I’m not watching the Torture President deliver his State of the Union pack o’ lies. Don’t need to see the chimp smirk and hear our Congress cheer every time the “Applause” sign lights up. But this, now — this is interesting: Cindy Sheehan, who was invited to attend the State of the Union address, was arrested by Capitol Police inside the Capitol Chamber and taken away. Why? Because she was wearing a T-shirt that showed the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq.

And that, kids, is the State of the Union.

I’m just going to get all Godwin’s Law on my own post here:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany!
Winter for Poland and France!

I love that song.

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Posted by Violet under Politics on January 31, 2006, 9:57 pm EST

15 Comments »

So, Alito’s in.

Over at firedoglake, they’re looking on the bright side, suggesting that the last-minute, netroots-driven support for a filibuster revealed some tipping point of exasperation in the populace. The theme is that we’re in a good position for the next round. ReddHedd says:

Okay, so it’s obvious there is cloture today. It sucks. But it happens in the big leagues that sometimes you lose an inning. That doesn’t mean you stop playing, it just means you take a deep breath and go back to the dugout for some fresh plays.

I don’t mean to sound all negative here, but…WHAT?

This wasn’t an inning. There aren’t any more innings. The Supreme Court is locked now, Roe is gone, civil rights are in peril. The upcoming fight over the wiretapping will have no effect on what has just gone down. We lost, and we’re screwed.

You can talk all you want about how this is just the “first skirmish” and we’re gonna be loaded for bear next time. There is no fucking next time. The Supreme Court is gone. Roe is gone. Women’s rights are gone. FISA hearings don’t mean jack.

It’s gone, people. We’re screwed.

Posted by Violet under Politics, Reproductive Rights on January 30, 2006, 10:22 pm EST

21 Comments »

An evolutionary-psychology lovin’ tool named Neil Chethik is interviewed in Salon this week about his new book on men and marriage. He says he’s in favor of feminism, and I’m willing to believe that he means well. What astonished me about the interview is the bullshit this guy spouts about the feminist movement — under the guise, of course, of defending it:

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Posted by Violet under Gender Issues on January 30, 2006, 5:12 am EST

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I am in torment.

My mailbox is being inundated with the spring gardening catalogs. See the picture at left? That’s from the new Jackson and Perkins catalog, and is a prime example of what’s known among connoisseurs as “rose porn.” It’s a saucy new floribunda called Black Cherry. It’s luscious, it’s heavenly, it’s no doubt been photo-styled and airbrushed beyond any possible resemblance to what an actual Black Cherry rose would look like growing in someone’s actual yard. Nevertheless, I, the inveterate rose gardener, want it bad.

But I can’t have it. I can’t have any more roses; I can’t have any more flowers, period. Why?

Because of The Snake.

I live on a heavily wooded, vast rural estate of 10 acres. The first year I moved here, I met The Snake whilst tromping happily through the woods with my dog. I was terrified, The Snake was terrified, my dog was oblivious. The next summer, I espied The Snake one afternoon from my bedroom window, slinking along the wood edge behind my 75-foot rose border. It was several weeks before I was able to muster the courage to go into the garden again, but I finally convinced myself that The Snake would heed my desperate telepathic pleadings to stay the fuck away.

Last year, The Snake made his appearance early in the season, not long after the roses had passed their first peak in May. (By the way, I fully realize that there are probably many snakes on these 10 acres, but in my mind it is just The One Snake, a terrifying being of mythic proportions.) On one occasion, I saw The Snake slinking horribly between the catmint and the Our Lady of Guadalupe floribunda. Another day I discovered him lounging in the lantana just inches away from my feet, despite the fact that I had been stomping about and whacking and weeding for half an hour. In mid-summer The Snake appeared in the back yard – inside the dog fence! – and scared the living daylights out of me by streaking across the yard, head held high, at lightening speed. After each of these encounters, it became harder and harder for me to brave the outdoors. Then we found a baby snake in the garage – dead, but still snaky – and I almost had a nervous breakdown.

The coup de grace came at the end of the season, when The Snake appeared right on our front porch. I have barely been outside the house since.

So here I am, imprisoned in my own home by The Snake. The gardening catalogs flood in, and I long to do what I’ve done every winter of my gardening life: pore over the pictures, sketch out new plantings, dream up delicious new juxtapositions of color and form. But there’s no point, because I no longer have the nerve to even step into the fucking yard.

