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.

Why I'm voting "no" on MAPS 3

On Tuesday, I'm voting against Oklahoma City's MAPS 3 proposal because the tax used to fund it -- the sales tax -- falls hardest on poor and working class people, who will benefit least from the projects that the tax will pay for.

MAPS stands for Metropolitan Area Projects.  The Oklahoma Gazette has a summary of the current proposal. MAPS 3 is a big, $777 million Christmas tree with something for everyone. It seems to have been constructed with the obvious hope of  getting people who have different beliefs about which projects are appropriate to vote for the whole proposal in order to get the parts they like.

Some of the proposed projects include a downtown park, a downtown streetcar system, bicycling and walking trails, 70 miles of sidewalks throughout the city, and aquatics centers for senior citizens. Other projects include improvements to the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds and new boating and recreational facilities on the Oklahoma River. I would be inclined to vote for many of those projects -- although I'd rather see public transit dollars spent on improving the transit system citywide, which is currently almost unusable.

But in order to get any of those projects, I would also have to vote to fund a new $280 convention center, which I consider a silly and offensive waste of money. It's a gift to wealthy downtown business owners from the rest of us, who can't really afford it. In the short term, this project would create some construction jobs. In the long term, it would create low-end minimum wage jobs with few or no benefits. And this one project would take up more than a third of the entire amount of money raised by the proposal.

I'm figuring that any one who is reading this blog post probably cares what I think about this topic, but I'm also figuring that you might like other sources of information. Here are some sources that I checked out:

About.com has an interesting history of MAPS, which began in 1993 with a "temporary" one-cent sales tax. The tax has never expired, because voters have repeatedly approved extensions of the tax for new projects.The first set of  MAPS projects has often been credited with revitalizing Oklahoma City's downtown in the 1990s. MAPS for Kids was approved in 2001, and the sales tax collected under that proposal for seven years seems to be funding much needed capital improvements for metropolitan area schools. Most recently the tax has gone for renovations to the Ford Center in order to draw a professional basketball team to town.

To read arguments in favor of MAPS3, you can go to yesformaps.com or mapsfacts.com. Propents have also produced a fairly tedious YouTube video.

Several groups oppose the extension of the one cent sales tax. There is the Campaign Against MAPS, which links to a website called Kill the Maps Tax. There is a Facebook page for Not This MAPS. Some opponents of MAPS seem to come from the extreme-right "teabagger" perspective. The blog for Kill the Maps Tax links to the site of radio talk show host Mike Shannon, who also seems to represent a hard right-wing perspective.

One piece of information that made a big impression on me was something not directly related to the MAPS controversy at all. This report from the OK Policy Blog, describes the way taxes in the state of Oklahoma affect different groups of people. That blog post links to an article from the Tulsa World, which shows that poor people are the ones who pay the highest percentage of their income in sales taxes, while better off people pay a higher percentage of their income in income taxes.

I do have a small amount of ambivalence about my "no" vote on Tuesday. Some of the projects are worthwhile. I don't trust the organized opposition to the tax extension, much of which is based on a far-right political perspective that I don't want to support. But the Christmas-tree approach to the sales tax measure is bad public policy. And the sales tax used to fund the proposal would force poor people buying the necessities of life to subsidize wealthy developers.

I would be willing to vote "yes" on a property tax or a graduated city wage tax to fund projects that benefited the entire population, but I'm voting "no" on MAPS 3.

UN treaty proves powerful force for women's rights

Inter Press Service describes how the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has become "an increasingly successful tool for challenging discriminatory laws and battling violence against women and girls." CEDAW was adopted 30 years ago this month by the UN General Assembly.

The 186 countries that that have both signed and ratified the Convention pledge to ensure equal recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights by women without discrimination. Only the Holy See, Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, Tonga and the United States have not signed and ratified the Convention.

Mammography not always a smashing success

Thanks to FeministPeaceNetwork on Facebook for a link to a commentary on the breast cancer screening controversy by the ever-wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich.

A federal government advisory panel recently proposed that women not receive routine mammograms before age 50, and to receive mammograms only every other year after that. These new proposals quickly became controversial, with many people, including feminist activists, charging that they were an effort to save money at the expense of women's lives. Ehrenreich argues that feminists should embrace the new guidelines, using her own experience as a cancer survivor to illustrate:

One response to the new guidelines has been that numbers don’t matter -- only individuals do -- and if just one life is saved, that’s good enough. So OK, let me cite my own individual experience. In 2000, at the age of 59, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer on the basis of one dubious mammogram followed by a really bad one, followed by a biopsy. Maybe I should be grateful that the cancer was detected in time, but the truth is, I’m not sure whether these mammograms detected the tumor or, along with many earlier ones, contributed to it: One known environmental cause of breast cancer is radiation, in amounts easily accumulated through regular mammography.

