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Saturday, May 10, 2003

Cluster bombs, depleted uranium just the beginning

Seven nuclear facilities in Iraq have been damaged or effectively destroyed by the looting that began in the first days of April, when U.S. ground forces thrust into Baghdad, according to U.S. investigators and others with detailed knowledge of their work. The Bush administration fears that technical documents, sensitive equipment and possibly radiation sources have been scattered.

If so, there are potentially significant consequences for public health and the spread of materials to build a nuclear or radiological bomb. President Bush had said the war was fought to prevent the spread of "the world's most dangerous weapons."

More at the Washington Post, via the Agonist.

posted by Jenny at 1:42 PM |

License to kill?

One of those must-reads, simply because of the sheer lunacy of it's implications. Jake of LMB has the scoop on the way the Israel is dealing with liability given those shootings of foreigners by its own soldiers:

"All foreigners entering the Occupied Territories must sign a waiver saying it is okay for the Israeli military to shoot them."

posted by Jenny at 1:30 PM |

We'll tax the expats, that's what we'll do...

Via Atrios.

Senate Republicans, struggling to make more room for President Bush's cherished tax cut plan in their annual budget, yesterday settled on an unusual and controversial solution: raise taxes elsewhere.

Under White House pressure to include at least a bare-bones version of Bush's bid to eliminate taxes on corporate dividends, Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and fellow committee Republicans broke from their no-new-taxes orthodoxy to propose tax increases on Americans living abroad, companies sheltering income overseas and others. All told, committee members approved more than 30 tax increases or other revenue raisers to help fund their tax cut in other areas, including dividends.

Americans working overseas would be hit the hardest: the bill would no longer allow them to exclude $80,000 in income from federal taxes. That provision alone would amount to a $32 billion tax increase.

Get those GOP asses out of government, now! Hell yes I'm motivated by self-interest! I've read several places that the US and Singapore are the only two governments to tax their expatriates at all...Well done, boys--if Bush himself isn't proposing it, then public objection won't be focused on him...and we overseas folks are too far away, it seems, to do too much screaming.

Of course, this might in some way punish those "American" corporations that move to plunder in tax-free zones in the global south...but I have a feeling that it's the "little guy" like we expatriates who are going to feel the burn. Thanks a lot, friends of AWOL. I'll be voting against you in 2004.

posted by Jenny at 6:08 AM |

Whew. (For you non-NYT subscribers, the gist is available at BlogLeft...)

posted by Jenny at 5:31 AM |

John Brady Kiesling, the State Department official who resigned over Bush's foreign policy, recently gave a speech at Rice University. (He grew up in Houston.) I'm in the process of reading it now over at Body and Soul; it's pretty good. Worth a read!

posted by Jenny at 5:27 AM |

The irony, the irony

Just as the Senate is releasing from cold storage 4,232 pages of transcripts from the McCarthy hearings, the White House is trying to stonewall the release of the 900-page Congressional report on 9-11.

posted by Jenny at 5:20 AM |

Friday, May 09, 2003

The New Totalitarians

You'd think I would have learned to stop with the Phelps family stuff. I stumbled upon this page while doing a random google search about the Frankfurt School...I was actually laughing until I realized that this guy's gotten his stuff up at the Washington Times...and come to think of it, the name sounds pretty familiar, too! Now, my ethical question for the day...how to even begin talking with these people, trying to get them to listen to us?

posted by Jenny at 7:16 AM |

Country Deejays for Free Speech

Nancy Skinner tells BuzzFlash about her campaign in relationship to corporate radio's Dixie Chicks boycott, to "send an unmistakeable message to the radio industry that organized suppression of free speech is very un-American indeed, and will not be forced upon a free people lightly. Too many people, of all political persuasions, just shook their heads in disbelief and disgust over the treatment of the Dixie Chicks. I want them to do something about it." You can find out more at Skinner's website...tell your local country radio DJs about it!

posted by Jenny at 4:13 AM |

Um, er...it's the Greens' fault!

