obama's speech today

if you missed it today, here's the transcript:

.. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories tha t we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicia ns, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committ ed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

[i'll try and post my thoughts about this later]

Shocking, yet not really: the Spitzer thing

The Eliot Spitzer Stuff - New York Times

On the way home yesterday as we were listening to NPR run down the whole sordid Eliot Spitzer scandal, Roomie and I were wondering why public officials just can't keep it in their pants. Or, rather, why male public officials can't keep it in their pants. What is it about a lonely hotel room, solitary hours and public scrutiny that leads to really ill-advised phone calls to sex workers?

This profile seems to lay it all at the feet of being 'reckless.' Perhaps. Maybe it's the high pressure of being a guy with power. But weird how we don't see scandals about women in power getting caught in sexually compromising positions. Or maybe not so weird. Their scandals are about illegal nannies or covering up hubby's bad business practices or tax evasions. Interesting how women in power have scandals still linked to domestic disturbances while men in power seem to get in trouble for making public service a libidinal pleasure dome.

Amen: Compassion Fatigue

LutheranChik's "L" Word Diary: Compassion Fatigue

Before I get lost in all the post-primary hand-wringing I just wanted to bring to y'all's attention this really thought-provoking post from LutheranChick about compassion fatigue, or that wall some people in the pastorate hit when, to use a business term, the ROI isn't forthcoming.

What would be an acceptable Return on Investment? Well, something indicating that an impact has been made; change or improvement, however miniscule.

After years of being senior pastor of a small community church, which came after being senior pastor at a medium Baptist congregation, my dad told me and my sister this past weekend that he's calling it quits.

"I don't want to stop being a pastor, but I don't want to be pastor of that church anymore,' he said, sounding more frustrated and angry than I've ever heard him sound. 'I've taken them as far as they can go and I'm tired. No matter how many sermons, bible studies, counseling sessions, nothing changes - they don't change. All that time I could have spent with my wife, with you daughters that I spent with them and it hurts."

My sister and I said, "It's about time. They were killing you."

So, in a way, this post is for my dad who's 64 years old and deserves a frakking rest.

From LutheranChik:
I have a friend who, through her church work, got involved with a similarly dysfunctional household. Soon she was being called in the middle of the night with requests like, "So-and-So is in jail. Can you go and bail her out?" She'd schedule doctors' appointments for the pregnant unwed daughter only to have the daughter refuse to comply with the healthcare provider. She'd arrange for the family matriarch to get hooked up with this or that social service, only to have the woman fail to show up for appointments or turn in paperwork. After many months of this, my friend was becoming physically ill, anxious and filled with guilt over somehow "not doing enough" for these people. "Whenever I say I'm done with them, I think, 'What would Jesus do?'" she said, tears in her eyes.

Maybe I'm just channeling the values of my hardworking blue-collar parents, but I can't help but think that at some point Jesus would tell immature, deadbeat parents to look for work, and pursue social services for which they're qualified, with the same energy that they look for excuses; and to make their children, rather than their own comfort and whim, the family priority.

...
In this Lenten season, this post also makes me think about Christ's short ministry and just how much it must have taken to be on that path of His, knowing where it would end and dragging those disciples behind Him as they consistently misunderstood His mission and vision. I wonder if he ever asked for a new group of guys who were a little bit more swift on the uptake.

And I think about the disciples, ordinary men struggling with everything they're seeing and hearing, following but getting some things wrong along the way. I wonder if they ever sat around and thought, 'WTH??'

...
The board that I sit on in my church governs our social service programs and we were in the middle of putting together some materials for external funding. Part of our standard language describes our mission as transforming lives which is a pretty feel-good claim to make. But the man who directs one of our programs said in a meeting once, 'We don't transform lives. We feed people. We give them clothes. We meet a material need. Are their lives transformed when they come to us, when we help them? I have no idea.'

His words were like a really cold bucket of water being thrown over my head. Is it even possible for us to transform lives?

Anyway, I hear you LutheranChik. Hang in there.

Mortified: sometimes you can't make this stuff up

remember when our mothers or our naughty aunts gave us our first blank journal? they told us to write our deepest feelings and thoughts and we did. boy, did we. and remember when you found your old diary and read through them and shuddered in absolute mortification?

well, now you can wallow in other people's shame.

i've been to the Mortified show twice and, each time, i laugh until i nearly pee in my pants. writers/performers get up and read from selections of their childhood/youthful/teenage diaries and journals and it's the most embarrassing night of spoken word performance EVER.

but it's also the most familiar. no matter what your background, your class, color or religion, there is something pretty universal about the act of writing down your myopic adolescent angst. i hear these stories and i recognize myself in all of them.

my favorite story has been from a guy who's now a youth pastor or something; he went to a pretty strict lutheran college and his piece is all about being 18, horny and sanctimonious. it's written in the voice of a regular, churchy guy who wants to be godly (desperately) but likes the girls, too, and it's basically the funniest, truest thing i've heard someone read about what it's like to be a young fundamentalist christian and a young horny bastard, all at the same time.

my favorite line went something like: "Daily masturbation does not lead to cascading joy."

it gets me every time.

Mortified: coming to Chicago

i'm so there and so should you be.

Sick Days Access: Call to Action!

I'm blowing some anonymity here but it's worth it:

My agency is part of a coalition, led by Women Employed and including Heartland Alliance, working with lead sponsor Rep. Julie Hamos to change the fact that 3 million private sector workers don't have the right to a single sick day.

Our basic bill proposes a way for these workers to accrue just 7 days of paid sick time over the course of one year. (For every 30 hours worked, a worker can earn 1 hour of paid sick time.)

The bill, HB 5320, has been introduced. There's support for this in the legislature but to move the bill out of Rules, through Labor, and towards a vote on the floor, we need more.

So we need stories.

We are looking for stories from people in Illinois who can talk about their need for paid sick days—either you used to work somewhere that didn’t have it when you needed it (and what happened), or you are currently working and don’t get paid sick days.
We’re looking for brief summaries that we could turn into a letter, use as part of legislative testimony, or perhaps include on a fact sheet.

If you have a story, email takeastand@ywcachicago.org.

