Friday, February 27, 2009

Don't try this at home...

...is the title of  the home-improvement blog I have thought about starting. But I've become a bit  sporadic about posting to the blog I already have, so I'll just continue to throw my house-repair posts in here along with everything else.

Earlier  this week I was hurrying to get out the door so I could get to work on time when all of  a sudden I heard the sound of water rushing. Looking into the kitchen, I could see water pouring out from under the sink.  I dashed out to the curb with my meter key as fast as my lame foot could carry me and turned off the water. Turned out that the hot water compression valve had blown clear off the pipe. It had  been on the pipe for a month, and up to that point hadn't leaked a bit. I'm still researching what I might have done wrong. If  I figure it out I'll let you know.

The pipes I put in under my sink are those new-fangled PEX pipes. I'm thinking about going ahead and getting the fancy expensive tool that you use to connect the pipe to specialized PEX fittings. The tool can be expensive--but not as expensive as calling a plumber. Besides, after I get the foundation and the roof fixed, it might be time to install some new plumbing. This testimonial says that installing PEX water supply pipes is fast, easy,  and  relatively cheap:
In all, even with a burnt hand and broken ribs....don't even ask......I am very pleased with my new plumbing system and the fact that I was able to complete it myself without my house floating down the street!
 And also, apparently, quite an adventure.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Rep. Schakowsky pushing for "big change" movements

You can read about it on Women's eNews

Paul Krugman is right

Nationalizing the banks is actually a pretty good idea:

The real question is why the Obama administration keeps coming up with proposals that sound like possible alternatives to nationalization, but turn out to involve huge handouts to bank stockholders.

For example, the administration initially floated the idea of offering banks guarantees against losses on troubled assets. This would have been a great deal for bank stockholders, not so much for the rest of us: heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

A broken health care system is causing budget deficits

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points this out in a recent op-ed piece. Read it.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Holder calls for honest talk on race

Last  week, Attorney General Eric Holder made a controversial speech at a Department of Justice Black History Month event. The controversy over this speech is a bit puzzling to me. In brief, Holder said that for all of the progress  Americans have made in civil rights and race relations, racism still has a deep influence on US society.  Places of  business have become integrated,  but  socially, we still live in a segregated society. In order to get past that, Americans need to learn to talk about race honestly across racial lines, and so far  we have not  been  able to do that.

At least, this is my understanding after having read the entire speech online.  (Thanks to Think Progress for the link to the speech. They also have a link to a video of the speech, which I haven't watched yet.)

There are several points of that speech that I might like to argue about with Mr. Holder. I think that  there are many issues that US citizens are not able to discuss honestly--not only race, but also class, gender, and the ways that the patriarchal family structure sets most of us up to be exploited and abused. Also, in reading the speech,  it looked perhaps as if Holder thought that race relations in the US were simply a matter of black and white--but racist oppression has also taken place and continues to take place against American Indians,  Lationos and Latinas, Asian people, and people of Middle Eastern descent.

Finally, I think the problem of racism in the United States in not just about the bigotry of individual white people, or about the difficulty US citizens have in communicating across racial boundaries.  I think there is such a thing as institutional racism, and until that is eliminated, we're not going to make much more progress.

I've greatly oversimplified this post, and hope to discuss these issues in much more depth in the future.  The  main point that I'm trying to make that there might be a number of points in Eric Holder's speech that are open to discussion. But it's not fair for everyone to get their knickers in a twist because one sentence has been taken out of context. Read  the whole thing. Then we can talk.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Hillary Clinton's replacement weak on immigrant rights

So reports Erica Gonzalez on the Women's Media Center web site:

While in the House, Gillibrand had given a thumbs-up to a series of harsh, punitive measures against undocumented immigrants. With so many families consisting of undocumented, legalized, and citizen members, these hard-line measures have wider implications, as we have seen with the devastating separation of parents and children through raids and deportation.