It's been awhile since I've posted anything from Amp, and I'd like to direct you folks to this one about Democrats scolding Greens for "getting Bush elected" and angrily railing about opposition to Joseph Lieberman. Some good points here; if nothing else, it illustrates the ways in which the Dems can be just as dissent-unfriendly as their Republican counterparts. I think all of this speaks to Kynn's recent post attributing the fact that "Bush will win again in 2004" largely to the fact that Democrats aren't interested in building a coalition with the left. I'm pretty much with Kynn on this one. How hard would be for the Democrats, particularly in this time of extreme Republicanization of American political culture, to attempt some talks at coalition building with the Greens? Kynn has more:

It sounds like the top three Green party candidates, as reported by Salon, are the last election's Green party candidate, a Democrat, and a Green member who ran a moderately high profile election. What is the shock here -- that Greens vote for Greens?

The reason that Greens are not supporting Democrats is twofold. First, few Democrats make an effort to appeal to the Green voters, sending the message that they're not welcome. Secondly, rabid Gore supporters who want to blame someone for their candidate's loss run around bashing on Nader voters, sending the message that they're not welcome. (Note that McKinney's inclusion shows that the Greens are not basing their support on partisanship, but on philosophical bases -- a Democrat who acts like a Green can win support.)

Even when progressive Democrats such as Howard Dean make an effort to appeal to Green voters, Dean's supporters, such as Negrino, will still go out of their way to attack, and thus alienate, the progressives who would otherwise support a Dean candidacy.

This type of childish infighting is what will ensure that Bush gains the election. Green voters can either hold their nose and vote for whatever right-center candidate the Democrats eventually offer, or they can register a protest vote -- assuming the Democrats continue to send signals that those of us on the left are not welcome.

We don't have a parliamentary system like much of Europe, for example, but we could take cues from parliamentary alliances across the Atlantic. Leftist parties have forged powerful coalitions in Germany, Denmark and Sweden, to name a few. Of course, the bottom line here is that the Democrats and Greens would bury the hatchet and compromise on policy issues. From the Green perspective, I can see how this would be a hard pill to swallow given the history of corporate interest among a variety of Democratic politicians. The Democrats, on the other hand, have a lot to lose in the way of popular perception if they wouldn’t frame such a merger in the right way—perhaps they fear they might lose those last-minute swing votes from centrist Republicans. But what I would say to the Dems is that, given the results of the last election and the incredible spin job being enacted, not only by politicians per se, but by the increasingly conservative media, your image is already tarnished, big time. Might be time to try something new. At any rate, we’re in the eleventh hour trying to wake up from the Bush nightmare…and I think that coalition building may be the only way to get through this. I think it’s worth having some conversations about with our favorite representatives and candidates, no? Comments would be nice here...

(And, since it wouldn't be fair for me to ramble authoritatively on without letting you in on how I actually voted in 2000: I went for Nader. I felt as if the Green platform spoke directly and honestly to almost all my own political views--and how often does a party platform do that? But, alas, my vote didn't count much for anything, because I'm from the great state of Texas (I swear the electoral college was invented by prescient Republicans). And since I'll be registering in Texas again in 2004, I'll probably be voting Green again; although Dean is starting to get my attention. For me, it all depends on the kinds of transformations the Left can pull off between now and the elections.)

Update: Some Green soul-searching about what to do in 2004 can be found at Politics in the Zeros...

posted by Jenny at 3:03 AM |

Thursday, May 08, 2003

More media deregulation? No way, FCC!

Try, very briefly, to imagine if all American networks started looking like Fox News. From MoveOn:

On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission is planning on authorizing sweeping changes to the American news media. The rule changes could allow your local TV stations, newspaper, radio stations, and cable provider to all be owned by one company. NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox could have the same corporate parent. The resulting concentration of ownership could be deeply destructive to our democracy.

When we talk to Congresspeople about this issue, their response is usually the same: "We only hear from media lobbyists on this. It seems like my constituents aren't very concerned with this issue." A few thousand emails could permanently change that perception. Please join us in asking Congress and the FCC to fight media deregulation at:

http://www.moveon.org/stopthefcc/?id=1344-1742989-rjwAg5dGLjMi_AdxHD9vlw

After the FCC and Congress relaxed radio ownership rules, corporate giant Clear Channel Communications swept in and bought hundreds of stations. Clear Channel has used its might to support pro-war political rallies and conservative talk shows, keep anti-war songs off its stations, coerce musicians into playing free promotional concerts, and bully them into performing at its music venues. In many towns that used to have a diverse array of radio options, Clear Channel is now the only thing on the dial.

