Majority leader will use reconcilliation to pass health bill

t r u t h o u t has this report about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to use the budget reconcilliation process to pass a health care bill through the Senate. This process allows the Democrats to pass a bill with a 51-vote majority, rather than needing to garner 60 votes to overcome a threatened Republican filibuster. Is this good news or bad news? Commentator Robert Kuttner points out that as long as we have a for-profit healthcare system, costs are likely to continue spiraling out of control, and substantial numbers of people will lack useful coverage. I find myself deeply ambivalent over the question of whether President Obama's bill is better than nothing. It doesn't seem to be clear at this point whether the Senate will even pass a bill with any form of public option. It is oddly comforrting, in the grip of this ambivalence, that my opinions on this subject will have no effect whatsoever on the far-right congressional delegation of my home state, Oklahoma.

There is one thing that I am quite clear about. The various young male progressives out on the 'net who call for the Democrats to "grow a pair of balls" and pass meaningful health care reform are voicing a hope that is patently stupid  The possession of testicles does not qualify someone to help make wise and courageous public policy. We have a genteel sufficiency of testicles in Congress already, thank you very much.

I'm not buying it.

I'm not posting very much lately because I'm in the middle of rewriting a novel. And posts may be less frequent over the indefinite future because I've canceled my at-home Internet access and landline phone. The phone and the Internet were very nice luxuries, but Cox Communications seemed to keeping finding inventive new ways to raise their prices. I did the arithmetic and figured out that they are getting about $700/year of my hard-earned money.

Cox would give me better rates on phone and Internet if I would get cable t.v. from them. But I don't want or need television, and my total cost would go up substantially. Other utilities -- the ones that are real necessities in an urban environment, like gas and electricity -- have also been going up. So I decided that I could get by with my little by-the-minute cell phone and the free Internet that is available at the public library and local coffeehouses. A side benefit of this is that I will be able to use the Internet more mindfully for the things that are really important to me, and not as a mindless time-waster when I am tired or bored.

My own situation reminded me of a story I heard on The Takeaway a few weeks ago. According to this public radio newscast, "The Obama administration has made universal access to broadband Internet a top priority, but a new FCC study says that access or no access, 31 percent of Americans can't afford the cost." As difficult economic times continue, with many people continuing to lose their jobs and fall behind on their mortgage payments, I would think that the percentage of people unable to afford home Internet service will only increase.

Given that times are difficult and most people would have less money to spend, it would seem odd that Cox would keep raising its prices. The laws of supply and demand would seem to work against this. If people have less money to spend, demand for things like high-speed Internet access ought to fall, and if demand falls, prices ought to fall as well. Maybe the marketing geniuses at Cox have decided that people are looking for ways to spend less money on entertainment outside the home, and will pay more money for Internet and cable t.v.

Free-market fundamentalists would say that capitalists make profits by offering customers superior goods and services, and that prices go up when demand for these services increases.But it is my observation and experience is that real world corporations do their very best to ignore the supposed laws of supply and demand. When demand is stagnant or falling, they try to make up for loss of revenue by raising prices. Whether this works well for the corporations, whether they increase their revenue more than enough to make up for a resulting loss of business, is something that I don't know. But it's pretty clear to me that it doesn't work well for the rest of us.

Obama's OSHA wants to track musuloskeletal disorder

Anyone who has ever suffered a repetitive motion injury at work will probably be interested in this post at t r u t h o u t.

A complicated tea party

This post from The Hutchinson Political Report is the best analysis I've seen of the right-wing "tea party" movement.

Revolutionary crocuses

Alice Walker has her revolutionary petunias, but if I were a poet, I would write about crocuses. How they bloom where they're not planted. How it matters not how desolate the winter, how wracked with war or fraught with flood, here comes Candlemas and there are the crocuses, shoving up through the mud, pushing out through the snow. I half think they could crack concrete if they had a mind to. I saw one growing once where an old slab had been demolished after maybe 40 years.The flower is fragile. A hard rain will melt it in an instant. But the bulb beneath is tough, and next year she will pour forth her delicate color again.

You might imprison her in your garden, but once she's lost the blossom that you captured her for, she will grow her leaves green and fat for her own pleasure and nourishment. Starting alone, she multiplies and spreads far beyond your established borders. She knows when to hide, when to go underground, and when to rise up singing, by the dozen, by the thousand, for she is related to everything and understands all. She may be crushed by the heel of the mighty, but understand, the flame of a million blooming crocuses will transform the landscape forever.

A careful reader of this poem will notice that it refers to crocuses blooming at Candlemas, about a month earlier than they bloom in Oklahoma. That's because I wrote this poem years ago in Western Oregon.

This started out as a post about the health care summit

Democracy Now! has this fascinating analysis of yesterday's healthcare summit. Amy Goodman interviews Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review and pediatrician Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program. PHNP advocates for a single-payer system. Despite PHNP's requests to be included in that discussion, no advocate for single-payer was included in the summit. (Rep. Dennis Kucinich would have been a logical choice.) Dr. Flowers talks about the role of powerful campaign contributors in keeping single-payer off the table. Trudy Lieberman says that since its founding, the United States has been deeply divided on the proper role of the federal government. (A link to video of the entire summit is here.)

Lieberman's comments on this topic were particularly interesting to me. My own reading in American history tell me that she's right. I've been pondering the irony that the forces that advocate "individual freedom" and "small government" have often been the same voices that advocate the freedom of rich white men to dominate everyone else. During the Civil War, for instance, the South broke away in order to preserve the property rights of slaveholders against the supposed tyranny of the federal government.

It seems to me that even in the 21st century, the US keeps re-fighting the Civil War, with the so-called red states representing a slightly reconfigured Confederacy. In the 19th century, we had slaveholders. Today we have giant corporations that battle to keep the federal government from interfering with their property rights. These corporations portray the federal government as a tyrant that would interfere with our individual freedom to choose our own healthcare options. They cover up  their own control over our lives. They manipulate us with rhetoric about "individual freedom."

I find myself terrifically ambivalent about the role of government. In the imperfect world we have now, it seems to me that the government has the potential to act as a countervailing power to large and oppressive private interests. My anarchist friends would remind me that the government is often the wholly owned subsidiary of corporate interests. This internal debate has been at the center of my political life -- how to work toward a radically transformed, egalitarian world, while not being frozen by some idea of revolutionary purity into opposing programs that help real people right now.

I don't know if I'll ever have a solution to this dilemma. We humans are such contradictory creatures. We can never be truly independent. We are born naked and helpless, and we rely on each other for survival throughout our entire lives. Yet we aren't sheep. We have these stubborn, creative individual selves. I think radical lesbian philosopher Sarah Hoagland has the best take on the topic, with a concept that she calls "autokeonony." But that is a topic for another time.

Is the public option worth fighting for?

Writing on CommonDreams.org, Andy Coates of Physicians for a National Health Program says Do Not Resuscitate the ‘Public Option.’

All along, adding a feeble public insurance plan to the insurance market has been but a very poor excuse to support “insurance reform” that will criminalize the uninsured, divert billions of tax dollars to subsidize unaffordable private insurance premiums and protect pharmaceutical industry super-profits.

Another world is still possible. It is called Medicare-for-all, expanded and improved.

