -- because of the tax cuts, there's been a tremendous increase in the number of entrepreneurs that have started their own businesses, and those numbers aren't reflected in the payroll survey.

"McClellan: That's correct, yes. The household survey is different from the payroll survey. And the household survey showed that some -- an increase of 496,000 jobs in January alone. So there are different numbers that you're talking about there. And we can look at both. But, again, you're getting into -- you're getting into the numbers here. The numbers that the President is interested in is the actual numbers of jobs being created and the policies that we are taking to create an even more robust environment for job creation."

In his March 10, 2004, column, Froomkin indicated that Gannon has served as a useful lifeline for McClellan amid hostile questioning from less compliant reporters:

But he [Gannon] does keep lobbing those softballs. Sometimes he even brings props. And press secretary McClellan seems to appreciate it.

Yesterday, for instance, McClellan was getting hammered with questions about the 9/11 commission and the possible inappropriate juxtaposition of a visit to a 9/11 memorial with a fundraiser on Thursday.

It was getting ugly. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response," McClellan said in response to a jibe. (See the full text of the briefing.)

Then he saw daylight:

"Go ahead, Jeff."

Gannon: "Thank you. First of all, I hope the grand jury didn't force you to turn over the wedding card I sent to you and your wife. (Laughter.) Do you see any hypocrisy in the controversy about the President's mention of 9/11 in his ads, when Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign issued this button, that says, 'Remember Pearl Harbor'? I have a visual aid for folks watching at home."

McClellan: "You're pointing out some historical facts. Obviously, Pearl Harbor was a defining moment back in the period of World War II, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was strongly committed to winning World War II and talked about it frequently."

Gannon: "So you think it certainly is valid that the President does talk about it and --"

McClellan: "Yes, he addressed this this weekend, when he was first asked about it. September 11th was a defining moment for our nation. We all shared in that experience. And it's important that we look at how we lead in a post-September 11th world. And that's an important discussion to have with the American people, and to talk about the differences in approaches to winning the war on terrorism and preventing attacks from happening in the first place."

It's nice to have such a supporting reporter in these troublesome press briefings, isn't it? Gannon likes the White House point of view on issues so well that he has used the RNC talking points extensively in his own writing, word by word, it appears, in some cases.

Thus, it's not surprising that Media Matters for America asks why Talon News has press credentials, especially as they appear to employ very few journalists. It might be equally engaging to ask how one gets to become the Washington bureau chief of a newspaper that has White House credentials. Gannon gives the following biographical information:

Jeff is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University System and holds a Bachelor of Science in Education. He is also a graduate of the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism.

I had never heard of the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism. This is what the Leadership Institute website says about the program:

The Broadcast Journalism School is a one-stop, full-service seminar for conservatives who want a career in journalism. You'll learn information you won't receive anywhere else and get personalized advice from our expert faculty:

* Learn how to find good internships and make the most of them
* Gain networking skills to help you land your job and increase your effectiveness
* Develop a top-notch resume and learn how to make yourself stand out in an interview
* Learn a proven, step-by-step job hunting strategy and much more

An intense two-day seminar, the Broadcast Journalism School is designed to give aspiring journalists the skills necessary to bring balance to the media and succeed in this highly competitive field.

For $50, you'll receive two days of instruction, meals on Saturday and Sunday and all course materials. Limited free housing is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Let me see if I got this right: One becomes the Washington bureau chief of a newspaper that has White House press credentials by taking an intense two-day seminar in journalism? And it costs all of fifty dollars?

Maggie Gallagher, the Goddess of Marriage

Maggie Gallagher is beginning to remind me of Hera, the Goddess of Marriage, the Divine Upholder of the Mrs. Degree and all that. In reality, Hera was always sneaking away to have all sorts of children with fathers whose name was not Zeus.

