Fact-esque

We Don't Need Don't Ask Don't Tell

Cong. Patrick Murphy (my Congressman) is going to champion the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Watch him participate in a hearing about it back in July of 2008. It's one of my favorite political videos because he does such a good job of exposing the flawed logic and stupid lies behind the argument that allowing gays and lesbians to serve would damage "unit cohesion."

What is This "Health of the Mother?"

Thanks to TPM for isolating the moment when John McCain dismissed the health of a pregnant woman as just one more trick she'd use to get rid of that damn baby. 

TPM also posted a longer clip where you can watch viewer opinion skyrocket as Obama talks about reducing unwanted pregnancies.

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Please note: The state of Georgia is about to murder an innocent man for no reason other than to avoid embarrassing the officials involved with the case.  On October 27, Georgia will execute Troy Davis for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

I Was Waiting for This

 

From the NYT:

“Sex and the City” and its legion of female fans over the weekend gave Hollywood exactly what it needs to survive an uncertain summer movie season: an unconventional hit.

The romantic comedy, based on HBO’s long-running television series of the same name, unexpectedly overtook the latest “Indiana Jones” movie at the domestic box office, bringing in an estimated $55.7 million since opening with midnight shows on Thursday, according to Warner Brothers., which released the film.

It's very tempting to try to tie the success to the film to a theory of the power of women and the Hillary Clinton campaign and feminism in general.  I'm not smart enough to do that.  I was smart enough to discount Manahola Dargis' out-of-touch review and see the movie on Saturday with a friend and my daughter.   We all loved it.  (You can sue me for being the worst, most permissive mother of a twelve-year old girl later).   When I read the Dargis review on Friday, I have to admit to being concerned that she may be right to pan the film until I read the last paragraph: (emph mine)

There was something seductive about the bubble world that the show created back in 1998, in the fantasy that all you needed to make it through the rough patches were good friends and throwdown heels. That was a beautiful lie, as the show acknowledged in its gently melancholic return in the wake of Sept. 11. Back in Season 3 Carrie asked, “Are we getting wiser, or just older?” The ideal, of course, is to do both. There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.

Having seen the film, I don't know where she saw the narcissism awash in it since it's very clearly all about rejecting that particular foible of youth, making choices to forgive our partners and friends as we accept the complexity of adult relationships.  ("Your forties are about buying the drinks," as Carrie says midway through.) But it was the bit about the Obama button that tipped me to the possible enormity of Ms. Dargis' cluelessness.  In case she forgot, the city in question is New York.  You don't see a lot of Obama buttons pinned to the blouses of forty-somethings.  When I was there recently, I didn't see any pinned to anything, although I was asked by two forty-something female strangers if they could have my Hillary button and was offered a better place in line by a sharp-eyed thirty-something African American man when he saw "Hillary" on jacket collar.  Again, I'm not able to spin theories from personal anecdotes and opening weekend box offices but I am smart enough to know that anyone who uses Obama buttons as a measure of Carrie Bradshaw's relevance and appeal just doesn't know what she's writing about and might need to think just a little bit about throwing stones around the glass house of narcissism.

Oh, and since we all know that the Market is Queen and that sex sells, will someone please fuck Maxim?

Bush Threatens to Veto Ledbetter Anti-Discrimination Bill (Updated)

Someday we're going to have to discuss the reason the Bush Administration doesn't seem to fear all the blowback from their utterly failed policies and ruinous reputation (although this may go a long way toward explaining some of it) in the nation and around the world. Whatever that reason is, it is perfectly clear they don't give a damn what we think or how angry we are because they go right on as if it was still 2003 and the country was enveloped in pro-Bushian war fever.

As if to prove how little they care and how eager they are to kiss corporate ass, Bush is today (Equal Pay Day in the Senate) threatening to veto a discrimination bill because he claims it "would make it easier for victims of discrimination to sue their employers over unequal pay."

The measure, which is scheduled for a vote today in the Senate, aims to reverse a controversial Supreme Court decision from last spring. That ruling held that Lilly Ledbetter, the lone female supervisor at an Alabama tire plant, could not sue her employer over unequal pay because the alleged discrimination that cut her wages occurred years before she filed a complaint.

