From the Archives
(March 2006) Consider for a moment the irony of the fact that Yahoo!’s lead headline today is The Trumps choose a name for their baby boy!
But only one major US paper has reported the news that Iranian security forces brutally attacked a group of women observing International Women’s Day.
These feminists organized under a platform of peace to support basic human rights, yet were ambushed by truckloads of state-authorized thugs who dumped garbage on them, kicked them and beat them with batons.
Victims include the famous (and elderly and nearly blind) poet Simin Behbehani, who says that the purpose of her poetry is to fight injustice.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali as-Sistani issued a death fatwa against queers and is calling for us to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”
This fatwa makes Medea want to grab her handy-dandy Sears and Roebuck vise grips and wrench the grand(iose) ayatollah’s scrotum about in the worst, most severe way.
SANG IN SHOWER: No, but I conditioned my frizzy hair
READING: Hiss and Tell’s latest entry (singing the praises of large breasts)
LISTENING TO: Kasey Chambers’ “Falling Into You”
BEST OF SPAM: Want your love back? (Well, I’m SURE I’d be asking a random e-mailer for it if I did)
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
199. A NEW DARK AGES, OR, REMEMBERING AWE
From the Archives
(Monday • 6 March 2006) I’m thinking about faith.
Many of my progressive Catholic friends miss the rituals and mysticism of their faith but cannot in good conscience participate in what they describe as a repressive and greedy organization. These days, their evolving spiritual practices include worshipping the moon or Spiderwoman weaving this big world. Others have joined Unitarian Universalist fellowships. And others use energy work and meditation to fill the void.
I once worked with a group of radical Catholic activists who rented whole floors of apartment buildings that we used as stealth offices. Priests’ or nuns’ bedrooms were off limits, but everyone otherwise walked freely between apartments, setting up women’s pottery collectives in Nicaragua; acquiring, organizing, and delivering humanitarian aid to Central America; writing inclusive non-hierarchical lectionaries and responsorial psalms; working to end the death penalty and to free Mumia; working to include women in the distribution of holy sacraments; editing and creating an inclusive non-hierarchical Bible; thwarting the anti-choice movement and the many sexist bishops who oppose women’s equality.
The founders of this organization—a Jesuit priest and nun—have since been excommunicated, but their work goes on.
One of the many things I learned as we ate our hummus and bean sprout sandwiches was that the now rabidly anti-choice Catholic church actually allowed abortions until the late 1800s, when the pope conveniently declared abortion an excommunicable offense just as France’s diminishing birth rates threatened its ability to maintain a strong army.
(Not coincidentally, the emperor declared the pope infallible soon after this decree.)
Matthew Fox, another radical Catholic, said
(Monday • 6 March 2006) I’m thinking about faith.
Many of my progressive Catholic friends miss the rituals and mysticism of their faith but cannot in good conscience participate in what they describe as a repressive and greedy organization. These days, their evolving spiritual practices include worshipping the moon or Spiderwoman weaving this big world. Others have joined Unitarian Universalist fellowships. And others use energy work and meditation to fill the void.
I once worked with a group of radical Catholic activists who rented whole floors of apartment buildings that we used as stealth offices. Priests’ or nuns’ bedrooms were off limits, but everyone otherwise walked freely between apartments, setting up women’s pottery collectives in Nicaragua; acquiring, organizing, and delivering humanitarian aid to Central America; writing inclusive non-hierarchical lectionaries and responsorial psalms; working to end the death penalty and to free Mumia; working to include women in the distribution of holy sacraments; editing and creating an inclusive non-hierarchical Bible; thwarting the anti-choice movement and the many sexist bishops who oppose women’s equality.
The founders of this organization—a Jesuit priest and nun—have since been excommunicated, but their work goes on.
One of the many things I learned as we ate our hummus and bean sprout sandwiches was that the now rabidly anti-choice Catholic church actually allowed abortions until the late 1800s, when the pope conveniently declared abortion an excommunicable offense just as France’s diminishing birth rates threatened its ability to maintain a strong army.
(Not coincidentally, the emperor declared the pope infallible soon after this decree.)
Matthew Fox, another radical Catholic, said
There are two Christianities in our midst. One worships a punitive father and seeks obedience at all costs. It is patriarchal, demonizes woman, the earth, science, gays, lesbians and deep thought. It builds on fear and it supports empire-builders. Its theology includes a Punitive Father in the Sky and teaches original sin.
The other Christianity recognizes the Original Blessing that all beings derive from. We recognize awe, not sin, not guilt, as the starting point of true religion. We recognize a Divinity who is source of all things and is as much mother as father, as much female as male. We honor creation and diversity. When God created everything, He pronounced it all good. We are here to make love to life. Yes, we are here to make love to life… Delight in creation and take your dreams into our politics and institutions….
We live in the midst of a suicidal economy, motivated by love of money. We have reached a dead end. What we need to turn it around are hearts in love with life. How do we do it? We first must move from domination to partnership and we begin by educating our young in awe and wonder, not how to take tests. Awe leads to reverence which leads to gratitude which will reinvent our species. This is the task of our generation, to regain awe. The 3 R’s need to be balanced by the 10 C’s; contemplation, creativity, chaos, compassion, courage, critical consciousness, community, celebration, ceremony and character.
I don’t recognize a divinity as the source of all things but do recognize that it is possible that we, plants and animals and people alike, could make up a larger soul (but not in an icky Borg way).
And we certainly make up boocoodles of matter and antimatter.
I also favor the notion of honoring creation and diversity, and appreciate the notion of being here to make love to life and delight in creation and take our dreams into our politics and institutions.
As Barbara Kingsolver says,
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what to hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers or the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides.
LISTENING TO: Ferron (Beware you sagging diplomats for you will not hear one gun, and though oceans lie between us, we will not be undone. And it won't take long . . .)
READING: Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes
BEST-OF SPAM: A cure for every disease!
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
198. I GOT THOSE MARKETED CRAVINGS AND BODY-IMAGE BLUES
From the Archives
(March 2006) I went to a diva competition last night that was a real hoot.
The post-performance gathering was also quite illuminating.
See, several contestants were overweight by today’s standards, so, as soon as they left the post-performance party, the petty remarks began:
(March 2006) I went to a diva competition last night that was a real hoot.
The post-performance gathering was also quite illuminating.
See, several contestants were overweight by today’s standards, so, as soon as they left the post-performance party, the petty remarks began:
Did you see those flabby arms? Someone should have told her to dance with those ham hocks covered.
and
How many babies do you reckon she’s had anyway? If you can’t lose the tummy, honey, at least hide it with a girdle.
and
Good lord! Did you catch a glimpse of those thunder thighs?
(Thighs that were, interestingly enough, primarily on gorgeous African-American and Latina contestants.)
I am relatively fit, yet understand that devotees of our culture’s diet, exercise, fashion, beauty, cosmetic, and plastic-surgery industries can have severely limited images of beauty and health.
And they really don’t like it when audiences crown a diva who doesn’t conform to the narrow standards of beauty these industries promote.
In fact, judging from last night’s behavior, I’d say this makes the scrawny girls downright pissed.
Don’t you wonder why, as a culture, we won’t acknowledge the reality that weight loss, for most of us, does not generally translate into improved chances of survival?
(Newsflash: being skinny does not ensure happiness either, but the pursuit of it can certainly harm people.)
Most of the “fat” divas weren’t really even fat, but were instead what my grandmother called “pleasantly plump”—maybe a size 14.
(You know, like Marilyn Monroe.)
So I’m wondering why we as a culture need to make fun of/marginalize/look with disgust upon moderately overweight people.
Why do we continue to believe that scrawny people are healthier when evidence confirms that being moderately fat by today’s standards isn't even unfit (and it looks a whole lot better on a woman IMHO)?
And let’s remember what the appearance industries don’t want us to acknowledge: 30 thousand Americans die annually from being underweight, in part because we equate with unworthiness.
Here’s some alarming data from Courtney E. Martin’s soon-to-be-published Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters:
In 1995, 34 percent of high school-aged girls in the US thought they were overweight but, today, 90 percent do.
To make matters worse, a survey of contemporary American parents confirmed that 1 in 10 would abort their child if they found out that he or she had a genetic tendency to be fat.
(READ THAT AGAIN. Slowly.)
Commercials feed us the lie that overweight people possess weak character and magazines feed us the lie that normal weight people are fat.
So I’m curious: Do you find it alarming that a recent Ellegirl magazine’s poll of 10 thousand readers found that 30 percent said they would rather be thin than healthy?
Or that over half the young women between the ages of 18 and 25 would prefer to be run over by a truck than to be fat?
No mention is made of the type of appearance-related articles and ads that run in this fashion magazine, but let’s remember that the teenage group most likely to consider or attempt suicide is girls who worry that they are overweight.
My hunch is that most of them measure themselves against models such as the ones found in the pages of Ellegirl too and find themselves wanting.
What’s particularly sad to me is that these girls feel worthless because of their appearance, when their substance, their souls (if you will) are so much more important.
I have rarely measured out my activity in tedious little TS Eliot coffee spoons and did not grow up reading magazines that encourage me to believe that I am inferior and ugly simply because I reject their products and diets and lies.
My friends would tell you that I have a healthy ego despite this obvious lack of social conformity (in between my bouts of insecurity and shyness anyway) and that I am tall, dark and handsome, and I guess what I'm saying is that I feel very fortunate because I've never felt compelled to focus much on what it feels like to present as ugly.
Still, I’m a dyke and one reality of being a dyke is that most of us wind up rejecting our parents’/church’s/peers’/cultures’ ideals in order to live life authentically.
Most of us also present as different, as Other—and, in my case, as more masculine than my mainstream sistuhs(and definitely more cocky).
So yeah, I guess I do have some experience in this arena, despite the fact that I have mostly lived in the interior with little interest in conforming.
Meanwhile, where's the valid nutritional information that is not driven by sales and that does not reject the perfect creature that I know I am? (-;
Where's the information driven by data, not cultural bias?
Maybe I'm just in denial but, to me, a healthy life style does not entail punishing myself or focusing on what I lack, but instead focuses on living in a manner that enables me to be as healthy as possible, both spiritually and physically.
As J. Eric Oliver says in Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, “equating weight loss, instead of life style changes, with improved health is like saying ‘whiter teeth produced by the elimination of smoking reduces the incidence of lung cancer.’”
Okay, I’ll end with the entire quote:
It is not fat itself that is unhealthy, but our hypocritical attitudes and compulsive behaviors that are. We drive two blocks to the grocery store and then spend 20 minutes circling the parking lot so we can get a close spot. Once inside we load up our carts with low-fat, microwave meals and diet shakes filled with artificial everything. In the checkout line, we read about the latest fitness trend in Men's Health or Self, then get back into our cars, drive the two blocks home, and sit in front of the television all night eating Pizza Hut while drinking a liter of Diet Coke. We go to bed late, wake up early, head to work—in our cars, of course—where we will spend the next eight hours stationary and bored. Rinse. Repeat.
The messages are coming in loud and clear, and they are riddled with disempowering dichotomies—all or nothing, feast or famine, disgustingly fat or virtuously thin, deeply flawed or triumphantly perfect. There is no talk of what Buddhists describe as ’the middle path,’ no discussion of the pleasure of walking, eating homemade food, slowing down. There is no permission to say ‘no’ sometimes and ‘yes’ sometimes, and have those no's and yeses be simple answers, insignificant scores on a Scrabble board, representative of nothing more than a mood. Instead our yeses and no's signify our desirability, our life expectancy, our self-worth.
And that’s bullshit. Because, as Martin says, ‘It is not fat itself that is unhealthy, but our hypocritical attitudes and compulsive behaviors that are.”
197. CASUAL AND MEANINGLESS PRODUCTS
From the Archives
(March 2006) As some readers know, I love the Pacific NW and would like to retire to Whidbey Island or thereabouts and spend the rest of my days kayaking in Lake Washington’s bird sanctuaries (where I will photograph and sketch birds) and off Vancouver (where I will cavort with the killer whales pods) and at Ebey’s Landing (where I will paint watercolors and watch birds).
I’d like to write on the deck of my tiny cottage and take long ferry rides and walk the wind-swept beaches while admiring the Olympic mountain range, then drive to Hurricane Ridge with my windows down and finally make use of my copy of How to Make Totem Poles (but I will never never ever kayak through the busy locks again as the huge boats nearly wash me into the walls).
Here’s something I don’t like about Seattle though: The Center for Science and Culture at the Discover Institute (which may sound like an organization that uses the scientific method to study and understand the world, but it’s really a bunch of so-called researchers who advocate the theory of intelligent design) is there.
(And I've already noted C-YA’s presence there.)
So, even though the Seahawks finally reached the SuperBowl (a game a coworker described as “they try to get more balls through the goalposts than the other team, right?”) and even though there’s all that water with mountains and fabulous sunsets and rain in one cool place, Seattle is nevertheless a little bit less appealing to me now.
The city's hosting the 14th Annual Women of Wisdom 2006 Conference (Return to the Well) though, and wow do I wish I could go to this crystal-squeezing feel-good event.
•
And speaking of evolution (heh) have you noticed that the Catholic church doesn’t promote the fact that Pope John Paul II said (in 1996) that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” ?
He qualified his statement though:
(March 2006) As some readers know, I love the Pacific NW and would like to retire to Whidbey Island or thereabouts and spend the rest of my days kayaking in Lake Washington’s bird sanctuaries (where I will photograph and sketch birds) and off Vancouver (where I will cavort with the killer whales pods) and at Ebey’s Landing (where I will paint watercolors and watch birds).
I’d like to write on the deck of my tiny cottage and take long ferry rides and walk the wind-swept beaches while admiring the Olympic mountain range, then drive to Hurricane Ridge with my windows down and finally make use of my copy of How to Make Totem Poles (but I will never never ever kayak through the busy locks again as the huge boats nearly wash me into the walls).
Here’s something I don’t like about Seattle though: The Center for Science and Culture at the Discover Institute (which may sound like an organization that uses the scientific method to study and understand the world, but it’s really a bunch of so-called researchers who advocate the theory of intelligent design) is there.
(And I've already noted C-YA’s presence there.)
So, even though the Seahawks finally reached the SuperBowl (a game a coworker described as “they try to get more balls through the goalposts than the other team, right?”) and even though there’s all that water with mountains and fabulous sunsets and rain in one cool place, Seattle is nevertheless a little bit less appealing to me now.
The city's hosting the 14th Annual Women of Wisdom 2006 Conference (Return to the Well) though, and wow do I wish I could go to this crystal-squeezing feel-good event.
•
And speaking of evolution (heh) have you noticed that the Catholic church doesn’t promote the fact that Pope John Paul II said (in 1996) that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” ?
He qualified his statement though:
Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection—is not.
Whereas the new homophobic pope Benedict said that humans “are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.”
And there you have it folks: two men in skirts who devoted their lives to scientific exploration in accordance with professionally established evidence-based methods of scientific inquiry have, in the typical voice of the (white male) expert, solved the vast mysteries of creation for us all.
Meanwhile Christianists recently coined the term “evolutionism” to categorize people who use the theory of evolution to refute what the Christianists call God’s hand in creation.
