You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around.
Traditional head-scratch at dearth of women in blogosphere.
Ritual response-link to What She Said!
Ancillary self-serving notation for record of new linchinography entries: Pinko Feminist Hellcat and Echidne of the Snakes.
Close with traditional packing away of subject, with flourish, someplace easily accessible. Note in calendar to exhume and respond to head-scratch again in three months’ time.
(You want to know what the funny thing is? The ice-edged gut-punching joke of it all? Five minutes spent perusing any feminist comment thread or discussion group would be enough to rapidly disabuse Messr. Drum and his commentariat of the idea that women aren’t “comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing.”)
Boy, that’s a lot of moms.
You might remember the recent flap over Buster the Bunny’s visit to a couple of mothers in Vermont, and the outrage our shiny new Secretary of Education felt at the idea tax money was being spent to expose our children to those people. Here’s a videoblog entry from Blogumentary that features an interview with the show’s senior editor, with clips from the episode in question, and some distressing news about just how much damage the Secretary’s intemperate words have wrought. —I’ll also throw in a letter to Secretary Spellings from Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that ends like this:
I am by now myself used to the kind of meanness which was the basis of your decision, but I am sorry that young people all over this country who happen to be gay or lesbian have now learned that the person who has been picked by the President of the United States to help with their education has such a fundamentally negative view of their very existence.
Keep those cards and letters coming.
While I’m making pithy posts.
Go, save Wampum. The Koufax Awards, a labor of love, swamped their bandwidth; Julia’s got an emergency donation button to get ’em back on their feet.
—If only so we can all vote for “Falling Reentlistment Rates Among Right Wing Pundits Threaten War on Terror” to get next year’s Koufax for Funniest Post.
Dog bites man.
Right-wing pundit accuses former US president of treason.
(We know at long last they have no shame, but what about the rest of us? What must we do to rid ourselves of these meddlesome batshiners? —Or at least return them to the dark corners where they won’t get in the way of the rest of us going about the business of the world?)
A modest proposal.
How about we on the Left start looking into a class-action libel suit against these moonshit batshiners?
(Psst. You grownups still clinging to the right wing? You libertarians still trying to convince yourselves that voting for Bush was the lesser of two evils? Y’all just got your Ward Churchill moment. Speak out or fuck off.)
Liberty is what I mean when I point to it.
And second, that it captured beautifully the single most important thing that I learned from my years working on “constitutionalism” in Eastern Europe: That 90% of the challenge is to build a culture that respects the rule of law, and that practices it. A document doesn’t build that culture. And no one has a formula—either for building it, or preserving it.
Certainly not a law professor.
—Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?
—John Yoo, Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law
But are not limited to.
The organizations who have filed letters of protest with the committee include: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC); American Federation of Labor- Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO); American Friends Service Committee; American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA); American Jewish Committee; Amnesty International USA; Anti-Defamation League; Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee; Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum; Asian Law Caucus; Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO; Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California; Bill of Rights Defense Committee; Catholic Charities USA; Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Univ. of Calif., Hastings College of the Law; Center for Community Change; Center for National Security Studies; Episcopal Migration Ministries; Fair Immigration Reform Movement; Golden Vision Foundation; Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Harvard Law School; Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights; Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; Hmong National Development; Human Rights First; Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights; Immigration Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services; Irish American Unity Conference; Jewish Community Action; Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Korean Alliance for Peace and Justice (KAPJ); Korean American Coalition; Kurdish Human Rights Watch, Inc.; Labor Council for Latin American Advancement; Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; League of United Latin American Citizens; Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Midwest Immigrant & Human Rights Center; The Multiracial Activist; National Asian Pacific American Bar Association; National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC); National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum; National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund; National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development; National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL); National Council of La Raza; National Day Laborer Organizing Network; National Employment Law Project; National Federation of Filipino American Associations; National Immigrant Solidarity Network; National Immigration Forum; National Immigration Law Center; National Korean American Service & Education Consortium; Organization of Chinese Americans; Peace Action; People for the American Way; Refugee Law Center; Rural Opportunities; Service Employees International Union; Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Sikh Coalition; South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow; South Asian Network; Southeast Asia Resource Action Center; Tahirih Justice Center; United Nations High Commission for Refugees; Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations; Unitarian Universalist Service Committee; UNITE HERE; U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI); Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs; Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children; World Organization for Human Rights USA; World Relief; YKASEC-Empowering the Korean American Community; and Young Koreans United of USA.
The Republicans on the committee in question want to set aside the rule of law for the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Apparently, our spanking new Attorney General was not a bad apple.
“It’s an amazing media error, a huge blunder. I’m sure the Bush administration is thrilled by this spin.”
Yeah, I know, we could be talking about almost anything. But in this case, it’s specifically out-of-the-ass estimates of voter turn-out and its implications that got trumpeted as gospel and slung as a cudgel and are now being walked back, well, over at Editor and Publisher, at least. I don’t know that this is even being hinted at on page A15, elsewhere, out there.
