Bart Stupak Thinks He Knows What I Can Do With My Body

And Congress is voting to let him make that choice.

The amendment, which you can download and read in full here, would do three things.

First, it would codify the Hyde Amendment provisions in the bill so that the ban on federal funds being used for abortions besides those resulting from rape or incest, or in cases where the mother’s life is endangered would remain intact regardless of Hyde being reauthorized. As it’s currently written, the bill’s restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion coverage would end if the Hyde Amendment, which has been reauthorized by Congress on an annual basis since 1976, is not reauthorized.

Secondly, it would not allow individuals purchasing insurance at least in part with federal affordability credits to buy a plan that covers abortions. The bill as currently written would allow individuals to use affordability credits to buy insurance that includes abortion coverage, but it requires any such plan to segregate the credits from individual premium payments and ensure that only the premium payments are used to fund the abortion services portion of the plan.

Affordability credits are available under the bill to people who don’t get insurance from work and earn between 150% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. The Stupak amendment would bar all people in this income bracket from purchasing insurance that covers elective abortions unless they can afford to pay for a separate abortion coverage plan on their own. People earning below 150% of FPL would already be ineligible for abortion coverage because they will be on Medicaid, which does not cover abortions under Hyde. There are no concrete numbers for how many people would be denied an abortion-coverage option under the amendment, but it would likely be at least 20 million.

Thirdly, the Stupak amendment would dictate that the government-run public option does not provide abortion coverage. The bill currently leaves the decision of abortion coverage in the public option up to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Allowing the public option to cover abortions would not violate the Hyde Amendment because the public option is not government funded; will be entirely financed by individual premiums, just like the private plans.

You better be contacting Congress and letting them know that you're pissed. This is ridiculous. This is NOT what we voted for in giving the Democrats huge majorities and this is NOT what we wanted in health care reform.

On Obama's possible Supreme picks.

Greenwald has an excellent piece on Sonia Sotomayor (and as usual, rips Establishment media a new one for using anonymous sources in the process).

I know far, far less than he does about Sonia Sotomayor or about the relative fitness of judicial nominees for the job. I was far more qualified to talk about Sarah Palin and the attacks leveled at her for being an affirmative action hire, a pretty dumb chick whose appeal was solely prurient.

Rebecca Traister pointed out the obvious gender bias to the TNR piece in question, a bias that is only multiplied by her being of Puerto Rican descent, as Adam Serwer notes. She's bossy! She doesn't shut up! She's not that smart--Obama is prioritizing diversity! (The Clarence Thomas arguments, of course, are too obvious.)

When Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the Court, we heard similar arguments about her intellectual ability--and we didn't argue. When Sarah Palin got the Republican VP nomination, we giggled and made our own jokes. Now Obama's nominees will face the same kind of criticisms, ones that would never be leveled at a white guy up for the same job, and what do we say?

It's a double bind. We don't want to be unable to criticize female nominees or people of color (*cough cough* Gonzalez--or closer to home, Roland Burris) but we need to be consistent in noting the difference between substantive attacks and gender or racially motivated ones. It's entirely possible that Sonia Sotomayor is not the best choice for the Supreme Court, but I very much doubt that she's any less "smart" than Thomas, Alito, or any number of federal judges that the Right (or the nominal left as represented by TNR) would have no problem with--because they're white and male.

The fact is, when it comes to the Supreme Court, there are probably many lawyers and judges and law professors who would do as good or better jobs than the people already on there. There's no one best person for the job, and it's also fairly difficult to predict how justices will rule once confirmed (note that the retiring Souter was nominated by George H.W. Bush and became one of the reliable liberal members of the Court). So there's absolutely nothing wrong with picking a qualified justice who comes from a different ethnic and class background than the rest of the Court for the sake of diversity.

Speaking of the Culture Wars

Amazon.com apparently hasn't gotten the memo that the culture wars are dead.

They've stripped the sales rankings--and therefore, the search ratings--of books that deal with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, as well as feminist books like Full Frontal Feminism.

It affects the search rankings for books. For small authors who depend on Amazon reviews and sales rankings, this is disastrous. Of course, it's also terrible for freedom of expression. When I searched BY TITLE for Full Frontal Feminism it didn't even come up on the first page of the search, which means that many people may erroneously assume that Amazon doesn't have the book. (Interestingly, Jessica Valenti's other book, "He's a Stud, She's a Slut" DOES come up first on a search for Full Frontal Feminism.) Julia Serano's Whipping Girl does appear, but only the Kindle edition, pointing out the randomness of this move.