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on January 29, 2006, 12:54 am EST

27 Comments »

John Lewis Gaddis has a new book out called The Cold War: A New History, in which he eulogizes Reagan as a visionary and the winner of the Cold War. Salon’s review of the book offers the following tidbit:

When John Lewis Gaddis, a history professor and expert on the conflict, teaches Yale undergraduates about the Cold War, “hardly any of them remember any of the events I’m describing.” His students, he reports, “have very little sense of how the Cold War started, what it was about or why it ended in the way that it did.”

Exactly. And that’s why revisionists like Gaddis are able to get away with this crap.

• Reagan didn’t win the Cold War; if anything, he prolonged it by years. Gorbachev began pushing for reform in the early 80s, and Reagan’s reactionary bluster actually gave the Kremlin hardliners ammunition to maintain the status quo.

• Reagan didn’t beat the Soviets by outspending them; the Soviets weren’t trying to keep up with us at all. They had long since abandoned the arms race, betting (accurately) that there was almost no chance of a hot war with the U.S.

I was at the IMF in the early 90s, working with the Russians and the newly independent republics. Those folks would have laughed their asses off if somebody had told them that Ronnie Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union. When I first heard Reagan referred to (on TV) as the guy who had “won the Cold War,” I almost choked to death on my coffee. It was Republican revisionism, pure and simple.

As Goebbels said, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Think of that whenever somebody tells you that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.

Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry on January 28, 2006, 1:33 am EST

6 Comments »

There’s a wave of delusion sweeping over America’s pharmacists, leading them to believe that it is their appointed mission in life to regulate the reproductive lives of their customers in accordance with dimly understood 2,000-year-old Near Eastern literature. We’ve all heard about the godbag pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception and birth control pills, generally because a) they imagine the pill is some kind of abortion or Satanic ritual, or b) the woman with the prescription isn’t married and therefore, in the estimation of these self-appointed arbiters, has no business doing anything that requires birth control. But that’s nothing compared to the pharmacists who refuse to sell any kind of contraceptive device at all:

“Where would the condoms be?” I asked with total sincerity and seriousness—I am an adult after all.

“We don’t have condoms.”

“You’re a pharmacy without condoms?”

“Well,” she scoffs, “that’s not exactly the kind of behavior we want to promote now, is it?”

And what kind behavior is that? Contraception?

Even by the godbags’ own reasoning (and I use the term loosely), this makes no sense. Here’s a nice married man – for all they know, a god-fearing Christian man – who just wants to have a little carnal knowledge of his chattel broodmare wife without impregnating her every single time. This is common and perfectly acceptable among even fundamentalist Protestants, who are most likely the dominant strain of godbag in this little town. And it’s the husband seeking contraception here, so there’s not even the risk of an uppity chattel broodmare wife making reproductive decisions on her own.

I’m guessing that full-bore sperm worship — which has long been the province of Catholics — is becoming more widespread among fundamentalist Protestants. Every spermatazoon is a perfect, sacred gift, created by Jesus Himself. Either that, or the godbags are willing to forego contraception just to keep those satanic condoms out of the hands (and off the dicks) of the godless. Hey, you gotta fight for what you believe in.

Link via pharyngula, the science blog that never fails to scare the shit out of you.

Posted by Violet under Godbags on January 27, 2006, 1:22 am EST

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Oh, man. The Wingnut God really crossed the diamond with the pearl when he made this guy. No, not the guy in the picture — that’s Criswell! I’m referring to Andrew Longman, whose columns appear on RenewAmerica. He’s the Ed Wood of wingnuts: impassioned, incomprehensible, and unintentionally hilarious.

In a piece called “You Can’t Fight Islamism with Gay Cowboys,” Andrew explains how Hollywood is abetting the terrorists by making movies with gay people in them. There are two movies Andrew’s pissed about: “Brokeback Mountain,” of course, but also “End of the Spear,” in which a Christian missionary is played by an openly gay actor.

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Posted by Violet under Wingnut Watch on January 25, 2006, 12:51 am EST

8 Comments »

JERUSALEM (The Age) — When Palestinians go to the polls tomorrow, it’s no surprise that many will be voting for the fundamentalist Hamas party. But what may be a surprise is that not all of the Hamas candidates are men. In a sign of growing liberalism in the Arab world, masked shapes are also on the party ticket.

