Saturday: Solidarity, Sisterhood
Posted: March 12, 2011 Filed under: Economy, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, morning reads, Women's Rights | Tags: 2012, 8.9 quake in Japan, bees, Bernie Sanders, Bradley Manning, civil liberties, collective bargaining, FDR, Joan Baez, Liberalism, Phil Ochs, Rep. King "hearings" on "radical Islam", US State Department, Wisconsin, womancession, Women's and children's health 74 Comments
Good morning, gleaners!
Grab your morning brew, and let’s go!
Wisconsin
- It’s farmer-labor day today at the WI Capitol building, starting at noon, complete with a “tractorcade.”
- Next, a piece I treasure. Plain Talk: Squandering 100 years of progress, by Dave Zweifel. Please take the time to click over and read this one sometime over the weekend if you can.
Hillaryland
- Guess who is going to Egypt and Tunisia next week. In her FY 2012 budget request before Congress on Thursday, Hillary announced she will be meeting with transitional leaders in both Tunis and Cairo as well as with Libyan opposition while she’s in the region. For the new Arab world that is emerging to be new at all, women cannot be left behind. Who better to put that world on notice than Hillary Rodham Clinton?
(second link will take you to an AFP report on Hillary’s remarks at Friday’s Women in the World conference in NY. See also her remarks at the 2011 Women of Courage event for more.)
- This week–on International Women’s day no less–our advocate-in-chief helped to launch a Global Partnership on Maternal and Child Health, bringing a long-neglected development goal further out of the shadows. Brava, Madam Secretary!
(see also Hillary’s 100 Women Initiative. If you don’t know what it is, click and find out.)
- From Politico’s quotes of the week: “Her Excellency, Madam President… I love saying that.”
— Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, introducing the president of Kyrgyzstan at a State Department event.
- Hillary and Julia from their bilateral on Tuesday.
- If you’re a Hillary fan who can’t get enough of all things Hill and missed my essays from earlier this week, knock yourself out. One is the mischievously titled Hillary: Warmonger and the other is Women, Workers, and The Sisterhood.
Women’s Rights
- My response to Rand Paul’s hypocritical libertarian rant on “choice” (choice of toilet, that is). Shorter Wonk: I hope Rand has a working garbage disposal, because he sure talks a lot of trash.
- See here for RH Reality Check’s exhaustive coverage of the latest developments from yesterday. Also, Minkoff Minx wrote to her Georgia state representative, Stephen Allison (R-8) and received a letter from Rep. Allison that you might find of interest. Scroll to the end of the post to see it.
- My $0.02 on Allison’s response: The excuse that the most draconian of these bills will never pass is baloney. The rise of mini-Stupaks in states across the country has built up a momentum in the war against women, and that momentum is helping to get other horrible versions of these bills passed. Furthermore, the preponderance of such nonsense legislation clearly indicates a concerted effort to use women and their civil rights as a tool of division and distraction from the economy, degrading those rights in the process and blocking unfettered access to reproductive healthcare for women–all women. The rich will get their safe abortions on demand one way or another, and we all know it.
Tired of hearing about Charlie Sheen?
- Here’s the fix. At least on the Internet.
Economy
- Bernie Sanders introduces The Emergency Deficit Reduction Act. Sanders’ press release says the bill would a) create a 5.4% surtax on millionaires, yielding up to $50 billion annually for the US Treasury, and b) end tax breaks for Big Oil, yielding about $3.5 billion a year in new revenue. Thank you, Bernie Sanders!
- Krugman: Dumbing Deficits Down
- BBC News Magazine: Are call centres the factories of the 21st Century?
- Womancession/nifty graph pick of the week: Women Lead in Unpaid Work. Click graph for more info.
CLICK TO GO TO ECONOMIX
US Politics: 2012
- Nate Silver/NYT: Wisconsin Dispute Could Mobilize Democratic Base
- Andrew Leonard/Salon: Do rising gas prices spell doom for Obama?
- US News & World Report says wedge issues are back just in time for the 2012 electoral cycle. In other news… Water? Yep, wet as ever. (When did wedge issues ever leave?)
