Arrested for living in a house while black

One of my very favorite blogs is the blog of Angry Black Bitch, who is at her most eloquent (which is saying quite a bit) in her commentary on the arrest of Professor Gates for living in a house in Cambridge while black.

If by some chance you have missed this widely publicized story, here is the short version. Last Thursday, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was returning to his home in Cambridge, Mass. after a research trip to China. His front door wouldn't open. He and the cab driver, who was also black, tried to force open the jammed door. This happened in broad daylight. A white neighbor thought there might be a burglary in progress and called the police.

The police officer who arrived to investigate the call demanded that Gates show ID to prove that he was the rightful owner of the house. According to a statement by Gates's lawyer, Gates went to his kitchen (followed by the officer), and produced his driver's license and his Harvard i.d.

Professor Gates then asked the police officer if he would give him his name and his badge number. He made this request several times. The officer did not produce any identification nor did he respond to Professor Gates’ request for this information. After an additional request by Professor Gates for the officer’s name and badge number, the officer then turned and left the kitchen of Professor Gates’ home without ever acknowledging who he was or if there were charges against Professor Gates. As Professor Gates followed the officer to his own front door, he was astonished to see several police officers gathered on his front porch. Professor Gates asked the officer’s colleagues for his name and badge number. As Professor Gates stepped onto his front porch, the officer who had been inside and who had examined his identification, said to him, “Thank you for accommodating my earlier request,” and then placed Professor Gates under arrest. He was handcuffed on his own front porch

The police report gives a contradictory version of events. Gates has challenged the accuracy of this report. But even if it'ss accurate, Gates, who is in his late 50s, stands 5' 7", weighs 150 pounds, and walks with a cane, obviously posed no threat of violence.  Given this country's long and continuing practice of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies, any distress that Gates might have showed seems entirely understandable.

Furthermore, if you work with public, you need to have a thick enough skin to deal with people who get upset with you. Even taking the arresting officer's version at face value, Gates was arrested because Gates's behavior "caused citizens passing by this location to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed." In other words, Gates was arrested for being uppity. Is this just one office with an exaggerated sense of his own importance? If we live in a country where we're expected to do absolutely everything a police officer tells us, with no expression of disagreement, we live in a police state. I have to say this police report made my blood run cold.

On Tuesday, the Cambridge police dropped the disorderly conduct charge against Gates. But the story is not going away just yet.

There's an excellent updated analysis of the story at Whose shoes are these anyway? Nordette Adams compares the Gates episode to other recent incidents, including the choking a black paramedic by a white Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer back in May.

Meanwhile The Root has an interview with Gates giving his own story of how the incident took place.

Does Obama’s health care reform merely prop up blood-sucking private insurance companies?

Anyone reading this blog knows that I've vacillated mightily on what to do about health care reform. A single-payer system seems obvious as the best way to make the health care industry work in favor of ordinary people. But maybe the option of allowing folks to buy into a public plan that competes with private insurers would be a workable compromise? I keep going back and forth. I think that I just don't know.

Writing in The Socialist WebZine, Billy Wharton makes a compelling argument that President Obama's proposed health care reform does little to help ordinary people and a whole lot to prop up the private health insurance industry:

The bill does little to address the structural failures of private corporations. Instead of a single-payer plan which would address the problem of cost and coverage by eliminating private health insurers, thereby opening access, the House bill proposes coercive mandates to herd the great mass of the uninsured toward private plans. Key to this is a focus on keeping costs low in the private plans. The problem is that there are only two ways to do this -– offer high-fee, high-deductible plans or offer plans with bare-bones coverage. Both maintain high profitability for the corporations, while fuelling the logic of health-care avoidance and debt accumulation.

Some of the uninsured may resist this drive into private health insurance plans designed for corporate profitability. The House of Representatives, under the advice of President Barack Obama, has therefore designed an intricate system of coercive penalties. Americans will either have to prove enough hardship to qualify for the public option or pay a 2.5% penalty on their annual income. Considering the high costs of monthly health-care premiums, we can imagine that many may opt to pay the fine in order to avoid the higher costs of a private plan.

To make up the difference, the House bill proposes the issue of “affordability credits” in order to, “reduce cost-sharing to levels that ensure access to care”. Where will these credits, read taxpayers' money, be headed? Directly to the private health insurance industry. Here again the new logic of the Obama regime is put to work. Instead of using the state to solve social problems by nationalising, or socialising industry, the administration chooses to toss taxpayers' funds at the private sector. All the while, they employ free-market language –- increased competition, market areas and individual responsibility -– to cover what is essentially a transfer of public funds to large corporations. No wonder nary a word of protest has been uttered by the normally vociferous private health-care industry.

Wharton observes -- accurately, I think -- that only a mass social movement can make real health care reform possible. If anybody knows how to ignite such a movement, would you please share that information with me?

Jimmy Carter leaves Southern Baptists to protest women's subordination

Oklahoma Voice of Reason reports that former president Jimmy Carter has left the Southern Baptist Church, because of that church's support for the subordination of women. I found Carter's explanation of this decision, published in The Age, to be quite moving. Not that I necessarily agree with all of it. Carter writes:

The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.

I not convinced by the argument that a "true" interpretation of the world's major religions would show that they support dignity and equality for women. See, for instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible.

I'm trying to find words to express all my mixed feelings about Jimmy Carter and his record on women's rights. I cast my first presidential vote in the 1976 election, in which Carter defeated Gerald Ford. I voted for Ford, largely because I was uncomfortable with Carter's Southern Baptist religious background. I feared he would undermine women's rights.

I think that voting for Ford was a mistake, but I think my uneasiness with Carter was justified. Doing online research just now, I'm not finding much to document what I remember. Carter's Wikipedia entry has limited information on his record on women's issues.

Carter (like Presidents Nixon and Ford before him) did give at least lip service to the Equal Rights Amendment. But The Socialist Webzine documents Carter's support for the Hyde Amendment, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women. And about.com notes that

In 1977-1978 Bella Abzug served as co-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Women. She was fired by President Jimmy Carter, who had originally appointed her, when the committee openly criticized Carter's budget for cutting women's programs.

Of course, that was then, this is now. Maybe Carter has grown over the years. Feminist Philosophers points out that Carter is now part of a group called The Elders, which has recently taken a stand saying that the use of religion to subordinate women is unacceptable. As Carter himself says:

(M)any political leaders can be reluctant about stepping into this minefield. Religion, and tradition, are powerful and sensitive areas to challenge. But my fellow Elders and I, who come from many faiths and backgrounds, no longer need to worry about winning votes or avoiding controversy - and we are deeply committed to challenging injustice wherever we see it.

The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. We have decided to draw particular attention to the responsibility of religious and traditional leaders in ensuring equality and human rights and have recently published a statement that declares: "The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable."

I don't share Carter's optimism about the role that religious leaders might play in ensuring women's rights. I think I do respect him for making this statement.

Thinking inside the box

Sotomayor affirms Roe as "Settled Law," in second day of confirmation hearings

John Nichols at thenation.com reports that during her second day of confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee affirmed Roe v. Wade as "settled law," and appears to have won a battle of wits with Utah Republican Orrin Hatch.

