Monday Reads: Let’s get Political
Posted: April 8, 2013 Filed under: Hillary Clinton, morning reads, North Korea, Political Affective Disorder, Political and Editorial Cartoons 67 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m still not puzzled by the lack of the hopey changey stuff because,as you know, I was never completely convinced of it all from the get-go. However, I am confused by how Republicans are ruled by the shrillest of their shrill base and the Democratic Party–and its leaders–could care less about theirs. I still feel I have no place to go. So, let’s look at a few political headlines this morning and see if we can come up with some place other than an island of our own.
I guess no one takes you seriously unless you can endlessly fund some one’s political career. Voting for a republican is not even a rational choice any more because it’s the party of enslaving women. Voting for a third party candidate is a gesture signifying a lot but creating nothing. Voting democrat is just damned depressing. There is a real messed up set of people in charge of things these days.
First, a very good question is why the electorate soundly rejects right wing policies but we still have right-wingers running America. Here’s a discussion of that from Salon and Amitai Etzioni as reprinted by Alternet.
There is more than may appear in President Obama’s plan to cut the social safety net in his new budget proposal. The offer, on the face of it, reflects a significant violation of a major liberal creed, discarding the strongest liberal political card and Obama’s peculiar negotiation style of making major concessions at the opening of a give-and-take session. But it also reflects the sad but true fact that the dynamics of American politics cannot be understood in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans. Party labels aside, the nation is still being ruled by what I call a majority “conservative party.”
If Democrats and Republicans were the true divide, the meager gun control measures recently introduced in the Senate would have the majority needed to pass. After all, there are 53 Democratic Senators (and two Independents who generally side with them). Moreover, this time, the threat of a GOP filibuster is not to blame. Yet the Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, removed the assault weapons ban from the draft bill because some 15 Democratic senators, in effect, supported the conservative pro-gun position, making up — with the Republican senators — that majority “conservative party.” Thanks to this party, the same legislative defeat is about to befall liberal proposals to curtail high-capacity magazines. This leaves only better background checks on the table, but these, too, will inevitably be rendered ineffective by the conservatives via the underhanded gutting of enforcement (more about this shortly).
Social security and gun safety are but a couple of the numerous issues on which conservatives in Washington get their way and the minority liberal party loses out. Most recently, every Republican and 33 Democratic conservatives came together to repeal a tax on medical devices, a major source of funding for Obamacare. And on Dec 28, the conservative party — 42 Republicans, 30 Democrats and 1 Independent senator — voted to extend the foreign intelligence law known as FISA, opposed by civil libertarians. We should further expect that the conservative party will keep winning on many fronts, from greatly limiting all new investments in education to unduly slashing social spending.
We still have a president that gives the right an extremely good deal right off the top and it does nothing more than piss them off while they ignore him to run a full scale war on every one that’s not a straight white christian male in this country. The nation turns its lonely eyes to a future President Hillary Clinton. Some times you just have to spend your week end shaking your tired old head. I can’t imagine that right wing republicans will treat a woman any better than a black man. Here’s how the Brits at the Sunday Times see it. BTW, the Times is a Murdoch Publication. So, be very concerned.
A TOP Democratic fundraiser and confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than two decades is advising a new group laying the foundations for a possible 2016 presidential bid by the former secretary of state.
Clinton has a 61% approval rating — 10% higher than Obama’s, making her the most popular politician in the US. A McClatchy-Marist poll released last week found she would defeat any Republican opponent. She is also far ahead of the vice-president, Joe Biden, her nearest Democratic rival.
A recent National Journal poll of senior Democratic insiders found that 81% believed Clinton would be their 2016 nominee. “Just the perception she may run has already cleared the field,” said one.
Even MoDo has something to say about that.
Hillary jokes that people regard her hair as totemic, and just so, her new haircut sends a signal of shimmering intention: she has ditched the skinned-back bun that gave her the air of a K.G.B. villainess in a Bond movie and has a sleek new layered cut that looks modern and glamorous.
In a hot pink jacket and black slacks, she leaned in for a 2016 manifesto, telling the blissed-out crowd of women that America cannot truly lead in the world until women here at home are full partners with equal pay and benefits, careers in math and science, and “no limit” on how big girls can dream.
