Magpie

Saturday, March 20, 2004

Meanwhile, back in 'liberated' Iraq.

At Baghdad Burning, Riverbend clues us in as to what life's like in Iraq, one year after the war:

We're trying to fight against the extremism that seems to be upon us like a black wave; we're wondering, on an hourly basis, how long it will take for some semblance of normality to creep back into our lives; we're hoping and praying against civil war?

We're watching with disbelief as American troops roam the streets of our towns and cities and break violently into our homes... we're watching with anger as the completely useless Puppet Council sits giving out fat contracts to foreigners and getting richer by the day- the same people who cared so little for their country, that they begged Bush and his cronies to wage a war that cost thousands of lives and is certain to cost thousands more.

We're watching sardonically as an Iranian cleric in the south turns a once secular country into America's worst nightmare- a carbon copy of Iran. We're watching as the lies unravel slowly in front of the world- the WMD farce and the Al-Qaeda mockery.

And where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of 'liberators' and 'Free Iraqi Fighters'; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we've seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspections? journalists are being killed 'accidentally' and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.

There's more. You need to read it.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:47 PM | Get permalink

The annotated Dubya.

Over at the Left Coaster, our Pacific Views compatriot Mary has thoughtfully annotated portions of Dubya's radio address from earlier today:

[Dubya] Good morning. One year ago this week, ground forces of a strong coalition entered Iraq to liberate that country from the rule of a tyrant. For the Iraqi people, it was the beginning of their deliverance. For the world, it was the moment when years of demands and pledges turned to decisive action.

[Mary] Bush really likes decisive action. In fact, last year, most of the world was saying, What's the rush? What happens if you give the inspectors another few weeks? In hindsight it is easy to see that if they waited a couple more weeks, their careful stack of lies would crumble under the weight of truth as witnessed by the fact that people were starting to realize how shaky their imminent threat justification was.

It gets much better.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:28 PM | Get permalink

Lesbian pastor acquitted in Methodist church trial.

A jury of thriteen Methodist pastors acquitted pastor Karen Dammann of violating church law by being in a lesbian relationship. Eleven of the pastors voted for acquittal; the other two were uncertain as to whether Damman had broken church laws.

Dammann trial came as the result of a 2001 letter to her bishop, in which she disclosed her sexuality. That admission started a process leading to church charges that she engaged in 'practices declared by the United Methodist Church to be incompatible with Christian teaching.' If Dammann had been found guilty, she would have lost her job as pastor of her congregation in Ellensburg, Washington, and been removed from the Methodist ministry.

The verdict in Damman's trial is expected to give a boost to Methodists who are trying to end the denomation's ban on openly lesbian and gay clergy.

Methodists on both sides of the issue predicted that the decision would reverberate through the 8.3 million-member denomination, much as the consecration of a gay bishop has embroiled the Episcopal Church in a debate between the authority of scriptural passages that condemn homosexuality and the desire to be an inclusive, tolerant religious community.

The not-guilty verdict "will be shocking to most United Methodists, because there is no question about what the Reverend Dammann is doing," said the Rev. James V. Heidinger, president of Good News, a conservative renewal movement in the church. "It was assumed by most of us that we were just going through due process to make sure her rights were protected, but that she obviously was in violation of church law."

Via Washington Post.

More: There are details about the arguments made during Damman's trial in this Seattle Times story.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:20 PM | Get permalink

Portrait of a textile worker.

Sculptor/textile artist Terese Agnew is in the middle of a two-year project to create a quilt showing the portrait of a textile worker, made entirely out of clothing labels. The finished work will be rather large (8 ft by 9 ft; 2.4 m by 2.7 m) , and will be used in prints and posters to raise money for the anti-sweatshop work of the National Labor Committee and the Coalition to Abolish Sweatshops.

I need thousands more labels to complete the image. That’s where you come in. If you send me labels cut from your clothes, I’ll include them in the quilt and your name in the list of contributors. You will be helping the effort to give a face and a name to the all-too-frequently anonymous textile worker.

Send your clothing labels to:

Terese Agnew
P.O. Box 11093
Shorewood, WI 53211

Agnew particularly needs gray labels right now.

You'll find some pictures of the quilt in progress here.

Thanks, Miriam!

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:18 PM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

The eastern hemisphere at equinox, from way above the Indian Ocean.

Earth at equinox

Happy spring to you northern hemisphere folks. And you antipodeans have a good autum. (We hope you're someplace with lots of seasonal colors.)