Hatch was firm with the nominee, especially during a pointed line of questioning about cases involving gun rights. But Judge Sotomayor matched wits with the senior senator point for point, meeting arcane questions with precise responses that referenced footnotes and comments by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

Hatch was impressed, telling the nominee at the close of their discourse: "I want you to know I've appreciated this little time we've had together." Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a key Democrat who led Judge Sotomayor through a line of questioning about executive powers issues, went even further, telling the committee how much he had "enjoyed" the Hatch-Sotomayor dialogue.

Ginsburg and Sotomayor: Two women justices would have both similarities and differences

With the Democrats holding 60 votes in the US Senate, Sonia Sotomayor is likely to gain confirmation as the third woman and first Latina appointed to the US Supreme Court. Sharon Johnson at Women's eNews has written an interesting analysis of the similarities and differences in legal outlook between Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the other woman current sitting on the Court. Both women are strong supporters of employment nondiscrimination, but Sotomayor is much weaker than Ginsburg in her support of reproductive choice.

Appeals court requires pharmacists to dispense "morning after" pill

A three-judge panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that pharmacists may not use their personal religious beliefs to dodge their legal obligation to dispense morning-after contraceptives. Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors has the details.

Pondering the history of revolution

Happy Bastille Day. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1889 was a major symbolic turning point in the French Revolution. While it held only seven prisoners at the time of the attack, the Bastille had once held numerous political prisoners condemned by royal decree, and symbolized the absolute power of King Louis XVI.

The French Revolution is notorious for devolving into the Reign of Terror. This is used to support the reactionary argument that absolute democracy always leads to horrible abuses. I think it's more accurate to say that, just as there are sincere people who are bigots, there are evildoers who seem quite willing and capable of manipulating good causes to their own purposes. It is also true that empire-builders are quite able to use the trappings of democracy to justify their actions. Like the United States, France has its own history of imperialism and colonialism.

Today, Bastille Day is the French national holiday. But the French don't call it that, they call it le 14 juillet. This holiday is celebrated not only in France, but also in the United States. Is this a sign that US citizens are eager once again to work toward social justice and the ideals of liberty, equality, and sisterhood? Or is it just an indication that Americans are always eager for an excuse to go on a bender?

I remain hopeful of the possibility of an egalitarian future, but it's going to take a lot of hard work to get there.

Paul Krugman on The Stimulus Trap

CommonDreams.org cross-posted Paul Krugman's excellent commentary on what President Obama should do now that the first round of stimulus has proved insufficient to revive the economy.What Mr. Obama needs to do is level with the American people.

He needs to admit that he may not have done enough on the first try. He needs to remind the country that he’s trying to steer the country through a severe economic storm, and that some course adjustments — including, quite possibly, another round of stimulus — may be necessary.

What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.

Can progressives join forces to fight the health care industry?

Should progressives insist on fighting for a single-payer health care system, or is it more realistic to fight for a public health care plan that competes alongside private insurers. Karen Dolan at the Institute for Policy Studies has an interesting analysis.

A public option may indeed be crafted in such a way to become the wedge that ultimately wins the prize, as public plans under-price costly private plans. The public option could offer public plans designed to adhere strictly to the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ laudable principles of universality, affordability, equality. They could be carefully constructed as to be so cost effective that the Republicans fear that they will crowd out private insurance due to their affordability becomes a reality.

But a public option could also be crafted in such a way to expressly prohibit that outcome by allowing private insurers to cherry-pick the healthiest patients, eventually bankrupting a public plan stuck with the nation's sickest people. If private insurers are allowed to continue the current practice of cultivating and covering the healthiest Americans, the sickest will be dumped into a public plan, thus creating a financially unsustainable situation for the public plans.

These scenarios need to be aired, debated, and dealt with. The way that Obama and progressives on and off Capitol Hill have set the debate thus far, a "robust Public Option" is, effectively, the "left flank," and thereby the very most we can hope for. It becomes the goal rather than the compromise. Had single-payer not been off the table, it might have served as the "left flank," thus making a public option, crafted to lead to single payer, a more politically feasible option, more appealing as the compromise that it is.

Dolan's ultimare message is that members of both camps should cooperate rather than attacking each other.

Why is Wal-Mart supporting Obama’s 'Public Option’ ?

Many of us have been supporting the option for people to buy into a public health-care plan as the best option we're likely to get in the current debate over health care reform.

Dave Lindorff suggests this isn't a realistic compromise:

(T)he plan being promoted by President Obama and by the Democrats in Congress is not real or progressive. It is a plan that will further enrich the health care industry, that will not stop the continuing rise in health care costs, that will still leave millions of people without access to quality medical care, and that will end up costing taxpayers more than they are already paying.

The proof is the support for this plan being offered by the likes of Wal-Mart and the big medical industry players.

You can read the entire post at CommonDreams.org.

This bugs me

I think it's because the weather has been so hot. At night on the front porch I've been seeing a few cockroaches. I've been thinking about going out to the hardware store and finding some roach bait. The only problem is that I've checked out some archy and mehitabel books from the library, and now I feel bad about the idea of killing cockroaches.

But entomology is not my strong suit. The insects I've been seeing might be junebugs. The more I think about it, the more I think they must be junebugs, because they don't scurry away from light the way that cockroaches do. One of these things crawled into my well-lighted living room last night and provided a great deal of entertainment for Spot. I doubt the experience was entertaining for the insect involved, which did not survive the occasion. But Spot needed the exercise.

I am also tempted to be sentimental about ants, whose form of social organization could be described as socialist matriarchy. Unfortunately, my kitchen counter was invaded this morning by what looked like pavement ants, and I had to get out the Terro again.

Can Keynesian economics still work to revive a faltering economy?

I always enjoy Warren Bello's economic essays at Foreign Policy in Focus. In his latest post, Bellow asks whether the great liberal economist John Maynard Keynes is A Man for this Season?

Keynesian economics provides the rationale for President Obama's economic stimulus policies--the idea is that during times of recession, the government should do what it can to stimulate consumption. Bello thinks this strategy may not work in our day and age. For instance, Bello thinks that we need radical restructuring of the relationship between "the central capitalist economies and the global periphery." Furthermore, he argues that increasing consumption in the good old Keynesian way might have unintended consequences as we try to deal with a global climate crisis:

The challenge to economics at this point is raising the consumption levels of the global poor with minimal disruption of the environment, while radically cutting back on environmentally damaging consumption or overconsumption in the North. All the talk of replacing the bankrupt American consumer with a Chinese peasant engaged in American-style consumption as the engine of global demand is both foolish and irresponsible.

Public plan rally at Inhofe's office

As the debate over health care reform heats up, local residents attended a rally outside of Senator James Inhofe's office to urge the senator to support a public plan as part of the package.


The rally was sponsored by moveon.org. The Peace House also had a significant presence.

If you support genuine health care reform, now is the time to contact your elected representatives. The for-profit health-care industry is putting lots of money into keeping a system that is profitable for them, even if it works very badly for ordinary people.