“This truly is the unfinished business of the 21st century,” she said. But everyone knew the truly “unfinished business” Hillary was referring to: herself.
“She’s gone to hell and back trying to be president,” Carville said. “She’s paid her dues, to say the least. The old cliché is that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. But now Republicans want a lot of people to run and they want to fall in love. And Democrats don’t want to fight; they just want to get behind Hillary and go on from there.”
I thought MoDO was only capable of bromance? At this point, the entire political establishment is ignoring voters so why will the pundits eventually behave differently?
Oh, well, there are still those men that really are beside themselves thinking of the good old days when women were at their beck and call. Consider the case of Fat Tony Scalia who makes decisions upon which all of our lives and rights depend. BB sent me this one and I nearly dropped my phone when I read this quote.
Here’s what he says when describing a class picture:
“The teacher standing in the back—that was a lady named Consuela Goins, and she was a wonderful teacher. Every cloud
has a silver lining, and one of the benefits of the exclusion of women from most professions was that we had wonderful teachers, especially the women who today would probably be CEOs.”
In a single sentence, Scalia manages to imply that wonderful teachers are a thing of the past — and that being a business leader automatically makes somebody an excellent teacher.
Then, there’s those guys that insist they’re on the side of women, but you know … we really just need to get a sense of humor, or perspective or something … Tom Matlack is once again telling women they have feminism all wrong because, well you know, father knows best. It’s another whining boy! The girls just don’t understand his sensibilities!
Just today, Matlack published another whiny post that basically equates to “Why me? WHY. (Me)” opining, yet again, feminist “attacks” on men, cloaked in this “I really care about women’s liberation, but women are doing it wrong” thing he’s become so fond of.
When a commenter says the following:
If feminists were truly concerned about equality they would not be seeking superiority. There are more challenges that we as men are facing today that females are not. Frankly society is not stepping up to the plate to bat for us. “They just don’t care.”
Tom responds saying he “couldn’t agree more.” These aren’t the words of an ally. This is MRA stuff, plain and simple.
So here’s the thing, Tom. Feminism doesn’t want you. The last thing we need is some rich, white dude explaining to us how REAL liberation should happen. You’ve proven yourself over and over again to be a sexist douche who thinks feminists are bashing all men simply because they call YOU out on your bullshit. YOU are part of the problem. And anyone with two brain cells can see that a man who goes around calling feminists crazy isn’t of any help to the feminist movement.
So here’s my suggestion: Stop talking about feminism. Stop talking about equality. Stop pretending to be on women’s side. You aren’t. You’re on your side. Your opinion on our movement is irrelevant and we keep telling you as much, yet you continue trying to force your opinions about women and “equality” onto the world and then get all butthurt when we tell you, once again, that you aren’t helping. What do you need from us? You’re already making more money than any of us evil feminist bloggers. Do you need attention? Kind of like a spoiled child? LOOK AT ME. ME. ME. Why not just come out, once and for all, as just another MRA who can’t put together a coherent argument to save his life?
Yes, yes yes … men have “special challenges” like trying to figure out which higher paying job to take. Sheesh. Just think of how rough the new leader of North Korea has it … it’s just tough out there being a manly man …
A South Korean newspaper is reporting that North Korean troops are scurrying around the site where it tested a nuclear bomb on February 12, its third ever. All signs point to a fourth, and the timing couldn’t be worse. “There are recent active movements of manpower and vehicles at the southern tunnel at Punggye-ri,” says the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo. “We are monitoring because the situation is similar to behavior seen prior to the third nuclear test.” Meanwhile, South Korean officials say that they expect North Korea to test another missile this week, probably on Wednesday.
Well, this isn’t good. The tense situation between the North Korea and, well, pretty much everyone on Earth has been escalating in the weeks since that third test and has become increasingly severe since last week, when supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s top brass promised a “merciless” attack on the United States. South Korea is more or less preparing for a war, while the United States has threatened a swift and decisive response it there is an attack. Even though President Obama’s senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer played down the threat of violence — he said this is just “a pattern of behavior we’ve seen from the North Koreans many times — the U.S. military’s been drawing up a plan in case it does. Accordingly, the U.S. commander in South Korea canceled a pre-planned trip to Washington, just in case something does go down this week.
