Laurie Says Goodbye

Laurie Garrett is leaving Newsday, and uses the opportunity to say a few things about the state of the U.S. media. For example:

Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of "snappy news", sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now. But you just can't realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it's damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere skeleton crew of reporters and editors.

This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness, in which cynically placed bits of misinformation (e.g. Cheney's, "If John Kerry had been President during the Cold War we would have had thermonuclear war.") fall on ears that absorb all, without filtration or fact-checking. Leading journalists have tried to defend their mission, pointing to the paucity of accurate, edited coverage found in blogs, internet sites, Fox-TV and talk radio. They argue that good old-fashioned newspaper editing is the key to providing America with credible information, forming the basis for wise voting and enlightened governance. But their claims have been undermined by Jayson Blair's blatant fabrications, Judy Miller's bogus weapons of mass destruction coverage, the media's inaccurate and inappropriate convictions of Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill, CBS' failure to smell a con job regarding Bush's Texas Air Guard career and, sadly, so on.

What does it mean when even journalists consider comedian John [sic] -- "This is a fake news show, People!" -- Stewart one of the most reliable sources of "news"?

It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

Read the whole thing. If I didn't have a relapse of the flu I'd write a lot more about the connections between profit maximizing and the quality of journalism. It's an interesting topic.
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Link from pixie on Eschaton threads.

Ten Years After the Beijing Conference on Women

The United Nations is having two weeks of meetings to assess the progress of women in the last ten years:

Sponsors say significant progress has been made in the goal of gender equality, with many nations adopting new policies to eliminate discrimination, enroll increasing numbers of girls in primary school and recognize rape and sexual violence as war crimes. According to a new report from the World Bank, the lives of women and girls around the world have improved in the last 10 years due, in part, to action by the international community following the Beijing conference.

But the global human rights group Amnesty International says violence against women has continued unabated since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration a decade ago, with many nations not fulfilling their pledges.

Kyung-wha Kang, the chairperson of the Commission on the Status of Women, said the issue remains the biggest obstacle to the advancement of the world's women. "I would have to say that the prevalence of violence against women in many forms in almost all countries. In some countries it could be the problem of domestic violence. In some other countries it could be other manifestations of that. But I think almost wherever you go whether it is the developing countries, the developed countries, western countries, wherever, there is still violence again women," she said.

The United States has used these meetings to focus on the question of abortion. This is a reflection of the current administration and its fundamentalist base:

But even before the two-week meeting began, delegates were wrangling behind closed doors Friday on a draft declaration that the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women put forward — and had hoped to have adopted by consensus before Monday's opening session.

The short declaration would have nations reaffirm the Beijing platform and a declaration adopted with it, welcome progress toward achieving gender equality, stress that challenges remain, and "pledge to undertake further action to ensure their full and accelerated implementation."

But at an informal closed-door meeting on Thursday, the United States said it could not accept the declaration because of its concerns that the Beijing platform legalized the right to abortion as a human right, according to several participants.

On Friday, the United States proposed an amendment to the draft declaration that would reaffirm the Beijing platform and declaration — but only "while reaffirming that they do not create any new international human rights, and that they do not include the right to abortion," according to the text obtained by The Associated Press.

This is pretty much what has happened in every international meeting about women since Bush got elected: the U.S. delegation focuses on the question of abortion or on something like trying to stop sex education at schools, and if there is any voting the U.S. votes en bloc with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Funny, if you start thinking about it.

Carnage in Iraq

It happens every day there, of course. But some days are even worse than others, and this is one of those days. And yes, the carnage is based on a political game plan. If you don't know it already you can find the details in the linked article.

May those who died find peace. May those who loved them find peace.

Jonah Goldberg on Torture

Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online thinks it would be good if nobody knew that the U.S. adminstration uses torture. In fact, that people know about the torture is worse than the torture itself:

For him, that concept extends to the clandestine activities of the U.S. government. "If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans -- and I'm all in favor of that -- we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I'm not horrified by that proposition," Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, "what undermines what we stand for," he says, "is the publication of all this information."

