WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Magpie is a former journalist, attempted historian [No, you can't ask how her thesis is going], and full-time corvid of the lesbian persuasion. She keeps herself in birdseed by writing those bad computer manuals that you toss out without bothering to read them. She also blogs too much when she's not on deadline, both here and at Pacific Views.
Magpie roosts in Portland, Oregon, where she annoys her housemates (as well as her cats Medea, Whiskers, and Jane Doe) by attempting to play Irish music on the fiddle and concertina.
Yes, it does matter who's in charge of the White House and Congress.
Katha Pollitt weighs in on Gonzales v. Carhart, the US Supreme Court's recent anti-abortion decision:
For the first time, the Supreme Court has ruled that the health of an actually existing human woman doesn't matter, never mind Roe. Nor does a doctor's judgment. What counts, according to Justice Kennedy's majority decision, is that this particular method of abortion "devalues human life." Besides, the woman, confused little flower nodding her head in the breeze, needs to be protected from regret, the "grief more anguished and sorrow more profound" that might come when she realizes the exact nature of the procedure. Regret! If that's a criterion, no one could ever decide about anything. Maybe we women should call up Justice Kennedy whenever we have a big decision to make. "Um, excuse me, Justice Kennedy, Bob just proposed, but what if he's not The One? And while I have you on the phone, the job in California sounds so great, but what if I never finish my novel? And what if I vote Republican because I'm scared of Osama, but then Congress tries to make me have a baby?" Numerous commentators have downplayed the significance of Gonzales v. Carhart--you can still get an abortion, just not with this method, which was only used in about 2,000 cases a year anyway. But that ho-hum approach overlooks what is new here and where it's going. I've mentioned the paternalism and the Roe-disregarding lack of a health exception. But let's not forget the sheer useless moral posturing: A woman can wind up injured, and her fetus will be aborted anyway, but the tender sensibilities of Kennedy and his four brethren will be protected! What other procedures will they find "shocking" down the line? It's not as if the alternatives--dismembering the fetus in the womb and extracting it piece by piece; poisoning it and delivering it dead--are delightful to contemplate. Why shouldn't they find more and more abortions unacceptable--maybe even all of them?
Perhaps they will. Because another thing this decision demonstrates is how deeply antichoice disinformation has penetrated the worlds of power and influence. Kennedy's regretful woman comes straight from the antichoice playbook, in which women who choose abortion are invariably bewildered, heedless, misled, manipulated and in need of guidance from wiser heads. When Kennedy refers to the gynecologists and obstetricians who perform abortions as "abortion doctors," he's repeating antichoice language intended to impugn the professionalism of these physicians and make it easier to disregard their judgment about how best to care for their patients. Abortion doctors! What do they know? The ban itself--calling the procedure "partial birth abortion," as if the fetus were days from being born (it's actually performed in the second trimester); singling out a method and using the emotions it arouses to violate the trimester distinctions of Roe and the pre-viability and post-viability distinction of Casey is part of the antichoice strategy to shut down legal abortion one restriction, one legal precedent at a time. And what about prochoicers' weak responses? NARAL caved in on the ridiculous Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. South Dakota's Healthy Families confined its opposition to the lack of rape, incest and health exceptions in the state's abortion ban, thus setting the stage for acceptance of future bans that added those provisos. [Emphasis added]
I wish I were even sometimes as eloquent as Pollitt is routinely. You should definitely go read the rest of what she has to say about Carhart.
She hadn't posted since February, and when a blogger who lives in Baghdad doesn't post for awhile, you have to worry.
It turns out that part of the reason for Riverbend's extended silence is that she and her family are getting ready to leave Iraq.
So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees—the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare—stay and wait and try to survive.
On the one hand, I know that leaving the country and starting a new life somewhere else—as yet unknown—is such a huge thing that it should dwarf every trivial concern. The funny thing is that it’s the trivial that seems to occupy our lives. We discuss whether to take photo albums or leave them behind. Can I bring along a stuffed animal I've had since the age of four? Is there room for E.'s guitar? What clothes do we take? Summer clothes? The winter clothes too? What about my books? What about the CDs, the baby pictures?
The problem is that we don't even know if we'll ever see this stuff again. We don't know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends ... And to what?
It's difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.
The decision of Riverbend's family to leave their country may be a small thing when looked at in isolation, but it's just another example of a decision that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis make every year. Meanwhile, Dubya and his supporters continue to claim that the occupation of Iraq is succeeding.