This all puts the U.S. in a really awkward position. On one hand, it needs to be prepared for the worst, hence the planning. However, it doesn’t want to overdo it, since that might scare the North Koreans into a launching a preemptive attack. At the same time, the U.S. is working hard to keep South Korea calm, because if they get too anxious and launch their own attack or even appear to be preparing one, North Korea could try to hit them first. That would be bad. On the other hand, the government really doesn’t want to scare the bejesus out American citizens.
Cannonfire argues that this may be a show while lil Kim sends us a smaller package in a shipping container. Could NK have a portable nuke?
All the news coming out of North Korea indicates war. The only thing that does not indicate war is the simple, obdurate fact that Kim’s situation is hopeless. He cannot win. I doubt that he could keep the fight going for longer than a day. If he strikes, he dies, along with many of his countrymen (presuming he cares about them).So the question comes down to this: Does Kim Jong-Un want to fulfill his sick, violent fantasies more than he wants to live?Suddenly, I’m flashing on Adam Lanza…
Paging Dennis Rodman (via SNL).
So, speaking of neanderthals, let’s end with the US idiot who supports weapons of mass destruction. Here’s what Connecticut governor said about the NRA’s Wayne La Pierre yesterday.
Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy had some harsh words for NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre on Sunday, comparing the gun lobby chief to “clowns at the circus.”
Appearing on CNN‘s “State of the Union” with Candy Crowley, Malloy hit back at LaPierre over his dismissal of Connecticut’s strict new gun laws.“Wayne reminds me of the clowns at the circus. They get the most attention,” Malloy said.
“And that’s what he’s paid to do. But the reality is is that the gun that was used to kill 26 people on Dec. 14 was legally purchased in the state of Connecticut, even though we had an Assault Weapons Ban. But there were loopholes in it that you could drive a truck through.”
Malloy also noted poll after poll that show around 90 percent of Americans supporting a federal expansion of universal background checks.
“This guy is so out of whack, it’s unbelievable — 92 percent of the American people want universal background checks. I can’t get on a plane as the Governor of the state of Connecticut without somebody running a background check on me.
“Why should you be able to buy a gun? Or buy armor-piercing munitions? It doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t make any sense. Thus, my reference to the circus.”
What’s on you reading and blogging list today?
Who Can be Trusted with Infrastructure? Certainly not for-profits …
Posted: April 6, 2013 Filed under: corporate greed, corporatism, Gulf Oil Spill, We are so F'd | Tags: infrastructure failure, New Orleans, oil spills 15 Comments
The one thing that has become apparent to me recently is that privatizing anything related to important infrastructure is a recipe for one disaster after another. For-profit corporations are into maximizing profits to owners by either slashing costs or hiking prices. They rarely do anything that actually improves service or delivery quality. When you experience any kind of disaster that taxes the infrastructure, you learn quickly how negligent for-profits are when it comes to maintaining or fixing infrastructure. My reality since Hurricane Katrina is living with infrastructure that comes and goes on a windy day, on a drizzly day, on any kind of day that might cause our privately owned electric and natural gas company’s patched together infrastructure to hiccup. We get power outages at the super bowl, in my home, and in our water treatment plant. I’ve experienced two boil water orders in the last six months and dozens of electric outages for days on end. Cox cable’s infrastructure is just about as bad. They patch things up when they have to do it. I’ve heard excuses about hungry squirrels, curious racoons, and unusual wind events to the point I could just scream.
Then, there’s these oil pipe disasters. Why on earth would you trust an oil company with any kind of pipe line given their obvious neglect? There is a THIRD major oil spill in a week. This time it is in Texas.
Thousands of gallons of oil have spilled from a pipeline in Texas, the third accident of its kind in only a week.
Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, shut down their West Columbia, Texas, pipeline last Friday after electronic calculations conducted by the US National Response Center showed that upwards of 700 barrels had been lost, amounting to almost 30,000 gallons of crude oil.