And why was I bothering with this mammogram in the first place? I had long ago made the decision not to spend my golden years undergoing cancer surveillance, but I wanted to get my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescription renewed, and the nurse practitioner wouldn’t do that without a fresh mammogram.

As for the HRT, I was taking it because I had been convinced, by the prevailing medical propaganda, that HRT helps prevent heart disease and Alzheimer’s. In 2002, we found out that HRT is itself a risk factor for breast cancer (as well as being ineffective at warding off heart disease and Alzheimer’s), but we didn’t know that in 2000. So did I get breast cancer because of the HRT -- and possibly because of the mammograms themselves -- or did HRT lead to the detection of a cancer I would have gotten anyway?

Ehrenreich also links to a post by noted breast cancer specialist Dr. Susan Love, explaining the new guidelines. Love notes that the guidelines don't say that no women under 50 should receive mammograms, but that the test shouldn't be done routinely. It should be an individual decision made by a woman and her doctor with an understanding of both the benefits and risks:

One key shift has been in our understanding of the biology of breast cancer. We used to think there was just one kind of cancer that grew at a steady pace; that when it reached a certain size, it spread to the rest of the body. As a result, it seemed to make sense that we could save lives if a screening test could identify the cancer while it was still "early," before it had spread. That's how we developed the notion of early detection. And it works, sometimes.

In the best of hands, mammographic screening in women over 50 will reduce a woman's risk of dying from breast cancer by 30%. That is a lot, but it is not 100%. Why? It turns out that breast cancers are not all the same. There are at least five kinds, with different growth rates and levels of aggression. Some are so aggressive that they will have spread before they are visible on a mammogram or form a lump. Some are very slow growing or may not even have the ability to spread, so there is no benefit from finding them early. This is because of the biology of the disease, not the limitations of screening.

One of the reasons that mammography is a less effective tool in young women is that they have a higher rate of these aggressive tumors. Younger women also have breast tissue that is more sensitive to the carcinogenic effects of low-dose radiation. Calculations by a research team in Britain published in the British Journal of Cancer in 2005 suggest that it is possible for women to develop cancer because of the cumulative radiation from yearly mammograms starting at 40 or younger. Finally, mammograms are generally less accurate in younger women who have dense breast tissue, which can mask a cancer. Thus the balance of risk versus benefit is not as clear.

Ehrenreich says, at the end of her post, that what we really need is a new women's health movement that is willing and able to ask hard questions about the causes and treatments of breast cancer, and not falling for the propaganda of what she calls "the cancer industrial complex." I wholeheartedly agree.

Empire assimilates Obama

One of my favorite blogs, Can it happen here? has an excellent analysis.

Troop surge will "magnify the crime against Afghanistan"

CommonDreams.org has reposted an eloquent opinion piece from The Guardian/UK by Malalai Joya, a feminist activist and former member of the Afghan Parliament. Joya says:

After months of waiting, President Obama is about to announce the new US strategy for Afghanistan. His speech may be long awaited, but few are expecting any surprise: it seems clear he will herald a major escalation of the war. In doing so he will be making something worse than a mistake. It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country.

I have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire. Now Obama is pouring fuel on these flames, and this week's announcement of upwards of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will have tragic consequences.

Do yourself a favor. Read the whole thing.

An anniversary to celebrate

On Facebook, I'm a fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and that is how I found out that this week is the anniversary of the first sex discrimination case against the federal government, filed by the SPLC back in 1972. In Frontiero v. Richardson, the SPLC successfully challenged an Air Force policy that automatically granted medical, dental, and housing benefits to the wives of married servicemen -- but required servicewomen to prove their husbands relied on them for more than half of their support.

Soon to return to our regularly unscheduled programing

The rough draft of my novel, Sisters from Another Planet, has been completed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- and 70,575 words.

I will soon be posting more frequently on this blog, with maybe a little bit of time off to let my hands and elbows heal.

Progressive senators push back on public option

CommonDreams.org has the details.

Reid Bill rejects Stupak Amendment language

John Nichols at thenation.com reports that the Senate Health Bill Rejects Anti-Choice Extremes.