(Or was that a Martian’s hand? You can never be sure with their so-called Intelligent Design.)
Meanwhile, in the About Time category, a recent Supreme Court ruling said that Ashcroft’s Federal Department exceeded the proper bounds of its authority when it tried to undermine Oregon’s assisted-suicide law—or, as the Times says so well, the decision “rejected Mr. Ashcroft’s attempt to impose his religiously conservative ideology on a state whose voters had decided differently.”
Mastuh Ashcroft first tried to trump the election results with a federal law that was overturned. Then, as attorney general, he announced that the Controlled Substances Act granted him the authority to prevent doctors from prescribing lethal drugs for the purpose of suicide.
Clever little troll, isn’t he?
The current Bland Old Party is, when you think about it, amazing. Frist announces that he is capable of medically diagnosing a patient via video; Ashcroft announces that physician-assisted suicides are not a “legitimate medical purpose”; and Bush announces that he can wiretap anygawddamnbody he chooses because he is the commander-in-chief of the known universe.
(um that’s of the armed services, dude)
The GOP clearly believes that they, not doctors, can define the parameters of medical practice...
....Meanwhile, it is 78 degrees outside, so I am going to walk in the great outdoors now, where daffodils are suddenly popping out everywhere, and banish any images of Karl Rove from my skull.
Ciao.
196. PRESIDENT FOR LIFE
From the Archives
(February 2006) DC's City Paper used to call Marion Berry “Mayor for Life” before he got busted for crack cocaine.
If Bush & Co had moved forward with their plan to cancel the recent presidential election (citing the threat of a terrorist attack), as Newsweek reported, then the City Paper would have perhaps revived this phrase while kicking it up a few notches.
Yep, the White House and DOJ seriously considered cancelling the elections (no doubt before those computer programmers devised a way to change Kerry votes to Bush ones).
So, who knows, we could have had a president for life who raises the terror alert to high whenever someone protests his position on the throne.
•
Meanwhile, an Austrian court has sentenced a historian to three years in prison for espousing his belief that the Holocaust never existed.
That’s in Austria.
In the US, people like Dr. Paul Cameron—who was kicked out of the APA long ago for announcing manufactured and bigoted results—continues to spread their homophobic crap far and wide.
And politicians like Rick Santorum continue to pronounce Cameron’s fictions as fact.
Cameron is the one who broadcast the lie that gay men routinely insert hamsters into their rectums.
Research groups failed to find even a single queer who practices this sex act and Cameron was uable to back up his claim with evidence, yet Santorum et al. repeat this data as if it’s accurate.
They also repeat the rumor that queers die in their forties, which is a lie even when you factor in the AIDS epidemic.
And no. I don’t believe one should be jailed for espousing opinions, even when they’re misguided and hateful and ignorant.
The Klan had the right to their ignorant opinions and so does Dr. Cameron. I’m glad that thinking people challenge their lies and logic though and kick them out of societies that require e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e. . .
(and don’t you wish the press still had to offer fair and balanced news? Thanks a whole lot, Ronnie.)
Telling historians that they cannot explore controversial theories—even about horrific events such as the Holocaust—limits knowledge. And I believe that scholars should be free to pursue their theories.
That’s how we learn new things and expand our knowledge.
•
And now a quote.
The now busted Ralph Reed said the following to Christian teens:
(February 2006) DC's City Paper used to call Marion Berry “Mayor for Life” before he got busted for crack cocaine.
If Bush & Co had moved forward with their plan to cancel the recent presidential election (citing the threat of a terrorist attack), as Newsweek reported, then the City Paper would have perhaps revived this phrase while kicking it up a few notches.
Yep, the White House and DOJ seriously considered cancelling the elections (no doubt before those computer programmers devised a way to change Kerry votes to Bush ones).
So, who knows, we could have had a president for life who raises the terror alert to high whenever someone protests his position on the throne.
•
Meanwhile, an Austrian court has sentenced a historian to three years in prison for espousing his belief that the Holocaust never existed.
That’s in Austria.
In the US, people like Dr. Paul Cameron—who was kicked out of the APA long ago for announcing manufactured and bigoted results—continues to spread their homophobic crap far and wide.
And politicians like Rick Santorum continue to pronounce Cameron’s fictions as fact.
Cameron is the one who broadcast the lie that gay men routinely insert hamsters into their rectums.
Research groups failed to find even a single queer who practices this sex act and Cameron was uable to back up his claim with evidence, yet Santorum et al. repeat this data as if it’s accurate.
They also repeat the rumor that queers die in their forties, which is a lie even when you factor in the AIDS epidemic.
And no. I don’t believe one should be jailed for espousing opinions, even when they’re misguided and hateful and ignorant.
The Klan had the right to their ignorant opinions and so does Dr. Cameron. I’m glad that thinking people challenge their lies and logic though and kick them out of societies that require e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e. . .
(and don’t you wish the press still had to offer fair and balanced news? Thanks a whole lot, Ronnie.)
Telling historians that they cannot explore controversial theories—even about horrific events such as the Holocaust—limits knowledge. And I believe that scholars should be free to pursue their theories.
That’s how we learn new things and expand our knowledge.
•
And now a quote.
The now busted Ralph Reed said the following to Christian teens:
We will never know how many marriages and lives were saved, or how many children were spared the consequences of compulsive gambling, because of our work to shut down casinos.
To quote Ecclesiastes, all things shall come to pass, Asshole.
•
Okay. I’ll close with this factoid. It’s 27 February 2006. On this date in 1991, President Bush the Older declared “Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated.”
Prescient, wasn’t he?
195. LITTLE PINK HOUSES FOR YOU AND ME
From the Archives
(February 2006) Sometimes I think I should just quit reading the news because stories such as this one leave me shaking my head in disbelief like the curmudgeon that I seem to have become, and then, instead of scribbling these tidbits into my journal as I once did, I wind up regurgitating this wild mix of random factoids into my blog like so much hip-hop news sampling.
My latest head-shaker? Well, there’s a Seattle group called C-YA (Catholic Youth Abstaining) that could come up with nothing better to do (since they’re abstaining from sex, natch), than to copy those idiots who object to “Happy Holidays” greeting cards and so launched a put-the-saint-back-in-Saint-Valentine’s-day campaign.
I though this story was a spoof at first because the group doesn’t provide any details about who their revered saint is or why we should consider him relevant to our lives, but then I went to their webpage and saw their floating discombobulated Jesus head that looks exactly like the Jesus that Southern Baptists used to print on their paper funeral fans and, well, knew it was legit.
I’m thinking maybe I should log onto some fundie websites and encourage them to protest this site, perahps by launching a put-the-body-back-on-the-bobbleheaded-Jesus campaign.
•
Meanwhile, the CIA has apparently gotten away with secretly removing over 55,000 pages from public access (even though they are required by law to report such removals to the Information Security Oversight Office.
Yup. Access to 9,500 documents was secretly revoked, depriving historians and the public of our nation’s history and of our cold hard facts.
These documents do not appear to contain sensitive information that a terrorist might use to harm our country either, but do demonstrate agency incompetence sometimes.
Example: a CIA assessment released just two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops entered Korea states that Chinese intervention was "not probable."
That one’s classified now.
(Maybe they need a new category for documents that contain “bureaucratic sensitivities”?)
One odd twist to this scandal is that historians—let me guess, Bush will classify them as liberal historians—who have copies of these now-reclassified documents may now be in violation of the federal Espionage Act.
No big surprise but, now that it’s been caught red-handed, the administration is, in typical fashion, writing off the whole thing as a “bureaucratic quirk.”
You see, gullible citizens, these reclassified documents were never properly declassified (even though they were reviewed, stamped as declassified, given freely to researchers, and published), and so they remain classified (said the Grinch to Cindy Lou Who as he stuffed her Christmas tree up the impossibly small chimbly), which means that pulling these documents from public access now is not illegal at all.
Let me guess. They didn’t inhale either.
(February 2006) Sometimes I think I should just quit reading the news because stories such as this one leave me shaking my head in disbelief like the curmudgeon that I seem to have become, and then, instead of scribbling these tidbits into my journal as I once did, I wind up regurgitating this wild mix of random factoids into my blog like so much hip-hop news sampling.
My latest head-shaker? Well, there’s a Seattle group called C-YA (Catholic Youth Abstaining) that could come up with nothing better to do (since they’re abstaining from sex, natch), than to copy those idiots who object to “Happy Holidays” greeting cards and so launched a put-the-saint-back-in-Saint-Valentine’s-day campaign.
I though this story was a spoof at first because the group doesn’t provide any details about who their revered saint is or why we should consider him relevant to our lives, but then I went to their webpage and saw their floating discombobulated Jesus head that looks exactly like the Jesus that Southern Baptists used to print on their paper funeral fans and, well, knew it was legit.
I’m thinking maybe I should log onto some fundie websites and encourage them to protest this site, perahps by launching a put-the-body-back-on-the-bobbleheaded-Jesus campaign.
•
Meanwhile, the CIA has apparently gotten away with secretly removing over 55,000 pages from public access (even though they are required by law to report such removals to the Information Security Oversight Office.
Yup. Access to 9,500 documents was secretly revoked, depriving historians and the public of our nation’s history and of our cold hard facts.
These documents do not appear to contain sensitive information that a terrorist might use to harm our country either, but do demonstrate agency incompetence sometimes.
Example: a CIA assessment released just two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops entered Korea states that Chinese intervention was "not probable."
That one’s classified now.
(Maybe they need a new category for documents that contain “bureaucratic sensitivities”?)
One odd twist to this scandal is that historians—let me guess, Bush will classify them as liberal historians—who have copies of these now-reclassified documents may now be in violation of the federal Espionage Act.
No big surprise but, now that it’s been caught red-handed, the administration is, in typical fashion, writing off the whole thing as a “bureaucratic quirk.”
You see, gullible citizens, these reclassified documents were never properly declassified (even though they were reviewed, stamped as declassified, given freely to researchers, and published), and so they remain classified (said the Grinch to Cindy Lou Who as he stuffed her Christmas tree up the impossibly small chimbly), which means that pulling these documents from public access now is not illegal at all.
Let me guess. They didn’t inhale either.
194. DILDOS, FRIENDSHIPS, AND AFFIRMATIONS, OR, THE DIFFICULT ORDINARINESS OF NOW
From the Archives
(February 2006) My bestgrrrl Lars says she knows that she’s a real Pisces because she is so clearly divided into two different people: one who believes she can do anything and another who is convinced that she is incapable of succeeding.
She wants to turn off the lack of confidence, or at least incorporate it into her work so that she can get something done.
So I know this is hokey, but I found a book of affirmations and thought I might send a shout out to her:
(February 2006) My bestgrrrl Lars says she knows that she’s a real Pisces because she is so clearly divided into two different people: one who believes she can do anything and another who is convinced that she is incapable of succeeding.
She wants to turn off the lack of confidence, or at least incorporate it into her work so that she can get something done.
So I know this is hokey, but I found a book of affirmations and thought I might send a shout out to her:
Empower me
to be a bold participant,
rather than a timid saint in waiting,
in the difficult ordinariness of now;
to exercise the authority of honesty;
rather than to defer to power,
or deceive to get it;
to influence someone for justice,
rather than impress anyone for gain;
and, by grace, to find treasures
of joy, of friendship, of peace
hidden in the fields of the daily
you give me to plow.
—Ted Loder
and
May my feet rest firmly on the ground
May my head touch the sky
May I see clearly
May I have the capacity to listen
May I be free to touch
May my words be true
May my heart and mind be open
May my hands be empty to fill the need
May my arms be open to others
May my gifts be revealed to me
So I may return that which has been given
Completing the great circle.
—the Terma Collective
Meanwhile, I discovered Susie Bright’s website and have been exploring it with, um, pleasure.
She’s advertising a book about the various fucking machines that people have created over the years.
Whee!
LISTENING TO: Here Comes President Kill Again (XTC)
193. WANT SOME TORTURE WITH THOSE CHEERIOS?, OR, THE GEOMETRY OF ATROCITY
From the Archives
(February 2006) I’ve been staring at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs.
(Yes, the ones that Bush & Co. tried so hard to keep under lock and key.)
The first batch was bad enough, but these are definitely worse. They also confirm that American soldiers beat at least one prisoner to death ... and for what? Loyalty to an administration that’s eager to eliminate anyone who challenges it?
Because they were just following orders, sir?
(But no John Wayne noble soldier bullshit can justify this one, fellas, so don’t even start in on It’s a Grand Ol’ Flag or that old following orders routine.)
What we have is lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of human blood smeared from one end of a holding cell to the other on top of white Muslim asses with bright red cigarette holes burned into them.
(Nothing to wave your stupid yellow ribbons about either, folks.)
So how many Americans do you figure are following what’s really going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo?
It’s time we recognize the necessity of bearing witness to the atrocities that are happening in our time. With our tax dollars. In our name.
You know, I’m a writer and I value words, but I also know that reading a hundred descriptions of abuse did not have the same impact of my seeing one photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered collection of chipped teeth and vomit and feces stains and hematomas all wrapped up in swaths of plastic wrap (to better what? Stew him in his own blood?).
So let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios, dear readers.
•
I downloaded some of the images and have been studying them the way I study Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians—in an effort to understand this geometry of atrocity.
I suppose these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors or that Vietnamese man who is one second away from getting his brains blown out by a soldier.
... So, yeah, back to my recovering-Seventh-Day-Adventist pal’s question regarding why anyone would voluntarily watch violence.
Here’s what I believe: Artists must walk into the fire with our souls bared and our eyes wide open and feed on the nightmares that are happening in our midst. And we must find a way to use these images—especially the horrific ones—in a manner that makes it impossible for people to hide inside their iPods and ignore what’s being done in their names.
•
Meanwhile, did anyone else note that this Outsource Everything administration contracted control of our ports to the Arabs?
•
And did you know that this past Sunday was EVOLUTION SUNDAY?
This little soire didn’t receive the publicity that Frist’s Creationist Sunday event garnered, but Evolution Sunday is part of the Clergy Letter Project—a religious response to fundamentalists’ insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion.
Turns out over 10,000 ministers disagree with Frist’s fundamentalism. They signed a letter stating that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and say that rejecting it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”
They also said
(February 2006) I’ve been staring at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs.
(Yes, the ones that Bush & Co. tried so hard to keep under lock and key.)
The first batch was bad enough, but these are definitely worse. They also confirm that American soldiers beat at least one prisoner to death ... and for what? Loyalty to an administration that’s eager to eliminate anyone who challenges it?
Because they were just following orders, sir?
(But no John Wayne noble soldier bullshit can justify this one, fellas, so don’t even start in on It’s a Grand Ol’ Flag or that old following orders routine.)
What we have is lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of human blood smeared from one end of a holding cell to the other on top of white Muslim asses with bright red cigarette holes burned into them.
(Nothing to wave your stupid yellow ribbons about either, folks.)
So how many Americans do you figure are following what’s really going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo?
It’s time we recognize the necessity of bearing witness to the atrocities that are happening in our time. With our tax dollars. In our name.