By Monday, Shell spokespeople said inspectors found “no evidence” of an oil leak, but days later it was revealed that a breach did occur. Representatives with the US Coast Guard confirmed to Dow Jones on Thursday that roughly 50 barrels of oil spilled from a pipe near Houston, Texas and entered a waterway that connects to the Gulf of Mexico.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Steven Lehman said that Shell had dispatched clean-up crews that were working hard to correct any damage to Vince Bayou, a small waterway that runs for less than 20 miles from the Houston area into a shipping channel that opens into the Gulf.
The spill was contained, said Lehman, who was hesitant to offer an official number on how much crude was lost in the accident. According to Shell spokeswoman Kim Windon, though, the damage could have been quite significant. After being presented with the estimate that said as much as 700 barrels were found to have leaked from the pipeline due to an unknown cause, investigators determined that 60 barrels entered the bayou.
“That’s a very early estimate–things can change,” Officer Lehman told Dow Jones.
Meanwhile, though, rescue works in Arkansas have been getting their hands dirty responding to an emergency there. A rupture in ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline late last week send thousands of barrels of oil into the small town of Mayflower, around 25 miles outside of Little Rock. Authorities evacuated more than 20 homes in response, and by this Thursday roughly 19,000 barrels had been recovered.
Mayflower, Ark is still fighting the sludge and will likely be doing so for some time.
We tend to think of oil spills on a massive scale, so large they are hard to imagine. Millions of barrels of crude pouring into the Bering Sea from the slashed hull of the Exxon Valdez. Tens of thousands of workers and volunteers combing hundreds of miles of Gulf Coast beaches after the Deep Water Horizon spill. But in Mayflower, Ark., the scale of an oil spill there is disturbing not for its size, but its proximity. On March 29, a 20-inch buried pipeline burst under the small town, turning backyards into tar pits and suburban streets into oil slicks.
This will probably be yet another part of our new reality given the age of pipelines–around 70 years old–and the continued negligence of oil companies who continue to make record profits and enjoy stupendous tax breaks in this country.
Wanna another weird example of infrastructure failure?
Residents of Washington, DC are used to jokes about metaphorical hot air, humidity, and the swampy history of their city. But there’s something they may not know about the District: it’s overrun with methane, which sometimes makes manhole covers explode.
Natural gas is mostly methane, and it is carried through underground pipes to heat buildings and cook food. Those pipes are often old, and this led ecologist and chemical engineer Robert Jackson of Duke University to drive around DC over a period of two months, regularly measuring the air to take methane levels.
He and his research team found methane leaks everywhere, with thousands of places having significantly higher than normal methane concentrations, and some places reaching 50 times normal urban levels (100 ppm vs 2 ppm). A similar study in Boston last year found essentially the same results. In DC, the source wasn’t the swamp on which the city was built — it was fossil fuel. (The methane they measured had more carbon-13 rather than the normal, modern carbon-12.)
You can laugh about this but I’ve actually seen exploding manhole covers in action. I was gigging at Balconies restaurant down in the French Quarter. The piano was
situated under a window and the restaurant–now defunct–was located in a building on the 600 block of Royal. It’s a really famous intersection and the building is one of those that gets photographed all the time. The window is basically to the left of the open door where they black car is passing the building. Mule drawn carriages would stop there frequently to listen to me play and to have a cocktail or cafe au lait brought out for the occupents. Anyway, one night, after a series of exploding man hole covers had been shutting down the electricity in the Quarter, one of them in the middle of this street took off like a cannon and sliced through the top part of a car right before my eyes. Of course, the electricity went off in the area and shut down the grocery across the street, the restaurants and everything in that locale. But, I’ll tell you, that manhole cover was an unbelievable projectile. Oh, it of course, the natural gas in town is Entergy-controlled. The other thing I recall was the distinct smell of ozone burning up and the wierdish green light show. This was about 15 years ago, but damn, I will never forget watching the roof of a hard top car get sliced off like a piece of salami. It’s been fixed now since the city doesn’t tolerate anything being wrong in the French Quarter, but for about 3 months of the summer 1996, it was a wild trip with a series of exploding manhole covers and black outs. It was also the same summer I got Karma so, who knows. Maybe it was just one of those summers.