I was on my way home from this rally when I suffered a small personal catastrophe.

Is this bad luck or good luck?

 

So, after the healthcare rally, I stopped at the Red Cup for lunch, and I was waiting at the counter for my sandwich, when someone came in and asked, "Is there anyone here who is driving a white Corolla?"

Witnesses told me that the driver of the car that hit me hit a telephone pole first, and then backed into my car. By the time I got out there, someone had already called the police. Soon a police officer came by and got my information and interviewed the driver of the other car. A little bit later, the police officer told me the other driver had failed--I think he called it an "STSI." Probably a sobriety test. The officer said the other driver was going into jail for driving under the influence. I'm sitting here in the Red Cup right now waiting for another officer to come in to talk to me.

So, this kind of sucks, having my car hit. I don't know at this point if it's drivable or not. It will especially suck if the other driver doesn't have insurance. On the other hand, I wasn't in the car when it was hit. And the people who hang out at the Red Cup are the very best. They were all over the situation like white on rice, so if the guy was thinking about hightailing it out of there, he wouldn't have had a chance.

Those of you who know me may remember that something similar happened to me three years ago, when I was sound asleep in my old apartment and a drunken driver totalled my pickup truck. That time they never caught the person.

I think there might be some greater social or political importance in this situation, but I'm not sure what it is.

Pop was the king of him

Here's another interesting piece on Michael Jackson, at dream not of today.

I found this rather by accident while I was writing the previous post about lightning bugs.

As disconnected from popular culture as I am, the truth is that I'm not terribly familiar with Michael Jackson's music. I don't know much about him as a person. I don't know if sexual abuse allegations made against him several years ago were true--he was acquitted in criminal court, but made a large cash payment to settle a civil case. But looking at him, it seems likely to me that he was himself a victim of severe abuse, as Patricia Williams also pointed out.

Are lightning bugs headed for extinction?

I guess I don't get out enough at night and pay attention to what's going on around me. Last night at the poetry reading down at Galileo, someone read a poem about lightning bugs going extinct. I did not know that this was happening. I used to see lots of lightning bugs back when I was growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s and '70s. Out west, in Oregon and Idaho, I never saw them. I figured it was a regional thing. Since I've moved to Oklahoma City, I've seen them sometimes, but not consistently, and usually not so many as I remember from those hot Philadelphia summer nights long ago.

Anyway, I wondered about this report of lightning bug extinction, so I did a web search. Here's a description of the situation over at dream not of today. Light pollution seems to be a major culprit. Lightning bugs--also called fireflies--require darkness in order to mate.

The best thing I've seen or heard about Michael Jackson...

...is Mirror Man, by Patricia J. Williams, in her Diary of A Mad Law Professor column at The Nation.

Oklahoma tax system is regressive

The OK Policy Blog has the details.

The regressivity of the system is obvious since the percentage paid in taxes drops with each increase in income. Those who are in the lowest 20 percent of income earners–making $12,000 or less each year–pay 12 percent (one-eighth) of their income in taxes. The percentage of income paid in taxes falls slightly for each income group above the middle. Those in the top 1 percent–making $250,000 or more each year–pay 8 percent (one-twelfth) of their income.

As much as we argue about taxes, most of us don’t think poor people should pay more in taxes than rich, but that’s how we’ve set up the system in Oklahoma.

The rest of the post includes proposals for remedying this situation.

Dean Baker on Life, Liberty, and Employer-Provided Health Insurance

Once again, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research hits the nail right on the head. The topic is health care reform:

As Congress starts to delve into the dirt of a health care reform package, the clearest point of conflict is over the existence and structure of a public health care plan. Some members of Congress have thrown down the gauntlet, insisting that they could never allow the public to have the option of buying into a government-run plan.

These members tell us that a government-run plan will be like having the Post Office manage our health care. While the Post Office actually does a pretty good job where I live, if the point is that a government-run plan is going to be bureaucratic and inefficient, then why are opponents of a public plan so worried about giving people the choice to buy into it? If the public plan is bad, then people will just stay with the options currently available in the private sector. As those of who believe in the free markets like to say: “what’s wrong with giving people a choice?”

In addition to the members who just say “no” when it comes to a public plan, there are also members who are willing to allow a public plan, but only if they can be sure that it will not provide real competition with existing private plans. This route involves crippling the public plan in various ways to make it less competitive.

The entire essay is well worth reading.

One thing leads to another...

Speaking of Elizabeth Cady Stantonand the 100th anniversary of the start of suffragette hunger strikes in Britain, I think I've finally found a reliable link to all six volumes of the old History of Woman Suffrage,  which Stanton co-authored. If you follow the link, you will find a Wikipedia article about this history, and at the end of the article are separate links to all six volumes on Google Books. This is a massive work--I downloaded one volume yesterday afternoon, and that one volume took up 35 megabytes of disk space, but well worth looking at.

Hondurans demand ousted president's return

Medea Benjamin reports the details on CommonDreams.org

British suffragette hunger strikes began 100 years ago

I found this fascinating and inspiring story by June Purvis at CommonDreams.org. It originated on www.guardian.co.uk.

One hundred years ago, on 5 July 1909, the imprisoned suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop, a sculptor and illustrator, went on hunger strike. A member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 to campaign for the parliamentary vote for women, she had been sent to Holloway prison for printing an extract from the bill of rights on the wall of St Stephen's Hall in the House of Commons. In her second division cell, Wallace Dunlop refused all food as a protest against the unwillingness of the authorities to recognise her as a political prisoner, and thus entitled to be placed in the first division where inmates enjoyed certain privileges. Her hunger strike, she claimed, was "a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me … refusing all food until this matter is settled to my satisfaction". After three and a half days of fasting, she was released.
Other suffragettes that summer of 1909, believing they had found a powerful weapon with which to fight a stubborn Liberal government, also went on hunger strike. However, the government feared that the early release of such rebellious prisoners would make a mockery of the justice system and by the end of September forcible feeding was introduced, an operation justified as "ordinary hospital treatment" to save the women's lives. Over the next five years, this vicious circle of events was to shape the representation of the suffragette movement for years to come.

Purvis implies that British suffragettes invented the hunger strike, and says that their use of this tactic influenced such activists as Mahatma Gandhi and the Irish nationalist James Connolly. Wikipedia, however, implies that the tactic dates back thousands of years.

Although Purvis doesn't mention this, one political activist much influenced by the tactics of the British suffragettes was the US suffragist Alice Paul. According to Wikipedia, Paul studied in Britain between 1907 and 1910. After hearing suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst speak in 1908, Paul joined the Women's Social and Political Union, and she was arrested and imprisoned three times as a result of her suffrage activism in Britain. Upon her return to the US, Paul became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Dissatisfied with the conservatism of NAWSA, Paul and her colleague Lucy Burns founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.