Author Nicola Griffeth, whose books lost their rankings, said:

I am tired of being the low-hanging fruit that cretins pluck when they need to pander to Moral America. This time, I hope some people choke on their soft fruit.

Amazon probably didn't count on the intense blowback, though. Twitter has been buzzing with #amazonfail, noting books that have been affected, and offering other options for bookbuying for those interested in boycotting, as well as contact information for various executives to contact and harass. The technogeek in me loves watching Twitter do what it's best at--spread information fast and far. #amazonfail is a top trending topic on Twitter right now.

Neil Gaiman, with his 200,000+ Twitter followers, has commented on the subject, and Jezebel is tracking the books with sales rank removed--as well as noting the hypocrisy of the ones that remain. There's also a Facebook group.

I suggest IndieBound as a good alternative to buying from Amazon, and apparently Powells is contemplating a sale on GLBT-themed books in response.

Also, Smart Bitches Trashy Books has a page to link to to Google-bomb the term "Amazon Rank."

This is exactly the problem with large corporations. They force smaller companies out of business, and then when there's no competition left, they are free to enforce their ideologies on you.

The Shock Doctrine 9: Crisis Works

(Previous posts here, Matt's posts here, Trend's "How to Overthrow a Government" here.)

"The more the global economy followed [Friedman's] prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export-oriented economies, the more crisis-prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of meltdowns he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice.

In this way, crisis is built into the Chicago School model. When limitless sums of money are free to travel the globe at great speed, and speculators are able to bet on the value of everything from cocoa to currencies, the result is enormous volatility."

On page 200, Naomi Klein nailed it. Well, the whole book is an exercise in nailing it, really, but these two short, simple paragraphs made me stop and shake my head yet again in amazement that anyone bought the argument Bush, Paulson, and others made that "no one could've seen the current crisis coming."

The Shock Doctrine is many things, and at first it doesn't appear to be a guide to internal U.S. policy, but as I've read on, I keep picking out more and more bits and pieces of the crisis we're facing--Klein could go back and write a history of the current crisis without having to do much new work.

This chapter, for example. Klein starts out noting that hyperinflation crises around the world became excuses for the IMF and World Bank to step in and use the crisis as a reason to push their preferred policies of deregulation, privatization, spending cuts and "free trade."

Friedman did not believe in the IMF or World Bank, but his students used them to carry out his policies. IMF was supposed to stabilize the global economy, yet instead it carried out more shocks, holding loans over countries' heads and forcing them to enact Friedmanite "reforms."

Countries were required to pay the debts of their oppressive governments after liberation--sort of like finally divorcing your abusive spouse only to find out that he's left you in thousands of dollars of credit card debt. I've likened the feeling at Obama's inauguration to finally getting rid of an old abusive relationship and starting a new one. That overwhelming relief and optimism. It must've been hundreds of times stronger for Chile and Argentina when their murderous regimes finally collapsed.

And then? In 1982, Argentina's new government agreed to pay the debts of large multinationals while the companies kept their assets--firms like, um, Citibank. Sound familiar? Scarily so.

And the shocks just kept on coming. Paul Volcker--yes, the one who is one of Obama's advisers--let interest rates skyrocket in the early 80s. Since these countries had been pressed into relying on one export for their entire economies, any time a price shifted, economies went into freefall. And the IMF and World Bank, counter to their original purpose, forced even more volatility down their throats in the disguise of "helping."

Free markets are volatile. That's part of the problem, and why unregulated capitalism just doesn't work. Companies fail. This is part of capitalism. Small businesses fail every day--I watched my family business crash and burn in the 90s. No one bailed us out. The less support and regulation you build into the system, the more likely wild price spikes and drops are going to run people out of business. Rebuilding the system the same way it has been is not enough. "Recovery" isn't going to cut it.

I watched MSNBC's new Ed Schultz show for a while the other night when it replaced Olbermann, and I swear I'm never going to complain about Olbermann being a blowhard again. (OK, I still will, but allow me my hyperbole.) Schultz really was the liberal version of a Fox News show, stocking his segments with radio hosts from both sides of the aisle who shouted at each other like Crossfire had returned, and running a segment on immigration with Al Sharpton and three white people. Seriously.