Anyway, after having lived in a city where levees failed us and electricity fails us all the time, I would just like to say that no private corporation should be left on its own with unmonitored vital infrastructure. All kinds of things are at stake. Also, you can’t trust any oil company to do right by any one but themselves after a spill. I have experience in that area too.
Friday Reads
Posted: April 5, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: antiquities robbers, Conscious Capitalism, RIP Roger Ebert, Segregation, women's equality 40 Comments
Good Morning!
Movie critic Roger Ebert passed away yesterday at the age of 70. His cancer had recurred and spread. I actually met Ebert on a plane to London 30 years ago. He was working on the movie “Syd and Nancy” and I was celebrating finishing my first masters. I used to love to watch his show with Siskel.
Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago.
“We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away,” said his wife, Chaz Ebert. “No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition.”
He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.
He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.
On Tuesday, Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December, and would be taking “a leave of presence.” In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the Sun-Times film critic, Ebert wrote “I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.”
Some times a story shocks me, then I stop to wonder why I should really be shocked. A high school in Georgia is still holding segregated prom.
WSAV in Georgia reports that Wilcox County High School holds two proms for its students: a whites-only prom, and an integrated prom. WSAV notes that the school has never had a fully inclusive prom in its history.
Best friends Stephanie Sinnot, Mareshia Rucker, Quanesha Wallace and Keela Bloodworth are trying to change that. “We are all friends,” said Sinnot. “That’s just kind of not right that we can’t go to prom together.”
If any non-white person tried to attend the whites-only prom, “They would probably have the police come out there and escort them off the premises,” said Bloodworth. According to WSAV, this was the case in 2012 when a biracial student who tried to attend the dance was “turned away by police.”
I’m not one to go round quoting the Harvard Business Review but this particular study is a good one. “Companies that Practice “Conscious Capitalism” Perform 10x Better”.
Blake Mycoskie, who founded Tom’s Shoes at age 26, talked about the profitable business he’s built on a model of giving a pair of shoes to a child in need for each pair of shoes the company sells. Shubhro Sen, who leads people development for Tata, the huge, privately-owned Indian conglomerate, described the founding tenet of the company that endures to this day: “We earn our profits from society and they should go back into society.” Most of the company today is owned by philanthropic trusts.
I took away from these three days a very clear and inspiring message. It’s not necessary to choose up sides between consciousness and capitalism, self-interest and the broader interest, or personal development and service to others. Rather, they’re each inextricably connected, and they all serve one another.
Raj Sisodia looked at 28 companies he identified as the most conscious — “firms of endearment” as he terms them — based on characteristics such as their stated purpose, generosity of compensation, quality of customer service, investment in their communities, and impact on the environment.
The 18 publicly traded companies out of the 28 outperformed the S&P 500 index by a factor of 10.5 over the years 1996-2011. And why, in the end, should that be a surprise? Conscious companies treat their stakeholders better. As a consequence, their suppliers are happier to do business with them. Employees are more engaged, productive, and likely to stay. These companies are more welcome in their communities and their customers are more satisfied and loyal. The most conscious companies give more, and they get more in return. The inescapable conclusion: it pays to care, widely and deeply.
Chelsea Clinton told MSNBC viewers that ‘We can’t leave a gender behind’ on Alex Wagner yesterday.
While affluent American women debate the merits of “leaning in” or “having it all,” U.S. women still earn 77-cents for every dollar earned by men, and the U.S. ranks 77th in the world for participation of women in government. And the economic stress is far greater for women worldwide. Today, 70% of the world’s poor and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women.
On Thursday, Chelsea Clinton, Jada Pinkett Smith and Zainab Salbi joined the NOW with Alex Wagner panel to discuss both the plight and the progress of women in America and across the globe.
One of most glaring gender disparities in the U.S. is the lack of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Women currently hold fewer than 25% of STEM jobs.
The U.S. Department of Commerce predicts the number of STEM jobs will grow 17% between 2008 and 2018–three times the growth rate for non-STEM jobs. “If we’re really going to own our own future,” Clinton said, “we can’t leave a gender behind. We all need to be a part of that.”