House health bill shortchanges women in many areas

As the Senate begins debate over Majority Leader Harry Reid's version of the health insurance reform bill RHRealityCheck.org reminds us that the House bill fails to cover many items necessary to women's health. In addition to the notorious Stupak Amendment limiting abortion coverage, the House bill also fails to cover such items as contraception, pelvic exams, and STD counseling.

As RHRealityCheck columnist Amanda Marcotte says:

I’m forced to suggest that the major factor is that our government is still mainly run by a bunch of middle-aged men who’ve been shielded from having to deal honestly and empathetically with women’s lives their whole lives, and therefore are prone to seeing women’s concerns as disposable at best, and at worst, as frighteningly alien and needing to be controlled. When you have that attitude, it’s easy to push aside all the ways you’ve personally benefited from contraception and abortion, and just assume the only women who need assistance in those areas are wayward sluts who need to be slapped down instead of given a hand. After all, I’m sure most of these men have had the benefit of women who quietly make sure that fertility control is taken care of, without bothering the over-privileged men in their lives.

Government task force changes mammography recommendations

Feminist Peace Network has the details.

Durbin releases poll results

Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who also serves as the Democratic whip in the Senate, has released his Public Option Poll Results. Durbin's poll showed 80 percent of respondents supporting a public option.

Respondents to the poll were self-selected, so this may not be a representative sample of the US public. But because of Durbin's position as the one who "gathers votes on major issues," this poll may indicate that Durbin is willing to use his position to push the public option through the Senate.

My mother called it Armistice Day

My father was a veteran of the Second World War. My mother and father both were civilian employees of the US Army at Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. I always thought of my mother as being conservative, as supporting US military efforts overseas that I considered unwise at best, but several times she expressed her regret to me at having helped to make armaments for a living. She felt this was something she had to do to support two young children, one of them disabled, after my father died.

My mother was five years old when the First World War ended, and she used to tell a story about how she fell down and skinned her nose on the pavement, and a returning veteran gave her a quarter to get her to stop crying, and called her his "rose of no-man's land." The holiday that we in the United States celebrate every November 11 is now called Veterans Day. But it began as a celebration of the end of the First World War on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month of 1918. My mother always called the day by its original name -- Armistice Day. Other nations still celebrate Armistice Day -- or Remembrance Day -- on this day.

There are only a handful of veterans of this horrific conflict who are yet living, and not very many others who remember that time. I've heard World War One described as the first modern war, but maybe in some ways the US Civil War was that -- war in which modern technology created effective machines of killing that efficiently slaughtered millions of people quickly. At any rate, the First World War was horrifying and hideously destructive, shattering dreams that technological and economic "progress" were creating a peaceful and prosperous world. Woodrow Wilson sold this mess to the US public as a "the war to end all wars" and a war to "make the world safe for democracy." (Wilson is often portrayed as a progressive idealist, but he was also a notorious racist, and pursued many anti-democratic policies.)

Even today in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government promotes the polite fiction that its military interventions are designed to make the world safe for democracy.  But we have lost even the hoped for ideal of ending all wars, and I think you can see that in the change from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. Armistice Day celebrated the end of what people were hoping and trying to make the last war. Veterans Day assumes that we will always have wars, that there will always be a justification for the United States to invade some other nation and make it right. On Veterans Day, we are supposed to thank military veterans for their service to their country. Especially on Veterans Day, if we question US military intervention in other countries, we are accused of dishonoring the brave men and women who wear our country's uniform. Heaven forfend that we might stop invading far-off places and use all that money and person power to make our own country right.

Meaning no disrespect to anyone who now is in the US military, or who has been in the military, I am not celebrating Veterans Day today. Today I am celebrating Armistice Day, when the guns fell silent to end the First World War, and when we can hope and dream and commit ourselves toward working for a day when all of the guns in all of the wars will fall silent.

And today, I would like to thank some other people for their service to our country. First of all, I would like to thank the activists who work for peace, for women's rights, for civil rights for people of color, for health care reform, for an end to poverty, for the preservation of our natural world. I want to thank the poets and the artists and the singer-songwriters. I want to thank the school teachers and the day care workers, and the people who labor in hospitals and nursing homes. I want to thank the librarians, and the historians, and the civil libertarians. I want to thank the people who volunteer for food banks, and food co-ops, and the people who tend community gardens. I want to thank the bloggers. I want to thank the bicycle mechanics and the drivers for public transport. I am sure I am forgetting someone, but I think you get the idea. I want to thank the people whose work and whose quiet courage make the possibility of peace more real. To all of you, I want to say, thank you for your service to your country, and to the entire world.

