Hey, folks, remember Hereville? It’s a comic I used to work on…
Anyhow, there’s now a website – www.hereville.com . It ain’t much – as usual, I’m having a terrible time trying to control the layout elements – but at least it’s there. And at least all of the pages will be available for free, for the forseeable future.
And how about new pages, you ask? Well… uh… soon, I hope.
…because I’m too lazy to do some original blogging (I just got off work, I’m tired damn it). Via DED Space and originally the Daily Kos, a protestor who’s being supported by the women’s peace/anti-war group CODE PINK, Cindy Sheehan, is awaiting to be arrested for being a “threat to national security” according to the authorities, while protesting outside of Dubya Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Cindy Sheehan phoned me from Texas a few minutes ago to say that she’s been informed that beginning Thursday, she and her companions will be considered a threat to national security and will be arrested. Coincidentally, Thursday is the day that Rice and Rumsfeld visit the ranch, and Friday is a fundraiser event for the haves and the have mores. Cindy said that she and others plan to be arrested.
Yes because we all know how “threatening” it is to peacefully demonstrate against a wartime president–whatever. Also from DED Space, a reminder of the hypocrisy we see in the media when it comes to criticizing Islamic extremism but not Christian extremism.
[…]However, it should be noted that no one ever gets on television to vent frustration that mainstream Christians are doing nothing to condemn Christian extremists. One sometimes wonders if there are any mainstream Christians left among us. Snowflakes, science-bashing, clinic bombings, exploitation of a dying woman, financial support for Eric Rudolph, legislation to bar gay citizens from possessing civil rights…where is the protest? I’m certainly not hearing it.
Apparently because one version of religious extremism is “okay,” because it’s ‘home grown’ and ‘it‘ dominates one political party, that happens to control both the White House and the Congress.
From LAMBDA Legal; attorneys of the pro-LGBT civil rights group will defend New York’s lower court ruling upholding marriage equality for Queer couples.
Today, Lambda Legal filed papers in the Appellate Division, First Department (the state’s middle court) to defend a lower court ruling that said same-sex couples should be allowed to marry in New York. The City filed an appeal seeking to overturn the ruling earlier this spring.
Best of luck to LAMBDA Legal and the same-sex couples of New York seeking marriage equality.
From Feminist Majority; Women Senators have sent a letter to Bush, expressing their concerns for the newly drafted constitution of Iraq, that may have not granted equality to Iraqi women.
Eleven women Senators sent a letter to President Bush yesterday expressing their concerns that the draft Iraqi constitution includes provisions that “may jeopardize the rights of Iraqi women.” Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Hillary R. Clinton (D-NY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Blanche L. Lincoln (D-AR), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Patty Murray (D-WA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) cited recent comments by the United States Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, that the United States will work to guarantee equality in the new constitution in urging Bush to “continue to express our support for a constitution that would maintain rights for women and equality for all Iraqis.”[…]
In her statement about the letter to Bush, Senator Barbara Mikulski said, “Iraqi women make up 65 percent of Iraq’s population and will play a vital role in its reconstruction. We cannot allow them to be left behind as Iraq begins to rebuild and transition to democracy.”
Since the women of Iraq make up over half of the population of the country, it probably wouldn’t be such a bad idea for them to be equally included in the process and to have the very same civil rights and liberties their male counterparts would enjoy within the new democratic government. Also new study has found that condoms may actually prevent HPV despite previous claims made to the contrary.
At the recent meeting of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research in Amsterdam, a team of scientists from the University of Washington presented evidence that consistent condom use reduces young women’s risk of contracting human papillomavirus (HPV). Researchers followed 123 college-aged women for an average of 22 months, collecting electronic diaries in which women charted their sexual behavior and condom use, and testing the women for HPV every four months. The study, entitled “The Effect of Consistent Condom Use on the Risk of Genital HPV Infection Among Newly Sexually Active Young Women,” found that women who used condoms 100 percent of the time were 70 percent less likely to contract HPV than women who used condoms only 5 percent of the time, according to Kaiser Daily Reproductive Health Report.
Of course, even if the study is substantiated ‘across the board’ with other research institutes, that wouldn’t stop anti-sex, ultra-conservative wingnuts (especially when it comes to women having sex for *gasp* non-reproductive purposes) from spouting all kinds of misinformation and puritanical superstitions about sex–ie: abstinence-only “education”.
From the ACLU; the Voting Rights Act is up for reauthorization as critical sections are set to expire in 2007. These crucial areas within the Act are Section 5, Section 203, and Sections 6 and 9. Let us hope that it is renewed–I certainly do because I am a person of Color, and I enjoy my right to vote.