But aside from my critiques of the program, I was also troubled by Schultz's exultation that Wells Fargo (a company that was never in serious trouble to begin with until it bought up troubled Wachovia) is making a profit and will be able to pay back TARP money.

Only problem is, the TARP was Bush's plan, enacted by Secretary of Goldman Sachs the Treasury Henry Paulson. It was the original absorption of bad debt by the government, while allowing the companies to keep their profits.

So while it's good news, sure, that we might get some of that cash back, it hardly means the crisis is solved, let alone that Obama's (read: Geithner/Summers's) plans are working.

We don't want to sound like Rush Limbaugh, so we don't say that we hope the Geithner plan fails. No, we want it to succeed. We even want the TARP to succeed. We're good progressives and we care about the actual people being hurt by the crisis too much to harp on ideology. But at the same time, will it be enough for our system to just go back to where it was? It requires change. Change that wasn't an original part of the Obama plan (clearly--look at his financial team) but that we must now press for, not least because if we don't see this crisis as an opportunity, the other side will.

Klein's work has clearly taught us that.

The Shock Doctrine 8: The New Doctor Shock

(Previous posts here, Matt's posts here, Trend's "How to Overthrow a Government" here.)

I passed up the chance to see Jeffrey Sachs speak at Temple this weekend and now I'm quite happy I did. After this chapter, anyway. Sure, he's changed his tune lately, but I'm still reminded of the fact that so-called "progressive" economists still pay plenty of fealty to Friedman's ideas.

Anyway, this chapter is about the "New Doctor Shock," and that would be Sachs. It's kind of frightening to think that the man who wrote this so recently:

The great scholars of capitalism, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, understood full well that a functioning economic system depends not on greed, but on moral sentiments and an acceptable social contract between the rich and the rest of society. The rich can make money, of course, but they must not flaunt it or consume it frivolously. Instead, they must invest their wealth for social benefit, whether in business or in philanthropy, or in both as in the case of history's most celebrated capitalist-philanthropists, from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. It is only the dangerously arrogant rich or the servants of the rich who believe that morals don't matter in the great matters of finance.

made his name enacting Friedman-style shock reforms on Bolivia's drug-war-flattened economy. And Sachs gained even more fame by helping push those reforms on a country with a democratically elected leader, one who years earlier had nationalized the country's tin mines and was considered center-left.

Once again, I'll leave digging up the details of Bolivian history to Trend and Erik and take this as a jumping-off point for some thoughts.

In light of Erik's drug war post, I have to note that it was the drug war that set Bolivia up for these "reforms," after Reagan's intervention sent inflation skyrocketing, and it was drugs that helped people survive when the unemployment rate hit 30% and real wages dropped 40%.

As Erik wrote, the war on drugs was an excuse for the American government to crap on people who couldn't fight back. It was also a way for people to make money. When your government's economic philosophy is essentially that whatever you have to do to make a profit is OK, is it at all shocking (yes, I used that word again) that people turn to drugs to make a living?

Like this article in the Nation today says:

As Professor Francisco E. Gonzalez of Johns Hopkins University suggests in explaining this predicament in Current History magazine, "[I]t goes without saying that conditions of hopelessness and extreme life choices abound in developing countries such as Mexico. As long as these conditions persist, and as long as the system put in place to counter the narcotics trade leads to the generation of exceptional profits, there will continue to be individuals willing to play this lottery."

It's also notable that even though a democratically elected leader enacted the reforms, he did so in complete reversal of what he promised, and that repression was still needed to enforce the reforms. In other words, nobody ever votes for the capitalist revolution, because far more people are harmed by it than are helped. Yet Sachs once again was lauded for his efforts, and little notice taken of the union leaders detained so that the reforms could be pressed on the people without organized resistance. Sachs cured hyperinflation, but real metrics of well-being were left on the sidelines.

Once the elections happened, in other words, the actions of the government were presumed to be legitimate, no matter what they were and how little the people approved of them.

More Geithner Bullshit

I was in a good mood this morning. I WAS.

Then I read this, from the Washington Post:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials...