- Here’s a derivative piece if ever there was one… Cameron Lynch says Barack Obama is the “Surprisingly Silent President.” This echoes Ruth Marcus last week suddenly discovering that Obama is the “Where’s Waldo” president. Obama told America who he was from 2004 to 2008. The
creativeclueless class was too busy chattering away and creating “a different kind of politician” narrative to take note that Obama was telegraphing very clearly that he would make an indifferent kind of president.
Civil Liberties
- Have you read Glenn Greenwald’s takedown of the NYT editors and Andrew Sullivan yet? Glenzilla exposes the hypocrisy of their “Bush-tortured” defenses for Obama’s indefinite detention.
- Amnesty International petition to Secretary Gates and President Obama: End the punitive detention of Bradley Manning
- This next one is an amazing development. Via Laura Rozen over at her new Yahoo digs, The Envoy — Reporter: State Department official raps Pentagon treatment of Manning as “counterproductive and stupid.” We’re talking about PJ Crowley over at Hillary Clinton’s state department, y’all. He told that to veteran BBC reporter Philippa Thomas without thinking twice. Thomas blogged about it here.
- Required Reading for all Liberals: Lynn Parramore’s Torture: The Movie (via New Deal 2.0) and Margaret Kimberly’s Peace Prize Torture (via Black Agenda Report).
King hearings
- Adam Serwer (via the American Prospect) has an important read up that puts it all in perspective… Good Cop, Bad Cop: “On counterterrorism, the only difference between Republicans and Obama is rhetorical.”
Disaster in Japan and Elsewhere
- Foreign Policy’s The Cable: Crowley deleted tweet comparing Middle East ‘tsunami’ to Japan crisis.
(Also, Crowley confirmed his comments about Manning to The Cable:”What I said was my personal opinion. It does not reflect an official USG policy position. I defer to the Department of Defense regarding the treatment of Bradley Manning.”)
- See the NYT’s photojournalism blog — Lens — for dramatic shots of the devastation from the 8.9 quake and tsunami in Japan, as well as other harrowing pictures from around the world yesterday, that tell the story of tragedy and strife.
Environment
- “The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century. Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people.”
–Achim Steiner, the executive director of UN Environment Programme
This Day in History (March 12)
- First fireside chat: “It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.” –FDR, 1933 (even FDR sounds like he’s saying Solidarity forever!)
What Kind of Liberal are You?
- Take the quiz. I’m a “Working Class Warrior.” How about you?
- I mostly linked to this silly quiz so I could share this priceless bumper sticker quote from the first question: “May the fetus you save be gay.”
Song of Protest for Saturday
Extra verse added to the PPM version: “Show me the famine, show me the frail, eyes with no future that show how we failed, and I’ll show you the children with so many reasons why there but for fortune, go you or I.”
- Also see Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, and check for a screening near you.
I’m turning the Saturday reads over to you in the comments… Take the quiz and let us know how you score, share a song, link us to what’s on your blogging list this weekend…and have a great day!
[originally posted at Let Them Listen; crossposted at Taylor Marsh and Liberal Rapture]
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
NW Luna
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Taylor Marsh on Lisa Murkowski coming out against defunding PP/Title X:
Another Reason It’s Good Palin’s Man Lost
Hear, hear!
C-Span’s writeup of Hillary’s testimony on Capitol Hill this week:
Clinton Pushes State Dept. Budget Request
Details U.S. Stance in Middle East
From the link:
Clinton: U.S. will keep helping Afghan women (Wapo)
At the 40 min, 55 sec -mark of this C-span archival footage from Thursday, of Hillary on the Hill testifying, you can hear Nita Lowey asking Hillary about the earlier Wapo article on USAID deprioritizing women’s rights in Afghanistan and the unnamed official from the Admin who trashed Afghan women’s rights as a “pet rock issue.”
Lowey says “now I know you pretty well” to Hillary (Hillary laughs)…Lowey goes on to say what the Wapo reported is unacceptable and that she (Lowey) has been a strong advocate for women’s rights and “I know you have” to Hillary.
Hillary nods warmly as Lowey says all of the above and goes on to say that:
the article “is NOT accurate” and that she’s “trying to find out who that unidentified official is because that’s NOT Administration policy.”
Good morning, Wonk! Thanks for all the good reading material. I have about ten windows opened up from your links now.
I hope none of the links are broken, lol.
Did you open up the Charlie Sheen link by any chance? The comments are funny… people keep asking for the same thing to be done with Sarah Palin.