"We did all sorts of terrible things in World War II, and there was a reason why we had military censors," he says. "I do think there's a reason why the CIA does this stuff in secret, and why I think it should do a lot of things in secret. These things have a lot of propaganda value, both negative and positive, so I think we need to separate out what we think are 'good policies' from what the consequences are if those policies are publicized."

"There are lots of things that are ugly and terrible about war," Goldberg adds. "I think that people on the right are more comfortable allowing for that."

Especially those like Jonah who are fighting safely from behind a desk and who don't have to worry about what would happen to them if they were caught by the enemy. But still, how odd for Goldberg to own up to all this, to say that he is comfortable allowing for the ugly and the terrible about war. Has he ever experienced any of it, except vicariously? Or is that what he means, that he's comfortable with someone else's experiences of ugliness and terror?

I find this very creepy.

Not Blogging On Oscars

I don't watch them and I know nothing about them. I also know nothing about music so rarely blog on musical topics. My ear is one large tin drum or like Vincent's ear, and despite all sorts of desperate attempts to understand music I don't. I can divide it into noises of varying pleasantness, and some are even useful for meditation purposes or because the words are funny, but I'm totally amusical. The missing fairy at my birth was the musical appreciation one, which means that the evil fairy was present. Which you knew already.

But I do like movies, I just don't like the commercial hullabaloo around them or the really long televized speeches about thanking the niece-of-the-lookalike for something or other. And now that I know the answer is double-sided tape, the only interesting question about the Oscars has been answered (the one about how the dresses stay up those years when straps are not allowed).

There are many other topics I haven't blogged on yet, but they are not safely beyond my reach. I have plans to write about painting and sculpture and the best ways of taming wild horses, for example.

Hocus Pocus Filiocus!

How the adminstration does science these days: a sort of a magical recipe with the eye of the Newt and the wallet of the corporation all thrown into a pot with lots of religious broth. Here, you can taste the result:

Ten members of the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel who voted that a group of powerful pain killers should continue to be sold had ties to the drug makers, an advocacy group says. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest indicates that 10 of the 32 panel members had ties to either Pfizer Inc. or Merck & Co., ranging from consulting fees and speaking honoraria to research support.

The FDA issued a statement saying it screened members of the panel for conflicts of interest. "This transparent process requires the agency to carefully weigh any potential financial interest with the need for essential scientific expertise in order to protect and advance the public health," the agency said.

Hard to find wingnuts who wouldn't be taking naps in the lint-lined back pockets of pharmaceutical companies, of course. We all understand.

And then there is this new "science" about how mercury is really quite innocent:

House Resources Committee chair Richard Pombo, R-Calif. -- longtime bete noire of the environmental community -- seems to have cooked up some fishy science in a report released last week titled "Mercury in Perspective: Fact and Fiction About the Debate Over Mercury" [PDF].

The report -- written not by scientists but rather by aides to Pombo and another member of his committee, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev. -- aims to downplay the overwhelming evidence that mercury from coal-burning power plants poses a significant health risk to Americans. Two of the report's claims are particularly stunning, as science journalist Chris C. Mooney points out. One: "There has been no credible evidence of harm to pregnant women or their unborn children from regular consumption of fish." And two: "Current, peer-reviewed scientific literature does not show any link between U.S. power plant emissions and mercury in fish."

The report ignores reams of data indicating that mercury disrupts fetal development and can cause learning and memory disabilities in children, as well as recent research linking mercury exposure to increased risk of cardiac problems in adults. And it gives short shrift to the well-established fact that coal-burning power plants are the major industrial source of mercury pollution in the U.S.

The national controversy over mercury pollution, having simmered for more than a year, will finally come to a boil on March 15, when the Bush EPA is legally required to finalize its rule determining how rigorously the toxic pollutant will be regulated. The first draft of the rule, published in January 2004, was roundly criticized by dozens of members of Congress, public health advocates, and environmental groups for being notably weaker than a rule proposed during the Clinton administration.

The Clinton-era proposal would have required mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants to be aggressively reduced using the best technology available on the market -- or, as the wonks put it, maximum achievable control technology (MACT) -- which would slash emissions by as much as 90 percent within a year, starting in 2008. In contrast, the Bush administration's draft rule proposes a cap-and-trade program requiring smaller and slower reductions of 70 percent from 2005 levels by 2018. And critics argue that these results would not be fully achieved until 2025, due to the nature of the market-based trading system.