For those who have not followed the news recently, Maggie Gallagher is a marriage expert of the conservative type: only traditional heterosexual marriages with the mother preferably at home full time are good ones, and anything else is a threat to the Western civilization, the military power of the United States and God. She has the right to say all this, of course, just as I have the right to denounce her for saying it. But Maggie has done a little bit more than that: she has taken money from the Bush administration (but only a humble wifely sum) to help them with their program of getting the poor married, and then she has stayed mum about having done so in her wingnut columns and other writings.

Maggie's message is a strong one. Here she is offering expert witness testimony to the government:

I am here today as an expert on marriage. I have devoted most of the last fifteen years to research and public education on the marriage issue, particularly the problem of family fragmentation: the growing proportion of our children in fatherless homes, created through divorce or unmarried childbearing.

Marriage is a key social institution, but it is also a fragile institution: with half or more of our children experiencing the suffering, poverty and deprivation of fatherlessness and fragmented families. This is a crisis that was of course not created by advocates of same-sex marriage. But the marriage crisis is intimately involved with how committed we as a society are to two key ideas: that children need mothers and fathers, and that marriage is the main way that we create stable, loving mother-father families for children

Take careful notes: Maggie had been working for this good cause for at least fifteen years at the time of these hearings, and she is adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage and single mothers. Ok. Are you ready? Here's more of Maggie's opinions on marriage:

Our better tradition, and the only one consistent with democratic principles, is to hold up a single ideal for all parents, which is ultimately based on our deep cultural commitment to the equal dignity and social worth of all children. All kids need and deserve a married mom and dad. All parents are supposed to at least try to behave in ways that will give their own children this important protection. Privately, religiously, emotionally, individually, marriage may have many meanings. But this is the core of its public, shared meaning: Marriage is the place where having children is not only tolerated but welcomed and encouraged, because it gives children mothers and fathers.

Of course, many couples fail to live up to this ideal. Many of the things men and women have to do to sustain their own marriages, and a culture of marriage, are hard. Few people will do them consistently if the larger culture does not affirm the critical importance of marriage as a social institution. Why stick out a frustrating relationship, turn down a tempting new love, abstain from sex outside marriage, or even take pains not to conceive children out of wedlock if family structure does not matter? If marriage is not a shared norm, and if successful marriage is not socially valued, do not expect it to survive as the generally accepted context for raising children. If marriage is just a way of publicly celebrating private love, then there is no need to encourage couples to stick it out for the sake of the children. If family structure does not matter, why have marriage laws at all? Do adults, or do they not, have a basic obligation to control their desires so that children can have mothers and fathers?

Got it? Especially the last line about adults having a basic obligation to control their desires so that children can have mothers and fathers? Good.

Now, here's the thing. Maggie was a single mother for over ten years before she found the haven of a good husband. Evidence? Here it is, thanks to Vulture:

I was twenty-two and unmarried when my son was born, just a few months after I had graduated from Yale University

And also courtesy of Vulture:

It has nothing to do with marriage," Gallagher pipes up. "I was a single mother for 10 years. You're pretty conscious about trying to make a decent living and take care of your kids. This is not time for gabbing about."

Maggie Gallagher has been a wingnut marriage expert for about twenty years, and half of that time she was a single mother, one of those threatening the fragile institution of marriage and all things good for children. This is two-faced, to say the least.

I am uncomfortable blogging about Maggie's private life, or the private lives of anyone but myself. This case, though, is an exception to the general rule of avoiding such topics. For Maggie keeps lecturing us how to control our basic desires and then she appears to have been unable to do that herself. She's also not very forthcoming about this schism in her writings. This is a worse ethics violation than anything I'm saying here.

The wingnut argument on Maggie's behalf would probably be that she has Seen The Light and that She Knows What She Talks About. That's what is used to justify George Bush's youthful adventures, too. But the light must have been dim indeed if it took Maggie ten years to find a way out of her "mistake". No, she's just two-faced.
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See also this earlier post by Digby on the same topic.