The masked shape shown here is one of three such entities, and the most prominent of the three. At campaign appearances, the thing communicates with reporters through a party spokesman.

“This is a natural development,” said Palestinian election official Fatwa al-Jazeera. “Masked shapes in Hamas already play many roles, particularly in the municipal councils, so why not in the parliament?”

The masked shape has insisted through its spokesman that it has no interest in pursuing masked-shape rights or special issues involving masks, shapes, or combinations thereof. Its stated goal is to represent all Palestinians — “men and masked shapes” — and to faithfully serve the Palestinian cause.

Posted by Violet under Genuine Fake News on January 24, 2006, 4:02 am EST

7 Comments »

In “Religions Evolve, Part 1,” I offered up 10 random truths about Christianity. In that post, I listed 10 well-accepted conclusions about Christianity that have emerged from the past two centuries of scholarship. Now I’ll try to do the same for Islam — except I’ve got 17 random truths, and the scholarship is more controversial.

Modern critical study of Islam is in its infancy. The techniques scholars have used to analyze the Hebrew and Christian bibles are only now being brought to bear on the Koran, with extreme resistance from Muslims. Modern historical analysis of the origins of Islam is equally new, and equally resisted. Islam is basically where Christianity was in the 19th century – critical scholarship is beginning, but the work is fiercely opposed by the Islamic establishment and virtually unknown to the faithful masses.

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Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Religion, Recommended on January 23, 2006, 8:14 pm EST

50 Comments »

Today we’re observing the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that handed women power over our own bodies. This was a power white men had enjoyed since the founding of our republic, and one that black men had achieved legally (though not practically, of course) a hundred years before.

You see, that’s what the right to an abortion is: it’s power over your own body. It’s the right to decide whether or not you’re going to incubate a fetus. It’s the right to fundamental bodily integrity.

I’ve always thought the pro-choice movement made a serious error when it settled on “choice” as the euphemism for the right to an abortion. Choice sounds like something you get at a Chinese restaurant. It sounds like having a nice variety of car colors to choose from, instead of only basic black, as Henry Ford envisioned.

It’s not “choice.” It’s personal, physical sovereignty.

If you’re a man, and you’re having a hard time grasping this, try the following thought experiment: Imagine if the government had the right to force an organ transplant on you. Imagine if the government had the right to take one of your kidneys, assuming it decided that somebody else needed that kidney more. Think of it: you’re at the mercy of the government. The fate of your own internal bodily organs is at the whim of some bureaucrat or judge.

Or try this (again, if you’re a man): Imagine if the government had the right to sterilize you. Governments used to do this, actually – our own experimented with sterilizing blacks, the Nazis experimented with sterilizing Jews. So, imagine if the government had the right at any time to seize you and sterilize you. They wouldn’t do this to all men, of course; just the ones the government didn’t want to procreate. Maybe just self-described liberal men. Heck, maybe just liberal bloggers of El Salvadoran extraction. There aren’t too many of those, but I’d be willing to bet that if the U.S. government were seizing them from the streets and force-sterilizing them, there would be an outcry.

And the outcry would be from everyone who values liberty, everyone who abhors a police state, everyone who understands that sovereignty over your own body is the root of freedom. I don’t think it would be dismissed as a fringe issue. I can’t imagine people saying, “well, it’s just liberal El Salvadoran bloggers that this is happening to. It’s a fringe issue.”

Buy a clue, boys: Abortion isn’t a fringe issue either.

First of all, anything that affects more than one half of the population is, by definition, not on the fringe. (And if you’re a Democrat, anything that affects well over half your voters is sure as hell not some little side issue.)

Secondly, abortion isn’t some girly “choice” thing, like which brand of tampon to use or what color nail polish to apply. It’s the right to control our bodies. It’s the right to determine what happens to our bodies, to determine if we will bear children, to determine our own destiny.

So, you liberal men: Let’s not have any more of this talk of abortion rights as something we can give up in exchange for greater popularity with people who vote Republican anyway. It’s not a bargaining chip, and it’s not optional. If you’re willing to sell me and my sisters down the river, then you might as well switch sides. You belong with the party of torture, extreme rendition, wiretapping, and thought police. The party of people who think “human rights” is a racket dreamed up by Amnesty International. Those are your kin, your brethren.

Got it?