Via Earth Science Picture of the Day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:43 PM | Get permalink

Get ready for more of those Dubya photo-ops.

This time, they'll be staged to make it look like the prez is doing a great job of fighting terrorism and keeping the country safe:

Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.

As Lambert at corrente pointed out, we now know why Dubya was so insistent on taking the Department of Homeland Security out of the civil service system: Civil service employees are insulated from this kind of political pressure.

Via Time.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:09 PM | Get permalink

Global warming continues to be bunk.

We're sure that the fact that carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas — has reached record high levels in the Earth's atmosphere is totally meaningless.

According to scientists at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory, the CO2 readings there have reached 379 parts per million (ppm), compared to 376 ppm in March 2003. A change of 3 ppm over the course of a year might not seem much, until you compare it to the 1.8 ppm average annual increase over the last decade. Or to the 1 ppm annual increase recorded 50 years ago.

Asked to explain the stepped-up rate, climatologists were cautious, saying data needed to be further evaluated. But Asia immediately sprang to mind.

"China is taking off economically and burning a lot of fuel. India, too," said Pieter Tans, a prominent carbon-cycle expert at NOAA's Boulder lab.

Another leading climatologist, Ralph Keeling, whose father, Charles D. Keeling, developed methods for measuring carbon dioxide, noted that the rate "does fluctuate up and down a bit," and said it was too early to reach conclusions. But he added: "People are worried about `feedbacks.' We are moving into a warmer world."

He explained that warming itself releases carbon dioxide from the ocean and soil. By raising the gas's level in the atmosphere, that in turn could increase warming, in a "positive feedback," said Keeling, of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

More: And then there's this alarmist in Australia.

Richard Matear, a Hobart-based marine researcher, said the oxygen content of deep ocean water between Australia and Antarctica had fallen 3 per cent since 1968.

If new research confirmed the decline was happening throughout the world's southern oceans, it would be a strong sign global warming was interfering with sea currents.

According to NASA "the thawing of sea ice covering the Arctic could disturb or even halt large currents in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Without the vast heat these currents deliver - comparable to the power generation of a million nuclear power plants - Europe's average temperature would likely drop 5 to 10 degrees."

While North America would not be as severely hit, the space agency said "such a dip in temperature would be similar to global average temperatures toward the end of the last ice age roughly 20,000 years ago".

Via AP and Sydney Morning Herald.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:53 AM | Get permalink

Yes, you're right.

There was indeed a different byline on the preceding post. Say 'hello' to Natasha, our compatriot at Pacific Views. She'll be roosting here while our other blog is hosed due to a hosting 'upgrade.'

Natasha brings a slightly different voice to Magpie. Where we tend to just point to a story and give an excerpt, Natasha has a gift for taking a story and teasing out its meaning at length. Hopefully we'll be lucky enough to get one of those longer posts while she's roosting here.

(And if we can twist her arm sufficiently, maybe she'll post here at least occasionally after Pacific Views is fixed.)

Welcome, Natasha!

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:44 AM | Get permalink

Friday, March 19, 2004

Why We Need Regulation

The Guardian brings us a classic example of why we need regulatory bodies:

...The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.

So now the full scale of Coke's PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it "pure" and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for "taste profile"; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide - which is not a problem - into bromate - which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre). ...

No regulatory body, no testing for bromate. No testing, no pressure to recall it from shelves. No recall, people end up drinking carcinogen contaminated tap water, for which they paid more than their own uncontaminated tap water.

The so-called Invisible Hand can't do its work when consumers have to rely for information on the same people who profit from deceiving them.

Update: Title added.

| | Posted by Natasha at 11:19 PM | Get permalink

Looking for one of Washington's lies about Iraq?

US representative Henry Waxman has just what you're looking for.

Iraq on the Record is a report on the statements about Iraq made by President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. But the report isn't everything Waxman's providing: His congressional website contains a page where you can search the statements in Iraq on the Record by speaker, date, keyword, and subject. It's how we found this:

Statement by President George W. Bush

"The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take."

Source: Address to the United Nations General Assembly, White House (9/12/2002).

Explanation: This statement was misleading because it suggested that Iraq posed an urgent threat despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community had deep divisions and divergent points of view regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet noted in February 2004, "Let me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the Estimate. They never said there was an 'imminent' threat."

Pretty good, eh?

The full report is available in PDF format here.

Via Blog for America.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:51 PM | Get permalink

Dubya's latest photo op.