The New York Immigration Coalition, Assemblyman Peter Rivera, and the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Diario/La Prensa quickly took Gillibrand to task. This pushed her record to the forefront of news reports. But that Gillibrand’s alarming votes weren’t reflected in early, English-language media coverage shows how the lives of immigrants are too often treated as an after-thought.

Some organizations neglected to note the contradiction between Gillibrand backing the rights of some while denying the rights of others. NARAL Pro Choice New York and the Human Rights Campaign were among those that issued congratulatory statements on Gillibrand’s appointment. But they could have at the same time held her accountable for people caught in the middle—immigrant women and GLBT immigrants.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Sunday, February 15, 2009

The mother of us all?

I was just looking at Susan B. Anthony's Wikipedia biography, because it is Anthony's 189th birthday today.

As long as I'm talking about birthdays so much recently, I don't want to omit The Mother of Us All. That is the title of a fanciful opera about Anthony's life that was written by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson in 1947.

If I were to write an opera about Susan B. Anthony, I think I would call it something else. If anything, Anthony was a sort of un-mother, though she did help to raise the children of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony refused the roles of wife and mother in order to remain an effective campaigner for women's rights. In this refusal, she was motivated at least in part by the fact that women who married in her day gave up many of the rights they had, such as the right to sign a contract.

Anthony is at least as complicated as anyone else I've discussed this week. She can be viewed as an activist of limited vision who subordinated all other interests to gaining the vote for women, in contrast with Stanton. Stanton was the revolutionary who challenged women's place in such institutions as religion and marriage. Then again, Stanton was mostly a theorist who, after her children were grown, supported herself on the lecture circuit. She could well afford to make thought-provoking radical statements--this may even have helped to increase the size of her audiences. And for all her radicalism, Stanton had a pronounced strain of elitism in her world view.

Anthony was the practical political organizer who built the political machinery that eventually gained women the right to vote. Anthony, in my estimation, was a true egalitarian, and probably as much a committed anti-racist as any white person in America in her day. Nevertheless, she was willing to accomodate to racists in her goal of winning the vote for women. She seemed to believe that until she herself was fully empowered as a citizen, she had to give other issues and causes less priority. Nevertheless, she viewed the vote as a means to an end, as a tool for political power. She said something like "Men will sell their vote, but not their right to vote."

I also think she seemed more radical when she was young and more conservative as she grew older. This is because she was young in times when radical political movements were gaining in strength, and later lived during the collapse of Reconstruction, when US politics veered sharply to the right. We are all so affected by the times we live in and the people who surround us, and that simply seems to be part of being human.

My favorite book on Anthony is Kathleen Barry's Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. It's rather difficult to find, which is why I included the online link to a site that sells used books. I was able to special order it locally at Full Circle Bookstore a year or two ago.

Online, you can find Ida Husted Harper's Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, and also Alma Lutz's biography of Anthony. You might also want to check out the History of Woman Suffrage which Anthony co-authored.

Happy birthday, Susan B. Now I've got to go and get that voter registration form in the mail...

Monson wins OKC school board chair

Having just moved, I wasn't eligible to vote in the recent Oklahoma City school board election. (My previous address was in the Putnam City School District.) I must be pretty out of touch with local news, because I didn't know until I saw it yesterday on the Oklahoma Women's Network Blog that Angela Monson won.

Thank goodness. And I'm sending in my new voter registration form right away.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

A journey toward Truth

I started writing this post because, on second thought, I regretted not having any kind words about Abraham Lincoln in my recent post remarking on the shared 200th birthday of Mr. Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Lincoln is not a particular hero of mine. This has been true at least since I took Mrs. Gentile's history class back at Northeast High School in Philadelphia. She had us read Richard Hofstadter's American Political Tradition, which, among other things, demonstrated that Lincoln shared many of the racist views of his time. Later reading told me that many abolitionists and woman's rights advocates were deeply suspicious of him. Furthermore, I don't like the "great man" theory of history that always finds some dead white man to credit for important events and social changes.