At first, when the initiative was being developed last year, the Bush administration decided to apply executive-pay limits to firms participating in this program. But Obama officials reversed that decision days before it was unveiled on March 3 and lifted the curbs, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private...

Yet as the Treasury has readied other programs, it has increasingly turned to creating the special entities. Legal experts said the Treasury's plan to bypass the restrictions may be unlawful.

The concerns persisted as the administration crafted other initiatives. Some private investors said, for instance, that they would not help the government buy toxic assets from banks if the congressional restrictions were applied to them. And every major provider of small-business loans has said that it will not participate in the government's program if it has to surrender ownership stakes to the government or submit to executive-pay limits.

I'm friggin' livid. Seriously. The OBAMA administration is so invested in Geithner's stupid fucking plan that it's willing to take possibly-illegal steps to preserve the profits for the same assholes who got us into this mess.

From the Wonk Room:

Last week, reports surfaced showing that bailed-out banks Citigroup and Bank of America were actively speculating on toxic mortgages with taxpayer money, potentially gaming the public-private investment fund that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has created to clean up the banking system.

Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings is good and pissed too. And we all should be.

When I stop being searingly fucking angry, there are other things here to consider. The administration is still pushing, at the same time, for expanded options to nationalize and liquidate "too big to fail" financial institutions.

The U.S. Treasury and FDIC would immediately have the tools need to walk into America’s largest financial institutions, such as Citibank or Bank of America, and liquidate them, or rewrite their contracts and capital structures. Such powers are clearly useful: if the banks are undercapitalized, and private money is not available, then the government could force creditors to swap claims into equity, thus instantly recapitalizing the banks while avoiding use of taxpayer funds. With such steps, the problem of moral hazard, where creditors to banks are bailed out by taxpayers, would at once be forgotten. Shareholders in banks would lose through dilution, some (unsecured?) creditors would lose with debt-equity swaps, while the nation would be better off having a well-capitalized banking system. The banks would remain private but now be controlled by (ex)creditors.

The Treasury doesn't have those powers now, as the piece notes, and Geithner is not exactly the type of weasel that inspires confidence in me (or anyone else) when it comes to properly using them. But Geithner is inextricably tied to the current plan, and if it fails, he's probably out on his ass (I'd say not a moment too soon, but it might be redundant).

But what if this plan is designed to let the fat cats get complacent while the administration moves in for the kill (nationalization)?

I wonder. And yet I think that Obama IS essentially conservative on this--he's invested in keeping the status quo rather than making real change in the system--in this case, Wall Street. He wants to restore "the economy," even though he talks about change. Most of the "changes" he's discussed have simply been restoring the regulations that controlled the financial industry for decades before the deregulation revolution hit.

And I wonder, would the Fair Elections Act help with Congress's willingness to press for systemic change in Wall Street, when less of them have financial investors from Wall Street? It might not help with the president, but if only Connecticut and New York congresscritters could take money from Wall Street, the rest of 'em would be a lot more willing to take drastic action without fear of losing cash.

As always, follow the money.

Populism: UR Doin It Rong redux

I wrote briefly about Santelli's disingenuous attempt at populism the other day.

Turns out, there's more to the story. A whole lot more. The whole "Chicago Tea Party" movement is a front for some familiar right-wing faces, according to this piece published at PLAYBOY, of all places. Some highlights (it's long):

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

So today’s protests show that the corporate war is on, and this is how they’ll fight it: hiding behind “objective” journalists and “grassroots” new media movements. Because in these times, if you want to push for policies that help the super-wealthy, you better do everything you can to make it seem like it’s “the people” who are “spontaneously” fighting your fight. As a 19th century slave management manual wrote, “The master should make it his business to show his slaves, that the advancement of his individual interest, is at the same time an advancement of theirs. Once they feel this, it will require little compulsion to make them act as becomes them.” (Southern Agriculturalist IX, 1836.) The question now is, will they get away with it, and will the rest of America advance the interests of Koch, Santelli, and the rest of the masters?

Read the whole thing. It's worth it. It's real journalism.

This prompts another bit of thought: with this piece coming out of Playboy, Greg Palast publishing at Suicide Girls and Larry Flynt's willingness to sue the government to get journalists battlefield access, is porn the new way to fund investigative journalism? New media models, indeed.