No, I didn’t. I’ll take a look.
I think I need one of those blockers for David Brooks. Yet another nauseating column from him up on memeorandum. What an asshat!
Has Sarah blamed Obama for the tsumani yet??
That will be worthy of Fox News interrupting regular programming.
Has Pat Robertson come forth to blame “the gays”?
Just asking.
Not yet that I know of, but her prayers for Japan are couched between two tweets telling Obama to drill baby drill. Clueless.
I’m sure Pat Robertson will be making a bigoted statement shortly.
Japan headlines from memeorandum… not good… nuclear plant explosion, radiation leaking…
http://mrand.us/BHk8
STRATFOR:
Red Alert: Nuclear Meltdown at Quake-Damaged Japanese Plant — A March 12 explosion at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, appears to have caused a reactor meltdown. — The key piece of technology in a nuclear reactor is the control rods.
BBC:
Japan warns of small radiation leak at nuclear plant — Pressure in one of the six reactors is considerably higher than normal, Japan’s nuclear agency says — Japanese authorities have warned there could be a small radiation leak from a nuclear reactor whose cooling system was knocked out by the earthquake.
Reuters:
Radiation leaking from Japan’s quake-hit nuclear — (Reuters) – Radiation leaked from a damaged Japanese nuclear reactor north of Tokyo on Saturday, the government said, after an explosion blew the roof off the facility in the wake of a massive earthquake.
I just saw that. It looks bad.
Video of explosion at nuclear plant
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12721498
Thanks BB. To say that this is alarming would be an understatement.
The news reports that it was a hydrogen explosion. This is not good since hydrogen is created because of a reaction between the nuclear fuel and the materials in the containment system. Also the reports noted that the roof of the containment facility collapsed.
This is a hoot… Obama promises to continue fight for women’s equality (The Hill)
lolsob…
He will not rest until the battle is won! I’d be more impressed if he said he will not golf until it’s won…
our President Present might do something then
Lolsob. It’s all one big lolsob these days. Worst of times, most hilarious of times… ShakesPalin tragicomedy.
Obama can’t help it if Republicans are sucking up women’s rights with a straw.
Pay no attention to the winking and dealmaking the Great O engages in with Aetna, BP, Stupak, Goldman, etc.
Just lap up the old okie doke. Valerie Jarret’s talented-and-easily-bored-Obama wants us to know how hard he’s trying to stay awake for us… he deserves his golf time. The least we could do is sacrifice!
Live updates from Japan here:
http://english.kyodonews.jp/
Thank you for this link, bb. I’m going to pass it on over at my crossposts.
Wes Clark op-ed in the Wapo, says Libya doesn’t meet the test for US military action: http://tinyurl.com/4jjdwf6
The translation: The rebels want to keep their own oil??
I’ve been thinking that the oil is the reason the big Western oil consuming nations are so eager to help the rebels.
But I figure they’ll do anything to ensure their access to that oil, as in how come our oil is under your sand?
The big test will be if and when the Saudi government starts cracking down on any dissidents in that nation. What will the Western oil consuming nations do in that sitution?
We don’t do pin point accuracy all that well, btw, and many innocents will be killed if we begin bombing to take our anti-aircraft, airports, munition caches, etc.
Our governments are between a rock and those oil wells….
Impressive job this morning, Wonk. Thank you for the round-up.
I loved the quiz. I’m a “Working Class Warrior”.
That’s what I scored too!
I wrote “hero” instead of “warrior” in the post by accident. Lol. I knew that didn’t sound right! I’ll go edit it.
I got the Working Class Warrior, too – I think a lot of readers here are that.
Terrific round up and links, Wonk – thanks!
You might have been thinking of the song!
I came out as “Social Justice Crusader.” I do care deeply about social justice, but don’t see myself as a crusader.
Sophie, yep! I’d posted the John Lennon acoustic of Working Class Hero on Thursday, and it was stuck in my mind’s eye/ear.
Thanks for posting the Marianne Faithfull cover… the mood on the instrumentals and the raspy vocals are nice.
Yup. Working class warrior here too. Although really it’s justice I’m looking for, plain old regular justice.
Working Class Warrior here as well, but there were some questions I tried to leave blank as none of the answers fit me. But had to answer, so…WCW.