And lastly, from NARAL Pro-Choice America; a new television spot citing Roberts’ legal ties with violent anti-choice groups.
NARAL Pro-Choice America, the nation’s leading advocate for personal privacy and a woman’s right to choose, launched a nationwide television ad campaign drawing attention to one of the most disturbing episodes in Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’ career ““ the brief he filed siding with groups like Operation Rescue and other anti-choice extremists who use bombings and other forms of intimidation against women, doctors, and nurses at women’s health clinics.
It’s about time. The people have the right to know what Bush has nominated to the bench.
Liberal blog Fables of the Reconstruction provides a “conservative blog taxomony.” Some of it made me chuckle (“Dean Esmay is popular among right-wingers as one of those centrists who just happen to hate liberals and Democrats”) , but his description of Michelle Malkin is pretty deplorable:
Far-right affirmative action hire who is so bigoted she’d arrest herself for trying to cross a border. Famously published a book praising internment of Japanese-Americans that was (a) incoherent and (b) probably not written by her. If she didn’t have tits, she’d be stuck writing at Townhall.com.
One comment-writer at Fables, Disputo, wrote in response: “I could do without the sexist language. Isn’t Malkin’s writings enough fodder for complaint? Must you also denigrate her for being a woman?” As far as I can tell (and it’s very possible I’ve missed a bunch), Disputo is the one and only lefty to object to the sexism – even though, as David Bernstein at Volokh points out, plenty of lefties have provided admiring comments or links.
Before anyone tells me “it was just a joke, you can’t object to jokes,” how would you have reacted if he wrote “if she wasn’t a slant-eyes….”?
Not the first time Malkin has received bigoted criticisms, and far from the grossest. Still, it would be nice if the allegedly anti-sexist and anti-racist half of the political spectrum was more, y’know, consistently anti-sexist and anti-racist.
UPDATE: See also Sivacracy and The Debate Link. From The Debate Link:
…Under this view, Malkin’s popularity is partially premised on her position as someone conservatives can point to and say: “Look! We’re not racist–some minorities agree with us!”–a status that is interwoven with her status as a woman and minority. And one could then extrapolate that if Malkin didn’t provide that particular service to conservatives (IE, being a conservative minority woman), she’d be a non-entity.
That argument is sophisticated, controversial, and debatable (I make no comment on whether or not it is correct as applied to Malkin). It is not, however, conveyed in a crude posting that marks Malkin’s success as solely attributable to her “tits.” Make the latter argument, but the former should be an anathema to true liberals.
On August 14, outspoken fundamentalist Christian leaders and their neoconservative wingnut political cohorts will be hosting yet another Justice Sunday–this time, Justice Sunday II. All in support of, you guessed it, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, and other judges and politicians of faith who are supposedly “under attack” because of their faith. What_a_joke. We can expect more of the “oh, they’re picking on him because he’s a man of faith! Blessed are the persecuted Christians…,” nonsense. It’s the man’s record that worries some of us, and I could care less about his faith or lack thereof. He could worship toasters for all I care, so long as he didn’t impose that on the rest of us by using the Law and politics in order to do so. (via N.O.W.)
The Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., will host the Family Research Council’s “Justice Sunday II – God Save the United States and this Honorable Court” on Sunday, August 14. This follow-up to “Justice Sunday – Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith” will be broadcast live in churches across the country, and carried on hundreds of radio and “Christian TV” stations, and via a live webcast.
The theme is “How activist judges subvert the family, undermine religious freedom and threaten our nation’s future.”
NOW objects to this cynical use of churches to promote a highly partisan message. The right wing is trying to claim that feminist and progressive groups are opposed to Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts because he is a man of faith. These cronies of George W. Bush are implying, as they often do, that liberals cannot also be people of faith. Their “one faith fits all” dogma is insulting.
By holding this event in a church and broadcasting it to churches across the country, political extremists are also making clear that they will use evangelical religion to promote ultra-conservative Supreme Court nominees and trample on women’s rights. The separation of church and state will also become history if their agenda succeeds.