The House approved the bill, dubbed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, last summer. Senate leaders are now bringing it to the floor in part to acknowledge Equal Pay Day, the date on which the average woman's wages catch up to what the average man earned during the previous year. The day was established in 1996 by civil rights advocates to call attention to a persistent wage gap that leaves women earning 77 cents on average for every dollar earned by men.

I wrote about the Ledbetter case at Matewan and called it, if memory serves, a legal travesty in which a compliant SCOTUS staffed by corporate puppets used a technicality to save a Republican campaign contributor from having to face any accountability for its discriminatory behavior toward women. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that the Democrats decided to take this on, but after all, they're only risking the displeasure of an Alabama firm that would never donate to anything but the GOP EVER, under any circumstances. Not too big a risk, which is the kind they like to take when they'll take one at all.

But it is no surprise whatever that Bush is willing to wield a veto that will make him and the Republicans even more enemies among voters, especially female voters. If nothing else, they've always known which side they were on and it ain't our'n.

Most Republicans, meanwhile, oppose the legislation, taking the side of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and other business groups, which are lobbying hard to defeat the measure. The presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, has yet to state his position.

The White House, however, has been quite clear. Yesterday, officials reasserted a veto threat issued in July, saying that the Ledbetter ruling was fair and that the bill "far exceeds the stated purpose of undoing the Court's decision."

Ya-da ya-da. Yet another nonsensical argument dredged from the deepest sludge to defend the indefensible. The bill, of course, does precisely what it was intended to do - undo the Court's decision - and that's the problem Bush has with it. But he can't say that so he claims it "goes too far".

Right. In BushWorld, any bill that makes corporations act like good citizens or requires accountability for their illegal actions "goes too far".

So what else is new?

Update: For once, WaPo editorial writer Fred Hiatt seems to agree with me.

Business leaders argue that the paycheck trigger would allow employees to "sit on their rights" and wait to file suit until years have passed in order to make it more difficult for companies to defend against old allegations. This argument is utterly without merit. In the first place, those who know -- or have strong suspicions -- that they're being discriminated against are unlikely to stay silent and continue to receive what they believe are unjustifiably and illegally low paychecks. Second, the new legislation would allow a paycheck to trigger a new opportunity to file suit only if that paycheck continues to reflect discriminatory pay. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that it's unlikely that many more claims of pay discrimination would be filed under the legislation than were filed before the Supreme Court eliminated the paycheck trigger in 2007.

(emphasis added)

Of course, Fred would like to see a couple of "loopholes" closed, like the one that would allow someone other than the employee to sue on their behalf (in case they, like, died before the case was heard; the company would be off the hook otherwise), but overall he seems to have finally grasped the concept that corporations aren't always, I don't know, fair.

Every journey starts with but a single step, Fred.

It's What We Do

Taylor Marsh has provided a great response to anyone who complains about the Democratic primary battle.  And, for the record, the only people I hear complaining are the online political junkies who fret non-stop about what all this democracy is doing to "the party."  Everyone I know outside that bubble is thrilled to watch the show and happy to have a chance to vote in a primary that matters.  And they take all the sniping with a grain of salt.  They're low-information voters, not stupid.  And thanks to the primary, they're getting less low-information every day.

Here's Taylor responding to execerable, human smokescreen and professional clown, Maureen Dowd, who wants to know which "historical guilt" will more Democratic voters use their votes to atone for - racism or misogyny:

The Democratic party is breaking barriers, which is never easy, especially   when you take on two at once. But "historical guilts?" Fault lines,   for sure, but breaking barriers and extending possibilities is what we do. Surely   Dowd can get her brain around that one without tripping on her bra strap.

C'mon racgynism!

Why I Vote Pro-Choice

My reasons have not changed from last year.   I'm politically pro-choice because my body is my own.  I am nobody's brood mare or offering to a god.  And no matter what the law says, women always have a choice to continue a pregnancy or to try to terminate it.  The political question is whether that choice will be safely and effectively available to all women, even those without access to money and power.  Of course, it must.

Common Ground

Widower of a victim of a recent honor killing in Syria puzzling out when an honor killing may be appropriate:

"Fawaz told me that he didn’t understand his own feelings about honor killing until Zahra’s death, and that he hoped the publicity surrounding her case would help other men to re-evaluate theirs. “In Zahra’s case, the girl was basically kidnapped,” Fawaz said. “If she’d been a bad girl, if she’d decided to run away with a man, I’d say, maybe. It’s a brutal solution, but maybe.”