Despite all that, Lincoln was a complicated and interesting person who did play a central role in ending slavery in the United States, and who paid with his life for this. A public radio program last Sunday noted that Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln was one of the few white men who treated him as a man, rather than a black man--even though Frederick Douglass knew many abolitionists. I had also read that Sojourner Truth thought highly of him.

So I started poking around for something else to say about Mr. Lincoln. One thing I found was a fascinating speech given by Douglass in 1876:
I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation actual speechof his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.
Another thing I found was this collection of speeches and commentaries by Sojourner Truth at the Sojourner Truth.org home page. It does indeed carry an account of a meeting she had with Lincoln in October 1864.

But it also includes an account of the actual speech Truth gave to a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.This account, by abolition journalist Marcus Robinson, is quite brief, and I'll include most of it below:
I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart -- why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, -- for we can't take more than our pint'll hold. The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble. I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.
If this sounds familiar, it should. A much more colorful version of this oration was published by white feminist and abolitionist Frances Dana Gage in 1863, 12 years after it happened. This famous Ain't I A Woman? speech was probably heavily fictionalized by Gage, according to historian Nell Irvin Painter. If nothing else, Painter points out, Truth--who was born and enslaved in New York State before that state abolished slavery--would not have spoken in the southern dialect that Gage put into her mouth.

Painter's Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol is available through the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System, or you can see a Google Books preview. It's not an easy book to read. Truth's early life was extremely difficult, and included sexual abuse by both white men and white women. From this difficult background, the slave Isabella reinvented herself as Sojourner Truth, a powerful public speaker and activist, although unable to read or write. Painter analyzes the difficulty of truly knowing anything about a woman who never was able to write her own story, but who was portrayed only by others, mostly white women activists.

I think that Painter says that ultimately, we can't know the truth about Truth, but it seems to me that it is more interesting and ultimately more inspiring to explore the nooks and crannies of complicated reality than to rely on the oversimplified myths that have been handed down to us about historical figures.

Large families aren't always a choice

I wish I'd written this.

Stimulus package gains final approval

Our Bodies Our Blog has this analysis.

Women are literally taking the helm

You can read all about it in this post from Inter Press Service.

Paul Krugman analyzes stimulus

CommonDreams.org posted this interesting commentary.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Two or three men and a birthday

This is undoubtedly one of those thing everyone but me has known for a long time, but I just figured out that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on this day in 1809.

In a story posted last summer, The Abraham Lincoln Blog mocks a goofy cover story run by  Newsweek, speculating about which of these men had a greater impact on history. A more typical web post treats both men as heroes who each, in his own way, helped to emancipate humanity.

Reality, of course is more complicated. Lincoln shared commonly held racist attitudes of his time, and freed the slaves mostly because he needed their help in order to defeat the Confederacy. Darwin's ideas were influenced by the right-wing social economist Thomas Malthus, and helped to influence the unsavory ideologies of social Darwinism and eugenics.

Furthermore, the famous Scopes Trial began at least in part as a publicity stunt designed to bring publicity to the town of Dayton, Tennessee, according to Douglas O. Linder. And William Jennings Bryan, derided on the witness stand by defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, may have been motivated as much by humane ideals as by religious bigotry:
 William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic candidate for President and a populist, led a Fundamentalist crusade to banish Darwin's theory of evolution from American classrooms. Bryan's motivation for mounting the crusade is unclear. It is possible that Bryan, who cared deeply about equality, worried that Darwin's theories were being used by supporters of a growing eugenics movement that was advocating sterilization of "inferior stock."
However, according to Wikipedia , Bryan himself built a political career in the segregationist Democratic party of his day by supporting its racist ideology:
Shannon Jones (2006) writes that one of the few topics touched on by historians is Bryan's apparent support of American racism, pointing that Bryan never took a principled stand against white supremacy in the Southern United States. Jones explains that "the ruling elite in the South, the remnants of the old southern slaveholding oligarchy, formed a critical base of the Democratic Party. This Party had defended slavery and secession and had led the struggle against post-Civil War Reconstruction. It had opposed granting suffrage to freed slaves and generally opposed all progressive reforms aimed at alleviating the oppression of blacks and poor whites. No politician could hope for national leadership in the Democratic Party, let alone expect to win the presidency, by attacking the system of racial oppression in the South."
It's a complicated world. There aren't any perfect plaster saints out there.  I ought to have a better concluding sentence, but it's way past my bedtime.