Monopoly power is a dangerous thing, and Congress is supposed to guard against it. But the upcoming rule change could change the landscape for all media and usher in an era in which a few corporations control your access to news and entertainment. Please tell Congress and the FCC to support a diverse, competitive media landscape ... You can also automatically have your comments publicly filed at the FCC.

In related news, Ted Barlow has the dirt on TVGoHome (if link is bloggered, go here)...

posted by Jenny at 11:58 PM |

Thanks, Mr. President

Well, looks like we have a pretty good reason for Spain joining the "Coalition of the Willing"...after Bush and Prime Minister Aznar's talks, the US government added Batasuna, the political wing of the Basque armed separatist group ETA, to its list of terrorist groups. This decision makes the group liable to sanctions from the US. Via Exit Stage Left.

posted by Jenny at 2:14 PM |

The Secret History of Mother's Day

Yet another day of protest and peacemaking, set into hibernation by Hallmark and consumer culture...read this and tell some mothers you know about it!

posted by Jenny at 1:49 PM |

"The Cabal"

This one's been floating around the blogosphere for a few days--it's about Rummy's inner circle of advisors, an operation conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, which has, among other things,

produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy otward Iraq ... By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Irag's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al-Quaeda.

posted by Jenny at 1:35 PM |

I've just been introduced to Richard Kahn's Vegan Blog (The [Eco] Logical Weblog, that is). Tons of great links and info at this site--you'll learn a lot, regardless of whether you're a carnivore, a breatharian, or anyplace in between. For starters, you can check out his post on Project HAARP and Washington's development of weapons that can modify weather conditions, among other things, and the enviro-ethical implications of all of this...which are, of course, staggering. Check it out, folks.

posted by Jenny at 9:13 AM |

Hmm, mocking the death of an Iraqi for a photo op (scroll down a bit) sounds pretty much on par with that AP mistranslation of the Iraqi protestors' sign...sounds like the press is doing a good job perpetuating stereotypes from all ends of the spectrum.

posted by Jenny at 6:06 AM |

"God hates..."

Want to take a quick peek into the depths of Christian religious fundamentalist cruelty? Click here. I found the "memorials" section particularly moving:

Matthew Shepard has been in hell for 1670 days.

Diane Whipple has been in hell for 833 days.

This website is run by the ministry of Pastor Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas's Westboro Baptist Church. For some background on them, click here. I got inspired to post about this by Atrios, who posted a letter from Marge Phelps to the NY Press. Then, while scrolling somewhat dumbfoundedly through the comments section, I discovered this tidbit:

The Phelps clan protested at Mr. Roger's memorial service, calling him a "faggot who poisoned children's minds"!!!

As if the above rejoicing about Shepard's and Whipple's deaths wasn't disgusting and dehumanizing enough. Somewhere Fred Rogers is looking at those people, asking his God to help them feel better about themselves. And you know what, if teaching children to create their own toys, to make believe instead of watching too much TV, to love others and to be curious about the world--thus sowing the seeds of critical thinking--is poison, then give me another heaping spoonful of that neighborhood arsenic!

I'm sorry. You just don't rejoice in the deaths of innocent people or the patron saint of the little red cookbook. If you do that, then you're a pretty big jerk.

posted by Jenny at 5:54 AM |

They can't even make up their own PR stunts!

Putin Woos Voters with Chechnya Fighter Jet

Via Mark, commenting at skippy's blog.

posted by Jenny at 5:34 AM |

*splutter*

skippy linked up to this article yesterday, which includes this choice quote:

Bennett’s critics really hate what he said, more than who he is. That’s because they have little interest in the things of God.

Riiiiight.

posted by Jenny at 5:31 AM |

Well, here's one visible instance of journalism morphing with advertising: Walter Cronkite and CNN's Aaron Brown will be hiring to appear in "videos resembling newscasts that are actually paid for by drug makers and other health care companies." Incidentally, they will be replacing Morley Safer, who quit (depite pulling in six figures per studio day) because the work "does not meet the standards of CBS News." He is still featured as the sole host for all four shows in the series. Incidentally, says the Cursor, those last two links are only to Google caches of the original site, which was taken offline hours after the Times article linked above appeared.