You know, I’m a writer and I value words, but I also know that reading a hundred descriptions of abuse did not have the same impact of my seeing one photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered collection of chipped teeth and vomit and feces stains and hematomas all wrapped up in swaths of plastic wrap (to better what? Stew him in his own blood?).
So let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios, dear readers.
•
I downloaded some of the images and have been studying them the way I study Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians—in an effort to understand this geometry of atrocity.
I suppose these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors or that Vietnamese man who is one second away from getting his brains blown out by a soldier.
... So, yeah, back to my recovering-Seventh-Day-Adventist pal’s question regarding why anyone would voluntarily watch violence.
Here’s what I believe: Artists must walk into the fire with our souls bared and our eyes wide open and feed on the nightmares that are happening in our midst. And we must find a way to use these images—especially the horrific ones—in a manner that makes it impossible for people to hide inside their iPods and ignore what’s being done in their names.
•
Meanwhile, did anyone else note that this Outsource Everything administration contracted control of our ports to the Arabs?
•
And did you know that this past Sunday was EVOLUTION SUNDAY?
This little soire didn’t receive the publicity that Frist’s Creationist Sunday event garnered, but Evolution Sunday is part of the Clergy Letter Project—a religious response to fundamentalists’ insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion.
Turns out over 10,000 ministers disagree with Frist’s fundamentalism. They signed a letter stating that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and say that rejecting it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”
They also said
We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.
The bad news is that most of the signatories are from mainline Protestant denominations, which are shrinking nearly as fast as evangelical fundie churches grow.
And here’s an interesting spin on a vote that actually endorses incorporating intelligent design into South Carolina classroom materials.
John Drake opened his AP article thusly:
COLUMBIA—The Education oversight Committee voted Monday to reject standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution and insisted the curriculum incorporate critical analysis.
Now I know you’re probably thinking his “critical analysis” involves evidence-based methodologies, but he’s actually referring to creationism.
And now I’ll end on a personal note.
My triathlete ex Tree just found out that she has a 69 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has only radiation treatment and an 81 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has chemo and radiation. (She elected for chemo, naturally.)
So please give yourself a breast exam. Today.
TAGS >
192. CHAMPIONS OF OBSCENITY
From the Archives
(February 2006) Norman Mailer once described himself as the
(February 2006) Norman Mailer once described himself as the
embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hardworking author, champion of obscenity ... amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter ... [who] had ... a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.
I drove all morning just to have lunch with a writer pal who fits much of this description but is decidedly NOT a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.
Tuscaloosa and I met at a Chapel Hill restaurant where racuous southern grrrls like us sometimes seek out flour-dredged ecstasy in between our healthy meals and we caught up over Mama Dip's sweet tea. Then I handed over the edits to her first draft of an excellent nonfiction piece and she handed over her comments to the newest draft of my novel.
Her essay is a real doozy of a piece, a thoughtful reflection on what happens to girls who are so damaged that they turn in on themselves.
I also reviewed her new book contract. And we decided that I really need to find a way to cut back on my academic demands so that I have some chance of giving some more readings with her.
(Plus, damn it, I am tired of being a thank you in another writer’s acknowledgments when what I want is to hold my own published novel in my own two hands and thank all of my friends and colleagues for a change!)
We wound up discussing the “rough South” stereotype over lunch and describing atrocities in our matter-of-fact way that so many people cannot stomach.
Then our conversation wound its way around to The Piano Teacher, a French film that left both of us speechless.
Practically everyone else we know stormed out of the theatre during the screening of this film, but we went back to see it again because it validated our experiences/depicted the damage that we’ve seen with incredible accuracy.
So yeah. We talked about all this in the context of our writing, and that got me thinking about my friend who grew up Seventh Day Adventist.
She had no access to films or television or public education or mainstream culture as a child and cannot view violence now. Nor can she understand why I would voluntarily read poetry of witness or watch films such as Hotel Rwanda or Schindler’s List or Bastard Out of Carolina and allow such graphic violence into my life.
But, let’s face it, violence happens on a very regular basis and often on our tax dollars. And I guess, if my hands aren’t clean, then I want to know about it.
Don't you?
•
Meanwhile I have discovered that, like Mr. Mailer, I am a much exaggerated street fighter.
I studied two styles of martial arts for years and taught self-defense for a while and still operate under the general assumption that, if need be, I could disarm most would-be attackers and, well kick some serious ass should the situation call for it.
This assumption has proven true the very few times that I have had to defend myself, but my new kung fu classes are kicking my ass now and exposing me as the wimp that I have somehow become.
Kung fu is based on monkeys’ movements. This style differs greatly from the styles I studied previously, particularly because the stances involve crouching so low to the ground that your bent knee nearly scrapes the floor (which makes your thighs scream as they become rock hard).
I sit on my ass for way too many hours a day now, I guess, and must have gotten out of shape when I wasn't looking because, wow, these sessions are KILLING me!
(Ow. Wimper. Ow.)
Whine.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
191. CREDIBILITY 101 AND THE PATRON SAINT OF WRITERS
From the Archives
(February 2006) Superbowl Sunday—the most dangerous day of the year to be female in the United States—came and went.
I guess the combination of alcohol and testosterone and heightened emotions and high-fivin’ with the dudes when your team scores big and hours of aggression must make some men feel the need to go home and assault the women who dare to love them.
A sad state of affairs indeed.
I did not watch the Superbowl (although I would have cheered for Seattle if I had).
Instead, I attended a wimmin’s gathering in which we formed a sacred circle and celebrated St. Brigit and our collective emergence from the dark winter into a season of new growth.
Our smudgesticks and poetry and candles lit in the four directions and laughter overflowed.
I read a Mary Oliver poem when the decidedly decorative talking stick made its way into my hands and believe it was well-received.
In between all of our ceremonial hoo-ha, we ate really good food and drank really good wine and ate delicious lavender- and chili-infused dark chocolate.
Mmm!
Of course, we also flipped on the game at halftime so we could watch Mick sing about his inability to get satisfaction, then wound up having an impromptu and quite spastic dance in the living room.
(I was hoping that Mick would “accidentally” flip open his shirt and expose his breast, but he showed more restraint.)
So yeah. Good energy abounded and the whole event reminded me of just how much I treasure women who have done their work and settled into who they are and are comfortable with themselves and aware of their power and who are not intimidated by mine or yours.
St. Brigit is the patron saint of writers, so I guess it was as appropriate day for Betty Friedan to die.
•
I did not get to see Tree this weekend, even though she was briefly in the mountains. She had her lumpectomy today and they removed two suspicious lymph nodes ...
... and even typing that is making my blood run cold and my throat clamp down.
The randomness of this is just so unfair. I mean, I was living the rock-’n’-roll life style way back in 1988 when Tree and I got together and am still staying up too late and eating too much bad-for-me food and indulging in good bottles of vino as she counts every morsel and competes in triathlons ...
... and I can’t write more than that on this topic right now because this news is just too overwhelming.
•
(February 2006) Superbowl Sunday—the most dangerous day of the year to be female in the United States—came and went.
I guess the combination of alcohol and testosterone and heightened emotions and high-fivin’ with the dudes when your team scores big and hours of aggression must make some men feel the need to go home and assault the women who dare to love them.
A sad state of affairs indeed.
I did not watch the Superbowl (although I would have cheered for Seattle if I had).
Instead, I attended a wimmin’s gathering in which we formed a sacred circle and celebrated St. Brigit and our collective emergence from the dark winter into a season of new growth.
Our smudgesticks and poetry and candles lit in the four directions and laughter overflowed.
I read a Mary Oliver poem when the decidedly decorative talking stick made its way into my hands and believe it was well-received.
In between all of our ceremonial hoo-ha, we ate really good food and drank really good wine and ate delicious lavender- and chili-infused dark chocolate.
Mmm!
Of course, we also flipped on the game at halftime so we could watch Mick sing about his inability to get satisfaction, then wound up having an impromptu and quite spastic dance in the living room.
(I was hoping that Mick would “accidentally” flip open his shirt and expose his breast, but he showed more restraint.)
So yeah. Good energy abounded and the whole event reminded me of just how much I treasure women who have done their work and settled into who they are and are comfortable with themselves and aware of their power and who are not intimidated by mine or yours.
St. Brigit is the patron saint of writers, so I guess it was as appropriate day for Betty Friedan to die.
•
I did not get to see Tree this weekend, even though she was briefly in the mountains. She had her lumpectomy today and they removed two suspicious lymph nodes ...
... and even typing that is making my blood run cold and my throat clamp down.
The randomness of this is just so unfair. I mean, I was living the rock-’n’-roll life style way back in 1988 when Tree and I got together and am still staying up too late and eating too much bad-for-me food and indulging in good bottles of vino as she counts every morsel and competes in triathlons ...
... and I can’t write more than that on this topic right now because this news is just too overwhelming.
•
We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible.
That’s what a preacher at Al Omari mosque said in response to a cartoon depicting Muhammad.
This would-be beheader and other extremists consider it blasphemy to print the image of their god and they really consider it blasphemous to depict their god in a bomb-shaped turban.
(Yet they’re in favor of beheading people who see the world differently and expresse those beliefs openly.)
Maybe the cartoonist should consider this preacher’s protests and the actions of that homophobe in Boston who attacked three gay bar patrons with a hatchet and revise the cartoons, convert the turban into a robe, and depict an axe-toting Jesus as well.
(You know, like that old Molly Hatchet album.)
Nice to know that religious fanatics have not completely silenced dissent here though.
The Washington Post recently ran a cartoon that featured "Dr." Rumsfeld writing “battle hardened” onto the medical chart of a quadruple-amputee soldier’s chart. This prompted protest letters from all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
(The administration is still throwing out barbs about the so-called liberal media too but hey, no comparison.)
And here’s more hope.
Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation recently grilled former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales about notifying the White House about the Plamegate investigation, then waiting till the next morning to inform them that they had to preserve all the materials relevant to an investigation (thus giving them time to destroy damning materials).
Now Scooter Libby’s lawyers say that emails from Cheney’s office were deleted contrary to White House policy or, to use their spin (which is reversible. See? You can flip it over to the corduroy side and apply it to those electronic voting machines that registered Bush votes when voters chose Kerry):
The computer system at the White House is supposed to automatically archive emails sent by the president and his aides. For reasons that are still unclear, these emails—which may or may not be relevant to the Plame investigation—were not preserved (from the NY Daily News)
As the church lady says, how conveeeeeenient.
For reasons that are still unclear? I mean gawddamn, how much clearer do they need to be?
And one writer accuses Gonzales of tipping off the White House five days earlier.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson notes that,
if there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give his State of the Union address from Oprah’s couch.... Bush should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day.
190. DATA MINING WHILE RULING WITHOUT RESTRAINT
From the Archives
(February 2006) All this talk about NSA’s illegal data mining exploits reminds me of Mud’s bright yellow textbook that had the words “DATA MINING” splashed across it in huge block letters. I remember it well because every time I saw the thing I started humming we are miners, hard rock miners. To the shaft house we must go ... and I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold. Yes I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold.
But hey! Let's turn lemons into lemonade, shall we, and make this West Virginia’s new post-regulation theme song now that miners seem to be getting trapped or killed on a daily basis.
•
So don’t you find it odd that President Bush has suddenly discovered science and now says he wants to recruit 30 thousand math and science professionals into our public classrooms?
Hasn’t he made the connection between scientists leaving public education and his party’s Dark Ages attempts to force scientists to teach myth-based bullshit?
And why does he refer to Social Security as a so-called entitlement program when I’ve paid into it every month since I was sixteen years old?
The man talks about our nation falling behind in technology and scientific knowledge, then refers to the federal student loan program as an entitlement program too (as opposed to an intelligent investment in the future—one that gets paid back with interest, as I know all too well).
And does it strike anyone else as depressingly humorous that Bush actually bragged about his party’s “spending restraint” with a straight face yesterday?
Anyone with a brain can see that taking another scalpel to already lean social programs while hemorrhaging money in a war fought on false evidence while operating under the faith-based notion that the dollar will remain the exchange rate while handing even more money to the super-rich is not exactly showing fiscal restraint.
Maybe he meant to say the Republicans are restraining from paying home health-care providers and the working poor adequately (which seems more like ethical restraint to me).
When yesterday’s policy—clearly written by special interest lobbyists from the insurance and drug industries—passed, even Republican party members were acknowledging that this administration’s reverse-Robin-Hood approach is unsustainable (although they didn't always get the reasons right).
Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said “the present course is unsustainable. We can’t keep cutting taxes and cutting revenues, while cutting programs to protect the most vulnerable in society.”
John Dingell (D-MI) said “the stench of special interests hangs over the chamber.”
Is the administration oblivious to the burgeoning lobbying scandal or do they believe that no one will make the connection to this special-interest butt-kissing and even more civil and criminal complaints that have just been announced against former insurance executives for apparent financial inproprieties?
Meanwhile, NPR ran an interesting show last night about health savings accounts, during which a guy from the Wall St. Journal said that each GM car has about $1,800 dollars in health-care costs rolled into its cost. These benefits makes it hard for US corporations to compete with overseas sweatshops.
The Republican solution is to quit offering health-care benefits to employees.
Why doesn’t it occur to these people that we can refuse to do business with overseas sweatshops instead and force human rights issues onto the table?
(Wouldn't be prudent?)
Remember that bumpersticker: The Labor Movement. We’re the folks that brought you the weekend?
Meanwhile, these corporations are raking in profits and getting tax breaks hand over fist right now.
For instance, if you want to get really pissed, take a look at the record oil company profits that occurred as we paid outrageous gas and heating bills.
The climate is right for corporations to shit on laborers and customers right now though.
Here’s another quote that references yesterday’s bill (that passed): “A vote for this bill is a vote, literally, to take away health care from our children so we can give more money to the super-rich” (Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-NY).
Where’s the goddamn outrage?
But, as Tom at tomdispatch.com notes, “This disconnect between the garnering of potentially staggering powers to rule without restraint and the incapacity to use them for the well-being of just about anyone on the planet (other than a few friends and cronies) is now a major part of our domestic landscape.”
READING: tax documents.
LISTENING TO: someone’s stupid car alarm
SANG IN SHOWER: Why should I keep loving you when I know that you are not true? And why should I call your name when you’re to blame for making me bluuuuuuue?
BEST OF SPAM: Before i wrote you,i prayed that you will be a honest and reliable person whom i can work with to achieve this deal of our life.From my section in the bank, I discovered an abandoned sum of EIGHTEEN MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS...
(February 2006) All this talk about NSA’s illegal data mining exploits reminds me of Mud’s bright yellow textbook that had the words “DATA MINING” splashed across it in huge block letters. I remember it well because every time I saw the thing I started humming we are miners, hard rock miners. To the shaft house we must go ... and I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold. Yes I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold.
But hey! Let's turn lemons into lemonade, shall we, and make this West Virginia’s new post-regulation theme song now that miners seem to be getting trapped or killed on a daily basis.
•
So don’t you find it odd that President Bush has suddenly discovered science and now says he wants to recruit 30 thousand math and science professionals into our public classrooms?