The prez certainly does like those carefully choreographed photo-ops in front of cheering troops. (Remember this one?) The Washington Post has the scoop on how Dubya's latest photo-op was set up yesterday at Fort Campbell, Kentucky:

Bush, wearing a green Army jacket, received an enthusiastic welcome from the troops, who stood on the post's muddy parade grounds under bright sunshine and chanted "U.S.A.!" Before Bush appeared, small U.S. flags were handed out, and an officer gave instructions to the troops on how to receive the commander in chief. "We're going to show him a lot of love by waving flags," the officer said. Telling the troops not to salute, he added: "You're going to wave and clap and make a lot of noise. . . . You must smile. We are happy campers here."

Via corrente.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:28 PM | Get permalink

Army drops all charges against Muslim chaplain.

You remember James Yee, the Army chaplain at Guantanamo who was arrested on suspicion of espionage last September, don't you? And how the Army suggested that he might have been guilty of treason, too?

Well, the Army dropped all charges against Yee earlier today, citing national security concerns as the reason.

Far be it from us to suggest that the charges might have been dropped sooner if Yee weren't a Muslim chaplain. And it's not like US authorities have a history of making unsubstantiated espionage charges against Chinese Americans or anything.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:09 PM | Get permalink

Hearings on same-sex marriages in Multnomah County.

We received the following message today from the ACLU of Oregon:

Mulnomah County to Hold Public Hearings on Marriage

Multnomah County has announced a series of public hearings regarding the issuing of marriage licenses to same sex couples. The Board will solicit testimony from members of the public on a resolution supporting Commission Chair Diane Linn's order to implement County Counsel's legal opinion that it is unconstitutional to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Please go to one of these hearings and express your views.

The hearings will be:

Thursday, March 25: 10:15 am to 12:00 pm

Wednesday, March 31: 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm, and 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Thursday, April 1: 10:15 am to 12:00 pm

All hearings will be held in the Commissioners' Boardroom located on the first floor of the Multnomah Building, 501 SE Hawthorne Blvd., Portland,

You can bet that the religious right is going to show up for the hearings in droves. If you live in the Portland area and support what the Multnomah County government has done, it's critical that you come to a hearing and make your voice heard.

Click here to download an MS-Word document containing the draft resolution that the County Commission will be considering.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:45 PM | Get permalink

Staying outside the Beltway.

At Campaign Desk, Susan Stranahan has a short interview with Dick Polman, the national political correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's worth a read.

SQS: What's the easiest bad habit for a political reporter to fall into?

DP: Reflecting and amplifying the latest conventional wisdom. We were all seemingly convinced last November that Howard Dean was the unstoppable Democrat, and that he'd be buried, a la Walter Mondale, by the invincible George Bush. That's because we paid attention to the early polls, which often bear no relation to what people do in the voting booth. The latest conventional wisdom, of course, is that we'll have a squeaker this November. I think we should all be required to write at least one contrarian story per week.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:46 PM | Get permalink

It's morning in America.

And cartoonist Scott Bateman has updated the classic Reagan commercial to better fit the first four years of life under Dubya's presidency.

You can find the 'Morning in America' campaign ad that helped Reagan win the 1984 election over here [QuickTime required].

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:29 PM | Get permalink

We bet there's no union label on these clothes, either.

Can we say 'Made in Burma'? Dubya's official online campaign store obviously can.

Newsday reports that www.georgewbushstore.com has been selling clothing items made in Burma. This is despite the fact that Dubya banned the import of Burmese goods a year ago because of that country's miserable human rights record. We guess he forgot.

The merchandise sold on www.georgewbushstore.com includes a $49.95 fleece pullover, embroidered with the Bush-Cheney '04 logo and bearing a label stating it was made in Burma, now Myanmar. The jacket was sent to Newsday as part of an order that included a shirt made in Mexico and a hat not bearing a country-of-origin label.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:25 AM | Get permalink

Our brain hurts.

Did you know that Jackie Chan and Ani DiFranco recorded Nat Cole's song, 'Unforgettable'? Well, they did.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:03 AM | Get permalink

Quebec high court okays same-sex marriages.

The Quebec Court of Appeal has ruled that lesbians and gay men in Quebec have the right to marry. The court upheld a 2002 ruling by a lower provincial court, which held that Quebec's ban on same-sex marriages violated Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That ruling had been appealed by religious groups.

This decision makes Quebec the third Canadian province to legalize same-sex marriages, following Ontario and British Columbia. The federal government is currently working on legislation that would make these marriages legal in all of Canada.