It's a brilliant strategic move on the part of the health care industry...take two news anchors who made multiple generations of Americans "feel safe" in times of war, assassination and vulnerability, and subtly (or not-so-subtly) associate them with your products. The elegance of it all.

posted by Jenny at 12:17 AM |

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

Salam Pax is back!

posted by Jenny at 1:08 PM |

Props to Robert Byrd

Good to know there's at least one person telling it like it is in the Senate chamber...

posted by Jenny at 12:56 PM |

Wow...they didn't stop at shooting a peace activist in the head; they decided to fire at his parents, too!

posted by Jenny at 12:52 PM |

Republican Family Values in Action

For the May 29th issue of the mag, on stands Friday, May 9th, Ashton [Kutcher] shares tidbits from his sometimes loco life -- including an unforgettable party with the Bush gals. He tells Rolling Stone: "So we're hanging out ... The Bushes were underage drinking at my house. When I checked outside, one of the Secret Service guys asked me if they'd be spending the night. I said no. And then I go upstairs to see another friend and I can smell the green wafting out under his door. I open the door, and there he is smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah."

Next thing you know they'll be sighted on MTV primetime, shooting everclear with Jack Osbourne. Atrios has the scoop...and the comments are pretty funny too. Not that I want to spoil anybody's party...it's just that if you're pushing legislation on pot smokers, you might as well check out what's going on in your own backyard, AWOL.

posted by Jenny at 5:02 AM |

GOP seeks more clout through state redistricting

Texas, Georgia, and Colorado readers: this applies especially to you! Tom DeLay has been urging state GOP lawmakers to redraw state congressional boundaries where the Republicans have new majorities in the state legislature although the process of redrawing districts was completely merely two years ago (it occurs every ten years, based upon census data). This is ostensibly a move to build party clout in state legislatures. The plan seems to be the most developed in Texas, where it was just approved in the state House of Representatives...interestingly, aside from an alarmed MoveOn alert and an email from informed friends in the Austin area, nobody I've talked to on the homefront knows anything about this! So get the word out if you, like I and many others, find this to be incredibly ridiculous. Information on proceedings on Georgia and Colorado is also up at the Daily Kos.

Via the Seth Bulletin.

posted by Jenny at 3:36 AM |

Tuesday, May 06, 2003

Unscientific poll alert!

Can President Bush be beat in 2004?

Go! Now!

posted by Jenny at 3:19 PM |

And speaking of radio, keep your ears open for that new Iraqi boy band!

posted by Jenny at 3:11 PM |

Some pesky Colorado deejays got suspended for playing the banned Dixie Chicks...

"They made it very clear that they support wholeheartedly the president of the United States. They support wholeheartedly the troops, the military. But they also support the right of free speech," Grant said.

The station has received a couple of hundred calls and 75 percent favored playing the music.

[Grant] said Moore and Singer will be out for a couple of days.

"I gave them an alternative: stop it now and they'll be on suspension, or they can continue playing them and when they come out of the studio they won't have a job."

Great. More airtime for the likes of Darryl Worley and Charlie Daniels. They certainly haven't expressed any radical political views or anything.

Update: skippy has posted the contact information for kkcs (the radio station). Specifically, this is email address of music director Stix Franklin, and this one goes to program director Shannon Stone. Jerry Grant, general manager quoted in the interview above, can be reached here. What better way to procrastinate than to write these folks a letter telling them your thoughts? (thanks again to skippy and Scott of the Gamers Nook)

posted by Jenny at 3:03 PM |

Oligopoly Watch has a good post up on the "textbook oligarchs". Here's an answer to why history isn't taught backwards...all the interesting stuff is taboo! Nice implications for the dumbing-down of society...this is what happens when watered-down identity politics and conservative values paranoia mate. An excerpt:

The oligopsony is made up to three state textbook evaluation committees. In 20 states, such committees chose the textbooks they find acceptable for the whole state, choosing several for each grade level and subject. In other words, local school districts in these states are required to choose among the accepted texts only. Of these states, three end up buying 30% of all textbooks sold, namely California, Texas, and Florida. Getting your elementary math series accepted by these states’ committees means a bonanza; rejection is a small disaster. So these three states education bureaucrats are the gatekeepers, while other committee states, and those 30 other states with local textbook choices, are not as immediate a concern, since they will be as the result of many smaller evaluations.