The $6400 question

Hilda Solis is Barack Obama's choice to be secretary of labor, and perhaps her nomination is in trouble because her husband's auto repair business had to pay $6400 in back taxes. Or, according to this article posted on Common Dreams, perhaps Republicans are trying to defeat her because of her support for labor unions.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

New York State may protect rights of domestic workers

Here is some good news from Women's eNews:

N.Y. Domestic Workers See Bill of Rights in '09

Increase OK grocery tax credit

Oklahoma is one of 16 states that taxes groceries. The state has offers a tax credit to low-income households and individuals to help offset the sales tax they pay on groceries, but the amount of the credit has not been raised since 1990. The eligibility level has not been adjusted for inflation since 1998.

According to the Oklahoma Policy Institute, Oklahoma has one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity in the nation. They're supporting action in the state house and senate to expand the grocery tax credit. According to OPI's fact sheet:
HB 2204 (Rep. Trebilcock) and SB 567 (Sen. Rice) would help hard-pressed Oklahoma families by increasing Oklahoma’s Sales Tax Relief credit, an existing tax credit intended to offset the sales tax on groceries for low- and moderate-income households. The bills as introduced would:
  • Increase the amount of the Sales Tax Relief credit from $40 to $60 per household member for those who are currently eligible for the credit (up to $50,000 for tax filers claiming a dependent child, senior, or person with disability status, or $20,000 for others);
  • Expand eligibility for a partial credit to $60,000 or $30,000, depending on household status. Those with income between current eligibility and expanded eligibility levels would receive a $30 credit;
  • Index eligibility levels annually to inflation beginning in 2011.
You can find email addresses and phone numbers here to encourage committee chairs in the House and Senate to hear these bills. For more information on the grocery tax credit, you can read the Oklahoma Policy Institute's policy brief.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Elizabet Sahtouris

Elizabeth Sahtouris was one of the guests featured this morning on the program To the Best of Our Knowledge on KOSU. According to the TTBOOK website:
Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris left her teaching job to go live on a Greek island and re-think her life as a scientist. She tells Anne Strainchamps that while she dismisses the Biblical creationists,she thinks the standard story of evolution has some major problems. Her book is "Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution."

I'm not exactly sure what I think of her ideas, but what Sahtouris has to say is very interesting. Here's an excerpt from a 2003 essay:
We have a new definition of life in biology in the last few decades called autopoesis which means that a living entity is onethat continually creates itself. This is very unlike a machine which is created from the outside by an inventor, given its rulesof operation, and usually in a hierarchic arrangement and has tobe reinvented to have generations of technology rather than being able to reinvent itself in an evolutionary trajectory.

On her website, you can download a copy of her book for free. Or you can watch her on YouTube.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Doomed to repeat it?

In a recent post, I discussed ways that the current economic stimulus plan under consideration by Congress slights the needs of women.

Apparently, this situation is nothing new. Writing at Women's eNews, Louise Bernikow discusses how the New Deal Slighted Women In Recovery Plans.

Meanwhile, over at RHRealityCheck.org, Cristina Page has this thought-provoking essay on the economic benefits provided by public spending on contraception. You may recall that the stimulus bill originally considered by the House included money to make contraception more available, but that this provision was removed in an unsuccessful effort to win Republican support for that bill.

Drawing on the work of several economists, Page argues that creating jobs for people who deliver contraceptive services stimulates the economy just as much as any other health care spending. More than that, unplanned pregnancies create a serious drain on the economy, and providing contraception helps to alleviate poverty. Furthermore, contraception makes greater workplace participation possible for (heterosexual) women.

Today, President Obama appeared in a brief video urging passage of a stimulus package. Also, the Senate appeared ready to pass a centrist compromise that cut about $110 billion from the plan that was passed by the House. Economist Dean Baker argues that the more Obama compromises, the less effective the stimulus bill will be.

