Monday Reads

Good Morning!

The news still reverberates with shock and awe over having to stand ground on the right to birth control access and many other things most of us thought were long solved when we got electricity, the right to own property and vote, and we headed off to university to learn things supported by evidence. The Democratic Governors attending the annual National Governors association meeting think this nonsense pulsing through our civilization today that rivals the Crusades, the witch trials, and the Inquisition gives them all political boosts.  Frankly, I’m just looking for a place to get away from the culture jihadists.   I don’t like listening to insane people like Rick Santorum. No where seems safe these days. Why is the media not consigning him to midnights on Saturday like the rest of the cheesy preachers?   I’d like to focus on the economy for a change instead of trying to refight every modern advantage and technology we’ve achieved for the last 150 or so years.

“I think we’re returning to the dark ages. What? We’re discussing the legitimacy of birth control in this country? That discussion, I thought, had ended 30 years ago,” said term-limited Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who dubbed the four Republican presidential candidates “Christmas packages under the tree.”

The Democratic governors pushed a message of job creation at the conference. But not far under the surface, they were basking in the hard right turn the presidential debate has taken in recent weeks with the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum. Santorum’s candidacy has surfaced issues like his personal opposition to contraception coverage, abortion rights and gay marriage.

“Their party has shown a great propensity to head into social issues and to take hard right-wing ideological turns, and I think that propensity has hurt them badly,” argued Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

On Friday, it was O’Malley, a second-term governor widely seen as a 2016 presidential prospect, who was forcefully confronting Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell during a POLITICO forum about the Virginia legislature’s push for a bill that would require women to take an ultrasound before having an abortion.

Meanwhile, O’Malley is set to sign a bill this week to make Maryland the eighth state in the country to recognize gay marriage.

“If the Republicans continue to be against diversity, continue to be against civil rights, I think they will continue to be the party of yesterday,” said Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin. “If the Republican Party continues to say no to equality, to diversity and to dignity, they will be a dinosaur party.”

Lizz Winstead–the brains behind the Daily Show– has a feature article at Alternet that introduces the university blatherings of that whacko Virginia Republican Governor behind the mother of all fetus fetish laws. I know which states are off my list of visits and potential moves.  She discusses Virginia’s transvaginal State Rape Governor Bob McDonnell and more.  You see Rick Perry has already put into play a transvaginal rape law.  I hope the Ob/Gyns there refuse to do them.

After I showered, hoping I could wash this vile stench of inequality off, I asked myself another question about Bob McDonnell, “What kind of man could enthusiastically support this kind of law in the first place?”

The answer is, a guy who wrote in his graduate thesis “The cost of sin should fall on the sinner, not the taxpayer.” So, it is cold comfort for those of us who are members of the demonic part of American society Bob McDonnell marginalizes as “cohabitators, homosexuals and fornicators” that he begrudgingly concedes we are entitled to protections under the fourth amendment.

But Bob McDonnell is a fluke, right? I mean, thank God no other state has a cretinous governor who wants doctors to insert some kind of Dead Ringers device into your vagina against your will, right?

Wrong.

Pssst, hey, Texas: the transvaginal express is already happening in your state. Yep. Implemented three weeks ago. Now, women in the Lone Star State must submit to a mandated vaginal probe if they want to terminate a pregnancy.

(Side bar: I would advise Texans to check the fine print of your new voter ID laws to see if you must also submit to a vaginal probe if you don’t have the proper documentation on election day.)

Also, you may want to expand that conceal-and-carry law to include your private parts, then amend that bumper sticker to say, “Don’t Mess With Texas Vaginas.” Or better yet, “You can give me a transvaginal when you pry it from my OBGYN’s cold dead hands.”

If you want a good read while your at Alternet try this one: “Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control — And Why We’ll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now”.  Well, isn’t that a depressing headline?

For the first time in human history, new technologies made fertility a conscious choice for an ever-growing number of the planet’s females. And that, in turn, changed everything else.

With that one essential choice came the possibility, for the first time, to make a vast range of other choices for ourselves that were simply never within reach before. We could choose to delay childbearing and limit the number of children we raise; and that, in turn, freed up time and energy to explore the world beyond the home. We could refuse to marry or have babies at all, and pursue our other passions instead. Contraception was the single necessary key that opened the door to the whole new universe of activities that had always been zealously monopolized by the men — education, the trades, the arts, government, travel, spiritual and cultural leadership, and even (eventually) war making.

That one fact, that one technological shift, is now rocking the foundations of every culture on the planet — and will keep rocking it for a very long time to come. It is, over time, bringing a louder and prouder female voice into the running of the world’s affairs at every level, creating new conversations and new priorities in areas where the men long ago thought things were settled and understood. It’s bending our understanding of what sex is about, and when and with whom we can have it — a wrinkle that created new frontiers for gay folk as well. It may well prove to the be the one breakthrough most responsible for the survival of the human race, and the future viability of the planet.