So it’s oligopsony, in the guise of the “educrats” from these three states, that set the rules. But let’s face it, California is in a totally different cultural and political world from Texas and Florida. So pity the textbook editors that try to appeal to both extremes, left-wing political correctness in California, and right-wing political correctness in the two Southern states.

The result has been a massive self-censorship, that is described at length in Stanford Professor Diane Ravitch’s new book The Language Police. For example, even high-school history and English texts cannot mention: divorce, drugs, homosexuality, or dinosaurs (evolution) on one hand; religion, women as homemakers, slavery, inequality, and so on, on the other. In other words, anything real or interesting or historically accurate.

The result according to the Jeanne Allen, president of The Center for Education Reform (an education advocacy group)“is an increasing trend toward texts that are long on visual gimmicks, short on factual information, and homogenized in content…And this result is having a 'trickle down' effect, weakening the classroom instruction by teachers who are more often than not reliant upon these books for a de facto lesson plan."

All this Ravitch elsewhere has called “a de facto national curriculum,” one that is “mainly geared to minimal competencies, and expectations about what children should learn are frequently low and unchallenging.”

Another result is that all of the Big Four produce clone versions of the same empty, picture-laden textbooks, so that even choosing between them is no choice at all.

Eh, forget the critical thinking. Just make sure they bring up those test scores so the football team gets some more funding--that fieldhouse we built last year just ain't gonna cut it...

posted by Jenny at 1:01 PM |

Douglas Kellner over at BlogLeft has linked up to a Guardian article on Gulf War syndrome. And there's also a figure I haven't seen before--apparently 160,000 of the 600,000+ US soldiers who fought in the first Gulf War are dead or on disability because of the "mystery illness"...Wow. Those numbers kind of bring it home.

posted by Jenny at 11:57 AM |

Just got a charming forward with this sole sentence in the body:

Men are like a fine wine. They start out as grapes, and it's up to women to stomp the shit out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with.

Hmm, passive/aggressive resentment much? Now, a few years ago, given my experience of gender role-playing within my own nuclear family, I might have laughed at this. But honestly, now it makes my stomach turn. Yet another instance in which those women's studies classes have made my "own" culture strange to me, I suppose. We talk so much of discrimination against women, of men circulating disparaging jokes about women, blondes or otherwise, but here's an equally insidious comment being passed around as a "joke among us girls". *sigh* Maybe somebody should do a study of the effectiveness of email forwards in reinscribing normative antagonism between men and women...and if they did, they'd probably find out that the tacitly (or even directly) antagonistic rhetoric can be just as stereotypical and vituperative when coming from the "second sex". As a matter of fact, by fostering such joking extremes, women work to sustain those systems of domination and subordination that shelve them in that secondary status. These sorts of forwards just reinforce the idea that men are inherently flawed ne'er-do-wells, and that only with the help of that disciplinary mother figure "genetically present" in every woman can they become socially acceptable beings. *sigh again*

posted by Jenny at 9:44 AM |

and BTW, there's a great Krugman excerpt over at Atrios's Eschaton today...

posted by Jenny at 9:14 AM |

Inverted Totalitarianism

This article touches on a lot of things upon which I have been ruminating--the authoritarian direction in which some of Bush's cadre seem to be taking us. I think the Nazi parallels are interesting, if a bit overly general at times. It would have been interesting to see comparisons to Stalinist and other "Eastern" totalitarian regimes...but the effect is still quite good. This excerpt brings it home, I think:

Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents.

posted by Jenny at 9:08 AM |

Monday, May 05, 2003

skippy is doing a good job carrying the torch on the Dixie Chicks thing...am too tired to comment extensively, but I especially liked the suggestion to email Lipton, their current tour sponsors, and tell them what we think of their decision to pull the plug on a promotional sweepstakes starring the Chicks. The industrious kangaroo has provided us not only with Lipton's general comments address, but also that of their PR guy...and, most delightfully, contact info (including phone numbers) of PepsiCo, the parent company of Lipton. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to hear from you.

posted by Jenny at 2:44 PM |

It's the (global) economy, stupid

Sighted this AP article while signing onto AOL this afternoon:

WASHINGTON (May 5) - The hope had been that a fast and successful war in Iraq would set off an economic boom that would quickly translate into falling unemployment for American households and fatter order books for U.S. businesses. But so far, the boom has been a bust.