Via CBC.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:43 AM | Get permalink

And that global warming stuff is crap, too.

We wonder how Dubya's sycophants in the scientific community are going to spin this?

Six large sets of data collected over the past 20 to 40 years in England, Wales, and Scotland were analysed by Jeremy Thomas of the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorchester, UK and colleagues. More than 20,000 volunteers submitted over 15 million records of species.

The researchers found that populations of 71 percent of the butterfly species have decreased over the last 20 years, compared to 56 percent for birds and 28 percent for plants. Two butterfly species (3.4 percent of total) became extinct, compared to six (0.4 percent) of the plant species surveyed. None of the native breeding birds went extinct in the last 20 years.

Crucially, the decline in populations happened in all the major ecosystems and was distributed evenly across Britain, rather than in just a few heavily degraded regions.

The crisis could be foreshadowing a sixth mass extinction, warn the researchers. Life on Earth has already seen five mass extinctions in its four billion year old history. The last one, which wiped out the dinosaurs, happened 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period and was possibly caused by a giant meteor collision.

Oh, oh! We just figured out how Washington will discount the importance of the UK findings: The butterflies probably all vote Democratic.. Who cares if they drop dead?

Via New Scientist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:18 AM | Get permalink

Girls just wanna get married.

At least that's the case among same-sex couples in Portland, Oregon.

The AP did an analysis of the 1983 marriage licenses issued by Multnomah County between March 3 and March 12, following the county's decision to let same-sex couples marry. Of those 1983 licenses, the AP found that at least 1252 marriage licenses — or 63% of the total — went to lesbian couples. The total might be even higher, but there were more than 200 licenses for which the gender makeup of the couples couldn't be determined by their names.

Ann Mussey, 53, an assistant professor of women's studies at Portland State University, was among the gay women who lined up for their licenses. She said she was struck by the number of lesbians who were there with children, and said their offspring might be one reason for the imbalance.

"Marriage is a really important protection for children," Mussey said. "I would suspect more lesbian couples have children, and many have adopted children as well."

Ellen Scott, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, also noted that lesbians, like heterosexual women, tend to make less money than their male counterparts, and so might seek to get married to get access to each other's health benefits, or to get tax advantages.

It will be interesting to see if this pattern continues as more licenses are issued.

Note: Ann Mussey, mentioned in the quote above, is this magpie's thesis advisor. It says something about these modern times we live in that the first we heard of her marriage came via an AP report in the online edition of the Boston Globe.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:27 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Dept. of Handy Hints.

If the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq makes you want to help Dubya and Paul Bremer bring democracy to the Iraqis, you might want to take a look at this Coalition Provisional Authority Phrase Book:

CPA phrasebook

Via the New Yorker.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:44 PM | Get permalink

Democracy for America.

We were going to post something about Democracy for America, the new political organization that's growing out of the Howard Dean campaign, but our Pacific Views colleague, natasha, has already written a really good post on the subject over at Open Source Politics. Go read it, okay?

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:17 PM | Get permalink

Disguising propaganda as news.

On Saturday, the NY Times ran an article on how federally funded puff pieces for Duyba's Medicare 'reforms' are turning up as ostensibly legitimate TV news stories. These 'video press releases' are cut from much the same cloth as the taxpayer-funded announcements about the new prescrption drug benefits that have already provoked controversy.

CJR's Campaign Desk has been all over the story this week, determining which TV newscasts aired the video releases, and figuring out the backgrounds of the two 'reporters' who did the voiceovers on the English and Spanish versions of the release.

Campaign Desk was finally able to talk to Karen Ryan, who did the English version. Ryan is a former journalist who these days heads up her own PR firm. Ryan told Campaign Desk that she feels singled out for blame — that she's become 'political roadkill' for just doing her job.

Does she have any qualms about the fact that her video press releases frequently run as "news"? No. The news stations, she said, bear the responsibility for how they use the footage she provides.

Does she choose the work she does on the basis of any political sympathy, or out of an interest in the product or service being promoted? Not at all, she told us. It's just a way of earning a buck. (Although, she allowed, if she were ever asked to work on an issue that was really beyond the pale, she might hesitate.)

Ryan worries that the Medicare furor will make it harder for her to find work (the Plain Dealer piece warned readers: "If you see her, don't believe her"). As she sees it, she's the smallest fish in the pond, someone who has become a scapegoat, when in fact she is only a cog in a vast p.r. machine. "I'm the lowest person down on the bottom," she told us. (And in a way, she's right; in the case of the controversial Medicare plugs, HHS hired Ketchum Advertising, which in turn hired Home Front Communications, which in turn hired Ryan.)