And now I think I'm going to get back to work on that anti-war novel of mine.

On the fall of the Berlin Wall

Today, many news reports celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The events of 1989, which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, are celebrated as some sort of final victory of capitalism over socialism. I wish I had the time for a full discussion of whether what was going on in the Soviet bloc countries deserved the name of socialism -- or whether what goes on in the United States deserves the name of democracy. But, ironically, I am in the midst of writing a novel about a character who has time traveled to the present from 1989, and I need to finish 50,000 words by the end of the month.

I did notice that CommonDreams.org cross-posted an interesting article from Reuters writer Anna Mudeva that points out that In Eastern Europe, People Pine for Socialism. Memories of atrocities committed by the old regimes have faded, Mudeva writes.

Capitalism's failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotism have given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high.

Furthermore, Common Dreams also reports that a recent global poll shows that most people are dissatisfied with free-market capitalism.

But certainly, advanced capitalist countries such as ours don't build walls defended with barbed wire and armed guards to keep people in. No, of course not. We build walls to keep people out.

Congresswomen speak out for reproductive freedom

Thanks to FeministPeaceNetwork for a link to this post from Spare Candy that shows five Congresswomen speaking out against the Stupak amendment, to the House's health care bill. The Stupak Amendment prevents women who sign up for the public option, or who get assistance to buy insurance from the exchanges, from getting health insurance that covers abortions.

Kucinich votes against house health insurance bill

Thanks to Whole Foods Boycott Action for their link to Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich's explanation of his vote against the health insurance bill.

Here'a an interesting anaylsis of the Stupak Amendment...

...from the always perceptive Feminist Peace Network.

A bittersweet victory on healthcare reform

Our Bodies Our Blog reports that the US House of Representatives has passed the the health care reform bill.

But first, they passed the Stupak Amendment, limiting women's access to abortion. This amendment passed with the support of 64 Democrats. More explanation of the Stupak Amendment can be found here.

Counting all the dead

Thanks to CommonDreams.org for reposting this commentary on the Fort Hood massacre from New American Media. Author Aaron Glantz identifies the victims of yesterday's violence as casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It seems clear that the violence that we as a nation have been perpetrating on other nations is coming back to haunt us.

How would space aliens understand our analysis of violence?

ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES has an interesting post on the violence at Ft. Hood. Her main point is that news commentators spend endless hours analyzing the causes of some sorts of violence, while violence against women is accepted as an ordinary part of life, not requiring much thought.

Ironically, the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre is coming up in about a month.

Time to write

I call this blog "Talking to Myself." It's sort of my practice blog. Once I've done a lot of practicing and feel I've got this blogging thing down, I'll start a real blog and try to get folks to read it. But I think there are two or three people besides me who read this blog from time to time, and I just wanted to let y'all know that I'm not going to be posting very much for a while, because next month, starting tomorrow at 12:01 a.m., I am going to write a novel.

The scariest costume I'll see all day

So I walk into the Red Cup just now for a breakfast burrito, and this guy comes in behind me in a Confederate uniform.

I think this is why I gave up doing Hallowe'en. Somewhere deep in my bones, I don't believe there is any such thing as a harmless fantasy. I remember an old dyke back in Oregon who told me once, "What you practice is what you get good at." Fantasy is a form of practice. (Or sometimes, it's a form a memory, but that's a different can of worms.) I don't think we completely create our own reality, but visualization is very powerful.

So I'm kinda procrastinating about finishing my breakfast and walking home. I'm kinda hoping this guy goes away before I do. Because I think it's best that I not have any opportunity to discuss his costume with him. Because from my point of view, there is nothing about the Confederacy that is quaint, comic, romantic, or worthy of emulation. If you think I'm joking, start reading the first autobiography of Frederick Douglass. And yes, the Civil War was about slavery. Lincoln may have started out with a willingness to continue to allow slavery if the union could be saved. By the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that was all over. The Emancipation Proclamation was a matter of pragmatic war strategy. The Union absolutely depended on the armed service of free blacks and emancipated slaves in order to win the war.

And yet, in some ways the Civil War is still not over. The war between Blue and Gray is the historical beginning of the hostility between "blue states" and "red states." Slavery was once known as "the patriarchal institution," and in the 21st century, neo-Confederates do their best to defend the rule of the richest white men over everybody else. So the guy in that gray uniform is definitely the scariest thing I'll see all day--unless someone else has the bad taste to show up wearing a storm trooper costume with a swastika or a white sheet with a pointed hood.