U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad in the second week of April, but the military victory did not stem a wave of new job layoffs in the United States.

With April's job cuts, total layoffs over the past three months topped a half-million workers, a performance usually seen only during the depths of a recession.

The picture looked even bleaker for the nation's hard-hit factories, which suffered another 95,000 lost jobs last month, the 33rd straight month of declines that have eliminated 2.2 million manufacturing jobs.

Other statistics have shown weakness as well, with a key gauge of manufacturing activity plunging further into recession territory in April and automakers reporting sales declines despite attractive incentive deals.

``Just to say that everything would be hunky-dory because the war was over would not have been a good forecast,'' said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis.

The irony is that AOL is framing all this as if it's a shocker. Good old Time Warner, spinning till the last. If only they were as creatively overt as the Iraqi Information Minister. I mean, come on, folks. The administration led us to believe that we'd enjoy a big economic boost with a new war...but the only people who seem to be profiting from this are the suits at Halliburton, Bechtel (and thus family bin Laden?), Dyncorp, and their ilk...the rest of us aren't getting anything out of this, and how could we--"American" multinationals started exporting labor and economic opportunity to the global south years ago. Maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but how can we create jobs when all production is being moved to locations with the lowest wages, most commonly within free-trade zones in the otherwise Third World? I think we've just seen another brilliant (although not completely foolproof) propaganda move of the Bush administration...they've tapped into our collective memory of economic shock therapy during the Second World War. But this time, there's nowhere for our economy to grow...if corporations are downsizing and domestic factories are shut down, what kind of employment can they create out of thin air? New maintenance guys for the acres of oilfields Bush is planning on churning out of Wyoming's Red Desert?

posted by Jenny at 2:20 PM |

"I now inform you that you are too far from reality"

It looks like our hero, Iraqi spin doctor Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, is seeking exile in Egypt (perhaps this is where he'll have his talk show on Arab TV?)...the Telegraph has the latest on the last moments before he, too, accepted reality (Via the Agonist). For an assortment of side-splitting quotes from the man, visit www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com. I have a feeling that their merchandise is selling a lot faster than EBay's Rumsfeldalia...

posted by Jenny at 7:32 AM |

Sunday, May 04, 2003

Slightly belated, there's a great and very thorough post over at Elayne's blog on May Day...my favorite link was to an article explaining May Day as "the real labor day". While this is recognized around the world--we just celebrated it in Germany--it's usually chalked up in the United States simply as May Day (i.e., pagan origins) and Liberty Day (inaugurated by Clinton and more recently reinstated by AWOL in his Top Gun publicity stunt last week). "By covering up the history of May Day," says the article, "the state, business, mainstream unions and the media have covered up an entire legacy of dissent in this country."

Update: Elayne wants everybody to know that, sadly, the archive link has been bloggered...but you can reach it by going to her front page and scrolling down to May 1st. Happy travels!

posted by Jenny at 10:46 AM |

Pretty soon the GOP is going to put together a soundtrack to the post-9/11/Iraq news coverage, and this song is going to be on it:

Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street for all the people to see that

Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
We’ll all meet back at the local saloon
We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces
Singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

I can already see the drunken Bud girls swaying to the beat, but I won't even get started on the gender stuff here. I think it's pretty explicit. Perhaps this song should win the award for "most transparent marketing piggyback on Bush's war lingo" in recent music history...more devastating for me personally is that Willie Nelson joins Toby Keith in writing/singing it. Willie, it was bad enough that you did the Gap ads last year...was it really necessary to completely sell out on war partisanship as well?

I recognize that Willie likes a good jam session, and maybe Keith delivered that with this song. But come on.

Of course, as an Atrios commentator points out, Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten" makes Toby Keith "look like Noam Chomsky".

Where, oh where has the good country gone?

posted by Jenny at 7:36 AM |

Ante up, William Bennett

According to the UPI:

Bennett has long been known to be part of a small-stakes poker game in Washington with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and lawyer Robert Bork.