While Ryan has previously worked as a journalist, as the Washington Post reported Tuesday, she currently heads her own p.r. firm. In addition to providing her corporate, government, and non-profit clients with communications advice and services, she often produces video news releases packaged as complete news segments, touting her clients' product or issue -- as she did for HHS recently. And she herself generally does the voiceover, which closes with the now legendary, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

We have to admit that we agree with Ryan's point that she is just the person at the bottom of the ladder. Obviously, the real heavies in this story are the people in Dubya's administration (and probably his re-election committee, too) who came up with the iidea of using taxpayer money to produce what are essentially campaign ads for Dubya. However, Ryan did decide to take the money to produce political propaganda that masquerades as news — and given her background as a reporter, we have to assume that she's well aware of the difference between news and PR. If her ethics allowed her to do this kind of work, then Ryan deserves whatever difficulties she encounters because of her notoriety. The only unfortunate thing is that the people higher up the chain probably won't get what they deserve as well.

But the story of the Medicare video releases points to a bigger problem: It's come to be an acceptable practice at many US news outlets (even national news, sometimes) to incorporate into newcasts the audio/video material provided by PR flacks — often without any indication of the materials' source. We've been around long enough to remember the outrage of many journalists when the first video releases started turning up in small-market newscasts during the 1980s. (If we still had all our old issues of the Columbia Journalism Review, we'd be able to load down this post with quotes from articles and letters.) Opponents of this practice claimed that using PR material — even when done carefully — would start journalists down a slippery slope toward becoming little more than PR flacks themselves. One look at today's newscasts in the US shows how correct these warnings were. Given the downsizing of news operations in the last 10 or 15 years, PR video and audio releases are now often viewed as a way to stretch limited resources. By using them, even the most marginal news operation can look 'big-league,' and get those all-important pictures or soundbites into their newscast. Anymore, it seems like questions of whether this practice compromises a news outlet's journalistic integrity just aren't asked much.

So while we're glad to see that the US government's use of 'video press releases' to tout Dubya's Medicare 'reforms' has raised some alarm bells in the media, these releases are just one tiny example of how the White House, corporations, and others are continually trying to slip their propaganda into the news media. And it's just one example of how some of the news media cooperates.

The whole house of journalism is on fire, and it's going to take more than a few buckets of water to put the fire out.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:33 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Putting the US Supreme Court in its place.

Worried about possible high court rulings on abortion and same-sex marriage, 12 members of the US Congress are backing a bill that would let Congress overrule decisions of the US Supreme Court. Under the bill (HR 3920), any Supreme Court decison that found a law unconstitutional could be reversed by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

While the bill's sponsors say their proposed law would counteract bad decisions made by 'activist' judges, legal scholars say the bill would erase the division of powers between Congress and the high court.

"This is jaw-dropping," said Mary Cheh, a professor of constitutional law at the George Washington University Law School. "It would overrule what our constitutional scheme has been for over 200 years." (AP)

Todd Peterson, a George Washington University law professor, calls the bill "possibly the most unconstitutional bill I've ever seen." [...]

Lewis' bill "expresses a genuine frustration with the judicial branch when the Supreme Court takes a position on difficult constitutional issues," Peterson said.

He points to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that decided the outcome of the 2000 election.

"The decision in Bush vs. Gore was about as judicially activist as you can get. You didn't see too many Republicans coming out and complaining about judicial activism," Peterson said. (Media General News Service)

We'd just point out that if the bill's sponsors had a good understanding of constitutional law, they wouldn't be proposing an Act of Congress, which is subject to Supreme Court review. Instead, they's be introducing a constitutional amendment. But we imagine this distinction is lost on a group of legislators who've so clearly shown how little regard they have for constitutional 'technicalities.'

Via Winston-Salem Journal and AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:23 PM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Frost on a blade of grass, as viewed through a scanning electron microscope.

Frost-covered blade of grass

Via Earth Science Picture of the Day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:24 PM | Get permalink

No comment.

Tennessee county wants to ban gays.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:05 PM | Get permalink

It's okay to act queer, just don't be queer.