—In Iraq, silly. I know, I know, it’s hard to keep up…
I do so hate this sour mood of mine.
Gets to the point when Matt Taibbi, trying to make Sy Hersh look like an optimist—
RUMSFELD: Anyway, I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t know if we’re starting another war. I tried to ask the president about it the other day. We schedule a meeting. I go in there. He’s sitting behind his desk and everything’s the same as before, except now he’s got this big brass plate on his desk that reads, “Ask me to show you my MANDATE!” He’s got a plate of tater tots and he’s hucking them at Laura’s new dog there, making these bomb noises, like “Pyew! Pyew!” And I’m like, “Sir, are we invading Iran?” And he looks up and says, “Iran? That’s a great idea! Put Rumsfeld on it!”
FEITH: Jesus! And you say?
RUMSFELD: And I say, “Sir, I am Rumsfeld!” And he says, “You’re kidding. Then who was that who was just in here?” And he points to a security monitor. I look at it, and there’s a guy walking down the White House corridor, towards the exit, who looks just like me!
FEITH: Who was it?
RUMSFELD: How the hell do I know?
FEITH: Was he Defense?
RUMSFELD: I don’t think so. I’m Defense!
—well, it just isn’t bleak enough, and I find myself scarfing up the War Nerd on the sly—
Everybody’s asking me what’ll happen if we attack Iran. To get a quick preview, just do what this guy in my eighth-grade class did: put a firecracker in your mouth, hold it between your front teeth, and light the fuse.
Your friends won’t believe you’ll go through with it. So when it blows up in your face, you’ll expect them to be impressed. And you’ll be surprised, just like this guy in junior high was surprised, when all you get is a perforated eardrum and a reputation as the biggest dumbass in the school.
Right now, Bush is standing there with a lit match and a big firecracker labeled “Iran” in his mouth. Except it’s more like an M-80 or a whole stick of dynamite than a firecracker. Nobody believes he’ll be dumb enough to light it, to actually attack Iran. Even the Iranians don’t believe it; Khameini, their head Mullah, said last week “America is in no position to invade Iran.”
He’s right about that. Even the US Army brass admits we’re “overstretched.” We don’t even have enough troops to control Iraq; a war with Iran would mean calling up every National Guard unit we have. Even then, it would take years to get them combat-ready.
And this time the Brits won’t come with us. They’ve been making that clear, on the quiet. If we go in, it’ll be as a coalition of one.
So Khameini’s right; we can’t attack Iran. But that doesn’t mean we won’t. Khameini was making the same mistake everybody’s been making: assuming Bush and his cronies have a lick of sense.
—so much so that it takes me too dam’ long to recognize the nihilism masquerading as tough-nosed realism, the second-hand armchair experience cloaking itself in coarse, pseudo–old-skool ethnicisms—I know you of old. You’ve got as much to learn from the world as we do, bucko.
I need to put it all down, the news and the knee-jerk and the flailing outrage, just put it all down and back away. Since I’m not getting the job done here. (A perennial plaint, hereabouts. —What is the job? You let me know, you ever find out.) Work on the damn reprogramming and re-design. Pick up the comics and the SF and the phantastique; start picking at the differences between trees and labyrinths. Drug myself with ostranenie; stave off with denial what I can’t move or shift with red-faced ranting.
My God. I used to live there.
Yes, it is embarrassing when Stern Daddy gets all in yo’ face muthafuckah like he’s cool or something.
But hey, it’s not like they could have gotten him elected on the issues or anything.
(My Christ. Fighting unpopular Hollywood movie stars! How terribly, terribly brave! And effective!)
You are the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve.
Maybe it’s the bourbon talking, but I just figured out the shorter meme that insists the MSM (sic; oh God, how sic) is successfully holding back the most sophisticated army on Earth with a handful of disgruntled insurgents half a world away when it couldn’t manage to rig an election in its own backyard against an incumbent with staggeringly low approval ratings and a Washington Redskins team that lost the crucial pre-election home game, and this despite its best efforts in discrediting those lovely Swift Boat chaps:
How is it the people who show us the news always just happen to be where the news they show us happens?
Because it is better to light a candle.
Thank you, Billie Miller. —Via Eschaton.
Extremism in defense of what, exactly?
But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of— The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for—you know, these—some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not—this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over—as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly—over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What’s going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes—the daughter had come home—before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a—I hadn’t thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows—she doesn’t know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just—I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn’t say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became—one of them was published.
—Seymour Hersh, speaking at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in December
via Sidelights
Sticky eyeballs.