Hasn’t he made the connection between scientists leaving public education and his party’s Dark Ages attempts to force scientists to teach myth-based bullshit?
And why does he refer to Social Security as a so-called entitlement program when I’ve paid into it every month since I was sixteen years old?
The man talks about our nation falling behind in technology and scientific knowledge, then refers to the federal student loan program as an entitlement program too (as opposed to an intelligent investment in the future—one that gets paid back with interest, as I know all too well).
And does it strike anyone else as depressingly humorous that Bush actually bragged about his party’s “spending restraint” with a straight face yesterday?
Anyone with a brain can see that taking another scalpel to already lean social programs while hemorrhaging money in a war fought on false evidence while operating under the faith-based notion that the dollar will remain the exchange rate while handing even more money to the super-rich is not exactly showing fiscal restraint.
Maybe he meant to say the Republicans are restraining from paying home health-care providers and the working poor adequately (which seems more like ethical restraint to me).
When yesterday’s policy—clearly written by special interest lobbyists from the insurance and drug industries—passed, even Republican party members were acknowledging that this administration’s reverse-Robin-Hood approach is unsustainable (although they didn't always get the reasons right).
Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said “the present course is unsustainable. We can’t keep cutting taxes and cutting revenues, while cutting programs to protect the most vulnerable in society.”
John Dingell (D-MI) said “the stench of special interests hangs over the chamber.”
Is the administration oblivious to the burgeoning lobbying scandal or do they believe that no one will make the connection to this special-interest butt-kissing and even more civil and criminal complaints that have just been announced against former insurance executives for apparent financial inproprieties?
Meanwhile, NPR ran an interesting show last night about health savings accounts, during which a guy from the Wall St. Journal said that each GM car has about $1,800 dollars in health-care costs rolled into its cost. These benefits makes it hard for US corporations to compete with overseas sweatshops.
The Republican solution is to quit offering health-care benefits to employees.
Why doesn’t it occur to these people that we can refuse to do business with overseas sweatshops instead and force human rights issues onto the table?
(Wouldn't be prudent?)
Remember that bumpersticker: The Labor Movement. We’re the folks that brought you the weekend?
Meanwhile, these corporations are raking in profits and getting tax breaks hand over fist right now.
For instance, if you want to get really pissed, take a look at the record oil company profits that occurred as we paid outrageous gas and heating bills.
The climate is right for corporations to shit on laborers and customers right now though.
Here’s another quote that references yesterday’s bill (that passed): “A vote for this bill is a vote, literally, to take away health care from our children so we can give more money to the super-rich” (Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-NY).
Where’s the goddamn outrage?
But, as Tom at tomdispatch.com notes, “This disconnect between the garnering of potentially staggering powers to rule without restraint and the incapacity to use them for the well-being of just about anyone on the planet (other than a few friends and cronies) is now a major part of our domestic landscape.”
READING: tax documents.
LISTENING TO: someone’s stupid car alarm
SANG IN SHOWER: Why should I keep loving you when I know that you are not true? And why should I call your name when you’re to blame for making me bluuuuuuue?
BEST OF SPAM: Before i wrote you,i prayed that you will be a honest and reliable person whom i can work with to achieve this deal of our life.From my section in the bank, I discovered an abandoned sum of EIGHTEEN MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS...
189. DIEBOLD (OR AT LEAST TRIP FORCEFULLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT)
... preferably on top of an electronic voting machine that you permanently disable.
From the Archives
(January 2006) I’ve been pondering what to plant in my yard this spring because, yes, as a matter of fact I do have spring fever already.
Blame it on what writer John Rosenthal refers to as January Spring—that five-week period down south when temperatures suddenly soar into the seventies and the sky turns an unblemished blue that is all the more vibrant because we’ve seen nothing but foggy gray for so long.
We Southerners spy that blue and go into a fit—pull out T-shirts and shorts and freeze our tits off as we stand outside oohing and aaahing over the foolish pink tulip poplars and purple hyacinths that have bloomed way too early again and we silently agree to pretend that we don’t know that it will freeze again before winter is officially over.
•
So it’s 31 January 2006. Thomas Merton’s birthday and the 141st anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment—which I suppose makes it a particularly appropriate day for Coretta Scott King to die.
Then again, maybe she just couldn’t bear the reality of a 58–43 split vote confirming a Supreme Court neocon who is so opposed to affirmative action.
(And then there were none....)
I guess we should all look forward to the boy king bragging about his latest victory in his fifth State of The (Dis)Union Address tonight, huh?
Not that I’ll bother to listen. I know branding and doublespeak when I hear it and would rather read the summary and assessments tomorrow.
And speaking of Bush&Co’s reign of error, Tomdispatch.com points out that four Januaries have already passed since our wanna-be emperor used his address to “brand Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—the first two then bitter enemies, the third completely unrelated to either of them and on the other side of the planet—as a World-War-II-style ‘axis of evil.’”
And it’s already been three Januaries since W said, with a straight face, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Progressives are calling for people to “make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out” the Address tonight. This is part one of a two-part Bush Step Down rally that culminates Saturday in front of the White House, where they plan to demand that W step down and take his program with him.
Now I’m all for rallies that might accomplish something—or at least draw attention to an issue that can be addressed—but this is the pure-T definition of pipe dream.
I do hope that more independent news outlets will notice the statistics cited in Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steam the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) and pressure politicians to investigate yet another potential crime committed by this administration though.
Miller says
From the Archives
(January 2006) I’ve been pondering what to plant in my yard this spring because, yes, as a matter of fact I do have spring fever already.
Blame it on what writer John Rosenthal refers to as January Spring—that five-week period down south when temperatures suddenly soar into the seventies and the sky turns an unblemished blue that is all the more vibrant because we’ve seen nothing but foggy gray for so long.
We Southerners spy that blue and go into a fit—pull out T-shirts and shorts and freeze our tits off as we stand outside oohing and aaahing over the foolish pink tulip poplars and purple hyacinths that have bloomed way too early again and we silently agree to pretend that we don’t know that it will freeze again before winter is officially over.
•
So it’s 31 January 2006. Thomas Merton’s birthday and the 141st anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment—which I suppose makes it a particularly appropriate day for Coretta Scott King to die.
Then again, maybe she just couldn’t bear the reality of a 58–43 split vote confirming a Supreme Court neocon who is so opposed to affirmative action.
(And then there were none....)
I guess we should all look forward to the boy king bragging about his latest victory in his fifth State of The (Dis)Union Address tonight, huh?
Not that I’ll bother to listen. I know branding and doublespeak when I hear it and would rather read the summary and assessments tomorrow.
And speaking of Bush&Co’s reign of error, Tomdispatch.com points out that four Januaries have already passed since our wanna-be emperor used his address to “brand Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—the first two then bitter enemies, the third completely unrelated to either of them and on the other side of the planet—as a World-War-II-style ‘axis of evil.’”
And it’s already been three Januaries since W said, with a straight face, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Progressives are calling for people to “make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out” the Address tonight. This is part one of a two-part Bush Step Down rally that culminates Saturday in front of the White House, where they plan to demand that W step down and take his program with him.
Now I’m all for rallies that might accomplish something—or at least draw attention to an issue that can be addressed—but this is the pure-T definition of pipe dream.
I do hope that more independent news outlets will notice the statistics cited in Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steam the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) and pressure politicians to investigate yet another potential crime committed by this administration though.
Miller says
for GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket staged a stunning comeback. Usually reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media agreed, that ‘moral values’ had made the difference.
(Can you say branding?) Miller says theft, not moral values, swung the election. And he uses statistics to back up his claim.
In reference to the 2002 congressional elections, he outlines how, in Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, and
a couple of other states—there was what we might call "Diebold magic" everywhere. In all these states, you had far-right-wing politicians predicted to lose by pre-election newspaper polls and by exit polls,
yet all of them won.
During the presidential elections, electronic touchscreen machines flipped Kerry votes into Bush votes in at least 11 states and evidence of wrongdoing in Ohio is copious.
Bush allegedly won that state by 118,000 votes, but the various stratagems, tricks and tactics used to prevent people from registering, to prevent them from voting, to throw away provisional ballots [see John Conyers’ report to the House Judiciary Committee]—all ... add up to a number far greater than 118,000.
Ohio practices were applied in other key states as well, most notably Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, New York and New Mexico, where
we're told that Bush won by some 7,000 votes. We know of over 17,000 Democratic voters who were unable to cast a vote for president [though] because the touchscreen machines in their districts refused to record a vote for president.
These 17,000-plus New Mexicans turned out to vote in Democratic areas, and they didn't record a vote for president. Seventeen thousand is 10,000 more than 7,000. That glitch alone can account for the ostensible victory margin of Bush over Kerry in New Mexico. Greg Palast's new book will have a whole chapter on New Mexico. It's hair-raising stuff, and we haven't heard a word about it. The same kind of thing happened in Iowa, where Bush supposedly won by under 10,000 votes.
The press kept telling us after the election that a huge outpouring of religious voters account for Bush's miraculous victory.
Well that's nothing more than a talking point that the religious right itself put out after the election. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever that there was any increase in the number of religious voters. ... Exit polls were most inaccurate—by a big margin—in those areas that used electronic voting machines with no paper trail ... (and particularly noticeable in 5 swing states).
Miller advises people to check out the Election Incident Reporting System website, where you can type in the name of your state or county and see a transcript of all the complaints that were lodged that day by people who called 1-866-MY-VOTE.
And on that note, I am going to change into my gym clothes and go break some things in kung fu class.
188. I NEED A HERO, I’M HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO TILL THE MORNING LIGHT ...
From the Archives
(February 2006) Just drove to the Gothic Wonderland to hear my friend Tuscaloosa read. The place was packed and she was, as always, brilliant and charming and oh so literate.
I’m so proud of her and the good work she’s doing.
Our friends remain aghast that Tuscaloosa and I never got together and, occasionally, I’m surprised by this too. In many ways, we’re a perfect fit. But I was married, then she was married, then I was married again and, well, the timing just never worked out.
We are very dear friends who recognize each other’s gorgeousness however and she’s someone I can talk with about anything—and someone I do talk with about writing on a very regular basis.
I’m going to include a long excerpt from Molly Ivins’s “Why Hilary Won’t Save Us,” but, first, can you believe that I actually heard an advertisement for a Toddler Spa (!) that offers designer haircuts and manicures?
Oh for the love of gawd throw your precious little rugrats outside and let them get grubby instead.
I mean, come on, if they can’t get their hands dirty when they’re toddlers, what hope do they have?
Anyway, here’s Molly. It’s just too good not to paste here:
(February 2006) Just drove to the Gothic Wonderland to hear my friend Tuscaloosa read. The place was packed and she was, as always, brilliant and charming and oh so literate.
I’m so proud of her and the good work she’s doing.
Our friends remain aghast that Tuscaloosa and I never got together and, occasionally, I’m surprised by this too. In many ways, we’re a perfect fit. But I was married, then she was married, then I was married again and, well, the timing just never worked out.
We are very dear friends who recognize each other’s gorgeousness however and she’s someone I can talk with about anything—and someone I do talk with about writing on a very regular basis.
I’m going to include a long excerpt from Molly Ivins’s “Why Hilary Won’t Save Us,” but, first, can you believe that I actually heard an advertisement for a Toddler Spa (!) that offers designer haircuts and manicures?
Oh for the love of gawd throw your precious little rugrats outside and let them get grubby instead.
I mean, come on, if they can’t get their hands dirty when they’re toddlers, what hope do they have?
Anyway, here’s Molly. It’s just too good not to paste here:
The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to relearn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.
If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy—rough, tough Bobby Kennedy—didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines, who liked to quote poetry.
What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. Who are you afraid of?
I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?
... Oh come on, people—get a grip on the concept of leadership....
Alito is all but confirmed. New scandals are erupting daily. Please! Someone rise up already and call a spade a spade. As Barack Osama said of Rosa Parks, “she reminded us all of the central truth of the American experience—that our greatness as a nation derives from seemingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
We are in need of a person who can do extraordinary things right now, before the corporations completely take over. (Alternet, 1/23/2006)
Molly’s letting out all the stops now.
187. INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER JILLITHAN SWIFT, REPORTING LIVE FROM PLANET OUT
From the Archives
(January 2006) This whole JT Leroy/ James Frey debacle got me wondering about the legitimacy of other creative types’ stories, so I did a little digging and discovered that embellishment runs rampant among us creative types.
Why just yesterday I discovered that Adrienne Rich isn’t really Adrienne Rich at all but is instead the once-popular singer-songwriter Paul Williams, a small blond man who recorded “Just An Old-Fashioned Love Song” back when we were all still playing our music on turntables.
You remember this hit, right? Just an old-fashioned love song playing on the radio and wrapped around the music is the sound of someone promising they’ll never go. You’ll swear you’ve heard it before as it slowly rambles on and on and no need it bringing it back ’cause it’s never really gone....
So how’d I smoke Paul out? Well it occurred to me that Paul’s hair looks an awful lot like any number of haircuts at Michigan Women’s Music Festival or any pride event or, for that matter, in my local writing group, and then click! I realized that Adrienne has always sported that same bowly haircut too (only Paul cleverly dyed it brown).
Well, you better just go ahead and sob into your dog-eared copy of Diving into the Wreck now because, even though some people will insist that she couldn’t be Paul and that Adrienne is firmly ensconsed in some remote Old Dyke Winnebago community in the desert, the truth is that this Adrienne construct is living proof of what a little hair dye and a lot of feminist theory can do to a man.
I never suspected that a small-time rock star could evolve like that but, of course, Ladyslipper has been telling us for twenty-some-odd years now that Meg Christian abandoned wimmin’s music for higher enlightenment.
And, well, that explanation always seemed a tad too convenient to me.
Turns out Meg’s ashram is a bunch of dildoeedoo. You see, Ladyslipper didn’t want the bad publicity so, when Meg got busted for masterminding a highly illegal lipstick ring and wound up in Leavenworth, they made up a PC story, but fast.
Could it get any worse, you ask.
Well, I’m sad to report that Mab and Minnie Bruce aren’t even from Alabama and Dorothy Allison ain’t from South Cackylacky either and nary a one of them can say y’all properly (yawwwwl).
Nope. The three chicas merely drove through the Deep South on their way to a Janis Joplin concert, parked their Falcon in an obscure Bamberg SC parking lot and, while sharing some of the Colonel’s secret recipe, decided that what the movement really needed was three professional lesbo southerners because, let’s face it, we are few and far between.
And I am spinning yarns out of thin air just because it amuses me, y'awwwl.
READING:The Nation
LISTENING TO: Siouxie and the Banshee’s “Peek-a-Boo”
SANG IN SHOWER: Elton John’s “Levon”
BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: your academic credentials have expired (egads, man!)
(January 2006) This whole JT Leroy/ James Frey debacle got me wondering about the legitimacy of other creative types’ stories, so I did a little digging and discovered that embellishment runs rampant among us creative types.
Why just yesterday I discovered that Adrienne Rich isn’t really Adrienne Rich at all but is instead the once-popular singer-songwriter Paul Williams, a small blond man who recorded “Just An Old-Fashioned Love Song” back when we were all still playing our music on turntables.