You can, of course, request your story to be as anonymous as you want it to be (i.e., Sarah, 34/Retail/Addison.)

We hope you can help. (If you're also interested in helping us lobby for this particular piece of legislation, you can send an email to that same address.)

[edited to remove Chicago Coalition for the Homeless as a coalition partner]

feminism 101: but what about the women...?

FAQ: But doesn’t evidence show that women are just as likely to batter their partners as men? « Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog

thank goodness this blog exists. it's written by a very smart person (see? i'm not going to assume it's a woman, though i think it is) and handily dispatches with the misconceptions, lies and inaccuracies directed toward feminist thought and practice.

this one is particularly nice. if you've participated in any discussion that deals with rape, violence against women, domestic violence or whatever, sooner or later some MRA-type guy is going to coyly ask the 'well, what about the women who - ' question.

'what about women who batter men?'
'what about women who falsely accuse men of rape?'

it's annoying and frustrating to deal with because those questions are utter crap and i never have the stats in my head to counter them.

well, now i do.

thanks, Feminism 101!

election 08: let's get real about 'experience'

Candidate Comparisons « Think On These Things

If you follow the link above, you land on a really good (and, yes, pro-Obama) collection of sources that compare the records of Obama and Clinton. Though the blog leans toward Obama, the links it provides are pretty good. (Any good researcher knows that the quality of your source material pretty much decides the validity of your results.)

I'm going through the links right now, when I should really be working, so why don't you join me?
I'll check back later.

you're not the boss of me!

Kansas HS says female cannot ref boys game - Wednesday February 13, 2008 9:40PM:

"The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs."

So, there was this one time back in college when I was talking (er, arguing) with my dad about why women are supposed to be subject to the authority of men and why his sexism was a problem to me.

Dad: I'm not a sexist. It's what the Bible says, Ding.
Me: But that's only within the context of the church and/or a married relationship. (Which I still think is crap but I decided to give that to my dad to make the argument a little easier.) So, ok, women can't preach or teach men in the church and we're supposed to bow and scrape when we're married. Fine. But that doesn't mean that women are supposed to be submissive to ALL men, everywhere, does it?

Dad: (long pause)
Me: I mean, so there's a woman doctor. Is she just supposed to take a back seat to some random guy because he's a guy? What about if you were on a jury? Does that mean a woman can't be a foreman on the jury because there are men there? What about female bosses? Does that mean that because of a few verses about the place of women in church, that all women everywhere can't be in positions of authority? Because that's totally sexist and if you agree, it means you're a sexist, too.
Dad: (silence)
Me: Yeah. Thought so.

You know, I really couldn't be the feminist I am now if it hadn't been for my Dad.

give me a break: anti-military or asking hard questions?

When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly - New York Times
War Torn: Slideshow
War Torn: The Cases
Criticism of War Torn (follow the links)

This particular part of the series makes me feel like a voyeur peeping into the seamy scenes of mental instability, pain and violence. But it's valuable in pointing out a dangerous lack in the military (one that I've written about again and again): the military's increasing inability to address issues like mental health, violence against civilians (although the articles reveal that these soldiers also turn against one another) and particularly domestic violence.

While I can understand criticisms of the series' methodology (I'd think they'd also want to look at those crimes of violence that weren't big enough to warrant a newspaper story) I think it's a narrow view to say that this series is 'anti-military.' (It's also hyperbolic to say that the article is 'lying.' There are no untruths here, only really uncomfortable and stark realities - some of the men and women coming back from our 'war on terror' come back damaged.)

So, here's a question to ask our pro-war candidates this election cycle: if they're going to commit our men and women to a 100-year war on terror, what are they also going to do to address the real human cost of such a war?

Now, that's not being anti-military, is it? Heavens, no.

if it wasn't so sad, it'd be funny

an author walks home on 9/11:

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? - New York Times

we're not only hostile to knowledge, if we saw it, we'd light some torches, chase it though the streets and then tar and feather it. then we'd go home and drink a beer.

gird your loins. a work-related complaint is coming:
i have a blazing headache.
i'm putting together two earmark requests (whoo-hoo, 'pork'!) and i'm struggling with putting together boilerplate for our programs
i have two church meetings after work tonight and i'm really not in the mood to sit in a board room for two hours
i'm just bushed - my mornings have started earlier than normal and lasted later than usual.

and tomorrow! tomorrow, the cute plumber is coming by and i have to work from home so he can replace the sink and...and... hm.

maybe that last one ain't so bad.

Black History Month: some resources

RACE - The Power of an Illusion PBS

this was a really great series. my favorite episode is the third, where it examines how the idea of racial difference is supported and disseminated through our institutions and, particularly, immigration and housing policy.

if you want to have a more meaningful engagement with what black history is, go here and read the transcripts. you'll learn something.

Black History Month: A Case for Voting Black

My aunt's apartment was stifling hot and smelled strange but I tried to ignore it.

"Our people took the name of Mr. C-, you know. He owned our family and when the war was over, we just kept the name," she said.
"I don't know anything about that time. I mean, no one's told me stories about it," I said.

"Well, it's here and there." She thought a little. "You know, there is a story about a relative of ours. The rest of the family kept the C- name and stayed in Alabama. But one left. He came up North and disappeared."

"Disappeared? Why'd he disappear?"
"Because he passed."
"No!"

"Yes. He was white. Real white. Your great granddaddy passed for white for a while; his wife could pass, too.” She paused again. “I don’t know how your grandfather got so dark. Anyway, he came up to Chicago and the story is that he worked in a store and started a business. But he never got back in touch with the rest of the family. He's lost."

She said this like he just wandered onto State Street and just couldn’t find his way back.

"I have *never* heard this story!"
My aunt sighed. "There aren't that many family members left who know it."
"Huh. Fascinating."

Unfortunately, I have totally forgotten what my passing distant relative’s name was.
...

The new Skip Gates special on PBS is full of these stories of passing, diaspora, disappearance and reinvention. (But sometimes I wonder if my own family's narrative is real or just patterned on other stories of black family lines whose origins are just as murky or tangled.)

