Taboo

Clearly the fight against gay marriage is a fight over what and what is not taboo in our society. Conservatives have already lost this one, whether they like it or not. Homosexuality is barely taboo anymore, and mostly it's not. They like to compare it to the incest taboo, but that argument only makes sense if you think that incest means the same thing in every time in every culture, and it doesn't.
For instance, in the Bible it's clear that in ancient times the incest taboo existed for siblings who shared a mother, but not a father. Abraham clearly states that Sarah is his paternal sister, and at the time that wasn't incest because families were still matrilineal instead of patrilineal. Or in recent times in Europe, marriage to a first cousin was not incest like it is in this country. Einstein and Darwin were both married to first cousins.
The incest taboo is extremely flexible AND extremely powerful. The arguments based in some sort of scientific meaning are just so much bullshit. Incest taboos reflect familial culture more than anything else. The closer your relative is to how you live your life, the more likely it is incest to marry him/her. On top of that, the more people you know, the more relatives are considered off-limits to you. More access to more partners has more to do with why cousin marriage is illegal than any genetic argument.
Taboos are created by societies, not by "nature". Our society does not lend itself to a taboo against homosexuality anymore. That's a leftover taboo from highly gendered societies that don't respect individuality. We're free, and it follows that homosexuals should be free, too.
The flaw in comparing homosexuality and incest is immediately apparent to anyone who is even slightly educated in anthropological findings about taboos. But if you don't know why something is taboo or that taboos change, you are suspectible to arguments comparing one not-really-taboo-anymore behavior with something that is strictly taboo because there's no real way to know the difference.
I see that flaw going on this this discussion. Arguing against homosexuality by drawing on unrelated sexual taboos is strictly an accident of bad education. But it's an extremely common lack of knowledge. How to explain that without sounding like an "elitist liberal"?
One more thought on taboos and the "slippery slope" argument. The argument against homosexuality is that if that ceases to be taboo than the barn door is open and all taboos will become acceptable. Evidence for the validity of this tends to come in the form of "First it was the pill...." type arguments. Intelligent people are running around saying that we have to shut down rights for homosexuals not out of hate for them so much as if we don't have some grossly unfair laws enforcing meaningless taboos then society will go to hell in a handbasket. But even though the law has little bearing on what is taboo, even if it did this argument would make no sense. Taboos change and society soliders on. For instance, people eat shellfish and pork without any noticiable downhill slide towards paganism and anarchy.
So, even if you do accept the argument that minority rights should be withheld to cater to hysterical taboos held by the majority if it will keep chaos at bay, there really isn't a reason to think that the taboo against homosexuality, which is really 75% gone already, is going to make a difference.

Most under-rated band.....ever

It is a well-received truth amongst certain friends of mine and myself that the most under-rated band of all time is surely DEVO. Though we agree on this and generally agree on why (the evil monikers "New Wave" and "one-hit wonder", terms we suspect we invented to disable the meaning of the word "punk"), it's hard to really understand why DEVO never got its well-deserved hipster reawakening, where people realized what a treasure we had all along.
There a couple of immediately obvious reasons that DEVO never took off as the epitome of hip that my friends and I know that they are. One reason is the loathing for heavy synthesizers that has grown to be a tenet of the hipster rock fan faith, a loathing that is born out of the noxious and growing fear of femininity that is material for another post. (Though fear of femininity is pretty much my favorite explanation for the resurgence of faux admiration for really, really crappy cock rock and even hair metal like The Darkness.) The other reason is that despite the fact that it's hip and charming to confess to a certain amount of nerdiness, particularly past nerdiness like say, Star Wars fandom, DEVO is openly intellectual and unrepentantly nerdy. Most hipsters will never truly embrace nerdiness; they are just too damn concerned about their image and many of them are actually ashamed of the heights of their nerdiness. (I don't know why I say "them" like I don't know what it's like to be a hipster hiding evidence of painful nerdiness in the past.)
But those two reasons only explain why people who aren't familiar with DEVO won't like DEVO. In fact, if you take a non-DEVO fan who really, really likes music, you have an easy convert to the DEVO cause. My boyfriend came over to the dark side upon getting rather fascinated with DEVO's love of whacked out basslines ("Whip It" is actually a stellar example of this), and became even more intrigued when I pointed out that nerdy math knowledge probably has a lot to do with that. No, a number of people are more than familiar with DEVO's music and even know that they are a punk band in the "classic" sense, and yet they still don't get it. Part of that is that they too have absorbed the fear of the nerdy and the feminine, but another part of it is that DEVO seems to actually be pretty hard to get.
Listen to DEVO much at all and you will become acquainted with the concept of de-volution that they espouse. De-volution is a seeminingly simple concept that humanity has evolved as far as we can and now we are de-volving. This creates a sort of chaos in their music, swinging back and forth from sarcasm to anger to an almost sweetness. It also means that they are good at capturing truths about the links between conformity, fascism, stupidity, happiness, ignorance and fear that are hard to articulate intellectually but definitely exist in our culture on an emotional level.
We don't want to know this, that we are drawn towards conformity and ignorance and that it's leaving us open to embracing totalitarianism and possibly fascism. I know that's a weird transistion but I think it's one of the reasons that alot of people who should know better give the shaft to DEVO. They are very entertaining and completely hilarious and it's easy to get into the fun and then they will hit you over the head with the shameful fact that you, yes even you, are drawn towards conformity and it leaves you open to making immoral choices. In fact, you are doing it even now. They are mostly fun, but occassionally they catch you and make you look at your own self and it's uncomfortable. So alot of people just ignore them.
So, listen to DEVO. They don't let you feel self-righteous, but they are also so fun that if you can get over that they are a blast. They are great musicians. And since de-volution really has been accelerating over time (think about all the people who supported Pat Buchanan's run for real), they can help you understand.

Shush....it's really a scam

I'm not saying that beauty products don't work at all or that there isn't a variance in quality, but this is ridiculous. I know resisting the advertisers is damn near impossible, when they make you feel like, "Okay, buy the cheaper product or don't bother to have elaborate highlights that you have to have touched up weekly, but you'll never get a job or a boyfriend again and it will be all your own fault," but most beauty products are pretty much a scam. Particularly make-up. The best mascara on the market costs like $6, for instance.
But maybe there's something I don't know. I don't think I've ever lost a date due to my stubborn unwillingness to wear Clinque's products, but I may just be daft.
Not that I'm superior or anything. I have my own vanity. I am obnoxiously proud of the fact that I am "low-maintenance" and that I often take less time getting ready to go out than my boyfriend. But if you're going to be proud about something, being proud about how you "don't need" a ton of makeup and hairspray to look good is cheaper at least.

Via Feministing.

Children or not is the real dividing line

Salon has a pretty good article about the first gated community aimed directly at gays and lesbians. There's a surprising amount of harassment the developers have received over this and that the residents can probably expect, at least for a little while from those who thought Jesus was just kidding when he talked about splinters and logs in eyes or when he talked about stone-throwing. (The Lord would never deprive anyone of the pleasure of self-righteous harassment, you know.)
This article made me chuckle at parts. From what I could tell, their real selling point wasn't the "open-mindedness" of the community so much as the fact that the houses were tailored to childless couples. The real breakthrough for real estate marketing will be when they realize the true divide between couples is the parents vs. childless, not gay vs. straight. As far as I can tell, that's the major selling point of this community, even if they don't realize it. There's a reason that you will often happen upon neighborhoods made up of young singles, young straight couples, gay couples of all ages and empty nesters and it has less to do with politics than it has to do with the desire not to trip over children in the grocery store, be woken up by children playing on a Saturday morning, or listen to parents screaming at their children. That and the draw of grocery stores that stock imported beers, wines and cheeses.
These guys have stumbled onto something like that and they don't even know it. They need to retool their strategy to emphasize the child-free lifestyle. The kitchens designed for actual entertaining instead of making macaroni and cheese with beanie-weenies is a good start. There are tons of straight couples who live like stereotypical gay couples, and my guess is gay couples with kids act like boring old married folks.
The rest of the article is interesting, if only that the freaky fundies are so powerfully offended by this. They truly have a talent for sticking their noses into other people's business. But all the time and energy exerted thinking about homosexuality, particularly for those who have an unending appetite for "disgusting" themselves thinking about homosexual sex, seems utterly wasted. Nothing whatsoever is learned. Case in point, this comment, which is surpassed in ignorance only by the inexplicable assurance of the speaker:

Murray sees Wilton Station as an example of the homosexual lifestyle presented in a deceptively positive light. "Really, there should not be a public sanction of these [gay] communities. People say, look, aren't these [lifestyles] wonderful? The reality is: They aren't if you look at the facts."

As far as I can tell, the freaky fundies really do believe that all gay people are miserable, freaky losers who just run around saying that everything is fine because.....well, it's not a well-thought out myth. But it's one that so precious that it can't be dropped even under an onslaught of evidence against it. Which made me think--this argument against homosexuality, that's it's unnatural and it's impossible to be fulfilled and happy when you are gay is pretty much the exact same argument that people throw at women (and occassionally even at men) who don't have or want to have children.
That self-righteousness is fueled in large part by jealousy is evident. If you doubt this, it would do well to watch anti-gay activists picket; there's usually one guy who will explain how "disgusting" gays are because they (fill in specific sex act described in extremely titillating detail), and he's usually the loudest shouter. But it's not possible that all super-dedicated gay-haters are all just in the closet. Instead, I think it's more that homosexuality has become a convienent shorthand for all the sexual freedoms that seem to be available to everyone but the freaky fundies. And one of those freedoms is the relatively pedestrian freedom to choose not to have children at all.
That's another reason gay marriage and adoption are "undermining" straight marriage. If gays aren't fated to loveless and childless lives anymore, than that many more straight people will realize they aren't fated to have marriages and children they don't want. And the comfort of knowing that you had children because you "had" to is taken away and you are left having to answer to yourself why you made the choice you did.
Apparently it's easier to bust your ass trying to get birth control and homosexuals banned completely than to take a good look at yourself.

VAWA committee concludes: Domestic violence caused by mouthy women

Trish Wilson has a great entry about exactly why the Bush administration has worked so hard at scaling back women's rights. Some commenters I've read on other blogs find this hostility to basic women's rights unbelievable. It sometimes seems....almost....as if....they HATE women. While there is definitely a touch of medieval-style fear and loathing of women and their basic biology in some members of BushCo (Ashcroft, I'm looking at you), it's not about hating women. It's about preserving male superiority. Granted, preserving male superiority can look like out and out hatred of women, particularly when you consider the work being done to "help" abused wives stay with their "families". Above all, the goal of domestic violence work is to make sure that women continue to respect men.

“The Violence Against Women Act will do nothing to protect women from crime. It will, though, perpetuate false information, waste money and urge vulnerable women to mistrust all men.”

Well, abused wives do tend to come around to distrusting their husbands, and I guess if they are good women that's their husbands are "all men" to them. That might be the meaning of "submitting graciously". Certainly there is nothing graciously submissive about appealing for help to leave an abusive marriage. In fact, there is an internal logic to saying that staying with a man can stop the abuse if you believe in the wifely duty of submission. Odds are men who beat women do so because their authority is being bucked. Wifely submission can cure all family problems!

Anyway, read the blog entry. It's a good round-up and a good way to understand the inexplicable push against preventing domestic violence.

Someone just did Al Franken a big favor

Center for American Progress is documenting all the lies that conservatives tell. It's a searchable database. Bookmarked!

Via South Knox Bubba.

Evidence that the tide is turning

Hans Blix managed to come to campus without bringing out screaming College Republicans protesting his very existence. This is big news. Eric Schlosser managed to get more protests for daring state that fast food doesn't have a right to undermine labor standards and contaminate our food supply. If a U.N. weapons inspector can come to campus unmolested, it may just mean that *gasp*, people aren't so gung-ho about the war anymore. We can only hope.
There will always be a reality-impaired College Republican on hand to dominate the article with some outlandishly dumb quotes, of course. Today our Republican is Sachiv Mehta. After revealing that the U.N. has no "legitimate power" (legitimatcy is determined by College Republicans nowadays, not world leaders), he hits us with this brillant insight:

"Using the U.N. was a measure that had no use - it's almost like [Blix] is speaking with no credibility, because he has no authority behind what he's saying," Mehta said. "I think the central point is that there was bad intelligence."

From what I can figure, he's saying that while Blix was right and Bush was wrong, Blix was still the one with "bad intelligence". I can only imagine what he says to teachers who mark his answers wrong on tests.

Because we're smarter and that's all you need to know

This post by Billmon about how Iraq is devolving into Vietnam at lightning speed got me to thinking. Particularly this part:

In a sense, it's a triumph for conservatism. In just a year, the Bush administration has managed to repeated almost every mistake the Johnson White House and Pentagon made in Vietnam, thus providing some empirical support for the argument that Big Government is inherently disfunctional.

First of all, that's just funny. But it got me to thinking--why exactly did BushCo think that they could succeed where others have failed? I mean, the list of reasons that Vietnam was a bad idea and we couldn't win are as long as my arm, but the basic reasons are the exact same ones as why Iraq is a bad idea. It's a substitute for fighting the real enemy, in part because the real enemy is too hard to fight. It's injecting ourselves in a situation that's been brewing for a long time. We have no real objectives or game plan to point to. The government lied to the public to get into the situation in the first place. Etc., etc.
So why do they think they can succeed? Well, because it's a tenet of faith in the Republican party that we actually could have won Vietnam if Johnson wasn't such a pussy. We lost because Democrats are pussies and that's all you need to know. We couldn't lose this war because we had Real Men in charge.
That Democrats are pussies and Republicans are real men is a tenet of faith is easy to demonstrate. Any random comment by Ann Coulter will do. It's why it seemed like a good strategy to force the issue of comparing Bush and Kerry's war records. It's the same strategy as bringing Jesus into the conversation. Reason flies out the windom and now you're arguing about faith.

Remember

It was the snotty little comment about cake that clinched it for Marie Antoniette.

I'm just saying.

More email nonsense

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4, what does it say?
"There seems to be an inordinate number of movies about mankind going to war with machines."

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
My dead staples cup.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?
That 70's Show

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, what time is it?
3:30pm

5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?
3:37pm

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
A coworker filing stuff.

7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
Lunch. Taking a walk and reading. It's cloudy out and weirdly chilly for Texas.

8: Before you came to this questionaire, what did you look at?
Um, someone else's blog. It's a dirty habit, I know.

9: What are you wearing?
Blue jeans and a blue T-shirt. It's casual Wednesday! Also, blue day for some reason. Almost everyone chose a blue shirt to wear today. We're a Smurfy office.

10: Did you dream last night?
Yes.

11: When did you last laugh?
A few minutes ago at discovering that someone changed his signin name to "boobs".

12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Calendar, bulletin board, painting of a cat with a ball of yarn which is cooler than it sounds.

13: What is the last film you saw?
According to Netflix, Buffalo 66.

14: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
My house. And then I would buy another house close into town. And then sell the house I have now.

15: Tell me something about you that I don't know.
I call my cat Max Power. It makes him sound like a superhero. But I got it off Homer Simpson, who got it off a blow dryer.

16: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or
politics, what would you do?
Probably make people stop listening to Creed. Is that too political?

17: Do you like to dance?
Yes, but other people would like me not to.

18: Do you like crossword puzzles?
I go through phases. I'm okay at them.

19a: Imagine your first (or next) child is a girl, what do you call her?
Max Power.

19b: Imagine your first (or next) child is a boy, what do you call him?
Max Power

20: Would you ever consider living abroad?
I tend to consider it at least once a day while reading the news.

Missing

Through Salon.

It's more than critical health information. The Bush administration has decided that as well as they can control it, you should not have any information that might drive you to consider the wisdom of feminism. Here's a report detailing what information has been taken off of government websites that might be useful to you, might have some bearing on how you vote. I thought we were against Communists in part because they practiced thought control.

Things That the Bush Administration Doesn't Want You to Know
or, Don't worry, pretty lady, we'll take care of this.

*Condoms will help protect you from disease if you have sex.
*Abortion will not give you breast cancer.
*Abstinence-only programs don't work and in fact can be dangerous.
*You have rights in the workplaces that the government has enshrined in law.
*Women are still making 76 to a man's dollar, and that's been true for a long, long time.
*Emergency contraception is safe for over-the-counter use and the only reason you can't have it is political.
*They generally don't want you to know a damn thing about STD's, as is evidenced by the constant harassment of people doing genuine, non-political research of those diseases.
*If you are in an abusive relationship, there is help for you.
*Women are being discriminated against and outright abused in the military.
*Victims of domestic violence are being systematically discriminated against by insurance companies.
*It is illegal to discriminate against gay government employees. (On top of trying to spread ignorance, they are trying to make it like it was never true that discrimination was illegal. Wishing makes it so, eh?)

And that's just the first term. If they win a second term and don't have to worry about scaring off voters, imagine what could come of it.

Smackdown on Bush

Neal Pollack has a good entry: George Bush Contacts the Family of a Dead Solider.

There goes my plan to post nekkid girlie pictures

The government is going to start cruising the blogs looking for "information". We ordinary Americans see "information" gathering as something the FBI and CIA do to look for terrorists. But this is Ashcroft's America, so "information" is mostly going to be evidence that women are getting abortions and pictures of stuff that gives Ashcroft an erection.
Guess what other nation actively tracks blogs!

At least one nation, China, is actively tracking blogs. It's also reportedly trying to block blogs. Several press reports earlier this year said the government shut two blogging services and banned access to all Web logs by Chinese citizens.

Via August Pollack.

Why popular music sucks so bad

Popular music is subversive. Or it's supposed to be, at least. Not always in a serious way. Usually it's playful, fun, sexual, preposterous, free. Just by being these things it's subversive; it embraces the very things that are frowned on by our puritanical culture. And because of this, shortly after people began to make recordings, music was the dominant medium for the voiceless to find their voices. For a century now, young people and black people have been leading the charge, changing music and creating a permanent state of panic for the dominant culture. And popular music has stubbornly refused to go away. Selling records is big business, so censoring popular music out of existence is not an option. Instead, there seems to be a loose conspiracy of sorts to pretend that popular music, particularly rock music, springs from the soul of the most under-represented, voiceless people in history--white guys.
Rolling Stone magazine is the predominant periodical of the No, It Was Actually a Bunch of White Guys movement. Periodically, they release Best Of issues, not only to sell magazines but also to reinforce the mythology that has become so dear, that popular music is about White Guyness. And now they've done it again.
They've gotten better about throwing a couple of bones in the direction of those of us who know the true diversity of popular music. For instance, there is actually a black artist in the top ten greatest albums of all time! (#6-Marvin Gaye, who should definitely be many spots above the Beatles in a just world.) Noticeably missing is the artist who gave the stupid magazine its name with his song "Rolling Stone"--Muddy Waters. He does show up at #38, probably only because they remembered that they owed him a big one. But there's room for 4 Beatles records and 2 Dylan records! (Granted, it's pretty much impossible to include most recordings before the 1960's, as they didn't really make "albums" then. I'll give them a pass on that. It would be great if they did try 500 greatest recordings, though. "Good Golly Miss Molly" is worth the entire Beatles catalog, in my opinion.)
The first female-headed band or female solo artist doesn't show up until #30, and then of course it's a nice, safe Joni Mitchell. You finally get a female artist who pushes the envelope a little at #44, Patti Smith. The first hip-hop album doesn't show up until #48, Public Enemy. The Allman Brothers rank above Little Richard! It's a nightmare. Girl groups get their due in a Phil Spector box set, and isn't that enough?
It's not just that black musicians, non-Boomer musicians, and female musicians get the shaft. The great diversity of popular music is ignored in favor of elevating the wave of masturbatory cock rock. (In the top 100: 4 Led Zepplin albums, 9 Beatles records, 4 Rolling Stones records.) They seem to figure that Miles Davis and John Coltrane are all you need to represent jazz. Of course, punk rock is my favorite music and I always feel that it gets the shaft. Out of the top 100, there are only 7 punk or punkish albums, and that's stretching to include the Velvet Underground and Nirvana. The Ramones, whose music should be regarded as the equivalent of setting a bomb off in the middle of the guitar solo wank-a-thon that rock music was at the time don't show up until #33. The Rolling Stone has good reason to hate underground, punk and art rock, since all these are giving them the big ol' finger. Too bad. Yes, it's never sold very well, but these are often the only bands doing original work, reinventing rock music and keeping it alive.
I'm sure these criticisms would amaze the people who compiled this list. No doubt they think of themselves hip and with it because they know who Public Enemy is, and what more do you want? It was enshrined in the 1970's that the Beatles are the greatest band of all time, and even though time has shown that in the long run, they are of interest to musical history but don't really have alot of influence, no one sent the memo to the folks at The Rolling Stone.
The problem with lists like this is that by stating that the greatest artists of all time all played the same tired white guy rock, you justify record companies decisions to promote that music above all others and radio stations who play that music instead of anything else, even and especially on stations that comically call themselves "alternative". There is no reason to push the envelope, because fans read these lists and say, "Well music sucks now because the heyday of great music is over." There's a cycle where the record industries put out and promote nothing but identical white guy bands and the magazines, radio stations and therefore record-buying public reinforce them by only buying it and the music just devolves into the crap you hear on the radio now, every band sounding like a variation on Pearl Jam.
This cycle won't be stopped by jerk-off magazines like The Rolling Stone and certainly not by the record industry or radio stations, all predominantly run by middle-aged white men who have way too much ego invested in their belief that men like themselves are the only true rock geniuses of all time. The only way that music is going to get better is if music fans make the effort to diversify their own tastes and throw their support behind artists who step out of the mold. After all, black musicians have managed to keep putting out albums and selling them despite sometimes open hostility from the industry and only because their fan base stayed loyal.
I got the Rolling Stone link through a link to the forum for the band Ween that was sent to me. Some of the comments on there were quite telling. There was complaining, thank goodness, that the Beatles didn't need to utterly dominate the list and that kicking them out would have made more space. (I would post the link, but it's not working for some reason.) But sadly, there were people who were complaining about what musicians did provide some diversity on the list. What really startled me was a poster who complained about Prince reaching #73 for Purple Rain. If Prince was born with the same amount of talent, but as a white boy in England and was a little older, he'd probably be heralded as the Second Coming and would definitely be in the top ten. But he's black and not a little weird and he threatens straight white guys and he's pushed down to #73 and even that relatively low rank is being questioned.
Music is not going to get better unless the audience demands that it gets better. And the audience isn't going to demand it unless they get over knee-jerk hatred of anything weird or different than themselves. If you find yourself getting annoyed at the monotonous crap on the radio, go home and look over your record collection. How much funk do you own? Hip-hop? Real punk rock? Art rock? Jazz? How many of the musicians aren't white? How many women? How much of it is published on independent labels? It's one thing to have a particular kind of music that you like and lean towards that. It's another not to see how your own prejudice is helping contribute to the creative bankruptcy that is dominating the industry.

Not above criticism

I'm sorry, but religion is just not above criticism. I don't know how that idea got out, but naturally the freaky Christians love that idea.
And now, taking a page out of the BushCo manual, some Christians have decided even the slightest criticism must be met with a full-on, out-of-proportion retaliation. Of course, they haven't yet grasped that most Christians who read the book probably wouldn't have even realized it attacked their faith unless it was pointed out to them. Oops.
At least they aren't calling for censorship, which is an improvement over the New York art debacle.

More page 23, 5th sentence

America's Women by Gail Collins.

There were nineteen adult women on board, all but one married, along with seven young girls and a handful of small children.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken.

And as I, a fellow Democrat, began to gain his trust, Glenn opened up to me about just how much he hates America.

*snicker*

Wampum's on it.

More great photos from the march

These are great. The mainstream press tends to favor photos of women shouting, the angrier they look the better. Not that there aren't things to be angry about, but that's not all that feminism is about.

Good for them.

Old ladies and Christians are pro-choice, too, you know.

Whole families showed up.

Looks like fun. I wish I could have gone.

I'm not endorsing this....

....but if I saw these stickers slapped on SUV's I would laugh pretty hard.

Let's hope Sandra didn't wake up with a horse's head this morning

Because Dick Cheney tries to justify hiding his evil plans from the voters today. Honestly, at this point in the administration, most of the cases are pre-decided. They could probably just call Nina Totenberg and ask her how each vote will go and call it a day. Of course, that won't work because Totenberg is a consumate professional and would never go for it. For god's sake, the woman reads Scalia's opinions in a tone that implies they might be anything but paranoid drivel. My hat's off to her.

Pics from the march

Just ones I particularly like from Yahoo!

This guy looks like he's going to cry. Have women ever paid him this much attention?

The coverage tried to show "both sides". But, like I always like to say, We got the numbers!

I'll bet this guy is easy to confuse. Ask him if gay fetuses should be aborted.

Biggest march ever.