The public option is back?

Talking Points Memo says that a public health care insurance plan might go back into the Senate health care bill, and they have the video from Rachel Maddow to prove it.

Health bill compromise reportedly near...

...or so says the Women's Health Policy report of the National Partnership for Women & Families. The deal could supposedly be announced this weekend that would resolve the conflicts between the House and Senate versions of the bill. No report of what this bill might actually contain, however.

Feminist abortion activist Jody Howard dies

Our Bodies Ourselves on Facebook has posted a link to the obituary for Jody Howard at chicagotribune.com. Howard was a co-founder of "Jane," the abortion service provided by the Chicago Women's Liberation Union before Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure.

According to the obituary, Howard became a feminist at Michigan State University,.After graduation, she moved with her husband to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. She became involved in a variety of progressive causes, including the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and the American Civil Liberties Union. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease while pregnant with her daughter. She needed an abortion for health reasons as the result of a later, unexpected pregnancy. In order to get a legal abortion, she was required to go through two psychiatric evaluations. This experience helped to inspire Howard to co-found Jane.

A forceful advocate for causes she backed, Ms. Howard "had a great deal of personal charisma and (at the same time) could offer a very nice analysis of the issue," [former Jane member Martha] Scott said.

With her daughters, Ms. Howard participated in a blockade of the Rock Island Arsenal to protest war. At an ACLU fundraiser at Hugh Hefner's Gold Coast mansion, she showed up with small pictures of naked men that she posted here and there.

"She was escorted out," her ex-husband said.

A commenter on Our Bodies Ourselves Facebook post pointed out that more information about Jane can be found at this page on the Chicago Women's Liberation Union herstory site.

In memory of the poet Lucille Clifton

Meta Watershed has a tribute to the poet Lucille Clifton, who died on Saturday.

What's the emergency?

The things that right-wing Republicans and mainstream news outlets use to stir up and manipulate popular fear are not always the things that really endanger us.

For instance, Truthout has cross-posted Hold Onto Your Underwear: This Is Not a National Emergency from TomDispatch.com. In this essay, Tom Englehardt compares the 290 fatalities that would have occurred on Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day -- if "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been successful -- with the things that actually kill US citizens:

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

In this list, Englehardt doesn't address our national health insurance situation, but I think he should have. Lack of access to lack of health care seems to be a real emergency in the US. According to the authors of this report,

44,789 Americans each year—123 people every day—die because they lack health insurance. Others are driven to financial ruin. Medical debt was a key reason that 62 percent of personal bankruptcy filers sought court protection in 2007.

Meanwhile, according to the same report, health insurance companies made record profits while 2.7 million more people lost health insurance coverage. (Thanks to Reclaiming Medusa on Facebook for the link.)

Right-wing Republicans insist that the United States has the best health care in the world and tries to frighten citizens about the possibility of socialized medicine. President Obama and other centrist Democrats seem to have crafted a "solution" to the health care crisis that forces uninsured people to buy insurance from private companies, with some subsidies that may or may not cover the cost of this insurance. Meanwhile, public discourse takes place in a climate of irrational panic.

I wish I had a clear idea of a good course of action to deal with this mess.

Don't know if this is really so wonderful

According to a story posted on t r u t h o u t, former Vice President Dick Cheney has endorsed the end of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy that excludes open lesbians and gay men from military service.

Meanwhile, Katherine Franke at the Gender and Sexuality Law blog has a post that expresses some of my difficult feelings about this issue. As Franke notes, the end of DADT "comes with no small measure of discomfort on the part of more progressive members of the community in so far as this civil rights issue marries lgbt politics with the values of militarization, state violence, and enormous human suffering." Her thoughtful post explores the changing ways the US military is dealing with sexuality as it struggles to find recruits willing to go to Afghanistan and Iraq, and is well worth reading in its entirety.

Climate change and snowstorms

Climate-change deniers such as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe have claimed that recent heavy snows on the East Coast disprove the theory that the earth is warming because of human activities. Inter Press Service has an interesting counterpoint:

If anything, though, the weather should help discredit climate change deniers, contend major climate scientists and activists.

"Record snow is not in any way, shape, or form evidence against climate science and in fact it is largely consistent with it," Joseph Romm, a former Energy Department official in President Bill Clinton's administration and the editor of the Centre for American Progress's Climate Progress blog, said Thursday.

"I wouldn’t want to say global warming is the cause or the sole cause [of the snowstorms]…but we are in a warming trend," he said. "It is absurd when we are in an overall warming trend that a snowstorm is evidence of a cooling trend. But the anti-science side – the ideologues – have been trying to push the idea that we're in a cooling trend and that this is evidence of that."

In fact, increased snowfall is entirely in line with climate projections, said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist with WeatherUnderground.com.

While the current storms are likely due to "natural variability" – the "jet stream this year [happened to] set up in a path that includes these cities" on the eastern U.S. seaboard, he explained – they are nonetheless historically "extraordinary" and it is reasonable to expect global warming to bring more such storms in the future.

Romm agrees. "You heat up the planet and you put more moisture in the atmosphere, you get the more intense precipitation that has been observed globally and has been observed in the United States," he said.

Is US helping or hurting Haiti?

AlterNet correspondent Arun Gupta reports that US forces in Haiti are creating a military occupation under the guise of helping in relief efforts. He says that a massive airlift of troops actually has hindered relief supplies from arriving at the Port-au-Prince airport. Reports of looting have been greatly exaggerated in order to justify the need for security.

This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly in the last 20 years -- two coups followed each time by the slaughter of thousands of activists and innocents by U.S.-armed death squads -- the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of the Fanmi Lavalas party of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Twice last year, after legislative elections were scheduled that banned Fanmi Lavalas, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate each time was reported to be at least 89 percent.

It is the OPs, while devastated and destitute, that are filling the void and remain the strongest voice against economic colonization. Thus, all the concern about “security and stability.” With no functioning government, calm prevailing, and people self-organizing, “security” does not mean safeguarding the population; it means securing the country against the population. “Stability” does not mean social harmony; it means stability for capital: low wages, no unions, no environmental laws, and the ability to repatriate profits easily.

Popularity contests

Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogger Joel Connelly reports that "A bare majority of Americans give thumbs-up to President Obama's job performance, while Democrats and Republican run dead-even in voter preference, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll." If you follow Connelly's link, you will see that a majority of survey respondents approve of the president's handling of terrorism, but disapprove of his handling of health care, the economy, the federal budget deficit, and jobs.

This is not necessarily good news for the extreme right wing that is doing its best to make sure that no real change results from the Obama presidency.

Talking Points Memo says that another poll, also conducted by ABC News/Washington Post, shows that "the amount of people with a favorable view of (Sarah) Palin has dropped to its lowest point ever recorded by the pollster. More than 70% of respondents said she's not qualified to be president." Only 45 percent of conservatives and 37 percent of Republicans consider her qualified for the presidency.

Sebelius criticizes California firm's health insurance hikes, California Senate passes single-payer bill

T r u t h o u t has the details.

Hope for healthcare reform?

Janinsanfran at Can it happen here? has an interesting analysis of Organizing for America's latest effort to revitalize a health care reform bill.