What strikes me about some of these early stories of lost family members reclaimed is how prominent black-owned land figures into them and how crucial the land is to forming early black identity as well as ideas of freedom and citizenship. The program begins with Gates visiting the land his family has owned for 6 generations and passes by a parcel of land his family had owned but had to sell. Since part of their own genealogical story is lost to them, their farm acts like an anchor for their identity. In subsequent conversations with celebrities like Chris Rock, Tina Turner, Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle or Tom Joyner, Gates reveals that their families had once owned land - 40 acres, 62 acres, 65 acres - donating or selling some of their land to build schools or churches.

The revelations about property and land ownership become a source of pride in their family. What is it that Rock says – If he had known this before, it would have taken away the inevitability that he would be nothing. And property is usually the vehicle for these stories to come to light; they act like a bracket around early black families: you were property and now you have property.

At the turn of the century blacks owned between 12-15 million acres of land; by the 30s and 40s that number shrinks to just a little over a million. For many of these black families the land is a foundation to build their newly acquired identities as freed people that suddenly disappears, forcing their story to jump, only to be picked up further down the line. What happened? What happened in those intervening years? Did African Americans just suddenly decide, "Hm, you know, owning land sucks. Let's pick up and go north"? Usually something else happened to make a family, or even a whole black town, disperse.

Tom Joyner's family story is a good example; Gates finds his great grandmother but her paper trail ends somewhere in late 19th/turn of the century Carolinas, only to pick up again several years later in the north. Joyner has no idea why she left home or what the story of his family is but Gates and his team discover the reason: His family owned a substantial parcel of land but when his two great uncles are accused of murder and executed, the family sells their land to pay for legal fees and the remaining family flees the area. But Gates' team also uncovers that the accusation was probably false, specifically targeted at the two great uncles because they were part of a black landowning family.

Chris Rock asks how his own ancestor could go from slave, to soldier, to legislator, to landowner, to sharecropper all in 10 short years; Gates simply answers, Reconstruction ended. We're left to conclude what happened to Julius Caesar Tingman's land on our own.
...

Three years ago the exhibit "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" came to the Chicago Historical Society and it was a hard exhibit to walk through. Again, I noticed stories of black land ownership (or burgeoning private enterprise) running alongside the photos of ‘extra-legal deaths at the hands of unknown persons' (which is how the Society described the lynchings that spread throughout the country from Reconstruction to roughly 1965 or '68.)

In 2001, the AP ran a series called 'Torn from the Land' that researched and confirmed claims of widespread land theft - claims that are crucial to the reparations movement. Opponents of the reparations movement say that it's a fallacy to punish or extort money from people today for events in the past; slavery is over. I counter that the cost of these past events is still felt today through procedures that, are legal and that still disproportionately affect poor communities of color, i.e., partitioning, rezoning, ‘revitalization’/gentrification, and eminent domain. These legal maneuvers aren't 'extra-legal' or as extreme as lynching but they sure do have the same result – displacement, dispersal, diasporas.

Personally, I'm sort of neutral about the reparations movement. Do I want my father's family to be paid money because of slavery? Not really. What I want is a deeper, more public acknowledgment of how slavery impacted and drove our capitalist system, and how our nation's participation in the slave trade laid a foundation for practices, industries and institutions that not only continue to have an adverse affect on communities of color today but still provide the elite in this country with wealth and prosperity. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Land is at the bottom of our American imagination and mythology. The land was the lure and the land has allowed us Americans to earn our claim to citizenship - we stole it, settled it, colonized it, killed for it, and exploited the shit out of it. American land is a metaphor for our political and national identities at home, as well as a justification for our acts abroad.

As an African American, though I am a participant in (and benefactor of) this American history, I am distant from it because of how the land figures into our own fraught, black history: we were counted with the land, we worked on the land, we fought and were killed for the land. More acted upon than actor, we have seen our roles in history marginalized or elided, but now we approach a moment where, at last, our acts can be writ large and with boldness.

I say we owe a debt to our ancestors for the sacrifices they were forced to make – if we have the chance to take a firm step toward repaying that debt, toward reclaiming the lost land of our identities as black Americans, then we should take it now.

Super Tuesday!

the best line of the night, so far:

CNN pundit guy: No one's more conservative than Huckabee! He doesn't believe in evolution, gravity or photosynthesis!

Ding and friends: (raucous laughter)
...
we're all sitting here with our projection sheets, wine and pizza like this is our superbowl. it is fantastic to see the GOP go completely schizoid.

election 08: what's a delegate?

The Role of Delegates in the U.S. Presidential Nominating Process - Council on Foreign Relations

now i know.

(i voted this morning and it was exciting! you could tell that folks made a very special effort this morning to get into the polling place. i skipped all the judge stuff, voted for my alderman, the water reclamation folks and, of course, presidential candidate. this was the first ballot that i could remember voting for delegates.

anyway, happy super tuesday!

i'll be watching the returns tonight with some friends. will you?)

election 08: does being 26 count as experience?

NPR: Tracing Hillary Clinton's '35 Years' of Experience

a friend of mine sent me an email this morning that ranted, basically, "I'm so sick of hearing about Billary's experience! My god! If she had 35 years of experience, she was 26 years old!"

i have to say that i never really paid that much attention.
but good point.

why isn't our media calling bullshit on that?

(yeah. i'm no fan of the Billary lately.)

well, i've *been* to Canada

Southern racists adopt "Canadian" as a euphemism for "black" - Boing Boing

are you frakking kidding me?!

hm. i wonder what could be a useful euphemism for racist asshat...

hey, don't forget about the SOTU tonight!

The State of the Union Address Drinking Game 2008

you can pretty much get plastered if you just take a shot every time he says 'freedom.'