Er, is that legal?

Via Atrios.

posted by Jenny at 7:21 AM |

Deep in the heart of Texas

Molly Ivins has the low-down on GOP machinations in the Texas legislature. Just a few achievements during the last session:

* Eliminated 10,810 state jobs;

* Cut 250,000 poor children off the Children's Health Insurance Program and about 365,000 from health insurance through Medicaid;

* Cut prenatal care and delivery for 17,000 pregnant women and services for 366 women with breast and cervical cancer;

* Closed one state school for the mentally retarded and one state mental hospital;

* (This one's my favorite) Cut $22 million from a criminal justice program that provides medication and treatment for mentally impaired offenders who are out on probation or parole. (Isn't that nice? They'll be wandering around the state without their meds.)

posted by Jenny at 7:09 AM |

An unconventional post

Please bear with me and read this post—I’ll be back to my usual tricks in a little while, but for now I would like you to meet my family. My second cousin Jake died yesterday of cancer. He was the glue that held our extended family together, and while my own father wasn't always the best at making me feel worthwhile, Jake took me aside and told me that I would one day be a great author, that he loved me and was proud of me. And he told me how much he loved me each time I saw him, without fail.

My mother has a huge family--there were 19 grandchildren in her generation, and most of them went on to have children of their own and bring them back to our junky old bayhouse every year for a family reunion. But this wasn't your conventional family reunion, with pasta salad or nametags...we all hung out, slept everywhere we wanted, sang redneck and hippie songs under the stars, and everybody was equal--kids, grownups, everyone was treated the same and approached each other with respect—at least the majority of the time. The only people we referred to as “adults” belonged to my mom’s parents’ generation, all of whom were approaching 80. We talked about art and fishing and bugs and beer, music and great books, building sandcastles and walking our dogs on the beach. The thing I loved the most was the storytelling—the cousins would tell about growing up in the 50s and 60s, and we’d ruminate on what it was like when our forebears came over from Europe in the nineteenth century. Our ancestors came from the Mosel river valley and the former Czechoslovakia, and we liked to exchange our knowledge of our predecessors. Jake even went to the vineyard where our great-great-(great?) grandfather was born and brought back white wine for everybody in his generation. I guess you could say that he's the one who made our family parties possible; the oldest of the "cuzzins", he wrote most of the invitations and made tons of phone calls to make sure that people showed up. He prodded his more lazy peers and made sure that everybody knew what time to show up. He loved the family, he loved seeing all the different people come together and share their experiences. An incredibly gifted writer, he used his gift solely on his family, writing up stories and jokes to maintain the spirit of the party the year round. Once we were all at the bay, the party would pretty much take care of itself in a wonderfully anarchic way, sometimes stretching into a weeklong event. The only things that could be counted on were Jake’s mom’s chocolate cake and a huge crab boil dumped willy-nilly on our dining table, and the promise of guitar jam sessions when the mood got right. There were no rules, and there was plenty to do...and since I wasn't always the proudest of my nuclear family, with a pathologically messy house and a dad who drank an awful lot, this space gave me my truest feeling of family and belonging, and made me feel like I had something decent and unique to give to the world. If I hadn't had my family, encouragement from people like Jake, in a situation like this, I wouldn't have survived or become who I am, and I am more grateful for that than I can say.

Jake loved animals of all shapes and sizes. He liked showing his pet boa constrictor (named Bo--"we're not sure if it's Bo Diddley or Bo Derrick") to captive children and older, more squeamish relatives. He taught school with a biology degree and had long since retired, but he spent his days managing homes for mentally disabled children, working with special education students, and hanging out with family members of all generations. He kept sight of something that evades most of us--the simple yet all-embracing beauty of humanity of the natural world, and it was his solace and his driving force, I know. He liked listening to whale song and Jerry Jeff Walker (“it all started with the song ‘Pissin’ in the Wind’”). He enjoyed baseball and religiously attended Houston Astros games. Most of all, he loved the outdoors. He traveled around North and Latin America volunteering for Earthwatch conservation projects, and had planned on joining a group in Madagascar before he was diagnosed last fall.