Trivia

The other day, Feminist Peace Network on Facebook posted a link to Issue 9 of the online journal TRIVIA - Voices of Feminism. This is the issue on goddesses from March 2009. It looks really interesting. I've read the editors' introduction and an article by Carolyn Gage on how the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by US forces in 1898 might have been stopped if Queen Liliuokalani has listened to her native shamans instead of  following Episcopalian teachings.

This is how I discovered that the feminist journal Trivia still survives after all these years. Or, more accurately, it was revived in 2004 as an online publication. Their dedication to their most recent issue, Are Lesbians Going Extinct? tells the story:

This issue of Trivia is dedicated to Mary Daly, without whom this online journal simply would not be. Trivia, a Journal of Ideas, its predecessor, published in print from 1982 to 1995, grew out of a study group that spun off from Mary's classes at Boston College. It was named after the Triple Goddess TRIVIA—whom we first encountered in the pages of Daly's Gyn/Ecology. While the journal developed its own identity over the years, it remained, and in this online version remains, rooted in her steadfast vision of female power and possibility. The word "lesbian" did not go far enough for Mary. She preferred to talk of "Terrible Women"—women who break the "Terrible Taboo: the universal, unnatural patriarchal taboo against Women Intimately/Ultimately Touching each Other."

Not only do they have an archive of all of their online issues, but you can order copies of most of the old print issues as well.

As I've said before, the existence of small independent feminist periodicals played a crucial role in creating radical feminist and lesbian movements that challenged patriarchy and all forms of oppression. Each time I discover another surviving feminist or lesbian periodical, I gain new hope that those movements can continue to move forward.

A tempest in a teapot?

The publicity and influence granted to right-wing political groups often outweighs their real popularity. I was reminded of this today by this item on the Right Wing Watch site of  People for the American Way. It was a critique of the speech given by right-wing activist Tom Tancredo at the opening session of the Tea Party Convention in Nashville this weekend.

Rep. Tom Tancredo’s deeply offensive remarks embodied the worst of today’s Republican Party, calling President Obama a ‘socialist ideologue,’ raving about the threat of immigration and multiculturalism, and longing for those good old days when literacy tests and other obstacles to the ballot were used to keep the ‘wrong’ people from voting. He would be nothing more than a bad joke if he did not represent a corrosive spirit that is far too prevalent in our politics today.

Too many conservative and Republican politicians, pundits, and political strategists have been eager to inflame racial and ethnic resentments for short-term political gain. And far too many have followed Tancredo’s path of demonizing immigrants in ways that dishonor our nation’s history and heritage.

Tancredo and the spirit of the ‘tea party’ groups that shouted down discussion of health care reform are destructive to civility and democracy. As President Obama said this week, it is possible to disagree strongly on policies and still engage in civil, respectful debate. But that’s not the path that GOP leaders, right-wing pundits, and behind-the-scenes backers of the tea party crowd have chosen.

PFAW's press release ended with a confident statement that ultimately the people of the United States will "reject this kind of ugly scapegoating and the political leaders who embrace it." I think they're right. But I was left to wonder why news of this convention was so prominent on public radio and on the web.

I came of age as a political activist in the years after Ronald Reagan won the US presidency in 1980. The mainstream news media described this as a huge change in the nation's political direction, but I remember it as a moment that set off a large wave of demonstrations by left-wing activists, against nuclear weapons and nuclear power, against US support for right-wing dictatorships in Central America, against US support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Feminist women's peace camps sprang up in the US and other nations. As I remember it, the mainstream news media ignored this movement. Unless you had other sources of information -- such as the small feminist newspapers that were still widespread in the 1980s -- you would have thought that the entire nation accepted Reagan's right-wing politics.

Although Barack Obama is not the ideologue that Reagan was, his presidency has also been presented as a major change in course for US politics. Now, at every possible moment, malestream news outlets are telling us that there is a significant part of the electorate that opposes Obama, and any political policy that deviates from the hard-right politics of  his predecessor. The publicity given to the so-called Tea Party Movement is merely one example of this. Not that we should ignore Obama's opponents, but it seems to me that this onslaught of publicity has given them much more influence than they deserve.

The reason for this is not too hard to find. Rachel Maddow pointed it out last summer. This "tea party" isn't a grassroots movement, it's astroturf, orchestrated and financed by long-established right-wing Republican organizations with lots of money. This is not a reason for despair. But it is a reason to look for ways to minimize the influence of money in politics. For instance, even here in Oklahoma, efforts are mounting to promote a US constitutional amendment for campaign finance reform.

We can create an egalitarian society in the United States. But we're going to have to fight for it.

Obama and Clinton condemn Ugandan anti-gay law at prayer breakfast

Feministing has a video clip and a report.

Worth noting

TPM LiveWire covers the controversy over the decision of CBS to air an anti-abortion ad from Focus on the Family. This after CBS has consistently refused to accept "issue ads" from progressive groups.

Jill on Feministe also has an interesting analysis.

To read the mainstream media spin in the Tim Tebow / anti-abortion ad controversy, you’d think that we Hysterical Feminists ™ were at it again, getting whipped into a censor-happy frenzy just because some lady decided to have a baby.
The issue, though, isn’t that we disagree with Pam Tebow’s choice (although it’s worth pointing out that she had a choice she now wishes to take away from other women, and that the choice she made — to continue a pregnancy after she became ill while on a mission trip in the Phillipines — isn’t actually available to most women in the Phillipines, where abortion is illegal and most procedures happen clandestinely); it isn’t that we don’t think anti-choice ads should be allowed on the air; it isn’t that we think anti-choice views should be censored. It’s that CBS has, for the past few years, regularly rejected ads from left-of-center organizations — MoveOn.org, PeTA, and the United Church of Christ. CBS was clear that it did not accept ads on contentious or controversial subjects such as, apparently, democracy, animal rights and gay rights. But an ad about abortion, from Focus on the Family — one of the most radical, right-leaning organizations out there? Apparently totally fine.

The power of prayer

Tomorrow is the National Prayer Breakfast, an innocuous-sounding gathering that has taken place in Washington, DC on the first Thursday in February every year since 1953. Every president since Dwight Eisenhower has addressed this gathering. Barack Obama has been no exception. He gave a speech last year, and he is scheduled to do so again tomorrow. Apparently, not everyone thinks that's okay.

This is not just about issues of separation of church and state. Critics of the event are concerned that its sponsor, a secretive right-wing group, variously called The Family or The Fellowship, has an agenda that tries to subvert democracy with an elitist ultra-conservative -- and explicitly patriarchal -- agenda. The Family includes many government officials and members of Congress, including Oklahoma senators Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe. Wikipedia describes the prayer breakfast as "a forum for political, social and business leaders of the world to assemble together and build relationships which might not otherwise be possible." Many of those relationships are less than desirable.

For instance,  Huffington Post columnist Melanie Sloan writes that

The one time of year when the Family emerges from the shadows is the annual National Prayer Breakfast, its signature event. This large-scale function serves as a recruiting tool for the group, but is often misconstrued by attendees as an official government event -- a perception reinforced by a presidential address at the breakfast, presidential seals strategically located around the room, and an organizing committee made up of members of Congress. Given the official façade, some attendees have expected at least a nod to other religions, but they are quickly disappointed. "JESUS is there!" reads a breakfast planning document.