The Pombo-Gibbons report argues in favor of the Bush administration's mercury-reduction plan, just in time to feed the heated tussle expected to break out in coming weeks as the final rule is released. "The report is essentially a preemptive strike," said John Walke, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group that sued the EPA over delays on its mercury rule and forced it to comply with a March 15 deadline.

According to Walke, the report repeatedly references data from industry-funded groups such as the Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, the latter a "quasi-scientific body that has repackaged the basic talking points that the utility industry has been relying on for years," he said. Walke accuses congressional Republicans of trying to drum up "wildly off-base claims about mercury just to make EPA's abominable rule look good by comparison."

Odd. Wasn't it just a few months ago that the FDA told pregnant women to avoid eating tuna and various other fish? Never mind, it's all too much to absorb, except perhaps the mercury.

On Racing Calves

This old lady I knew (well, ok, my grandmother) said that debating a fool is as profitable as trying to have a speed race with a calf. (If you find this mysterious you have never tried to catch a calf who doesn't want to be caught. The calf zigzags and kicks you with its hindlegs.)

This has hidden relevance for the next post about turds and trolls, because trolls are defined by their very inability to debate logically. To enter such a debate is foolish, yet to stay out of it is very hard if you are a competitive know-it-all type goddess. But out of it you must stay if you want to stay sane, because a troll will not follow any of the usual debating rules such as presenting actual evidence to back arguments or accepting your evidence in return. Trolls also turn the issue upside down in the middle of the debate or move on to some totally unrelated topic. If all else fails trolls attack you for saying something you never said or for being responsible for everything a certain ill-defined and possibly nonexistent group of individuals has ever done. Or they accuse you for not having explained everything that ever happened.

It's very tiresome and utterly pointless. It's also pretty similar to the O'Reilly show or Limbaugh's tirades or Ann Coulter's writings. None of these have much to do with real debates. Real debates can be interesting and even enlightening but trollabates are neither. Sadly, though, real debates are getting increasingly rare.

Many so-called debates are pre-orchestrated to come across as prize fights: pick an issue and then find two people with extreme and opposite opinions on the issue. They must express strong emotions and bombard each other with their absolutist messages. The audience is then supposed to conclude who is right and which side won.

This is rubbish, of course. It's quite possible that a middle-of-the-road position would be the most correct one or that the person who seems to win is just a better debater or that the whole issue is framed badly. It's even possible that such an adversary setup will not enlighten us at all, whereas a cooperative "fill-in-the-missing-pieces-of-the-puzzle" approach might get us somewhere. In any case, I'm very sceptical about the ability of an uninformed public to learn anything from most debates the way they are currently run.

Not that education is the objective of most staged debates. Rather, the idea is that the audience will relish the fighting and not get bored. Debating as entertainment.

How Wingnut Trolls Argue

Usually this topic would be beneath my interest, but this particular comment on Eschaton is really hilarious:

I can't imagine why real Americans would accuse you people of being seditious turds

It's intended to be read in a satirical voice, I presume. "Real Americans" is wingnut for, well, wingnuts. But the really odd part is the "seditious turds" bit. How can turds be seditious? They don't do much anything, except float down passively in the stream of water. And if they were seditious, what would they rebel against? The hole from which they emerged?

Friday Embroidery Blogging

Fallen Angel 


This is an embroidery joke. The red things on the angel's arms are supposed to be long evening gloves all wrinkled up. You can see more technical details by clicking on the picture. Sorry about the reflection from the glass. I forgot to remove it again.

A Funny Thought for the Day

Jeff Gannon has a new blog (no, I'm not going to link to it). Guess what it is called?

A Voice of the New Media

Heh.

On Sex and Power

Robin Givhan in the Washington Post muses on the way Condoleezza Rice is dressed:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield on Wednesday dressed all in black. She was wearing a black skirt that hit just above the knee, and it was topped with a black coat that fell to mid-calf. The coat, with its seven gold buttons running down the front and its band collar, called to mind a Marine's dress uniform or the "save humanity" ensemble worn by Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix."