This is rich.
Republican legislator in Iowa caught on mic mocking bill he supports as the “give-a-handgun-to-a-schizophrenic bill.”
http://tinyurl.com/47ase76
Interesting. I turned out to be an Eco-Avenger kind of liberal.
While I was there, I took the Hillary loyalty quiz as well. It’s mostly dated, but in some cases still relevant. My results: Your score is 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. You are pure, diehard Hillary Clinton loyalist. Not only do you think she’s the best candidate, but she’d make an even better president than her husband. Can’t argue with that!
I did not see the Hillary quiz, but don’t have to do it to know I’d be ten out of ten. The longer I have watched her, the more I have admired her.
I just took the Hillary loyalty quiz and I got a 10 — diehard Hill loyalist. I’m sure y’all are shocked!
The only problems with the quiz is that it didn’t ridicule pseudo-liberals who are besotted with 0bama and his corporation-loving administration. Too much concern about Palin, a political lightweight who didn’t say she could see Russia from her window. The person to first say that was Tina Fey, mindless 0bama supporter who ignored all of his obvious overtures to the conservatives during his campaign.
Agree. Whoever made these quizzes doesn’t have any awareness beyond the first layer and a half of the issues. Still, I can’t argue with my Obama quiz result:
You’d never vote for Barack Obama. You think he’s an inexperienced, incompetent neophyte who’s never accomplished anything notable
Interesting…
So the quizmaker thinks the Eco-Avenger would never vote for Obama?
While I think that’s true for a genuine environmentalist, let’s face it… the Sierra Club president said O was “the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt.”
And, that was said in June 2010. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Talk about your cognitive dissonance!
These were unrelated quizzes. It looks like the Hillary & Obama quizzes were there since around the primaries.
Oh! I didn’t realize you took another quiz beside the Liberal and Hillary quizzes. I get it now.
Well, I took the quiz…and I got:
Result: Reality-based Intellectualist
Reality-based Intellectualist
You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.
I’m impressed, MM. The rest of us seem to be working-class. 🙂
Strange huh? Must be all the Darwin and no-bible thumping questions I answered. I am very opinionated about keeping religion out of politics. It is really one of my pet peeves…I just don’t mention it much. All these damn PLUBs use Jesus as justification for everything…war, women’s rights, anti-american hearings, and patriotism. It just pisses me off. And I don’t consider myself an atheist…or an agnostic.
Minx, my mom got the Intellectual/Liberal elite too, for the same reason. She picked a lot of the same answers I did but on a few I chose the more populist answers and she went with the more anti-Southern confederacy and anti-fundie answers. And, what makes it even funnier is that between the two of us, I’m the one who doesn’t believe in God, heh.
All I can say is… if ONLY you and my mom and others like you were the “liberal elite”… today’s lib elite is a bunch of pseudointellectuals and/or suckers who fell for Obama because they wanted to feel more enlightened than the Bubbas.
Wonk, I guess I am all for ethics…you don’t need God or Jesus or Religion to be a good person.
“you don’t need God or Jesus or Religion to be a good person.”
That’s what I believe, as well. But I also see C-street as being enabled by K-street, so these rightwing fundamentalists, bigots, and haters, while their politics is complete anathema to me, also seem to me to be secondary in power to the oligarchy that *wants* C-street to keep at it and keep dividing people.
Quiz results –
You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.
I eat sleep, dream
ERA, ERA, ERA
Wonk – great round up – thanks! back to your links.
Hey Boo Radly…
“Eat, sleep, dream
ERA, ERA, ERA”
Nice!
There should be a “Economic and Social justice champion” result. I think that would most accurately reflect a lot of us.
Ohhh – I’m an “eco-avenger”, aka a treehugger.
Did you pick Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth?
Yep. Actually, I sometimes wanted to answer “all of the above” and sometimes I agreed with one part of a single choice and not with another part of the same one, therefore not wholly with any one of the choices. I’m really all different “types” of liberal, but I chose the environment in most of the questions because I didn’t think
Whoops – it posted before I was done.
To finish the unfinished sentence – I didn’t think any of the other issues would matter if the earth didn’t survive.
I also agree that the quizmaker didn’t have a lot of awareness of the issues beyond the surface layer, and assumed that a liberal would be pro Obama.