At past breakfasts, the Family has facilitated meetings between its foreign allies and the president as well as members of Congress, outside the reach of the Department of State and traditional U.S. diplomatic protocol. Past prayer breakfast attendees have included General Eugenio Vides Casanova of El Salvador, later found liable for the torture of thousands of civilians, and General Alvarez Martinez of Honduras, later linked to secret death squads in that country.

Part of the controversy surrounding President Obama's attendance at the prayer breakfast has to do with another of this year's attendees -- Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, sponsor of a bizarre and hateful Anti-Homosexuality Bill. New York Jewish Week blogger James Besser says that Bahati may not attend the event after all, but that Obama and other US government officials should still stay away.

Meanwhile, AlterNet Washington Bureau Chief Adele N. Stan has a fascinating analysis of The Family and the controversy surrounding tomorrow's event. She includes information from Jeff Sharlet, author of a recent book about The Family. Sharlet's book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, is available through the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System.

Kansas City man convicted in death of Dr. Tiller

Thanks to the Kansas National Organization for Women on Facebook for linking to a report in the Kansas Free Press that a Kansas jury has convicted Scott Roeder for the murder of Dr.George Tiller. Sentencing is scheduled for March 9th, The Huffington Post also has a report on the case.

Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein on the State of the Union

On Democracy Now, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein discuss President Obama's President Obama's First State of the Union address.

Historian Howard Zinn is dead

Howard Zinn, radical activist, historian, and author of the People's History of the United States, died yesterday at the age of 87.

Amy Goodman has a tribute with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, and Anthony Arnove at Democracy Now. Daniel Ellsberg has a remembrance at CommonDreams.org.

Common Dreams has also republished this commentary that Zinn wrote in December 2001 for The Progressive, right at the beginning of the "War on Terror." This, of course, was the period of time shortly after the terrorist bombings in New York and Washington in September of that year. Many commentators, at that time, were referring to the US invasion of Afghanistan as a "just war." Zinn wrote:

I have puzzled over this. How can a war be truly just when it involves the daily killing of civilians, when it causes hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to leave their homes to escape the bombs, when it may not find those who planned the September 11 attacks, and when it will multiply the ranks of people who are angry enough at this country to become terrorists themselves?

This war amounts to a gross violation of human rights, and it will produce the exact opposite of what is wanted: It will not end terrorism; it will proliferate terrorism.

I believe that the progressive supporters of the war have confused a "just cause" with a "just war." There are unjust causes, such as the attempt of the United States to establish its power in Vietnam, or to dominate Panama or Grenada, or to subvert the government of Nicaragua. And a cause may be just--getting North Korea to withdraw from South Korea, getting Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, or ending terrorism--but it does not follow that going to war on behalf of that cause, with the inevitable mayhem that follows, is just.

I found this by accident on Wikipedia

A biography of the fabulous foresister Marjory Stoneman Douglas was featured on Wikipedia's main page this morning. I'd never heard of her before. She sounds fascinating.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was an American journalist, writer, feminist, and environmentalist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, Douglas became a freelance writer, producing over a hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp; its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring (1962). Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, which she used to advance her causes.

Nothing the matter with Massachusetts?

Robert Scheer at Truthdig argues that the reason that Massachusetts voters elected a Republican senator who vowed to opposed President Obama's health care reform plan is because they have experience with a similar plan in their own state -- and it stinks.

Instead of blindly following the failed Massachusetts model, Obama should have insisted on an extension of the Medicare program to all who are willing to pay for it. He squandered the opportunity to bring about meaningful health care change that the public would have supported had it been kept simple and just. Instead, Obama gave away the store to medical profiteers. They, in turn, hopelessly muddied the waters with well-funded scare advertising tactics that principled leadership on Obama’s part could have thwarted.

Keeping hope alive.

I've seen some interesting stuff come across my email and show up on the web in the days since Republican Scott Brown won the special election to fill the late Senator Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts US Senate seat.

The oddly titled Losing Hope campaign is actually all about concrete actions that activists can take to work for peace, healthcare reform, financial reform and sustainable energy policy. It includes a letter to President Obama calling on him to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and to fulfill the spirit of his campaign promises. On the losinghope.com website, there is a link to this commentary by Medea Benjamin of Code Pink.

Then there is this post by blogger Jerry Critter, linking to an incisive commentary on healthcare reform by Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka argues in a YouTube video that the Massachusetts special election is a wake-up call for the Democratic Party -- and unions -- to do more to promote the interests of ordinary working people by creating jobs and affordable healthcare.

Meanwhile, Rethink Afghanistan has a petition calling on President Obama to present a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan in his State of the Union address.

I expect that there's more activity out there, but I'm too tired to look for more of it tonight.

Dr. Tiller and Professor Frye

Today, on the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the National Abortion Rights Action League is sponsoring Blog for Choice Day.  According to the Blog for Choice web page, "In honor of Dr. George Tiller, who often wore a button that simply read, `Trust Women,' this year's Blog for Choice question is: What does Trust Women mean to you?

Dr. Tiller, of course, is the Kansas abortion provider who was murdered by an anti-choice terrorist last May. Dr. Tiller was often villified by right-wing Christians because he was one of the few doctors in the country who would provide late-term abortions. To the Christian Right, the only reason that a pregnant woman would end a late-term pregnancy was because she was an irresponsible blood-thirsty fiend intent on murdering her unborn baby (or perhaps was being forced to murder her baby by a fiendish blood-thirsty relative). Real life, of course, is more complicated.

I suspect that there are indeed cases -- particularly in fundamentalist families in which pregnancies "out of wedlock" are considered shameful -- where a pregnant woman chooses, or is forced by her family, to abort a viable late-term fetus. I suspect that this secret, shameful family history is part of what motivates some anti-choice activists. But in most cases, when a woman ends a late-term pregnancy, it is because continuing the pregnancy would seriously endanger her health, or because the fetus has a serious condition that would doom it to a brief and very painful life. By oversimplifying the issue of late-term abortion, and exaggerating its frequency, the anti-choice movement hopes to turn the public against abortion rights in general.

The button that Dr. Tiller wore was meant to say that women, in general, are reasonable people, and not bloodthirsty fiends. We can be trusted to make decisions about  what goes on inside our bodies. Why would anyone argue otherwise?

Tulsa native Marilyn Frye suggests an answer in her essay Some Reflections on Separatism and Power. First, Frye notes that both feminist and anti-feminist literature seem to agree that males and females live in a parasitic relationship -- "a parasitism of the male on the female... that it is, generally speaking, the strength, energy, inspiration and nurturance of women that keeps men going, and not the strength, aggression, spirituality and hunting of men that keeps women going." She says that it is this analysis that accounts for right-wing panic over the issue of abortion.