Wingnuttia on Campuses

University campuses are known hotbeds of communism and feminism and other frightening movements that threaten the Murkan Freedom. Everybody knows this. And wise women such as Ann Coulter warn us about the danger of leaving this situation unattended:

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Committee's 2002 annual conference in Washington D.C. where presenters included William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Katherine Harris, Chris Mathews, Condoleeza Rice and Tommy Thompson, Coulter said:

"In contemplating college liberals, you really regret, once again, that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too. Otherwise they will turn out into out right traitors."

"On the bright side, and in conclusion," continued Coulter, "at least college campuses serve as sort of an internment camp for useless leftists in wartime. We know where they are, this way. And, as General Patton said, 'I love it when they come out and shoot at me because then I know where they are and I can shoot the bastards.'"

Coulter is so tiring, but she's not alone in the fear and hatred of campus liberals. You might assume that a country where the Republicans already control most everything wouldn't have to worry about the dangers of a few lonely liberals in academic internment camps.

You would be wrong. The wingnuts are very worried about this tiny, unimportant fringe group (yes, you can have it both ways), and they spend large amounts of money on counterpropaganda specifically aimed at university students:

The three largest conservative campus organizations are the innocuous-sounding Young America's Foundation (YAF), Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and the Leadership Institute which spent approximately $25 million on various campus outreach programs in 2004.

Others include the Ward Connerly-led American Civil Rights Institute, Madison Center for Educational Affairs and the David Horowitz-led Students for Academic Freedom.

According to People for the American Way, a progressive organization exposing the right, the "...right-wing foundations are aware that they must not only control contemporary public debate, but also foster the next generation of conservative scholars, journalists, government employees, legislators and activists."

Conservative foundations "...and others funnel millions of dollars into conservative university programs, university chairs, lecture circuits and right-wing student publications and promote conservative research in the media to legitimize their positions," (www.pfaw.org).

Over the past 30 years, the organized right-wing has built a nation-wide campus network with scores of right-wing intelligentsia and over a dozen conservative student-focused think tanks that now spend over $40 million annually.

In contrast the Sierra Student Coalition, the student-led organization of the Sierra Club, services a network of 150 campus chapters with a staff of three and a budget of $350,000, one of the largest budgets of independent progressive campus organizations.

In 2004 YAF subsidized over 200 campus lectures by well-known right-wing speakers largely through the right-wing National Association of Scholar's chapters on various campuses. YAF, according to its website, was founded to combat affirmative action, feminism, communism and Marxism and also to "counter-balance 'New Left and Communist influence on campuses." YAF provides assistance to students and their organizations by providing guest speakers, organizing and training seminars, networking opportunities, promotional merchandise and other resources.

In 1998 YAF purchased the "Western White House" otherwise known as former U.S. president's Ronald Reagan's California vacation ranch where conferences, retreats and other activities are held in an effort to recruit and groom the next generation of young conservatives. Its National Journalism Center maintains a job bank for college graduates and program alumni who increasingly employed in "mainstream" media corporations. YAF has received over $1.6 million from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, John M. Olin, Sarah Scaife Foundations according to www.Mediatransparency.org, a progressive website clearinghouse that tracks right-wing funding.

ISI spent about $1 million subsidizing a network of over 80 right-wing campus newspapers in 2004 and over $9 million for book publishing and periodicals for college conservatives. The ISI has received over $16 million since 1985 from conservative foundations. The Collegiate Network founded by Reagan's treasury secretary William Simon and Irving Kristol, before recently merging with the ISI, received over $4.3 million from conservative foundations.

The ISI's most well-known graduate is Dinesh D'Souza, former editor of the Dartmouth Review, and a current "fellow" at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. In his 1995 book "The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society," D'Souza claimed that segregation was designed to, "...to assure that [Blacks], like the handicapped, would be...permitted to perform to the capacity of their arrested development." (The Feeding Through: The Bradley Foundation, "The Bell Curve," & the Real Story Behind W-2).

The Leadership Institute's goal is to foster conservatism on campuses and through workshops and other means to train young conservative "journalists." The institute has received over $1.6 million since 1986 from the Richard and Helen DeVos (Amway), the Bradley Foundation and others.

