George Carlin

I miss him already...

Female in America

About six years ago, when it was being postulated that Hillary Clinton would be making a run at the Oval Office in 2008, I was frankly skeptical. After everything she had been through - Whitewater, Travelgate and then Lewinsky, watching her diligent work on the nation's health care system shot out of the sky - all of which was weathered with great dignity, she was finally vindicated with a political career of her own. As a Senator she could make a difference. And I didn't believe she was foolish enough to attempt the impossible.

After all, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that despite the Virginia Slims commercials, we have NOT "come a long way, Baby." No Equal Rights Amendment, no equal pay, restricted (and getting more so,) reproductive rights and a pathetic representation in our national government. If 51% of the population is female, then what's up with 16% of the Senate being female? Puh-lease. So who would be dumb enough to believe that the US of A is ready to elect a woman to the White House?

Oh, Senator Clinton. Rarely, if ever, has someone fallen so completely and spectacularly from grace. Naked ambition - of either gender - is truly an ugly thing. The only thing uglier than the depths to which the Clintons seem eager to sink to in this election year, is the misogyny that seems to be a national anthem. And the sad state of affairs that this speaks to my daughter. Or to her daughter to be. I think Peggy Orenstein says it best in her article The Hillary Lesson:

Right now, my daughter doesn’t know about the obstacles she may face someday, and I’m not sure of the wisdom of girding her in advance. Even the supposedly “girl positive” picture books, designed to address this very issue, pose a dilemma. Take “Elenita,” a magical-realist tale, given to my daughter by a family friend, about a girl who wants to be a glass blower. Her father says she can’t do it: she’s too little, and besides, the trade is forbidden to women. The lesson, naturally, is that with a little ingenuity girls can be glass blowers or stevedores or [fill in the blank]. Nice. Still, I found myself hesitating over the “girls can’t” section. My daughter has never heard that “girls can’t be” or “girls can’t do.” Why should I plant the idea in her head only to knock it down?

The same quandary crops up with older girls. They are sports stars, yearbook editors, valedictorians. We have assured them the world is theirs, and they have no reason to disbelieve us. Like Clinton, our daughters are no victims. And yet, all is not quite well. Not when achieving C.E.O., M.D. or Ph.D. status can still come appended with a second alphabet of b- and c-words. Not when a woman who runs for office is accused of harboring a “testicle lockbox.” Clinton, whatever else she may be, has become a reflection, a freeze frame of the complications and contradictions of female success. Her bid for the White House has embodied both the possibilities we never imagined for our daughters — shattering not just the glass ceiling but the glass stratosphere — and the vitriol that attaining them can provoke. Both are real; so Godspeed, girls.

Indeed.

Disgusting Profits by Armament Companies

Don't read this article by Matthew Rothschild on an empty stomach.

"I’ve been joking the last few years that if you invested in military stocks on January 20, 2001, you’d be sitting pretty right now.

Well, now I’ve got some more evidence to back up that not-so-funny joke.

Since the Iraq War began, aerospace and defense industry stocks have more than doubled.

General Dynamics did even better than that.

Its stock has tripled.

Banking on its Abrams tanks and Stryker troop transports, General Dynamics gobbled up $2.35 billion “in war revenue last year,” according to Bloomberg News.

“The war has been a huge benefit to almost all contractors,” William Hartung of the New America Foundation told Bloomberg.

War profiteering is not news, I suppose. But it is disgusting. And those who are profiting from the war are Bush and Cheney’s cronies in the corporate boardrooms. For them, war is not a bloody tragedy, it’s a golden opportunity. Bush’s “base” is doing just fine.

Almost 100 years ago, back in 1911, Fighting Bob La Follette, the pioneer of the Progressive movement and founder of the magazine I’m working for, opposed U.S. intervention in Mexico and asked a crucial question:

“Have we come to this point, that patriotism, valor, and life and death are openly made the pawns of Wall Street’s politicians, to be moved about as suits the greater profits of Wall Street’s master spirits?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is yes.

La Follette also said, in January 1917, “If our nation manufactured its own munitions in its own factories at cost, it would take the private profit out of war, and the war traders out of American politics.’

Alas, the war traders have not yet been expelled from the temple of American politics."

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

The Torture Veto by David Cole

George W. Bush made history on March 8, when he became the first American President to use the veto power to preserve the right to torture. Of course, he wouldn’t put it that way–he prefers to call it “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That sounds so much more civilized. But what, at the end of the day, is the difference?