I wish Riverbend and her family a happy, peaceful life in whatever country they wind up in. And I hope that it's safe for them to return home sooner, rather than later.
The more your company sells to Wal-Mart, the smaller your profit margin.
On balance, firms that derive less than 10% of its sales through Wal-Mart averaged 39.1% in gross margin, or the percentage of profit realized before items like fixed costs and interest expense are considered. For those falling between 10% and 20%, gross margin falls to 36.2%. Above 20%, and margin dips a little bit more, to 35.4%. The trend is most pronounced in the apparel & accessories category, where average gross margin drops from 48.7% for companies generating less than 10% of its sales through Wal-Mart, to 28.7% for those selling 20% or more. Food & beverage also shows a big disparity, where the same breakdown shows average gross margins dropping from 39% to 22%.
In all, only 25 of 333 companies managed to beat its sector gross margin average while generating at least 10% of their revenue through Wal-Mart. Only seven that sold over 20% there did it. And the numbers show that company size has little to do with Wal-Mart dependency, at least once you get past the top handful....
If you're a working woman in the US, you've finally worked enough additional days this year to catch up with what your average male co-worker made during 2006. And, just think, you only have to work until sometime in August 2008 to earn what that co-worker will be paid this year.
You can find more info about pay equity (and the lack of it in the US) if you go here.
On the April 19 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show , the famous conservative talk radio host opined about the political views of Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia tech massacre madman.
"If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? " Limbaugh asked. "This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just pointing it out."
In a new video, the the right-wing American Family Association attributes the tragedy at Virginia Tech to: a lack of prayer in school, a lack of the Bible in school, a lack of spanking kids, a lack of physical punishment in school, abortion, condoms, Bill Clinton, internet pornography, free speech, the entertainment industry, "satanic" music, and liberal culture in general.
From Bentonville, Arkansas comes the news that a local man is pissed off about a lesbian sex book in the local library:
Earl Adams said his 14- and 16-year-old sons were "greatly disturbed" after finding the book, titled "The Whole Lesbian Sex Book." Adams said the book caused "many sleepless nights in our house."
Adams said the book is "patently offensive and lacks any artistic, literary or scientific value," according to a letter he faxed to Mayor Bob McCaslin. He said the teenagers found it while browsing for material on military academies.
Adams wants the city to pay $10,000 to each of his sons. That's the maximum allowed under the Arkansas obscenity law. However, the city's attorney dismissed Adams' claim as baseless. She said the book is not pornographic. [Emphasis added]
Let me get this right: The male kids 'accidentally' found a lesbian sex book, yes? Then the kids and the father were kept up at night because of the book? Fill in the blanks yourself.
Paul Krugman bears the news in his latest NY Times column:
There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it's a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren't met.
If you're a Times subscriber, you can read the whole thing here. If not, the column has been kindly bootlegged here at Welcome to Pottersville.
Another threat to the nation is turned back at the border.
Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar is a really dangerous guy. He had the nerve to write about his experiences with psychedelic drugs and suggest that, under some circumstances and with some patients, those drugs might be more effective in dealing with psychological problems than standard psychotherapy. Despite the fact that Feldmar's experiences with psychedelics took place decades ago -- many of them before the drugs were illegal in the US or Canada -- and despite the fact that he wrote in a scientific journal, Feldmar was turned back at the border the last time he tried to cross from Canada and has been permanently barred from entering the US.
Sadly, this kind of story is nothing new. As this article points out, the US has a history of keeping out people it doesn't like politically. Since 9/11, however, Dubya's administration has been excluding foreigners from the US with distressing regularity:
Pop singer Cat Stevens was turned back from the U.S. in 2004, after being detained. Bolivian human rights leader and lawyer, Leonida Zurita Vargas was prevented from entering in February of 2006. She was planning to be in the U.S. as part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and human rights.... [She] never got beyond the airport check-in at Santa Cruz, Bolivia where she was informed her ten-year visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.
The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.
In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.
What's more dangerous to freedom than these exclusions themselves, I'd suggest, is the apparatus that has to be set up to identify such people at the border. The feds need to collect information from all over the place, consolidate it into databases that can be easily used by border officials, and make sure that there are more people at the borders identifying 'undesirables.' As one person mentioned in the Tyee article about Feldmar suggests, the tools for an authoritarian state have been put into place in the US. The fact that they haven't been used yet on most of us doesn't mean that they won't be.