Good to see politicians fearlessly marched.

Loving life looks like this, not this.

Largest march ever

That's what I'm hearing. Even the more conservative estimates put the number of people marching for women at over a million. I guess this shows that people are quite aware how women's rights are being threatened by this administration. The media is doing what it can to ignore this. Women's rights have always suffered under-reporting because of the knee-jerk belief that women don't really have anything to say worth listening to. But still, this is pretty hard to ignore. Congrats to everyone who busted their ass to make this happen!
I heard some people expressing surprise that the media, even Fox News, is admitting there were more than a million people out there. That's great! That means it was surely more than that.

Adjectives will be the death of marriage

Through Alas, a Blog.

David Blankenhorn argues that what will kill marriage is using adjectives to distinguish one marriage from another. He firmly believes that marriage is an institution that is so powerful that every couple in it must wedge themselves into the standard form regardless of their personalities or needs, must less their sexes. And who gets to decide what the standard form is? Well, Blankenhorn has a great solution for deciding what the definition--whatever Blankenhorn says it is! Thank god the debate is over! Why didn't we think of this before?
One distinction that doesn't need to be made is healthy or unhealthy marriages.

Take an example: "healthy" marriage. I understand where this comes from. But it troubles me. Are you for marriage? Well, not really. I am for "healthy" marriage. Regular old marriage, you see, might be full of all kinds of problems, like domestic violence, unhappiness, patriarchy, and rigid sex roles. (Do you like to play tennis? Not really. But I do from time to time enjoy "healthy tennis." You know, tennis that's not ... unhealthy.)

Huh. That makes sense. After all, marriage is as universally good for people in the same way that exercise is. And what about those 50% of marriages that end in tears and heartbreak? Well, it's simple. Those aren't "marriage".

Here is my rule: Every time marriage nuts are forced to stick an adjective in front of the word marriage, we lose. Marriage is a big, old, strong word that has gotten along fine for 4,000 years without any adjectives.

I'm sure those who are looking to divorce are relieved. Now that their marriage requires an adjective, such as the dreaded "unhealthy" or even "ending", all they can say is that theirs is not marriage, since adjectives got involved. I'm sure the courts will buy that.
In all seriousness, there is a reason that people differentiate between healthy and unhealthy marriages. I'm sure that Blankenhorn wouldn't have a problem with differentiating between healthy and unhealthy people. (If he does, I can imagine what a pill he is for doctors when he gets sick. Once he receives his diagnose, "What was wrong with just being a person? Why do you have to call me unhealthy?) Marriages, whether he likes it or not, are made up of people. Marriage, I would argue, exists because of people and for people, not the other way around. It's a very Zen thing. Without people, there would be no marriage. With no marriage, there would still be people. It turns out you do need ears to hear trees falling.
There are other distinctions between marriages that Blankenhorn thinks we need to get rid of:

And now, as of about five minutes ago, we have something called "civil marriage," which, we are told, is something quite different from "religious marriage."

Technically, that is a distinction that was created the minute that the church and state became different things. I don't know if Blankenhorn is married, but if he is he must not have handled the paperwork or he might have noticed that outside of his religious ceremony there was this thing called a marriage license that the state made him fill out, or else he wasn't legally married no matter if a priest said so. As people point out on Alas, a Blog , many people have to learn the difference super fast when they try to obtain a divorce and an annulment and find out these are two very different things.
Well, no matter. In our brave new world, we have to get rid of distinctions between marriages, so one of these has to go. My guess is that Blankenhorn wishes to rid the world of this "civil" marriage, especially considering how inconvienent it will be to tell religious officials that they cannot marry people anymore if the "religious" distinction is abandoned. Of course, this means that people who were married just by the courthouse without the tacked-on religious ceremony will have their marriages disolved. Maybe it really would be easier to just get rid of "religious" marriages, since all "religious" marriages have some kind of civil component. Or we could go back to a theocracy where the state runs religion, since that was a situation that worked out so well in the past.
But even after Blankenhorn has rid the world of those troublesome descriptions, there is much work to do. Besides the adjectives that they bring up on Alas, there are more mundane descriptions that people carelessly use every day, not realizing that by distinguishing marriages by the people in them, they are doing irreparable damage to the institution. Even more frightening, some of these adjectives have been in use for centuries. Sometimes millenia! I'm surprised marriage has been able to hang on.
There are faithful marriages and adulterous marriages. Newlyweds have traditionally been differentiated from older couples, sometimes even to the point where older couples have been asked for advice on marriage! First, second, third marriages, all of which are often distinguished by the wedding clothes. Monogamous and polygamous marriages, the latter being indulged in by great Biblical heroes, mind you. Barren and fertile marriages. Sometimes marriages can be one, and then turn into another kind, such as a childless marriage becoming a fertile one. Traditionally, there were distinctions made between love matches, financial unions, arranged marriages and marriages of convenience.
All these differences make it a simple thing to make room for homosexual and heterosexual marriages. Obviously, the problem is diversity, as Blankenhorn points out. Getting rid of diversity is going to be a lot of work. I'm sure Blankenhorn is up to the job, though, even though he has trouble understanding the history and diversity of marriage that has existed until this point. Hell, maybe his inability to grasp that will help him.

Are people's opinions on abortion really changing?

The Washington Post argues that they are, but I think there's more going on here than you might think. This article seems to be evidence that people, especially young people, are uneducated on the subject.

"Kids need their parents to help make that decision," she says of parental notification requirements. It would have angered her "if there had been a law -- but it's for the best."

Note that she does not actually support parental notification laws. She just offers that it would be ideal if girls can have their parents' help if they have to get abortions, but she is against the law. Anyone pro-choice disagree? Anyone think it would be bad if girls can rely on their parents for help? This quote does not show increasing support for limits on abortion at all.

"I have not met one person who is very anti-choice," she says. "I have met people who said they would never think about having an abortion but they always add it's the person's choice."

You hear this alot, and it's an attitude that is used to push for limits on abortion rights. My take on this attitude is that no one imagines herself in the situation, or likes to. But you don't know what you will need until you need it.
When somebody says that they don't think of herself as the kind of person who would get an abortion, but she's pro-choice, it's interesting to prod a little further than leave it at that. Most girls who say this, if your next question is "What would you do if you got pregnant right now?" and you will learn alot more about their thinking. In my experience, there are two standard answers you'll get. Women who really don't want children, at least not now, will generally point out that they can't get pregnant, because they use birth control. Other women I know who are older and feel secure in a relationship will often say, "Well, I do want children and it might just be the time."
Asking someone point-blank if they imagine themselves getting an abortion is as good as asking her if she thinks of herself as a stupid slut in our parlance. We know in our hearts it's a bullshit question, but being women and raised to be dodgy when discussing our opinions, we're likely to answer with a dodge.
If pushed for their real opinions by someone who shows respect for those opinions, you are likely to get more interesting answers from women. They will talk about abortions they've had, their fears of childbirth, their desire for children, their wish that men were more involved. And they will tell you, over and over again, that things are never simple and the law should not get involved.
Here's a good example of how the media is confusing the issue of "what's wrong" with "what should be illegal":

Increasingly, women say men should be notified when their girlfriends or wives get pregnant and consulted about the decision to proceed with the birth or abort -- a concept of inclusion anathema to earlier activists.

Again, there is nowhere in that statement where women say that men have a legal right to be notified so that he can take control of the decision, at least some control. If you point blank asked women if there should be a notification law, you'll see much different answers. But when you ask a fuzzy "should", the question turns into a moral question about your own personal decisions. And as most women would feel comfortable turning to their partners, and in fact would really want that support, they are likely to answer accordingly. But if you ask if a woman who is the victim of domestic violence should be required to "consult" with her abusive husband, the answers would be much different. That men have a role is not something contested by "earlier activists". They were, and are, fighting spousal consent laws. They were fighting laws that said the ultimate decision is the man's, not the woman's.
Buried deep in the story is very good news indeed. Young men are showing equal numbers in support for abortion rights as young women. This is not evidence that the young are becoming more conservative. This is evidence that men are finally coming around to the feminist side, and that's a real news story.

By the way, a million people march for women's rights! Yea!

Abortion and class warfare

August Pollack has a good entry on how liberal policies are more effective at reducing the abortion rate than any ban on abortion ever could be.
The war against reproductive rights is more than an assault on women. It's more even than an assault on the basic right to bodily intergrity. It's a tool in the class war.
The right likes to go on and on about how criticizing government policies that steal from the poor and give to the rich are an unacceptable form of "class warfare". Of course, taking money from those who need it most and giving it to those who need it less is somehow not class warfare, but that's another post. It has become very difficult indeed for people in the major media to point out how certain laws disenfranchise the poor without being accused of socialist tendencies or commiting acts of class warfare. But it does well to remember that abortion bans are a weapon in the war of the wealthy and powerful against the rest of us.
If one of the Bush twins found herself in a precarious position and needed to obtain an abortion before she embarrassed her father the President after he has managed to get the procedure outlawed, what do you think the odds that she won't get the necessary abortion in a timely manner? Yeah, that's what I thought. There's a reason that anti-abortion groups are well-funded, because the rich know that they are only banning the procedure for the poor. If you have enough money, you never get an abortion. You merely had to have treatment for your "miscarriage".
Limiting ordinary women's access to birth control disempowers them as women and as members of their socio-economic class. Overly big families are an effective way to disempower the men as well. And of course, the disempowerment reaches well into the next generation. Simply put, the more people, the less resources for each individual. Scarcity means that people are too busy fighting for scraps to cooperate and put the people on top out of power. People who are busy always trying to figure out how to cover their own bills don't have time to follow politics and vote, much less time to organize and educate other people.
It has been shown repeatedly that the bigger the family, the smaller the economic chances for each child in it. People everywhere are figuring this out and deliberately limiting their family size, much to their government's consternation. Ordinary, working class people are ready to raise a generation of kids who have a better shot at getting a good education and some basic psychological motivation than the generations before them.
What's a rich, powerful class to do to hang onto their power? Well, they have to attack the working class's ability to raise themselves up through their children. If I were to come up with a plan to squash the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans, my plan would be to a) make it difficult if not impossible for ordinary people to control their family size, b) lower wages and raise unemployment so that they were too worried about keeping their jobs and making it through today rather than think about tomorrow, and c) destroy the ability of the public school system to give their students a worthwhile education so that only those who can afford private school are able to educate their children. Funny how those three goals seem to have gained ground under BushCo. Nah, it has to be coincidence.

Men and abortion rights

On Air America they are interviewing a young man who is marching on D.C. today and it's sort of sad that the first question addressed is, "Why would a man care?" His answer, a good one, is that people need to understand the importance of standing up for the right of others. Certainly, that's a more than sufficient argument for men to stand up for women's rights. If it wasn't for men acting out of a sense of basic justice, for instance, women would have never gotten the right to vote.
But in the case of women's reproductive rights, men have more invested than simple sympathy for women's causes. If a woman has a baby that she doesn't want, odds are pretty good that the father of the baby doesn't want it either. While well-off men have nothing to worry about because they have the cash and connections to obtain abortions for women that they have impregnated, there are alot of average men who will be very sorry they didn't support women's rights if abortion rights get repealed.
I have spent alot of space in this blog arguing that one of the major reasons that the abortion rights is that abortion rights symbolize, to many men, women's rejection of male control and therefore of men themselves. It's nonsense on various levels, but it's an emotional argument and not a logical one. In my experience, the likelihood that a man is pro-choice or pro-life depends more on his fear of losing power and importance in women's lives than any other factor. There's a solid reason that churches that vehmently have opposed women's rights throughout history are the very ones that oppose abortion. It's about women, not about babies. And it explains why so many men who cheerfully support politicians who would ban abortion tolerate it and even promote it in their own lives if it seems like the best decision.
The anti-abortion arguments that are made to appeal to men make it a man vs. woman issue. That's the reasoning behind the long lists of important men in history who could have been aborted, at least in theory. To those of us who are pro-choice, this list is utter bullshit. Yes, in theory these men could have been aborted. In theory, their parents could have fallen asleep early that night and not conceived, either. In theory, their mothers could have been killed in accidents before they were born. It didn't happen. So what?
Well, the list is an emotional argument addressed directly at the fear that women want to take over. This is a list of Important Men who could have been wiped out by foolish women who didn't understand their place in life, as support systems for Important Men. These independent women out there are threatening the world, because how can men be Important if they don't have a network of women willing to give up everything to support them?
In order to get men on our side, we're going to have to work through the emotional propaganda thrown at them to convince them that they are under attack by women who want to wipe them out altogether. One important message that needs to get across is that reproductive rights for women help couples make the best decisions for themselves. It would be helpful if the men in the pro-choice movement addressed other men about male self-interest served by feminism. Right off the top of my head, I can think of two big things that men will lose if women don't have easy access to birth control--sex and money.
I see why feminists, male and female alike, shy away from speaking frankly about how men save money on child and housewife care if women are allowed to minimize their number of births. It seems so shallow. And they really shy away from pointing out that women who don't have to worry about pregnancy are women who are more willing to have lots o' sex. True as it is, there's a fear that it will only increase men's sense of entitlement to access to women's bodies. But I think that fear is a bit overblown. The argument is that if women are free, men get laid more. That's outright encouragement for men to support female independence. It's also would have the effect of undermining anti-feminist arguments that feminists hate men and male sexuality.

Huh?

There's got to be more to this story. When I was last in England, everyone used terms of address that to Americans might seem a little forward, but to the English seemed perfectly natural. People called you "love" who didn't know you from Adam, it was just a way of saying, "Hey you!" It startled me at first, but I adapted.
I wonder if that's what's going on here, that they don't want to upset different cultural sensibilities instead of the whole sexual harassment nonsense. Note that there's no outright ban on calling somebody "love" or "darling".

"The wording of the document says the use of affectionate names such as 'darling' may also constitute sexual harassment," said a spokesman. "It's not that the word is banned. It's the context."

Yep. My guess is that the code is nowhere near as severe as this story implies. Of course, there is no way to know, considering that the text of the code is printed nowhere in this story. If more of these "severe" sexual harassment codes came out it might do serious damage to the belief that hysterical feminists are trying to ban flirting altogether so that men, who they hate, never get laid again.

What liberal media?

Even a boring old AP story covering The March for Women's Lives has to show proper deference to conservatives, even though there is no way that merely showing the march is taking sides. Scroll down to the bottom of the story so that you can find contact information to help protest the rights of women to bodily autonomy. Personally, I don't think it's balanced enough. There's no contact information to join the proper Taliban, just the Christian Taliban.

You think if there was a story about an anti-abortion rally, there would be contact information for Planned Parenthood at the bottom? No, I didn't think so either.

Religion and ridicule

Tristero has a great retort to the usually astute Kevin Drum's assertion that liberals need to avoid ridiculing Christian right-wingers, who are, after all, using their piety to shield themselves from criticism of their political beliefs and actions. Great points, across the board.
On top of the "what he said" stuff, I have some points I'd like to add.
Kevin likens the religious right to other insider groups who are permitted to mock themselves but cannot be mocked from the outside.

I too find this puzzling. I'm about as nonreligious as you can get, but even I understand the basics of in-group comedy: only blacks get to make fun of blacks, only Jews get to make fun of Jews, and only religious folks get to mock religion. That's both common sense and common courtesy.

Well, it's not polite to mock somebody's deeply held religious beliefs to their face, of course. But I think it's permissible to have humor around religion in situations where it's not right to make racist or sexist jokes. Tristero points out one generally applicable situation--it's fine to mock the hell out of someone, even to his face, who is putting on a false piety to push his political agenda. But there are other situations as well. Many of my friends and I (as well as my sister) have alot of fun making fun of the church and we have a right.
Because being a race or a sex or whatever is something you are, and your religion is something you choose. This cannot be emphasized enough. It's right to respect people's religious differences, just as it's right to respect all differences, particularly those held close to the heart, like religion. I show deference and respect to rabid NASCAR fans but then I make fun of them behind their back. Big deal.
On top of it, religion is not an insider/outsider issue in the same way that race or sex is, because religion is so pervasive that we are insiders to some degree. As an atheist, I'm an outsider by Kevin's standards. But as a baptized Episcopalian, I reserve the right to mock the church I was raised in relentlessly. And since I had to grow up in the part of the country where the Southern Baptists are blending not very well with Mexican Catholics and had to suffer through the Piety Wars that are ongoing there, I reserve the right to make fun of Christians in general. I don't, as a general rule, make fun of other religions, but then again it's not that funny if it's outside your experience.
I remember once in a high school literature class, a teacher was trying to explain the concept of "allusion". For those who don't know, a literary allusion is when a poet or writer alludes to mythology. The teacher said the most common mythological allusions were to Greek mythology and the Bible. When she said this, some students raised hell because the Bible is not "mythology". She tried to explain that "mythology" was a type of literature and the truth of it is not relevant, but they basically whined until she took it back. I reserve the right to mock them for being morons and mock them for having such strident religious beliefs that it turns them into morons.
Outside of overt mockery is the question of, well, questioning. The Christian right is pushing their agenda and then hiding behind their religious beliefs, which is wrong for the reasons Tristero mentions, since they are using religion to push a secular agenda. But they are able to dismiss that argument outright, because all they say is that their religion forbids them to accept secularism. That is, their religious beliefs dictate that they have to convert people to their cause by miseducation, force, whatever it takes. And if you don't let them act out their religious beliefs by letting them force them on others, then you are oppressing their religion. Dig?
Unfortunately, they have forced the issue. Either you turn the government over or you are oppressing their religion. That turning the government over would mean that they oppress everyone else is making an unacceptable secularist argument. They don't believe in equal rights, and forcing it on them is oppression. Really, this is the logic.
Fundamentalists know they are on shaky ground asking that their religion be favored above all others by our government so they have to justify it. The justification is something like this: this is a Judeo-Christian society. There weren't any atheists or Muslims or gays or feminists back when the country was founded so when they created religious freedom they just meant you got to pick which Christian denomination you belong to. And we're open to letting people go to other Christian churches, as long as ours is the official belief put forward by the law.
Why fundamentalism above other religions? Well, because they follow the Bible to the letter.
Tell me that isn't an open invitation to point out the logical inconsistencies in a religious belief that claims superiority because it has no logical inconsistencies. Luckily, there is nothing wrong with attacking somebody's religious beliefs. If there was something wrong with it, there would be no Protestantism, philosophy, or theology. Hell, there wouldn't be Christianity which is basically built on one man's criticisms of Judaism as it existed in his time.
Dingy liberals have mixed up being polite about other people's religious beliefs with criticizing religion. You don't just bust someone's ass at a party or whatever about their religious beliefs. Alot of Christian denomincations don't get this and their members will start trying to convert you, but bad manners in others doesn't mean that you have to have bad manners, so it's best to just sort of weasel out of the situation instead of getting into it.
But you start meddling in politics, saying that your Bible says that the government needs to adhere to your religious beliefs and you have invited others to look at those beliefs and criticize them. Yes, it's good to argue secularlism for its own sake, but I don't have a problem with pointing out that someone is mistaken about their own Bible, where it clearly states that one is to leave unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

Links through Roger Ailes.

Monogamy, holding office and Europeans

I'm reading right now about Eleanor Roosevelt and the Roosevelt's highly unusual but productive relationship. Now there is alot of speculation and rumor swirling around their marriage, but there are a few things that are clear. FDR philandered, Eleanor didn't like it but managed to deal with it, FDR thought well of his wife and took her opinion into consideration on many decisions, Eleanor did alot of the legwork for FDR because his disability made it difficult for him to travel or appear in public, FDR died in the arms of his mistress, and Eleanor was an inconsolable wreck when she got the news. Everything else is conjecture. Still, from what we do know for a fact, one thing can be concluded--the Roosevelts defined their marriage outside the narrow definition of what a traditional marriage is. But it was still a real marriage.
Marriage is obviously under alot of scrutiny right now. Gay activists have made their move towards getting same-sex marriage legalized and conservatives are also using this time to make the move to redefining marriage narrowly while pretending that their definition was always the definition of marriage. And their definition of marriage centers around sex, a definition that way too many liberals are willing to accept. According to cultural conservatives, marriage is a sexual relationship between a man and a woman who have sexual fidelity towards each other and produce children out of their sexual union. Lots of sex for the people who are trying to desex everything else in our culture.
Liberals accept the sexual argument, but they just want to expand the definition of what kind of sexual unions are acceptable under the definition of marriage. It's assumed all around that two people who marry will be in a sexually monogamous relationship, be it straight or gay. But sexual monogamy is not what makes a marriage. And this is a critical point. A marriage is a partnership, largely defined by outside rights and a series of private negotiations between the couple. It does not necessarily include fidelity, though it usually does. It doesn't require sexual reproduction. And nowadays there is no legal obligation to participate in marital "duties".
On top of that, there are countless ways that heterosexuals can create non-marital sexual relationships that are tolerated or even outright recognized by the law. Reliable birth control means that heterosexual sex isn't a guarantee of sexual reproduction. There's no shoving the toothpaste back in the tube. The mechanics of heterosexual sexuality have been divorced from marriage. And this has been going on for a long time, all over the globe. Marriage isn't about dealing with heterosexual sexuality anymore, so there's no reason not to extend it to homosexuals. My guess is that in the future, people will look at our refusal to extend marriage rights to homosexuals in puzzlement, the same way that we find the hysterical desire for virginal brides in the past to be overwrought.
The other thing that occured to me in reading this was how like the reaction to the Clintons was to the reaction of the Roosevelts, except that the anger against the Clintons was more organized. Most people felt like it was none of their business, a few people clutched their pearls and pretended they thought it was inconcievable that a couple might have an unusual marriage and still enter politics, and a few paranoid men who disliked independent women spread rumors that it was an orgy-fest all the time at the White House.
Lesson learned. There will always be paranoid misogynists and pearl-clutchers. It's a waste of time trying to make them grow up and understand what most people understand, that there are as many definitions of marriage as there are marriages. Gay rights activists should probably appeal to people's common sense on this issue. Since no two marriages are exactly alike, why should their marriages be held to a higher standard to be considered "legitimate" than straight people's marriages? I don't want the government coming in and making sure that my marriage adheres to this person or that's definition of what makes it right before the Lord, so why should gay people have to suffer under that scrutiny? They are adults, they want to form a family, the rest is their business and not yours.
If they stick to that message and don't dither from it, I think more people will jump on the gay marriage bandwagon.

Wouldn't burqas be easier?

Talk about inexact wording. What is the definition of "low-riding" pants? "Intimate" clothing? Honestly, requiring young women to cover themselves head to toe and show no skin would be easier.
This rules:

"I'm sick of seeing it," said Shepherd, a first-term legislator. "The community's outraged. And if parents can't do their job, if parents can't regulate what their children wear, then there should be a law."

Agreed! We should all get to make laws against fashions we don't like! Personally, I am against golf pants. And novelty ties. Oh! Wait! I want to make a law against men who have beer bellies who hang them over their belts. Can I do that? Or is it only kosher to make laws against fashion as long as fear and loathing of the female body is the impetus?

Via Pandagon.

Scrambling

Pandagon has a little fun with this blatantly stupid article by Victor Hanson, bravely adding his nonsense to the scramble. Jesse's take on it is good, but brief. Hanson broke his argument down into parts and used all sorts of weaselly arguments, two strategies that are like chocolate to me. So, my turn:

Myth #1: America turned off its allies. His point is that NATO barely has any troops in Afghanistan, and um, there are lots of Coalition troops in Iraq. (For now.) This might almost work if you pretend as hard as you can that the Coalition is anything other than a BushCo figment that exists outside of NATO or UN approval. He refuses to address how the UN or our traditional allies regard this situation. And then he proves himself wrong:

Yes, the U.N. will return to Iraq — but only when the United States defeats the insurrectionists.

Let me get this straight: The UN refuses to support this invasion of Iraq because they refused to support it in the first place and this is proof of allied support. Sure, dude.

Myth #2: Democracy cannot be implemented by force. The major thrust of his argument is that we kicked ass in WWII. He manages to insult our ever-supportive allies by saying that European resistance was an utter failure without question. (One does wonder how well the war would have gone if it was just the U.S. fighting with absolutely no European resistance.) But anyway, apparently I learned about WWII and why we got into all wrong. Apparently we went to Europe to oust a bunch of tyrants that seized power under mysterious cirumstances and teach the backwards Europeans the Meaning of Democracy. That they are Democracies Now proves that it works. Let's pretend that, say, Hitler, wasn't democratically elected and this works great.

Myth #3: Lies got us into this war. Weasel words never get better than this:

Mr. Bush's lectures about WMD, while perhaps privileging such fears over more pressing practical and humanitarian reasons to remove Saddam Hussein....