North Dakota state senator, Bill Napoli, puzzling out when it's okay to allow an American woman control over her body:

"A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl, could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life."

It's like watching monkeys set an alarm clock.

Darcy Burner

This is the video of Darcy Burner that got me to send $15.00 to the netroots fundraising bonanzathon that's happening on her behalf.  via   I recommend you do the same.

Watching Hopelessly

This morning I made the mistake of watching the video of the seventeen-year old Dua Khalil being stoned to death in Kurdish Iraq.  Her family, in the perfect metaphor, belongs to some especially screwball religion that combines elements of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and has strict provisions against mingling with outsiders.  When she was spotted with a Sunni Arab man, her family arranged and participated in the public execution, while dozens of men looked on, clamoring only to get shots of the murder on their cellphones.   

Score one for Freedom's Libertudinous Flames although I don't blame this death on BushCo's war of aggression as much as I do on the religion that codified the custom and the pervasive misogyny of the region.  The Vanity Press has more on that.

Anyway, I was pretty sure it couldn't get any worse but I was wrong because just a few hours ago I read this story in the Newark Star-Ledger: (The S-L link rotted.  Use this one.)

Hanna Yousef Tamer watches hopelessly as her 1-year-old daughter, Mahdi, writhes on the pink sheets inside a crowded ward of the Ibn Al-Baladi Pediatric Hospital in Sadr City.

The feeble child cries and looks around the bustling room through hollowed eyes.

Her body is wasted from malnutrition and dehydration.

But with the hospital lacking basic medications and intravenous fluids to treat her, doctors and nurses can't do much to help Mahdi. And while the precious drugs are available in pharmacies outside the hospital, the little girl's family can't afford them.

This is familiar territory for Tamer, who lost another daughter, Roqia, in 2005 when the 2-year-old died of the same disorders. So now, on this May morning, the 27-year-old mother of four must confront the possibility of the same outcome in less than 24 months.

"Unfortunately, this is becoming common," said Saad Mehdi, 35, a pediatrician at Ibn Al-Baladi.

The rate of mortality in Iraq among children younger than 5 shot up 150 percent between 1990 and 2005, according to a report released earlier this month by the U.S.-based humanitarian aid group Save the Children. In its most startling terms, the group estimates one in eight Iraqis never makes it to their 5th birthday.

The report said Iraq faced a grave humanitarian crisis "even before the latest war," but physicians here said the 4-year-old conflict has had an unmistakable impact on what they see.

I even got to see a photo of one-year boy dying slowly of infection and dehydration as his mother watched helpless from the foot of the bed.  Score two for Freedom.  The article goes on to list other occurances, now so common the doctors consider them normal: birth defects, anemia, prematurity,  typhoid, neruological disorders ... 

And always the compassionate conservative refrain, "If you can't afford the five dollars a day to treat your baby's chest infection, I'm sorry, Ma'am, but your baby has to die.  If only you had planned better, saved more, been more industrious, thrifty and wise.   But you'll learn.  There will be no Welfare Queens in the New Iraq." 

Good to Know

The 8th Circuit Court decided to allow Union Pacific Railroad not to cover any contraceptives on their insurance plan:

Union Pacific Railroad's policy of not covering contraceptives in its health plan didn't discriminate against women, the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.   

The railroad prevailed on appeal because its policy does not cover any contraceptives for men or women, so the court agreed Union Pacific did not violate the federal Civil Rights Act.   

"Union Pacific's health plans do not cover any contraception used by women such as birth control, sponges, diaphragms, intrauterine devices or tubal ligations or any contraception used by men such as condoms and vasectomies," the court panel said in its 2-1 ruling. "Therefore, the coverage provided to women is not less favorable than that provided to men."

I think that this is really going to end up being good news.  First, UP currently provides coverage for contraception, which they started doing after losing the lower court's decision in 2005.  The spokesperson said that the company has no plans to take it away - of course, time will tell on that score.  Secondly, there's increased urgency now for Congress to look into this no-brainer issue and along those lines Planned Parenthood is making some book off the story, asking members to donate to support that group's fight for Prevention First legislation.  And there's going to be an appeal, which means more discussion and more pressure and more people finding out exactly who wants to make it more difficult to avoid unwanted pregnancies and who doesn't.  That's a public debate we can't lose.

By the way, viagra was covered by the UP plan from the beginning.  But you probably guessed that.