I'm half joking, of course, but it bears consideration, with newspapers dying left and right. Somebody's got to do the work, and somebody's got to pay for it. And good journalism is good journalism, whether it's published at the New York Times, Mother Jones, or Playboy.

Ah, progressive Utah.

Woke up this morning and matttbastard and Sylvia were already ahead of me on this one:

The Utah House of Representatives will hear a controversial proposal that could hold physicians responsible for homicide if they perform abortions deemed illegal by the state.

Under current state law, abortion is allowed only in cases of rape or incest, if the fetus cannot survive outside the womb or is unlikely to survive, or to save the mother's life or preserve her health.

Abortions that don't meet any of those standards can result in third-degree felony charges.

Under House Bill 90, sponsored by Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clinton, physicians who perform illegal abortions could be charged with second-degree felony criminal homicide...

Ray's bill states that, to justify an abortion, two physicians would have to separately determine a fetus has a birth defect that would prevent it from surviving outside the womb, but Hodo said it may still force women to give birth to children who have no chance of long-term survival...

Rep. Phil Riesen, D-Salt Lake City, cast the only vote against the measure. He said women should be allowed to make their own choices, and expressed frustration with the overall nature of the abortion debate in the Legislature.

"It's analogous to charging people with crimes because there are accidents at four-way intersections, when we have the technology and the knowledge to prevent those accidents by installing traffic lights," Riesen said.

Yeah. Um, Utah state leg? Fuck right off. You can tell 'em what you think here, at their website.

Note, also, that it's the doctors being charged. Not the women, because women clearly don't have enough agency to make their own choices. Doctors (obviously gendered male) must make the choices for them.

Like Sylvia said,

“Will women be accomplices, then? Or scenes of the crime?”

"Balance"

Not that I think that providing a representative from each side of a false binary is any way to measure news objectivity, but this is pretty screwed up:



H/t matttbastard.

The Blago Interview

I had to watch Blago try to dig himself out of his hole on Rachel Maddow tonight.

This guy is slick. Really slick. Either that or he really believes his bullshit.

He came in with his talking points, for sure--"The fix is in..." "Saints and Mother Teresa," "I was just trying to help people!"

But Maddow sits back and lets him hang himself. (Metaphorically!) She even offers him a way out--though it's not really, because we've all heard the tapes, so he can't really deny it. Instead, he raided an Obama speech for his talking points, but he ends up tripping over his words.

Also, one more reference to breast and cervical cancer and I'm filing a sexual harassment suit.

She's a beauty queen

So I'm used to feminist complaints about overly retouched, unrealistic photos in fashion magazines. I've even indulged in a bit of this myself (even while I photoshop zits out of my own pictures on Flickr.)

But now apparently there's some controversy (granted, this is from FOX NEWS) about an UNretouched photo of Sarah Palin gracing the cover of Newsweek.

I found this ridiculous sentence while searching: "The cover photo is a very close-up picture, which drew controversy because many people say that a close-up picture of a woman is meant to be unflattering."

To me, among many, many other things, this proves the fact that Republicans chose Palin because she was pretty, not because of any other qualities she brought to the ticket. I've seen hundreds of unflattering photos of Obama and McCain this election cycle, not to mention insulting and racist cartoons. Yet we're supposed to be up in arms because she was NOT photoshopped?

First off, from what I know of photojournalism (and I do TA in the photojournalism department of my university), altering the photo is a breach of ethics. Now, granted, that usually has more to do with adding people into events where they weren't, or making someone look worse (whoops, Fox), or, perhaps, making a black man look blacker?

So apparently I'm supposed to be up in arms because a close-up photo of a very attractive 44-year-old woman with more money than average and better skin than I've got shows what, her pores? That she's got a few fine lines?

This is ridiculous.

I write in defense of beauty rituals and makeup, glitter and sparkle and high heels and femininity. And I don't pick on Sarah Palin for using any of the above. I don't even pick on her for being "Caribou Barbie" or "Bible Spice." She's allowed to be a pretty woman and to make herself even prettier.

But what the hell is wrong with us that a simple unretouched photo is enough to set the right wing howling that it's unfair coverage? What's wrong with showing a 44-year-old woman's skin? Do they honestly think someone's going to decide not to vote for her because they can see her laugh lines?