As ridiculous as it sounds, that's pretty much the position of the current head of the US Office of Special Counsel, the federal agency that is supposed to protect whistleblowers and other federal employees from unfair practices. According to Scott Bloch, lesbian and gay federal employees are not covered by federal antidiscrimination laws. This reverses the position that the Office of Special Counsel took during the Clinton administration.

Bloch said that the while a gay employee would have no recourse for being fired or demoted for being gay, that same worker could not be fired for attending a gay Pride event.

In his interpretation, Bloch is making a distinction between one’s conduct as a gay or lesbian and one’s status as a gay or lesbian.

"People confuse conduct and sexual orientation as the same thing, and I don’t think they are," Bloch said in an interview with Federal Times, a publication for government employees.

Bloch said gays, lesbians and bisexuals cannot be covered as a protected class because they are not protected under the nation’s civil rights laws.

"When you’re interpreting a statute, you have to be very careful to interpret strictly according to how it’s written and not get into loose interpretations,” Bloch said. "Someone may have jumped to the conclusion that conduct equals sexual orientation, but they are essentially very different. One is a class . . . and one is behavior."

Bloch's predecessor in the office, Elaine Kaplan, says that Bloch's understanding of the law is 'dead wrong':

"The legal position that he is taking, that there is some distinction between discrimination based on sexual orientation and discrimination based on conduct, is absurd," Kaplan said. "It is a distinction that has not been made by OPM, the Justice Department or anybody else in the executive branch." [...]

Kaplan said Bloch seems intent on narrowing the government’s long-held interpretation of the law to exclude gay, lesbian and bisexual employees from job protections.

Like Dubya's administration hadn't already done enough to tell lesbians and gay men that they are second-class citizens.

Via 365Gay.com and Federal Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:25 PM | Get permalink

Maybe Rumsfeld should just keep on talking.

We just love it when people who deserve the worst give their opponents the ammunition they need. Like US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld so kindly provided to MoveOn.org for use in their new television ad.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:06 PM | Get permalink

New to the blogroll.

Today is Kevin Drum's first day as the blogger for the Washington Monthly. The content of the Monthly's blog, Political Animal, is now essentially a version of Calpundit with a new address.

Make sure to check Kevin's current writing out. We don't always agree with him, but we always make sure to read him.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:26 PM | Get permalink

Those Celtic Fiddle Festival guys.

We arrived home from our short road trip to a phone message from our friend E, telling us that there weren't many people in line at Artichoke Music for the recording of a new Celtic Fiddle Festival album, and that if we wanted to hear the concert, she'd save a seat for us. So even though we'd just gotten off the road from Seattle, we hightailed it across town to join E for the show.

(For those of you not familiar with the group, Celtic Fiddle Festival started out in the early 1990s as a one-shot grouping of Irish fiddler Kevin Burke, Scots fiddler Johnny Cunningham, and Breton fiddler Christian Lemaitre. The combination really clicked, and the trio toured and recorded fairly frequently over the next decade or so. Just before the current tour was to start, however, Johnny Cunningam died suddenly (see this post, leaving Burke and Lemaitre to figure out whether they should carry on. With the econcouragement of people close to Cunningham, the group has continued with the addition of Quebecois fiddler Andre Brunet, who's known for his playing with La Bottine Souriante.)

So what about the show? Well, the operative word was 'hammered' — it was very quickly apparent that the three fiddlers had had a few drinks with their dinner. Okay, more than a few. So what we wound up hearing was, in Kevin Burke's word's, a comedy album with some music stuck in between the comedy bits. And, as Brunet said, they're going to keep the music in the album anyway. We don't mean to make it sound like the playing was bad — it certainly wasn't. (We wish we played half as well when we're sober.) But there was a certain charm to watching Kevin Burke make some glaringly obvious mistakes, and go off on long rambling monologues in which he'd forget exactly what he was talking about. Our favorite one was when he interrupted Brunet's description of how Quebecois traditional music had often been viewed as the work of the devil. Kevin went on to describe how you needed a kitchen with the devil in it, and then you needed to put a chair on top of the table. Or something like that. We guess you had to be there.

The best thing about the show was how well Brunet fit in with the other two fiddlers. While we certainly miss Johnny Cunningham's Scottish style and tunes, replacing him with a player from a different Celtic tradition was a wise move. Brunet gives a nice edge to the group's performance, which sometimes can verge on being too smooth.

The album, they said, should be out later this year. We're waiting to see how much of the between-the-tunes stuff makes it to the CD.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:29 PM | Get permalink

We're back.

Expect some more substantive posts later today.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:30 PM | Get permalink