As Rice walked out to greet the troops, the coat blew open in a rather swashbuckling way to reveal the top of a pair of knee-high boots. The boots had a high, slender heel that is not particularly practical. But it is a popular silhouette because it tends to elongate and flatter the leg. In short, the boots are sexy.

Givhan then goes on to interpret this outfit as the way a woman can look powerful:

Rice boldly eschewed the typical fare chosen by powerful American women on the world stage. She was not wearing a bland suit with a loose-fitting skirt and short boxy jacket with a pair of sensible pumps. She did not cloak her power in photogenic hues, a feminine brooch and a non-threatening aesthetic. Rice looked as though she was prepared to talk tough, knock heads and do a freeze-frame "Matrix" jump kick if necessary. Who wouldn't give her ensemble a double take -- all the while hoping not to rub her the wrong way?

Rice's coat and boots speak of sex and power -- such a volatile combination, and one that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal. When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy. When a woman combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have her power devolving into a form that is purely sexual.

Rice challenges expectations and assumptions. There is undeniable authority in her long black jacket with its severe details and menacing silhouette. The darkness lends an air of mystery and foreboding. Black is the color of intellectualism, of abstinence, of penitence. If there is any symbolism to be gleaned from Rice's stark garments, it is that she is tough and focused enough for whatever task is at hand.

A dominatrix indeed...

Givhan's article is annoying in that it drapes the issue of female power into an issue of clothing, as if we could all be powerful by just finding the right things to wear. On the other hand, she (or he?) has a point: there is no generally accepted way for a woman in power to dress. But to borrow from the sexual arena seems a big mistake to me, because so many of the sexual signs of female power make women into passive objects of adulation, not into active leaders.

Take the high heels that Givhan mentions:

Countless essays and books have been written about the erotic nature of high heels. There is no need to reiterate in detail the reasons why so many women swear by uncomfortable three-inch heels and why so many men are happy that they do. Heels change the way a woman walks, forcing her hips to sway. They alter her posture in myriad enticing ways, all of which are politically incorrect to discuss.

The politically incorrect parts probably have to do with the fact that a woman in high heels is showing her availability for sex in two ways: first, her pelvis is tilted to receive rear-entry and second, she is clearly unable to run away. Or so I imagine. Though high heels are also excellent weapons of self-defense, especially if used against the eyes of the attacker. Just kidding, just kidding! Don't quote me on any of this and don't try any of this at home.

I have never been able to learn how to walk in high heels, so whenever I wear them I end up barefoot, carrying the damn things strapped together around my neck. Which gives me an idea for power-dressing women: how about a pair of stiletto heels hanging from a belt? Or better still, a sword?

Bush and Putin Holding Hands

Not really. It's more like each trying to be the top, but on the whole they come across as almost equally stupid. Almost, because it's impossible to beat Bush. Just listen to these comments by our dear leader:

"Strong countries are built by developing strong democracies," Bush said he told Putin. "I think Vladimir heard me loud and clear."
...
"This is the kind of fellow who, when he says `Yes,' he means yes, and when he says `No,' he means no," Bush said.

But Putin did almost as well in the stupidity competition:

"I'm not the minister of propaganda," Putin said, standing alongside Bush at a news conference.

And these guys are the leaders of the so-called free world? Give me a break.

Well, you can't give me a break. It just goes on and on. This bit is especially interesting:

Bush was challenged as well, by a Russian journalist who asked about "violations of the rights of journalists in the United States" without giving specifics.

Bush seemed irritated. He said he talked with Putin about Russian press freedom and that the Russian leader asked in turn about practices in the United States.

"People do get fired in American press," the president said, adding that they get fired by editors or producers or others -- not by government.

But while saying that a free press is the sign of a healthy society, Bush added, "Obviously there has got to be constraints. There's got to be truth."

And how do we get that truth, hmh? By paying money to journalists to be the government mouthpieces? By giving press passes to nonjournalists? I guess so.

It is interesting that Bush seemed irritated. He fares poorly under any kind of criticism and that is perhaps why he has walled himself into a little circle of yes-men and yes-women. Frightening, isn't it? Nothing is so important as good and open criticism on the highest levels of government but we might not be getting any of that.

Why Blog?