What most of us would call "lied outright" turns into "privileging such fears". He forgot the word "unfounded", but c'mon, he's not being dishonest!
Next step--Clinton did it. He had to have been the one who lied! We all know that oral copulators are liars! Beginning and end of story!
He forgets that the there was reason to believe during Clinton's administration that there were WMD and that's why we cooperated with the evil UN to force Hussein to allow UN inspectors in to make sure he didn't. Of course, you remember that Clinton only dealt with the Middle East to distract from the Most Important Blow Job of All Time. Of course, why this means that the inspectors didn't do their job is unknown.

Myth #4: Profit-making led to this war. Seriously, the right needs to quit denying this. Why not start saying that there can be no "just" war without profiteering? The base is laid for that belief. It's believed that capitalism=freedom&democracy. Why not just start saying that it's impossible to wage good wars unless there is a profit motivation, just as there is no reason to do anything else if it isn't for profit? The best part about this argument is that it circumvents the argument from the left that if Iraq is a war of liberation, why not all un-liberated countries? You can fall back on the handy blame-the-victim argument: if the people of other countries want liberation, they need to offer something to us for their liberation, like oil. Un-liberated countries just haven't worked hard enough to get our attention, see?

Myth #5: Israel has caused the United States untold headaches in the Arab world by its intransigent policies. His point is that this isn't true because Palestinians are morons. I'm not sure how that means we don't have problems due to our support of Israel.
First, he complains that different Palestinians have different opinions.

Some Arab citizens of Israel, residing in almost entirely Arab border towns and calling themselves Palestinians, were furious about Mr. Sharon's offer to cede them sovereign Israeli soil and thus allow them to join the new Palestinian nation. Others were hysterical that two killers — who promised not merely the "liberation" of the West Bank, but also the utter destruction of Israel — were in fact killed in a war by Israelis.

I like his weasel word to even concede that "Palestinians" even exist: "calling themselves Palestinians". Apparently, it's their fault that they aren't Israelis. Israel treats them like crap because they somehow got it into their head that they don't belong for some reason.
Of course, his view of the whole situation, that Palestinians are causing their own problems, made me realize how simple it would be to fix the entire Middle East: all the Palestinians need to convert to Judaism! Then they would fit right in, no questions asked! It's simple to convert to Judaism, you know. They are famous for their open-door policy. I'm sure Mr. Hanson will convert today to set a good example.
While they're at it, it might be wise to start pretending that the House of Saud are Christian. Make a law against reporting the truth in the U.S. and watch the criticism dry up. Maybe.

The terms of the debate

I couldn't figure exactly what it is about this essay by William Saletan on what feminists need to do to garner sympathy for abortion rights. I mean, I agree with him that the major issues is reminding people that the decision to have an abortion is not made in a vacuum. I agree that radical feminists need to be reminded that they are speaking to middle America and like it or not, they are going to have address the fact that much of middle America sees women as mothers and nothing more. (Get them to appreciate that the state of motherhood should be be empowered and slowly but surely they will understand that mothers are people with their own hopes and dreams is the theory. It's a sloooooow strategy but it's effective. Women didn't get the vote until the suffragists were able to get people to see that women would be voting to improve the condition of children, i.e. they would be voting as mothers not as individuals.)
What's obviously wrong with his argument is that he makes the common mistake of assuming that feminists are guilty of something they are entirely innocent of. He assumes that it was feminists who hyper-focused the debate on the moment of the abortion, that they were the ones who divided women into two groups--mothers and women who got abortions. Or, if they didn't do it, they allowed it. Hardly. Feminists have arguing from the beginning that abortion and contraception need to be legalized because they are already used, that women who obtain abortions are all women, mothers and future mothers, single women and married women, younger and older. They have fought an uphill battle against the conservative stereotype of the woman who gets an abortion--a selfish teenager, usually of color, stupid slutty and mean. In fact, it's unlikely that this stereotype of Hitler as a black teenage mom exists at all.
But all the evidence in the world that women who get abortions will probably one day be good mommies or often are good mommies already (a possibility that this author forgets himself) isn't going to convince the hard-core family values crowd. Now is the time not to be fooled by the code word "family". "Family" doesn't mean actual, living, breathing families. "Family" is code for patriarchy, and if you value patriarchy, you don't get abortions, period. Terminating a pregnancy is a rejection of a woman's fate as baby-bearer and therefore a rejection of the patriarchy, period. Even if a woman already has children or wants to have children is irrelevant. The reality of motherhood, the day-to-day work of it is no matter in "family values". Motherhood is essentially the act of bringing forth what a man has conceived. The actual raising of children is Hallmark card nonsense.
Most Americans are not hard-core patriarchy fans. Women can vote in this country and they do. We do have a certain amount of respect for our history of feminism. That's why there is so much anxiety around abortion. People don't like women rejecting men but they don't like men having total control over women either. Feminists have argued effectively in the past and will continue to do so that by disallowing male control over women does not automatically equal female rejection of men.
I do agree that feminists need to do what they can to show that they embrace motherhood. In fact, they need to constantly point out that they are greater champions of real motherhood than any family values screamer. It's liberals after all who want better daycare, better schools, and better health care, all a great help to actual mothers. Feminists want girl children educated as well as boy children, which appeals to the mother-sense over "family" values. But far better to the feminist cause is to see the reality of this argument, that it is the meat of the history of feminist arguments, instead of see motherhood as something to co-opt from conservatives.
A far better argument than "We like mothers, too!" is to point out how feminists have fought for mothers against conservative resistance from day one. Birth control so that the children you have don't starve because you keep having them. Better health care and legal abortion for women so children don't grow up motherless as often as they used to. Widows' pensions. Day care so that women don't have to decide between watching over their children and feeding them. The vote so that women may vote for that which improves family life as well as just women's lives. Property rights for married women so that whne men die widows can continue to care for their children. No-fault divorce so that children don't have to be dragged through ugly, drawn-out divorce cases where the parents are accusing each other of vile things in public. Feminists spearheaded the campaigns against child abuse and sexual abuse. Anti-domestic violence initiatives in large part so that children don't have to grow up in violent atmospheres. Shall I continue?

Something to think about

The book I'm reading right now is pretty hard to put down. It's called America's Women by Gail Collins and her breezy humor and grasp of human nature makes it fun to read. Anyway, I just finished her discussion of how the temperance movement gave way to the free and easy 1920's and something really struck me.
The temperance movement, for all its surface resemblances to the cultural warriors of today, was profoundly different. For one thing, the cultural warriors of today are anti-progress on all levels and their antipathy towards sexuality is based in a loathing of women more than anything else. The temperance movement of the late 19th century was started by men but the ball really got rolling when the suffragists joined up. The temperance movement suffragists resembled nothing more than the anti-sex feminists like Andrea Dworkin that are the minority of feminists today, not the majority like then.
The female-run temperance movement had two major goals--stop men from drinking and visiting prostitutes. Alot of their reasoning was similar to the reasoning of the cultural warriors today. They were religious killjoys and resentful of people having all the fun they couldn't have. But they also had a very good reason for their goals as well. As women barely had any rights at all, wives had to suffer miserably if they had husbands who were drunken louses. Worse, if their husbands cheated with prostitutes, and many if not most husbands did, it was not only a betrayal it was a huge health risk. Many, many good loyal wives were victims of ugly and incurable venereal diseases. There are not exact numbers, but the situation was bad. From the book:

Dr. Prince Morrow, a New York physician, stunned his audience by estimating "that there is more venereal infection among virtuous wives than among professional prostitutes."... Morrow claimed that 60 percent of American men had contacted syphilis or gonorrhea....

At the time, the temperance movement, like the chastity movement now, framed the discussion in terms of the wickedly unchaste vs. the pure and godly women. In the 1920's, though, things changed. Women began to be able to go on dates unchaperoned and sexual contact between unmarried people became common. The result? The number of men who visited prostitutes plummeted. Birth control information became more widely used. Women were expected to learn something about sex before they grew up and subsequently their health improved.
There are no exact figures outside of the birth rate. Alot of this is conjecture. But just the fact that the birth rate more than halved between 1880 and 1900 and kept plummeting after that shows that women were learning to take control of their health and that loosened sexual mores, not tightened ones, made that possible. I think alot of people realized that at the time and that's one of the reasons that within a couple generations using contraception went from being an unspeakable sin for most people to common practice.
And I think that all this happened so long ago that people have forgotten. The lessons that abstinence just ain't gonna happen and contraception is critical for a woman's health are lost to time. And that what we cannot remember is doomed to repeat itself. Certainly it's been forgotten that in the days before widespread contraception use that abortion was actually quite common, despite its dangers. Health workers of the time reported working with women who had easily twice as many abortions as babies, and that was in the days when women had 5, 6, 7 children. The anti-abortion movement has been very effective in tricking people into believing that abortion is a modern problem, something beyond the pale for our more virtuous ancestors. In fact, the opposite is true. Nothing has done more to lower the abortion rate than empowering women to take charge of their own bodies and therefore lives.

The culture war attacks from another angle

I guess anything that isn't staying home and praying is under attack these days. Like live music. I am always perplexed by the idea that music hurts anybody, but as I'm sure everyone knows, it's a widely held opinion that music is dangerous. And today in Austin, the supposed Live Music Capitol of the World, music got the smackdown again. This shit is ridiculous:

Austin police arrested Ozomatli members and the band's manager on March 18 while enforcing the city noise ordinance.
The band took the stage late and played past 2 a.m., McCracken said.
Police charged one of the musicians with assaulting a police officer. Lawyers are working to get the charges dropped, according to the band.

Actually, what happened was the band played even though the cops were shouting at them and people were dancing and in a desperate attempt to stop these evildoers from their sick, twisted dancing behavior, the cops pepper sprayed everyone and then arrested the band.
And of course, a big nationwide blow to live music is the so-called RAVE act, designed to circumvent your right to peaceably assemble by holding everyone liable if one person in a crowd partakes of an illegal drug. Supposedly written up to make taking drugs even more illegal (whatever), this act in reality has a chilling effect on live music venues. As usual, expect underground music scenes to be the hardest hit. I have a funny feeling Tim McGraw concerts won't be busted up by cops looking for crankheads, common as they are in the country music world.
Music is political, even if not overtly so. The mere existence of an underground music scene makes cultural conservatives quake in their boots. People getting together, full of joy and energy and creativity are dangerous indeed. And that's when the music isn't political at all. Add a band like, say, the routinely censored Dead Kennedys in the mix and the threat grows.
Here's a website with information about the RAVE act and other attacks on music. Check it out. And, if nothing else, please remain conscious of the continous threat that just ordinary music, literature and other creative arts are under.

Earth Day

There's alot of talk on Earth Day about regulations (important!), SUV's (bad!) and recycling (keep it up!). However, I notice that sometimes people forget one of the biggest enviromental problems--how we're powering our homes and offices.
Austin has a Green Choice electricity option, as I'm sure many places do. Renewable resource energy options are often a little more expensive, but it doesn't have to be that way. By signing up for Green Choice, I locked into a constant rate for the next five years. As everyone else's prices skyrocket, mine will stay the same. And the more people who plug into wind farms and dams for their electricity, the cheaper it will get.
It was easy for me to switch over. I just emailed them, basically. Go to your local energy provider's website and see if they have similar programs. It's simple to do and is certainly just as important a decision as recycling and driving efficient vehicles.

Men are shut out of the discussion

Should men have a say when it comes to abortion? Listening to the radio, there were a series of calls about men and abortion. One woman who was an escort to a clinic noted that the protesters at clinics were mostly male, and the male protesters were the ones who were most likely to be loud, insulting and violent. It's obvious to everyone but themselves that they hate women and they hate that women are outside of their control. This push towards complete control confuses the issue of what men's place in the discussion is.
Some people called the show and expressed anxiety about how women can just go and make the decision to have abortions without consulting the men who got them pregnant. That this is even an issue concerns me greatly. Men cannot be given the right to decide what women do with their bodies. Isn't that the whole point of the controversy?
Abortion is about more than not having a baby. It's about not being pregnant, too. Men can have babies in the sense that they can father them, raise them, love them, pay for them, etc. But men can't become pregnant-duh. Until they do, it's just not their decision to make. And of course, that's not going to happen.
Of course, in the context of a relationship, decisions are made together. Couples usually confer on everything, from the color of the couch to the contraception that they are going to use. But there is a vast world of sexual decisions and behaviors that happen outside the realm of happy, monogamous couples. And sometimes those involve terminating a pregnancy. And sometimes bringing the guy into the discussion is a bad idea.
Legal abortion on demand should be an absolute right regardless of what any individual's feelings about what is right for herself might be. Even if it would feel like a betrayal to you if someone in your life got an abortion without telling you, that doesn't mean that it isn't the right decision for another woman living another life.
Laws requiring women to tell father or husband about her abortion highlight exactly what I am saying about this discussion. It has nothing to do with saving babies, but about preserving the patriarchy. Even beyond abortion, the discussion of controlling medical decisions centers only around that which women do to their own wombs. Culture conservatives want laws keeping women from over-the-counter emergency contraception, laws requiring girls to inform their parents if they are on the pill, laws forcing health workers to turn over the names of girls having sex outside of marriage. It's telling that there isn't a push for spousal and parental consent laws for men's choices. No phone calls to parents of teenage boys purchasing condoms, no laws requiring men to inform their wives about vasectomies.

Fear of a Black Planet

That was the c.d. that was sitting in my passenger seat. This was years ago in my single days. I was on a date with a guy a bit, but not much older than me. He picked the disc up and said, "Ugh. How can you listen to this rap music?" That was the first and last date. I know nascent grumpy old fartitude when I see it.
I thought of it while listening to my new addiction, Air America, this morning. The hosts of Morning Sedition were taking phone calls on "hip hop culture". One grumpy old fart after another called in with the same litany of complaints about rap:

*It's not melodic--it's noisy.
*I can't understand what they're saying.
*It's violent.
*It disrespects women.
*It's obscene, sex-obsessed, grossly sexual.
*It promotes drug use.
*The kids who listen to it look and act ridiculous.

The danger of the modern grumpy old fart is that he thinks that his is hip and with it, so the problem must be the music. When you point out, as the hosts on the show pointed out, that this litany of complaints are the same racist, youth-loathing, sex-phobic complaints that have been aimed at every new music that emerges from black culture. Replace the words "rap" and "hip-hop" with "rock and roll", and the talk show could be straight out of the 50's and 60's without any other changes. And it's easy to "prove" that a certain kind of music is all these things if you only look at certain songs, certain lyrics.

*It's not melodic--it's noisy.
*I can't understand what they're saying.
*It's violent.
*It disrespects women.
*It's obscene, sex-obsessed, grossly sexual.
*It promotes drug use.

Ours is a violent, misogynistic culture. It's inevitable that some of the music it produces will reflect that. It does seem that the violent, misogynistic rap music is the most popular, but that's the result of the mentality that dominates the record industry now. Record executives are actively trying reduce the diversity of the music that is released, and putting all their efforts towards promoting the handful of albums they do release. The few records that do get released are going to reflect the racist stereotypes and misogyny of the record executives. Those records are promoted relentlessly and purchased in large numbers by the violent, misogynistic buying audience. Because it sells, record executives are reinforced in their practices. It turns into a huge echo chamber. The monopolization of radio and television stations makes it increasingly difficult for alternative voices to invade and break up the circle jerk.
It's not just hip-hop that is affected. Punk rock, at least the stuff that makes it onto the radio, which used to be a fantastic way for female musicians and subversive viewpoints to have access to the airwaves has been reduced to the same bullshit as everything else on the radio--mean sexism, stupid materialism, the whole frat boy viewpoint.
If you don't like this crap, and I know I don't, you can do something about it. Boycott MTV and corporate labels. Buy from independent labels. Make an effort to seek out diverse music; I promise, it's out there. Go to shows to support smaller bands. But trashing entire genres of music is helping no one.

Rotten on so many levels

This whole thing is depressing. It's depressing that these coffins are filled with those barely out of high school. It's depressing that this has been supressed until now for political reasons. It's depressing that the freedom of the press is being stifled with barely a protest. It's depressing that the administration is so petty that they likely influenced the decision to have the photographer fired for disturbing their control over the press. But for some reason, this is what stuck with me the most:

Pentagon officials yesterday said the government's policy defers to the sensitivities of bereaved families.

This is a horrid example of doublespeak. I have trouble believing that families of dead soliders support a policy of pretending that the deaths didn't happen so that it is easier to whip up support for wars that will result in more dead soliders. This is crawling-on-the-belly low to use the grief of military families as an excuse to protect their own sorry asses.

Thoughts on choice

The March for Women's Lives is coming up this weekend, and thoughts about birth control, abortion and the meaning of "choice" are crowding my head.

*I watched the episode of Sex and the City where Miranda falls pregnant and can't go through with the abortion. For once, it's not the usual cop-out episode about the unwanted pregnancy where the woman (usually very young) becomes pregnant, can't go through with the abortion because it's wrong, and is rewarded with a miscarriage. Miranda has the baby and it's portrayed as a real choice. She doesn't get out of an abortion because it's wrong, but because her reproductive system is all goofy and she thinks it may be her last chance. There was no talk about the "baby" in any real sense; when Carrie's doofus boyfriend says something about Miranda's baby, she reminds him that there won't be a baby.
Miranda doesn't have an abortion, but that doesn't mean the show gets away with pretending that abortion never happens like other shows do. Carrie and Samantha talk freely about having abortions in the past. Samantha doesn't feel guilty; Carrie does but only because she is afraid, as many women are, that she will be judged unfairly. Even the ridiculousness of adoption as a handy alternative was given its due. Miranda is pregnant and doesn't want to be; Charlotte wants to be pregnant but can't be. When Carrie's doofus boyfriend jokingly suggests a swap, she points out that it's not like giving away a sweater.
The show also dealt well with the subject of men and their part in all of this. It's the big bugaboo no one wants to deal with, in no small part because so many men just want to dig their heels in and demand control over things they have no right to control. But still, it takes two to tango and the question was whether men have a right to know if they have impregnated a woman. But knowledge is power and a man who knows that he has gotten a woman pregnant is bound to feel that he has a say is what she chooses next. There's not a right answer, but it's good that somebody feels brave enough to ask the question.

*I liked that episode alot because a friend and I kicked around the ethics of telling the guy who got you pregnant that you were getting an abortion. Neither of us had been in that situation, but both of us felt like that just as it's a woman's choice to get an abortion it's her choice to involve who she will in that decision. Of course, on a realistic level, if you get an abortion behind the back of a long-term boyfriend or husband, there's serious issues that need to be dealt with and we would support completely a male friend who had to split with a woman for that. However, we agreed that if a friend came to us and asked to help with an abortion and she wasn't telling the guy for whatever reason, we would respect her decision completely and support it however we could.
To get a male perspective, I asked my boyfriend. Putting himself in his immediate circumstances, he said he would feel betrayed if it happened to him. I pointed out that yes, it would be a betrayal in his current circumstances, since he had a long-term girlfriend. He said, yes, he would mostly like to help as he could. But if a female friend asked for his help and had reason not to tell the guy who got her pregnant, he would trust her judgement and help how he could, he said.

*I had to sit in traffic behind a Mercedes with a right-to-life sticker beside a flag sticker on it today for a half hour. I was bored and nearly got out to start shit with the driver. Nothing makes me madder than maudlin stickers decrying child-murder, particularly stickers like this one which accused women who have abortions of murdering children to further their own decadent (read: slutty) lifestyles. If abortion is infanticide, then why is miscarriage taken in stride? Why don't women weep and tear out their hair when they have their periods?
I finally passed the car and we rode alongside each other for awhile. The driver was a young guy dressed in Ralph Lauren-type clothes and talking on his cell phone at an animated pace. I was a bit surprised. Most guys my age, particularly those that bother to get a Mercedes, designer clothes, and a cell phone, really like to bother with advertising that they are hardline on wanting to punish women for errant sexual behavior; in fact, they would like women to participate in errant sexual behavior with them.
It made me wonder. Is this guy married? Chaste? Doubtful on both counts. Odds are he is like most guys, cruising and hitting girls up and like alot of young Republicans his politics don't have much relation to his behavior.
Yes, it was alot of guesswork. But I've known far too many guys like him. They still amaze me every time.

*A friend and I discussed the birth control pill. It can be a pain in the ass at times, and it isn't for everyone, but the birth control pill is still one of the greatest things ever, as far as we were concerned. Not only was it one of the most effective forms of birth control ever, it effectively turned the responsibility for birth control over to those who had the strongest interest in effective birth control, i.e. women.
There's alot of rhetoric about how young women don't understand what choice means, that we don't realize what a threat our choices are under. I used to think this was overstated. My friends and I knew the history of contraceptive rights. We vote. We give what we can to Planned Parenthood. Alot of my friends are a few years older than me and came of age during the AIDS crisis. Alot of them watched good friends die from the disease. In a way, we know more than older women do the importance of protection; after all, the feminist fighters of yore were unlikely to have to run forward and clean up when a friend with HIV accidentally cut himself and no one else would find the guts to help him as a friend of mine did.
But same friend and I were talking about men and sex and birth control the other night and I realized that we are making our decisions on a different level than we might have at the height of the AIDS scare and our own dating years. We're in monogamous, disease-free relationships and condoms are a part of the past. We talk about the pill and abortion now, the very two things that are most under attack by cultural conservatives. We do take it for granted that we can keep using the pill as long as we want to and that if the pill fails us, abortion is always available. We are wrong to take it for granted since there are so many people who would have that taken from us.
Make no mistake; it's women's sexuality that is on trial with the anti-abortion movement. They have elaborate reasons that the pill, emergency contraception, and abortion are on their hit list. These contraceptive methods must be employed at the moment of intercourse, and therefore men must be consulted. All other methods require involving a man in the process, and as I said before, knowledge is power. It's no coincidence that the very contraceptive methods the right-to-life movement is targeting happen to be the ones that men don't control. This isn't about babies or families or anything nice like that. It's about making sure that men have the final say in what happens to women's bodies, and that's wrong.

In a free society, everyone, including women, has the right to physical autonomy.

Porn debate rears its ugly head

Now the anti-porn argument is that "real" women just don't compare to porn actresses. Naomi Wolf kicked off the opening shot of this argument and alot of people are liking it. But I just don't buy it. I see far, far too many flaws in this argument.
The major point of the argument is that men have been built up by porn to expect physical perfection in women and therefore women are going to be sexually neglected as men turn to porn, where women are better-looking. I think that's women projecting their own physical insecurities onto porn actresses, not men comparing. For one thing, I find it hard to believe that most men really consider super-skinny women with hard, fake breasts, fried and bleached hair and leathery tans to be some kind of physical ideal. Sure, there are a handful of men who really like that, but most men have their own particular tastes, and most men that I know of at least would rather be with a woman who is pretty and natural instead of skanked up and surgically redecorated. Yeah, it's a different version of the Madonna/whore complex, but at least it's much milder. Most guys expect good girls to like sex and good girls are still the ones they want to date.
Wolf brings up the fashion of trimming pubic hair as evidence that women have to compete with porn actresses for male attention, stating that women her age don't really trim or shave whereas women my age do. In this case, she is mistaking fashion for something more serious. It used to be that women didn't shave their legs or armpits either, but both came into fashion without any pressure from the pornography industry. For the entire century, each generation added a little more area to be shaved; pubic hair was just the last frontier on that. For all we know, being hairy might be the fashion half a century from now.
There is no doubt that women are under alot of pressure to be beautiful, but this has always been true and I don't really see how adding just one more series of images to the public imagination can really make a difference. Images of supermodels with their unattainable beauty are far more threatening to me than any porn star could ever be. In fact, you are far more likely to see a slight thickness of thigh, a round tummy, a bit of cellulite or an ass pimple in porn than you are ever on television or in mainstream magazines.
Another concern she brings up is that women just don't have the arsenal of sexual skills to compete with porn stars. Again, I have to wonder how much bearing that has on real life. Maybe there was a time when men were completely satisfied with women who just showed up and took off their clothes, but I doubt that just as I doubt that there was a time when women were completely satisfied with hands off missionary position sex themselves. Raised expectations are a result of the sexual revolution that also increased the acceptability of porn, but raised expectations are also the result of feminism and women's demands that they too want to have pleasure in bed alongside men.
But Wolf argues that expectations have been raised more on women than on men:

The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.

Fair enough. We still live in a male-dominated society and standard male fantasies are going to dominate young people's sexual experimentation. The cure for this isn't sexual repression but continuing to work at making space for girl's sexual fantasies and experiments.
I can't help but think that this is the old argument of "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"--i.e., men will not be happy in ordinary, monogamous relationships and women cannot be happy without them, so sex becomes a bartering tool that women use to "buy" themselves commitment from men. Porn, in this case, is a way for men to "cheat" and devalue what women have to offer and thereby "escape" having to commit to relationships to get any kind of sex. This argument degrades women more than a porn movie can. If women have to use sex to "snag" men, think about what that says about women--that we are desperate for men, that we have nothing to offer outside of sex--all those ugly, mean, and untrue stereotypes.
The cow-milk argument is a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's one of the myriad of arguments that can be boiled down to: We have to impede women's freedom for their own good. The cow-milk argument is used against women who choose to have sex without tying themselves down right away to the first guy they sleep with. It's used against abortion and birth control to say that these things are a male plot to escape responsibility towards women. A variation of take-away-freedom-for-your-own-good is used to justify chaperones and curfews. And both the protectionist argument and the cow-milk argument have been used to justify the veil. In fact, Wolf gets taken away by her own logic and become enamored of the veil:

Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.
She must feel, I thought, so hot.