You remember this hit, right? Just an old-fashioned love song playing on the radio and wrapped around the music is the sound of someone promising they’ll never go. You’ll swear you’ve heard it before as it slowly rambles on and on and no need it bringing it back ’cause it’s never really gone....
So how’d I smoke Paul out? Well it occurred to me that Paul’s hair looks an awful lot like any number of haircuts at Michigan Women’s Music Festival or any pride event or, for that matter, in my local writing group, and then click! I realized that Adrienne has always sported that same bowly haircut too (only Paul cleverly dyed it brown).
Well, you better just go ahead and sob into your dog-eared copy of Diving into the Wreck now because, even though some people will insist that she couldn’t be Paul and that Adrienne is firmly ensconsed in some remote Old Dyke Winnebago community in the desert, the truth is that this Adrienne construct is living proof of what a little hair dye and a lot of feminist theory can do to a man.
I never suspected that a small-time rock star could evolve like that but, of course, Ladyslipper has been telling us for twenty-some-odd years now that Meg Christian abandoned wimmin’s music for higher enlightenment.
And, well, that explanation always seemed a tad too convenient to me.
Turns out Meg’s ashram is a bunch of dildoeedoo. You see, Ladyslipper didn’t want the bad publicity so, when Meg got busted for masterminding a highly illegal lipstick ring and wound up in Leavenworth, they made up a PC story, but fast.
Could it get any worse, you ask.
Well, I’m sad to report that Mab and Minnie Bruce aren’t even from Alabama and Dorothy Allison ain’t from South Cackylacky either and nary a one of them can say y’all properly (yawwwwl).
Nope. The three chicas merely drove through the Deep South on their way to a Janis Joplin concert, parked their Falcon in an obscure Bamberg SC parking lot and, while sharing some of the Colonel’s secret recipe, decided that what the movement really needed was three professional lesbo southerners because, let’s face it, we are few and far between.
And I am spinning yarns out of thin air just because it amuses me, y'awwwl.
READING:The Nation
LISTENING TO: Siouxie and the Banshee’s “Peek-a-Boo”
SANG IN SHOWER: Elton John’s “Levon”
BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: your academic credentials have expired (egads, man!)
186. SLURPING WORD SOUP IN THE CULTURESPHERE
From the Archives
(January 2006) Rachel Neumann, in an end-of-the-year AlterNet story, laments the fact that conservatives won the 2005 war on frames—"how we talk about the big news and big ideas in the culturesphere"—by using effective catch phrases such as War on Terrorism and Intelligent Design and the ever-popular War on Christmas, and suggests a few phrases that progressives can adopt tbefore the next elections: Debacle in the Desert, the Great Mistake, the Iraqi Quagmire, and Plamegate.
(They don’t exactly turn my head but I do hope that Christianism catches on.)
Meanwhile I've been thinking about how pathetic it is that US citizens require a clever phrase to recognize what’s going on (a song that Marvin Gaye really needs to update for 2006).
I mean, think about it. Gaye could begin start the chorus with illegal, illegal and see if anyone looks up from the football finals to notice that the CIA played a role in an Abu Ghraib killing and created secret Eastern European prisons.
What’s going on when doctors and psychologists participate in Guantánamo Bay tortures and the Pentagon pays the Iraqi press to publish pro-USA stories?
(And it infuriates me no end to know that the New York Times waited till after the elections to inform its readers that the boy emperor authorized the NSA to spy on ordinary American citizens—Quakers, people!—without warrants.)
We sound like a third-world country with a greedy despot who makes people disappear, and not like the cradle of democracy, and, if I were teaching this semester, I would make Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Forché's Against Forgetting and Ariel Dorfman’s poetry required reading.
I am not teaching right now though (but I am listening intently).
So here’s what I’m thinking: If we must rely on clever little soundbites to get people to stand up and take notice, then let’s pepper our conversations in 2006 with this Jesse Jackson-inspired phrase that I just created: Lost Your Home? Just Live in the Dome.
Or let’s just play the word-association game: Faith-Based Giving. Holy Mission. Christian Taliban. Body Armor. Escalating Gas Prices. Mass Destruction. Cindy Sheehan. Broken Levees. Brownie. Abu Ghraib. Illegal Wire-tapping. Sanctioned Torture. Corruption. Recessed Appointments. Abramoff. Cronyism. Boy Dictator. Brownie. Brownie. Brownie.
Makes you think of Neumann's Destruction of Democracy, huh?
•
I read today that at least four groups comprised of military families are actively opposing our self-proclaimed emperor’s Great Mistake.
Amadee Braxton, a member Veterans Against The War, says
(January 2006) Rachel Neumann, in an end-of-the-year AlterNet story, laments the fact that conservatives won the 2005 war on frames—"how we talk about the big news and big ideas in the culturesphere"—by using effective catch phrases such as War on Terrorism and Intelligent Design and the ever-popular War on Christmas, and suggests a few phrases that progressives can adopt tbefore the next elections: Debacle in the Desert, the Great Mistake, the Iraqi Quagmire, and Plamegate.
(They don’t exactly turn my head but I do hope that Christianism catches on.)
Meanwhile I've been thinking about how pathetic it is that US citizens require a clever phrase to recognize what’s going on (a song that Marvin Gaye really needs to update for 2006).
I mean, think about it. Gaye could begin start the chorus with illegal, illegal and see if anyone looks up from the football finals to notice that the CIA played a role in an Abu Ghraib killing and created secret Eastern European prisons.
What’s going on when doctors and psychologists participate in Guantánamo Bay tortures and the Pentagon pays the Iraqi press to publish pro-USA stories?
(And it infuriates me no end to know that the New York Times waited till after the elections to inform its readers that the boy emperor authorized the NSA to spy on ordinary American citizens—Quakers, people!—without warrants.)
We sound like a third-world country with a greedy despot who makes people disappear, and not like the cradle of democracy, and, if I were teaching this semester, I would make Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Forché's Against Forgetting and Ariel Dorfman’s poetry required reading.
I am not teaching right now though (but I am listening intently).
So here’s what I’m thinking: If we must rely on clever little soundbites to get people to stand up and take notice, then let’s pepper our conversations in 2006 with this Jesse Jackson-inspired phrase that I just created: Lost Your Home? Just Live in the Dome.
Or let’s just play the word-association game: Faith-Based Giving. Holy Mission. Christian Taliban. Body Armor. Escalating Gas Prices. Mass Destruction. Cindy Sheehan. Broken Levees. Brownie. Abu Ghraib. Illegal Wire-tapping. Sanctioned Torture. Corruption. Recessed Appointments. Abramoff. Cronyism. Boy Dictator. Brownie. Brownie. Brownie.
Makes you think of Neumann's Destruction of Democracy, huh?
•
I read today that at least four groups comprised of military families are actively opposing our self-proclaimed emperor’s Great Mistake.
Amadee Braxton, a member Veterans Against The War, says
Veterans of the Iraq war and those still serving are the ones most capable of explaining the differences between the war the Bush administration portrays and the reality of the war on the ground. Most ... veterans realize, when they're over there, that they're viewed as an occupying force; not as liberators but as target practice. Americans were lied to, and Iraqi veterans are uniquely qualified to describe the disastrous consequences of that lie.
Her group emphasizes the connections between spending billions on the Debacle in the Desert and domestic cuts at home.
A good message indeed but the working-class voters hurt most by domestic cuts still support Shrub, despite his torture and disregard of poor people and the recent New Orleans apartheid, because he has somehow convinced them that he is a moral man.
(Why isn't helping the poor and seeking peace and justice considered moral?)
I just don't understand but suspect that, if we find a way to get beyond soundbites and speak heart-to-heart with people, most people will recognize the difference.
But how to do that when the headlines are focused on Brad and Angelina adopting a baby or Ted Kennedy having a secret love child or Eminem and Kim tying the knot (again)?
(Well, he did clearly still had strong feelings for her.)
And now I know that those two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders who were making out in that bathroom got fired for embarrassing the team after one planted a kiss on another (which, obviously, ranks right up there with murdering your pregnant wife or drag-racing down Charlotte highways in your Masurati ... or Porsche or Spyder or whatever luxury vehicle it was that those players were driving when one of them ate the gravel biscuit.
•
So yeah. Here it is 2 AM already and I am on yet another political rampage and still wide awake (goddamnit to Hell and Stillwater Texas).
I cannot sleep this week and have resorted to a glass of wine in an attempt to exhaust myself into slumber.
Why? Well I’ll sound like a ho hum broken record if I list the obvious reasons here, but here goes:
First, I read that a musician who plays here a lot was murdered with his wife and two children in a home robbery invasion and I cannot block the visuals.
(Please please tell me that they killed the parents first. And please please tell me that they killled the husband first so he didn’t have to die knowing that he failed to protect his family because I know men well enough to know that, otherwise, his father’s voice was chastising him for failing to protect his family as he died.)
And please please tell me that the stupid-ass teenagers who killed four people for a few lousy bucks at least used silencers so that the last one to die didn’t have to listen to the first three executions.
And please please please help me quit envisioning their teeth chattering in terror as the kids screaming Daddy.....
So yeah. I’m a visual AND aural person and know I’ll have nightmares if I go to sleep and so am resisting it.
Other reasons? Well, I have definitely entered the hot-flash zone and feel as if I'm roasting alive right now even though I dropped the heater down to 62 degrees.
But I am whining again and it’s after 3 AM already and I really ought to go to bed now since I have to get at 7 so I will at least go lie in the bed now and try to tell myself that I can sleep.
(Whimper.)
185. THE FUNNIEST JUSTICE, OR, MEN IN BLACK (THE SEQUEL)
From the Archives
(January 2005) A (no doubt tenured) professor reports in today’s Times that transcripts of the oral arguments of the US Supreme Court reveal the funniness quotient of the various judges.
Scalia is the funniest (pre-Roberts) judge, weighing in at a nine-month tally of seventy-seven laughing episodes in one gestational period. On average, that means the conservative unibrowed justice was good for 1.027 laughs per argument.
Breyer was the next funniest justice, weighing in at 45 laughs in the same nine-month period (which ain’t much, when you think about it). Ginsburg, on the other hand, produced only four such snorts in the same period.
(Let the feminist jokes begin, despite the fact that the white men are defining what’s funny.)
So Mud’s father asked me once, How many feminists it takes to screw in a lightbulb?
Oh I dunno, I replied.
Well, first of all, that’s NOT a funny question! And, second of all, that’s Ms. Feminist to you, asshole. And, as any enlightened man would know, the word “screw” is a misogynistic term. The very fact that you use it makes it clear that you hate all women, and....)
Well. Anyway, Ruth’s four pitiful ha’s top those of good ol’ Clarence Thomas, who has a downright pathetic humor quotient.
See, Clarence (who apparently only finds pubic hairs on Coke cans funny) rarely even speaks during oral arguments, so it’s no surprise that he failed to produce even a single bout of laughter in the same nine-month period (and yes my mind is calculating the accepted humor vs. minority status vs. discomfort with judicial white-boy fraternity quotient versus the generally accepted as agreed-upon humor, but let’s don’t forget that we are talking about a man who called a sister who works 60 hours/week picking crabmeat out of shells in the unair-conditioned Georgia heat a lazy American).
This man will no doubt vote to leave the minimum wage exactly where it is.
And speaking of cheap tricks, did you notice that the London Times ran an ambush article after reporters anonymously submitted two Booker award-winning novels from the 1970s to twenty publishers and agents? One of these novels was Naipaul’s In a Free State and the other was Stanley Middleton’s Free State.
The Times claims that this exercise “draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent" ... and yes, I do think that pressure to sell a set number of books in a set number of days can produce formulaic titles in much the same way as Hollywood can produce formulaic, predictable films by big-name directors.
But, as Publishers Lunch points out, we really should ask ourselves what would have happened if the reporters had done the same thing with some of the London Times’s op-ed essays submitted blindly to top newspapers.
And, while we’re at it, let’s remind ourselves that novels written three decades ago may no longer be particularly compelling to readers—especially if Naipaul wrote it.
(Oh Oh Oh. A bias. A clear and unadulterated bias that is clearly and freely noted here.)
So yeah. Naipaul won an award but, you know, it ain’t exactly compelling reading sometimes.
And I’ve worked in the publishing industry long enough to know that overworked publishers send unsolicited material or material delivered from a person rather than an agent to their slush pile. I also know that mentioning a big award or a major publisher in your cover letter can translate into a contract really quickly because none of the overworked publishing types want to be the one who let the good stuff slip by.
I’m not sure what any of this proves except that publishing is an overworked, underpaid field that no one should work in (and that the Times possesses way too much willingness to scoff at its own industry when, really, there are all kinds of new dictators that it could be studying for profiles in American criminal activity and such).
And while we’re on the topic of the nonessential (but oh so entertaining) publishing industry, why is James Frey running hog- wild? This opportunist now says that Talese et al. weren’t sure if they’d call his book fiction or memoir .. and this after she defended his sorry ass when his lies were revealed (at considerable professional sacrifice to her career and prestige).
Or maybe she was aware all along and encouraged him to sell it as fact.
The guy is still selling books right and left though, so let the controversy continue....
•
Now let me tell you about the funny thing that happened at work today in the vaguest kind of way that cann’t cause me to get fired.
Faculty, as a general rule, rule on college campuses and the most unorganized ones tend to demand and expect extreme assistance. So this truly unorganized faculty member instructed her secretary to drop everything and do a complicated last-minute task this morning. The secretary pointed out that she had other pressing (and scheduled) deadlines to meet and then the unorganized faculty member said (and I quote) “I don’t care. That' a direct order. Now do it.”
And this is when her prone-to-extremes and pushed-to-the-edge secretary basically lost her shit (and mine and yours too) and threw down the faculty member’s papers and followed her up and down the halls yelling that these unreal expectations are bullshit, just bullshit! and I don't have to account for your lack of planning and I don’t remember everything else, but she definitely included the phrase “you just go fuck yourself.”
Yeah.
So. Whee. Work was sure fun today!
(January 2005) A (no doubt tenured) professor reports in today’s Times that transcripts of the oral arguments of the US Supreme Court reveal the funniness quotient of the various judges.
Scalia is the funniest (pre-Roberts) judge, weighing in at a nine-month tally of seventy-seven laughing episodes in one gestational period. On average, that means the conservative unibrowed justice was good for 1.027 laughs per argument.
Breyer was the next funniest justice, weighing in at 45 laughs in the same nine-month period (which ain’t much, when you think about it). Ginsburg, on the other hand, produced only four such snorts in the same period.
(Let the feminist jokes begin, despite the fact that the white men are defining what’s funny.)
So Mud’s father asked me once, How many feminists it takes to screw in a lightbulb?
Oh I dunno, I replied.
Well, first of all, that’s NOT a funny question! And, second of all, that’s Ms. Feminist to you, asshole. And, as any enlightened man would know, the word “screw” is a misogynistic term. The very fact that you use it makes it clear that you hate all women, and....)