When it comes to investing in women, Zainab Salbi says, “it’s the one investment that will help everyone.”
I’ve got a few quick links on antiquities smugglers that you might find intriguing. First, a Utah couple has been indicted for smuggling Peruvian antiquities to the US.
A federal grand jury indicted two West Valley City residents Wednesday on allegations they helped smuggled Peruvian artifacts, including pre-Columbian vessels, to the United States.
Cesar Guarderas, 70, and his wife, Rosa Isabel Guarderas, 45, were arrested March 25 following an investigation that began in October. They will make their first court appearance Friday.
Two other men also are named in the indictment: Javier Abanto-Sarmiento, 39, and Alfredo Abanto-Sarmiento, 36, of Trujillo, Peru. Javier Abanto-Sarmiento and Rosa Isabel Guarderas are siblings.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents arrested Javier Abanto-Sarmiento on March 4 when he arrived in Miami from Peru. He is currently being brought to Salt Lake City by U.S. Marshals. Alfredo Abanto-Sarmiento has not yet been arrested.
HSI used an undercover agent to buy two Peruvian artifacts from Cesar Guarderas in November for $3,000. The agent then paid $20,000 that same month for 10 additional artifacts.
Professors at Utah Valley University and Tulane University who are Peruvian experts authenticated the artifacts; the items also were tested at a laboratory in Washington. Since 1997, the U.S. and Peru have had an agreement barring specific artifacts and ethnological religious objects from being brought to the U.S.
The artifact trafficking scheme also was corroborated by undercover telephone, email and in-person discussions with Javier Abanto-Sarmiento and Cesar Guarderas. At some point, Cesar Guarderas said Javier Abanto-Sarmiento had access to more than 100 pieces of pottery in Peru, some he had found buried in the ground, and was willing to ship them to the U.S.
Then, there’s a gang in India that’s been arrested for taking ancient idols from Temples.
The police on Wednesday arrested a four-member gang involved in idol thefts at various places in and around Kumbakonam and recovered 26 ancient and exquisite stone and copper idols besides four thiruvasis (arch around an idol), all dating back to the Chola and Pallava era.
Following frequent incidents of idol theft from ancient temples in Kumbakonam, Swamimalai and Pasupathikoil recently, the police formed a special team under the direct supervision of DSP Silambarasan to investigate the issue.
This reminds me of a ring of thieves in New Orleans that were stealing some of the angels, vases, and grave ornaments from our historic 
cemeteries. Here’s a link to a really terrific description of that crime in the NYT. I think it would make a great movie, frankly.
On a moody February day, with rain dripping off the muscadine vines and a concerto by Respighi wafting through the living room, Peter Patout, an antiques dealer, was cosseted in the splendor of his Bourbon Street home. There amid Paris porcelain and ancestral oils in gilt frames, he gave his version of the insidious crime that has made him one of the most talked-about men in the city: conspiring to steal cemetery ornaments from hallowed tombs.
”The thieves are in jail,” said Mr. Patout, a descendant of sugar planters, who is out on bail. ”I’ve been arrested four times. Would you like some Patout sugar in your coffee?”
Around New Orleans, there is the smell of a rat amid the scent of sweet olive. It was in Mr. Patout’s secluded courtyard, lush with banana trees of deep Louisiana lineage, that detectives seized two funerary statues, including a $50,000 marble Madonna. The New Orleans police say these were part of a cache of more than 200 romantically patinated urns, angels and Blessed Mothers plundered by thieves last year from the above-ground marble tombs and granite sarcophagi that populate New Orleans’s legendary ”cities of the dead.”
If we had google “nose”, I would try to waft some night blooming jasmine your way.
You just knew I’d fit something in here about grave goods didn’t you? I love antiques as much as the next person. I want folks stealing from graves, temples, and poor countries to support my passion. However, I’m sure these items are way out of my league but evidently some people don’t care how they come by a collectible.
So, I tried to concentrate on some newsy things today and give us a break from the politics. It’s up to you to fill in the blanks. What’s on your reading and blogging list this morning?
What’s wrong with this Picture?