The veil is not there to protect women or to make them feel special. It's there to degrade them, to be a constant reminder of the shamefulness of female sexuality. And, one look at the tight, pinched faces of most of the people making the cow-milk or protectionist arguments against short skirts, porn, birth control, cohabitation, or even unchaperoned dates tells you all you need to know about why they are really against these things--they believe women are nasty and their sexuality is disturbing. John Ashcroft didn't conceal a nude statue and then demand a list of names of women who have had abortions because he is concerned that women are losing their ability to "snag" men.
At the end, Wolf trots out a young man who seems to have lost his ability to be amazed by sex:

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

This doesn't tell me that young men have lost their interest in sex. This tells me that Wolf has forgotten what young men are like. This kind of dumbass blundering and bragging is far from unknown in young men, to say the least. And of course young men who are too immature to properly manage a real relationship are going to avail themselves of plenty of porn. Taking that away from them in order to compel them to date young women isn't a way to help young women, but it's a great way to get young women into relationships with men who haven't learned to respect women and treat them right. Anyway, it's not likely to work. Young men were enthusiastic masturbators before Internet porn and nothing will change that.
That the younger men in her story sound like morons and the older men have a more thoughtful approach to sex and relationships isn't the result of older men's youthful deprivations. It's more likely a product of maturity.
Men grow up and start wanting more than quick arousal. They want love, companionship, family and all sorts of things living breathing women will always fulfill better than any picture could. And yes, they want sex with love and affection, and oh yeah, the sense that a real person is there and responding. Some men are emotional retards, of course, and they may never get past preferring porn to the messiness of real sex with real women. But I don't see the harm in letting them remove themselves from the dating scene so that they don't inflict themselves on other people.

Are women capable of making their own choices?

I think it's a rhetorical question, duh. Of course, women are capable of making their own decisions. Whether you like it or not, there is absolutely no reason to believe that men are better judges of women's lives than women themselves. In fact, there is a long and sordid history of what can happen to women when their autonomy is handed over to others, always on the theory that women can't make decisions for themselves. And even though women are considered legally equal to men in this country, there are still tons of people who think that women shouldn't have autonomy, because the Bible says no-no:

Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior(Eph 5:22-23).

Of course, most of us hear about a bunch of men already in charge of the church voting themselves the Biblical authority not to hear backtalk from their wives and we just roll our eyes and snicker. A small faction of super-religious people are free to make their own decisions and that doesn't have any effect on women who don't believe in their religion, right? Well, not quite. Women are daughters of Eve, sinful and dangerously out of control.

I would like to outlaw contraception...contraception is disgusting – people using each other for pleasure. -Joseph Scheidler, Pro-Life Action League

Women who seek emergency contraception reveal an 'inability to control themselves in sexual situations.- Jennifer Taylor of Human Rights International, an anti-choice group

Women can't control themselves and they need an outside force to keep them under control. If a husband isn't there to do it, the government needs to step in. The constant threat of unwanted pregnancy is a very effective way to keep women's sexual decisions under control. That most women use or have used contraception and that a third of them have had an abortion is just all the more evidence that female immorality is rampant and needs to be brought under control.
That's why abortion and contraception rights are critical even to people who don't have immediate need to use either. This is about equality. Women are not monstrous, sinful creatures who need god, government and men to bring them under control, they are simply human beings who deserve the right to make decisions about themselves for themselves. There will be alot of rhetoric about sex and babies, whores vs. families flying around this weekend from those who will be protesting the March for Women's Lives. Think about what they are saying, about you and your sisters and friends and girlfriends and wives and mothers, and don't let them take control of this country.

Working hard at finding the right family to be born to

Here's an editorial debunking the myth that tax cuts somehow benefit the hardest-working people in the country. In fact, they benefit people born to wealth more than anybody.
Now, I know that the whole "hard-earned" money crap conservatives pour out is there to convince ordinary working Americans that they are getting a tax cut when they're not. After all, we are the ones who are earning our money the hard way--by over-working ourselves at demeaning jobs. But we aren't getting the tax cuts. The other conservative bugaboo is that progressive taxes "punish success".
I really have a problem with that. By that definition, how "successful" you are is based solely on how much money you have. And no one seems to question this, even though it means that Paris Hilton is more "successful" than me, even though I have at least successfully learned there are times when you don't have to answer your cell phone.
It's hard to understand why all this talk about hard work and success has any resonance with Americans at all. We work hard, but we don't get rich. You'd think people's own experiences would tell them that they are getting screwed by this rhetoric. I guess it's true then that many, if not most Americans labor under the irrational belief that our ship is coming in any damn day now and we'll be owning hotels and getting our own reality shows. That has to be it, because otherwise I don't see why people are lining up to vote themselves higher taxes to support the leisure class.
Whether I suddenly get rich or not (and working for the state, my guess is on the not side), I still tend to think we shouldn't be taxing the hell out of the "unsuccessful" people who keep the electricity on, keep the tires on your car from just falling off, teach kids to read, put out fires when they start, make sure you don't bleed to death if you have an accident, diligently make sure your private bank account information stays private and the other millions of jobs we can't function without that fall on the working class. After all, we are the ones whose work is actually most likely to suffer if it's not paying as well as it should, not because we aren't properly "motivated" but because financial troubles can be incredibly distracting.

Via Prometheus 6.

I get mail

I wrote a letter a few weeks ago to my Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, regarding my disapproval of the recent push towards censorship, between the raising of the FCC fines and the expansion of what is considered "obscene". I specifically pointed out that if "the children" are a concern, it's more important to teach children the importance of freedom instead of raising them in fear that they may one day hear the F word.
Well, her office must have seen the words "FCC" and "children" and assumed I was one of the hysterics who think society will end if a kid hears a curse word, because the letter assured me that Hutchinson is doing what she can to supress my 1st amendment rights (though it wasn't quite phrased that way). Well, she's getting another letter with less rhetorical flourish stating my opinions on this subject. The word "children" will be in it, but more along the lines of why I don't want my tax dollars spent on raising other people's children to be morons, but I'm sure I'll get another letter like this. Anyway, until then, I will share what my Senator thinks of your intelligence:

Last year, I wrote FCC Chairman Michael Powell expressing my disapproval of his panel's October 2003 ruling that a certain four-letter word is obscene only when used as a verb. Increased fines should send a strong message to the FCC to use its authority to protect our children and to broadcasters to provide more wholesome programming.

I wonder if her aides who write this sit around laughing and trying to figure out how to make this as ridiculous-sounding as possible. A "certain four-letter word"? Why, I am a decent person and I'm not sure I know what you mean, Ms. Hutchinson. "Wholesome programming"? I'll bet she means Seventh Heaven, the most offensive program on television, in my opinion. "Protect our children"? Well, that's a reasonable stance to take. I lost my faith and decided to become a shoplifter when I hear Bono say "fucking" on television, and that's a fact. I can only imagine how depraved it might make naive children.
We the public do not need to be treated like a kindergarten classroom. And if we must be, I want a naptime. This letter does have useful information. If you want to complain about censorship to the FCC, go ahead and contact their consumer line at 1-888-225-5322 or email them at fccinfo@fcc.gov.

Viagra cited in a divorce case

A British woman divorced her husband because she said he was too aggressive afte taking Viagra. Obviously, this is a load of nonsense. Viagra isn't going to create problems that weren't there. Still, it's pretty funny--especially Pfizer's response:

However, the drug's manufacturers Pfizer said it was unfair to blame the treatment - and said the pill has helped bring couples closer.

Those new ads with the football and the tire are probably the problem more than anything, particularly is "sexually aggressive" is a euphemism for "thinks foreplay is for sissies".

Via Trish Wilson.

The Big Name Change

Cary Tennis fields a question from a woman who's husband-to-be is pressuring her to change her name to his once they get married. His answer is cute and funny, and I don't really have a quarrel with it. But the very fact of the question makes me sad. She is obviously insulted that he is asking her to give up her name, but she has also sucked up all the nonsense that passes for reason that is getting shoved down women's throats regarding this issue and she's confused.
For some reason, the issue of the married name change has become a major player in the backlash. There's a huge effort to recast the decision to change one's name at one's husband's insistence as a feminist choice. The reasons to do it are laughably transparent:

-It's just a name, after all. Really? Why should you put out the effort to change it on your Social Security card, driver's license, credit cards, library cards, address, bills, phone, and email account to name a few if it's not a big deal? Why spend the next few years retraining everyone to learn your name? If it's not important, it's not worth busting your ass for.
-It's my choice. Technically, it is your choice to let others make your choices for you, but it's a little misleading to call it "your" choice in that sense. If you were nagged and guilt-tripped into doing it when you'd rather not, as this woman in this letter would clearly rather not, then it's not your choice in the Platonic ideal sense of a choice at all.
-It shows that we are bonded/that we are family now. This argument has alot of weight with the letter-writer. However, she makes it clear that she doesn't really see the need and her husband is the one who thinks that it's about bonding. Well, it's important to him and not to her, so the solution is obvious--he needs to put out the effort and change his name to hers. Simple. What? Men won't do this? But I thought it was about bonding, not about ownership.....
-The children should have the same last name as their mother. Well, no one's stopping you from naming your children after yourself, and since your husband has changed his name to yours there should be no problem. Anyway, my mom and I didn't have the same last name and I promise you, no one ever got confused and tried to take me away from her.

You can change your name or not, whichever you like. I don't care. But this nonsense has got to stop. These are excuses, not reasons. All the smoke and mirrors in the world cannot change the fact that women taking on their husbands' names is a retrograde and sexist institution.

You're just one gadget away from Penthouse Forum

It seems lately like for every new gadget on the market, there is a story about people using it to arrange casual encounters. My guess is that the companies release these stories as part of their advertising campaigns to better reach their coveted single young male consumer. This is the "journalist" version of an advertisement in Maxim magazine where the half-dressed young lady is draped over the newest gadget for no discernible reason.
I would hope that no one is dumb enough to believe that getting this new doodad will really improve your chance of anoymous sexual encounters, but then again, I remember the early 90's when being online and revealing that you were female produced a deluge of propositions, sight unseen. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

The obsessive art of list-making

Half the reason to make lists is to have people jump all over you about your choices of who to include and who not to include. Comedy Central just had the 100 greatest comedians of all and I don't think it's nit-picking to ask what the fuck they were thinking. How the hell did Gallagher make the list and Margaret Cho didn't? You don't have to like her to realize that's just nonsense.

Harassment campaigns

Thinking With My Fingers on the culture of sexual harassment in the upper sciences that women can expect. Basically, it's about how one of the big barriers to women joining the sciences is the hostility that greets their presence, often expressed in gross sexual harassment. Of course, the myth about sexual harassment that girls should be grateful for whatever sexual attention they get is expressed and noted by Torill:

However these guys are not really doing you any harm, admittedly they are objectifying your body but, heck, i'd love for someone to objectify my body and most women love the flattery.

I hope this poster is making money to spread this crap. She (or she claims to be a she) goes on to say that women love being treated like meat and brainy women particularly should like it because they so rarely get the opportunity. She claims most women feel this way. I'm sorry but not in my world. I don't know any women who think it's wonderful to be intimidated by a man using sexual behavior in a threatening manner because he is threatened by intelligence in women. That is an insult on so many levels.
This kind of rhetoric not only hurts women intellectually, by suggesting that they should enjoy being treated like retarded versions of men mentally, but it damages them sexually as well. In the real world, if a man is attracted to a woman he doesn't decide to let her know by scaring her. Instead of focusing on what is wrong with a woman who doesn't like to be man-handled and harassed, it might be more productive to examine why some men are so threatened by women they fall back on sexual degradation and hints of violence to restore their own self-esteem.

Roger Ebert defends Howard Stern

Censorship is an important issue to film critics, of course, but still, it was cool that he wrote this. I have to say, I agree pretty much whole-heartedly. This made me chuckle:

Sometimes he is ''offensive,'' but to be quite frank, I am not ''offended,'' because what he says falls within the realm of words and subjects that, as an adult, I have long been familiar with even without the tutelage of Stern.

He's saying, "Duh, dumbass" but nicely. Hee hee.

Via Sideshow.

Random book memes

Through Trish Wilson.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.


"There is no need to introduce the idea of an ether, whose presence anyway cannot be detected, as the Michelson-Morley experiment showed." A Brief History of Time, Stephen W. Hawking

Useful reference material

Newt Gingrich wasn't particularly good at concealing his love of generalities and buzzwords. After all, he published a list of buzzwords that Republicans should use as propagandistic phrases. Here's a copy. Most of the anti-liberal smears are in here, but missing are coded words regarding racial minorities, foreigners, and the beliefs of the religious right.

Via Pacific Views.

Coded language and the Christian right

It has been well-documented how coded racist language is used to help politicians speak directly to their racist constituencies while avoiding detection by the mainstream press. W.'s speechwriters have effectively tweaked this strategy to speak to the religious right without alarming the majority of us who would have a problem, to say the least, with policy decisions being guided in any way by Biblical prophecies. Bush got caught when he used an overly-loaded word "crusade" a couple years ago when speaking of the war on terrorism, and last night it was revealed that this was no mistake, that "crusade" is an important word that BushCo intends to keep in circulation.
This is not a badly planned attempt to intimidate Muslims, even if that is the effect. This word was used in a campaign letter and was intended to set fire to people who already vote Republican. It's coded language rearing its ugly head again. BushCo is nodding to the religious right again, and he's probably not going to get called out for it this time, either.

Edited to say: I'm glad I'm not crazy. Atrios apparently believes that this language is meant to raise right wing religious cash as well.

Tom Ridge lays the groundwork

Tom Ridge fully expects the terrorist threats to escalate the closer the election gets. The terrorists, it seems, really want Bush to win:

"I think we also have to take seriously that they might try during the cycle leading up to the election to do something," Rice said. "In some ways, it seems like it would be too good to pass up for them, and so we are actively ... trying to make certain that we are responding appropriately."

And another thing-misdefining capitalism

Conservatives really do miss the Cold War, as has been widely noted. Hell, our administration appointed a bunch of people who think if they wish hard enough, they can still be fighting it. It gave them an enemy, a purpose. It was exciting, because with the Evil Empire as an enemy they could run around the globe making deals with the devil in order to undermine it, a mess that we are still getting to clean up now and probably will be trying to clean up for decades.
But, on the money side of things, it created the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to redefine what the words "democracy" and "capitalism" meant. Or, more specifically, to conflate the two words so that they were generally regarded as the same thing. Of course, it was a long, involved process to do this and it meant setting up and rigidly enforcing a series of dichotomies. Luckily, they had help.
Democracy is diametrically opposed to dictatorship. When communism first emerged, there really was no reason for people to assume communist countries would have to be dictatorships, and in theory, they don't have to be. However, thanks in large part to Stalin who didn't really seem to see a difference, communist countries are dictatorships.
So now that communism=dictatorship, there was alot of work put into creating a second dichotomy of communism/capitalism. Are they opposites? Well, I don't really think so, but only because I tend to think that no economic system really can have an opposite in another. That is a profound misunderstanding of what an economy is. Any one economy has many different economic systems and they all rely on one another to exist, even if sometimes there are conflicts that have to be managed, such as the conflict between capitalism and free markets. Under communism, in fact, there can be a sort of capitalism that is just heavily capped and managed. And there's no reason there can't be some kind of free market.
So, to fix the communist/capitalist dichotomy in people's minds, a real Us vs. Them mentality had to come into play. Luckily, the dictatorship/democracy dichotomy was there to feed into it. If you look back on anti-Soviet propaganda in the 1950's, there's surprisingly little criticism of their economy and more criticism of the lack of freedom and conformity.
The economic differences were fed slowly into the propaganda. Once we had accepted that theirs was a system opposite of ours, we were open to messages about how we had refrigerators and grocery stores and they had bread lines. Of course, it helped that it was true that their economies sucked. The messages regarding economic differences grew in size until in the 1980's, you barely heard about how the Russians were not allowed, say, freedom of speech and religion and all you heard was the poor Russians don't have McDonald's.
(I'm not trying to trivialize their deprivation at all. If only to rid their people of deprivation, then communism had to fall. However, economic deprivation is a different thing than being deprived of civil rights, even if the two are related.)
Basically the Us side was democracy and the Them side was dictatorship and slowly but surely capitalism began to be fed into the Us side while communism was on the Them side. We're opposites, aren't we? And therefore, just as surely as communism=dictatorship, democracy=capitalism. The media around the fall of the Berlin Wall was a culmination of decades of developing this belief. I remember that the new "freedom" of the East Berliners was represented by their awe at the huge, Western grocery stores.
Meanwhile, back home criticizing capitalism was equated with criticizing democracy and therefore freedom. And since capitalism=democracy and democracy=freedom, freedom means capitalist freedom. Suggesting that consumer freedom might be closer to the spirit of democracy was and still is dismissed as "communist" thinking. But there was a big flaw in the whole communism-dictatorship/democracy-capitalist set-up. And that was that once communism fell, the dichotomy would fall with it.
Now that the Soviet Union doesn't dominate our foreign policy and press, it's easy to see that democracy=capitalism is false. There are capitalist countries that aren't free and there are semi-socialist countries that are. And it defies common sense. In a democracy, we can vote capitalism out of existence and still have a democracy.
I'm not against capitalism outright; it has its place. But I am glad that people are waking up and realizing capitalism isn't essential to democracy and we can move on and find ways to manage it.

Food and free markets

Linking to Atrios is like breathing in its obviousness, but this is such a short but perfect entry, I'm going to extract it in hopes that someone who might have missed it reads it.

Do businessmen like free markets? No, why would they?

Anyway, if you just want to skip Atrios and go to the story he links to, here it is. The government has come in and forced a small, high-quality beef distributor not to test every cow it slaughters for mad cow in order to open itself back up to the Japanese market. Conservatives like to talk about their love of free markets, but what they actually love is capitalism.
They're not the same thing? No, they are not. When it comes to economics, politicians have been playing fast and loose with their terms in order to garner support they wouldn't otherwise would have for huge, soul-destroying corporations. Capitalism is an economic system where people put up capital and expect return on their investments. Freedom and competition are totally irrelevant. In fact, freedom and competition can undermine profits, because consumers are free to take their business to competitors.
Conservatives are trying to convince the public that "free" markets mean that capitalists are free to invest money where they like. As I see it though, free markets should and do mean that the consumer has freedom of choice due to healthy competition.
So, heavy regulation can actually help free markets. That's why monopoly-busting is a free market principle, but a serious problem for capitalists. Advertising regulation is an important factor, too, so that businesses have to compete fairly on the quality of their products instead of on the quality of their marketing.
Free markets vs. capitalism is really well-illustrated right now in the food industry. Small farmers are really suffering under corporate monopolies and everybody's freedom to make sound food purchases is suffering as well. Jim Hightower is a good guy to read on this, since he was our Texas Ag Commissioner for two terms and worked with small farmers. Read his book There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos for a good breakdown of how the food industry suffers under anti-free market capitalism.

So, what does this have to do with campaign finance reform? Glad you asked.
Under our current campaign finance system, capitalists are allowed to use campaign contributions as a form of investment capital and they expect good return on their investments. Right now they are pouring tons of money into both parties and they see it as nothing more than buying stock in those parties. Our government is being run like a business, alright. And as big corporations are the major stockholders, they get to make decisions with their own profits in mind.
This is not a democracy. I imagine that if it was put to a vote, the majority of Americans would prefer letting small business find ways to improve safety testing of meat. In a democracy, one person gets a vote, not one dollar. People like me who say that we have to get the money out of politics NOW are considered radicals. But I really can't think of anything more off-the-wall than our current situation where whether or not our food is safety-tested is decided by the people who have to spend money to safety-test it. That's like letting criminals decide what the crime laws should be.

The cover-up will continue whether Bush wins or loses

It's in the only way they know how--cover, distort and hide. Knowing that there is a solid chance of a loss this November, BushCo is trying to push the national archivist out so that they can put their own person in, somebody with experience at hiding pertinent information, Allen Weinstein. With all their effort going towards covering up mistakes of the past, it's unlikely they are going to avoid making new ones.

Via Pacific Views

Reversing vandalism

Slate has a story on an art project that grew out of vandalism in a public library. A homophobe on a mission apparently went into the library and vandalized books on gay and lesbian topics. For all his enthusiasm, he doesn't seem to be the sharpest pencil in the box:

Among the books destroyed were works by author Gay Talese and those concerning the Enola Gay, the famous World War II warplane, as well as romance novels and books on women's health.

He must spaz out when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy comes on. Which is it? Queer or straight?

Not sure how I feel about this one

I think that anti-abortion people have freedom of speech for sure. But I do have a quarrel with they way they say that they are simply passing out fliers. As I have noted many times before, the Christian fundamentalists and anti-abortion activists who come to campus are not interested in politely passing out fliers. They are interested in shouting at people, shoving gross pictures in their faces, and singling women out for abuse by the way they are dressed. Of course, that's only a small minority, but they do make a spectacle.
However, I feel like they should be able to come to campus and make a spectacle of themselves. They have their freedom of speech. Campus security should be on hand to stop them lest they attack people personally, but if they want to shout themselves hoarse at people who mostly ignore them, I say let them.

What is oppression and what isn't

I am so sick and tired of hearing about how oppressed people are for being rich, white, straight, male, Christian or whatever. Whenever I hear this coming out of people's mouths, I do feel a small urge to let them know what fun it really can be to be oppressed or bullied for being different. Like this wonderous piece of work trolling on Pandagon's site:

being bullied in school has nothing to do with being gay. I know thousands of people who are straight and who were bullied in school. This is just a silly attempt at bullying conservatives into accepting gay marriage.

Beyond the sheer ridiculousness of pretending that gay teenagers aren't bully targets, you see a perfect example of real bullying (such as getting beaten up for simply existing) equated with non-bullying (having to live with the knowledge that people exist who are different than you). It clearly pains some people to have to live in a world with people different from themselves, but I say, tough. Cry me a fucking river.

Other things that are not oppression versus things that are:

*Getting hit on by someone you don't like and blowing them off is not oppression. Getting beat to death because you flirted innocently with the wrong person is oppression.
*Conversely, getting blown off by someone you are hitting on in a bar is not harassment. Calling somebody names and groping them against their protests is harassment.
*People speaking about things that are outside of your belief system on a radio station you can switch off is not oppressing you and your beliefs. You are allowed to have those beliefs even if someone has different ones. Being fined thousands or even millions of dollars for speaking your mind is oppression.
*Not getting to hear people praise your religion day in and day out is not oppression. Being forced to praise a religion that you do not believe in is oppression.
*Hearing criticism of a power structure that benefits you personally is not oppression. Power structures based on accident of birth are oppressive.

He really is Son of a Bush

I heard it again today, a fact that probably does need to be flogged as much as possible--Bush cut taxes during a war, and we have NEVER cut taxes during a war. It's insanity and why would he do it? Pretty much I think the general feeling was that it was an idealogical thing--BushCo believes in tax cuts and no silly war is going to get in the way. The more cynical of us felt like BushCo knew that cutting taxes during the war is bad for the country but didn't care because it fit their own ends, that being to make themselves and their friends as rich as possible and screw everybody else. There's lots of validity to both those arguments but I think something else is working here.
The question is: Why did Cheney, Rove, etc. choose Bush to be their figurehead? I'm certain they could have found a figurehead who was a better public speaker, for one thing. Then it occurs to me--this is about Bush the First more than I realized. It's felt that the campaigners dropped the ball on Bush I, that they wasted too much time on making decisions with the public interest in mind and less time on building up his image.
I imagine after Ronald Reagan, Republicans felt like they had a lock on power indefinitely and if Democrats kept winning it was that Republicans weren't hanging onto power hard enough. The way the media spun the Bush the First loss has infected their minds. The media's take is not that Clinton won, but that Bush lost on two issues--not "finishing" the war with Iraq and raising taxes. He didn't "finish" the war with Iraq and he raised taxes.
They want a do-over. They have convinced themselves Bush would have won if he had "finished" the war and cut taxes. Once they installed a Bush who can fix the "mistakes" his dad made, then they would have a lock on power to infinity. And that's why they're flailing. People are questioning the very things that should have made the Bush presidency perfect, and they don't know what to do. Isn't that why Bush the First lost: taxes and Iraq? What's going on?