When their lobbying efforts proved fruitless, Paul and her colleagues formed the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916 and began introducing some of the methods used by the suffrage movement in Britain. Tactics included demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, suffrage watch, fires, and hunger strikes. These actions were accompanied by press coverage and the publication of the weekly Suffragist.^[3]

Alice Paul is widely credited with helping to revive a near-dead US suffrage movement and playing a critical role in winning the vote for US women in 1920. And she used the tactics that she'd learned from her British sisters.

Credit where credit is due

Speaking of Sodom and Gomorrah, I need to give proper credit to Elizabeth Cady Stanton for giving me the idea for that poem. You can find her analysis in The Woman's Bible, which is also available through the OKC area Metropolitan Library System.

Which Biblical morality are we talking about?

I kind of hate to take potshots at Sally Kern. It's not exactly rigorous intellectual exercise. I would like to say that my mother told me never to undertake a battle of wits with an unarmed person, but my mother never actually said that. OK State Rep. Kern (R. Oklahoma City) may be sincerely bigoted, or she may be your typical cynical politician who knows how to fire up her base, but her statements are so outrageous, and have been so ably dissected by so many commentators, that it seems unnecessary to chime in.

But the recent controversy surrounding her "Oklahoma Citizens' Proclamation for Morality" reminded me of an old poem of mine that I meant to read during OKC pride, but didn't get around to. Kern was not actually so tactless as to refer to Sodom and Gomorrah in her proclamation, but she did opine that "our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis." She also begged God to "to have mercy on this nation, to stay His hand of judgment." Given that this old story from the nineteenth chapter of Genesis is often used as an example of God's response to homosexuality, I think it bears retelling from a feminist perspective.

So here's the poem. It's a poem about Lot's wife.

Sodomy

Turned to stone
just like that
left alone for all eternity
for all the gawking tourists
to photograph and talk about.

How did she get mixed up with that Lot, anyway?
He, known as the one righteous man in Sodom,
the kind whom angels come to visit.
He was a pillar of the community
before she was.
He wore his righteousness like a shroud.

His neighbors were not so neighborly.
"Intercourse" is a work that also means "to talk"
but the neighbors didn't want to talk with the angels.
"Take my wife, please,"
a phrase remaining to be invented by some much later wiseass.
But Lot was not about to put his own butt on the line.
"Do not be so wicked," he told the neighbors.
"Take my daughters, they are virgins, you can do as you please to them."
He pulled his righteousness around him like a shroud.

He had offered his dearest possessions.
His neighbors, not deterred, tried to break down the door
only to be driven back by an angelic lightning flash.
Those Sodomites didn't care who they fucked with.
This town could not be saved.
Only the family of the righteous Lot could escape with the angels.
But they must trust in righteousness
and not look back.

What was her name, anyway?
Was she not ready to leave behind
the grief and sorrow of this place
or did she know what tragedy lay ahead?
She could not trust.
The river of salt flowed from her eyes.
She knew what was underneath the shroud.

Flowing powerless like a river of salt,
she could go no further.
She could not conceive
how to protect her daughters from righteousness.
She looked back.
Frozen, now, for all eternity as a bad example.

Lot took his righteousness and her daughters
and made camp in the mountains.
Later, he said the daughters were seductive.
He said they got him drunk.
We've heard that excuse many times since then.
The daughters heard it many times before
and blamed themselves as damaged goods
the neighbors would not accept.
Lot's line went on
to prove a paradigm of righteousness.
The daughters wept many bitter tears.
And their mother, whoever she was
stands alone for all eternity as the first bad example.

I have to say it crossed my mind...

...that the US government might have had something to do with instigating the popular unrest in Iran after the controversial recent election. Apparently many other progressives have harbored similar suspicions. Over on CommonDreams.org, Reese Erlich argues convincing that the US and the CIA couldn't and didn't sponsor or manipulate the current Iranian uprising, and that the Iranian people could and did rise up for themselves.

[ I scheduled this post to appear on the 30th of June, but for some reason it didn't appear at that time. So I'm going to schedule it for Sunday the 5th of July. We'll see what happens.}

Fireworks

I didn't go out to see any fireworks tonight (unless you count stepping out the door to take out the trash while people on my street are setting a few things off). But earlier there was a very dramatic thunderstorm. I was in the midst of printing out a manuscript that a friend had asked to see when after one big boom, all the power went out.

A couple of years ago during the big December ice storm that left me without power for eight days, I swore that I'd never complain about the Oklahoma summer again. Tonight I was reflecting that being without power during the Oklahoma summer could be a worse thing than going without it during an ice storm.

I wandered around my neighborhood trying to figure out how far the outage went. Just around the corner from my house, some nice young people sitting out on a porch offered to let me barbecue a marshmallow on their charcoal grill. So I did, since it had been ever so long since I'd had a toasted marshmallow. Then I proceded to survey the extent of the blackout. It seemed to extend from the north side of 31st to the south side of Hill, and from Western to at least as far as Walker.

When I passed the substation at 31st and Western, there was an OG&E truck parked out front. Just then, some very loud popping sounds emanated from some of the substation equipment, and large sparks jumped into the air. This was not encouraging, but a few minutes later when I passed my house again, I could see that the power had come back on.

Meanwhile, the nice young people on the porch had been joined by another friend, and they were all discussing whether a straight man might shave his testicles without any aspersions being cast on his masculinity. This question was actually posed to me. I gave the only answer possible, which was, "I'm an old-school lesbian feminist, how the hell should I know?" But I offered the opinion that everyone should shave whatever they wanted to shave, and leave alone whatever body hair they liked as it was.

Now there are loud popping sounds out on the street that seem to be caused by fireworks rather than by thunder, and my little cat is sitting under the bed. But she doesn't seem terribly distressed.  All in all, a fairly pleasant evening.

Boren one of 19 House Democrats who oppose health care plan if abortion coverage included

Oklahoma's own Rep. Dan Boren is one of 19 House Democrats who sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi that they will oppose any health care reform bill that doesn't explicity exclude coverage for abortion. The Daily Women's Health Policy Report has the details.

More on President Obama from happening-here?

Here is Part Two of janinsanfran's excellent analysis of the record of the Obama Administration so far. (I linked to Part One yesterday.)

happening-here? is consistently one of my favorite blogs. Not that I agree with everything she has to say. In this second post about the Obama Administration, for instance, she says that a majority of US citizens are so fearful of terrorism that they are willing to accept severe curtailments of civil liberties in order to be "protected." I find myself wondering if maybe most folks are too distracted to pay much attention to political issues. The daily struggle to pay the rent and put food on the table may preoccupy folks so much that they're willing to put up with stuff they would rise up against if they had the time and energy to pay attention.

Which is it?

Over at happening-here? janinsanfran takes on the difficult question, President Obama: Betrayal or Failure?

Read it. As always, she's informative and thought-provoking.

Pride can be a virtue

Had a great time at OKC Pride this past weekend. Rode bike. Survived heat. Saw fine performance by Zone 18 at the festival. Had marvelous time at Herland picnic and at Grace's birthday party afterward. Had fun reading poetry and riding with Herland in the parade. Lots of folks did lots of hard work to put on this fine event. Good time seemed to have been tired by all. Still too tired to write in complete sentences. Will try to post something soon.