Geez, tried the quiz and the questions were too general. First time, I was a working class warrior, so I went back and changed two of my response and became an Eco avenger.
It is a cheesy quiz. I knew I’d be the populist liberal by the answers I was picking.
About Walker’s little End Run legislation nuke-type bomb, the Repubs covered just about anything people might do to improve their working conditions as being grounds for firing:
I particularly like that they will fire people for “mass resignations.” And for “other concerted activities”….
So, STFU, wage slaves.
Now, how broadly could “other concerted activities” be construed? Lunch table discussion of work conditions? Griping while on break? Brainstorming?
Truly, it’s now watch what you say time in Wisconsin for public employees….
And watch those Thought Crimes as well, peons.
Remove the designator “wage” and you have the crux – Slaves. Unions have been absent from workers’ right for a long time – concentrating on power and politics, but now is the time for them to return to what they were organized to be – a voice for the common people, and if they do not step up and take the initiative, they will become redundant. I hope their union management have the sense to realize they are in their death knells if they don’t take concerted action.
HT, spot on. The grassroots need to take back the unions from the Trumka level.
The leadership level of unions is much like the story of Dem leadership and DC Dems in general… much like the story of the national level of the women’s orgs.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel or abolish fundamental rights (in this case collective bargaining) that have been hard-won. The grassroots that form the current-day FDR coalition needs to wrest back control–unions, women’s orgs, Dem party. These organizations and institutions aren’t doing what they are designed to do if they’re not a medium for ordinary people to voice their demands from the populist left.
Note to any/all —
If you ever get time to read Naomi Klein’s book “Shock Doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism,” you would find that time to have been well-invested, i.e., that your understanding of much of what we are witnessing would be quite enlightened. Mine has been.
I often listen to such books on CD in the car or like that. This was one of those.
Klein is amazing – a Cassandra. I’m amazed that most people don’t even know who she is, much less have read her books.
Yes. Naomi Klein and Janet Tavakoli, cassandras both.
According to the quiz, I’m a Working Class Warrior [sort of knew that all along].
I’d like to know why Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed Socialist, sounds like the only FDR Dem we have left in DC? If there’s any proof that the entire political class has moved decidedly right, it’s Bernie Sanders and what he’s willing to stand for: ordinary Americans.
The situation in Japan is terrifying. They’ve had an exploson at one of the plants, though they insist the damage is only to the outer walls of the reactor. What an absolute nightmare.
And not to minimize any of the human suffering on the ground but this is one more hit to global food supplies. Rice is going to go through the roof. Talk about piling on.
Whenever I think that I’ve heard everything from the corporatists, I find out that they are even worse than I thought. Check this out from Larry Kudlow…
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/03/larry-kudlow-devalues-human-life-with-japan-earthquake-freudian-slip.html
WTF?!?!
That is horrendous. My jaw is on the floor.
ugh, ugh, ugh. I just skipped to the 0:38 mark on the video with the slim hope that hearing it in context would reveal Kudlow saying anything at all that would mitigate how awful that sounds, but nope. He bats the human toll away, saying oh yeah it’s a “tragedy” for a split-sec, then goes on to keep talking up the good news that the markets aren’t reacting. “Cheerleading” is exactly the right descriptor here.
Yeah, I had to go listen to it too, because I couldn’t believe what I was reading, but he said it, and he meant it. We just got a little glimpse into the thought process of the capitalists/corporatists, and it’s more frightening than I ever imagined. I need to take a shower to try to wash it away.
Good grief, where did this man come from? naked capitalism at it’s worst or just and inhuman monster looking out for number one?
I’ve been listening to old radio programs lately, and this one link is one of the main reasons why. It’s not capitalism, it’s cannibalism. Feed on your fellow man to enlarge your bank account.
Ack. Just discovered I double-linked to the Hillary: Warmonger post twice.
I’ve corrected it now (I think!), but below is the other Hillary essay for anyone who clicked on it earlier and was wondering what the heck! Sorry about that.
Women, Workers, and The Sisterhood
Heard on CNN that 3 people have tested positive for radiation exposure.
http://tinyurl.com/4nlh79r
great post Wonk..:)
thanks! Did you take the quiz foxyladi14?
I’m a peace patroller-” also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. You believe in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.”!!!