Limousine liberals, Air America and "bounced" checks

Conservative radio was so eager for any sign that Air America was going to go under that they jumped all over the fact that their L.A. affiliate dumped them over a stop payment on a check that they unwittingly made an off-target argument. It mostly annoyed me that Drudge, etc. were lying about the situation and I didn't think of the larger implications of the lie until my boyfriend came home from full of reports from his mostly conservative co-workers about how Air America has been "shut down completely". That they were "bouncing checks". Just as I was about to boil over, he said, "They were laughing and saying how did anyone think a liberal group could get any money together?"
I said, "Wait a minute. Isn't the problem with evil liberals is that they are rich and look down their noses at the common man who has to work for a living?"
In their eagerness to jump all over Air America, conservative pundits accidentally let on the truth of the matter, however subtly--they only exist because they have a constant flow of cash from the rich who have quite a bit of interest in keeping the public bought and the Republicans in power. I doubt their loyal audiences will catch onto that (since they still haven't wrapped their minds around the absurdity behind the theory of a cabal of the super-rich who want to turn us into Communists), but still, I had to laugh.

The Southern strategy

Has the Republican party disavowed racism? No, they've only dressed it up some, argues David Neiwert. While not all conservatives, or even most conservatives, necessarily have racist beliefs personally, it is still an approved strategy for the Republican party. In fact, alot of effort goes into redecorating racists beliefs to adjust for cultural changes. And while the intention may not be to keep racism alive, that is the effect.
It's a great piece. I would add, as an aside, that racial intolerance towards blacks proved to be such an effective strategy that it's being expanded to open intolerance on a number of issues, including growing antagonism towards equality for women, gays, immigrants, Hispanics, etc., all in an attempt to attract different groups who may harbor these intolerances. So, while someone may have conservative religious beliefs but not be racist, he may be attracted to the message of intolerance towards gays and feminism.
But by aligning himself with racists, he is expanding their power base, if inadvertently. So, Republicans are increasingly allowing themselves to be defined as the party of intolerance across the board.

Another Googlebomb

Christopher Ruddy

Here's why.

A reminder

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Apparently, there is some confusion about what the word "no" means. It means zero, none, nada. I'm not certain where the airwaves exception is. Putting a microphone in someone's hand doesn't strip away the freedom of speech, or at least it shouldn't.
I realize that the convoluted argument that allows the FCC to regulate what can and cannot be said on the radio is that they don't regulate "political" speech, and that they just uphold "community standards" regarding sexual or scatological language. However, there is no language, as you can see, in the 1st amendment specifying what kind of speech is protected. Indeed, it seems that all speech is protected.
There's a good reason that the 1st amendment doesn't specify "political" speech, that was the intention. And that is because "political speech" is a redundant phrase in this context. All speech is political, or at least potentially so. The minute that speech offends someone and there is an attempt to supress it, that speech becomes political.
So yes, while speech with sexual content may not originally be intended to make a political statement but merely to entertain, it becomes political once censorship enters the debate. To put it simply, when you say "fuck" on the radio, you are not only saying the word but you are protesting censorship and that word is political, and therefore must be defended even under the "political" definition of free speech.

Another reminder: Because someone has the freedom to speech does not mean others are required to listen. If something offends you, don't listen to it. Simple, but true.

Are we really a Christian nation?

One of the big arguments for forcing kids to praise God in schools is that it is "historical" and not a reference to God but to the fact that our founders were Christian. Some quotes from our Founding Fathers on that subject.

Thanks, Talent Show.

Hours of entertainment

This is one of the funniest (albeit unintentionally) sites I have seen in awhile. Just a sampling of the writing:

In recent years, because of a popular President’s personal peccadilloes, Americans have seen an increase of oral sex among young people. Also, in the last year alone, high school campuses in America have seen an explosion of lesbian kissing after Madonna kissed Britney Spears on national TV. Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you find your sons and daughters making secret porn movies at their schools in the wake of this new movie.

That would be alarming, especially if you caught your sons and daughters making a porn together.

Exactly!

Great breakdown of how most Americans can actually qualify as political liberals and still yet think of themselves as conservatives. My big disagreement with the author is that Americans aren't aligned with the Democrats--in many cases, they are left of the Democrats. Here's a great quote:

Conservatives, after all, are dominating through superior marketing, not with better ideas or policies. However, because Democrats have failed to grasp the root of the problem, they have reacted to the growing conservative dominance by trying to fit into a more conservative mold. This wrong-headed response has played into the hands of conservatives.

I think that it's critical that liberals hold their nose and learn to "brand" themselves like conservatives do. While thoughtful analysis is naturally preferrable to soundbite-style "branding", it also comes off as obtuse in our soundbite driven world. And we're not gonna change anything being at the bottom of the heap. First get the power, then make the changes.
Of course, the reason our marketers suck is that we just don't have the cash. And we never will. Donating to the Republican party is making a business investment for the rich, and it generally pays off better than even the biggest stock market boom. We cannot waste time bemoaning that and take Spivak's advice and discover our advantages. And those big advantages are youth, energy and talent that the Republicans just don't have.
The Republicans know how important recruiting the young is. That's why they focus so much on the College Republicans and waste so much ink on the supposed super-liberalness on college campuses, the unfairness of racial minorities getting college spots that "belong" to whites, and the importance of controlling female sexual behavior while also defending men against being charged with sexual harassment and date rape, to best appeal to young men who feel like they are getting less than they are entitled to. But c'mon! That rhetoric doesn't really attract the brightest and most talented of young people. And everyone else hates the young Republicans--tap that energy.
Women are our strength, too, particularly young and single women. A simple move would be to make a real effort to make the top people in the party 50% female, branding ourselves visually as the female-friendly party. The Republicans could never compete with that. They just don't have enough women for it.
And, well, we're sexier. It's true! The Republicans know that sex appeal is important and so they dug and dug and the best they could come up with was ANN COULTER. We can totally do better than that. We're the party of John Kennedy! Most Americans practice one or another of the sexual behaviors that the Republicans are trying to supress or censor or whatever. The Democrats have gone conservative on this, afraid that they don't have a counter point to the "it's for the children" crap. Also, we haven't the guts to confront party members who are pro-censorship, like Al Gore. But the Republicans are kicking our ass by pretending liberals censor stuff for "political correctness". We need to turn that shit around and say that we are the party that believes that people can make decisions for themselves. Don't hold our noses and vaguely say that we are pro-choice. Make it specific--they want to take away your damn birth control pills. That will get the vote out.
This Air America station is a really good first step. I hope we can keep it up.

Bush can't think of any mistakes he may have made

The Center for American Progress is giving us an opportunity to jog his memory.

My friend cannot decide whether or not to get a tattoo

So she decided to take a survey. She sent this to a bunch of her friends to find out what we think. She informs me that this is very serious, but here it is for your entertainment. I'm taking her name out, and replacing it with the initial L. Those of you who know her will probably figure it out anyway.

Name: ____________________________
Relation to L.: ____________________

Please underline the response that most accurately reflects your opinion or
experience:

I like tattoos. TRUE FALSE NO OPINION
I have a tattoo(s). TRUE FALSE
I am happy with my ink. TRUE FALSE NO OPINION
I regret getting my tattoo. TRUE FALSE NO OPINION
I anticipate getting more. TRUE FALSE NOT SURE
I anticipate removing mine. TRUE FALSE NOT SURE
My tattoo(s) is/are generally visible. TRUE FALSE SOME ARE
My tattoo(s) is/are in a fleshy spot. TRUE FALSE SOME ARE
My tattoo(s) is/are in a bony spot TRUE FALSE SOME ARE
My tattoo(s) has faded too much. TRUE FALSE CAN'T SEE IT
On a scale of 1-10 (1 being the least), how painful was getting your ink?
__________
Do you anticipate still liking your tattoo(s) at age 40? 55? 70? 85?
(indicate all that apply.)
Will you hide your tattoo(s) from your kids? YES NO NO KIDS ANTICIPATED
Is your significant other fond of your ink? YES NO HAS NO OPINION
Did you get your tattoo(s) BEFORE AFTER meeting
your S.O.?
Would your SO's opinion affect your decision if you were to get more? YES NO
MAYBE
Does your SO have any tattoos? YES NO
Do you like your SO's tattoo? YES NO NO OPINION
Would you want your SO to consult you before getting inked? YES NO NO
OPINION

Knowing what you know of me, please underline the response that most accurately
reflects your opinion or experience:
L. is pretty level headed. ABSOLUTELY HA, YOU'RE KIDDING,
RIGHT?
L. is capricious. ENTIRELY NO NO MORE THAN ANYONE
L. over-thinks everything. WELL, DUH I WISH NO MORE THAN MYSELF
L. under-thinks everything. WAY NAH NO MORE THAN ANYONE
L. is too level headed to get inked. TRUE FALSE NOT A
FACTOR
L. is too capricious to get inked. TRUE FALSE NOT A
FACTOR
L. is/will over-think(ing) this idea. ENTIRELY NO NO MORE THAN
ANYONE
L. is/will under-think(ing) this idea. CERTAINLY NO SHE'S
STILL SMARTER THAN A SAILOR
L. will love a tattoo. SURE DOUBTFUL WHO KNOWS?
L. will hate a tattoo. SURE DOUBTFUL WHO KNOWS?
L. is an enigma. CITRUS SLUDGE SLEEP? THAT'S WHERE I'M A
VIKING!
Which icon below best describes L.?
OPUS, THE PENGUIN BLUEBONNET A SWEETPEA SNOOPY CELTIC
CROSS SUN LENNON'S DOVE A MONKEY A TULIP CALLA LILY YUCCA
HORNY TOAD (non-TCU-related) GRAPE CLUSTER LEMON ZIA "1101" a
DAISY NAVAJO STORYTELLER
OTHER: _____________________ L. IS HER OWN ICON.

Any other comments welcome:
_____________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

She is open to any input, including that from strangers. Feel free to give an opinion and I'll pass it along.

Freaky fundie Wednesday

Wednesdays on campus the fundamentalists come to the mall and scream at people for a few hours, get ignored or argued with and go home. I am frequently startled by their willingness to sink to new lows in tastelessness. For a few weeks, it was one guy screaming detailed descriptions of anal sex in order to encourage Christ-like love of homosexuals, making me wish the FCC would consider regulating missionaries.
But today they sank to an all-time low. One man was holding an enormous sign with a picture of the Twin Towers on fire and the words to the effect that if you were on the 86th floor it would be best if you are saved. I told them they made me sick as I walked by but they ignored me. I guess they think they're doing the right thing, but from the outside it looks like self-righteousness far past the point of delusion.

The attack on public schools continues

Governor Perry wants to get rid of the already weak Robin Hood fund. The Robin Hood fund is an attempt to rectify some of the huge disparities between the public schools here in Texas, and it has been resisted every step of the way by people in the "better" neighborhoods who don't see why a penny of their money should go to educating "those people" but still manage to get irritated when fast food workers have bad grammar. Perry wants to try to get some more money to poorer schools by the favorite tax of Republicans--the sales tax. Yes, it's dressed up as a "sin tax", taking money from the wicked and giving it to poor children, but that's just a fancy way of avoiding the words "sales tax".
Regardless of the sinfulness of the product, a sales tax is a regressive tax. I don't like the property tax system of funding schools, either, but I don't think that replacing an already unfair tax with an even more unfair tax is the solution at all. It doesn't help poor people to hit them harder with taxes. We need to replace our outrageous property and sales taxes with an old-fashioned, progressive income tax.
In some school districts of wealthier neighborhoods, there is a computer for every student. In my school district, which was pretty much dirt poor, some kids had to get up at 4:00 or earlier in the morning to take the bus 80 miles to go to school because there wasn't enough money to build a high school in their town. This is not a situation that will be helped at all by shifting more of the tax burden from the rich to the poor.

Bush speaks

I commend everyone out there who was able to sit through that entire thing. I tuned in for a bit, heard him whine that he was asked a question that he hadn't been given in written form beforehand and then complain that the reporters were pressuring him and I had to flip it off.
On top of everything else, Son of a Bush annoys me. He is often described as being a personable guy that everyone likes, and I can sort of see it. He's from a common enough type down here in Texas--the smirking rich frat boy, proud that he's a little dumb, doesn't take anything seriously and reveals that he actually has a temper when someone asks him to take something seriously. You can wander into any classroom here at UT and watch one of these guys get called on by the teacher and see a repeat of the performance he gave last night. Those guys are usually pretty popular, but they irritate me whether they get to be President or not. I secretly always suspected, though, that they are only popular because they sort of intimidate people into acting like they like them, but since the Prez can't intimidate his fans into liking him, I may have to rethink that opinion.

SXSW round-ups continue

My boyfriend the bum made the Austin Chronicle working for free for the Yuppie Pricks. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see. Speaking of the Yuppie Pricks, a video clip of their made the official SXSW page. Yea!

Money is boring, but very important

Good post from Prometheus 6. Everything else is important, of course, but don't lose focus. The main BushCo goal is reinstate a situation where lesser people are taxed in order to finance their betters. In feudal times, people worked for the king, paid the king money, gave the king not only their labor but their lives in case there was war. In return, the king, uh, brought god's mercy on them or something. This is a great situation if you are the king. Don't forget that.

The Great Israeli mistake

The interview on Majority Report with Colin Quinn is telling. I don't know if he really knows it or not, but Quinn tends to reveal the justifications that the everyday conservative guy tells himself about his politics. It's obvious that Israel is problem numero uno in the Middle East for us in the long term. Why we support Israel and what it means in the long run probably does more to confuse people than anything else.
The big selling point of our support for Israel to conservatives is to flatter their own sense of themselves as practical-minded cynics. It's felt that we need to support Israel despite all the problems it causes us, because we need a sympathetic foothold in the Middle East. Colin Quinn said this as an aside, and I don't think this is a side issue at all.
My sister and I had a long conversation about this and we both agreed that most Americans, if they were to speak honestly, would feel that the best chance for Middle East peace is to start out by giving Palestine its own state and then using our political and financial pull to keep them from fighting each other. However, conservatives are led to believe that this is an impossibility so we better just support Israel, even if they try to decimate Palestine, because we need an ally in the Middle East.
Well, they're wrong. I sincerely think this. I think our best chance of having good relations with the Middle East is to make a good faith effort to promote peace, and the first step is to convince Israel of the necessity of creating a separate Palestinian state. And, considering the amount of cash we give them, I think we can be very convincing.
So, what's the real reason that we just can't make ourselves ask Israel to back off? This is where the confusion comes in. I think conservatives and liberals alike assume it must be a really good reason. But from what I can tell, it's not really, not at all. In both America and in Israel, small minorities of religious conservatives are dictating political policy, for slightly different reasons that just happen to converge right now.
Fundamentalist Jews believe quite sincerely that God promised them that land, all of it, and letting non-Jews have some of it is breaking a very serious covenant with God. And in this country, a minority of Christians believe not only that Israel must have that land in order for Jesus to return, but that Jesus' return will be in their lifetimes and they surely aren't going to let some political compromise screw that up for them.
You bring this up, and people squirm and say, "No, it's about oil, etc." Yes, but I ask you this: how in the hell would it change the fact that we would have an ally in Israel if they allowed Palestine their own state?
We don't like to admit the obvious--we are allowing freaky religious types to dictate government policy. The first step in ridding ourselves of the terrorist threat is embracing our secularism and refusing to support governments that screw themselves and others in order to confirm their own freaky religious beliefs.

The Great Iraqi mistake

Listening to Majority Report on Air America, Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder are making the Great Iraqi arguing mistake with Colin Quinn. They are allowing him to make Hussein's crimes the issues. This is a conservative's favorite argument because they are trying to press you into sounding like you are defending Hussein. My suggestion: When a conservative accuses you of wanting to keep a murderous despot in power, ask why the murdering was so acceptable at its height when we were funding it. Say it nicely. Is there a good reason we felt he was such a swell guy when he was bombing the crap out if Iran? Well?

Unfortunate death turned into political card

The vultures are swarming over the unfortunate death of a teenage girl who tried to have an abortion. This article manages to condemn the poor girl while still "mourning" her death, by implying that she felt about abortion as she did about shoe shopping:

"They literally went shopping," Redden told reporters. "One even offered prenatal care and vitamins."

There's no way to know what really went on here, particularly since this article tries to make the abortion clinic sound as much like a bunch of militant criminals as possible. However, her peculiar situation manages to leak through. There's an implication that her family is opposed to abortion:

Redden said the abortion business acted out of interest in "money and greed" when they performed an abortion on her cousin, Tamiia Russell, who was six months pregnant.

She was skirted back and forth to various doctors and hospitals by various relatives and friends and the enitre thing sounds like it was dragged out and very emotionally draining, if not worse. And why was it that she was allowed to bleed through a mattress before she was taken to the hospital?
The article makes a big deal out of how she was under 18. Yes, she was under 18 and that surely had alot to do with death, but not for the reasons they believe. If she had her full rights, she wouldn't have had to scuttle around for 24 weeks trying to get an abortion, leading to this tragedy.
I am most sorry that this girl died. I find it saddening that the pro-life forces are pretending to care to score political points. The pro-choice side believes in choice, and therefore we respect both the choice to be pregnant as surely as we do not to be pregnant and we don't run around scoring points by pointing out how many women die every year in childbirth.
Don't believe pro-lifers for a moment when they pretend that one of their main missions is to somehow reduce abortion-related deaths. Making abortion illegal will, without a doubt, result in many more women dying from abortion-related deaths.
In fact, this girl's death is more indicative of what you can expect if abortion is illegal. As this article points out repeatedly, this was an illegal abortion.

Via Alas, a Blog.

Why should Ashcroft give a crap?

He was appointed as a big fat thank you to the Christian right, and as such, he is pretty secure. He was the perfect person to try to blame 9/11 on Clinton even though in many ways he is more responsible than anyone for blatantly ignoring the terrorist threat, and he's been one of the most opportunistic members of the administration, seeing 9/11 as a perfect excuse to expand his powers and take away those pesky rights that allow Americans to continue to live their lives in unholy ways.
Still, I can tell that he was coached to contain himself. I suspect that he had trouble restraining himself from blaming Americans themselves for the attacks, as we have brought The Lord's wrath upon ourselves with our sinning. 9/11 is exactly the sort of thing God threw down on Israel every time the king did something sinful. And considering that Clinton both the sinned like David (adultery) and like Solomon (letting his wife have some authority), he may have single-handedly brought the wrath of God upon us. One more Democrat in office, and we might be worshipping Baal.

Tax day is coming up

Billionaires for Bush is on it. Don't forget that this is exactly why Bush is in the White House. The money in this country bought themselves a tax cut and we're paying for it in every way.

The delights of "buggery"

Just when I'm kind of falling asleep at my desk, I get a great laugh from BoiFromTroy. John Derbeyshire really, really hates homosexuals, so much, in fact that he just can't seem to stop thinking about all the dirty, dirty and possibly delicious things they do together.
Once again, we have a conservative trying to disguise his backward ignorance by making lots and lots of references. And once again, he misses the entire point.

Via Wonkette.

Sign of the times

Flowers for patriots. I certainly don't think less of FTD for this--it's no doubt difficult to design flower arrangements for funerals, and certainly hard to come up with something appropriate for a young person lost to war. These flowers are perfectably suitable for a military funeral. It's just that this brings it home, the daily reality of military families, that this is something they have to fear all the time and that they must do so in silence so as not to hurt the President's re-election chances.

Via Whiskey Bar.

Scalia's descent continues

Taking lessons from his fellows in the party, Scalia has apologized while insisting that he was in the right. It is disturbing to say the least that someone appointed to defend the Constitution doesn't understand that the First Amendment was written to protect the press's right to report freely on the government.
Scalia doesn't want to be held accountable for his remarks because he knows that he doesn't believe in the very system he is supposed to protect and that he might slip up and say so.

Via Prometheus 6.

Telling one racist from another

I'm not nearly as good at it as I would think. I didn't even pass this quiz. Racists are apparently uncreative on top of their other, more worrisome bad qualities.

Sexism in all its glory

I truly wasn't aware how many people think breasts are so frightfully ugly until this year. Frankly, in my little world, boobies are generally viewed in a positive way, downright attractive, in fact. I doubt that any women around here were out there trying to frighten anyone with Wonderbras or low-cut shirts.
On the other side of the coin, apparently these guys are having trouble even believing that women consent to sex, ever.

“Always Remember: If no really meant no, we’d all still be embryos. A community message from your friends at the Vanderbilt Men’s Center.”

Sorry, guys. Sounds like a personal problem, a good time for a little self-reflection. Maybe changing your attitude a little might help? I can assure you that there is tons of consensual heterosexual sex going on all the time. Probably right now as you're reading this, in fact.

Both links via South Knox Bubba.

Buy a cookie for democracy

Moveon.org is having a national bake sale to raise money. Hopefully there will be one near you. If not, have one!

AIDS drugs

Listening to Unfiltered on Air America this morning, I heard an interesting debate about the funding for AIDS drugs that Bush talked about in the State of the Union address. It blew me away when I heard the numbers: $15 billion! For AIDS! How can this be? This is something that can actually help people! How can this be?
Well, "with strings attached" is BushCo's motto. That money is called "$15 billion for AIDS patients" but in fact is "$15 billion for American drug companies". The money won't be buying any drugs for people unless they come from American drug companies. The official line is that the generic drugs from other countries, drugs that can keep AIDS patients alive at $365 a year, aren't proven safe. See, they are worried about the safety of AIDS patients. The danger that AIDS itself presents to the patients doesn't really seem to worry them overmuch, though.
I know I have a bad attitude. I need to get in line with American capitalist optimism--where some might see a terminal disease, good old-fashioned American optimists see an opportunity to make some money.

"It's been a tough week."

Yep, that's what I got to hear our Exalted Leader say as I walked into the room with the TV on this morning. With The Famous Smirk on his face. And in that sales manager tone of voice he tends to take. If I didn't know who he was, I would have thought he was giving a group of Bible salesmen a pep talk. I asked my boyfriend if he was talking about the thumping his administration is getting over 9/11. He said, no, he's talking about the deaths in Iraq.
Tough week, indeed. That's why they don't let this guy go to the funerals of the war dead. For one thing, it might upset his delusions, but worse, he may accidentally tell a war widow to shrug it off.

I would be alarmed, too

If somebody broke down my door and committed sodomy in front of me. Luckily, this doesn't happen here in Austin or the rest of the world. However, it seems to happen all the time to this poor woman.
I wasn't aware the gays had the right to use taxpayer money to break into houses, but I demand a stop to it right now. I'm all for gay rights-the right to marriage, to privacy. The same rights as everybody else. But tax-payer funded assaults on private residences? Shameful.
And it was shameful when it happened here in Texas, when police officers invaded the private residence of a gay man to arrest him for sodomy, too.
I feel that it is entirely possible for both straight and gay people to live their lives without anybody knocking down their doors to enforce unwanted sexual behavior on private residences. I'm afraid that June Griffin disagrees--and if she can show me when someone has knocked down her door to assault her, then I will have to reconsider my opinion.

Why don't single women vote?

Possibly because they are tired of being treated like addled-brained, boy-crazy, shoe whores. Why vote? I mean (giggle), it's not like you'll meet men at the polls! *sigh*
Well, it's too much to ask that Democratic politicians actually promote feminist values that might attract single women to the polls, so we might as well keep adding to the tired stereotype pile. Of course, there is the obligatory paragraph about how most single women aren't as shallow as the rest of the story will argue that they are. Nice.
There is a little noise that suggests that the male-dominated nature of politics might have something to do with why women feel excluded.

"They represent the rigid kind of male authority that single women have basically been fighting against their whole lives. And it's that male authority that has proven to be in their experience intrinsically false and suspicious," Bushnell said.

Good point. However, it's more than just the image of male authority that works on single female voters. After all, we are smart enough to know we aren't sleeping with or living with whoever we vote for. But since politics are dominated by men, it's very easy for women-specific issues to either be forgotten or disdained, the latter a particular problem with this administration. After the President truimphantly signs a bill according what your womb might hold more value than your entire personhood, it's easy to conclude that there is no place for you in politics.

Lots of numbers

Don't forget that there are ruined lives behind those negative job "growth" numbers.

Limbaugh's just moved onto smoking crack

“Only in Washington when the girl is a Republican and a black can you beat up on her.
Couldn't do this if she were representing a Democrat administration regardless of her color,
but especially given that she's black.”

The great thing about Limbaugh is that he can be counted on to lay bare the underpinnings of the cynical Republican political strategies. Step one of course is to build up an elaborate myth that "liberals" think one's race or sex makes one above criticism. Then accuse people of hypocrisy when, say, a black woman is criticized.
What's funny about that is by pointing out that Rice is a black woman over and over and over and over and over and over again is that it's really reinforcing alot of people's suspicions that the Bush administration is asking her to take a bullet in large part because she's black. Why this might point to their own racism is lost on Rush's loyal audience, I'm sure, but it is building up even more resentment amongst the rest of the population. Race-baiting to get out of this situation is a weasel thing to do and it is insulting to the majority of the nation whose desire for answers about 9/11 has absolutely nothing to do with race.