Atrios has an interesting post on the topic of blogging, on what we want to get from it and on how to do it well. At the end of the post he gives advice to new bloggers:

1) Don't send me an email saying "read my blog." I won't. If you want to get my interest, send me something interesting. If you have something interesting, it'll get noticed and linked. Have enough interesting things, people will start coming back on their own to look for it, and you'll have a larger regular readership.

2) What's interesting? Your opinion on stuff by itself isn't really interesting to anyone except your friends. If you're funny, or you write well, or you actually know something, or can make a good argument, or are good at unearthing interesting and relevant tidbits, that's interesting.

3) One things blogs do is act as news aggregators/filters and places for discussion. You may be an excellent news aggregator/filter, but that's a pretty crowded market. That's one place where being an early entrant helps. If you want to distinguish your blog, you need to have some additional interesting original content.

4) Don't create a spam list and send out every blog post to the list. We all get too much email. Send me something you think that I would be interested in. It's personal. I don't cover every issue under the sun. Nobody else does either.

5) Don't just focus on trying to get a link from me, or Kos, or Instapundit, or whatever. If you have something good, send it to blogs with somewhat less, but still decent traffic. They probably get less email than we do. s

6) Establishing a large regular readership takes a lot of time, no matter how brilliant and persistent you are. And, persistence is key. While some fairly popular bloggers post inconsistently, most people with a large regular readership post at least daily. People will click on your site more often if they think there's a good chance there will be something new to look at.

My first emotional reaction to this advice was that I'd never have started blogging if I had really thought it out carefully. This has something to do with my upbringing which consisted of a lot of discouragement against the dreadful possibility of gaining a big head (So you ranked number one in the country? Big deal. They're all crazy.) But more generally, how do we ever know if we have something interesting to say without trying to say it?

My second reaction was a great depression over my inability to market my blog. I'm really bad at it, never mind my MBA. Once every six months or so I send out two feeble e-mails to Famous People and that's about it, so it's a relief to hear that most e-mails go unread anyway. Artful Asp will take on the marketing of the blog in the summer when she has more time (the snake school has a vacation then), and she's planning t-shirts and keyrings and stuff. I'm looking forward to the great influx of money and new readers that I will gain then.

What Atrios doesn't mention in his description of what might be interest to the readers is that some topics may not be discussed very much. If you feel strongly about one of those topics you can have a valid blogging voice even if you are not the greatest writer or the funniest person or otherwise really fascinating. Or that's what I hope, anyway, given that this was my original impetus for blogging.

The really interesting question is why people blog at all, and the answer to this question determines how suitable Atrios's advice is. If you want to write a general political blog with a high readership, go on and follow his advice. If, however, you are more interested in talking to a particular group of people than the general blogistan, you need to modify the advice accordingly. For example, the feminist blogs have their own internal relationships and if you write on feminism it may make more sense to e-mail blogs in that group than one of the big political blogs.

Skippy said somewhere that the only valid reason for blogging is when one must. This is like the old argument for writing: that you should write only if you can't do the alternatives. Though this is not the whole truth there is something to the idea that you should absolutely love to blog. If you don't, the days when you get lots of trolls and when your writing stinks will be too hard to take, especially if you have bothersome details such as work-for-money to take care of. And if you love blogging the numbers and the fame are not so important. They are both fickle gods, anyway. They also quickly turn into hollow gods if you don't love blogging, whereas the love of the work itself will keep you going even if nobody reads you at all.

It's Kansas, Dorothy!

Via Atrios I learn about the incredible things going on in Kansas:

Attorney General Phill Kline is seeking the complete medical records of nearly 90 women who received late-term abortions to search for evidence of crimes, according to court documents.

The secret investigation began in October, according to written legal arguments filed Tuesday by two medical clinics that are opposing Kline's effort. They are asking the Kansas Supreme Court to intercede, saying if it doesn't, "a woman who exercised her constitutional right to privacy" could find government agents knocking at her door.

Kline, an abortion opponent, scheduled a news conference for Thursday afternoon, and his office said he would discuss "questions raised relating to child rape and abortion in Kansas."

The records include the patients' names, medical histories, birth control practises and psychological profiles.

This smells to high heavens. Late-term abortions are almost always abortions where something has gone horribly wrong with the fetus. Going through one of those is not something taken lightly, and the families involved have severe traumas. Then someone comes digging for details about their sex lives!