Posted: April 4, 2013 Filed under: Women's Healthcare | Tags: female mortality rates in the USA 21 Comments
I suppose I should tell you more about what this multi-colored map of the US means before asking a set of questions including wtf is wrong with our country? No, this isn’t an indicator of which counties in the USA are ‘red’ v. ‘blue’ in the republican vs. democratic party scheme of things. However, before we go much further, I would like you to notice that most of the blue areas do line up with more democratically-inclined parts of the country. I can’t say that there’s a correlation however beyond the eyeball kind because that’s not in the data set.
What is in the data set should appall you. Red means “worsening” female mortality.
There is a frightening graph in a recent article in Health Affairs by David Kindig and Erika Cheng. Kindig and Cheng looked at trends in male and female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in 3,140 US counties. What they found was that female mortality rates increased in 42.8% of counties (male mortality rates increased in only 3.4%). The counties are mapped below: red means that female mortality worsened. You can see a strong regional pattern: just about every county showed had worsened female mortality in several southern states, while no county showed such decline in New England. There are many questions about what explains this pattern. For example, did healthier women migrate out of the south from 1992 to 2006? Nevertheless, the map depicts a shocking pattern of female hardship, primarily in the southeast and midwest.
Read that bolded (mine) statement again. It’s an outrageous statement of fact representing an unbelievable statement of what the current and future outlook of the USA will be. This undoubtedly impacts children too.
“Although we are accustomed to seeing varying rates of mortality reduction in states and nations,” Kindig and Cheng write, “it is striking and discouraging to find female mortality rates on the rise in 42.8 percent of US counties, despite increasing medical care expenditures and public health efforts.”
Kindig and Cheng looked at a number of factors that might give some context for why female morality went up in some counties but down in others. A somewhat surprising finding was that the availability of medical care — measured by the number of primary care providers or percentage of uninsured — didn’t really make a difference.
“Female mortality rates were not predicted by any of the medical care factors,” they write.
What could predict worsening mortality rates, however, were socioeconomic factors.
“Many people believe that medical care and individual behaviors such as exercise, diet, and smoking are the primary reasons for declines in health,” the authors write. “We did find significant associations between mortality rates and some of these factors, such as smoking rates for both sexes. But socioeconomic factors such as the percentage of a county’s population with a college education and the rate of children living in poverty had equally strong or stronger relationships to fluctuations in mortality rates.”
Here’s a great question by Incidental Economist Austin Frakt. (Bold mine again.)
I speculate, but do not have the expertise to test, that what we are seeing is that the widely discussed increase in economic inequality in late 20th century America is also an increase in geographic inequality. My guess is that not only are rich Americans rapidly pulling ahead of poor Americans, but that these groups are also increasingly segregated by region.
It takes a family and a village to raise a child. What happens when the moms in the village all get crushed?
Just think about this in terms of the number of women that will not be able to access health care in the near future because Legislatures in those same states are defunding Planned Parenthood which is one of the major source of low-cost to free healthcare for low income women? I’m shuddering at what those same statistics will grow to in the next five years. We need to seriously rethink our priorities in this country.
Religion Pimping: Secessionists and Proselytizers on the Public Dole
Posted: April 3, 2013 Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, religious extremists, Vagina, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: north carolina religious extremists 46 Comments
I’m not the the resident psychologist here, but I really feel hyper-religiousity is a fricking mental disease. I know it is a social one. I have no idea why some people feel they have the right and duty to plaster their religious beliefs all over the rest of us, but it is clearly not an American idea. Here’s the latest whackadoodle attempt to do an end run around our constitution by a cluster of bananas in North Carolina.
The Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional” according to a resolution sponsored by North Carolina House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes (R) and ten of his fellow Republicans — a statement that puts them at odds with over 200 years of constitutional law. In light of this novel reading of the Constitution, Starnes and his allies also claim that North Carolina is free to ignore the Constitution’s ban on government endorsement of religion:
SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
This resolution is nothing less than an effort to repudiate the result of the Civil War. As the resolution correctly notes, the First Amendment merely provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and, indeed, the Bill of Rights was originally understood to only place limits on the federal government. For the earliest years of the Republic, the Bill of Rights were not really “rights” at all, but were instead guidelines on which powers belonged to central authorities and which ones remained exclusively in the hands of state lawmakers.