A little poetry reading on a Sunday

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes, one of my all-time favorites. Hughes's work rarely suffers from feeling dated, which is wonderful on one hand, but also very terrible since he often wrote about contemporary issues and therefore his poetry's relevance leads one to conclude that despite all the hard work, nothing substantial has really changed.

Via Prometheus 6

Bill Bennet quotes someone again, still can't make any sense

In this editorial, he makes the case for the war in Iraq by never actually making a case for it. But he quotes philosophers, so neener neener neener. Little does he know, he doesn't actually have a monopoly on quoting philosphers, and in fact, I'm gonna quote him quoting a philosopher right now:

"War," John Stuart Mill said, "is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

Be that as it may, but just because some things are worth fighting for doesn't mean that everything is worth fighting for. Bennet shoves this out there and then doesn't actually offer up what things should be cherished more than personal safety.
He also trots out the ever-loved argument that the death and destruction that is a direct result of our presence is no big deal. You see, Muslims are used to violence. He damn near says that they like it. It's interesting to note that people who make this argument are usually the first to take offense when someone points out the violence in our history and culture. It's wrong to Blame America First and when you focus on the violence you don't see the good things in American culture. But if you're talking about the Middle East, they see nothing wrong with focusing on the violence and ignoring everything else.
And here's a great contradiction right there in the essay, brought to you by the man who tells everyone else to be virtuous while gambling away millions of dollars. In one paragraph:

Because of many early victories, we cannot forget that wars are not easy and that they are not clean and, when truly meaningful, they are not short.

Well, thanks for reminding me! That war sucks is something brought up by peace activists at the beginning of this whole thing. The administration's reply was essentially that we were blowing this out of proportion, that Iraq would essentially be a cakewalk. According to Bill Bennet, that the war is turning out to be long and ugly is a good thing, it assures us that it is "meaningful". Painful, ugly, "truly meaningful" wars are fantastic things, good for character-building. But then, a few paragraphs later:

* The death toll is nowhere near Vietnam: At the height of Vietnam, we were losing up to 300 American soldiers a week and we lost 58,000 by war's end. Tragically, we have lost about 600 Americans in Iraq. But those numbers are not Vietnam numbers.

We're not losing that many soliders compared to Vietnam. Does that mean that this war is pretty much meaningless compared to Vietnam?
There is evidence that his mind is slipping. Some things that just don't make any sense at all:

We rid the world of one of the worst tyrants of our age; mass graves are being emptied, not filled; we are helping to build the first democracy in the Arab world, and we vouchsafed the region, and ourselves, from a madman intent on building weapons of mass destruction.

The insanity isn't that he repeats the lie about weapons of mass destruction--that is the same perfectly sane if nefarious strategy we've been victimized by this whole time. What is weird is the part about mass graves being emptied not filled. Does that mean we're digging up mass graves? I didn't know about this. Is he making this up?

Kennedy, knowing of Saddam Hussein's slaughter, torture, and aggression that led to the gruesome and vile deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, berates our efforts to oust Hussein.

His mind is clearly slipping. I do believe that it was the great humanitarians of this administration who were buddy-buddy with Hussein at what you might call the height of his "slaughter, torture, and aggression" on Iran. And that number would actually be more than hundreds of thousands. If I'm not mistaken, it would be over a million deaths. But I'm sure that the plan behind aiding and arming Hussein was to somehow reduce the number of people he could kill, and I'm just not smart enough to see it.

President Bush speaks with one voice on this. Clinton and Kennedy do not.

Yeah, he's lost it. Someone needs to explain to him that Bush, being one person, will naturally have one voice, but Clinton and Kennedy are two separate people with two separate voices.

Political correctness and classroom debate

World O' Crap has a long, but very interesting dissection of a recent campus political correctness flair-up at UNC. I had to laugh. Maybe there are schools free of them, but my school definitely was infested with straight white Christian guys (and occasionally girls) who sat around waiting to be offended so they could bring all discourse to a halt by whining about their oppression. They claim that they don't get a voice, but usually the reason their strategy worked was because of the wicked liberal dedication to educational and democratic principles. They got a voice, but so did everyone else, and so the complaint was more about not getting to dominate discussion.
That being said, I read this article and the prof was fucked when it came to handling this guy. Granted, she shouldn't have to be on guard for students who are hired by right wing groups who look to take classes from people on the right wing shitlist--women, minorities, people who teach classes with certain poisonous buzzwords like "diversity" or even "culture" nowadays--so that they can lay in wait for someone to say something even vaguely resentful of having to live at the whim of the powerful. You have to walk on eggshells to keep from hurting the feelings of right wing students.
She called him a homophobe, though, and calling someone a name is a big no-no. (Wingnuts claim to be against political correctness and vigorously defend the right to say "nigger" and "faggot" in academic situations without suffering penalties, but even they find the words "racist", "sexist", and "homophobic" beyond the pale, words far more damning than any racial slur.) That it was the truth is apparently irrelevant. He baited her, she bit. Now they can say that colleges hate white men based on the fact that a professor got angry with a white male who acted like a pissant in her class. This sense of outrage seems well out of proportion until you remember that she, as a member of the teaching class, and a female to boot, had the gall to upbraid one of her betters who is simply tolerating her class because it is required.
If I were her, I would have worded it differently, made some noise about how classroom discussions need to be on substantiated opinions instead of emotional ones, like whether one finds a sexual orientation gross or not. That's a matter of taste and not up for debate. But he said it hatefully and meant it hatefully. I can understand her anger.

The big question: How much does it matter?

It's the question that no one can really have the answer to. The presumably soon-to-be-infamous security memo was released on Easter for no doubt thoroughly political reasons. Bush, as any good Christian would, decided to use the holiday honoring Christ's resurrection to distract from his own failings. Praise Jesus indeed.
Despite this craven dodge, the 9/11 commission and the memo were the only topics amongst my friends tonight, and we are not usually prone to talking politics at any sort of length over dinner. The anger and sense of betrayal saddened me. No one at the table liked or trusted Bush; we had never voted for him as Governor or President. No one there would trust Bush a minute with their pocketbooks, but that his administration would just allow this to happen is beyond belief. Surely there was some kind of law broken, one friend wondered. One way or another, it was thought, he will get kicked out on his ass come November. There's no way to know what sort of impact this will have.
But will people ever really get to know what is going on, what has been revealed? I doubt it. Those of us who have the time or energy or whatever to know all the details of what has been going on lately had already figured it out by what information had managed to trickle out anyway, and this is just confirming suspicions and allegations, albeit beyond what most of would have imagined. But the important thing is: how much of this will make it to the general public and what will they do about it?
My biggest fear is this: The major media have been absolutely cowed by right wing accusations of liberal bias. Even if something is quite simply true, it can't be reported on the news straightforwardly anymore if there's even a chance that the simple truth is beneficial to any liberal cause. No matter how objectively true a liberal-favoring fact may be, news organizations feel obliged to find some right-winger to cast doubt by using all sorts of distortion and lies, all in the name of "balance", which has mysteriously replaced "truth" as the standard for objective journalism.
This hobgoblin of "balance" has spread out beyond mere journalism to eat away at other institutions dedicated to expanding learning and knowledge for the betterment of everyone. Witness how magic is being forced into science classes for "balance", or the way that scientific research is weighed against a set or religo-magical beliefs before getting granted research money. While lots of people have pointed out that so-called "balance" is rarely whipped out to grant progressives a voice, the very idea that "balance" should somehow beat out "truth" is gaining currency.
So, this is what I fear will happen. The vast majority of news shows will present the facts, which are quite damning to BushCo. Then, for "balance", frothing right-wingers will be given time to start spilling emotionally laden, if nonsensical, attacks to confuse the issue. Once everyone has been thoroughly convinced that this is too complex to understand, they will be responsive to the emotional and symbolic, if factually untrue, statements by BushCo.
My friends scoffed at this, but it's not like it hasn't happened before. Think about how the confusion of 9/11 caused people to flock to Bush's simple if untrue explanation that people would kill themselves because they are simply evil and hate freedom. To get out of this tangle, they just need to replace the confusing saga of allegations and blame with a simple, appealing message. It may not work; they have been pushing Bush the Protector for so long that proving that he didn't really think to protect this country from attack could undermine him. But there's a long slog ahead. They may rescue his image yet.

The Jimmy Stewart test

I love it. Of course, I have an irrational crush on James Stewart and am therefore in no position to comment on It's a Wonderful Life or any theories derived from it. I think about asking a crowd of people dramatically if something is good for Bedford Falls, and Jimmy approaches me, admiration in his eyes with just that right amount of twinkle and I forget what the hell that I was talking about.

What is compassionate conservatism?

Apparently it means getting your photo taken with black people.

Thanks, Jake.

The controversy over plastic surgery heats up

The Swan is getting written up everywhere. Of course, using the language of "choice", plastic surgery is being reimagined as a feminist choice, which is right up there with "if more women give up their jobs for family than men it's just a coincidence" for Bullshit Rhetoric of the Year award. Anyway, this article made me really, really sad. This quote in particular off the show's forums:

"These women who were chosen are blessed. I hope that one day, I too will be blessed in such a way. My husband says that we can't afford any surgeries, so I'm just going to trust the Lord, and pray that one day I too will be given the opportunity to be a swan."

Fascinating. To be a fly on the wall in her house must be something else. I wonder if her husband is holding back the cash because he doesn't want her to get surgery, or if they really can't afford it. Possibly a combination.
Humanity managed to reproduce itself for millenia without plastic surgery to make women's bodies palatable to men. One might be forced to conclude that men are perfectly capable of having sexual interest in women who haven't been torn up and rebuilt to look like Barbie dolls. In fact, one may even conclude that heterosexual men want to have sex with actual women, even if Fox thinks that's disgusting.
I think plastic surgery is going to be a relic soon enough. People will look back on it and see the barbarism we see in foot binding, corseting, and female genital mutilation. And women who didn't give in can take real pride in themselves for it.

DEVO was right.

De-evolution is a fact of life, since being crazy and/or stupid seems to increase fecundity. Or maybe people read too much of the Bible and have delusional visions that they are the next wave of Isrealite patriarchs. Wanting 15 children in these times of over-population is crazy enough but rewarding someone for it is downright bizarre.
Of course, if you can blather on about God, some people will sit around applauding the ancient spiritual wisdom of your irrational behavior. This couple seems to have had 15 kids as a political swipe against that wicked science, which does in fact pose a viable threat to the dominance of superstition in our lives.

"We're letting the Lord give us the gifts that he wants to give us and I'm open to more gifts," she said. "I'll take them one at a time or two at a time."

Why don't more married Christians take Paul's advice and live as brother and sister?
They claim that they had to avoid the birth control pill, since it causes miscarriage. Comments like this make me sweat. After redefining abortion as murder, the next step does seem to be to define preventing conception as abortion. To steal from Bill Hicks, think of the multitudes of people whose lives tragically ended before they began by being unceremoniously dumped in tissue and flushed down the toliet today alone.
The irony in all of this is that the artificial and wicked science that allows people to control their fertility is one and the same with the science that turns 15 pregnancies into 15 grown adults. In order to believe that we were meant to reproduce the way our ancestors did, you pretty much have to ignore unpleasant facts. Facts like a simple breech birth would be curtains for mom and baby in the good old days.
Imagine if all women were this dedicated to being godly baby factories. The population would quadruple in a generation. And you thought traffic was bad now.

The Mormon Church continues to recruit from Holocaust victims

How weird is this? I mean, this is obviously an insulting thing to do and they need to cut it out, but I don't get the logic of it either?
If they can decide who is Mormon or not without actually consulting that person, why don't they just do one big baptism and declare everyone who ever lived a Mormon?
If I had Mormon relatives, I would specify in my will that I do not want to be declared a post-humous Mormon. Of course, that probably doesn't stop them.

A small bone to pick

It's obvious to me and pretty much everyone I know in my little enclave of the world that the Bush administration is lying out their collective asses about 9/11. It is becoming clear very quickly that they should have done something but didn't. And the reason they didn't seems to be nothing more than plain old arrogance.
But the line is that they didn't know enough to prevent it, and they are sticking to it, even though that line is becoming ridiculous. They didn't know al Qaeda planned to attack; oh yeah, I guess they did. They didn't know that hijacked planes were falling into favor as weapons; oops, they knew that, too. Today the line is that they didn't have a way to narrow down any goddamn targets.

While there were no specific targets mentioned in the United States, there was intelligence indicating al-Qaida might attempt to crash a plane into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. And other reports said Islamic extremists might try to hijack a plane to gain release of comrades.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but how could they have not had the World Trade Center on the short list of potential targets of hijacked planes? I am not in intelligence, but if they had decided to randomly call me and ask me what Osama bin Laden probably had a hard-on for taking out, I would have guessed the WTC. You know, considering there was a previous attempt to bomb it to the ground.
And anyway, why would having a list of specific targets really be all that relevant? Preventing the attack had nothing to do with securing possible targets, but preventing hijackers from getting on the planes with weapons to begin with.
I may be over-simplifying here. I don't know. Part of me is inclined to think that BushCo is deliberately trying to complicate matters in order to confuse people to the point that they just tune the whole 9/11 commission's findings out. Certainly that was Condi Rice's strategy when getting questioned--pretend like simple, straightforward questions were invitations to lecture Congress on the history of surprise attacks on our country.

Great post on same-sex marriage

Does gay marriage affect straight marriages? Well, yes, but not in the way that you'd think. I've said it before, but it's worth restating--denying marriage to gay couples is degrading, not uplifting the institution. Marriage should be about love and family and commitment, but under the current circumstances, it's more about priveliging one group of people over another.

From Alas, a Blog.

Could I have more, please? I need to buy a bear trap.

A peeping Tom in Arkansas tried to buy off his victim with $20. I have a funny feeling the note was less "apologetic" than this story implies. Just a hunch, but I'll bet giving her money figures into his fantasy somehow. I've noticed that peeping Toms tend to get reported more sympathetically than they deserve. I guess people still think it's harmless, but I'm sure that it doesn't seem harmless to the girl being watched.

Walmart making a non-offensive DVD player

This rules. Not in the sense of actually being a good thing, but in the sense that in order to want such a thing you must be a first class asshole. God, it's bad enough the way television tears up people's work with everything from censorship to colorization, but now people are going to let a machine decide what is offensive to them, using the same boring old standard that our bodies and their functions are automatically offensive. (I know the stories that explain why bodies are bad things, but still it seems like blasphemy to call god's supposed greatest creation "dirty".)
I've been thinking of starting a children's reading group to entertain kids with the god and Jesus-approved Book. Clean and holy Bible stories are clearly what kids need in our sex and violence soaked culture. I think I'll start with a story kids probably need to know in our marriage-preserving enviroment of today: the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah. Nothing more wholesome than an old-fashioned adventure story where our hero fends off a group of men intent on gang-raping angels by offering them his virgin daughters, followed by a coda where said virgin daughters get their dad drunk to have sex with him so that they can conceive. The best part is that it's entertaining and educational. Kids can learn all sorts of new vocabulary words like sodomy, rape, virgin, and incest. Makes me want to go right back to looking at Janet Jackson's boobie.

Same words, different meanings

Ezra has a good post on why conservatives have an inherent problem in running government when they claim to hate government. Of course, even though he uses a position advocated by the leaders and mouthpieces of conservatism now, he still gets a lot of "are not!" replies. But he's right. That is indeed what they say about government, that it is inherently wrong, that it inherently limits freedom.
What's confusing about the whole situation is that liberals and conservatives both agree with this statement, "Government is in the wrong when it denies basic freedoms." The contention arises because liberals and conservatives have very different models of what freedom is. Liberals tend to view freedom as the right to go about your life as you see fit unmolested. Conservatives tend to define it as the right of a man to have his authority over his own life and business go unchallenged. There are huge, gaping differences between those similar-seeming concepts.
Liberals are utterly confused by the fact that conservatives claim they want less government interference in their lives, but then turn around and support the government's right to push religion on the population, censor what they can see on TV, prevent women from obtaining abortions, or spy on its citizens to make sure that they aren't using illegal drugs. But generally conservatives answer that if you are already living an upright, authoritative life than these aren't impositions on your freedom. Freedom is the right of worthy, moral, ambitious men to wield authority in their own lives. That's why conservatives see business regulations as a restriction on freedom--productive, authoritative men's business is business. Telling a man how to run his business is tantamount to telling a man how to run his family.
Liberals tend to see freedom in terms of diversity and individuality. The most important rights are individual freedom and equal access, i.e., civil rights. Businesses must be restricted to secure freedom; businesses aren't people and don't have individual rights. However, businesses are quite capable of stomping other people's freedom in their efforts to earn a profit. Since liberals tend to see all people as having equal freedom, an employee is considered as free a human as the employer.
I hope that's not too confusing. Conservatives and liberals can have opposite views on an issue and each can see himself on the side of freedom and rights. But here's lots o' examples of what I'm trying to express here (not all liberals or conservatives will agree with every position, but it's sort of the standard position of each side I'm trying to get across):

Abortion/birth control. Liberals argue that women have the right to control their bodies. Conservatives see easy access to birth control as a deliberate attempt by meddling feminists to undermine their right to maintain control over their own families. That's why alot of states have laws stating that women cannot obtain abortions without husband or father consent.
Employee protection from discrimination and/or employer interference. Liberals think people have a right to make a living without having to submit their personal lives or histories scrutiny. That's why questions regarding age, marital status, etc. are forbidden in interviews. Conservatives see this as a restriction on a man's right to control his business, including his employees. Liberals see employers and employees as having the same rights, but conservatives tend to think that if someone is the boss, he has earned more rights.
Censorship. Liberals think a person has an individual right to express herself as she sees fit and that people have a right to read or watch whatever they like. Conservatives see censorship as the right to develop community morals and standards.
Business and pollution. Liberals think people have a right to live free of pollution and conservatives see government regulation on business as restricting a man's right to run his business as he sees fit.
Religion in government. Liberals think a secular government is best; by not favoring one religion over another or even religion over non-belief, than all people are free to make their own choices. Conservatives tend to think that if most people are religious and the government is of the people, it is by definition religious. They therefore tend to view people who want to get religion out of government as a immoral minority trying to impose their will on the majority.

In a way, liberals tend to be more distrustful of government because liberals tend to disfavor all authority. Conservatives favor authority, and they only dislike government when they feel it is being used by people who aren't or at least shouldn't be in authority positions to undermine the authority that they and their values have in their homes and communities.
In a non-democratic government, then conservatives tend to align themselves with the government automatically and it's progressives/liberals who are on the outs. But we are under a liberal democracy, where the government is legally required to protect people's rights and freedoms, in the liberal sense. So we have sort of an inversion of the "natural" order where authoritative conservatives dislike the government who limits their ability to impose authority and egalitarian liberals are defending their government because they see it as a powerful tool to preserve rights and liberties.

Pardon, I meant to point out a critical reference. The linguist George Lakoff made me realize exactly how stratified the metaphorical systems between conservatives and liberals have become in his book Moral Politics. Please read this book. You don't have to know much about linguistics to understand it. You actually don't have to know much about tropes or metaphors, because he writes to a larger audience who isn't familiar with grammar or linguistics and so he very carefully explains his terms. In fact, I can see people getting turned onto linguistics from this book. And it isn't boring to people who do know linguistics. It's a quick, about a day read. Thanks, Jake for keeping me in line.

Every time someone has to take a dive for Son of a Bush.....

....I kind of feel almost a little sorry for him/her. I almost have to wonder if Condi Rice has some sort of contract requiring her to sacrifice her career if necessary to save her boss.
Anyway, it's all very undignified. It's one of the sad things about the modern world that you just can't go down in flames, but offered to the wolves. If we were more like ancient Rome, Rice could at least yell, "I regret that I have but one life to give for the Republican Party!" and fall on her sword.

Sad incident in Seattle

A kid threatened but didn't succeed in killing himself in school. Thanks to blogging, of course, it's easier to get an idea of what some kids at least are saying about this incident. It's the same old story, though. It seems like everyone knows he was a misfit and everyone knows he was teased, but no one seems to have actually done the teasing. (Teasing is such an inadequate word for the harassment that kids have to live through in high school.) I'm pretty sure the reason is that fellow students articulate and sensitive enough to express their feelings about this were not the ones participating in the bullying, but that certainly doesn't mean it wasn't going on. What's sad is that this problem is never going to correct itself. High school kids are adept at hiding their lives from the adults around them. The ones who deal out the majority of the abuse are often the same damn kids that get the majority of the adulation from the community at large. The misfits are not respected by adults or kids, no matter what the adults pretend otherwise.
I remember the scene in Bowling for Columbine where Matt Stone says that if kids could just know that there is life after high school and it does get better and who they are in high school will not condemn them for life, there wouldn't be these sort of incidents. I think he has a point, but I don't think that's going to change either. For some reason, people want high school kids to think that high school is the highlight of life--I think the idea is that way, the kids will focus like laserbeams on their schoolwork. Well, that's not what happens. What happens is that kids think that every little setback or slight is the end of the world. They are set against each other in a cut-throat competition and there's no room for anything but the worst kind of conformity.
I occassionally run into people I went to high school with and there's almost always been a tone of melancholy to the conversation, like we're both thinking, "Wow. I can't believe I used to worry what you thought about me."

You can't bury your head in the sand deeper than this

The original research pointed to the fact that kids that take those virginity pledges are just as likely to catch STD's as kids who don't. Disease-prevention was the big cover for the anti-woman and religious origins of these programs. Well, just because they have been shown not to prevent disease but actually encourage the spread of disease doesn't mean the right's going to give up on them. They are just going to have to switch to the more openly sexist tactic that I'm sure alot of them were dying to use anyway: slut-bashing.
This is the most misleading article I've read on this issue in a long, long time.
The first thing she says is that the pledges "work". Granted, the vast majority of the kids break the pledge so I don't get how it "works", but the kids who take it delay sex for a year or so longer. So, they do it at the senior prom instead of the junior prom. I'm sure Christian parents everywhere are relieved.
She admits that the virginity pledge kids are less likely to use birth control or protection, and if they do get sick they are less likely to get help, but shrugs it off. I wonder if she would shrug it off if a lifelong smoker started coughing up blood but wouldn't go to the doctor to get it checked out. Anyway, that seems to me to be evidence that those virginity pledges are related to sexual shame and/or ignorance and it's keeping people from taking care of their health, which is serious indeed. A minor STD can cause major problems if left untreated.
Then she and the Heritage Foundation work on some good, old-fashioned mistaking correlation for causation, particularly when they find that the kids were more likely to be married and have kids in wedlock than the non-virginity pledge control group. But it would seem to me that those inclined to take this pledge are also inclined to marry because of an unplanned pregnancy. Since the oldest of the study group were only 24 years old, higher rates of marriage doesn't really seem to be a positive outcome. Just because two teenagers get married doesn't make an unplanned pregnancy a good idea.
But I especially like the end, where after hand-picking the numbers she likes that these researchers came up with, she dismisses the researchers own conclusion that abstinence-only education has detrimental health effects.
I blame creation "science" for this piece of crap article. Once the idea got out that ignoring unpleasant evidence, deliberately misunderstanding research methods and using mythical thinking could pass muster as "science" for a good deal of people, it opened the floodgates. That science and research can and should be twisted for political ends is quickly becoming common wisdom on the right. And when pesky research disproves a tenet of their ideology, than it should be dismissed out of hand or even better, surpressed entirely.
The only solid conclusions you can draw from this research is that virginity pledges are correlated to slightly older ages at first sexual intercourse and that kids who took the pledges were much worse at looking after their health on average than kids who didn't take the pledge. And while one can theorize about causation, I don't see that any causation was proved. For all we know, an undiscovered factor makes kids both likely to delay sexual intercourse and take a virginity pledge.

An exercise in understatment

The New England Journal of Medicine says the FDA's postponement of making emergency contraception over-the-counter "suggests that the FDA's decision-making process is being influenced by political considerations." Ya think?
By deliberately conflating emergency contraception and the abortion pill, the anti-contraception forces have made huge inroads in confusing on this issue. Emergency contraception is not an abortion pill. In fact, it's predicted that emergency contraception could half the abortion rate if it is made over-the-counter.
I've said it before and I'll say it again--the best way to reduce the number of abortions is education and easy access to contraception. Contrary to the anti-abortion propaganda, most women who get one are not using abortion as an easy method of birth control. (How stupid is that anyway? Why would women choose a painful medical procedure over, say, a small daily pill?) The purpose of outlawing abortion is to keep women under control. Everyone knows that the abortion rate wouldn't really go down if it was made illegal. Many women who want abortions already have to throw themselves on the mercy of family, husband, or boyfriend in order to get the money and this will only get worse if abortions are made illegal and the price skyrockets. The point is to create a situation where family or husband is the one making the decisions for a woman. Emergency contraception gives women an out to avoid the whole situation altogether.