And how much do the feminist organizations that work on campuses get? Largely pencils and mugs, I suppose. And I know that they don't have the money to give.

The main difference between the Wingnuttia organizations and the rest appears to be that the Wingnuttians operate from the top down (in fact, they seldom seem to have much of a base) and pour money down the funnel to a few preselected individuals, whereas the progressives and liberals operate mainly on the grassroots level (or pencil-and-paper level) and appear to have very little money coming from the top, if there is a top interested in the campuses at all. This does not bode well for the future of liberal voices on campuses, unless the parent organizations learn their lessons and offer some support for the impending fights against radical conservatism.

Whether money alone can win minds isn't clear, but I would prefer not to have to wait for the next attack by the Independent Women's Forum (very well funded by the Scaife Foundation and not independent at all) on feminism just to find out.

Dress Codes

Dick Cheney was our representative in the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one of the most infamous Nazi concentration camps. You can see that he was given a seat in the front row as is appropriate.


You can also see that Dick was dressed to hit the slopes, or, as Washington Post says:

At yesterday's gathering of world leaders in southern Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the United States was represented by Vice President Cheney. The ceremony at the Nazi death camp was outdoors, so those in attendance, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were wearing dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots. Because it was cold and snowing, they were also wearing gentlemen's hats. In short, they were dressed for the inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity of the event.

The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.

Dick knows how to dress for such events. He wasn't wearing a parka and a beanie for George Bush's coronation last week, and it was pretty cold in Washington, D.C., too.

This is an example of implicit dress codes and how they can be broken. The idea is not very different from how one might dress to a funeral, say: with respect and so that one doesn't stand out in the crowd. Or with respect and so that one doesn't remind other participants of their last experiences on the skislopes or the need to shovel their front yards. The exceptions to such codes apply to people who are too poor to have several outer garments to choose from, but Dick is pretty well stocked in comparison to most of the participants, and they all managed to find something dark and unnoticeable.

Is this all quite trivial and unworthy of comments here? Perhaps, but I felt like commenting on it, and it's not trivial that many Europeans will interpret Cheney's outfit as yet another example of American exceptionality or of American obliviousness. Though the Washington Post writer is wrong in arguing that Cheney would have been cold in proper clothing. Long underwear was invented for a very good reason.

Today's Action Alert

Action of the Day

Today's action is courtesy of the League of Conservation Voters. It's simple, too.

Go to http://www.bushpollution.com/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=124&track=lcvhome

and send a letter telling Bush not to ruin our environment.

Thanks for taking today's action.

A Bit More on Michael McManus

He is indeed a religious man. According to Amazon, his book, Marriage Savers, is

...filled with concrete, biblical advice for those serious about saving marriage.

Elsewhere, McManus takes the conservative churches to task for not being adequately disapproving of cohabitation before marriage:

Truth is, a woman gains nothing" by cohabitating before marriage, said journalist Michael McManus, author of "Marriage Savers: Helping Your Friends and Family Stay Married." Whatever their rationalizations, these women "are just being fools. ... Too many women today are allowing themselves to be used as playmates," he said.

Some church leaders, said McManus, have fallen silent on this issue because they no longer believe that sex outside of marriage is sin. Their silence is understandable. It is harder to understand the silence in so many congregations -- Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox -- that still affirm centuries of Judeo-Christian teachings on sexual morality.

And even:

"Our church will not knowingly marry anyone who is living together," says Michael McManus, a syndicated columnist who heads the Marriage Savers group.

That seems backwards. If cohabiting is so dangerous and sinful, why force the couple to continue doing it? I'm glad to know that Mr. McManus has been helping the government to figure all this out.

And Then There Were Three...

That is intended to be a reference to a detective story by Agatha Christie and also a reference to the third journalist that has been paid by the Bush administration for their "expertise":

One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged. Salon has confirmed that Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, "Ethics & Religion," appears in 50 newspapers, was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and Human Services to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed.