(Posted in conjunction with: Blog for Choice)

Posted by Violet under Blogging for Choice, Reproductive Rights, Recommended on January 22, 2006, 2:16 pm EST

29 Comments »

The real news is too goddamn depressing today, so here’s something to lighten your load: rapper 50 Cent is being sued by rapper Luther Campbell for plagiarism. (The fact that I have to preface these names with the identifying word “rapper” should clue you in that I’ve never heard any of this shit.)

Check out the alleged plagiarism:

50 cent song ‘In Da Club’: “Go shorty, it’s your birthday. We’re gonna party like it’s your birthday.”

Luther Campbell song ‘It’s Your Birthday’: “Go Freddie! Go! Go! Go Freddie! Go! Go! Go Freddie! It’s your birthday. It’s your birthday. It’s your birthday.”

Okay, aside from the fact that I’m dazzled by the lyricism here, I must say the plagiarism case seems a tad weak. “Go __, it’s your birthday” doesn’t seem like the kind of immortal phrase that would be plagiarized, you know? It just strikes me as a string of five words that any English speaker might come up with. It’s not exactly “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”, is it? But no doubt there are deep rapful mysteries here that elude me.

So here’s the deal: if you say, “go __, it’s your birthday,” you may be plagiarizing one Luther Campbell, and he is not afraid to sue. Just keep that in mind.

Go, kactus! It’s your birthday!

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on January 21, 2006, 6:15 pm EST

6 Comments »

Happy Birthday to kactus at Super Babymama, who is 46 today. She’s observed the occasion with a beautiful tribute to her mother, one of those incredible women who lived “women’s lib” before it had a name. The kind of woman who had the strength to walk out on an abusive man, raise 5 children on her own, educate herself, and build a career in a man’s world.

When women’s lib came around she was an enthusiastic believer, as if finally somebody was putting into words what she had been living. She subscribed to Ms from the very first issue, at a time when just the word Ms was an act of radicalism. I think that feminism, for her, was simply logical; not an ideological point-of-view, but the way she lived her life.

It’s quite a story. Go read it.

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, Various and Sundry on January 21, 2006, 3:39 pm EST

1 Comment »

Kevin Drum committed a kind of intellectual self-immolation this week, and cordially invited the entire liberal blogosphere to watch. In response to the U.S. missile attack in Pakistan, he wrote:

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let’s also assume that we did indeed kill al-Masri and several other major al-Qaeda leaders. Finally, let’s assume that the 18 civilians killed in the attack were genuinely innocent bystanders with no connection to terrorists. Question: Under those assumptions, was the attack justified? I think the answer is pretty plainly yes, but I’d sure like to see the liberal blogosphere discuss it.

What? He says yes? Yes, it’s “plainly” justified? He’s talking about the deaths of 18 innocent people. And we’re not even at war with Pakistan, so you can’t argue about the inevitable hazards of wartime and life in a combat zone.

Basically, Kevin’s saying that he thinks it’s justified to take out 18 innocent bystanders anywhere in the world, if that means we can also knock off a few members of al Qaeda.

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Posted by Violet under War on January 20, 2006, 1:54 am EST

9 Comments »

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has caused a rift among Senate Democrats, with some planning to vote for the conservative judge while others remain undecided.

Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska announced Tuesday he will support Alito, the second Democrat to do so. Nelson said he will support Alito “because of his impeccable judicial credentials, the American Bar Association’s strong recommendation, and the fact that I’m running for re-election in, like, the most Republican state in the union.”

Nelson’s statement was issued from a highway rest stop near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he was assisting Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in an emergency heart transplant. The two men were on the way to a housewarming party at Sen. Trent Lott’s temporary vacation home on the Florida coast.

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was the first Democrat to announce his support for Alito. “I have just returned from my fourth trip to the Senate in the past 17 months and can report real progress there,” he wrote in an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Alito Must Be Confirmed.” He argued that “it’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Alito met Wednesday with several undecided Democratic senators, including Bill Nelson of Florida and Ron Wyden of Oregon, at which time the senators received GOP ballcaps and refrigerator magnets. Alito planned to meet Thursday with Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware and Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

“I’m not a fan of Alito,” said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. “I wish more Democrats would line up to oppose him. Unfortunately, it’s just very difficult to compete with the Republicans when it comes to the swag and the house parties. They’ve really got that stuff down.”

Posted by Violet under Genuine Fake News, Recommended on January 19, 2006, 1:47 am EST

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