I'm writing about Jake because I want people to know about him, and because I think it's important to recognize who he really was, and that that person defies a lot of stereotypes that we on the "left" tend to perpetuate about folks on the "right". To me, Jake represents the amazing impact an “average” person whose civic participation, simply out of the joy of giving to others, made him an outstanding soul. Jake was a native Texan and a loyal graduate of Texas A&M University, which I have always held to be a hotbed of nationalist and conservative fervor masked in happy "howdies" and bright maroon T-shirts. We used to mock each other constantly because I was a Longhorn, a fan of the University of Texas. (Back in the days when A&M and UT belonged to the Southwest Conference, this was a pretty big deal.) When I applied to a smaller liberal arts college he christened it "Dryhill U" to needle me anew. We always kidded each other--he had an incredibly sharp wit--but as I got older, it became more and more obvious that his conservative views were at total and complete odds with the ideals I'd picked up at college. At one point, upon learning that I wanted to become a professor, he looked me squarely in the eye and said, "sometimes I really believe that is a communist plot to destroy the country from within." Shocked and hurt, thinking that he had just lumped me into a huge, one-dimensional stereotype, I avoided serious talk with him almost until the last time I saw him, unable to believe that such a loving and capable man could take such a polarized and paranoid position about my future career.

In retrospect, I think he might have been kidding about the communist part, but there's no missing that Jake was Republican to the core...and that he had trouble embracing views that challenged his own. I never stopped loving him, but I was so hurt for so long, I almost lost sight of who he was beyond his "political" views--a human being, flawed and sometimes angry, who nonetheless worked himself raw helping other people and holding an incredibly gifted family together for three generations. For a time, I assumed that he thought I was some kind of horrible heretic, and that he couldn’t accept me for who I was. And I resented him for that. In retrospect, I wish I could have laughed and started a conversation with him instead. I think now, looking back, that his comments to me were laced with fear—not only fear that I might “be manipulated”, but fear that I was growing up, and moving beyond those sheltered spheres he and others had created for me and my generation as a child.

Jake never quit loving me; never rejected me for my views. When the news of my grant made a half-page spread in the local newspaper, he immediately went out and Xeroxed it for the whole family to have. That’s just the kind of person he was—he loved unconditionally, and didn’t hesitate to tell people how proud he was, how much love he had for them. Although he was already very sick the last time we spoke, he told me I didn’t need to come home—that everything was under control. He wanted to know about my life in Germany, and what I was going to do when I finished my grant. He told me that I would become a professor, that I would do all those things that I wanted. I realize now how wrong I was to assume that he wouldn’t accept me; we might have fought, but he had loved me like his own kid all along. And I guess I’m posting this to say that yes, the huge differences between left and right may make it seem impossible to view people on the other side as having an ounce of sense…but when we “progressives” want to take Republicans or other “conservatives” to task for social and political wrongdoing, it’s useful to remember that there are human faces on that other side—who have contributed in their own community, who do things out of love for others. And with those people, conversations, not attacks, are the only way to effect change, to invite help and partnership. Some differences will never go away, but it’s important that mutual respect be retained because it’s key step in dismantling systems of domination. When we lose sight of that, we forget our opponents’ humanity, and our own capacity for love. At least I did, momentarily, with Jake…and I’m glad that I found it again. I know he is too. I love him so very much.

So you speak to me of sadness
And the coming of the winter

Fear that is within you now
It seems to never end...

And you wonder where we’re going
Where’s the rhyme and where’s the reason
And it’s you cannot accept
It is here we must begin
To seek the wisdom of the children
And the graceful way of flowers in the wind

For the children and the flowers
Are my sisters and my brothers
Their laughter and their loveliness
Could clear a cloudy day

Like the music of the mountains
And the colours of the rainbow
They’re a promise of the future
And a blessing for today
Though the cities start to crumble
And the towers fall around us
The sun is slowly fading
And it’s colder than the sea

It is written from the desert
To the mountains they shall lead us
By the hand and by the heart
They will comfort you and me
In their innocence and trusting
They will teach us to be free

For the children and the flowers
Are my sisters and my brothers
Their laughter and their loveliness
Could clear a cloudy day

And the song that I am singing
Is a prayer to non believers
Come and stand beside us
We can find a better way

--John Denver, "Rhymes and Reasons"

posted by Jenny at 4:06 AM |