It's yet another step in our road to Gillead, another step in harassing and stigmatizing anyone who has had an abortion. But to do it to those parents who have gone through one of the most painful experiences parents can have is plain wrong and plain disgusting.

There are much more productive ways for going after child rape than such random searches in medical files.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action Comes from the NRDC. Visit their webpage at www.nrdc.org and click on:

"Stop Global Mercury Pollution The U.S. should lead the way," to send an email to the State Department asking them to adopt meaningful goals for reducing mercury pollution. Or, copy and send the sample letter below.

*************************************************************

February 24, 2005

Claudia A. McMurray
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Environment
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

The Bush administration has frequently pointed to the fact that much of our mercury pollution in the United States comes from abroad. The upcoming United Nations Environment Program meeting in Nairobi provides the first chance to take meaningful action to address this pollution in a coordinated fashion with the rest of the world. But the current U.S. position falls clearly short of the bare minimum required to make any substantial progress on reducing this harmful pollutant.

The U.S. plan should be greatly strengthened for this meeting. We should adopt goals for reducing mercury use by 50 percent by 2010 and 75 percent by 2015. We should promote a policy to phase out mercury uses across the globe and to put excess mercury into long-term storage rather than selling it into global commerce. Finally, our government should provide technical and financial assistance to countries in the developing world to phase out their current mercury uses, starting with the largest, most dispersive uses for which there are alternatives, particularly in chemical manufacturing and for switches and measuring devices.

The global problem of mercury pollution needs a global solution. The United States should lead the way, and the upcoming UNEP meeting would be a good place to start.

Sincerely,

*******************************************************************



Thanks for taking Today's Action

Sex Toys

These are toys for sex, either with yourself or with another person. Things like vibrators or handcuffs or whatever catches your fancy. Probably inflatable dolls are a sex toy, too.

Sex toys are dangerous! In many states their use is illegal due to old laws still on books about immoral behavior, though mostly these laws are not enforced. But the state of Alabama has a law explicitly banning the sale of sex toys and the U.S. Supreme Court has just refused to review the constitutionality of the law. This means that states can go on making laws that ban certain private forms of behavior in the name of public morality.

It is odd, especially given that the sale of condoms is quite legal in Alabama, but the sale of vibrators is not. This shows a bias towards fornication, don't you think? Though it's legal to own a vibrator, provided that the user has purchased it out of state.

Cumbersome. This reminds me of the illegal nature of growing opium poppies, yet the seeds are available on top of every poppyseed bagel we eat. Baking doesn't stop the seeds from sprouting, so it would be theoretically possible to have the poppies growing in the yard quite by accident. But the police wouldn't believe this story so you better not try.

Of, By and for Big Business

This is the title of an article by Robert Scheer, one that is well worth reading. A snippet:

In fact, the GOP's legislative calendar looks like a wish list sent over to the White House from the Chamber of Commerce across the street. Senate Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) dropped in there the other day after a breakfast meeting with the president to assure the chamber that its wishes would soon be law. After all, the chamber spent $168 million to push the anti-class-action lawsuit bill along. Still to come this session: raising allowable emissions standards on major pollutants, oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the granddaddy of all corporate payouts, privatization of Social Security.

And getting rid of those pesky consumer lawsuits against medical practitioners and those pesky cancer lawsuits by workers who had to deal with asbestos. Note how the administration has time for all this but not for the Defense of Marriage stuff. This tells who the real masters of Bush and co. are, and they are not extremist clerics, at least not in off-election years. Nope. It's the money, as always.

Eberle and Gannon

An interesting Salon article tells us more about the day-passes that Gannon (aka Guckert) was able to procure for months on end:

So the mystery remains: How did Guckert, with absolutely no journalism background and working for a phony news organization, manage to adopt the day-pass system as his own while sidestepping a thorough background check that might have detected his sordid past? That's the central question the White House refuses to address. And like its initial explanation that Guckert received his press pass the same way other journalists do, the notion first put out by White House officials that they knew little or nothing about GOPUSA/Talon News, its correspondent Guckert or its founder Eberle has also melted away. Instead, we now know, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer personally spoke with Eberle about GOPUSA, so concerned was Fleischer that it was not an independent organization. (Eberle convinced Fleischer that it was.) Additionally, Guckert attended the invitation-only White House press Christmas parties in 2003 and 2004, and last holiday season, in a personal posting on GOPUSA, Eberle thanked Karl Rove for his "assistance, guidance, and friendship."