The President can’t actually tell us, ostensibly because if Al Qaeda knew how we interrogate, it would steel its fighters to withstand the tactics. Except, that is, when he has told us–as in the case of waterboarding, a practice the Administration recently admitted the CIA has employed against Al Qaeda suspects, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Waterboarding, the Administration insists, was used on only three suspects and is no longer practiced. Nevertheless, since it is the only “enhanced interrogation technique” the Administration has admitted to, it is worth exploring just why they think it’s not torture. After all, we’ve treated simulated drowning as torture when others have used it. We convicted Japanese soldiers for using it on Americans in World War II. The State Department has repeatedly referred to the tactic as torture in its human rights reports on other nations. But when we do it, it’s only an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, conceded in Congressional testimony in February that waterboarding may be “distressing, uncomfortable, even frightening” but insisted that it is not torture because it does not inflict serious physical harm and doesn’t last very long. Severity and duration of pain, it turns out, are in the eyes of the CIA, or the Office of Legal Counsel–but certainly not the suspect who cannot breathe, has water in his lungs and fears that he will drown if he doesn’t say what the interrogators want to hear.

It’s these kinds of fallacious distinctions that led the world to prohibit not just torture in the Convention Against Torture but all “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” And it was just these kinds of elusive distinctions that led both houses of Congress to attempt to impose on the CIA the same restrictions that the Army’s interrogators live by–restrictions that set forth clearly what can and cannot be done.

Bush says “hardened terrorists” merit different treatment from captured soldiers. But in this conflict that distinction quickly dissolves. What exactly is the basis for treating suspected terrorists differently from other human beings? The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment does not have an exception for suspected terrorists. It insists that all humans be treated equally, with respect for their inviolable dignity–even when they do not respect ours. It is nothing less than that notion of human dignity that was the real object of Bush’s veto.

David Cole is The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and author.

Love American Style

You just gotta love this article by David Michael Green. Excerpt:

"I guess it won’t be a huge surprise to anybody that the US spends more on ‘defense’ than any other country in the world. Maybe that’s not so completely absurd, given that we have the third largest population on the planet. (At least it’s not entirely out of line if you set aside the slightly inconvenient fact that the two larger countries are about four times bigger than we are). But here’s the truly scary part: The United States not only outspends every other country in the world on military goodies, it outspends ALL other countries of the world. Combined. That’s right. Take all 190-plus countries out there and add together their defense budgets and you still won’t equal America’s alone. What’s more, that doesn’t even include the $100 billion or so that we’re dropping each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the additional costs in veterans’ (so-called) care, munitions replacement and economic losses we have been hemorrhaging for those wars, and will continue to, for decades to come, estimated to run up toward two trillion bucks total. (Oh, and did I mention that one-sixth of our population doesn’t have healthcare coverage? Never mind. I’m sure those are completely unrelated facts.) Anyhow, does that sound like a peace-loving country to you? We love it so much that we outspend nearly 200 other countries in the world – combined! – in buying shit for war? And think about this for a second: How absolutely disastrous does your diplomacy have to get so that you need to be able to fight off every other country of the world, all at once?!"

Read the rest here.

Happy Easter?

While you're dipping those hard boiled goodies for the kids, consider that 85% of eggs produced in the US are from "battery caged" hens. This type of confinement is considered the cruelest form of commercial agriculture. Example:

“After six weeks in the incredibly crowded cages of this facility, you could not recognize the poor creatures as chickens, ” writes an internet commentator of a summer he worked on a egg farm. “Missing most of their feathers, eyes, bloody, broken and unable to walk, our job was to grab these birds, by any means necessary, and throw them into a truck. Where did the truck go? To a chicken soup plant a few towns over. Unable to sell these bruised and battered chickens as whole chickens, the egg plant owners would sell them to be made into soup base. As if their lives were not hellish enough to that point, these birds would be flung, often after being battered against the pillars of the plant and kicked a few times for fun by the sadistic workers, who were mainly teenagers and weird illiterate country bumpkins. The chickens, nearly dead, would be transported in unheated trucks to the soup plant to be battered and likely boiled alive to make soup . . .”

Yum.

OMG - Pedicures for the Pre-school Set?

Recent article in the New York Times on cosmetic services for the rich and precocious. Obviously we are not experiencing economic meltdown when folks can fork over American dollars to let a seven year old de-stress with a mani-pedi makeover combo platter complete with glitter hearts and a limo ride.

But as a much admired Bitch pointed out - let's pay a woman of color to literally sit at the feet of our little Paris-in-training....

This nail artist is lucky enough to be able to just say no.