Feminist Peace Network to ABC: Don't trivialize role of Iranian women

Here is the latest excellent post from Feminist Peace Network on the situation in Iran.

Iran Online Newroom

The Iran Online Newroom looks very interesting.

They had a democracy until we crushed it

Stephen Kinzer has an excellent post over at guardian.co.uk about the sordid history of US intervention in Iran. Kinzer describes the 1953 US overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq. The US coup resulted in the re-installation of the despotic Shah Reza Pahlavi. The shah's tyranny--with the complete support of the US government--resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the current tyrants to power.

The demonstrators in Iran who are protesting the possibly fraudulent results of the recent elections are carrying pictures of Mossadeq. Their message is that they want freedom without foreign intervention.

As Kinzer points out:

The US sowed the seeds of repression in Iran by deposing Mossadeq in 1953, and then helped bathe Iran in blood by giving Saddam Hussein generous military aid during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Militants in Washington who now want the US to intervene on behalf of Iranian protesters either are unaware of this history or delude themselves into thinking that Iranians have forgotten it. Some of them, in fact, are the same people who were demanding just last year that the US bomb Iran – an act which would have killed many of the brave young protesters they now hold up as heroes.

America's moral authority in Iran is all but non-existent. To the idea that the US should jump into the Tehran fray and help bring democracy to Iran, many Iranians would roll their eyes and say: "We had a democracy here until you came in and crushed it!

For more information, see Wikipedia's biography of Mossadeq. A New York Times history of the C.I.A. in Iran is here.

No holiday from hunger

See this thought-provoking post on OK Policy Blog.

Rep. Lee sponsors single-payer health plan bill

I'm still too busy to blog, but I wanted to mention this great post on Feminist Peace Network about Rep. Lee’s Universal Health Service Act and why women need a single-payer plan.

Here is the link FPN provided to Rep. Lee's own description of House Bill 3000.

The FPN post (it's a beautiful thing, please go and read all of it) also includes a link to an endorsement of single-payer by Our Bodies Ourselves. Here's part of the Our Bodies Ourselves post that I found particularly interesting. They are quoting Judy Norsigian, OBOS executive director:

Advocating for single payer is an uphill battle, but not a losing cause, said Norsigian, citing the current organizing efforts around single payer that are drawing congressional and media attention.

"Our efforts could also assist those now seeking to strengthen so-called public health insurance options designed to compete with private insurance companies," said Norsigian. "Though such government-sponsored health care plans are likely doomed to fail, they may ultimately be the only compromise solutions that could succeed in Congress."

The American Medical Association, which President Obama addressed on Monday, objects to a shift away from private insurance coverage, but Norsigian said that's to be expected.

"The AMA now represents fewer than 25 percent of all doctors, about 250,000. Although some doctors, mostly specialists, will have greater income under a private insurance system, most doctors view a single-payer solution as the best approach to health care reform. In fact, the second largest physician group, the American College of Physicians, which represents about 126,000 doctors, is on record in support of single payer," said Norsigian.

Low-down on domestic terrorism

AngryBlackBitch tells it like it is.

No hole in her head

Just found this YouTube clip of the incomparable Malvina Reynolds:

Of course, Malvina also has her own Wikipedia entry. Plus, her daughter Nancy Schimmel is writing a biography and blogging about the process. If you'd like to know more, or to find more music videos or tidbits of  information, you can do the Google search yourself.

A trashy post

 

I've still got to put primer around the edges, windows and doorframes, but I've tested my blue samples, and I think my color scheme is going to work. Meanwhile, I decided that it's getting hot fast and I'd better get going on putting a working air conditioner into my main room. First, I had to get rid of the dead one. With a little help from one of the friendly folks at the collective household up the street, I got the old monster out of the wall and dragged it to the curb.

Within an hour, metal scavengers had taken away the guts of the thing:

 

Shortly thereafter, the outer shell also disappeared. But I had other stuff to put out for Big Trash Day. I'm clearing away overgrown sumacs and birches from along my fence line, and getting rid of the remains of an old sidewalk along the east side of the house so that I can add a much needed French drain.

Not that Paul Bunyan or John Henry will be worried about the competition (yet), but I thought it was pretty good evening's work for a middle-aged woman armed only with a bow saw, some loppers, a shovel, a sledge hammer and a pick.

Prime time

If I don't post a lot in the next little while, it's because I've got a lot of house projects that I'm working on.

I'm painting my front bedroom before I move my bed and dresser in there. It's the one room in the house that has an air conditioner at the moment, and the Oklahoma summer is starting to get warm. I'm priming the walls while I decide what color to paint them. I think I've forgotten everything my painting friends taught me back in January, but it's my house, and I get to learn by making mistakes. Whatever I end up with will at least hide the crappy paneling. If I decide I don't like it, I can repaint it another time.

I'm still not sure exactly what color I'm painting it. Probably some shade of blue, to help me feel cooler. Maybe I'll paint each wall a slightly different shade. I thought about stripes, but that would probably drive me nuts. People always say, "It's your house, you can paint the walls black if you want." Um, well, I think it won't do that. If y'all want to paint your walls black, I hope you enjoy the experience and the results. For me, what it's all about is the freedom not to worry about a less than perfect result, and the freedom to try again.

Web discoveries

I would like to thank Angry Black Bitch for the webroll link to Brown Sugar & Cinnamon, and I would like to thank Brown Sugar & Cinnamon for the webroll link to Alternative Tulsa, and I would like to thank Alternative Tulsa for the link to Colbert Takes on 'Old White Men' Who Call SCOTUS Nominee a Racist.

The fatal flaw in President Obama's health care plan

President Obama's health care plan has a fatal flaw, and ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES points this out in a beautifully written post.

Meanwhile, Mybarackobama.com is asking us to sign a pledge of support for the president's three health care principles, which are, as follows:

* Reduce Costs — Rising health care costs are crushing the budgets of governments, businesses, individuals and families and they must be brought under control
* Guarantee Choice — Americans must have the freedom to keep whatever doctor and health care plan they have, or to select a new doctor or health care plan if they choose
* Ensure Quality Care for All — All Americans must have quality and affordable health care

This all sounds perfectly lovely, except that it is entirely lacking in specifics. As Echidne puts it,

And pigs would float if they were born with parachutes. I'm getting tired of a list of desires when combined with a plan which will do nothing to fulfill them. Sure, we need affordable insurance. But how are we going to get that?

Note that the reason other countries have lower health care costs is largely because they have one dominant source of public health care funding, perhaps combined with a small private insurance market. It is this which keeps the costs low. One large buyer can negotiate low prices and take advantage of huge quantity discounts and the public sector has the power to make new rules and regulations to limit the high rate of price increases in health care.

But we are not going to have that. We might not even get a public insurance option! So what is it exactly that we would get in the most recent Obama plan?

I agree with Echidne that we need to fight for the public insurance option. As for myself, if there is not a public insurance option included -- and at least a fair discussion of the merits of a single-payer plan--I am not going to be able to support Obama on this one.