Yeah, I know, I should lay off the AFA; low-hanging fruit, kulturkampf is a rationalization of assholery by other means, ignore the bully, strike them down and they will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. But hey: they want you to write a letter to the FCC, telling them to stop cutting sweetheart deals with CBS, and that’s something we can all get behind, right? Anyway, here’s the pitch:
In November 2004, the FCC cut a backroom deal with CBS and its parent company Viacom.
In summary, Viacom agreed to donate a paltry $3.5 million to the FCC in exchange for dropping thousands of indecency complaints filed against it by taxpaying consumers.
Basically, the FCC cut a deal with CBS. What was the result? CBS immediately went back to their standard fare of lewd and indecency programs.
On December 31, 2004, CBS re-aired an episode of Without A Trace, complete with an extended teen-age orgy scene. The original broadcast of this episode had thousands of FCC complaints against it, which were tossed out in the November FCC/CBS “back-scratching” deal.
Click here to view the abominable Without A Trace scene for yourself! Be warned, it contains offensive and graphic scenes.
Because of these kinds of backdoor deals, the FCC continues to allow networks like CBS to flood the airwaves with indecency.
Do I need to tell you that the emphasis was in the original? —Way to drive the traffic there, Don.
The Book, the Book, the Book is on fire!
Another week, another email from the American Family Association. Shall we?
In the 27 years of this ministry, I have never witnessed a more outrageous miscarriage of justice than what is happening in Philadelphia. Four Christians are facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment.
Holy cow! Really? That’s awful!
On October 10, 2004, the four Christians were arrested in Philadelphia. They are part of Repent America. Along with founder Michael Marcavage, members of Repent America—with police approval—were preaching near Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages.
When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christians’ movement on the street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians’ messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.
Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and jailed the Christians!
Goodness. As something of a free-speech absolutist, I’m appalled. One thing, though: you say Repent America already “were preaching,” “handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages,” but then, when “they tried to speak”—tell me, why do you separate the acts of preaching and speaking like that? What, exactly, were y’all doing when you “tried to speak”? —Let’s get another point of view, shall we?
The confrontation began when the 11 protestors marched to the front of a stage at Outfest and began to yell out Biblical passages to drown out the events on stage.
Police attempted to get the protestors to move to to an area on the edge of the site. Instead they went deeper into the gay crowd. Using a bullhorn they condemned homosexuality. They then got into an argument with a group of Pink Angels, who screamed back.
It was at that point police intervened arresting the 11.
Oh.
Hey, look, folks, not to jog your elbow or nothin,’ but most definitions of “speak” aren’t so broad as to include “marching to the front of the stage and yelling out antagonistic slogans so as to disrupt what other people have peaceably assembled to do.” That just doesn’t go without saying. So, your email message? About how they’re “facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment”? Not to tell you your commandments or nothin,’ but that’s perilously close to false witness. Y’all might want to reconsider.
After all, yelling “Faggot!” at a crowded gay pride event is one fuck of a lot closer to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater than, oh, sending out a letter urging resistance to an upcoming draft. So that First Amendment? Not as operational as you seem to think, here. —Yes, I know, it’s a terribly grey area, fraught with complications, rife with the potential for abuse; like anyone who lives in a major American metropolitan area, I’ve seen how the cops will use it to shut down legitimate protest. But y’all went in spoiling for a fight, and you got one. You want my sympathy? You gonna have a problem if we bum-rush the megachurch, carrying Darwin fish emblems and yelling through a bullhorn about how the Christianist faith makes mothers cut their babies’ arms off?
Thought so.
Oh, and one more thing: the Bible has been determined to be hate speech? Really? Are you actually trying to tell me that 2,000 years and 66 books and three-quarters of a million words of theology and philosophy and myth and law and story and peace, love, and understanding can in its essence be boiled down to a couple of verses you like to use to hate on people whose sex lives make you feel uncomfortable somewhere deep inside?
Well, hell. Forget it. We don’t need no water; let the motherfucker burn.
Pissing in the wind.
This, this is what Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), former exterminator and fine, upstanding Christianist American, your House Majority Leader and mine, had to say about the 150,000 people who died, who have died, who are still dying as a result of the horrible earthquakes and tsunamis that struck on St. Stephen’s Day:
Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
And had I believed in God, as such, I would no longer: no word has yet reached Google news of the sudden and spontaneous immolation of Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land). How could any God worthy of the name allow such blasphemy to blot His earth without smiting the squalid little pisher with lightning? Or at least a coronary failure in flagrante? —There’s mysterious ways, and then there’s the only decent thing, and this, this man dares turn his back on love and compassion, decency and tolerance, on all our best qualities, the very things that make us human, that the book he professes to follow would teach him if he’d ever bother to listen—all this he spits on in a public forum before us all to play yet another game of my god is bigger than your god, Allahu Akbar motherfucker? The Old Testament God would at the very least have sent a bear to eat him up for this insult, and even the New Testament Christ at His most peaceful would eyes flashing toss this moneychanger from the temple and hurl stones upon his head.