Well. Anyway, Ruth’s four pitiful ha’s top those of good ol’ Clarence Thomas, who has a downright pathetic humor quotient.
See, Clarence (who apparently only finds pubic hairs on Coke cans funny) rarely even speaks during oral arguments, so it’s no surprise that he failed to produce even a single bout of laughter in the same nine-month period (and yes my mind is calculating the accepted humor vs. minority status vs. discomfort with judicial white-boy fraternity quotient versus the generally accepted as agreed-upon humor, but let’s don’t forget that we are talking about a man who called a sister who works 60 hours/week picking crabmeat out of shells in the unair-conditioned Georgia heat a lazy American).
This man will no doubt vote to leave the minimum wage exactly where it is.
And speaking of cheap tricks, did you notice that the London Times ran an ambush article after reporters anonymously submitted two Booker award-winning novels from the 1970s to twenty publishers and agents? One of these novels was Naipaul’s In a Free State and the other was Stanley Middleton’s Free State.
The Times claims that this exercise “draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent" ... and yes, I do think that pressure to sell a set number of books in a set number of days can produce formulaic titles in much the same way as Hollywood can produce formulaic, predictable films by big-name directors.
But, as Publishers Lunch points out, we really should ask ourselves what would have happened if the reporters had done the same thing with some of the London Times’s op-ed essays submitted blindly to top newspapers.
And, while we’re at it, let’s remind ourselves that novels written three decades ago may no longer be particularly compelling to readers—especially if Naipaul wrote it.
(Oh Oh Oh. A bias. A clear and unadulterated bias that is clearly and freely noted here.)
So yeah. Naipaul won an award but, you know, it ain’t exactly compelling reading sometimes.
And I’ve worked in the publishing industry long enough to know that overworked publishers send unsolicited material or material delivered from a person rather than an agent to their slush pile. I also know that mentioning a big award or a major publisher in your cover letter can translate into a contract really quickly because none of the overworked publishing types want to be the one who let the good stuff slip by.
I’m not sure what any of this proves except that publishing is an overworked, underpaid field that no one should work in (and that the Times possesses way too much willingness to scoff at its own industry when, really, there are all kinds of new dictators that it could be studying for profiles in American criminal activity and such).
And while we’re on the topic of the nonessential (but oh so entertaining) publishing industry, why is James Frey running hog- wild? This opportunist now says that Talese et al. weren’t sure if they’d call his book fiction or memoir .. and this after she defended his sorry ass when his lies were revealed (at considerable professional sacrifice to her career and prestige).
Or maybe she was aware all along and encouraged him to sell it as fact.
The guy is still selling books right and left though, so let the controversy continue....
•
Now let me tell you about the funny thing that happened at work today in the vaguest kind of way that cann’t cause me to get fired.
Faculty, as a general rule, rule on college campuses and the most unorganized ones tend to demand and expect extreme assistance. So this truly unorganized faculty member instructed her secretary to drop everything and do a complicated last-minute task this morning. The secretary pointed out that she had other pressing (and scheduled) deadlines to meet and then the unorganized faculty member said (and I quote) “I don’t care. That' a direct order. Now do it.”
And this is when her prone-to-extremes and pushed-to-the-edge secretary basically lost her shit (and mine and yours too) and threw down the faculty member’s papers and followed her up and down the halls yelling that these unreal expectations are bullshit, just bullshit! and I don't have to account for your lack of planning and I don’t remember everything else, but she definitely included the phrase “you just go fuck yourself.”
Yeah.
So. Whee. Work was sure fun today!
184. TRANSITIONING INTO THE NEW HUMANITY
From the Archives
(January 2005) Headline on Yahoo! today: “Shatner sells kidney stone to charity.”
Huh. I wonder if it will try to rap, entertain its new owner....
If that’s not disturbing enough, then here’s news from Kiplinger’s: if you’re one of those consumers who charged $232 billion on your Visa between November 1 and Christmas Day, then you’ll be pleased to know that your government is concerned about your credit-card debt so—even though you have probably not gotten a substantial raise in 5 years and even though the cost-of-living has gone up substantially and even though your heating and transportation costs have doubled—nevertheless, your friendly Big Brother has issued new federal guidelines that require creditors to double your minimum credit-card payments.
Meanwhile, the coauthors of the million-copy selling, New Age Medicine Cards deck and the memoir Crossing into Medicine Country are also looking out for us.
(People are so NICE, aren’t they? I mean, all this charity has inspired me to do a Sally chant: They like me. They really liiiiiiike me!).
Yep, the Medicine Card folks are now publishing 2012 Oracle: Transitioning into the New Humanity, and well before 2012! This divinatory deck and accompanying book are “intended to help guide humanity through immense world change heralded for 2012 by the Bible Code, Nostradamus, astrology, and the Mayan calendar.”
(Why not go all out and include the fucking Code of fucking Hammurabi in that list too?)
Well, clearly, I best rush right out and purchase this deck since I like to plan ahead for such momentous life events.
I wonder, though, if these co-authors might need to make a slight adjustment in their calculations. I mean, our boy dictator apparently believes that the earth is only 6 thousand years old. And we know he’s competitive. So surely he’ll notice soon enough that he and his party and their corporate interests haven’t quite controlled the Press as much as, say, dictators in Chile and El Salvador were able to do.
Nope, he just hasn’t gone far enough.
If he believes that our ancestors walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, then the Medicine Card folks better adjust their oracle transitions to fit these beliefs or he’ll prohibit them from publishing this information.
Meanwhile MSN is looking out for us (there are angels everywhere!) by publishing this depressing list of
(January 2005) Headline on Yahoo! today: “Shatner sells kidney stone to charity.”
Huh. I wonder if it will try to rap, entertain its new owner....
If that’s not disturbing enough, then here’s news from Kiplinger’s: if you’re one of those consumers who charged $232 billion on your Visa between November 1 and Christmas Day, then you’ll be pleased to know that your government is concerned about your credit-card debt so—even though you have probably not gotten a substantial raise in 5 years and even though the cost-of-living has gone up substantially and even though your heating and transportation costs have doubled—nevertheless, your friendly Big Brother has issued new federal guidelines that require creditors to double your minimum credit-card payments.
Meanwhile, the coauthors of the million-copy selling, New Age Medicine Cards deck and the memoir Crossing into Medicine Country are also looking out for us.
(People are so NICE, aren’t they? I mean, all this charity has inspired me to do a Sally chant: They like me. They really liiiiiiike me!).
Yep, the Medicine Card folks are now publishing 2012 Oracle: Transitioning into the New Humanity, and well before 2012! This divinatory deck and accompanying book are “intended to help guide humanity through immense world change heralded for 2012 by the Bible Code, Nostradamus, astrology, and the Mayan calendar.”
(Why not go all out and include the fucking Code of fucking Hammurabi in that list too?)
Well, clearly, I best rush right out and purchase this deck since I like to plan ahead for such momentous life events.
I wonder, though, if these co-authors might need to make a slight adjustment in their calculations. I mean, our boy dictator apparently believes that the earth is only 6 thousand years old. And we know he’s competitive. So surely he’ll notice soon enough that he and his party and their corporate interests haven’t quite controlled the Press as much as, say, dictators in Chile and El Salvador were able to do.
Nope, he just hasn’t gone far enough.
If he believes that our ancestors walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, then the Medicine Card folks better adjust their oracle transitions to fit these beliefs or he’ll prohibit them from publishing this information.
Meanwhile MSN is looking out for us (there are angels everywhere!) by publishing this depressing list of
THE TEN WORST THINGS YOU CAN EAT
Hydrogenated/Trans fats > These manufactured fats are used in bakery items and margarine. Studies indicate that it isn't so much how much fat you consume, but what kind you consume. These are the worst, so better avoid cookies, crackers, baked goods etc. that include hydrogenated oil in their ingredient list.
Olestra > This fake fat is used in the manufacturing of fat-free potato chips and other snack foods. It binds with fat-soluble vitamins A, E, D and K and carotenoids—substances believed to keep the immune system healthy and prevent some cancers—and eliminates them. Proctor and Gamble, Olestra’s producer, has acknowledged the problem with vitamins and is now fortifying their um food-like stuff with them. Olestra causes some serious digestive problems in many people too and environmentalists suggest that, since Olestra does not break down, it is incredibly harmful to our environment.
Nitrates > Nitrates are used in many foods, especially cured meats such as bacon and hot dogs, to preserve color and maintain microbial safety. Nitrate is harmless, but it can convert to nitrite, which can form nitrosamines, a powerful cancer-causing chemical, in your body so, whenever possible, look for nitrate-free preserved meats. If consuming foods containing nitrates, have a glass of orange juice at the same time (for instance, orange juice with your morning bacon), since Vitamin C is known to inhibit conversion to nitrosamines in your stomach.
Alcohol > This one item has created more problems than all the rest put together. Of course, it is possible to consume alcohol wisely and safely. Just stick to that one glass of red wine for its healthful side effects, exercise caution, and don’t overdo it.
(Damn it! Now that is just not fair!)
Raw oysters > Raw oysters can carry a deadly bacteria that can cause severe illness or death so are marketed strictly in the "buyer beware" category. You take a big risk every time you consume them raw.
Saturated animal fats > That means fatty meats, especially beef and pork, or the skin on poultry. It also includes full-fat dairy products such as cheese, milk and cream. Fatty meat and dairy products do have some contributions to make to a diet, but none that can't be found elsewhere.
Soda > Drinking soda is a poor way to get fluids. They are full of sugar or artificial sweeteners and often contain caffeine, artificial colors and flavors. Substitute homemade soda by mixing sparkling water with fresh, 100 percent juice.
Low-acid home-canned foods > Home canning can be dangerous for foods low in acid such as green beans, carrots, or other garden vegetables. The potential of botulism is high because home canners often do not reach the temperatures and pressures necessary to kill the botulism spores that may contaminate the food. Low-acid home-canned foods are one of the main causes of food poisoning.
High-fat snacks, chips > Even if they are made with vegetable oil, they should be minimized. The balance of fat in our diets has shifted too far to the omega-6 variety (found in most processed vegetable oils) and it is thought that consuming too many of omega-6 fats may lead to certain chronic diseases. Focus on fruits and non-fat whole grains for snacking instead.
Liquid meals > They aren't inherently bad for you, but they do keep you from eating whole, natural foods that contain more nutrients and fiber and disease-fighting phytochemicals. They may be okay for people who are too sick to eat, but don't let them displace the real foods in your diet.
Finally, my advice (’cause hey I’m looking out for you too, wink wink): just don’t even look at the number of nitrates that are now allowed under the revised-for-corporate-gain-at-the-expense-of-your-health “organic” label. It’s too depressing.
All right. Back to work now. Mush, mush!
183. KLEPTOCRACY, AMERICAN-STYLE, OR ANOTHER DAY OF ARMCHAIR ÜBERLIBERAL RANTING
From the Archives
(January 2006) MLK Jr. Day 2006, so most businesses are closed. I am perched in a rocker with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window at the remnants of a two-day snowstorm that is now being washed away by a gentle rain.
“It’s easy to be an armchair überliberal,” a Sun magazine letter writer notes, but “out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.”
I want to believe that is true. And I know that is sometimes true.
I know that people who have very little can be incredibly generous, that a few brave souls will eventually rise up, refuse to sit in the back of the bus or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory, that, every once in a great while, humanity will make an incremental step forward.
I also recognize that I am talking about kindness in the era of Abu Ghraib, in a year in which the VP of our democracy is lobbying Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.
When my pal Rosa was a peace corp volunteer in Africa, a woman whose younger sister died told her matter-of-factly that her deceased sister’s infant twins would now die too. This is reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm.
Resignation in the face of atrocity is ocassionally the norm in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive —sometimes for generation after generation and sometimes by learning to work the system—but the twins would have had a much better chance of surviving in this country.
... so let’s all sing oh oh your worries ain’t like mine now, shall we, and turn back to our reality TV shows because, as Barbara Bush says, look how well those poor people are doing!
Meanwhile, it is almost certainly no coincidence that MLK was assassinated when he began to criticize capitalism.
The twins fought to survive in a landscape in which the strongest takes the food and therefore thrives.
In our landscape, the ones with the most resources claim others’ resources as their own—through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminished workers’ rights and confiscated pensions, through supply and demand.
The rich rob the poor legally because they have the resources necessary to do so.
If you grew up among poor but honest Americans, as I did, then you scrimped and saved and did without and followed the Golden Rule and lived in accordance with the tenets of the bible—that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant—while you kept your eyes fixed firmly to the afterlife.
(Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn’t it?)
It’s no coincidence that, when I lived in DC, it was the drug dealers who bought the shoeless children their shoes, not the government or any of those money-laundering nonprofits that Republicans open right and left.
Talk to dealers and gang members and you will learn that many recognize the social structures that oppress them and they’re understandably infuriated by the fact that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets barefoot while others have so much.
In some ways, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout in our squalor are the true entrepreneurs, the disenfranchised who somehow discover a way to achieve the American dream.
Listen to good rap music or good indy music or good art or, well, many things and you will discover an undercurrent of unrest along with a determination to deviate from the predetermined suburban script for having it all.
•
So okay I’ll jump topics again and end with a poem:
(January 2006) MLK Jr. Day 2006, so most businesses are closed. I am perched in a rocker with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window at the remnants of a two-day snowstorm that is now being washed away by a gentle rain.
“It’s easy to be an armchair überliberal,” a Sun magazine letter writer notes, but “out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.”
I want to believe that is true. And I know that is sometimes true.
I know that people who have very little can be incredibly generous, that a few brave souls will eventually rise up, refuse to sit in the back of the bus or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory, that, every once in a great while, humanity will make an incremental step forward.
I also recognize that I am talking about kindness in the era of Abu Ghraib, in a year in which the VP of our democracy is lobbying Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.
When my pal Rosa was a peace corp volunteer in Africa, a woman whose younger sister died told her matter-of-factly that her deceased sister’s infant twins would now die too. This is reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm.
Resignation in the face of atrocity is ocassionally the norm in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive —sometimes for generation after generation and sometimes by learning to work the system—but the twins would have had a much better chance of surviving in this country.
... so let’s all sing oh oh your worries ain’t like mine now, shall we, and turn back to our reality TV shows because, as Barbara Bush says, look how well those poor people are doing!
Meanwhile, it is almost certainly no coincidence that MLK was assassinated when he began to criticize capitalism.
The twins fought to survive in a landscape in which the strongest takes the food and therefore thrives.
In our landscape, the ones with the most resources claim others’ resources as their own—through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminished workers’ rights and confiscated pensions, through supply and demand.
The rich rob the poor legally because they have the resources necessary to do so.
If you grew up among poor but honest Americans, as I did, then you scrimped and saved and did without and followed the Golden Rule and lived in accordance with the tenets of the bible—that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant—while you kept your eyes fixed firmly to the afterlife.
(Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn’t it?)
It’s no coincidence that, when I lived in DC, it was the drug dealers who bought the shoeless children their shoes, not the government or any of those money-laundering nonprofits that Republicans open right and left.
Talk to dealers and gang members and you will learn that many recognize the social structures that oppress them and they’re understandably infuriated by the fact that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets barefoot while others have so much.