Some good news that didn't make the malestream media

Thanks to The Angry Black Woman for this story about how a black woman, Rear Admiral Michelle Howard, commanded the ship that rescued Captain Richard Phillips after he was kidnapped by Somalian pirates,

A thought-provoking post on the Tiller murder...

... from Bitch Ph.D.

Thoughts on the death of Dr. George Tiller

I found this out by accident Monday night while reading a friend's comments on Facebook about an unrelated subject. Abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered Sunday morning while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church in Wichita, Kansas.

Dr. Tiller and his clinic were controversial in part because he was a provider of late-term abortions--abortions performed after the fetus is supposed to be able to survive outside of its mother's body. These are the abortions that the Christian Right uses as "proof" that the right to choose is the same as "baby killing." Even Frank Schaeffer, a former Christian Right leader who has recanted many of his former positions, claims that the availability of late-term abortions is partly to blame for Dr. Tiller's murder:

Contributing to an extreme and sometimes violent climate has not only been the fault of the antiabortion crusaders. The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It's the late term abortions that horrify most people...(T)he Roe ruling was an over broad court decision that makes abortion legal even in the last weeks of pregnancy. Take away the pictures of all those dead late term fetuses and everything changes emotionally. Democracy and civil debate is messy but if abortion had been argued state-by-state abortion would be legal in almost all our states today and probably the laws would be written more like those of Europe, where late-term abortions (of the kind Dr. Tiller specialized in performing) are illegal and/or highly discouraged.

Schaeffer is seriously oversimplifying Roe v. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court decision that affirmed--with some serious qualifications--a woman's right to choose. Writing for the court, Justice Harry Blackmun summarized his opinion as follows:

1. A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a lifesaving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.

In other words, under Roe v. Wade, once the stage of viability has been reached, abortion is legal only to protect the pregnant woman's life or health. According to Wikipedia, the law in Kansas, where Dr. Tiller's clinic is located, "prohibits aborting viable fetuses, which is generally midway through the second trimester, unless two doctors certify that continuing the pregnancy would cause the woman `substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.'[25]"

Opponents of abortion rights often argue that late-term abortions are often performed for trivial reasons, such as "temporary depression" on the part of the pregnant woman. Barack Obama, during the recent presidential campaign, famously said that pregnant women should not be allowed to obtain late-term abortions for reasons of "mental distress." But as one woman described eloquently on RHRealityCheck.org, this mental distress is most often caused by the discovery by the mother that she is carrying a fetus that has such serious problems that it will never be able to survive outside her body.

RHRealityCheck.org has many excellent posts on Dr. Tiller and his murder, including a forum on which women are sharing their personal experience of late term abortion, and also this report that Tiller's colleague Leroy Carhart is working to ensure that Tiller's practice continues.

Where does Sonia Sotomayor stand on reproductive choice?

RHRealityCheck.org had a link to this L.A. Times article that describes Sonia Sotomayor's unclear record on freedom of reproductive choice. Here's another RHRealityCheck post on Sotomayor, which discusses both her record on reproductive choise, and her judicial record in general.

She sticks to the rule of law, respects precedent and writes thoughtful and reasoned opinions. She was nominated to the federal district court by George H.W. Bush. Her decisions are left-leaning insofar as she generally seeks to protect Constitutional rights by supporting religious freedom and free speech, and she often sides with the plaintiffs in discrimination cases - hardly "activist" material. But she's not a liberal dream by any stretch. She has some bad First Amendment cases to her name (Doninger v. Niehoff, where she sided with a school that disqualified a student from running for senior class secretary after the student posted a vulgar school-related message on her blog), and some bad Fourth Amendment ones (United States v. Howard, where she held it was constitutional for state troopers to entice suspects away from their cars in order to allow other troopers to search the vehicles for drugs). Those cases, though, are the exceptions rather than the rule; generally, Sotomayor follows a fairly consistent Constitutional philosophy, and errs on the side of maintaining rather than limiting rights.

Domestic violence is more deadly than swine flu

Feminist Peace Network points out that While We Were Obsessing About Swine Flu, 68 People Died From Domestic Violence.

US covert military actions continue even though Bush is gone

Conn Hallinan has an interesting analysis of continuing covert operations by the Obama Administration at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Electrinic Frontier Foundation launches copyright education website

As someone who has to deal with copyright law every day, I can tell you that the entertainment industry seems to go to extremes to protect what it considers its legal right to prevent copying of the material it has produced. Carried to extremes, this stifles artistic creativity and freedom of speech.

Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new website to give help teachers teach their students a more balanced view of copyright law. Here is the press release announcing the new web site. A link to the actual web site is here.

Gender & Sexuality Law Blog on Sonia Sotomayor

“Justice Sotomayor” - A View from Columbia Law School

"Freedom of speech" versus women's privacy and safety

You can read about the disturbing case of Barnes v. Yahoo over at Feminist Law Professors. Here is the more recent post, and here is the original post.

OK Policy Blog comments on health care coverage initiative

David over at OK Policy Blog has this commentary on the Oklahoma State Coverage Initiative.

I'm not sure what I think of either the initiative or the commentary, but it's sure an interesting read. The SCI is apparently a project of Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland which has been developed over the past two years. The goal is to find a way to bring health care coverage to the 640,000 Oklahomans who lack it. Last week a meeting of the SCI reportedly reached consensus on a way to do this. According to David:

The cornerstone of the plan would be a gradual expansion of Insure Oklahoma, the public-private partnership which provides subsidized employer-based coverage for working adults, along with a public product for eligible adults without access to employer coverage. The program, which is funded by a portion of tobacco tax revenues approved by voters in 2004, has now grown to cover just under 20,000 Oklahomans, which is about half of the capacity under existing revenues. The principal SCI recommendation is to generate new revenues by assessing a dedicated fee on all health insurance claims paid by health insurers in Oklahoma. It is estimated than an initial 1 percent fee would generate $78 million that, along with matching federal funds, could insure an additional 80,000 Oklahomans.

David also summarizes other parts of the plan:

In addition to expanding Insure Oklahoma through a targeted assessment, the SCI plan includes several other components:

• It endorsed creation of lower-cost commercial health plans targeting younger adults through the waiving of mandated benefits, as was recently enacted by HB 2026. This approach is unlikely to have any real impact on expanding coverage as insurers already enjoy considerable flexibility in the individual market and limited-benefit plans have proven unpopular with consumers;
• It added a recommendation that OK Policy has strongly advocated to extend Medicaid coverage to all adults with incomes below the poverty level. Currently, Medicaid extends to less than 40 percent of the poverty level, and this population of very-low income adults is unlikely to be able to afford any of the cost-sharing obligations required of Insure Oklahoma
• The group weighed recommending an individual health insurance mandate, in conjunction with guaranteed issue of coverage, but stopped short. Instead, they are calling for a variety of strategies to “induce” Oklahomans to purchase coverage, stating that “the failure of these strategies will require policymakers to consider mandating that all individuals secure health insurance”.