US to contractors: rape? what rape?

remember that story i posted about a month ago? the one about jamie leigh jones, the woman who was working in Iraq for a Halliburton subsidiary, was drugged and gang raped by her colleagues, imprisoned by her employer and only released when her Congressman contacted the State Department?

well, two years later, there's still no action about this case. the Justice Dept is silent; there is no investigation and some women on the Hill want answers why no one has been under investigation and where her rape kit disappeared to.

feministing has a progress report from one of the Congresswoman who is pressing for some resolution. with Jan Schakowsky, Rep. Slaughter sent two letters to the State Department and the Justice Department. join them and contact your congressman to keep applying pressure.

no woman overseas should have to suffer what this young woman has.

the economy: i don't get it (and not because i'm a girl)

Take these three articles and tell me what you think:
Tentative Deal on Economic Stimulus Plan - New York Times (today)
Make the Tax Cuts Work (yesterday)
How to Stop the Downturn (yesterday)
(The guys over at Lawyers, Guns & Money have a little post here, too, that I liked.)

From the first article we find out that a compromise has been reached to give ordinary folks like you and me a $300 check - a rebate, I guess. But to get that check, a couple of concessions had to be made (and this is where my confusion comes in):

A House aide close to the negotiations said that Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and the Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, reached an “agreement in principle” after Ms. Pelosi agreed not to include two proposals that had broad support among Congressional Democrats: an extension of unemployment benefits and a temporary increase in food stamps.

In the op-eds from yesterday it's pretty clear to the economists that aid to the lower- and middle-income strata would help out the most. (The Times has a nifty summary of why this could be here.) One of them even mentions how expanding unemployment could help. But while a $300 check is ok, how much of a financial bulwark is it against a scaled back food stamp program and no extension of unemployment benefits?

I mean, let's say you've spent the $300 - to pay rent, pay off a credit card bill, buy some groceries or buy some gas, whatever. Now what? You're still on insufficient food stamps or you're still unemployed and your benefits are about to run out (or you didn't qualify for it in the first place.)

Since I'm not a theory head when it comes to economics or business, what's the long view of this issue?
I mean, is a $300 rebate check really the best that can be done? (I'm assuming, too, that if one qualifies for a federal and state EITC, then one would receive those checks, too, so maybe we're talking about more than $300 for a family?)

And what did you do with the last rebate check in 2001?
Shit, I don't even remember getting one.

Blog for Choice: there's no right without access

Let's talk about a great big elephant in the room before folks start celebrating the decreased need for abortion: access. From the Chicago Tribune article:

Bill Beckman, director of the Illinois Right to Life Committee, said he sees the national decline in abortion numbers as a victory for anti-abortion efforts."A number of states over the last five or six years have enhanced their pro-life laws, such as requirements for informed consent and parental notice," said Beckman. "When those laws take effect, the rate of abortion drops. I think the data they're getting is reflecting that change."

What Beckman calls an 'enhancement', I call 'building a financial box around women to make sure they're forced to give birth.'

Clinics offering abortion services are in a decline all over the country; in fact, since 2000, 77 clinics have closed and only 29 have opened. For some women in urban areas - with private doctors and access to a wide range of family planning options - access might not be such a hardship (yes, I know there are other circumstances that could slow down access to abortion in urban areas, like cash, but let's just deal with this.)
But for women in rural areas, travel could mean driving up to 50 miles to get to the nearest abortion provider. To get there and back, that woman would most likely have to schedule time off work taken as a sick day (perhaps an unpaid sick day and perhaps more than one day, particularly if that state requires a nonsensical 'waiting' period), loss of wages, perhaps arrangement of childcare for her other children (which adds to that woman's economic burden), increased travel expenses (i.e., gas) and just the physically wearying fact that she is driving to another county or state for a doctor's appointment.

I don't know about you, but I get pissed off if I have to go outside of my area code to see my ob/gyn, much less another state. And what does it cost me? A walk down the street from my office for a few blocks or, at most, a $7 cab ride if I take a cab from my house.

It is an undue hardship for a woman in downstate Illinois, or another rural area, to take two days off work for her abortion. Roadblocks to access basically put a woman needing an abortion between the proverbial financial rock and hard place. It's neat how the anti-choice folks have cut off a woman's reproductive rights from other realities in her life, like the economic ones. For them what's important is the unborn child; nevermind that there is a material cost to a woman's life if she has a child her life can't support (for whatever reason that it can't.)

In this next election there are some things to think about, the most important of which will be deciding which candidate will be able to ensure women have access to full reproductive health services. A lot of my friends are comfortable that Roe v. Wade will stand, but can we rely on that? Speaking with a lawyer friend tonight, she said that Roe v. Wade is probably one vote short of being knocked over in our forseeable future. We can also probably anticipate 2-3 Supreme Court vacancies in the immediate future. Which Presidential candidate will have the best chance to appoint Supreme Court justices willing to uphold Roe v. Wade? Can we safely rely on a Huckabee, a Romney, an Edwards or an Obama to act in women's best interests? Or can we only rely on a Clinton?

And action on the SCOTUS isn't the only thing to worry about. At the state level, over the past decade, states have become more aggressive in introducing legislation to limit, if not outright ban, access to abortion; states like Kansas, Missouri, The Dakotas, Wyoming, Utah, Iowa, Colorado, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, South Carolina and Arkansas either already have, or are in the process of introducing, some of the most restrictive laws to affect a woman's right to control her own fertility. States aren't backing away from this fight; anti-choice grassroots lobbying has proven most effective at this level, while we scramble to keep a fricking clinic open in Aurora. (You can check out the states with the least access to abortion at the Abortion Acess Project website here.)

And what will happen in Illinois if our next governor is Republican? (Not so inconceivable, considering how Blago is alienating absolutely everyone these days.) Will the women of Illinois still enjoy access to birth control without the interference of pharmacists? Will we be able to rely on timely access of Plan B birth control? Will we be able to rely on the shrinking number of clinics that offer a wide range of reproductive health services to women? Or will we suddenly have to familiarize ourselves with the days of the underground Jane network, like back in the day? Will we find our family planning needs taking a back seat to a man's outdated, patriarchal ideas of female sexuality and autonomy? Will we suddenly find ourselves planning group trips to Canada or New York or California for a simple doctor's appointment?

The right to control our fertility does not exist if we do not have access to the services that allow us to control our fertility. Access isn't just for the women who have good medical benefits and live in a city and can rattle off where the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic is; it's for women who make barely minimum wage and live in places like Bloomington, Alton or Aurora and there's no one around to help them.