In some ways, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout in our squalor are the true entrepreneurs, the disenfranchised who somehow discover a way to achieve the American dream.
Listen to good rap music or good indy music or good art or, well, many things and you will discover an undercurrent of unrest along with a determination to deviate from the predetermined suburban script for having it all.
•
So okay I’ll jump topics again and end with a poem:
WATER PRAYER
by Stuart Kestenbaum (From The Sun magazine (12.2005)
And this morning I awoke to rain, which makes
its own rhythm on the window, and the world is full
of these rhythms, rhythm of water, rhythm of the heart,
which sounds like an underwater pump, the lub-dud
of all it knows, which is making all I know possible,
and on the roof rain falls and turns to hail, then snow,
then rain again, running down the shingles to the gutters,
the gathering-up that makes rivers and lakes and oceans,
from cloud to drop to torrent, how nothing is lost.
LISTENING TO: the tea kettle starting to boil
READING: The Sun magazine
182. WE ARE ONLY COMING THROUGH IN WAVES
From the Archives
(January 2006) Okay does anyone see a pattern here? We withhold body armor from soldiers then mortality rates rise. We destroy our environment then hotter oceans yield stronger hurricanes and tsunamis. We destroy barrier islands then hurricanes hit cities full force. We deregulate, then inspectors who once drove their Chevies to the levees to see if they’re dry and structurally sound wind up bagging groceries somewhere. We lower taxes to the point that chronically understaffed offices can no longer perform vital services such as visiting mines to ensure compliance, then trapped miners die waiting for missing rescuers to arrive.
There’s a gap we’re not minding here, a critical black hole into which the cause-and-effect rationale of people who complain about long lines at the DMV while demanding further tax cuts has been sucked.
Meanwhile, 5 million more of us slipped into poverty in the last four years even as the conservative bobbleheads insisted that our economy is fine, and middle- and lower-class citizens experienced substantial cost-of-living increases alongside a 40-percent rise in health-care costs.
Molly Ivins points out that the federal minimum wage has held steady at $5.15/hour since 1997 even though the Economic Policy Institute reports that inflation has eroded away minimum wage’s buying power to its second-lowest level since the fifties.
The gap between (vanishing) middle-class workers and the super-rich is the largest ever recorded, yet no one’s calling it the new gilded age. Yet.
Conservatives argue that increasing the minimum wage hurts small businesses and causes layoffs, but there’s ample evidence to prove otherwise.
Meanwhile, Democrats are holding strategic sessions to determine how to best pepper their speeches with more religious and “moral” phrases. But bless Edwards’s lobbyist-fed heart, at least he is saying publicly that “the poverty thing” is a moral issue.
•
I forgot to include one key event in my recap of 2005: Bill Frist watched a video of Terri Schiavo then declared that she “certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” even though her autopsy revealed that she was blind.
(It is, as Paul Simon says, an age of miracles though, isn’t it?)
Frankly, I haven’t met anyone who isn’t glad that 2005 is behind them. As Molly Ivins says, “With a few, shining exceptions (such as Cindy Sheehan) we can bid adieu to 2005 without great regret. Or, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry said to a reporter earlier this year, "Adios, mo-fo."
SANG IN SHOWER: “Slipsliding Away” by Paul Simon
READING: Hoppin’ John’s Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah Dining at Home in the Lowcountry cookbook (gotta find that poached pear recipe before this weekend)
BEST-OF SPAM: We cure any disease!
(January 2006) Okay does anyone see a pattern here? We withhold body armor from soldiers then mortality rates rise. We destroy our environment then hotter oceans yield stronger hurricanes and tsunamis. We destroy barrier islands then hurricanes hit cities full force. We deregulate, then inspectors who once drove their Chevies to the levees to see if they’re dry and structurally sound wind up bagging groceries somewhere. We lower taxes to the point that chronically understaffed offices can no longer perform vital services such as visiting mines to ensure compliance, then trapped miners die waiting for missing rescuers to arrive.
There’s a gap we’re not minding here, a critical black hole into which the cause-and-effect rationale of people who complain about long lines at the DMV while demanding further tax cuts has been sucked.
Meanwhile, 5 million more of us slipped into poverty in the last four years even as the conservative bobbleheads insisted that our economy is fine, and middle- and lower-class citizens experienced substantial cost-of-living increases alongside a 40-percent rise in health-care costs.
Molly Ivins points out that the federal minimum wage has held steady at $5.15/hour since 1997 even though the Economic Policy Institute reports that inflation has eroded away minimum wage’s buying power to its second-lowest level since the fifties.
The gap between (vanishing) middle-class workers and the super-rich is the largest ever recorded, yet no one’s calling it the new gilded age. Yet.
Conservatives argue that increasing the minimum wage hurts small businesses and causes layoffs, but there’s ample evidence to prove otherwise.
Meanwhile, Democrats are holding strategic sessions to determine how to best pepper their speeches with more religious and “moral” phrases. But bless Edwards’s lobbyist-fed heart, at least he is saying publicly that “the poverty thing” is a moral issue.
•
I forgot to include one key event in my recap of 2005: Bill Frist watched a video of Terri Schiavo then declared that she “certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” even though her autopsy revealed that she was blind.
(It is, as Paul Simon says, an age of miracles though, isn’t it?)
Frankly, I haven’t met anyone who isn’t glad that 2005 is behind them. As Molly Ivins says, “With a few, shining exceptions (such as Cindy Sheehan) we can bid adieu to 2005 without great regret. Or, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry said to a reporter earlier this year, "Adios, mo-fo."
SANG IN SHOWER: “Slipsliding Away” by Paul Simon
READING: Hoppin’ John’s Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah Dining at Home in the Lowcountry cookbook (gotta find that poached pear recipe before this weekend)
BEST-OF SPAM: We cure any disease!
181. DIVINE PUNISHMENT, OR, WAS JESUS A NAMBY-PAMBY FRAT BOY?
From the Archives
(January 2006) Wasting no time whatsoever, Pat Robertson announced yesterday that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.”
Interesting how egomaniacs always want you to believe that they speak for god, isn’t it?
(What was Terry Schiavo’s coma divine punishment for, Patso?)
As for me, I’m holding onto the hope that Pat’s latest decree will inspire Oral Roberts to climb back into his crystal tower and refuse to come down until God delivers a Jim Jones poison Kool-Aid acid test to the idiots over at the 700 Club.
(And, man, I can’t WAIT till Pat finally dies so I can announce his death as God’s wrath pouring down on the Christianists.)
Meanwhile, Pat and his pals are pressuring NBC to bump the “Book of Daniel,” which premieres Friday.
This show stars Aidan Quinn as an Episcopal priest with a queer son, and the Christianists consider it another indication of NBC’s “anti-Christian bigotry.”
The fact that a gay man produced the show no doubt encourages this view too. And they’re particularly unhappy about the fact that the priest has long conversations with Jesus.
(Wonder who’s playing Jesus? Maybe they revived that Jesus of Montreal star.)
I fail to parse how a sitcom that features Jesus in a starring role can be labeled anti-Christian, but a Dobson spokesperson describes this Jesus is “a namby-pamby frat boy who basically winks at every sin and perversity under the sun.”
What would they have him do with human foibles? Shoot electric lightning bolts out of his pinkies?
Clearly, they want that black-and-white Old Testament god instead of a human who recognizes subtllety, frailty.
Meanwhile, the empathetic namby-pamby Jesus must be thrilled to see Tom DeLay on trial and the Boy King’s feet pressed to the fire and Abramoff’s so-called charitable giving coming back to bite him and those other conservative moneychangers on their lily-white asses.
And, low and behold, Abramoff’s plea agreement reveals that he funneled $50,000 to the wife of one of DeLay’s senior staff members (a woman who is probably in some Texas church right now praying her well-perfumed ass off that some higher being will get her out of this one).
The whipster god must be chuckling at the fundies’ misuse of the word family too, now that we know that DeLay’s former chief of staff apparently created the US Family Network nonprofit in order to receive $1 million from an Abramoff client.
Oh and I bet he’s happy as a clam to know that Randy Cunningham is finally headed to prison and we all know now that Bill Frist (who can diagnose patients from a video) uses his AIDS charity to funnel half a million dollars to his pals and allegedly pulled a Martha and sold some of his family’s HRC stock illegally too.
(Wanna place bets on whether or not he’s sent to some West Virginia prison though?)
Meanwhile, the Times is finally abuzz with talk about the symbiosis between lobbyists and lawmakers but who’s surprised by THAT relationship? We legalized lobbying after all.
(But whodathunk lawmakers would be greedy instead of looking out for every citizen’s interests? Amazing!)
SANG IN SHOWER: “The sun’s so hot and my heart is thumping. Let me buy you a beer or something...” (Lucinda Williams)
READING: Alternet’s “Fighting GOP Corruption”
LISTENING TO: “Triangle man, triangle man. Doing the things that a triangle can.” (Moxy Früvous)
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Government officials and government action are not for sale.” (Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s criminal division, as she suggested that a bigger influence-peddling scandal is about to unfold)
(We should all say a silent thank you that her boss is not former attorney general John Ashcroft.)
(January 2006) Wasting no time whatsoever, Pat Robertson announced yesterday that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.”
Interesting how egomaniacs always want you to believe that they speak for god, isn’t it?
(What was Terry Schiavo’s coma divine punishment for, Patso?)
As for me, I’m holding onto the hope that Pat’s latest decree will inspire Oral Roberts to climb back into his crystal tower and refuse to come down until God delivers a Jim Jones poison Kool-Aid acid test to the idiots over at the 700 Club.
(And, man, I can’t WAIT till Pat finally dies so I can announce his death as God’s wrath pouring down on the Christianists.)
Meanwhile, Pat and his pals are pressuring NBC to bump the “Book of Daniel,” which premieres Friday.
This show stars Aidan Quinn as an Episcopal priest with a queer son, and the Christianists consider it another indication of NBC’s “anti-Christian bigotry.”
The fact that a gay man produced the show no doubt encourages this view too. And they’re particularly unhappy about the fact that the priest has long conversations with Jesus.
(Wonder who’s playing Jesus? Maybe they revived that Jesus of Montreal star.)
I fail to parse how a sitcom that features Jesus in a starring role can be labeled anti-Christian, but a Dobson spokesperson describes this Jesus is “a namby-pamby frat boy who basically winks at every sin and perversity under the sun.”
What would they have him do with human foibles? Shoot electric lightning bolts out of his pinkies?
Clearly, they want that black-and-white Old Testament god instead of a human who recognizes subtllety, frailty.
Meanwhile, the empathetic namby-pamby Jesus must be thrilled to see Tom DeLay on trial and the Boy King’s feet pressed to the fire and Abramoff’s so-called charitable giving coming back to bite him and those other conservative moneychangers on their lily-white asses.
And, low and behold, Abramoff’s plea agreement reveals that he funneled $50,000 to the wife of one of DeLay’s senior staff members (a woman who is probably in some Texas church right now praying her well-perfumed ass off that some higher being will get her out of this one).
The whipster god must be chuckling at the fundies’ misuse of the word family too, now that we know that DeLay’s former chief of staff apparently created the US Family Network nonprofit in order to receive $1 million from an Abramoff client.
Oh and I bet he’s happy as a clam to know that Randy Cunningham is finally headed to prison and we all know now that Bill Frist (who can diagnose patients from a video) uses his AIDS charity to funnel half a million dollars to his pals and allegedly pulled a Martha and sold some of his family’s HRC stock illegally too.
(Wanna place bets on whether or not he’s sent to some West Virginia prison though?)
Meanwhile, the Times is finally abuzz with talk about the symbiosis between lobbyists and lawmakers but who’s surprised by THAT relationship? We legalized lobbying after all.
(But whodathunk lawmakers would be greedy instead of looking out for every citizen’s interests? Amazing!)
SANG IN SHOWER: “The sun’s so hot and my heart is thumping. Let me buy you a beer or something...” (Lucinda Williams)
READING: Alternet’s “Fighting GOP Corruption”
LISTENING TO: “Triangle man, triangle man. Doing the things that a triangle can.” (Moxy Früvous)
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Government officials and government action are not for sale.” (Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s criminal division, as she suggested that a bigger influence-peddling scandal is about to unfold)
(We should all say a silent thank you that her boss is not former attorney general John Ashcroft.)
180. STRATEGIC DISTRACTIONS, OR, WHEN IN DOUBT, ADD MORE CHEESE!
From the Archives
(January 2006) The latter part of my title (“When in doubt, add more cheese”) is the final line of a New York Times food article written by a child of the seventies who grew up eating falafel and stir-fry and only recently discovered the pleasures of well-prepared macaroni and cheese.
This foodie would appreciate the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom door of a major live music venue here: Random Cheese Fact No. 4: Cheese is the best ingredient in any dish in which it is a part.
I don’t have any clue why someone would pay good money to see Sun Ra or the Connells or Two Dollar Pistols, then head to the bathroom to scrawl cheese facts on the door, but there you have it.
(And ueah I’ve been ranting about our government so much lately that I figured I’d talk about food today before I slip into a familiar rant.)
So, yeah. In the deep south where I was raised (twitch twitch), macaroni and cheese is a staple. A field guide to the region would define its natural habitat as Baptist meals on the grounds, funeral wakes, Sunday afternoon family gatherings, your Grandmother’s Thanksgiving table, hot food bars, and little plastic children’s bowls everywhere.
My paternal grandmother always arrived at our house for Thanksgiving carrying a glass baking dish of the creamy stuff fitted into a matching wicker basket (and, incidentally, made THE BEST macaroni and cheese in the world).
The gourmands who insist that Whole Food’s free-range chickens taste divine tend to incorporate a horrid white sauce, but even this newly macaronied author recognizes that this sauce is wrong for the dish.
(And, come to think of it, my ex Mud once took this mistake a step further and added onions to her bechemel sauce.)
Any southerner worth her weight in grits would tell you that you should not get too adventurous with time-honored culinary traditions that are all about nostalgia and comfort though (although parmesan-topped collard greens ain’t half bad).
Meanwhile, the White House now has three leak investigations underway.
(No, not corruption investigations, leak investigations.)
The most secretive administration since Nixon—one that condones torture and suspects Mexicans crossing the border of terrorist acts—isn’t concerned with it’s corruption; they just wantsto know who dared challenge the dictator’s wishes.
(Wonder if the neocons handpicked their investigators to ensure that they only ask questions that monkeyboys can answer?)
So here, let me coin a phrase. Our administration is plaming the messenger. (You heard it here first.)
There's no so-called liberal bias behind my failure to understand how a thinking citizen can fail to notice that punishing whistleblowers thwarts democracy. Plamegate (or Nixon, Revisited) may catch up with the Administration eventually, but I bet attention will remain focused on who informed the public about the (illegal) eavesdropping.
(Speaking of which, wonder what Bunnatine Greenhouse is up to these days?)
I worry that Americans have been rendered so logic-impaired by the Tim Russerts and Rush Limbaughs and Pat Robertsons and yammering hate-radio soundbiters of our age that they’l kowtow to whatever the administration tells them to believe.