I wish I had a brilliant concluding sentence that would create a clear path to follow to make all of this work out okay. But the Red Cup is closing in five minutes, and I'm going to post this.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Spouting off

If you know me, something you may not know about me is that I have a favorite shower head. It is a low-flow shower head that has a little push button thingee on the side that allows you to regulate the water flow. You can get a full whopping 2.5 gallons per minute for a luxurious high-pressure shower experience, or you can shut it down to a trickle. A handyman at my old apartment complex was kind enough to install it for me when he was in my apartment a few years ago doing a different plumbing repair.

The existing shower head in my new house was just not satisfactory, as far as I could see. Now that I'm gone, the management company is probably going to completely remodel my apartment, as they're doing with every apartment that goes vacant. So I figured, what's the harm, I'll swap shower heads with them. So I did.

The difficulty with this scheme made itself apparent on Sunday morning when I took a shower to clean up after moving. You know how you pull up the little thingee on the tub spout in order to send the water up to the shower head? When I did this, most of the water kept cascading out of the tub spout, and very little of it came out up top. I was sure I had tested this before and found it satisfactory -- but this was before I swapped shower heads.

What to do? Unlike most of my other recent plumbing adventures, this turned out to be quite simple. To make a long story as short as possible, I soaked the shower head in vinegar -- following the recommendation in a home maintenance book. After that, the amount of water coming out of the shower head was much better--but the tub spout diverter valve still leaked. So I went ahead and replaced the tub spout.

Now, in case you haven't replaced a tub spout lately, be advised that that there are at least three different types of tub spout, each requiring a different replacement. Fortunately, there is such a thing as a universal tub-spout replacement kit. The one I got over at Westlake Ace Hardware on 23rd even included the Teflon tape that you wrap around the pipe threads. Be advised that you also need something called water pump pliers. Back when I was a kid, we just called these Channellocks. Anyway, I forgot to get them Sunday and had to go back for them Monday. Hopefully my personal hygiene did not suffer too much as a consequence.

Once I'd replaced the tub spout, it all worked like a, like a...well, it worked exactly like a shower should. Yay!!! When I looked at the old shower head, it looked as if there was a build-up of corrosion that had kept the valve from closing properly. Next time I face this situation, I'll most likely soak the tub spout in vinegar, too, before I replace it.

It's good that I like fixing things, or I would have the wrong house.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Good news and bad news on Obama economic stimulus package.

The good news is, the economic stimulus package offers real hope for substantial long-term economic change, according to Greg Palast writing on Truthout.
The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

Now, truth be told, this "good news" includes a down side. The only concession Obama made to the Republican right on this bill, Palast notes, was to remove money for contraception. A troubling sign that Obama considers women's needs to be expendable. (And Palast says that he doesn't much care.)

The really bad news is, the package needs substantial revision in order to meet the needs of women and people of color, according to Susan Feiner writing on Women's eNews.

She describes Obama's proposal as "too meager, too male" -- that is, favoring expenditures in areas such as road construction where a vast majority of wage earners are male. Feiner and other progressive economists have formed W.E.A.V.E., Women's Equality Adds Value to the Economy, and gathered over 1200 signatures to promote significant changes to Obama's plan:
We are pushing three basic steps to help tens of millions of women--and their children--weather the stormy economy.

No. 1: Revive and enforce Labor Department regulations requiring affirmative action for all federal contractors.

No. 2: Set aside apprenticeship and training programs in infrastructure projects for women and people of color. Both groups are seriously underrepresented in the construction trades.

No. 3: Spend recovery money on projects in health, child care, education and social services.

You can send a brief comment to the White House here.

You can also contact the White House by calling:

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

And you can always send a good old-fashioned letter:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Sunday, February 1, 2009

I live here now


It's a little bit messy, still, because I don't have everything arranged yet. I think Spot likes it okay. And now I need to go off to find the parts to make my shower head work properly...