The fetus lives parasitically. It is a distinct animal surviving off the life (the blood) of another animal creature. It is incapable of surviving on its own resources, of independent nutrition; incapable even of symbiosis. If it is true that males live parasitically upon females, it seems reasonable to suppose that many of them and those loyal to them are in some way sensitive to the parallelism between their situation and that of the fetus. They could easily identify with the fetus. The woman who is free to see the fetus as a parasite might be free to see the man as a parasite. The woman's willingness to cut off the life line to one parasite suggests a willingness to cut off the life line to another parasite. The woman who is capable (legally, psychologically, physically) of decisively, self-interestedly, independently rejecting the one parasite, is capable of rejecting, with the same decisiveness and independence, the like burden of the other parasite. In the eyes of the other parasite, the image of the wholly self-determined abortion, involving not even a ritual submission to male veto power, is the mirror image of death.

Another clue here is that one line of argument against free and easy abortion is the slippery slope argument that if fetuses are to be freely dispensed with, old people will be next. Old people? Why are old people next? And why the great concern for them? Most old people are women, indeed, and patriarchal loyalists are not generally so solicitous of the welfare of any women. Why old people? Because, I think, in the modem patriarchal divisions of labor, old people too are parasites on women. The anti-abortion folks seem not to worry about wife beating and wife murder-there is no broad or emotional popular support for stopping these violences. They do not worry about murder and involuntary sterilization in prisons, nor murder in war, nor murder by pollution and industrial accidents. Either these are not real to them or they cannot identify with the victims; but anyway, killing in general is not what they oppose. They worry about the rejection by women, at women's discretion, of something which lives parasitically on women. I suspect that they fret not because old people are next, but because men are next.

To the Christian Right, the parasitism of men upon women is ordained by God and unavoidable. To me as a radical lesbian feminist, it is obvious that men really are quite capable of taking care of their own physical and emotional well being, and it is neither necessary nor right for them to control women's bodies and lives.Once the rest of the world figures that out, the world will be a very different and much better place.

How to fix the economy with shorter work weeks and longer vacations

For anyone who lives in the real world (rather than, say, on Wall Street), I suppose it isn't news that The Economy Is a Disaster: We Should Fix It. Nevertheless, over at truthout.com, Dean Baker tells us how we can do this:

There is an incredible complacency about this unemployment rate around Washington even though all the official projections show it remaining high years into the future. For example, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the unemployment rate will not fall below 7.0 percent until well into 2012 and will not return to normal levels until 2014. Perhaps, if more of the people in policymaking positions faced unemployment they would be more concerned about the problem.

The especially disturbing part of the story is that we do know how to get the unemployment rate down. In principle, we could create demand through another stimulus package, with the government directly or indirectly creating the demand needed to employ many of the 15 million unemployed workers. For political and superstitious reasons, a stimulus package large enough to substantially boost demand does not seem feasible.

However, we can also go the route that has proven successful at keeping unemployment down in Europe: work-sharing. The concept is very simple. Instead of paying workers unemployment benefits when they are not working, we pay companies to keep workers employed, but working shorter hours at pretty much the same pay.

Six scenarios in search of an election result

Generally, I think it is better to avoid the old game of "what if?" but John Nichols at thenation.com has created an interesting and useful analysis with Six Scenarios for the Massachusetts Vote and After.

The other side of microfinance

Microfinance -- particularly the provision of small loans to women entrepreneurs in developing countries -- is often portrayed as one of the most effective economic development strategies. But as Rebecca Harshbarger at Womens eNews points out, when these loans are directed toward teenage girls, problems often result. For instance:

Partnering with a Kenyan microfinance institution called K-Rep, the Population Council's Tap and Reposition Youth, or TRY, program offered female teens loans at an interest rate of 15 percent.

To receive a loan, the teens were required to provide 4 percent of the loan to the program as collateral.

The program also encouraged the teens to apply peer pressure to ensure members of the borrowing group paid back the loan. In order to borrow, the teens formed watanos, or groups of five, who helped each other to keep up with payments.

Less than 20 percent of the participants lived with their parents or said they had friends they could turn to for support. Most lived transient lives, often staying with boyfriends or male friends.

The program started out well, but most of the teens were soon unable to pay back their loans and lost their collateral. Starting hairdressing salons, food salons and other small businesses was very challenging. An emergency would come up in their personal lives--losing their shelter or getting ill--that require more cash than they had and participants would fall behind on repayments.

The teens told TRY that they disliked the pressure they were under to both take out and pay back the loans.

Harshbarger's entire article is well worth reading.

New York rep posts healthcare poll

New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner has an online poll asking whether he should oppose the final health insurance reform bill "unless it represents a genuine improvement on the Senate Bill."

Haiti

I think that Haiti is on many people's minds today after a devastating 7.0 earthquake hit that country yesterday. Angry Black Bitch has links to sites where you can donate to relief efforts and search for family members and friends in Haiti. Truthout has reposted a report from the Christian Science Monitor. It's interesting to compare the CSM report--which notes that "Wracked by political instability and poverty, and hammered by a series of hurricanes in 2008, Haiti faces a tough recovery ahead"--with this account from Democracy Now, which shows the origins of that instability and poverty in an ongoing history of intervention by the US and European powers. (Thanks to Common Dreams for reposting that account.)

US forces execute eight Afghani children

Dawg's Blawg from Canada has this disturbing report of the murder of eight children by US-led forces in Afghanistan.

Kern confronts heterosexual menace

Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern is well known for promoting the view that gay men and lesbians -- particularly those who advocate gay marriage -- are a threat to the stability of marriage as an institution. Reasonable people have been inclined to answer, but what about all those straight people who wreck their marriages and get divorced without any help from evil homosexuals?

Kern's answer is to propose a bill to make it much more difficult for heterosexual Oklahomans to get divorced. Oklahoma City television station KOCO provides a video of Kern explaining her proposal here.

Thanks to Right Wing Watch and Pam's House Blend for alerting me to this story.

Mary Daly is dead

Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors reports that radical feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly is dead at the age of 81. In the comments to Crawford's post, Ann Bartow of FLP links to this obituary at Reclusive Leftist.

Mary Daly was a colossus. She was an absolutely towering influence on modern feminist thought. If you’re a feminist alive today, then Mary Daly influenced you. Even if you’ve never heard of her, even if you’ve never read her books — she influenced you.

Crawford links to Daly's obituary at National Catholic Reporter online.

Daly most often contemplated the divine essence as a verb, Be-ing itself, so that worship is "not kneeling in front of a so-and-so but swirling in energy." Her language echoed quantum physics, and she was flattered if you said so: "I do think about space-time a great deal," she admitted. "It's a kind of mysticism which is also political."

The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology also has an interesting biography.As in life, in death Mary Daly remains controversial. Her Wikipedia biography, while grossly oversimplified, gives some sense of the controversies that surrounded her.

In Gyn/Ecology, Daly wrote that the number of people killed as witches during the Witch Hunt in early modern Europe added up to nine million people, mostly women. This high figure, which is rejected by most researchers,^[12] caused her to coin the term 'Gynocide' and to draw comparisons with the Holocaust. Nearly all estimates today range from 60,000 to 100,000 people killed between the 14th and 18th centuries.^[13]

Also in Gyn/Ecology, Daly asserted her negative view of transsexual people, whom she referred to as "Frankensteinian." She labels transsexualism a "male problem" and claimed that post-operative transsexuals exist in a "contrived and artifactual condition."^[14] Daly was also the dissertation advisor to Janice Raymond, whose dissertation, published in 1979 as The Transsexual Empire, is critical of "transsexualism." Transsexual activist Riki Wilchins has accused Daly of being transphobic.