Big business takes a breather from firing people

Only 328,000 new people filed for unemployment this month. Bush naturally says that this shows that his economic policies are working. While that sort of comment tends to make me think he's either stupid or lying, it occurs to me that he is probably being honest in his own way. His policies do work for those that matter.

Can it be true?

Neal Pollack is back! Yea! More of my time can be wasted now.

Listening to Condi Rice's testimony right now

And boy does she sound pissed off. I still think she's taking a dive for her boss, though. She's trying to spin it, but she has basically admitted ignoring Richard Clarke's suggestions until after 9/11. A total dive. I'll be quite surprised if everyone else doesn't wipe their hands of this entire situation.

My boyfriend doesn't have a blog...

...He has other things to do. For one thing he has a band. Or two. Or three. I'm not sure. His busy schedule does not prevent him from witty comments. Like it or not, he makes me laugh. So, his pithy comments are going to make their way into this blog.
Anyway, we were making fun of the fact that the Republicans are making money hand over fist, no questions asked. John Kerry has been raising unprecedented amounts for his campaign, obviously because there is a unified effort to get Bush out of office. I'm detailing the various bullshit the attack dogs are spouting about every godamn dollar, and he says, "It's like going after a bum with a $100 bill. They gotta wonder where he got it."
He's got a point.

Pranking is fun and useful

Scoobie Davis has the right idea. This totally rules. I have scored on a couple talk shows in my time posing as a Christian fundie, but sadly that was a long time ago and it was no one famous. Anyway, kudos!

I hope the HMO's don't find out about this

I can almost hear the arguments against hospitals stays and medication for women who have caesarians.

It only counts if you wear a Wonderbra.

I don't even see the point of being a cross-dresser if you live in Ft. Worth. It takes alot of commitment to dress "like a woman" there, between the inch of makeup, the manicure, and the once or twice-weekly hair appointments, not to mention the huge amounts of closet space required. Basically, even the women are huge drag queens.

I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I live in Austin and it's a knee-jerk reaction to make fun of our northerly neighbors, or, as we like to call them, "The Threat from the North".

People still not protecting themselves

Alarming health news--people aren't protecting themselves from STD's. I hate to say it, but this is a direct result of the attitudes that we have in this country that only sluts get STD's.
The religious right wants to scare people off of using condoms by having warning labels on them declaring that they are not 100% effective. They figure they can scare people into getting married that way. I say, fine, but as a fair tradeoff, you have to sign a piece of paper when you get married that says that you understand that your spouse is not 100% guaranteed not to cheat on you and bring disease home. That's about an equally fair statement, I would think.
Most people I know who got an STD got it from a cheating partner or spouse. I'm not saying that trust isn't a good thing; it is. Monogamy isn't a 100%, but it still one of the best ways to protect yourself. And so are condoms.

Is one misogynistic, fundamentalist religion better than another?

Efforts to dehumanize Muslims continue unabated. Now we all have our blind spots, but it really takes a superhuman effort at willful ignorance in this day and age to look at two groups of people commiting violence and declare one "barbaric" and the other "heroic" based on nation, race, and particularly religion? I am in no way, shape or form defending what happened in Fallujah (and am a little annoyed that the apparent fact still has to be S-P-E-L-L-E-D-O-U-T.), but to clutch your pearls and pretend that we are not capable of violence when we just invaded a country unprovoked is well, willful ignorance.
What is particularly irritating about this slam against Islamic fundamentalism is that he is implying a comparison to Christian fundamentalism in this country and finding that since Islamic fundamentalism is more violent, that is because Islam is inferior to Christianity. But in reality, the biggest difference is that our secular government reins our freaky fundies in.
One of Davis's examples of how wicked Muslims are:
Some will interject that the Saudis are not to be forgotten—whose religious police recently allowed trapped school girls to be incinerated rather than have them leave the flaming building unescorted, engage in public amputations, and behead adulteresses.
That is incredibly deplorable. I have nothing but hate for men who use the government to hurt and oppress women like this. And also for those who feel that women should be forced to carry babies for rapists. The difference is only that these guys got fired. There is already a press for government protection for pharmacists who wish to use their religious beliefs as an excuse to oppress women.
We are different than Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. And in order to stay that way, we need to be able to face down Christian fundies who wish to wield government to force their religious beliefs on the public at large.

Funny

I'm listening to Air America, and Chuck D is cracking me up with his calling George W. "Son of a Bush". I may have to steal that.
They need to let Chuck D talk more. He cheers me up.

I didn't even know it was two songs.

This is something to play on your speakers, not headphones. Someone took two Nickelback songs and played them at the same time, one in each channel.
Praise the lord for Clear Channel, working to help make every song exactly like the last one.

Wouldn't be easier to just write our checks directly to the rich?

I can sort of see a government program where us "lucky duckies" (if you spend more than 30 seconds trying to figure out which bag of beans is a nickel cheaper at the grocery store, you're probably one of us.) go ahead and sponsor a rich person, much like those programs where you can sponsor a child overseas for a dollar a day. Except in this case, it would be mandatory, it would be something more like $10 a day, and each top tax bracket family would need a bare minimum of 1,000 of us to sponsor them. You know, to keep it to a "fair" scale based on income. If we complained, we would be accused of class warfare. Limbaugh would point out that, on average, $10 a day is an equitable percentage of our income to the $10,000 a day, blah blah fancy way of saying that we don't respect our betters enough.
Well, it's far in the future. But Ohio Republicans are taking another step towards this better future.

Thanks, Ross.

More evidence that it's not about babies

It's about keeping women under control. While I wish babies could be born healthy as often as possible, that's not even remotely the point behind these fetal protection laws. The ugliness of these laws regarding the "protection" of pregnant women is that they are intended to do no such thing. These laws are generally used to punish women for drug abuse during pregnancy, but there have been experimental cases seeing if these laws can be used to force women to adhere to state-mandated prenatal care. I imagine that ideally the "fetal protection" movement would like to be able to lock women up for the whole of their pregnancies so they can be under constant survelliance for unmotherly behavior.
The overall intention of course is a long term plan to redefine women by their wombs and the contents therein. I'm sure they intend to get women back to accepting their "natural" role as mothers and wives and other support system roles for men's goals. But in some respects, it's going to backfire. If every stillbirth or sickly baby starts an investigation into a woman's health habits, more women will be scared off accepting the role of "mother" altogether. I doubt that all mothers now could get a 100% on their health habits during pregnancy.
If our government was really dedicated to delivering as many healthy babies as possible, it would take constructive steps, like making sure that every pregnant woman had sufficient access to prenatal care and nutrition, no matter how poor she is. Under these laws, poor women who need prenatal care will be scared off seeking it, knowing that they will be under a microscope to see if they are potential "fetal assault" suspects. There is a sort of irony to the fact that when you reduce women to wombs, the quality of those wombs actually suffers.

While I pay $1 out of every $4 I earn in taxes....

...I can sleep better knowing that at least I'm helping make up for the huge tax dodges that corporations are entitled to.

Americans may not be able to see it....

....but the anti-Semiticism of The Passion is really making the movie popular in other parts of the world. Way to go, Mel!
Last Salon link today, I promise.

Boy I hope Salon can keep it up

If they keep drubbing the President on a daily basis, eventually they may actually be able to embarrass the mainstream media out of continuing to give him a free ride. Today Gary Hart reminds readers that many, many people issued many, many warnings to the White House about terrorist attacks and all were ignored. I'm sure the Bush administration would have loved to deal with terrorism, but their hands were tied. There just isn't that much money to be made by defense contractors in the area of airport security, so there was really no way for the Bushies to advocate for it.

More from the ungrateful poor.

It turns out that some people have a problem with the poor going to die in wars designed to enrich the wealthy on salaries that they can't live on because the wealthy need tax cuts. Ungrateful wretches. They should be grateful for the opportunity to die anoymously for the enrichment of Halliburton and Lockheed Martin. How else do they expect to participate in history, anyway?

Taxes and class warfare

I am doing my taxes today and I thought it might be instructive to demonstrate exactly how badly we are getting screwed by taxes under the Republicans. The Republicans like to bandy around the income tax, saying how "unfair" it is that the wealthy have to pay a higher percentage of their taxes in income tax than the "lucky duckies" at the bottom, like myself for instance. I'm not telling you how much my boyfriend and I pull in, but suffice it to say, we are solidly lower middle class, the much-rhapsodized about but mostly screwed working class. Instead of just calculating how much we paid in income tax, I added up payroll taxes, income tax and property tax and found that we pay 22% of our income.
And all that is before you add in sales taxes. Sales taxes are incredibly regressive but they are roundly ignored because they are pretty hard to estimate. But I'm game, since I used to be a banker. Estimating sales tax has to done backwards, not from percentage of income or a fixed number, but by figuring out how much a person spends on taxable items and pays in taxable bills. The best way to figure it out is probably to start with monthly take-home pay, subtract amount spent on non-taxed bills and on food, subtract the amount put towards savings and figure that the rest spent is taxed at 8.25%, Texas's sales tax. I was extremely generous to myself in alloting what is spent on non-taxed items. I probably pay more in sales taxes than this, but I'm trying to be conservative.
To make sure my numbers are right, I multipled the actual amount of cash spent on sales tax each month times 12 and added that total to my income, property and payroll tax totals. With the amount of our money that goes to sales tax each year, 25% of our income went to the government this year.
A big chunk of this is due to the double punch we got from Governor Bush and then President Bush. Both ushered in budget cuts from public schools that meant that the schools had to raise property taxes to make up the difference. Our property taxes more than doubled. A Democrat wouldn't have done anything about our income, payroll or sales taxes, but he wouldn't have starved the schools so property taxes wouldn't have gone up so dramatically. Property taxes holding steady or just undergoing a slight increase would have resulted in our altogether taxes being 22% of our income instead of 25%.
My taxes increased by three percentage points thanks to President Bush. If the wealthy had a 3 percentage point tax increase, there would be a full-court press to remove the offender from office. Ghastly amounts of money would pour into his opponent's campaign coffers. But ordinary working people just can't buy off candidates like that.
But we can vote. The problem is that people are confused and unwittingly voting themselves lower-paying jobs and higher taxes all bundled up under a simplified version of a "tax cut". That $300 check was payoff to distract you from how your money is being rerouted into the pockets of the rich.

If secularism works, why do people want to return to theocracy?

See my post below on secularism vs. theocracy.
I think secularism is the best of all possible government styles. Its tools are available to everyone, since logic, proof, and reason do not know color, religion, race, sexual orientation, class, sex or whatever else causes people to rig your place on the social hierarchy. To alot of people, this seems obvious and they get frustrated with people who don't see it. It's good to remember that the logic of secular government was not obvious to most people for most of history.
But it is the system we live under now, so why do people want to change it? Well, there's alot of reasons. I doubt any one person wants an autoritative theocracy for all these reasons, it seems reasonable to me that most people have a combination of some of these reasons.
Some people feel that they would benefit from a theocracy. This is a big one, though it's hard to get anyone to admit to it outright. Because of historical reasons, certain people would almost surely be accorded more authority and therefore more privilege because of arbitrary reasons. Men would have authority over women, straight over gay, white over black, Christian over non-Christian. If I'm right, white, straight, Christian males who want more power can be expected to be the biggest group clamoring for a return to theocracy or at least some amount of it in government. Not that all people in this group will clamor for it. Many, if not most, will be content with the secular situation. But power-hungry straight, white, Christian males will be drawn towards a theocratic government.
Bad or non-existant education makes it hard for people to distinguish between arguments from proof and arguments from authority. Far better people than me have pointed out how critical it is for the citizenry of a democracy to be educated and able to think reasonably for themselves. Reasonable thinking isn't easy to acquire. Even well-educated people slip up all the time. Nonetheless, the basic difference between using reason to think for yourself and just accepting authority is a lesson that could be passed on in schools and should. However, schools tend to teach by authority things that were learned by reason and leave their students unable to tell the difference. For instance, the concept of gravity is taught by telling the story of how Newton was hit on the head by an apple and realized stuff falls down. The debates aren't introduced, how Einstein clarified parts of Newton and disproved others isn't taught, and students are not required to try to conceptualize how gravity works. It just does, 'cause Newton said so. It might as well be magic.
The theory of evolution is reduced to an insight from Charles Darwin that is just accepted on authority now. Students are not really required to puzzle out how it might work and nor are they introduced to the reams of work that have both proven the basic principle while disproving the particulars of Darwin. It's no wonder fundies think their myth is as good as the scientists' "myth". That evolution is not a myth isn't really demonstrated.
Without any way of telling the difference between a reasoned argument with evidence and argument from authority, many people are going to be drawn to the authority because it has emotional appeal that the reasonable argument may not have.
People need their spirtual side affirmed. Alot of my fellow atheists disagree that people have a need for spirtuality, since they seemingly don't. Well, they are ignoring the evidence in front of their eyes. Obviously, spirituality is important to alot of people. Proponents for theocracy are adept at exploiting people's spirituality for their own gains. It's a simple swindle. The opponents of theocracy are portrayed as denying the truth of people's spiritual feelings, and the proponents of theocracy affirm people's feelings for them as long as they sign on the dotted line. Watch how fundamentalists are jumping to convert people's strong feelings over this movie The Passion into support for their political causes. Mocking people's spiritual experiences is playing right into the hands of the proponents of theocracy. Whether you like it or not, those experiences feel real.
Fighting religious authority is scary; it's easier to give in. Religious authority wants to preserve itself and it will use intimidation to keep in power. The more powerful the religious authority, the more this particular issue comes into play. If the religious authority does control the government, it's nearly impossible to rebel and keep your life. But even under ostensibly free societies like ours, religious authority exists and finds ways to assert itself on people and acquire more power. It gets the most attention when it directly challenges state power, but there are thousands of ways that religious authority intimidates people outside of any government oversight. The best and most obvious example is good old fear of hell. But there are many more subtle ways it creates power hierarchies and sustains them through fear. For instance, women under fundamentalist Christianity are required to be subservient to men. They usually can't be intimidated with obvious things like stoning for refusal to comply (though there is always the fear of hell in the background), but they can be ostracized. They can be told by people they love and trust that they are a failure. Humans are social animals, and one of the best punishments is to deprive them of a spot in human society.
The other side of this is the reward system. People are promised heaven for compliance, of course. But, more importantly, one can gain social approval by working towards the goal of installing religious authority. In fact, a big reward for hard work is to be personally appreciated by a high-up religious authority himself.
Fear of an outside threat. The urge to band together under a common leader when a common threat is perceived is a basic part of human nature. This is neither a good nor bad trait, but it is better is people understand it. It probably evolved to help us survive under constant attacks from wild animals and foreign tribes. Whatever causes it, religious authorities are good at exploiting it. In fact, they are good at creating enemies out of thin air and banding people together to fight against them, thereby expanding their own power. Again, witch hunts are instructive for understanding how fictional enemies can feel very real to a mob. Right now to people outside of fundamentalist churches it is hard to understand why they feel persecuted when nobody is actually attacking their right to their religious beliefs. And yet they feel persecuted. They are bound together to fight a common enemy, and this is an biological urge like hunger or sexual desire that is hard to reason with.

There are tons more reasons, but these are the ones that strike me. I am not trying to excuse or attack religious fundamentalists here. I am trying to understand them to the best of my abilities. I obviously do not agree with them and I don't see that happening any time soon or ever. But trying to understand them is bound to be more productive than writing them and their reasons off as pure lunacy.

Deanna Laney, religion and why secularism works

I was discussing this case with my ever-witty boyfriend, and he made a great point: How is it that we know that God wasn't actually talking to her?
It was a joke but it goes right to the heart of the questions of knowledge and how that affects church and state. There is no actual way to prove or disprove God. There is no way to prove or disprove that God spoke to any one person. There is no way to prove or disprove that God wants any one thing. That he is telling women to kill their children is as testable a hypothesis as proving that he spoke to Moses out of a burning bush, which is to say, it's not at all. In fact, that is the very notion of faith, that one believes without proof.
The only test of religious revelations is to run them by the argument by authority. In a religious institution, we sort of arbitrarily decide who are the gatekeepers of religious revelation and they are accorded a position of superiority over all others. For example, in the Catholic Church, people don't get to decide what is a miracle, whether they witnessed it or not. All miracles have to be verified by the Church authorities. Who made them authorities? Anyone can see how no matter how long and hard you dig, eventually religion is based on faith and authority, both of which are ultimately arbitrary.
In a democracy, everyone is equal before the law, meaning no one person legally has more authority than another. There is no trump card--one person legally can't come in and be believed over another due to a higher social position. So we must base our decisions on the facts at hand. That science is perfectly suited to our legal system has been a great boon to humanity.
So, how do we know if God actually told her to kill her children? We can't know so it's not admissible in court. We can only judge what she did (kill her children) and whether or not she was of a rational mind when she did it. Since she was beholden to voice in her head that told her to do it and she was unable to resist that voice, she is judged not to be in control of her actions at the time. Whether or not the voice was actually God or not is irrelevant; what is relevant is whether or not she was able to defy that voice or not.
If we lived under a theocratic government, that is, one where powers were based on religious authority, her trial would have been much different. The debate would not be on whether or not the evidence shows that she was unable to think clearly at the time of her crimes. The debate would be authority-centered. Simply put, the debate would be about whether or not God actually told her to kill her children. The prosecution would argue that the Bible forbids murder, particularly infanticide. The defense would bring up the story of how Abraham was instructed to kill Isaac but God stayed his hand at the last moment; perhaps her hand was not stayed. The jury would decide according to which side demonstrated better Biblical authority.
I hope it's clear why our system is a better bet. If you were charged with a crime, which court would you rather sit in? And of course, in a religious system, things that don't exist in a factual sense but do under certain belief systems can be crimes, like witchcraft.
It expands beyond the justice system. Policy decisions need to appeal to reason, not authority, because there is no ultimate authority when the people own the government. What's nice about the reasonable approach is that it has science at its disposal for use. Policies can be tested and disposed if they are ineffective by the scientific method. Under the religious system, a policy that is causing problems cannot be changed. If God is perfect and he handed down this law, who are we to say it doesn't work? Under the secular system, we are free to tinker and life demonstrably improves.
Leaders have a job and they are beholden to do the job they were hired to do. Under a democratic system, they are elected and are beholden to the populace who elected them. Under a theocracy, leaders are appointed by an ultimately arbitrary system of authority. They tell everyone else what God wants and there is no way to prove or disprove this, so you must simply live with it. If you are the sort of person God has a problem with, you are in big trouble and no amount of reason is going to save you. While we still presumably have a democratic system where our President was elected (at least legally), he has publically declared that he considers himself appointed by God. If he believes this, he does not believe that he is beholden to the people he elected. Something to consider.

Lacking in nuance, indeed

A Townhall editorial fantasizing about just nuking Baghdad away. Granted, she immediately says that this wouldn't be a workable idea. So, why worry about it if it's so far off the plate?
I sincerely think that neocons really do think that America's duty is to remake the world in its own image, that is, the perfect neocon world. All of history would be just a footnote to this new world. If you really believe this, the image of a neocon-controlled America destroying the oldest city in the world with a single bomb is just an irresistible image.
The fundamentalist contribution to this is just unavoidable. The end of times is coming, and any non-Biblical history will be irrelevant as soon as the Rapture happens. The big problem with the Biblical prophecies is that they all center around Christians and Jews and the geography of the Middle East. There is no mention of Muslims. They are simply in the way. On top of it, they have their own claims to holy lands that look just as legitimate as the Judeo-Christian claims to an outsider. On top of it, Arabs themselves have this unfortunate well-researched history supporting that ungodly notion that there may have been entire cities when God was entertaining himself watching Adam and Eve cavort in the Garden. (Okay, I don't know how much thought they put into that last part, but one has to wonder.) How tempting it must be just to clean them out!
It is critical to understanding the secular neocon's alliance with the religious right, particularly over the issue of American world dominance and the Middle East. The neocons believe in it because of simple nationalism, and the fundies believe it because of contorted and self-serving interpetations of the Bible, but the end result is the same--America is fighting to take its place as the rightful world leader. That's why people who innocently question whether it's wise to strongarm the rest of the world like this is considered treason. America's purpose is world dominance and to question that is to question America.
Four contractor/mercenaries got murdered in an ugly, ugly way. Kos got into alot of shit for overstating what is a fact--mercenaries are never appreciated wherever they go and this stuff is bound to happen. Neocons surely understand this on a certain level, but they can't ever state it and there is a good reason. There is never a better time than the present to exploit a torturous murder for political gain. After the hoopla over that movie The Passion, the fundies are primed for messages about how the enemies of all that is good (and holy) can be spotted by their sadistic pleasure in torturing enemies. This war is being sold covertly to the religious base as a holy war. If these men are anything but martyrs, then it undermines the firmest support the administration has in its war plans.

I was just going to leave a comment at Pandagon, but I realized I had alot more to say, obviously.

Heavenly Creatures

I finally watched this movie, which got here from Netflix last week. I have been busy, in no small part from watching other movies. I thought it was really good. It certainly was quite imaginative, and the fantasy the girls create together grows organically over the course of the story, sweeping the viewer into it.
If you don't know what the movie is about, it's a true crime movie of sorts chronicling events that led two teenage girls in 1950's New Zealand to attack one of their mothers and bash her head in with a rock while taking a walk. The movie wisely doesn't try to explain fully why these girls commit this crime. It shows their reasons, sure, but there it will always be a mystery why some people cross this line and others don't.
The movie avoids demonizing these girls. They are as human as anyone else, and it's very easy to sympathize with their impossible plight. Their lives are incredibly stressful, and they are in love with each other in a time when lesbianism was too horrible to even pronounce. The apparent homosexuality of the girls is handled marvelously. It would be too easy for a lazy director to fall back on the stereotype of the evil lesbian killer. Jackson's direction makes the girls' love for each other the most normal thing in their lives, and the world around them is crazy. The parents condemn the relationship for the wrong reasons; fixated on their "unhealthy" sexuality, the parents seem to miss that the real problem is that these girls have grown dangerously co-dependent because they have no other support system in the rest of the lives.
Jackson's handling of the elaborate fantasy lives of adolescents is awesome. The special effects draw the viewer into agreeing that these girls' other world is fantastic indeed, if disconcertingly violent. The embarassing nature of teenage romanticism isn't soft-pedaled at all; all the vanity of their emerging femininity and anxiety about male sexuality is there to make any of us who were imaginative teenage girls once squirm. Thankfully, he dodges another stereotype about lesbianism resulting from a fear of men. The girls handle boys fine, but they just prefer each other.
This movie made me think about Monster, which I haven't seen yet. But it seems to have similar structures and themes, particularly the theme of how human killers really are. I wonder if it's just easier to make female murderers seem more human or if it's just a coincedence. Probably a little of both.
These two girls were found guilty of murder but released in their early 20's on the condition that they never see each other again. Apparently, the writer Anne Perry is one of the murderers, the accomplice. Alot of people wonder if murderers are just born that way or if they are the product of a certain set of circumstances in a certain place in time. Anne Perry is evidence that the latter may be true, at least some of the time.

Woman who killed her children found not guilty

By reason of insanity. This case is so much like Andrea Yates's case that even the defendent drew the comparison. While some on the right, particularly the religious right, are scrambling to call these crimes a natural product of leftism by arguing the slippery slope argument. Quickly: This is what you get when you allow women small amounts of independence and abortion rights. Next thing you know, they are hiding things from their husbands and killing their children. Of course, to everyone else, it looks like both these women, isolated by their ultra-conservative religious beliefs simply went mad from cabin fever mixed with post-partum depression. Because of the constant presence of religion in their lives, it isn't any wonder that their madness seemed as God-driven as everything else in their lives. Those same religious values make it incredibly difficult for a woman to speak up and either ask for help or even explain that God is speaking to them directly. There are countless stories from Catholicism that demonstrate how women who feel they have received direct communication from God are treated--they are pretty much ignored until the orchestrate something dramatic like the stigmata. Of course, showing stigmata is a relatively harmless act compared to killing your children, but then again, these women of the Catholic tradition were not isolated from the society around them.
I am by no means arguing that religious belief in and of itself spurs people to murder, and definitely not child murder. Catholicism emphasizes the importance of good works and community, making it more likely that a woman who is sliding downhill like this will be discovered and helped. In fact, most mainstream religions recognize the place that psychology has in our society and most priests and ministers would counsel a woman in this situation to seek help and would also probably help in making sure that the children were put in a safer situation.
What I see in these two child-murdering cases is how unworkable the monolithic standard of "traditional" family is. One father who rules over the family, one mother who silenty nutures the children and adores the husband, and no outside interference from relatives who might undermine the father's absolute authority is too tight a fit for the majority of people. And it's not really a tradition anyway. Extended families and friends have always played an important role in raising children, as advice-givers, babysitters and most importantly, as adult companions to mothers of young children who may otherwise feel isolated. The stereotype of the friends and family of housewives is a bunch of clucking gossips who seem to exist only to undermine the husband's control of his household. From another perspective, however, the gossips (in the older sense of the word, meaning women who spend alot of time visiting and talking about their own and others' lives) are an anchor to the world that keeps women from going crazy from isolation.