After debates over Biden's possible Botox, and comments that Palin could wink so she clearly hasn't had it (used to imply elitism on the part of the Democrats), this whole tempest in a teapot seems forced at best. At worst, it's profoundly insulting to the woman's intelligence--and to all of ours.

But then, presidential campaigns in general are an insult to our intelligence. And the more we harp on issues like this, the more they really do seem like a beauty contest.

More on McCain's...

Erik said most everything. I had to rant elsewhere about it, and so I dug up some fun info on the votes McCain has missed and how little he cared about, say, the first economic bailout bill. Or the Webb GI Bill.

I wrote more here.

You know it's bad when I compare him unfavorably to Bush and Reagan.

Also? Letterman: (h/t Susie Bright, among others)



(Anyone find it funny that CBS, the "communist broadcast service" from last election, is now the softball network of choice for the Republican candidates?)

More thoughts on the police state.

I linked below to Little Light's post, and I want you to please read it first, before I weigh in on this.

BFP wrote about this as well, and her post is also far better than mine. The two of them are an inspiration in so many ways, and I think more people should be reading them.

Police brutality is a feminist issue. I've written about it, oh, a million times. In addition, it is a progressive issue, a liberal issue, an issue for anyone who cares about civil rights and civil liberties.

Our freedoms are NOT granted to us by the state. They are agreed upon with the state, and part of the contract we've made with the state is that it will protect us and provide certain things for us.

I posted the First Amendment the other day in regards to Amy Goodman and other journalists' arrests. It, in addition to the right of a free press, provides that people shall be allowed to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This State has failed us. Instead of protecting us, it has gotten us into unwarranted wars that have weakened us and diminished our ability to protect ourselves (and that's even allowing that war may sometimes be necessary, an argument I am not going to have here). Instead of providing for us, it has attempted to control our personal lives and allowed profit to take precedence over silly little things like health and shelter.

Protests at the RNC especially, but at the DNC as well, have every fucking right to go on. There is no need for a "free speech zone" or anything of the kind. As long as the protesters aren't attacking people in the streets, they have a right to be there and be heard. They certainly don't deserve being arrested, let alone being brutalized beforehand (and afterward, while in jail).

This is not getting the press it deserves. Which is ironic, considering that the press should be freaking out at its rights being trampled, the way they freaked out at the idea that Judith Miller might have to give up her high and powerful source.

Freedom of speech, in other words, is no longer the concern of the ones who are supposed to fight for it: the media. They are more concerned with access to power. It is up to us to preserve the rights that we handed over control of to some state authority. The police are here to serve, not to coerce and control.

The aftermath of the RNC.

Over at Taking Steps, there's video and her excellent writeup on the fallout from the arrests at the RNC protests. Please read it.

On Palin

Ok, so I'm cross-cross-posting, but my full piece is up at GlobalComment, thanks to Natalia.

John McCain waited until after Barack Obama’s speech to make a superbly-timed announcement of his vice-presidential pick.

Unfortunately for him, he undermined what were his best arguments against Obama with that choice.

Sarah Palin is the first-term governor of Alaska, a large, oil-rich state with a small population, and she’s even younger than Obama. Her only political experience before beating the previous Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, in a primary in 2006 was being mayor of Walsilla.

Palin is a mother of five, including one son who’s off to Iraq and another, just born, with Down syndrome. She is staunchly pro-life and considered a Christian conservative, but, rather obviously, is a high-profile working mother.

She campaigned on ethics reform and is considered (much like McCain) a party maverick. She is also seen as a break from ethically-challenged Alaska Republicans like Senator Ted Stevens. However, Palin is under investigation herself for possibly having abused her office to get her former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, fired from his job as a state trooper, according to the Wall Street Journal. She supports drilling as energy policy, and her husband is a longtime BP employee, but he’s a blue-collar type. Palin has also threatened to evict ExxonMobil and its partners from their drilling rights to publicly held oilfields.

This woman is quite a contradiction, seen at once as a sop to the religious right who have not quite come around to McCain and as outreach to disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters who value biological sex over a record on the issues. Read the rest

oh you binary things

“I say a boring word like woman takes all the fun out of being a girl.” –Foxglove, “Death: The Time of Your Life”

Granted Neil Gaiman wrote that line, and he is definitely a guy, a straight white British guy for goodness’s sake, but I’ve been trying to think of where I read it for months now, every time I see these humorless ‘radical feminist’ arguments for some sort of vanilla world where there are no gender signifiers—which, by the way, are totally Western gender signifiers like lipstick and high heels that they’re always fighting, and not any sort of universal perception of women as weak and in need of protection constantly.