In a personal letter to Daly, published after four months without any reply, Audre Lorde expressed a fondness for Daly's work, but expressed concern over Gyn/Ecology, citing homogenizing tendencies, and a refusal to acknowledge the "herstory and myth" of women of color. ^[15] The letter, and Daly's decision not to publicly respond, greatly affected the reception of Daly's work among other feminist theorists, and has been described as a "paradigmatic example of challenges to white feminist theory by feminists of color in the 1980s." ^[16]

I would say that one of the biggest reasons that Daly remains controversial is the utter seriousness with which she took women's lives and patriarchal oppression. For an analysis of Daly's work that gives due respect to Mary Daly's work, while also criticizing it, I would recommend the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly edited by philosophers Sarah Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, which was reviewed by Carol Anne Douglas in off our backs. I admit that it's been sitting on my bookshelf for years, and I've kept it because it looks so interesting. When I'm finished reading it, you're welcome to borrow it.

In the meantime, you can get some of the flavor of Mary Daly's work by visiting her web site.

Health insurance reform in a nutshell

I wish I'd written this.

NPR examines OK abortion law

The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that the National Public Radio news show All Things Considered recently ran a story on a controversial new Oklahoma law that requires women seeking an abortion to answer a long list of questions about their reasons for seeking the procedure.

My word!

Nigel at rosetta moon has a fascinating essay on "The Trouble with Modern Scrabble."

Ellen Goodman is retiring

Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman is retiring. She says that a lot has changed in the 40 years that she's been a journalist.

Today, half the law students and medical students are female. But only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs. We had the first serious female candidate run for president ... and lose. We had a mother of five, a governor and a Title IX baby run for vice president ... as a conservative.

The Equal Rights Amendment was defeated because people were scared into believing that women could end up in combat. Now, nearly a quarter-million women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, 120 have died, 650 have been wounded. But still no ERA.

What a story this has been to cover. Women now hold the majority of jobs ... because men have lost more of them. Women earn six out of 10 college degrees ... yet earn 77 cents for every male dollar.

I've kind of lost track of Ellen Goodman over the years, maybe because I don't read much mainstream news any more (even were I to subscribe to the Daily Oklahoman, they don't carry any columnists further to the left than say, George Will). But I think I'm going to miss her, and not just because it's a sign that I'm getting old that a columnist that I used to read regularly when I was in college has reached the age of retirement.

It's not just a white Christmas

It's an actual blizzard. CNN.com has the details.

Senate passes health insurance bill, capitalists cheer, patients mourn, progressive House Democrats fight back

As you've probably heard already, the US Senate passed its version of the health insurance reform bill today. The Associated Press (courtesy of msnbc.com) calls it an historic occasion:

WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats passed a landmark health care bill in a climactic Christmas Eve vote that could define President Barack Obama's legacy and usher in near-universal medical coverage for the first time in the country's history.

The 60-39 vote on a cold winter morning capped months of arduous negotiations and 24 days of floor debate. It also followed a succession of failures by past congresses to get to this point. Vice President Joe Biden presided as 58 Democrats and two independents voted "yes." Republicans unanimously voted "no."

The Motley Fool site, which offers stock investing advice, is glad to be "closer to capping off the long process that's weighed on health-care stocks this year. If it's made into law, the $871 billion bill will represent the largest expansion of health-care coverage since the creation of Medicare in 1965." Commentator Brian Orelli notes that

Someone has to pay for this thing, and it's been interesting to see who has the most clout in Washington. Pharmaceutical companies negotiated early. Medical-device companies like Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) and Medtronic (NYSE: MDT) looked like they were going to get a big hit, but managed to whittle down their tax considerably. And cosmetic treatments like wrinkle removers and breast implants made by Allergan and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) managed to get their proposed tax removed altogether. Tanning salons (and their customers) apparently don't have that great of a lobby; they've been slapped with a 10% tax, which will raise an estimated $2.7 billion over the next 10 years.

The only question now is whether the companies will end up being able to pass the costs along to consumers. Will investors have to pay for health-care reform with their portfolios or their pocketbooks?

Orelli doesn't know (or doesn't care) that there are vast numbers of us out here without stock portfolios who need access to health care. For us, the news is not very good. At CommonDreams.org, Donna Smith describes the Senate Bill as "a lump of Christmas coal all polished up with sparkling rhetoric. " She knows what she's talking about from personal experience.

I went broke while carrying health insurance, a disability insurance policy and a small healthcare savings account. And if I get sick under this mess of a plan, it will happen to me again. Little has changed except that millions more of my fellow citizens will join my ranks.

Smith describes exactly how this can happen, and her entire post is well worth reading.

Meanwhile, progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives are pushing back against the watered-down Senate bill, which lacks a public option. New York Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter says that the Senate bill is so fatally flawed that it could not be successfully reconciled with the House bill passed earlier this fall. She calls for the defeat of health care legislation in its current form. And California Reps. Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey have mounted what politico.com calls "a full-throated defense of the public option."

Will healthcare bill destroy the Right?

Nathan Newman at TPMCafe thinks that it will. It's an interesting post. Newman says that

You have some bloggers treating the health care bill as a sell-out to the rightwing and many on the Right treating it as the slipperly slope to socialism. While the latter is probably a bit far, I actually side more with the political analysis of the right; while progressives didn't get as much as they wanted, they got enough to put in place a dynamic that will be almost impossible for the right to reverse. The working middle class will have a clear monetary stake in federal spending each year and participation in the broader welfare state. That reality will profoundly change both political rhetoric and budgetary politics in ways in which the modern conservative movement can not survive.

There will be a few stormy years to come but in two decades, this week's votes in the Senate I predict will come to be seen as a turning point in American history and the cementing of progressive power for decades to come.

I hope that Newman is right about this, but it might merely mean that the Right and the Republican party rely more on anti-feminist, anti-gay social conservatism in order to keep power.

Pray tell

Thanks to Alternative Tulsa for a link to a report about this bizarre call by our own Senator Tom Coburn for Americans to pray that a Democratic senator would be unable to show up for a vote on the health care bill.



Perhaps there is a more charitable explanation for Coburn's prayer request. Perhaps he would only pray for a Democratic Senator to get stuck in traffic, or to take a long nap and oversleep, rather than to die or be injured. But a senator with a lick of sense would know that these words could be interpreted in a very bad way.

If I were a praying person, I would pray that Oklahoma had at least one senator with a lick of sense. Coburn will face the voters again in 2010.

Health care live chat tonight @ six

Congressman Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who is a proponent of a strong public option, is conducting a live chat on health care reform tonight at seven eastern time (which would be six o'clock out here in Oklahoma).

Rep. Weiner says:

There's a lot to discuss. Some have said that progressives shouldn't support the current Senate proposal. Without the public option, they say, there's not enough to provide genuine competition to insurers.

Others have said that we should focus our energies on how to improve whatever emerges from the Senate. Once the Senate passes a bill, it will go to a conference committee to be reconciled with the House bill. That process could be a real opportunity to move the Senate bill closer to the one we passed in the House.

Looks interesting. If I weren't working tonight, I would log in and check it out.