And that's what the issue of access means to me: helping women get over the situation they find themselves in, not making them stew in it for months or years because it justifies a stranger's religion. How does it help that woman to wait days to get done what she already decided? How does it help a woman when we make her empty her wallet to visit a doctor? How does it help a woman when you force her to give birth and take away her ability to control her own fertility?

I guess it doesn't.

uh, totally bizarro

Ex-Lawmaker Charged in Terror Conspiracy

and he was a Republican!
how crazy is this??

there is a really good diary on Kos here (where, if you follow the links, pretty much fills in the blanks.)

poverty in illinois

the ctba released a study on illinois' economy in december and here it is. (well, the executive summary, anyway.)

major findings:

job creation in the state lags behind other states
wages are declining
low wage jobs are replacing good ones
there are real differences in workforce populations, skills and experiences
(race is not unimportant here)

these are the issues that should be burning underneath presidential candidates' feet, rather than hillary's 'shrillness' or obama's 'magical negritude.'

don't you think?

Baltimore Finds Subprime Crisis Snags Women - New York Times

well, this is going to put my condo-buying dreams on hold for a while.

i'm curious to find out how women home owners in chicago are faring; during the housing boom (which is still quietly booming) a lot of my single coworkers/friends bought homes on their own. the crisis that finds some of these women now is startling; the path to economic security has now become shaky.

ugh, dating again

so how are things on the 'dating' front?

well, there was a brief setback last week when i discovered that, horror of horrors, B- is now in a relationship. my horror and dismay was not from jealousy; there was no regret that things hadn't worked out between us. (though there is much evidence of my inconsistency here.) no, my dismay and shock came from an irrational sense of competition.

"how dare he, the most lonely and dysfunctional of men, have a relationship while i don't! at least i'm working on my issues, dammit." i'm not proud of my pettiness; i just acknowledge that it exists.

anyway, a friend reminded me of my many vows to leave B-'s eeyore-like specter behind and so, finally, i am. (it helps that i'm confident B-'s inherent lack of generosity will doom his relationship in a few months no matter how often he goes jogging.) as i leave the weirdo behind, i look to the future and what do i see?

i see more weirdos.
i'm on a black networking site and, lord help me, it's sort of depressing. it's almost as bad as those christian dating sites i tried years ago. my kingdom for a man who can spell and use punctuation correctly!

and i'm tired of telling black men no, i don't have kids. make of that what you will.

are the men i've met there weird because they their writing skills are a little lacking? no. most of them are weird because they live in the burbs and can't say anything that doesn't sound like a R&B cliche. i'd also give my left nipple for a decent bit of banter.

(there was this one guy who thought he was being funny when he said that he'd buy me dinner, drinks and give me a warm place to stay for folding his laundry. it took everything in me not to get snippy. enough women have been snippy to these guys, it seems but, lord, trying to communicate with these guys is drying up my very small well of patience!)

i'll keep looking, though. there's gotta be a black/brown equivalent to me out there, somewhere. right?

i just got back from the union league lunch where former secretary of state spoke. it was an awesome lunch and her new book sounds great. i was totally impressed with how she answered questions - fully, thoughtfully and smartly.

what a change, huh?

um, shuck & jive is NOT 'bob & weave'

Pandagon :: Andrew Cuomo on Obama: ‘You Can’t Shuck And Jive’ at a press conf :: January :: 2008

dude.
really?

that's like the time my white, liberal, lesbian dissertation chair said to me (while i was helping her carry some things for our seminar): "Ding, thanks so much, but I really can't have you be my step and fetchit."

oh, yes, she did! Step 'n Fetchit.

i suppose, nowadays, that would be synonymous with, um, ... what?

but, boy howdy, i sure am glad racism is dead, though.

are you kidding me??

Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House? - New York Times

"There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing."

really? was this really what was happening, or are MoDo's exegetics just a bit off? (or plain wacko?)

i swear pundits and columnists are all drinking the same jonestown kool-aid.
there isn't a single stereotype they aren't willing to trot out and 'discuss' while not really questioning the frakking thing in the first place.

everyone cries!

yes, even macho men with giant testicles cry! my dad was in a conflict with his congregation and he cried! he cried when our mother died, he cried when my sister got married, he cried when i came home for christmas last year!

i've seen men cry at corporate retreats, recalling their best golf outing with their fathers; i've seen male CEOs cry as they tell their employees how great it is to work for their crappy company; i've seen men from new jersey cry when they had to lay off a buddy in another office. and who hasn't fucking seen an athlete cry when they win some stupid championship?!

for cripes' sake, can we lay off the hillary crying thing already??

is it too much to ask our 'journalists' to stop being so g'dammed stupid? really? (oh, and don't think i wasn't paying attention when that war-mongering wanker, bill kristol, said that hillary was faking tears. geez. talk about someone in need of a good nose punch.)

election '08: iowa. wow.

incredible. obama wins the iowa caucus for the dems. who put him over the edge? women, young people and independents.

edwards (squee!) comes in second!

and (gulp) huck takes the GOP caucus lead. mccain got spanked; romney got schooled.

please, let this be the end of GOP hegemony.

Take the Plan B Survey!

hm. if women ran the world...

there would be a different culture around rape. definitely.
at the end of this most excellent post Twisty asks what you do when your (or a friend's) rapist goes free.

well, this is what we tried: we tried to get that bastard fired from his job (which put him in proximity to women and enabled him to sexually assault my friend) and run out of his building. we got his home address, photo, license plate, email address, phone number and were about to launch an all-out guerilla attack on his rape-loving reputation when our friend backed down. i still get mad when i think of this man (who was a drunken dickhead) and if i ever see him in a bar with a girl i will tell her he's a rapist.

what i really wished we did: got a group of women, shoved him into a dark van, took him to a remote location and beat him repeatedly, leaving him to make his own way out of the forest preserve.

there are worse things than jail. and for rapists, i believe in making sure they get them.