I mean, the idea that to “smash the gender binary” we have to all dress in some sort of clothing that provides no hint of the pleasing curves of our bodies, that doesn’t in any way decorate the bodies we were born with—some sort of religious asceticism that says we can’t mess with the bodies God (the Goddess, in those conversations, and often a specific Goddess that, well, wouldn’t even know what to do with those Western gender signifiers if she ran across them, but sure knows what to do with people who don’t take her seriously) gave us… Yeah.

That’s just the outward coating anyway. The lipstick, the clothes, the hair, it’s just the wrapping, and not the problem. The problem is that with the external perception “Woman” comes all sorts of other perceptions about what that woman is like, what she can and can’t do, and whether or not she’ll fuck you, quite often.

And those ideas come whether or not I’m wearing makeup, when I’m in a man’s top and vest or in a dress and heels, when my hair is short or long.

The idea, especially, that gender is a construct, a choice, a game (an idea I like, personally, a Game of You like Neil said, again, because I’m just on that kind of trip right now), would seem to preclude some sort of need to protect Biological Woman from invasion.

If you want to break down the idea that certain traits come with certain genders, why do you always want to embrace the male signifiers? To me, sometimes, I see the idea of not shaving, of not wearing skirts, as just an embrace of the things that have always been coded male and powerful, rather than any sort of re-empowering those things coded feminine, and so how does that help us any?

These thoughts, of course, have been prompted by another round of what Queen Emily called the Trans Wars. To me, well, it seems pretty damn obvious that when you’re terribly concerned about the biology of the people who call themselves women, you’re probably the one actually upholding, reifying, policing gender binaries.

I mean, I look at it two ways: One is that it ain’t my life, ain’t my gender, so who the hell am I to tell someone that how they feel is wrong, that who they are is wrong? Basic empathy for human beings can get you so much further sometimes than reading books.

And two is that if you’ve got to be an asshole and try to theorize about people’s lives, well, this still doesn’t make any sense. How is the idea that your gender doesn’t necessarily match your body anything but a plus for people who want to get rid of the gender binary? How is the thought that we aren’t trapped by our biology anything but a cheering one for feminism?

Is your oppression so important to you that you have to police it too? Is your feeling of victimhood such an important identity that you have to protect it from outsiders? Or is it just that if you set up impossible goals, you can safely assume we'll never actually reach that happy vanilla genderless utopia where we all wear what, togas? and no one has kinky sex, or any sex at all really because that might imply gender roles or objectification, oh my? And that way you just get to complain away, continue feeling like a victim, and tell anyone who doesn't feel like a victim, or who feels like the wrong kind of victim, that they're wrong?

I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere by sitting in a corner whimpering about how beaten down we are. I feel like we get somewhere when we fight back. Or sometimes when we get together and laugh, have a drink, and realize that life can still be good. Thinking about how I’ve been fucked over never made me feel strong, but putting on sparkly makeup and dancing on a bar sure has. Yeah, poor deluded me, performing for the patriarchy, right?

See, Foxglove, who said that quote, above? She’s a lesbian. And a rock star. And yes, a character on a page and in Neil Gaiman’s head (and drawn so pretty by Chris Bachalo). Clear-eyed gaze and all. So who’s she performing for when she puts on her tight skirt?

Maybe she’s just doing what makes her happy. So was Wanda, back in A Game of You, when she left behind Alvin and moved to New York. And even though when she died her family tried to force her back into being Alvin, well, Barbie (oh, Barbie you supreme tool of oppression, blonde busty doll) scrawled her real name in hot pink lipstick on her grave.

I’m not trans. And I'm straight. I like men (quite often too much). And even my gender performance is drag. After years of jeans and T-shirts suddenly I wear red lip gloss every day and dresses and skirts, dresses and skirts, and I like it that way. It’s my armor and war paint and the noise that high heels make is much more satisfying to my ears these days.

And I was treated like a stupid little girl and had more assumptions made about my competence, skill, and sexual availability when I wore jeans and no makeup and worked on bicycles all day.