Speakers at the event will include Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX), Dr. James Dobson (Focus on the Family), Phyllis Schlafly (Eagle Forum), Bill Donohue (Catholic League), Bishop Harry Jackson (Hope Christian Church) and former Senator Zell Miller (D-GA), among others, and are featured on their web site.[…]
Background Information on Select Speakers:
Tony Perkins
Tony Perkins is President of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council. Perkins is a former member of the Louisiana legislature, where he was author of the nation’s first “Covenant Marriage Law.” He hosts a weekly national radio program, “Washington Watch Weekly,” and sends daily updates to tens of thousands of grassroots activists. In 1996, Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 (allegedly for his small mailing list), as campaign manager for a right wing candidate – who was later fined for trying to hide the payment to Duke. In 2001, Perkins addressed one of America’s leading white supremacist organizations, the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), successor to the White Citizens’ Councils which battled integration in the South.Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX)
Tom DeLay is the Majority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has a pattern of repeated legal and ethical scandals. As The New York Times reported, “Almost every Republican in the House owes Mr. DeLay for something – a job, a piece of legislation or a large campaign contribution.” He is being investigated for campaign finance violations associated with his TRMPAC (Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee) and international trips with lobbyists. He has said, “A woman can take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure, to provide stability.”Dr. James Dobson
Dr. James Dobson is a conservative psychologist who hosts a daily radio show called Focus on the Family on over 6,000 radio stations. In 1977, he founded a non-profit organization of the same name of which he is currently chair of the board. His programs are estimated to be heard by more than 200 million people every day. The Family Research Council is the political arm of Focus on the Family. Dobson is one of the most influential evangelical leaders in America today.Phyllis Schlafly
Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, has been a national leader of the conservative movement since 1964. She rose to prominence while opposing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, she has been a regular spokesperson against progressive causes, particularly women’s rights and LGBT rights.Sen. Zell Miller
Zell Miller is the former Democratic senator and former governor of Georgia. Miller was appointed to Georgia’s open Senate seat in 2000 and his conservative conversion gained strength. In 2004, he published A National Party No More, a tirade against the Democratic Party. He endorsed Bush for the presidency in 2004 and gave a keynote address at the Republican National Convention in New York last summer. He has become the Republican’s symbol of what they call the “out-of-touch Democratic Party.”
Hilarious. In a nutshell, wingnut politicians and judges of faith are “under attack” because they can’t impose their religious views on the rest of us via the Law and politics. The poor things.
It looks like it might be a decent adaptation – they’re using 6 of the original 8 main cast members, which is a good sign. According to what I’ve read, they’ve added some new dialog and cut a few songs (no clue which ones), which is too bad but probably inevitable. As part of updating it from the mid-1990s to the present day, they’ve added gay marriage to the show’s litany of issues, which makes sense.
Maybe if Rent is a hit, the Sweeny Todd movie will finally happen. Or better yet, an Assassins movie. (I can dream, can’t I?)
An interesting new study from a researcher at Cornell. The researcher had men and women take a gender identity survey. The test subjects were then told that the survey showed that they were “masculine” or “feminine.”In fact, what they were told had nothing to do with their survey answers – whether they were told that their answers were “masculine” or “feminine” was random.
The subjects were then surveyed regarding various issues and also regarding car-buying preferences. The men who had had their masculinity “threatened” became more likely to support the Iraq war; more likely to oppose same-sex marriage; and more likely to want to buy an S.U.V. The researcher calls this phenomenon “masculine overcompensation”; Media Girl calls it the Fragile Male Ego.
The researcher, Robb Willer, says he’s planning a follow-up study to see if men are also more likely to favor violence against women if their masculinity is questioned.
Via Volsunga, an interview with Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:
The first priority is to survive. The moment you step onto the street, you are an immediate target just because you are female. If a woman goes out, she may be assaulted, she may be kidnapped. The gangsters are very organised. Ransom is becoming an everyday thing. A gang kidnaps a woman and they contact her family to ask for a fat ransom. Unfortunately, some families will ask whether anything sexual has happened to the woman. If it has, they won’t want her back.
Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.
In many mosques they preach that a female should leave school in Grade 6, because otherwise she will be mixing with males and evil will happen.[…]
If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.
In that culture women are just a tool for production of children and sexual entertainment of men. Young females are promised by their families to other males in the tribe, in a very inhumane way. On top of that, women are considered to be sources of evil, and that is why we need to be covered from top to toe.
The entire interview is worth reading.
She’s careful to point out that problems for women’s rights existed under Hussain’s rule as well; The invasion and occupation have made things much worse for Iraqi women, but what existed before wasn’t utopian.
I wish I knew of a solution. That the Republican idea that freedom can be created through invasion has been discredited doesn’t provide much comfort for women in Iraq who have had their rights taken away. We’ve squandered away any shred of moral credibility we had in the region, and we don’t have enough soldiers to remake entire cultures at gunpoint. Frankly, I doubt there is anything substantial the US can do to clean up the enourmous mess we’ve made.