Its another Blamer Brain Trust Alert at I Blame The Patriarchy

election 08: huckish

while i have never eaten squirrel from a popcorn popper, i have eaten ramen from a coffee maker. (yay, grad school.)

anyway, this was the funniest political piece i read this morning. while poking a finger in the GOP's eye over class, it also says Huck ain't no threat to the moneyed establishment, much. (which says a lot about our country's entrenched capitalist ideologies.)

my favorite part:
"Huckabee revels in the class war. He’s Two-Buck Huck, and darn proud of it. He likes nothing better than playing the Hick from Hope. He and his wife lived in a trailer for a while, he points out. His son killed a dog one summer, “a mangy dog” at that, as Huckabee explained to the befuddled national press corps. He said he used to eat squirrels, cooking them up in his popcorn popper. Ewwwwhhh!
And what’s up with that Chuck Norris shadow, following him everywhere like a late-night rerun? To the establishment, Norris is a B-lister with a bad hair dye and a ’70s-era karate shtick. They prefer Bruce Willis – bald Republican action hero."

if the press corps actually watched tv, they'd know why pairing chuck norris with mike huckabee is brilliant. (and they'd know that norris came out on his own to endorse huckabee - and they'd know that the grassroots in the religious right read norris' blog and sent up a big Yay!) a plain talking, modest, anti-establishment texas ranger who could kick his feet up and hit you in the throat - and he had a black partner? he's the less mild-mannered alter ego of the 'garsh' huckabee. duhh. read the semiotics!

as for me, i'm done with the 'good ol' rube' routine.
hello! we've already had a fake rube in the white house for two terms; why go with a real one? it's not like it'd be an improvement!
why can't the american people vote for someone SMART?? jeebus! SMART!

Two-Buck Huck - Outposts - Op-Extra Columnist - Opinion - - New York Times Blog

huck for president?

Shake, Rattle and Roil the Grand Ol’ Coalition - New York Times
The Enduring Strength of Huckabee - Andrew Sullivan
Holy Huck, Straight out of Flannery O'Connor - Oh, Dave
Meet the Press transcript, Dec 30, 2007 - MSNBC

do you want an ex-baptist preacher for president?
Huckabee has an interesting reply when Meet the Press' Tim Russert asks him about his pastor past:

MR. RUSSERT: But where does this leave non-Christians?
GOV. HUCKABEE: Oh, it leaves them right in the middle of America. I think the Judeo-Christian background of this country is one that respects people not only of faith, but it respects people who don't have faith. The, the key issue of real faith is that it never can be forced on someone. And never would I want to use the government institutions to impose mine or anybody else's faith or to restrict. I think the First Amendment, Tim, is explicitly clear. Government should be restricted, not faith, government. And government's restriction is on two fronts: one, it's not to prefer one faith over another; and the second, it's not to prohibit the practice of somebody's religion, period.
MR. RUSSERT: So you'd have no problem appointing atheists to your Cabinet?
GOV. HUCKABEE: No, I wouldn't have any problem at all appointing atheists. I probably had some working for me as governor. You know, I think you got to realize if people want--say, "Well, you were a pastor," but I was a governor 10 1/2 years. I have more executive experience running a government. I was actually in a government position longer than I was a pastor. And if people want to know how I would blend these issues, the best way to look at it is how I served as a governor. I didn't ever propose a bill that we would remove the capitol dome of Arkansas and replace it with a steeple. You know, we didn't do tent revivals on the grounds of the capitol. But my faith is important to me. I try to be more descriptive of it. I just don't want to run from it and act like it's not important. It drives my views on everything from the environment to poverty to disease to hunger. Issues, frankly, I think the Republicans need to take a greater leadership role in. And as a Republican, but as a Christian, I would want to make sure that we're speaking out on some of these issues that I think we've been lacking in as a party and as, as a nation. [emphasis mine]

my question is, where does the separation between political animal and person of faith begin? if, as Huckabee puts it, faith is an intrinsic part of him, how can he separate that faith from future political decisions, made for a pluralistic society? Huckabee says that his evangelical past leaves non-Christians in the middle of America; i think that's fairly astute. it leaves them surrounded by a government led by an evangelical Christian and a citizenry that believes in the literal truth of the Rapture for the most part. if you were a non-Christian wouldn't you feel a little heebie-jeebie?

the attacks on huckabee from his own party are interesting, too. the times article mentions folks like limbaugh calling Huckabee a fake Republican because of his populist stances on poverty and i have to admit that i always feel sort of good about whatever makes limbaugh get his drawers in a bunch. but then i remember this is a Republican candidate we're talking about. his likeability, speechifying and surprisingly holistic views on education and poverty aside, he's still the man who's the most dangerous to a woman's reproductive freedom. again, from Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: And what would happen to doctors or women who participated in abortion?
GOV. HUCKABEE: It's always the, the point of trying to say, "Are you going to criminalize it?" That's not the issue.
MR. RUSSERT: Well, if it, if it's illegal, it would be.
GOV. HUCKABEE: It would be. And I think you don't punish the woman, first of all, because it's not about--I consider her a victim, not a, not a criminal. You would...
MR. RUSSERT: But you would punish the doctor.
GOV. HUCKABEE: I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that's why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor. I don't know that you'd put him in prison, but there's something to me untoward about a person who has committed himself to healing people and to making people alive who would take money to take an innocent life and to make that life dead. There's something that just doesn't ring true about the purpose of medical practice when the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath is "First, do no harm." Well, if you take the life and suction out the pieces of an unborn child for no reason than its inconvenience to the mother, I don't think you've lived up to your Hippocratic Oath of doing no harm. [emphasis mine]

like his fellow social conservatives who shudder at the thought of women controlling their own fertility, Huck stops short of saying that those women should be thrown in prison. instead, he displays his unconscious devaluing of women by calling us victims. we aren't agents in the decisions we make about our fertility, but objects at the mercy of inveigling doctors or 'inconvenience.' whether his ideas stem from his faith or just a good old lack of trust in women's autonomy, they don't bode well for women's issues; do i want this man as president, wielding the power to appoint supreme court judges?

not so much.

bhutto assassinated!