Nor do I believe in hell, for all that I wish I could, so that I might join right-thinking people everywhere in praying fervently for his damnation to it. We could console ourselves by imagining him in the icy realm of Cocytus, and while away sinfully pleasant hours by disputing whether he might end up gripped in ice, head bent forward or backward, or completely submerged at the center of the Earth itself, awaiting his turn in one of Lucifer’s mouths. —Nor can I play the Devil, and quote Scripture to my purpose: much as I might dream of driving all-out for days from here to Washington, DC, stopping only for gas and the occasional cat nap, that I might stride horns swelling up the steps of the Capitol in my Chuck Taylors, unshaven and wild-eyed, demanding his whereabouts of everyone I met in those polished halls of power until I finally got to beard the pathetic little Texan in his wood-panelled lair and point my finger thusly, bellowing with a preacher’s booming cadences, “Know this, sinner: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”
But I probably couldn’t make it past the cops, and anyway, that’s Tarantino, not Ezekial.
Not even the cooler æsthetic comfort of poetic justice is available to me: much as I might look forward to the day when his power will be broken, the panoply of his office scattered, his house razed, when his family will deny him bread and salt and PAC money, when the pot he pisses in will be taken from him and he must beg for the very compassion he tried to drive from this land, I can’t begin to believe he will ever come to realize it is all only what he must reap for the filth he has sown and the hurt he has spread. I can’t believe he’ll ever learn a thing. Comprehension is as far from him as compassion, or shame.
GIMEL ZAYIN YUD. This, too, shall pass. Y’all had the slightest inkling of what that really meant, we’d all be much better off. My god is bigger than your god: if that is all the meaning you pathetic little shits can draw from something like this, give me nihilistic despair. Please. It’s far more human.
0wnzorship society.
Hark! That awful, sucking sound… the indescribable shape looming towards us through the gloom… that gagsome stench… What could it be? (Melvin?) —No, it’s the January Surprise: the plans to abolish Social Security, as prophesied, are beginning, slowly, to coalesce...
Social Security Formula Weighed: In informal briefings on Capitol Hill, White House aides have told lawmakers and aides that Bush will propose the change in the benefits formula…. Currently, initial benefits are set by… adjust[ing] those earnings… based on wage growth…. Under the commission plan, the adjustment would be based instead on the rise of consumer prices…. [A] middle-class worker retiring in 2022 would see guaranteed benefits cut by 9.9 percent. By 2042, average monthly benefits for middle- and high-income workers would fall by more than a quarter. A retiree in 2075 would receive 54 percent of the benefit now promised….
Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post on October 20, 2004:
Ads Push the Factual Envelope: John F. Kerry is denouncing deep Social Security cutbacks that President Bush has not proposed…. A Kerry ad, based on a private comment Bush is reported to have made on wanting to privatize Social Security, says: “Now Bush has a plan that cuts Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.” But the president, while favoring allowing younger workers to put part of their benefits in private accounts, has never put forth a plan—and has vowed that any change would not affect current retirees…
But that’s not the funny bit; that’s not the funny bit by half. For the funny bit, you have to dig into the numbers a little, and figure out what you ought to be making, what you’ll probably be making if we do nothing, and what you’ll end up making if the Republicans carry the day. Max points out the CBO study which does the math, and you really ought to listen:
In Table 2 of this study, we get estimates of benefits resulting from this approach. Since it’s all about the kids, we should start with the impact on what’s called the “10-year birth cohort starting in year 2000.” Kids born after January 1, 2000. We focus on the middle of the middle, as far as income distribution goes (“median in middle household earnings quintile”).
If Little Nell is this type of person, in retirement she would be due $26,400 a year in benefits annually under current law. This would require some kind of infusion into the Trust Fund after 2052 (when CBO says it runs a shortfall). With no such infusion, alas Little Nell can only be paid $19,900 (everything here is constant 2004 dollars). (The same type of person retiring today—“the 1940 birth cohort”—gets $14,900.)
Let’s chew on that for a second. With no transfer of revenue into the Trust Fund after 2052 (as opposed to redemptions of its assets with general revenue), Little Nell still does quite a bit better than a retiree today.
This is a crisis? Surely we can do better. What about the excellent reform envisioned by G. Bush?
When you include the returns to the individual accounts and “price indexing” of benefits, Little Nell’s benefit is . . . $14,600. SHE DOES WORSE THAN UNDER THE “BANKRUPT” TRUST FUND! Way worse! Can you hear me now? She even does worse than a current retiree.
And Matt’s right: there’s nothing ideological about this, the delusions of Grover Norquist notwithstanding. The financial industry has more money than any one of us does. So we lose. Simple as that. Our future’s been pwned.