That super-thin model on the cover was probably airbrushed to look that way

Womens eNews has the details.

Bad news from DC, good news from Oklahoma

Blogger Robin Marty tells all in a reproductive rights news roundup at RHRealityCheck.org. An Oklahoma law that would require women seeking abortions to answer more than 30 invasive questions has been blocked again for the time being. Marty also has more information on the abortion compromise that gained the vote of conservative Democrat Ben Nelson for the health insurance reform bill. This is the compromise that allowed Democrats to win a key procedural vote at one o'clock this morning, virtually guaranteeing passage of the Senate bill by Christmas Eve.

Feminists condemn Senate health bill compromise

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently has succeeded in cobbling together a filibuster-proof health insurance bill that can pass the Senate before Christmas. In the process, he has made a bill of questionable benefit even worse, according to John Nichols at thenation.com. Among the changes weakening the bill were concessions to right-wing Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

To get Nelson's vote, Reid had to agree to restrict the availability of abortions in insurance sold in newly created exchanges.

"I know this is hard for some of my colleagues to accept and I appreciate their right to disagree," Nelson said of the anti-choice language. "But I would not have voted for this bill without these provisions."

The question now is whether supporters of abortion rights can -- or should -- back a bill that not only disrespects but disregards a woman's right to choose.

While President Obama made a bizarre statement Saturday about how he was "pleased that recently added amendments have made this landmark bill even stronger," the co-chairs of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus signaled deep disappointment with the Senate compromise.

The compromise has also angered mainstream feminist organizations that have supported the health insurance reform bill up until now. Groups opposing the compromise include the National Partnership for Women and Families, EMILY's List, and NARAL. The National Organization for Women has gone so far as to oppose passage of the health insurance bill if the anti-choice amendment remains.

Over at RH Reality Check, blogger Rebecca Sive is also calling for defeat of the health insurance bill in its current form:

If the bottom line in all this is that we won't be getting healthcare reform, but we might be getting healthcare finance reform, is it too much to ask that the Democratic women members of the House and Senate insist on eliminating any kind of two-tiered system for paying for abortions-one for the rich and one for the poor. Is it too much to ask that they say to do otherwise isn't reform of any kind; it's the same bad business as usual, and we won't have it?

I can understand someone who believes abortion is wrong and must be prohibited under all circumstances; hence, my respect for Senator Nelson. What I don't understand is women who are complicit in the use of government power to deny their poorer sisters access to the healthcare they, the richer sisters, get. This looks like what we used to call in the 70s "identifying with the oppressor." It's still a very bad idea.

So, here's this week's talking point for the Democratic women Senators:

Have the courage of your convictions: Stand-up, and say what Ben Nelson said: "There isn't any real way to move away from your principle on abortion, and we won't."

Update: Thanks to Feminist Peace Network on Facebook for linking to this explanation by Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein on how the latest anti-choice compromise is supposed to work:

The basic compromise is that states can impose the Stupak rules on their own exchanges, but the rules will not be imposed by the federal legislation. I've been assured that at least one plan in each state will cover abortion, but I'm still trying to get clarification on how that works (my hazy understanding is that at least one of national non-profit plans, and probably more, will include abortion coverage, and they'll be offered in all states).

US lesbian soldier seeks asylum in Canada

Womens eNews reports that after suffering through months of anti-lesbian verbal and physical abuse, Private Bethany Smith received the anonymous death threat that convinced her to leave her post at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky in 2007, and head for Canada in the hopes of receiving asylum there.

"It said that they were going to break into the supply room and get the keys to my room and beat me to death in my bed," Smith said, adding that the letter came only a couple months after she learned the Army was deploying her to Afghanistan. "It was at that point that I knew I was more afraid of the people who were supposed to be on my side than people we were supposed to be fighting overseas."

More than 12,000 service members have lost their jobs because of the U.S. military's so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy. A disproportionate number of those discharges are women, according to 2008 statistics gathered by the Washington-based Servicemembers Legal Defense Network from the government under the Freedom of Information Act.

After two years in Canada, Smith is still fighting to receive asylum. In November, Canadian Federal Court Justice Yves de Montigny ruled that the country's refugee board should reconsider Smith's case, which it had earlier denied.

The entire article is short and well worth reading.

I couldn't bring myself to sign this

I recently received an email from NARAL Pro-Choice America: asking me to sign a petition to moderate Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine. The petition reads as follows:

We, the undersigned, ask you to vote for the health-reform bill and stand firm against attempts to block women's access to insurance coverage for abortion.

Health reform is too important to be held up by the anti-choice politics of Sen. Nelson. You have shown courage, leadership, and independence by voting against anti-choice amendments in the Senate Finance Committee and voting to move the bill forward. We ask you to stand with us again. We're counting on you, Sen. Snowe. Thank you.

And you know, I almost signed the darned thing. But then I remembered that the health care reform that I would be urging her to back has no public option, no Medicare buy-in for people 55-64, no meaningful method to control the unconscionable waste and price-gouging of our for-profit medical system. And I just couldn't bring myself to support that. Am I wrong? What do you think? If you would like to sign the NARAL petition, you can do so here.

Not the climate change I was hoping for

Reclaiming Medusa on Facebook for linking to this post at thenation.com by Naomi Klein. As I write this, the Unites Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen has been teetering on the brink of failure. In order to get the conference moving again, the Obama administration -- in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- is pushing to seriously weaken the Kyoto Protocol in return for the financial assistance poor countries desperately need to cope with the effects of climate change that they've already suffered.

This offer is being spun very differently in the mainstream media -- for instance, see this version of the story in the New York Times. In that version of the story, the US offer of aid may save the climate talks from failure, by forcing developing nations -- including China -- to be more "transparent" about its level of carbon dioxide emissions.

The official UN home page for the conference has cross-posted this article from the Associated Press, noting that President Obama is extremely unlikely to promise any significant reduction in US emissions of greenhouse gases.  Western European nations will likewise be unwilling to make serious cuts in their own emissions. Developing nations have called on western developed nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions at least 34 percent from their 2005 levels by 2020.

The situation puts a person in mind of the debate here at home over healthcare reform. Once again, the Obama administration will try to achieve a cosmetic change and then repackage it as substantive progress.

Lucinda Marshall of Reclaiming Medusa also has a blog called Feminist Peace Network, on which she has posted this interesting and comprehensive set of links to news and analysis about the climate change conference.

Senate to take up single payer

CommonDreams.org reports that the Senate will take up Bernie Sanders's single-payer health plan today.

Update 12/17/09: Senate Republicans used extreme obstructionist tactics to completely block discussion of Sanders's amendment to the health care bill. See this post by John Nichols of The Nation, crossposted at CommonDreams.org.

Throwing in the towel on health care reform...

That's what John Nichols at thenation.com says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is doing.

So, as it stands now, Reid appears to be ready to try and pass a health-care "reform" bill that includes neither a public option or and expansion of Medicare to cover millions of uninsured Americans in the 55-to-64 age bracket.

In other words, the legislation Reid will try to get passed before Christmas is not health-care reform any longer, it is insurance reform.