It's the disclosing bit that is of concern here. McManus supposedly got his ten thousand dollars for work done in the government's pro-marriage programs, not for spouting the administration's propaganda in his column. His case is similar to that of Maggie Gallagher, though he scored even less money.

As I mentioned before, what is really worrisome about these two hires is that they are not impartial scientist employed for the improvement of the government's plans but partisan debaters on the issues. The Salon article says as much:

The problem springs from the failure of both Gallagher and McManus to disclose their government payments when writing about the Bush proposals. But one HHS critic says another dynamic has led to the controversy, and a blurring of ethical and journalistic lines: Horn and HHS are hiring advocates -- not scholars -- from the pro-marriage movement. "They're ideological sympathizers who propagandize," says Tim Casey, attorney for Legal Momentum, a women's rights organization. He describes McManus as being a member of the "extreme religious right."

Now, I wonder who will be number four?
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Original link via Eschaton.

Just To Frighten You!

By showing you a photograph of the most powerful man in the world.

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From Drudgereport.

Unrelated Musings

Time to blog on something not based on links and events that crop up on the day's radar. Time to smell the snow, so to speak.

I'm still pretty much snowed in and it's great fun. I have dug tunnels through the back yard for the dogs to race in, with little cul-de-sacs for toilet needs. The squirrels have their own little path shoveled from the trees to the remains of my gingerbread castle. It should be enough to keep them alive until the thaw.

That's pretty much the nice news about me. The rest of the time I stomp around furious at one thing or another, especially at politics. It's hard to discuss politics when people in fact don't have a shared language at all. Your idea of "democracy" may be very different from mine, your view of "majority" may have nothing to do with the actual numerical majority and so on.

One example of this is in the use of the word "government". As a crude oversimplification, Americans mean something very different from Europeans when they use this word. For many Americans, the government is a potentially tyrannic meanie that is after the hard-earned money of the tax-payers and has no real reason for existing in the first place. For many Europeans, at least those from the so-called old Europe, the government may be something viewed with a bit of sceptism but it's not seen as inherently different from other organizations human beings create. If governments are not to be wholly trusted, neither are large firms or large churches and so on.

This is all linked to the meaning of the word "freedom", and this is surely the one word where definitions vary all over the place. Who knows what George Bush has in mind when he talks about freedom? He appears to believe that the god of the Methodists has given it to all the people on this earth, but he has never given a Biblical reference to this promise, nor has he ever explained what he means by freedom. I suspect that he's talking about the freedom of corporations from laws and regulations, not really about the freedom of individuals from exploitation by corporations. His actions support this view more than any other view.

The plot is naturally to make the listener equate Bush's use of the word freedom with whatever the listener might deem as desirable in this respect. Then we all hear what we wish to hear and Bush goes on doing whatever he wants to do. Too bad that nobody really knows what we are talking about here.

The extreme state of freedom is anarchy, not some earthly paradise. Our freedoms are by necessity reined in by the harm we can do others. Real political solutions always require compromises between rights and obligations and between freedoms and laws. But this is all nuanced and lefty and not interesting enough for political debates.

How did I end up so preachery? Well, this is my bully pulpit, after all.

On Domestic Violence and Muslims in Holland

An article well worth reading on honor killings in Holland is this one. It begins:

--With Dutch Muslim extremists threatening her life, Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali dove into hiding last November.

Days earlier, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been ritually slaughtered in Amsterdam by extremists angered by his film, "Submission," about the abuse of Muslim women. Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film, the killer declared, would be next.

Now, two months later, she has returned to work, resuming her role as a beacon of hope for thousands of Dutch Muslim women. For in the shadows of the famously tolerant and peaceful Netherlands has long lurked a secret it took Hirsi Ali's courage to lay bare: Honor killings.

Because these killings long were kept hidden and unspoken in the Muslim community, the actual number of such murders that occur in Holland every year is unknown, though Hirsi Ali believes it could be as many as 50, possibly more. While Muslims account for less than 6 percent of the Dutch population, Muslim women are 60 percent of those in battered women's shelters. The government was reluctant to talk about the situation, Hirsi Ali says, because they believed tolerance required respecting different cultures and traditions.