Bhutto Assassinated in Attack on Rally - New York Times

just shocking.
the world is really insane.

merry merry

Enough of the Hills and Woods, Can I Send Grandma an E-Card? - New York Times

merry christmas to all 7 of my readers!
instead of sleeping on an arrow mattress in my sister's tv room, i will be warmly ensconced in chicago's brutal, weird weather, drinking all sorts of sparkly things and hosting a sleepover for my friends and other holiday orphans. it's good to know that the ny times has recognized how nice it is to sometimes spend christmas on one's own.

i hope all of you have a wonderful holiday!

cheers,
ding

awesome!
apparently, i'm brainier on this blog than my other one, which only clocked in at 'high school.'

thanks, Orange!

WTF?!?

this is utterly unbelievable - except i believe it because haven't we heard (some version of) this story before?

if you haven't already received the MoveOn alert, here it is:
...
Jamie Leigh Jones was a 20-year-old woman working in Iraq for a subsidiary of Halliburton when she was drugged and brutally gang-raped by several co-workers.
The next day, Halliburton told her that if she left Iraq to get medical treatment, she could lose her job.1
Jamie's story gets even more horrific: For the last two years, she's been asking the US government to hold the perpetrators accountable. But the men who raped her may never be brought to justice because Halliburton and other contractors in Iraq aren't subject to US or Iraqi laws. They can't be tried for a crime in any court.2
This is one of the most disturbing stories we have come across in a while. We're calling on Congress to investigate Jamie's case, hold those involved accountable, and bring US contractors under the jurisdiction of US law so this can't happen again. If hundreds of thousands of us speak out against this outrageous story, we can force Congress to take action.

Can you sign the petition? ... Clicking below will add your name.
http://pol.moveon.org/contractors_accountable/o.pl?id=11800-4019649-L9cSbn&t=3

After you sign, please forward this email to friends, family and colleagues—we all need to speak out together.

When you get an email from us, it doesn't usually include a graphic description of a brutal attack. But when we heard this story, we knew we had to do something about it.
Here's how Jamie described what happened after the attack:
I awoke the next morning in the barracks to find my naked body battered and bruised. I was still groggy from whatever had been put in my drink. I was bleeding... After getting to the clinic and having a rape kit performed...I was locked in a container with no food, no way to call my parents, and was placed under armed guard by Halliburton.3

Jamie's attackers aren't the only ones exploiting a legal loophole to get away with their violent crimes. Another female employee of Halliburton says she was raped by her co-workers in Iraq.4 Employees of Blackwater, another private contracting firm in Iraq, were accused of killing innocent Iraqi civilians, and that incident turned into an international scandal. Worst of all, they may never be punished.5
Private contractors in Iraq are making massive amounts of money, operating above the law and are accountable to no one. This has to stop.
Congress needs to act now to bring these contractors under the rule of law. If they don't, nothing will prevent a case like Jamie's from happening again. No man or woman working in Iraq should have to fear that they can be attacked without consequences.

Please sign on to the petition: "Congress must investigate the rape of Jamie Leigh Jones and others, hold those involved accountable, and bring US contractors under the jurisdiction of US law." Clicking below adds your name:
http://pol.moveon.org/contractors_accountable/o.pl?id=11800-4019649-L9cSbn&t=4

Thanks for all you do,
–Nita, Wes, Karin, Marika, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Friday, December 14th, 2007

Sources:
1. "Halliburton hit in rape lawsuit," New York Daily News, December 11, 2007
2. "Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR," ABC News, December 10, 2007
3. Jamie's Journal, The Jamie Leigh Foundation
4. "Female ex-employees sue KBR, Halliburton—report," Reuters, June 29, 2007
5."Blackwater Probe Narrows Focus to Guards," Associated Press, December 8, 2007

PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

for the sake of honesty

why can't we, as a nation, just admit that we torture people?
it would make things so much easier.

no more linguistic acrobatics as pundits and analysts weigh the correctness of 'torture' vs. 'enhanced techniques.'
no more propaganda about revealing secrets to the 'enemy' during a closed door session of the Senate. (is the Senate the 'enemy'?)

it would be such a relief to have our cowboy of a president throw a press conference and say, "Look, y'all. We torture. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but we do it anyway. We strap down these young fellers and do things to them that Michael Vick just got sent to prison for doing. But it's ok, because we're America and we think that's what we need to do. You don't like it? Well, too bad."

if we admitted we tortured people we could finally relieve ourselves of the burden of being Democracy's shining light. we could stand tall knowing we are the type of country that literally hurts other people. it's a dubious distinction but one that could make us either really macho tough or really psycho sick. it's like we're living in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, you know? as a nation, we do these horrible sickening things but the picture of ourselves is just as glowing, youthful and full of beauty as it was when we were sort of innocent of such things. but we're so used to looking at the picture of our youth we've forgotten that our nation's true face is warty, full of pus and ravaged by our ... what? our sin? our immorality? our forgetfulness that we aren't supposed to be like some dirty ignorant totalitarian country with a secret police force putting the screws to people?

and if we admitted that we torture people then we, the people, would have an opportunity to ask ourselves if this is really what we want to be and we, the people, could finally begin to demand some change instead of watching the Torture Word Choice Wars like it was some frickin' tennis match.

abu ghraib almost made us look at our true face but it was too easy to blame that ugliness on some poor trashy enlisted men and women. this could be our next opportunity to come to grips with who we are as a country.

how much you wanna bet we're going to find another excuse to ignore our nature again?