But perhaps most critically for us right now: mass-produced, affordable, reliable contraception has shredded the ages-old social contracts between men and women, and is forcing us all (willing or not) into wholesale re-negotiations on a raft of new ones.

And, frankly, while some men have embraced this new order— perhaps seeing in it the potential to open up some interesting new choices for them, too — a global majority is increasingly confused, enraged, and terrified by it. They never wanted to be at this table in the first place, and they’re furious to even find themselves being forced to have this conversation at all.

The Guardian‘s George Monbiot is after the whackos that are behind the climate change denial propaganda.  This is another group that wants to put us firmly back into the dawn of the dirty industrial age.  It’s probably why they’re declaring war on the Lorax too.  I’ve been following the Heartland “Institute”  story like one would any public enemy.  Cannonfire’s done several blog bits on them.  He even put together a nifty little video to explain how a “institute” with absolutely no scientists keeps showing up all over the media like the voice of gawd.  Anyway, Monbiot calls the entire effort to be the workings of the Plutocracy. We continue to have the worst government their money can buy.  Here’s a  nice little tick tock starting with archdemon Frank Luntz the master of propaganda and subterfuge.

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”(2)

Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution or burning fossil fuels causes climate change is still wide open, and that both sides of the “controversy” should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multi-millionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools, which teaches that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial.”(3).

The institute has claimed that it is “a genuinely independent source of research and commentary”(4) and that “we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors”(5). But the documents, if authentic, reveal that its attacks on climate science have been largely funded by a single anonymous donor and that “we are extinguishing primarily global warming projects in pace with declines in his giving”(6).

The climate change deniers it funds have made similar claims to independence. For example, last year Fred Singer told a French website, “of course I am not funded by the fossil fuel lobbies. It’s a completely absurd invention.”(7) The documents suggest that the institute, funded among others by the coal company Murray Energy, the oil company Marathon and the former Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol, has been paying him $5000 a month(8).

Robert Carter has claimed that he “receives no research funding from special interest organisations”(9). But the documents suggest that Heartland pays him $1,667 a month(10). Among the speakers at its conferences were two writers for the Telegraph (Christopher Booker and James Delingpole(11,12)). The Telegraph group should now reveal whether and how much they were paid by the Heartland Institute.

It seems to be as clear an illustration as we have yet seen of the gulf between what such groups call themselves and what they really are.

So, we continue to have a theme in nearly everything I read these days.   There is not one policy that’s been embraced in modern history that’s not under threat right now by our home grown Taliban.  Here’s yet another one via Crooked Timber.   It’s a 5000 year view of debt amnesties in history that provide a shocking contrast to our current approach to bailing out the gambling debt holders while impoverishing every one else to ensure their unreasonable terms and cheating still pay.  It’s a synopsis of a book I should probably buy immediate called “Debt” by David Graeber.  We treat debt with a Victorian viewpoint on all levels.  Prior to the 19th century, there wasn’t all that religious moral sturm and drang around debt.  The lenders were always assumed to wind up giving every one a bad deal and they were held to account.  If lenders got overzealous and lent out too much, they were the ones that took the hits. Remember the old testament admonitions about usary?  There’s bits on consumer debt too, but I grabbed this explanation on the “debt” crises hyped up by pinched nose politicians that belong in pages of Dickensian novels sending nations to the poor houses and debtor’s prisions.

Countries don’t have bankruptcy codes governing them, and so in the sphere of international debt negotiations, one can see all the pernicious aspects of the “folk-economics” version of the debt contract that Graeber describes. Looking at the relationship between the European Union and Greece, or even Ireland, one can see that the debt relation is being specifically shaped into a tool for exercising power in a way which would not have been possible through democratic means. IMF programs seem to be typically designed to fail, to put the client country into the position of a defaulting debtor and entirely reliant on the mercy of its creditors. So even though I’d have liked to see the book twice as long and ten times as ambitious, the analysis that it presents is very useful in looking at debt-relations outside the commercial codes that govern most of the world’s actually existing debts, and it’s a very salutary reminder of what happens when people forget that debt is really only (or really only ought to be) the legal system’s best guess at what kind of arrangements would best serve the general purposes of commerce. It is, as Graeber intimates, when the debt relation takes on an independent life of its own that the problems all start.

For some reason, I can’t find a lot to write about that isn’t related to fighting against the perpetuation and rule of right wing mythology and the Crusade to punish us all.  It’s every where I look these days.  Where were these people when the muggings of rational thought began?  There were tons of cautionary tales out there.  Why are they now pointing fingers when we’ve got so many rats in the policy making maze?   I guess it’s because we’re the cheese and they’re not.  The cheese stands alone.

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?  Find anything at all that doesn’t depress?