In 1868, however the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified for the express purpose of changing this balance of power. While the early Constitution envisioned “rights” as little more than a battle between central and local government, the Fourteenth Amendment ushered in a more modern understanding. Under this amendment, “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” nor may any state “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment completely transformed the nature of the American Republic, from one where liberties were generally protected — if at all — by tensions between competing governments to one which recognized that there are certain liberties that cannot be abridged by any government.
So, a few folk want a state religion in North Carolina because sectarian opening prayers just aren’t pious enough for them.
A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.
The legislation grew out of a dispute between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In a federal lawsuit filed last month, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.
Overtly Christian prayers at government meetings are not rare in North Carolina. Since the Republican takeover in 2011, the state Senate chaplain has offered an explicitly Christian invocation virtually every day of session, despite the fact that some senators are not Christian.
In a 2011 ruling on a similar lawsuit against the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not ban prayer at government meetings outright, but said prayers favoring one religion over another are unconstitutional.
“To plant sectarian prayers at the heart of local government is a prescription for religious discord,” the court said. “Where prayer in public fora is concerned, the deep beliefs of the speaker afford only more reason to respect the profound convictions of the listener. Free religious exercise posits broad religious tolerance.”
Supplanting modernity, science, rationale thought and replacing it with government mandated religious views is the agenda here. Here’s another good example. RNC Chair Reince Preibus thinks he knows more than doctors. He equates letting doctors and women decide about the outcomes of late term abortions–and possibly pre-term births–to infanticide.
In an article published Wednesday on the conservative website RedState, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus blasted Democrats for supporting Planned Parenthood, while floating the damning suggestion that the likes of President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) support infanticide.
“The President, the Senate Majority Leader, the House Democratic Leader, and the Chair of the Democratic National Committee (in whose home state this hearing occurred) made funding Planned Parenthood an issue in the 2012 campaign,” Priebus wrote. “They should now all be held to account for that outspoken support. If the media won’t, then voters must ask the pressing questions: Do these Democrats also believe a newborn has no rights? Do they also endorse infanticide?”
Priebus appeared to predicate much of his piece on recent testimony from a Planned Parenthood lobbyist before the Florida legislature. The lobbyist was posed a number of hypotheticals on what the women’s healthcare organization would do if a baby survived a botched abortion.
“Not once in her testimony did the Planned Parenthood representative say the newborn baby has a right to life. Not once did she say anyone has a duty to care for the child,” Priebus wrote. “Whether the living, breathing child survives is up to the adults in the room because, as we now know, Planned Parenthood doesn’t believe the baby has rights.”
Who better knows the outcome of this situation? The State? Priestb00 and his merry band of republican religious nuts?
This reminds me of the attempts in Louisiana and other places to drain money from public schools to religious-based schools. Republicans are horrified to think that religions other than their own might have access to the funds. This is playing out in Tennessee right now.
Republican lawmakers in Tennessee are threatening to block Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s school voucher bill over fears that Muslim schools could receive funding.
The Knoxville News Sentinel reported on Monday that Haslam hinted that he would withdraw his bill after objections from Republican lawmakers that it was not broad enough and that the vouchers could be used by Islamic schools.
Over the weekend, state Sen. Jim Tracy (R) had told The Murfreesboro Post that he had “considerable concern” that tax dollars could go to schools that teach principles from the Quran.
Tracy, who is on the Senate Education Committee and identifies himself as a member of the Church of Christ, insisted that Islamic school funding was an “an issue we must address” before the voucher bill can go forward.
“I don’t know whether we can simply amend the bill in such a way that will fix the issue at this point,” he said.
Yes, there is one Muslim school in Memphis that would have access to state funds under the bill. So, it’s wrong to fund Muslim schools, but you can guess which religious schools should be the only ones funded by government.
Look, I have nothing against other people’s free practice of religion. There are at least two great places for that to happen. The places are called THEIR home and THEIR place of worship. Every place else should be a religion-free zone. It’s obvious these folks didn’t get a very good education in American history or political thought. For that matter, the don’t appear to have been well-educated in much else. OR, they are just plain crazy. I’m going with the latter.
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