Or maybe we’re just decorative citizens now who spend our time focused on consumer questions such as what to wear and where to live and what ringtone to use on our flip-top mobile phonesas our civil rights vanish?
And why not? I mean, come on. Consumer culture tells us that we are defined by our material possessions and our very-own FEMA director wrote, in the midst of a hurricane that was drowning thousands of people, “I am a fashion god.”
Or, worst of all, do you think people actually believe that it’s fine for our unapologetic president to confer dictatorial authority on himself and to stalk anyone who dares question his authority?
(Yep. What a strategy: Plame the messenger and maybe no one will notice that a military coup is taking place in their homeland.)
•
Meanwhile, I guess we’ll have to get ourselves geared up for the Alito hearings, which begin on Monday.
(That information alone has no doubt sent many a tofu-eating liberal in search of some good old mac and cheese.)
But we can at least remind ourselves that the GOP is mired in corruption and plaming the messenger will only cover that fact up for so long.
Alito is the scariest nominee since Bork. A loyal friend to big business who opposes to the Establishment Clause (which prohibits public prayer/religious displays) and is “especially proud” of his work opposing abortion and affirmative action.
He protects homophobic speech. And, at a time when corporations rape the environment even as our polar ice caps are melting, the judge favors limiting our ability to sue against toxic omissions under the Clean Air Act (which he probably also opposes).
Alito favors capital punishment for children and opposed admitting women to his alma mater. And he was deputy assistant attorney general to Ed Meese.
(Remember those “Meese Is A Pig” protests? I've still got my pig nose from them .)
He disagrees with the Miranda decision and struck down an anti-harassment policy that interfered with Christian groups’ right to speak out against queers (because, you know, it's just a life-style choice really. People can choose to whom we are attracted.).
Alito also has a history of being sole dissenter in cases involving sex or race discrimination.
(Thank you Daniel Pollitt for sharing this information with the world.)
...but enough about Alito because maybe you’d prefer to know which men are the nation’s most eligible bachelors.
That’s what Yahoo! is headlining today.
I feel trapped in a rock-paper-scissors world where convenience and stress and obligations and static from the talking heads are trumping my civil rights. And I don’t like it one bit.
SANG IN SHOWER: “Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat baby. Rock the boat. Don’t tip the boat over.” Who sang that? I want to say Hues Corporation but am too lazy to Google it.
READING: The Nation
(January 2006) The latter part of my title (“When in doubt, add more cheese”) is the final line of a New York Times food article written by a child of the seventies who grew up eating falafel and stir-fry and only recently discovered the pleasures of well-prepared macaroni and cheese.
This foodie would appreciate the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom door of a major live music venue here: Random Cheese Fact No. 4: Cheese is the best ingredient in any dish in which it is a part.
I don’t have any clue why someone would pay good money to see Sun Ra or the Connells or Two Dollar Pistols, then head to the bathroom to scrawl cheese facts on the door, but there you have it.
(And ueah I’ve been ranting about our government so much lately that I figured I’d talk about food today before I slip into a familiar rant.)
So, yeah. In the deep south where I was raised (twitch twitch), macaroni and cheese is a staple. A field guide to the region would define its natural habitat as Baptist meals on the grounds, funeral wakes, Sunday afternoon family gatherings, your Grandmother’s Thanksgiving table, hot food bars, and little plastic children’s bowls everywhere.
My paternal grandmother always arrived at our house for Thanksgiving carrying a glass baking dish of the creamy stuff fitted into a matching wicker basket (and, incidentally, made THE BEST macaroni and cheese in the world).
The gourmands who insist that Whole Food’s free-range chickens taste divine tend to incorporate a horrid white sauce, but even this newly macaronied author recognizes that this sauce is wrong for the dish.
(And, come to think of it, my ex Mud once took this mistake a step further and added onions to her bechemel sauce.)
Any southerner worth her weight in grits would tell you that you should not get too adventurous with time-honored culinary traditions that are all about nostalgia and comfort though (although parmesan-topped collard greens ain’t half bad).
Meanwhile, the White House now has three leak investigations underway.
(No, not corruption investigations, leak investigations.)
The most secretive administration since Nixon—one that condones torture and suspects Mexicans crossing the border of terrorist acts—isn’t concerned with it’s corruption; they just wantsto know who dared challenge the dictator’s wishes.
(Wonder if the neocons handpicked their investigators to ensure that they only ask questions that monkeyboys can answer?)
So here, let me coin a phrase. Our administration is plaming the messenger. (You heard it here first.)
There's no so-called liberal bias behind my failure to understand how a thinking citizen can fail to notice that punishing whistleblowers thwarts democracy. Plamegate (or Nixon, Revisited) may catch up with the Administration eventually, but I bet attention will remain focused on who informed the public about the (illegal) eavesdropping.
(Speaking of which, wonder what Bunnatine Greenhouse is up to these days?)
I worry that Americans have been rendered so logic-impaired by the Tim Russerts and Rush Limbaughs and Pat Robertsons and yammering hate-radio soundbiters of our age that they’l kowtow to whatever the administration tells them to believe.
Or maybe we’re just decorative citizens now who spend our time focused on consumer questions such as what to wear and where to live and what ringtone to use on our flip-top mobile phonesas our civil rights vanish?
And why not? I mean, come on. Consumer culture tells us that we are defined by our material possessions and our very-own FEMA director wrote, in the midst of a hurricane that was drowning thousands of people, “I am a fashion god.”
Or, worst of all, do you think people actually believe that it’s fine for our unapologetic president to confer dictatorial authority on himself and to stalk anyone who dares question his authority?
(Yep. What a strategy: Plame the messenger and maybe no one will notice that a military coup is taking place in their homeland.)
•
Meanwhile, I guess we’ll have to get ourselves geared up for the Alito hearings, which begin on Monday.
(That information alone has no doubt sent many a tofu-eating liberal in search of some good old mac and cheese.)
But we can at least remind ourselves that the GOP is mired in corruption and plaming the messenger will only cover that fact up for so long.
Alito is the scariest nominee since Bork. A loyal friend to big business who opposes to the Establishment Clause (which prohibits public prayer/religious displays) and is “especially proud” of his work opposing abortion and affirmative action.
He protects homophobic speech. And, at a time when corporations rape the environment even as our polar ice caps are melting, the judge favors limiting our ability to sue against toxic omissions under the Clean Air Act (which he probably also opposes).
Alito favors capital punishment for children and opposed admitting women to his alma mater. And he was deputy assistant attorney general to Ed Meese.
(Remember those “Meese Is A Pig” protests? I've still got my pig nose from them .)
He disagrees with the Miranda decision and struck down an anti-harassment policy that interfered with Christian groups’ right to speak out against queers (because, you know, it's just a life-style choice really. People can choose to whom we are attracted.).
Alito also has a history of being sole dissenter in cases involving sex or race discrimination.
(Thank you Daniel Pollitt for sharing this information with the world.)
...but enough about Alito because maybe you’d prefer to know which men are the nation’s most eligible bachelors.
That’s what Yahoo! is headlining today.
I feel trapped in a rock-paper-scissors world where convenience and stress and obligations and static from the talking heads are trumping my civil rights. And I don’t like it one bit.
SANG IN SHOWER: “Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat baby. Rock the boat. Don’t tip the boat over.” Who sang that? I want to say Hues Corporation but am too lazy to Google it.
READING: The Nation
179. LET THE DNA CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY
From the Archives
(4 January 2006) Julian day 2,453,740 and I am wondering if John and Yoko named their son after this measure.
It’s 12:02 AM and I am backing up my four-thousand-plus iTunes songs in anticipation of an upgrade to Creative Suite II tomorrow.
So lots to ponder these days. A Virginia coroner’s preserved blood samples were subjected to modern DNA tests, and they exonerated five inmates who spent a total of 90 years in prison on rape convictions. Gov. Warner has now ordered that the coroner’s other samples be tested and has vowed to “let the DNA chips fall where they may.”
Meanwhile, at a time when it’s well nigh impossible to avoid suggestions of Republican corruption, King Bush the Latter has announced his nominees for the Federal Election Commission. His choices, according to the New York Times., “would keep the policing of campaign abuses firmly in the hands of party wheel horses.”
Our would-be king waited till the Senate recessed to make his announcement in an effort to avoid confirmation hearings (which certainly makes me believe that there’s nothing, nothing at all, to worry about).
Even though one of his nominees “is reported to have been involved in the maneuvering to overrule the career specialists” at the Justice Department who “warned that the Texas gerrymandering orchestrated by Rep. Tom DeLay violated minority voting rights” and in “such voting rights abuses as the purging of voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 elections.”
It appears that big money has taken over our voting rights now too.
(An did I mention Shrub’s connections to the company that makes the popular [and untraceable] electronic voting equipment?)
I suppose I could have entitled this entry “Let the Republican Chips Fall Where They May,” since Ralph Reed (ha ha snort) and Tom DeLay (who will yet be found guilty of money-laundering and conspiracy yet) and Dennis Hastert and Sonny Bono’s widowed wife-turned-representative and Trent Lott and numerous other Republicans who accepted $4.4 million in funneled corporate funds plus lavish gifts from super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff have been squirming in their loafers ever since Abramoff agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the burgeoning corruption and bribery investigation of Washington lawmakers.
According to the Times, the soon-to-be-falling Republican chips could make Abscam and The Keating 5 look like small potatoes.
So let’s see, there’s CIA leaks and NSA wiretapping, and nd Michael Scanlon, former aid to Tom DeLay, pleading guilty to conspiring to bribe officials and now cooperating with prosecutors.
And Abramoff, who scammed $80 million from native-American tribes (my ancestors curse you, now cooperating with prosecutors.
It won’t take long, according to the Times, to follow the bouncing Abramoff ball to David H. Safavian (indicted former head of the White House procurement office), Karl Rove (whose former employer became Abramoff’s personal assistant), Tyco (whose executives funneld $2 million to Grassroots Interactive), Ralph Reed (demanded laundered tribal money from Abramofff), Tom DeLay (“Abramoff is one of my closest and dearest friends”), and Rep. Ney (R-Oh), who went to Scotland to golf on Abramoff’s dime.
And that’s just what we know right now.
Let’s say that out loud fast: law makers breaking laws. No ethics none.
This certainly explains the Democrats' strategy of fighting Republican culture of corruption in the next election, eh?
(And who knew that Ralph Reed was even a candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia? Why Georgia? And is this a step to higher office à la Pat Robertson?
Reed is, after all, the strategist who came up with the idea of placing stealth Christianist candidates in public office. And gosh, don’t those untaxed Christian Coalition purse strings keep getting looped around every corrupt Republican thing?)
Meanwhile, Free Press has moved up the release date of James Risen’s State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration to Today, since the AP already exposed Risen’s major revelation that the US is secretly eavesdropping on US citizens.
This book outlines how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. In fact,
I am losing faith. (Not that I had much to begin with.)
When exactly will the impeachment procedures begin?
(4 January 2006) Julian day 2,453,740 and I am wondering if John and Yoko named their son after this measure.
It’s 12:02 AM and I am backing up my four-thousand-plus iTunes songs in anticipation of an upgrade to Creative Suite II tomorrow.
So lots to ponder these days. A Virginia coroner’s preserved blood samples were subjected to modern DNA tests, and they exonerated five inmates who spent a total of 90 years in prison on rape convictions. Gov. Warner has now ordered that the coroner’s other samples be tested and has vowed to “let the DNA chips fall where they may.”
Meanwhile, at a time when it’s well nigh impossible to avoid suggestions of Republican corruption, King Bush the Latter has announced his nominees for the Federal Election Commission. His choices, according to the New York Times., “would keep the policing of campaign abuses firmly in the hands of party wheel horses.”
Our would-be king waited till the Senate recessed to make his announcement in an effort to avoid confirmation hearings (which certainly makes me believe that there’s nothing, nothing at all, to worry about).
Even though one of his nominees “is reported to have been involved in the maneuvering to overrule the career specialists” at the Justice Department who “warned that the Texas gerrymandering orchestrated by Rep. Tom DeLay violated minority voting rights” and in “such voting rights abuses as the purging of voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 elections.”
It appears that big money has taken over our voting rights now too.
(An did I mention Shrub’s connections to the company that makes the popular [and untraceable] electronic voting equipment?)
I suppose I could have entitled this entry “Let the Republican Chips Fall Where They May,” since Ralph Reed (ha ha snort) and Tom DeLay (who will yet be found guilty of money-laundering and conspiracy yet) and Dennis Hastert and Sonny Bono’s widowed wife-turned-representative and Trent Lott and numerous other Republicans who accepted $4.4 million in funneled corporate funds plus lavish gifts from super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff have been squirming in their loafers ever since Abramoff agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the burgeoning corruption and bribery investigation of Washington lawmakers.
According to the Times, the soon-to-be-falling Republican chips could make Abscam and The Keating 5 look like small potatoes.
So let’s see, there’s CIA leaks and NSA wiretapping, and nd Michael Scanlon, former aid to Tom DeLay, pleading guilty to conspiring to bribe officials and now cooperating with prosecutors.
And Abramoff, who scammed $80 million from native-American tribes (my ancestors curse you, now cooperating with prosecutors.
It won’t take long, according to the Times, to follow the bouncing Abramoff ball to David H. Safavian (indicted former head of the White House procurement office), Karl Rove (whose former employer became Abramoff’s personal assistant), Tyco (whose executives funneld $2 million to Grassroots Interactive), Ralph Reed (demanded laundered tribal money from Abramofff), Tom DeLay (“Abramoff is one of my closest and dearest friends”), and Rep. Ney (R-Oh), who went to Scotland to golf on Abramoff’s dime.
And that’s just what we know right now.
Let’s say that out loud fast: law makers breaking laws. No ethics none.
This certainly explains the Democrats' strategy of fighting Republican culture of corruption in the next election, eh?
(And who knew that Ralph Reed was even a candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia? Why Georgia? And is this a step to higher office à la Pat Robertson?
Reed is, after all, the strategist who came up with the idea of placing stealth Christianist candidates in public office. And gosh, don’t those untaxed Christian Coalition purse strings keep getting looped around every corrupt Republican thing?)
Meanwhile, Free Press has moved up the release date of James Risen’s State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration to Today, since the AP already exposed Risen’s major revelation that the US is secretly eavesdropping on US citizens.
This book outlines how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. In fact,
State of War provides an account of the origins and scope of the wiretap program that basically repeats the revelations contained in Risen and Lichtblau's stories in the Times. But the book also argues that the NSA's eavesdropping policy shows the extent to which the war on terrorism has spurred the intelligence community to flout legal conventions at home and abroad. Risen's chief target is the CIA, where, he argues, institutional dysfunction and feckless leadership after 9/11 led to intelligence breakdowns that continue to haunt the U.S. Though much of State of War covers ground that is broadly familiar, the book is punctuated with a wealth of previously unreported tidbits about covert meetings, aborted CIA operations and Oval Office outbursts. (Time magazine)
I am losing faith. (Not that I had much to begin with.)
When exactly will the impeachment procedures begin?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