The article notes that during the Clinton administration a reporter would get a day-pass only if she or he could justify the need for the reporting to happen from inside the White House rather than from elsewhere on that specific day. Clearly, the Bush administration doesn't use the same criteria. So what criteria do they use?

Whatever they might be, it turns out that Bobby Eberle, a conservative activist and the founder of Talon News, was also able to get a White House pass:

Yet, if there's one other person who did manage to receive the same type of kid-glove treatment from the White House press office, it was Guckert's boss at GOPUSA and later at Talon News, Bobby Eberle. A Texas-based Republican activist and a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000, Eberle founded Talon News after he became concerned that the name GOPUSA might appear to have a "built-in bias." With no journalism background, he too was able to secure a White House press pass, in early 2003, on the strength of representing GOPUSA, dedicated to "spreading the conservative message throughout America."

Is there anything wrong with any of this? I believe that there is a clear ethical problem in letting political activists infiltrate the press corps for the purpose of asking planted questions or steering the questioning into a safer direction. This makes the White House press conferences into total farces. It is also an attempt to manipulate public opinion in ways that are at least sneaky if not outright nasty.

Other problems with careless screening of journalists should be obvious to even the White House. For example, a terrorist could get in on a day-pass.

But my major concern with the whole Gannongate is how it reveals the tentacles of the administration in all sorts of improper places, just as the earlier revelations about paid journalists did. How much else is there that we don't know about yet? How many superficially independent journalists are getting their talking points and their bank accounts filled by the White House?

More on Women in Iraq

Is freedom coming to the Iraqi women? It is most doubtful:

As the Shiite clerics and Kurdish nationalists, who suddenly find themselves in power in Iraq, debate the form and function of the new government, one often ignored group of Iraqis finds itself ambivalent about the future. Although women participated in January's election in unprecedented numbers, a heartening sign that women would have a strong political voice in Iraq, many Iraqi women remain extremely anxious as religious party leaders, with strong ties to Iran, sit down to write a constitution.

Keep in mind that the majority of Iraqis are women. Yet they are in great danger of being totally ignored in the reconstruction effort and in the creation of a new constitution. The latter may be based on the shariah law which would mean lesser rights for women in the areas of family law (including the right to divorce and inheritance rights) as well as in women's rights to participate in the legal process as equal individuals.

But maybe the Iraqi women don't want such equal rights? Maybe this is all Western propaganda? Maybe. But a recent survey in Iraq suggests something different:

What's also dismaying to activists is that the election appears to conflict with what Iraqi women really want. Women for Women International, an American-Iraqi advocacy group, recently conducted a survey of Iraqi women and found that high percentages of them expect a role in the reconstruction of Iraq. "Many Iraqi leaders have claimed that women do not want to be involved in the reconstruction process," Women for Women founder Zainab Salbi said in a statement. "This survey clearly shows that women overwhelmingly believe they should have a seat at the table." The survey also reveals that Iraqi women expect equal rights -- 94 percent want legal protection as women, and 84 percent want to vote on the final constitution.

It's hard to interpret these two phenomena (large numbers of women voting for the religious list of candidates and so many of them also wanting what the religious candidates won't provide) in any other way except as an indication that most Iraqi women (and perhaps most Iraqis) don't know what the religious candidates stand for. This wouldn't be surprising. How could anyone know what democracy entails when it hasn't been tried in the recent past or even in the lifetimes of many of the voters?

I hope that the future is bright for all the Iraqis, both women and men, but this hope is not based on anything realistic. The most likely outcome in Iraq is a civil war followed by a theocracy which will not be good for women and girls. But at least we brought freedom there...

Today's Really Dum Comment

Not from my blog. I rarely get dum comments. This is from Washington Monthly and has to do with the recent round of lamenting the lack of female political bloggers:

More women are high verbal than men. They should do better at blogging.

As long as the blogs are devoid of content about chess, go, or mathematics.

Now you know.