David admits that it's uncertain how well the plan will work, but seems to believe that on the whole it "represents a realistic, middle-ground approach to tackling this huge and urgent issue." Meaning, perhaps, that it doesn't seriously tread on toes of insurance companies and won't arouse their well funded opposition, even if it can't result in significant expansion of health care coverage?

Single payer health-insurance is often criticized on the grounds that it is not a middle-of-the-road, realistic approach. But single-payer, or possibly the creation of a voluntary public health care plan that could compete with private insurers, seems to be the only effective ways to actually contain health care costs and provide universal coverage. If the Oklahoma State Coverage Initiative is a realistic and effective approach, surely it will succeed without any support from me. Given what I've read, it's difficult for me to work up any enthusiasm about working to support it.

Inter Press Service on Sonia Sotomayor

U.S.: Obama Picks Latina Judge as First Supreme Court Nominee

Another interesting post on gay marriage from the Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Reflecting on The Way to Win Marriage Rights from the Perspective of Roe v. Wade

Why not just get rid of marriage?

Yesterday, as most everyone seemed to expect, the California Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of last November's anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8. Feminist Law Professors cross-posted Katherine Frank's interesting analysis of Marriage in California After Strauss v. Horton, which also appeared on the Gender & Sexuality Law Blog. On this second blog, after a bit of exploration, I found a wonderful post from the same author which argued that it would make the most sense for the California Supreme Court to disestablish marriage.

So is marriage more than a word?  Did the justices of the California Supreme Court simply not “get it” when they asked why Prop 8 didn’t just deny same sex couples a word, a label, the nomenclature of marriage? The plaintiffs in the Prop 8 case insisted that the fight is not simply over a word.  It is a fight for dignity and respect.  They claim and indeed insist that denying the label marriage to the unions of same sex couples is an insult, a degradation, and a dignity harm.  Yet to do so is to take for granted that marriage is something sacred, something to be honored and something that dignifies those who earn its blessings.  It is to argue from within a normative universe whose values you take for granted and embrace.  And it is to base your legal arguments on the legitimacy of those values - the recognition of the harm alleged in the Prop 8 case depends on it.

Hear, hear.

Update on email hoax case

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that a Massachusetts judge has ruled that a dorm room search for evidence of a "prank" email was illegal.

I reported on this case a about a month ago. While the email in question wasn't criminal, it wasn't exactly a "prank," either. It involved outing a gay student to a campus electronic mailing list. Unfortunately, the student whose dorm room was searched was identified as a suspect on the dubious grounds that he had computer expertise.

Trying not to do anything rash

This afternoon, some friends came over to see my little house. One of these women told me she thought that the plant with shiny red leaves that has spread through so much of my back yard might be poison ivy. I'd had that same thought myself, but concluded it was something different. I've pulled lots of it out of my yard, and haven't had a reaction, so I'd thought I had nothing to worry about.

But, then again, back when I was a Girl Scout in Philadelphia, I used to get the worst cases of poison ivy. Once, I had a big red scar on my face and one eye was almost swollen shut. Another time, I managed to get a poison ivy rash in the dead of winter. Hearing my friend explain how much this thing looked like poison ivy, I could feel myself start to itch. If this stuff turned out to be my old nemesis, I was going to be in for some itchy times indeed.

What to do?

I did a web search on poison ivy pictures and found the Poison Ivy, Oak and Sumac Information Center. A quick search of their site turned up a photo of the thing growing in my back yard, which appears to be something called pepper vine. Comments on the site said that this plant can also cause a rash, but so far I haven't gotten one.

This must be my lucky week. I don't have poison ivy and the Terro got rid of the ants.

Antipathy and anticipation

For the past week or two, there have been a very few ants wandering aimlessly around my kitchen counter. I could trace them back to a line that was marching along my living room basement. My kitchen is mostly clean. It hasn't particularly gotten dirtier in the past couple of days. But for some reason, this morning, the right-hand countertop and the cabinet shelves above it were swarming with ants. A bit of investigation showed that they had found a little chocolate pastry from the supermarket that comes clad in only a cardboard package. Discarding the pastry, wiping up under the honey and jam, and murdering thousands of ants with my dishrag did little to discourage them. Convinced that a bounty of sugary stuff awaits them in my kitchen, they just keep coming.

It's time to get serious about ant eradication. I went out to Ace Hardware and got the Terro. Tonight when I get home I'll put it out. It's sugar syrup with boric acid in it, and I've had good luck with it in the past. You pour out a little bit of the stuff on a flat piece of cardboard or plastic and put it where the ants will find it. At first, you draw more ants than you can imagine. They all come out to get this wonderful treat and dutifully carry it back to their nest, where it kills them and their offspring. Ants are difficult not to admire for their hard work and team spirit. I kind of hate to do them in. But it's kinda gross when they climb all over everything. (By this afternoon they had even infested Spot's dish of cat food.) At least with the Terro, I figure they'll die happy.

My little house

Here are some photos that I've taken of my house since I've moved in. As I've said before, it's a sweet little house, but it's going to keep me busy doing repairs for a while.

Retreating

You won't see any posts for a few days because I've gone to the Herland Spring Retreat. See you there?

GOP ought to be made to live up to its health-care rhetoric

So writes Lois Uttley in an interesting analysis of the health care debate at RHRealityCheck.org.

Cooking with the sun...

...is usually practical in Oklahoma nine months of the year. But this spring is a little bit different, as Peak Oil Hausfrau discovered when she tried to demonstrate solar cooking to a Sierra Club outing last weekend.

The cure was worse than the disease

I don't know why I happened to remember this, but I did. Back in the mid-1970s, during the Ford Administration, there was great concern about the possible public health effects of an outbreak of swine flu. The flu outbreak itself was relatively minor, but the vaccine that the federal government encouraged everyone to get had serious side effects.

Wondering if I remembered this right, I did a Google search and found this Los Angeles Times article that tells the story. The death of a soldier at Ft. Dix in New Jersey raised concerns that the deadly influenza virus that killed so many people in 1918 had returned. More than 40 million US citizens received a vaccine against the flu. More than 500 people contracted a disorder that causes temporary paralysis from this vaccine, and 25 people died.

In the current wave of concern about the H1N1 flu virus that has spread internationally, I think it's well to remember that it may be impossible to predict exactly what will happen with an outbreak of any contagious disease. Ironically, CNNhealth.com reports that "Acting CDC Director Richard Besser...said U.S. health officials are examining whether people who received flu shots for the swine flu in 1976 may have some level of protection from the current swine flu."

US also imprisons journalists for dubious reasons

Yesterday I noted that journalist Roxana Saberi had been released by the Iranian government after being imprisoned for several months on trumped-up espionage charges. Over at CommonDreams.org I found a piece by Glenn Greenwald (originally published on salon.com) that documents several cases of the US government imprisoning foreign journalists for basically no reason.

For instance:

Right now -- as the American press corps celebrates itself for demanding Saberi's release in Iran -- the U.S. continues to imprison Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance photographer for Reuters, even though an Iraqi court last December -- more than five months ago -- found that there was no evidence to justify his detention and ordered him released. The U.S. -- over the objections of the CPJ, Reporters Without Borders and Reuters -- refused to recognize the validity of that Iraqi court order and announced it would continue to keep him imprisoned.