Policing our presentation doesn’t help. You really want to smash the binary? Fight the idea that how we look has anything at all to do with how smart we are, how competent we are, how strong we are. Fight the idea that women can only get anywhere by being just like men.

I’ve got another quote for you, this one snagged off the Twitter of a friend of mine.

“Sexiness and professionalism are both drag. The problems arise when people confuse them for honest attributes.” –Molly Crabapple

Oh, and Lisa, as usual, has much, much more.

(Cross-posted, of course)

Santa Fe

To say that I find the New York Times travel section annoying significantly understates the issue. It's combination of elitism, wealth, and snobbery makes it the least readable section of the paper. It offers virtually nothing to travellers like myself who prefer to go cheap. Even their frugal traveler section really caters to rather expensive tastes.

This all comes out strongly in their constant coverage of New Mexico. The Times loves New Mexico. At least once a month, some article appears about the newest Taos hotel, the charms of Galisteo, or the latest Santa Fe gallery. The paper caters to New Yorkers who want to play out their western fantasies in Santa Fe, all while spending $300 a night on a hotel.

Henry Shukman's cover article in Sunday's section followed in this tradition. This week's New Mexico coverage focused on new developments in Santa Fe. Crazy stuff too. Some new restaurants opened that are slightly different from already existing establishments. The city has the temerity to push a new business district that doesn't per se cater to tourists. Oh, and some galleries are now selling non-Old West art. Wow.

Shukman actually admits one of the most loathsome parts about Santa Fe. Its authenticity is a hoax created in the 1910s to save the city from economic irrelevance. So they created and codified a particular architectural design for the city, forced older buildings to conform, and prohibited new buildings from venturing from the newly constructed norm. They also invented the romantic tricultural heritage myth which says that Indians, Spanish, and Anglos got along peacefully to create tranquil Santa Fe. All of this happened though while whites were stealing the property of the Native American and Hispano population, appropriating and commodifiying those people's authenticity for their own purposes

But while making a nod toward this reality, Shukman also falls into the pseudo-romantic language used by easterners who project their fantasies onto Santa Fe while ignoring the social and cultural realities of the place. See the opening two paragraphs:

"A SUNDAY evening in late June. A crowd of well-dressed people is spilling out of the St. Francis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts in downtown Santa Fe, a grand adobe building some 90 years old, with monolithic mud towers and tender curvaceous walls connecting them. The late sun doesn't just gleam on the old adobe edifice. It's deeper than that. The red and orange that lights up on the walls, over the heads of the exiting crowd, seems to come from deep within them. The low light transforms the scene into a vision.

There's a moment like this almost every evening in Santa Fe, when the light suddenly transfigures the earthen buildings, the lush cottonwood trees, even the blacktop and cars. It all becomes luminous and dreamlike. It's as if the light contains some special MSG of sight, and one can't stop staring. Santa Fe must have offered this spectacle for the last four centuries, since the Palace of the Governors was built on the plaza by the Spanish."

Jesus Christ. I think that special MSG of sight is a LSD flashback that hits everytime visitors come to Santa Fe. They certainly don't feel this way about Española, Pecos, or Truchas. These places scare them. They might be quaint and worth a quick visit, but they don't have the nice white safety of Santa Fe.

Santa Fe exists on the backs of poor brown people. The white elites of the city have created a historical fantasy that brings in millions of dollars a year. That would be OK if they didn't falsify what they were doing behind a facade of authenticity. Today, Santa Fe is one of the whitest towns in New Mexico's heartland. You see brown people, but they are mostly working class folks who cannot afford to live in this insanely expensive city. So they are forced to live on the pueblos and in the towns and villages outside Santa Fe and commute to work, thus spending a large percentage of their meagre wages on gasoline and car bills. Meanwhile, the cheapest place the Times recommends to stay in this story costs a mere $85 a night and it condescends in its description of the place.

But hey, those romantic brown people sure do provide a lovely flavor of authenticity to my Santa Fe fantasies. It's great to be white. You can project your desires on brown people around the world, throw some money around, and believe them to be true. You get to be served by brown people who make you feel white, er, special! You don't have to worry about the actual conditions people live in. And when you leave, you can take stories about those quaint natives who have such funny customs and ways of speaking!!!