Things are not quite as uncomplicated as they might seem from these beginning paragraphs. But the article brings to light the many problems that Holland faces in trying to negotiate multiculturalism on the one hand and women's rights on the other. The common feminist response to these problems is to empower the women within a specific subculture and to let them decide what equal rights they wish to achieve first, rather than have such rights determined from above or from outside. But in practice the empowerment of women who are isolated from the mainstream culture and sometimes even physically isolated is not an easy matter. And then there is the whole problem of how to persuade individuals who equate women's rights with Western imperialism and the gaining of such rights with the loss of cultural traditions.

For me human rights come first, and women's rights to be free of honor killings are part of human rights. Those parts of any tradition that dishonor humans should go.

Ted Turner on Hitler

Ted Turner has never heard of Godwin's law:

CNN founder Ted Turner, never shy about speaking his mind, has compared the ascent of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News to the rise of Adolf Hitler before the second world war.

"Adolf Hitler was more popular in Germany than the people who ran against him," he told a conference of programming executives in Las Vegas.

"Just because you are bigger doesn't mean to say you are right," he added. In a typically pugnacious speech, the 67-year-old billionaire also told the audience at the Natpe programme sales market that Fox had become a propaganda tool for the Bush administration.

"There's nothing wrong with that," he said. "It's certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy. Particularly when the news is dumbed down, leaving voters without critical information on politics and world events and overloaded with fluff. We need to know what's going on in the world. A little less Hollywood and a little more hard news would probably be good for our society."

Fox hit back in equally confrontational style. "Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network, and now his mind," a Fox News spokesman said.

That's it in a nutshell, the level of debate in this country. Sadly, Turner is right on several counts. Popularity does not necessarily equal truth, Fox News indeed does biased reporting and sloppy analysis, and it produces misinformed viewers as shown by a recent study. Then there is the whole story about the lemmings to keep in mind here.

Mentioning Hitler exacerbates the communication problems, though, because Hitler is regarded as evil personified. Ted would have been more successful if he had moderated his comments somewhat. Maybe Mussolini? Just kidding.

How It Is Done

The way changes are crammed down our throats in this country is done by repetition and by the refusal to hear any other alternatives. President Bush showed this today in his answers to questions from the press many times. Just one example is enough (and won't harm you as much as reading through the whole thing). This is about the coming destruction of Social Security and the role of Bill Thomas in it. Thomas has been musing on cutting the benefits on solely the basis of sex or race, but I'm not sure if Bush was talking about that when he praised Thomas:

The threshold question is, will Congress -- is Congress willing to say we have a problem. We do have a problem. The math shows we have a problem. And now is the time to act on the problem. And once people realize there's a problem, then I believe there's an obligation for all sides to bring forth ideas. And that's what you're seeing with Chairman Thomas. And I appreciate that. I'm looking forward to my visit with him this afternoon.
(Bolds mine.)

Never mind that the math shows nothing of the sort of problem that would make it necessary to do something along the lines the president advocates. Never mind what other people say, what experts might say. If the president says we have a problem then we have one. Right?

The wingnuts do have a problem, of course, and it is the fact that they don't want to have a Social Security system to begin with. If they had been around in the 1930's they would have voted against the program. Republicans did, in those days, too. The fact is that the abolition of the Social Security has been on the conservative long-term agenda for decades, and now seems to be the time to act on that. First, lets privatize some accounts (oops! should be "let's personalize some accounts"), next, lets get rid of guaranteed benefits, and voila!, the next step will be the death of any insurance aspect in the Social Security system and the return to the times when the poorhouses were full of the elderly.

I'm exaggerating for the benefit of style, but not by much. The wingnuts really do want to erase most of governmental functions. This will bring in anarchy, which is interesting as I have never heard the wingnuts called anarchists before.