Feminist author Marilyn French dead at 80

Carol Jenkins has an obituary at the Women's Media Center site.

Right here in Oklahoma City

There is this really cool blog: Peak Oil Hausfrau. Check it out.

Roxana Saberi freed

The government of Iran has freed jailed reporter Roxana Saberi. BBC NEWS has the details. Saberi was not acquitted on appeal. Her sentence was reduced and suspended. She was banned from working as a journalist in Iran for five years. This seems to me to be a tacit admission on the part of the Iranian government that the spying charges against her were baseless. If she has really been spying on them, would they allow her to come back in five years and do the same thing?

According to the BBC, "her partner, film director Bahman Ghobadi - whose work has won prizes in Cannes and Berlin - said Ms Saberi was a victim of Iran's `political games'." That sounds about right.

State budget for 2010 won't be OK

The OK Policy Blog has the details.

In spite of all the attention paid in Oklahoma in recent weeks to such urgent matters as the Ten Commandments, stem cells, and the Flaming Lips, the real work of the 2009 legislative session has been unfolding largely behind the scenes as key legislative leaders from the House and Senate try to hammer out an agreement on the budget for the upcoming year, FY ‘10. From conversations I had last week at the Capitol with a number of legislators, fiscal staff, lobbyists, and agency personnel, it appears that the main outlines of the budget have been decided, although some key issues and details remain to be determined.

Apparently, most state agencies will be facing budget cuts of 7.5 to 10 percent in fiscal year 2010.

Writing on

Posting here may become a little bit sporadic in the near future as I not only have a bunch of work to do on my house, but I am also trying to get back to work on Urban Legends, my convenience store novel. It's the first novel I started to write, during National Novel Writing Month in 2006. So, not knowing anything about what I was doing, I started right in on a complicated multi-plot novel. I have often said Urban Legends is what might have resulted if George Eliot had written a Naiad novel. Except, George Eliot  was really good at writing complicated multi-plot novels, and I am not--at least not yet. (If you're not familiar with Naiad Press, you could check out their Wikipedia entry. If you aren't into following links and doing research today, your average Naiad novel was a sort of Harlequin romance for lesbians.)

Anyway, I've been floundering around a bit, wondering what I am going to do with Urban Legends. It's a mess.  I tell myself that we learn by making messes. Maybe I should give it up as a writing exercise that has taken me as far as it can. But the truth is, I'm kind of in love with the characters, and I'm kind of in love with the idea of a novel about lesbians who hand out in a convenience store in downtown Oklahoma City. So I've been re-reading George Eliot's Middlemarch and Dusty's Queen of Hearts Diner by Lee Lynch, trying to figure out some stuff about how to re-build this novel.

Wish me luck.

Thanks, but no thanks

The Daily Women's Health Policy Report said on May 6 that the president of America's Health Insurance Plans has offered to end the practice of charging women more than men for private health insurance.

About 9% of U.S. residents, including about 5.7 million women, are insured through individual policies. Unlike employer-sponsored plans, premiums for individual insurance policies typically charge women higher premiums than men (Alonso-Zaldivar, AP/Contra Costa Times, 5/5). Women in these plans can be charged 25% to 50% more than men for the same coverage, according to the Times. Insurers say the disparity results from women using more health care than men, especially during their childbearing years.

Eliminating this form of discrimination against women sounds like a great idea, right? But wait, there's a catch.

Democrats, including President Obama and congressional leaders, have proposed creating a public insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. During a congressional hearing on how to provide health insurance to people who don't have it, Karen Ignagni, president of AHIP, made the offer to end discrimination against women seeking private insurance--if the government doesn't create the public health insurance plan.

Now let's reason this out. Most likely, the proposed public insurance plan would not discriminate against women. Which means lots and lot of women--maybe as many as 5.7 million of them--would stop giving their money to private insurers and sign up for the public plan. As I've written in a previous post, the option to choose a public health plan has significant drawbacks to the option of creating a single-payer health insurance program. But this situation makes it obvious that private insurers don't want to have to compete with a public plan, which would probably offer superior care at a lower cost than private insurance. I don't think we should let the private insurers try to bargain their way out of this one.

Cinco de Mayo, a few days later

I always forget what Cinco de Mayo celebrates, so I did a Google search on it. Then, I had to leave for work on May 5th before I'd finished the post. But it seems to me that the information is still worth knowing.

According to Wikipedia:

Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for "fifth of May") is a regional holiday in Mexico, primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla, with some limited recognition in other parts of Mexico.^[1][2] The holiday commemorates the Mexican army's unlikely defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.^[3][4]

This is not at all the same as Mexican Independence Day, which fell on Sept. 16, 1810. Nevertheless, it represented a significant victory by the Mexican army over a much larger French force.

According to vivacincodemayo.org:

The French had landed in Mexico (along with Spanish and English troops) five months earlier on the pretext of collecting Mexican debts from the newly elected government of democratic President (and Indian) Benito Juarez. The English and Spanish quickly made deals and left. The French, however, had different ideas.

Under Emperor Napoleon III, who detested the United States, the French came to stay. They brought a Hapsburg prince with them to rule the new Mexican empire. His name was Maximilian; his wife, Carolota. Napoleon's French Army had not been defeated in 50 years, and it invaded Mexico with the finest modern equipment and with a newly reconstituted Foreign Legion. The French were not afraid of anyone, especially since the United States was embroiled in its own Civil War.

Wikipedia notes that the holiday is of limited importance in Mexico, but that it serves in the United States as a way for Mexican-Americans to celebrate their heritage--much the same role that St. Patrick's Day plays for US citizens of Irish descent. Not only that, the Mexican Army, though victorious at Puebla, was unable to keep the French from installing Maxmillian I as Emperor of Mexico in 1864. Eventually, however, the democratically elected government of Benito Juarez  was able to regain power with the help of large quantities of weapons that had been conveniently "lost" by US forces near the Mexican border. Juarez executed Maxmillian in 1867.

Vivacincodemayo.org suggests that the Mexican victory at Puebla on Cinco de Mayo, 1862 may have played a role in allowing the US government to survive long enough to aid Juarez.

The Mexicans had won a great victory that kept Napoleon III from supplying the confederate rebels for another year, allowing the United States to build the greatest army the world had ever seen.  This grand army smashed the Confederates at Gettysburg just 14 months after the battle of Puebla, essentially ending the Civil War.

This year the celebration of this famous victory over European imperialism may have been subdued because of swine flu and difficult economic conditions. Here's hoping that next year will be better.

Bill to strengthen grocery tax rebate unlikely to pass Oklahoma Legislature this session

Oklahoma Policy Institute has the details.

There are worse things than being fat...

...including the health problems often caused by popular weight-loss supplements. This Los Angeles Times story describes the side-effects that caused the Food and Drug Administration to recall the weight-loss supplement known as hydroxycut.

The kitty in the window

I took this a couple of weeks ago before I got rid of the pool. Spot likes to sit in my kitchen window and look out at the back yard.