And even that is giving the proposal more credit than is probably deserves. The legislation expands access to health care to millions of Americans. That's a good thing -- perhaps even good enough to merit the support of reformers who are determined to get more care to more Americans. But it does so by setting up a scheme that uses scant federal resources to dramatically enrich insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And it fails to establish the government-backed competition, in the form of a public option of Medicare expansion, that might have kept insurance companies in line.

Thus, at the very best, just half the goal of serious reform is met. More Americans will have health-care. But that progress will be purchased at enormous, and potentially unsustainable, cost to the taxpayers.

Just read this guy's post, okay?

Writing at truthout.org, Mike Elk explains why My Grandmother Takes a Stand for Gay Marriage in Church Despite Being a Glenn Beck Follower

Worse things than infidelity

Dave Zirin at thenation.com actually has something thought-provoking to say about the Tiger Woods mess.

For example:

This is what we call chickens roosting. The least attractive part of Woods's persona--including all recent peccadilloes--is his complete absence of conscience when it comes to peddling his billion-dollar brand. As we have been writing for years here at The Nation, Tiger's partnership with the habitual toxic waste dumpers Chevron and the financial criminals in Dubai deserves far more scrutiny from the sports press than it's received (none).

Then there was the Philippines. As detailed in the documentary The Golf War, the Filipino government, in conjunction with the military and developers, attempted in the late nineties to remove thousands of peasants from their land, known as Hacienda Looc, to build a golf course. They resisted and three movement leaders ended up dead. Where was Woods? He was brought in by the government to play in an exhibition match and sell golf (not explicitly the course, wink, wink), all for an undisclosed fee. The government called it "The Day of the Tiger" and followed his--assumedly G-rated--actions for twenty-four hours. The Golf War filmmakers show clips of Woods saying to kids, "I want all of you to learn and grow from this experience. Invariably you're gonna learn life, gonna learn about life because golf is a microcosm of life." Meanwhile the developers of the course were thrilled at the PR boost his appearance gave their project. Macky Maceda, a vice-president for Fil-Estate Land, Incorporated, the golf course developer in Hacienda Looc, commented, "Oh, I think it's going to be a great picker upper for the entire country in general. Everybody's feeling kind of down with this economic crisis. And Tiger is just, I know it, he's going to give everybody a good feeling."

Senate health insurance bill gets worse and worse

Chris Bowers at Open Left has the details.

MAPS citizens panel won't have veto

According to NewsOK.com, Mayor Mick Cornett says that there is no need to give a citizens advisory panel veto power over how money from the recently approved MAPS 3 proposal is spent. Former Mayor Kirk Humphreys says that the panel needs veto power in order to be effective in its work.

OKC residents wishing to serve on the oversight board can send a resume of no more than two pages to maps3@okc.gov.

Give war a chance?

I've been trying to fight off a cold, and didn't have a chance to read this thoroughly, but Paul Rosenberg has an analysis of President Obama's War-Is-Peace Prize speech over at Open Left. It looks really interesting, and I'm going to read it sometime soon when I have some mental energy.

Lesbian wins Houston mayoral runoff

AMERICAblog reports that open lesbian Annise Parker has triumphed in a runoff election to be elected mayor of Houston, despite being subjected to homophobic attacks.

According to AMERICAblog, both Parker and her opponent in the nonpartisan runoff election, Gene Locke, are Democrats. According to the Wikipedia entry on Parker, the 53-year-old Parker worked for more than 20 years in the oil and gas industry, and has a long record of involvement in mainstream civic organizations. She was elected to an at-large position on the Houston City Council in 1997 and served on the council until being elected city controller in 2003, a post she has held since that time. She has been with her life partner, Kathy Hubbard, since 1990.

Other than the fact that Parker has been open about her lesbianism, she sounds like a fairly conventional mainstream politician. But also according to Wikipedia, "she co-owned Inklings Bookshop with business partner Pokey Anderson from the late 1980s until 1997." I thought that the name of the bookstore sounded familiar, and a bit more searching confirmed that Inklings is or was a feminist bookstore.

Nevertheless, the LA Times blog describes Parker as a "conservative," which is probably an accurate description.

I don't know what to think of this

Yesterday I received an email (as "a member of Hillary Clinton's online community") inviting me to join NoLimits.org. Frankly, I don't know what to think of this invitation. The website itself looks useful and interesting. When I looked at it , the posts had such themes as fair trade, and stopping the Stupak Amendment. There was a video of Hillary Clinton addressing the fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing, telling attendees that "women's rights are human rights." There was a link to an Equal Pay Action Kit.

So what's not to like?

This little paragraph from the invitation email gave me pause:

Here at NoLimits.org, we're proud of Hillary's leadership as Secretary of State: working to rebuild our global alliances and serving as a strong voice for human rights. Our progressive agenda includes supporting these new directions in foreign policy, and also focuses on economic and work-family issues here at home, including the need for health care reform and new initiatives to combat the too-high rate of unemployment. We are advocates for an America engaged and active, domestically and internationally, supporting policies that truly reflect our values.

I couldn't help but wondering if these "new directions in foreign policy" include the sending of 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan by the administration that Clinton is part of. And I'm sorry, sisters, but I can't sign up to support that.

What happened to a family that didn't want an abortion, but needed one

AlterNet has cross-posted a story from truthout.org about an anti-choice Catholic couple that found compassion and help from Dr. George Tiller when they discovered that the mother was carrying a baby that would be unable to live.

Senate health bill negotiations more complicated than you've heard

First, the good news.

Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors reports that

The Nelson-Hatch amendment (the Senate version of the Stupak ban) has been rejected in the Senate by a 54-45 vote. The roll call result is here. The amendment would have placed significant restrictions on private health insurance coverage for abortion services.

Then the more complicated news.

The mainstream news report that I heard when I woke up this morning said that the public option had been removed from the Senate health care bill by a "gang of ten" made up of five liberal and five conservative senators. Jason Leopold at truthout.org reports that the situation is actually more complicated than that.

Disappointing, but not necessarily surprising

NewsOK.com reports that Oklahoma City voters passed the MAPS 3 sales tax extension with more than 54 percent of voters favoring the measure.

The Yes for MAPS watch party, held in a Cox Convention Center ballroom, featured giant projection screens and flat screen televisions showing election coverage, a lighting system projecting colorful designs around the room and an ice sculpture adorning one of several food tables.

As election results came in, partygoers cheered while dining on upscale foods and vast selections of artisan breads, cheeses, meats and fresh vegetables.

A person can't help wondering if there was any cake left over for the rest of us to eat.

Remembering the Montreal Massacre

Unlike Lilian Nattel, I have a strong (if somewhat blurry) memory of finding out about the Montreal Massacre that took place twenty years ago today. But I didn't remember that today was the 20th anniversary of that catastrophic event until I read Natel's thoughtful analysis of what happened that day at the Polytechnique Institute when Marc Lepine walked in gunning for feminists and killed 14 women engineering students.

Feministing.com has a link to Catherine Porter's "Lessons of the Montreal Massacre," at the online edition of the Toronto Star, and also a link to an edgier analysis at Bastard Logic. Historiann and Feminist Law Professors also have remembrances.

Finally, Peggy Seeger's song, "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer," always seems like a fitting memorial for the victims and survivors of the Montreal Massacre. Here is a version sung by her brother Pete in concert in the late 1970s.