Hightower explains it succiently

My beloved city was the target of the infamous redistricting fight that caused Texas Democrats to flee rather than stand by while Republicans deliberately disenfranchised the voters of the very city they work in. Hightower cuts through the bullshit and explains how silly the new district lines are.
Here's a map to show you where they thought a good place to draw a district line would be. Yep, it is what it looks like. Right through our city. Notice how close the university is and how a line like that might split up the student vote. In fact, if you live in this city, you'll know that this central part of Austin is almost like a pinwheel, spreading liberal voters in every direction. And now, as Hightower explained, instead of voting with your friends who live a couple blocks away, you get to vote with neighborhoods where Austinites are usually described as "weird" or even "queer".
We don't even call it gerrymandering. It's Perry-mandering to us. But, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was too busy with his personal life to consider how rude it is to work to disenfranchise your neighbors.

I want this shirt

It's a response to Republican-owned Urban Outfitter's attempt to impress upon young people how uncool voting is by selling a T-shirt claiming voting is for old people. C'mon. I would be cute in the girlie cut one.
I go this link from Punkvoter. It's a site well worth checking out. As I mentioned before, I heard about them from their Rock Against Bush show at SXSW. I really admire their commitment to this cause. There is no reason punk rock should be apolitical. What are people afraid of? Offending someone? For fuck's sake, it's punk rock. It's supposed to be seditious. Regardless of what Johnny Ramone may say, punk rock really doesn't function to support soul-sucking conservative bullshit. Anyway, one of the great Ramones songs is "Bonzo Goes tto Bitburg", a scathing critique of the sickness that permeated the Reagan administration. One can only imagine what Joey Ramone would think of this administration. Sick would just be a beginning.
Go! Sign up! Pissing on uptight conservatives isn't just necessary, it's fun!

Holy shit

In the South, trying to disenfranchise black voters is just par for the course. Of course, we've loaded up the White House with a bunch of people who think dirty Texas politics needs to become the national standard. Black voters across the country can count on their votes being, well, not counted. A quote:

There is something called the Help America Vote Act that our president signed a year and a half ago. As soon as the Bush family tells us they’re going to help us vote I get very nervous. And sure enough, it is filled with expanding the purge of voters they did in Florida. Instead of eliminating that horror show, that racial voter pogrom, they’re going to take it on the road nationwide....Here’s the bottom line: In 2000, I’m working with Chris Edley of Harvard Law School on this—using his statistics and numbers and he was a U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner—to determine that 1 million black people cast votes nationwide and didn’t have their votes counted. So the non-count of the black vote is a serious racial problem.

Read the whole thing. Please try not to mess yourself. Scary stuff.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry

The Passion is working. A lot of friends and relatives of mine have gone to see this piece of shit, and when I ask them point blank why they are giving Mel Gibson money, they don't know what to say. The Jesus freaks are trumpeting the box office take of this movie while ignoring the huge percentages of the audience who saw it out of just pure curiousity. This whole situation almost seems designed to frustrate us evil well-read liberals who know the history of anti-Semitism and the role that Christianity has played in it. Most people I have asked about the anti-Semitism of this movie have just sort of blinked at me blankly. A handful of the more religious have said, "Well, the Jews did kill Jesus. This movie is just the facts." Pointing out that Romans in fact killed Jesus, and that crucifixion was a part of daily Roman life just doesn't penetrate. Jesus suffered worse than any other person ever, and that's the end of the story. Those other two dudes getting crucified with him in the Bible who were not victims of the ongoing Jewish Conspiracy are roundly ignored. That this movie has more to do with the passion plays of medieval times than the Bible isn't really understood. Most people couldn't tell you what the "blood libel" is.
People I know who have a grasp of the issues that this kind of anti-Semitic movie raises assure me that people's ignorance of the history of anti-Semitism acts as a sort of guard against them having those feelings themselves. If they don't see how this movie is anti-Semitic, then maybe they won't get its message. Well, I grew up in Bible Thumper Land and I know different. It is well-received that the Jews Killed Jesus and the only things that have kept that attitude contained is that the believers don't know or don't know they know any Jews and that there hasn't been a really good way to transmit and sustain this anti-Semitic belief. Well, this stupid movie has filled the hole.
In case, you didn't know, the Nazis had a really good understanding of how effective movies were for focusing people's prejudices. I'm glad South Park confronted this movie. It was surprisingly astute in how people can get swept up in a religious fervor and not realize that they are also getting swept into a racist mob.

Is marriage rotten? Is it okay?

Psychology Today is pretty bad about being reactionary alot of the time. And there's alot of that in this article, for instance, the focus on marriages that break up because of infidelity. They play up the stereotype of the marriage falling apart because one partner, stereotypically the husband, has a roving eye. Last time I checked, though, I do believe most marriages are broken up by the wives. The high divorce rate coincided with the rise of feminism. While that doesn't necessarily prove a causal relationship, it's not useful for feminists to tiptoe around the issue. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that women just got tired of putting up with crap and start walking out in large numbers. Conservatives have grabbed onto this to demonstrate that women need to be subservient in order for marriages to work. Feminists need to quit avoiding the issue and state outright that no, unless men can learn to treat their wives respectfully, they will continue to lose out on the benefits of marriage. That men benefit even more than women from marriage is detailed in this article.
I have trouble believing men, and yes, women, who have a roving eye are really the cause behind the high divorce rate. In my experience, for what it's worth, roving eye types tend to avoid commitment to begin with. Even in this article, the man they found who walked out because he was afraid that he might not get to bed another woman ever did so when his girlfriend pressed for marriage. Not that people don't cheat; they do. But married people cheat for a whole buffet of reasons and it's rarely the boring old fear that their lives won't be exciting enough.
Nonetheless, this article's main message is critical. The most important factor in a solid relationship is not a set of compatibility factors. It's the level of commitment that the individuals feel towards each other. I can't think of better advice for keeping a marriage together than just simply making the commitment a priority. If the first thing you picture when tempted to cheat is how badly it will devastate a loved one, you will be more likely to refrain, I would think. Some things really are pretty simple.

Thanks, Diotima.

Good news

Stephen F. Austin has not bowed to pressure from religious conservatives to deny students health services. I'm glad they took a stand; if they had buckled on this, next thing you know, the Jesus freaks would be pressing for biology to be replaced with creationism.
Thank you to everyone who sent emails protesting this. I am sure that Rep. Christian still feels that it is his right to tell young women what to do with their bodies, but for now, he doesn't have the university's cooperation.
Here is the original article in the local paper regarding the controversy. It's quite telling. For instance, the incident that arose the ire of the constituents was free HIV testing offered by Planned Parenthood on campus. According to my sister, who is a student there, the line was practically wrapped around the block for this service. Widespread HIV testing can do wonders in slowing the spread of the disease. However, testing on college campuses is tacit admission that there is the potential for students to be infected, an unfortunate truth that I guess some people think is best to ignore. Possibly the way that it's easier to pretend that you never took biology and man was created by God 6,000 years ago. Except in this case it kills.
Of course, Rep. Christian knew that this was a good opportunity to score anti-abortion points.

The only extra thing Planned Parenthood brings in is abortion options, and I don't believe it's proper for SFA to enter into that debate.

Honestly, you would think they were performing abortions in the student union. The mere existence of Planned Parenthood on campus is not entering a debate abortion, unless of course the forces of sexism want to make it an issue. Of course, the real issue is this: Alot of righties spend years building up their own daughters and using the schools and clubs to build up other people's daughters to fear Planned Parenthood, to think that it's a bunch of militant lesbian feminists who will remove your uterus and make you a lesbian if you dare walk through their doors. God knows the first time I heard a nice, ordinary doctor mention his respect for Planned Parenthood, I almost fainted from shock. (I assure you my parents had absolutely nothing to do with my mistaken impression of Planned Parenthood. It was the way that religious people in my community mentioned Planned Parenthood in hushed tones like they might mention the Church of Satan.) I think the fear is that if these young women saw that the Planned Parenthood workers are mostly young women, not much different from themselves, then the fear will fall away.
Now it may be true that the students can get the education and services they need elsewhere, if they take time from their studies and social life to do the footwork. But why make it harder than necessary? And what about the students who may not even know that there is information to be had? I remember one friend of mine telling me that he didn't know why condoms kept breaking on him until he stumbled onto a Planned Parenthood demonstration and realized he was putting them on wrong. He didn't even know there was a right and wrong way to put on a condom. Who knows how his life might have turned out if he kept breaking the damn things right and left without knowing what he was doing wrong?
I flash back on my idea that alot of people's opinions on the young are shaped by resentment. Because they didn't have education and birth control, their sex lives have been dominated by their fertility. Maybe they haven't had as much sex as they'd like. Maybe they had to marry the first person they ever dated because of an unplanned pregnancy. Maybe their ignorance racked hell on their health. Regardless, these are all petty reasons to hold back from younger people. Imagine if people in the past didn't allow the youth to have books or lightbulbs because they didn't get those things in their own youth.

I wonder....

.....if having Cheney sit with Bush to babysit and coach him on the right answers in front of the 9/11 commission is such a good idea for them. It could really backfire. For one thing, it's creepy. And it could really undermine their campaign. Bush is running on the image of The Cowboy, and being a sharp-shooting, quick-thinking loner is a big part of that image. Maybe they need to start selling Cheney & Bush as more of a buddy cop team, with Cheney as the grizzled old cop who is about to retire but is hanging in to train the hot-headed younger cop. Hey, they could even play good cop/bad cop with the 9/11 commission. But I don't really see that as working, because the what-me-worry frat boy inside Bush won't allow him to take this stuff seriously enough to play a good hothead.

Not another one

Another pharmacist took charge of a woman's body for her again. That's two incidents in Texas within a month. This sort of thing raises flags for me. Are fundie Christians targeting pharmacists and trying to guilt them into refusing to give medication to women?
I follow this stuff pretty closely, and it seems that lately the anti-woman contigent is getting sloppy and letting their true motivations slip through more and more. The general rule is to frame all attacks on female autonomy in terms of protecting babies and protecting family. They know that the vast majority of Americans don't see birth control as hurtful to family or babies, regardless of any opinions on women working or whatever. In fact, I would argue that most people view birth control as a positive factor in their family life, since reducing their family size means that they can give each individual child a better chance. Birth control strengthens marriage as well, by allowing couples to make love without worrying about conceiving. I doubt really that conservatives have much of a problem with either of those arguments, but they are still against birth control because of it is so critical to women. Without it, there really is no way to both be free and live with men, like it or not.
When birth control is challenged, it is usually couched in the language of misogyny. Letting women have birth control means losing woman control. Women become sluts and whores. Eventually, women are going to lose their respect and subservience to men, and then, well, huh. What horrible things would happen if women actually achieved equality are described hazily, if at all. The very fact of equality is taken as horror itself.
I know it sounds paranoid, particularly to people who are unaware of the history of legislation against birth control and abortion. For instance, did you know the Supreme Court only allowed birth control since married couples, i.e. where a man was calling the shots, needed privacy? Roe vs. Wade established more than right to abortion, it helped establish that women have sexual privacy rights as surely as men, a right that the Justice Dept. is challenging right now.
Anti-contraceptive advocates claim they are against sexual pleasure in and of itself. (Still doesn't explain why they don't keep it to themselves, but whatever.) But if that is really true, then where are the pharmacists refusing to fill Viagra prescriptions? No matter how vigorously they protest that sexual pleasure is to be denied to both men and women, women do seem to get the brunt of it every time.

Good post

Pandagon hits it again. The comments are good. At first the argument that conservatives don't consider poor families to fall under the "family values" umbrella seems mean and petty.
The important thing to consider is how the term "family values" functions semantically. Most people err in understanding the definition of it, because they break it into two words and assume the phrase means "valuing families". In order to understand what a word or phrase means, you have to pay attention to how it is used, what its context is. The phrase "family values" gets hauled out everytime something or someone threatens patriarchal authority, so it is better understood as meaning "valuing patriarchal authority". A good working example of this is how families with gay parents are denied equal legal protection under the auspice of "family values". Obviously, families are not being valued, since actual families are suffering. However, denying equal rights to gays does uphold the traditional straight male authority.
Poor families are often, in reality and even more so in stereotype, run by women. This is without question a violation of "family values". If women can raise children well by themselves, it is an insult to patriarchal values and therefore every effort needs to be expended to keep that from happening. Individual women and children will get trampled, but that is unavoidable. Above all, the patriarchal order needs protection.

Urban legends strike again

I love www.snopes.com. You can learn a whole lot about how people see recent events by looking at the bullshit stories they send each other in email. This one is a real doozy.
Okay, someone actually sent this to someone else thinking it was a great story about a real hero. Who thinks this? This story makes no sense.
First of all, how rude! This woman expresses dismay about deaths of people from her old country and this guy pretty much tells her that doesn't matter since Americans have died in war. Actually, if a woman is from Iraq, odds are she knows something about war, considering the million people killed in the Iran/Iraq war.
And how dumb do you have to be to think Iraqi women wear the burqa? And of course, there's always the brillance of the "go back to your own country" rant at non-white people. It's funny to me that your average xenophobic "patriot" probably knows alot less about American law and history than an immigrant who has to learn that stuff to get citizenship.
I highly doubt people would applaud and cheer a racist haranguing of a stranger, but hell, maybe there are places where everyone sits around hoping some Muslim gets yelled at so they can cheer. Who knows?
If Iraqis are such wicked people, why are we "liberating" them?
And the best part, the whole "If you were in _____, you wouldn't even get to say that" argument, completely missing that the supposed defender of freedom is, in fact, not letting the woman speak her mind.
I'm sure this story isn't true, and I have to wonder where these stories come from. Wherever they come from, these stories obviously have alot of meaning to somebody, and that worries me.

Red and blue

With all this talk about red vs. blue states, I have felt the urge to weigh in. I live smack dab in the middle of the Big Red State. But I also live in a pretty standard blue city. But I have serious problems with the red and blue divide. It is a useful tool, and it's been an extremely useful tool for Republicans, useful to create resentment and garner working class votes. Blue voters, aka "elitist liberals", are stereotyped as overly educated and without "common sense", stuck on material goods that red voters supposedly do not have access to while piously mocking the down-home taste of red voters. The gay marriage thing is a standard-issue wedge between red and blue voters. It's not just about homosexuality, it's feeding into decades resentment over this educated elite who allows themselves sexual freedom. I find it interesting how many people aren't angry about being condescended to by the Republican party, who apparently thinks their base is ignorant, repressed, and tasteless and ripe for resenting the educated, free and tasteful.
Alot of people instinctively relate to this great divide. In fact, alot of us who came from blue collar, conservative backgrounds only to become educated and liberal tend to wish for a straightforward red/blue divide. But the red/blue divide is handy for conservatives and gives them a blueprint for breeding resentment. It needs to be examined more closely. Are the reds and blues really so far apart?
David Brooks claimed to prove that indeed the uneducated red salt-of-the-earth myth was true. This article demonstrates he basically made it all up. I wish the author had pounded him harder on the way he implied that blue women had better bodies; the anti-gay thing is really bringing the sexual resentment part of the sell to the forefront and it needs more examination.
I liked this article, so I decided to do a quick overview of my friends who I know for a fact vote Democratic and see how "blue" they really are.
Guns: Yep. I don't own them, but I've definitely fired them. Most of my friends think guns should be legal, at least for sport. Many own guns.
Taste in food/drink: Mostly we drink Lone Star when we hang out together. I like to cook and so do a couple friends of mine, but as a general rule, the big occasion is old-fashioned barbeque. Wine is nearly unknown. Margaritas are considered fancy drinking.
Book larnin': About half with college degrees, half without.
Coffee drinking: No one I know likes latte. I may be wrong, but I think everyone is standard coffee-drinking.
Music: Lots of punk rockers. Yes, liberal generally. But stereotypically blue? Not in the slightest.
Cars: Wide variety, everything from pickups to electric cars to muscle cars.
Clothes: Not designer by any stretch. Unless Goodwill is a designer.

Mostly, I am not well-off enough to be a blue liberal and neither are my friends. This blue vs. red thing is kind of yuppie baiting. Make no mistake about who the real yuppies are, though.

Holy shit

Instapundit is going nuts over a DAISY that John Kerry had hanging off his jacket. Understandably, The Talent Show and Pandagon are really upset and perplexed. It's easy to see conservatives as pathological or freaky or desperate to go after a stupid plastic flower.
But there is a very, very, very good reason for conservatives to go after things like this. And yes, it is, as usual, an issue of language, metaphor and imagery.
When commentators on the TV and radio say that Bush is "strong" on national security, they are referring not to any actual policy decisions and how well they work on preventing terrorism--on that issue, the Democrats have a much better track record. It's only in the metaphorical sense.
When most Americans think of somebody "strong" defending "home", they draw on the picture of the strong father, protecting his wife and children against mysterious threats. Daddy may or may not understand those threats, but the wife and children don't need to; all they need to know is that Daddy will protect them. This is an image that Bush and Co. fill well, and they cultivate this image by using words like "homeland" to evoke home and by confusing the public on foreign policy so that we are more likely to give up and trust Daddy to take care of us.
But then Kerry runs, and Kerry is quickly becoming a more appealing version of Daddy. He's the Daddy that we wish we had. Just as tough and strong, but also intelligent, glamorous and just. He's like Michael Landon or something. And for many Americans, intelligent and just do not necessarily undermine tough, so the Bushies are panicking.
So, they are looking for a way to undermine his masculinity, because by definition, Daddy is a Man, particularly Daddy as a Warrior. Even then, they are still grasping for ways to emasculate Kerry, because he really is a man's man in a lot of ways. So the second he has a moment of whimsy, they go ballistic. Real Men are not whimsical.
They can try, I guess. It is unlikely to work. A little bit of goofiness is expected of men now. It can actually add to the perception that a man is virile, because it shows he's not too hung up on stupid stuff. We'll see.

How to write effective propaganda

It's a shame that Marvin Olasky and I have the same employer, especially considering he surely makes quite a bit more than I do. It's amazing to me that someone can rack up so much so-called education and none of it really sinks in. Olasky has been hoodwinked into believing the myth that the Founding Fathers really intended our country to be a theocracy but just somehow forgot to mention that fact in the Constitution. Anyway, this essay is cute. Olasky is a big contributor to the conservative strategy of crafting language and images to override the reader's ability to think reasonably about the issue. Misleading your audience with evocative phrasing is what he would consider "good writing". To justify himself, he draws on a number of pretty famous writers, very few of whom actually seem to back up his apparent thesis. Where I was educated, having internal consistency to an essay was "good" writing, but what do I know?
Mostly he just wants to imply that writers like Mark Twain (a big critic of irrational Christian fundamentalism of the sort that Olasky would like to have dominate the government) and George Orwell (need I remind anyone Orwell's opinions on misleading propaganda?) would somehow support him. It's a nice conservative trick that it's best to be aware of--to bolster the belief that in every way, shape, and form, that they have the force of history behind them, they will quote writers out of context to recruit them to the cause, pretty much hoping that their audience is uneducated enough not to catch it. And then they have the balls to pretend that it's liberals who are condescending!

Unemployment and the South

One of the big questions that perplexes Democrats is that why it is that white Southerners so consistently vote against their own economic interests. A lot of reasons are bandied around, and most have validity. Southerners listen to more radio; Southerners are more old-fashioned; Southerners are more religious. And, while it's unpleasant to say so, the race issue is a big vote winner for the Republicans. It worked so well to switch Southern whites over to the party, they have expanded into using inflammatory rhetoric against Hispanics (increasingly indistinguishable from "illegal immigrants") to start getting votes in the Southwest. Still, it's hard to really believe that animosity towards racial minorities is so strong that it compels people to vote against their own economic interests. So, the confusion continues.
Well, a big clue to the whole mystery came to me listening to NPR in the car today. The big story, of course, is that unemployment didn't go up as much as it has been going up. Of course, since the media is in a constant race away from the word "liberal", this was reported straightforwardly as a victory for Bush's economic plan. Anyway, in batting the numbers around, one number jumped out at me. While overall unemployment didn't rise because of a run on McJobs, the unemployment rate for blacks went up even more, and is now over 10%.
10%--one in every ten black people who is actively looking for a job (mind you, not the ones who gave up or the ones who would like a job but can't find transportation or childcare or the ones who haven't found a real job but are surviving off odd jobs) cannot find one. Now, the overall unemployment rate is 5.7%. Blacks aren't unemployed at twice the rate of the average, yet, but give it a couple go-arounds of unemployment overall holding steady and blacks continuing to lose work, and we'll get there.
White Southerners do think they are voting their own economic interests. Again, it helps to understand the complex meanings behind simple-seeming buzzwords. "Affirmative action" and "quotas" are such buzzwords. Behind those phrases are worlds of meaning. But to keep it quite simple, those words are a good way for the Republicans to promise their voters that the unemployment rate may go up or go down, but by aggressively going against any attempt by racial minorities to better their economic lot, there will be a cushion of people between white voters and losing jobs.
What's particularly damaging about the "cushion" of black unemployment is that a lot of people who wouldn't really otherwise be racist find themselves feeling that it needs to exist. And our society reflects it. Any attempt to take a few cards out of the deck stacked against blacks is protested vehmently, everything from affirmative action to attempts to make public schools more equitable in their funding.
I have no idea how to counteract the Republican's well-built propaganda machine designed to make people feel that in order for their race to prosper, another must suffer. Pointing out that this or that is "racist" and trying to shame people doesn't really go very far; when Grand Dragons of the KKK bristle at the mere suggestion that they are racist, the word has lost much of its meaning.

Maybe it's 'cause he's looney

This article from Salon tries to take a well-reasoned approach to the world of crazy that Justice Scalia's tenure as a justice has become, but in doing so, I think the author kind of misses the point. People are shying away from Scalia because it seems like he has lost even his basic ability to practice law. In fact, his work is the inverse of what justices are supposed to do, which is hear arguments and then decide which is better according to logic, reason and Constitutional principles. He has decided what he thinks and he is going to twist arguments to confirm his beliefs. And some of the twisting is very, very far from reasonable or principled at this point.

Lying or Standerd Operating Procedure?

The fact that the White House wasted a minute to try to protect Bush with lies from jokes about boring a teenager with a speech is scary enough. For most Presidents, and I think I can say this with some assurance, even if they were angry about being mocked like this, it would be considered too much effort for his people to concoct a lie, sell it to CNN, and retract it without actually retracting it later by claiming that they never said it in the first place. But that was the knee-jerk first reaction of the Bush administration, because it wasn't hard for them--it is Standard Operating Procedure. I can almost picture page one of the Bush Bible O' Spin:

1) Anything said or shown in a negative tone or light about the Magnificent President must automatically be untrue, as He is Infalliable. This is the message that we must maintain at all costs.
2) Therefore, any negative thing said or shown must be corrected immediately. If, for some reason, the negative thing seems to be, as the godless rationlists might put it, "true", then refer to one of our standard spins:
a) This "evidence" must be faked.
b) We have reason to believe that the person making this accusation doesn't like Bush. And anyone who doesn't like the Magnificent President is a heretic, um, I mean, "unpatrioitic" or "doesn't support the troops."
c) We have reason to believe the person making this accusation is a (homosexual, wife-beater, commuter who drives past the homes of Democrats on his daily drive).
3) These utterly transparent spins are being revealed more and more quickly now, often within moments of being used. This is unfortunate, but we must persist in using these spins, because Fox News needs something to repeat ad nauseum for the next two weeks.
4) A retraction may be necessary. Don't panic! Many millions more people will hear the spin than the retraction. If a retraction is necessary, use one of these three standard retractions:
a) We didn't say that. (Best used if the person phoning in the lie bothered to disguise his/her voice and not give a name.)
b) Accuse the person demanding a retraction of being unpatriotic.
c) Repeat after me: "the liberal media". (This phrase works like a dog whistle on Fox News, unifying the attack dogs.)
The important thing to remember is that if we can get the media heads talking about whether or not this or that was true or if so-and-so smokes cock or if the media is really liberal, then the original negative statements, however true, will fade away.

At this point, they rattle through this plan of action so quickly that they don't even realize that they are wasting it on really, really stupid stuff like a yawning kid.