At the very least, we should establish, as much as security concerns allow, an “open door” immigration policy for any Iraqi woman who wants to move to the US in order to avoid the tyranny of radical fundimentalist Islamic law. Since we can’t offer them freedom in their own land from tyrants we’ve empowered, we should at least offer an escape route.
Not a day has gone by since Roberts’ nomination and I don’t receive some “take action” or “alert” email from NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Organization for Women, and Save Our Courts. The emails always have some recently discovered memo, letter, or comment made by Roberts himself concerning his opposing position on the Roe v. Wade and Conn. v. Griswold rulings, along with other civil rights and liberties issues. As if his close ties with violent anti-choice groups such as Operation Rescue and him even arguing on their behalf in cases such as Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, weren’t unsettling and disturbing enough. But now, some more memos (oh joy) citing that Roberts doesn’t really view the right to privacy to be fundamental for American citizens. (via NARAL Pro-Choice America)
Today’s Washington Post reports on a memo regarding the landmark 1965 Supreme Court ruling that legalized the use of birth control by married couples under a right to privacy. According to the records, Roberts’ memo “to the attorney general on Dec. 11, 1981, summarized a lecture six years earlier by then-Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold at Washington and Lee University, which touched on the same theme. Griswold’s lecture, Roberts said, devotes a section to the so-called ‘right to privacy,’ arguing as we have that such an amorphous right is not to be found in the Constitution. He specifically criticizes Roe v. Wade.” [WashingtonPost, 8/3/2005]
And from that Washington Post article….
[…]Separately, new documents released by the National Archives from Roberts’s tenure as a senior adviser to the attorney general during the Reagan administration make clear that he was deeply skeptical of the court’s recognition of a citizen’s fundamental “right to privacy” — the legal concept that underpinned its historic 1973 decision upholding a right to abortion.[…]
The new documents disclosed by the archive that reflect Roberts’ skeptical views regarding a “fundamental” right to privacy include a lengthy article on judicial restraint that he apparently drafted for publication in a journal of the American Bar Association under the name of then-Attorney General William French Smith, his boss.
The article approvingly quoted from a dissenting opinion by Justice Hugo Black in a 1965 court decision, in which the majority held that a Connecticut law forbidding the use of contraceptives was unconstitutional. Black’s opinion, as cited in the draft, complained that the court had used “a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional.” The draft article said that “the broad range of rights which are now alleged to be ‘fundamental’ by litigants, with only the most tenuous connection the to Constitution, bears ample witness to the dangers of this doctrine.”[…]
[…]A second memo, sent by Roberts to the attorney general on Dec. 11, 1981, summarized a lecture six years earlier by then- Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold at Washington and Lee University, which touched on the same theme. Griswold’s lecture, Roberts said, “devotes a section to the so-called ‘right to privacy,’ arguing as we have that such an amorphous right is not to be found in the Constitution. He specifically criticizes Roe v. Wade.”
The words “so-called” do not appear in Griswold’s lecture. But Roberts drafted a letter to Griswold, signed by Smith, saying he was cheered that Griswold made “many of the same points” that the administration had about these matters.[…]
Now with Nancy Keenan’s, President of NARAL Pro-Choice America, own statement regarding Roberts’ view on the right to privacy, which I will agree is “extremely troubling.”
“That John Roberts, President Bush’s nominee to the highest court in the nation, should refer disparagingly to our ‘so-called right to privacy’ is extremely troubling. The right to privacy is central to our American ideals of liberty and personal freedom, and it’s something most Americans cherish,”….”The more we learn about John Roberts’ judicial philosophy, the clearer it becomes that he is not the right choice for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. With each new piece of information the White House’s artfully constructed façade falls farther away, and the real John Roberts comes into clearer view ““ a career activist who would bring a clear ideological agenda to the Supreme Court.[…]”
Oh the scary, scary times in which we live. These may have been past comments and letters made by Roberts long before he was even a judge, however, who’s to say that someone’s history doesn’t repeat itself, while the person’s identity has taken on a whole new incarnation….Supreme Court Justice Roberts.
I want to put that WORDS poster on a t-shirt!
While Bob Hope was indeed an immigrant, white anglo saxon protestant male immigrants are explicitly welcomed by the current shitocracy…
I bet I.C.E. comes back for them later.
I'm surprised the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion aren't getting arrested seeing as they are not U.S. citizens. I…
LOL, thanks!