Questions Linger After Hayden Testimony

My Sorority Pledge? I Swore Off Sisterhood - New York Times

i'm back in the saddle, sort of.
but this mornng, came across a very good Modern Love column about the damage some women do to one another.

i remember writing about how harsh we women seem to be with one another and i've honestly tried to interrogate myself whenever i find myself dismissing a woman because she doesn't fit the mold i have in my head of what makes a woman worthwhile. stay at home mothers, pregnant teenagers, bitchy bosses (ok, they deserve my disdain) - i've tried to ease up a little. but i don't think i've ever emotionally crippled someone. i don't think my friends have, either.

i belong to a small, yet tight circle of women friends in chicago, and these women are as close to me as my own family. for the past month, i've enjoyed these friends of mine as they've brought me books, music, Dr. Who, cookies, magazines and gossip while i've been laid up recovering. we all live different types of lives (one of us just got engaged and one of us would rather poke her eyes out than get married) but we don't judge one another. we certainly don't attack another woman when she's been treated the way the author was treated in this article.

anyway, it only confirmed why i hated sororities when i was at ucla.
and made me glad i have the friends that i have.

i think i've watched all the tv i can reasonably bear.

so...i am going to venture forth today. the sky is grey but it's still sunny and i want to be outside. i'll get a cup of coffee. maybe i'll sit in a dark theater for hours. or maybe i'll slowly walk around a mall and shop for holiday cards. or maybe i'll buy a book and find a bar to sit in and read for a few hours. who am i kidding? i'm going to go to the comic book store.

then i'll come back home and (gasp) write. yeah...write. i haven't written anything worthwhile in ages. well, at least it's a goal.

i love thanksgiving

but i'm in no shape to cook a whole freaking dinner. my solution? get someone else to cook it for me.

i cannot say enough about not cooking. (isn't that what being a feminist means during the holidays? the expectation NOT to cook?) why get all hot and sweaty and tired (and smell like stuffing) when you're about to have people over? i used to watch my mother ramp up into a fine resentful boil every thanksgiving afternoon so that, by the time guests arrived, she was completely off her rocker. it wasn't pretty so i decided early on to save myself all that hassle.

i love having friends over and feeding them - i just hate cooking. i hate the timing, the rush, the uncertainty, and the inability to snatch victory from the jaws of culinary defeat.

so i ordered a dinner for 6. the friends are bringing wine, dessert and side dishes, i'm 'doing' the rest.

thanks, fox & obel. you're the best.

(happy thanksgiving to everyone. don't pig out too hard.)

wow.

At Jets Game, a Halftime Ritual of Harassment - New York Times

unbelievably crass and tacky. hundreds of men line the ramp at Gate D and chant to women to expose their breasts.
stadium security thinks it's not their problem and the Jets don't think it's their problem.

is it a free speech issue or a threat to the safety of women?

When people describe Something (war, architecture or poverty) as a ‘scar across the landscape’, I don’t think they mean that Something (war, architecture or poverty) was black, scabby, bruised and held together with bloodstained strips of adhesive.

I’ve been looking at my scar, my wound, for the past three days. I take a little silver hand mirror and put it on the sink. Then I pull up my shirt, pull down my pants and, holding up my belly a little, I lightly touch the bruised skin above the scar. It looks like my skin has turned into a smashed plum. The scar slashes across my lower belly; it’s about 3 or 4 inches long. The scar is the ugliest, grossest thing I’ve ever seen on my body.
…
A few days before the surgery, I thought of the virginal way I think about my body. By ‘virginal’ I mean that I hold my body aggressively to myself. Thinking of my body as ‘virgin’ has nothing to do with sex or chastity. I don’t know how to explain it; I just think of my body as mine. It is inviolate; it is whole; it is the same as it has always been; it has all its original parts; it is not shared by anyone or anything. No flag has been planted on it, by marriage or motherhood.

But this surgery, as minor as it was, has changed my body’s landscape.
Where there was previously nothing, now there waves a tiny white flag with a red cross on it.

all is well; i've farted.

hello, from room 1471!
can you believe it? i can blog from my hospital bed! it's day three and i think this is the day i'll go home. they've been asking me if i've passed gas, yet, and finally i can tell them Yes, I have passed gas.

(apparently, when you've had your guts rearranged, farting is an important part of healing. so that's what i'm going to say from now on when i fart in public. "I'm healing.")

the surgery went well, i apparently sing while coming out of anasthesia, and i haven't had an appetite yet. that will change, though, i'm sure. my wound is terribly ugly but the hospital is gorgeous and i have my own room with a view of the lake and the little park by the contemporary art museum.

thanks to all the good wishes, the prayers and thoughtfulness. they are hugely appreciated. i wish i could send a big thank-you note.

tomorrow's the day - fibroid extraction day.

because i'm a (paranoid) modern girl, i've spent the morning getting my affairs in order: living will, power of attorney for healthcare, letter of final wishes in case i stroke out on the operating table, instructions to my friends about de-scandalizing my effects for my family and providing a list of favorite hymns.

i'll probably call my dad and sister tonight, you know, just for filial comfort.
i even went to church on sunday. all bases are covered, i think.

but all this to say that posting here is probably going to be non-existent for the next two weeks while i'm in the hospital and recovering at home for the first week.
LW, i'll be back in the middle of the month when the drugs have worn off!

more on rape and the military

Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Sexual Assault and the Military

the folks at FLP have done the hard work for me. they've compiled some depressing stories tracing the (lack of) progress made re: rape in the military.

it's an interesting and sobering collection of stats and stories and forces me to ask my question again: Should women serve in the military with men when it's clear that women are in danger from their male cohort?

is that an unfeminist question to ask?

another asshat: tucker carlson

Media Matters - MSNBC's Carlson suggested women may be "so sensible, they don't want to get involved in something as stupid as politics"

you know, maybe black people shouldn't vote, either.

i mean, we're under stress because lynching is making a comeback, we die in prison, we die from violence and hip hop - it's no wonder we all die before we get old! clearly, we have some major issues to address before we can even start to think about voting. we're struggling for survival, people! what is voting compared to basic human survival??

and maybe other brown people should stay home, too. they have other things to deal with - not being deported and avoiding Gitmo and waterboarding. why do they want to vote? they have some serious legal issues to deal with.

and the gays - the gays should look the other way on election day, too. their fight to get married is so important they shouldn't even bother voting. they need to keep their eyes on the prize. certainly not on the white house.

you know who else shouldn't vote? poor people. poor people (sorta like black people) are too busy trying to find food. and shelter. or a job. voting is trivial.

in fact, voting is so trivial it should be reserved for smug, white, privileged, heterosexual men.

(fucking asshat.)

[h/t feministing]

they must really wanna win bad

Pat Loves Rudy - New York Times

who'da thought it?
i mean, giuliani! i knew the conservative right was varied (just as the progressive left is), but this is just weird.
what about values?
what about shared ideology? (beyond agreeing that torturing the hell out of middle easterners is good, i mean.)

james dobson must be having a stroke.