The Littlest Lobbyists (Oh, Oh, Ohio! Your Abortion Politics Shame Me)

Remember when proponents of Ohio’s proposed “Heartbeat Bill” tried to get a fetus to testify in favor of the legislation, which would ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat becomes detectable? (That’s usually between the 6th and 8th weeks, when many women still don’t know they’re pregnant.)

Well, apparently pre-born witnesses aren’t awfully reliable. One of the two pre-born tykes invited to testify last spring flat-out refused to make a statement. No galloping hearttones were entered into the legislative record for her (or him).

The lastest trick, now, is to bring in post-born children. This age group is bound to afflict our legislators with a new level of chaos. The messes! (I still have one prone to wreaking EVIL with crayons.) The backtalk! (Ditto for both of my beloved boys, though vastly improved.) The irreligiosity! (At our annual Christmas Eve foray to church, my Tiger kept asking loudly what “Amen” meant. Meanwhile, his older brother the Bear managed to set his church bulletin aflame during “Silent Night,” the candlelit portion of the service.)

But not all post-born children are like the hoydenish heathens I’m raising.** Those who testified were surely obedient, docile Christian children. They know when to say Amen. Granted, they’re no longer imbued with the perfect innocent of the pre-born, but at least their heartbeat is reliable.

This is how the testimony of post-born children played out last week (thanks, Daily Record, for covering it):

Christian Harrington didn’t mince words during his moment at the Statehouse Tuesday.

The 8-year-old wants the Ohio Senate to take action on the Heartbeat Bill, legislation that would ban abortions within weeks of conception.

“I’m here to save babies with beating hearts,” Christian, barely tall enough to peer over a podium, told a packed committee hearing room. “And I want to tell the senators to pass the Heartbeat Bill right now. And when I mean right now, I mean right now.”

The youngster was one of more than 50 children who were in Columbus Tuesday as part of the latest attempt by backers of the Heartbeat Bill to convince lawmakers to pass the legislation.

They had a press conference with reporters, held a faux committee hearing showing lawmakers how to vote in favor of the bill and delivered Teddy bears, complete with real heartbeat sound chip, to all 33 Ohio senators.

“Do not believe the stuff the people tell you at the abortion clinic,” said 11-year-old Sydney McCauley. “The just say it’s a blob of tissue, and that is not the truth. That blob of tissue is actually forming into a baby.”

She added, “Think if someone aborted you. That would be a whole generation of people who (would not) be able to live their lives.”

Fifty kids? That’s a veritable Children’s Crusade. These children are being brainwashed into a key tenet of movement pro-life belief: that their existence was predestined. No one is telling these kids, “Well, you wouldn’t exist had the condom stayed put.” “You were only possible because Mama lost her first pregnancy after four months, and you came along 12 months later.” “The only reason you came into this world is that my ex was just too damn hot, and oh, I know I shouldn’t have – I know it! – but I just could stop loving him. A week later he punched me in the jaw. Never seen him since.” Or even: “You can be glad your Mom and I got drunk and horny on New Year’s. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here today.” (This last one came to me via my own father, though I’m pretty sure he didn’t quite say “horny.” I was, in any event, a September baby – and fortunate to have been wanted and well-loved.)

The “Heartbeat” movement has no truck with chance. Its obsessions with the pivot point of abortion as the arbiter of live and death effaces all the other contingencies and serendipities – every crazy chance of fate – leading up to the conception and birth of  a particular baby. It constructs a teleology in which every baby was always and forever meant to be, and thus their (potential) mothers are obligated to carry every pregnancy to term.

Catch me if I’m wrong, but are there Christian religions other than Mormonism that envision a pre-heavenly waiting room of souls? Otherwise, it’s just silly luck that you were born as opposed to another combo of gametes in your parent’s DNA deck of cards.

But this seemingly philosophical question – “what if you’d never been born?” – is a standard cudgel in the hardcore anti-abortion toolbag. It’s as simple as it is existentially threatening. No wonder it resonates with the tween crowd.

The kids hauled into Columbus to testify can’t begin to gauge the depth of dishonesty and muddy thinking in the slough of despond (first their churches, then the Ohio Legislature) to which their parents have led them. And so it feel abusive to me to use children to try to score a few cheap emotional points. All kids can do until their early to mid teens is to parrot their parents’ opinions. I mean, my Tiger has political ideas at 8, but danged if I’m gonna force him to the mat to defend them. I’d much rather test and challenge my kids’ ideals –  in hopes that they will eventually understand what is truly their own.

Let us hope to all the gods – their God, my Buddha-Jesus, and the Ceiling Cat – that these kids urged to perform for the legislature will someday find enough distance from their manipulative parents that they can later make their own wise, considered sexual decisions.

And let us hope that the Heartbeat Bill, which was left to languish last month, won’t be revived by this small horde of child crusaders.

Further, we can only hope that the vicious overreach of the Heartbeat Bill – its overly broad provisions, sloppy thinking, contempt for women, prima facie unconstitutionality, and far-ranging interference with the rights of both doctor and patient – will doom it, no matter how many post-born children mount testimony, church pageants, or lemonade stands in its favor.

But given that the latest  Quinnipiac Poll found public support for the Heartbeat Bill at a dead heat (45% favoring, 46% against), I’m skeptical that Ohio has any chance of electing pro-choice legislators (the theme for this week’s Blog for Choice day).

Instead, we need to start pointing out how the self-styled champions of children are using other children as a political ramrod. We need to question their leaky teleology of sex –> pregnancy –> birth –> earthly arrival of souls from heaven. And we need to howl to the moon about the lunacy of the Heartbeat Bill, which – like a zombie, a vampire – isn’t dead yet, but poses a mortal threat to women’s autonomy.

** My kids are actually quite wonderful, in my wholly unbiased opinion. But the incident with the church bulletin aflame really did happen.

SOPA Is Dead. Long Live SOPA!

I’m as happy as anyone that SOPA and PIPA seem to have crawled back into the Hollywood hidey-hole from whence they came. They threatened the free exchange of ideas on the Internet as we know it.

But make no mistake: The withdrawal of these nasty bills has very little to do with grassroots protest. Kittywampus went black for the day. My Facebook friends – including the handful of Republicans – vocally opposed SOPA/PIPA, except for a few who didn’t know what the fuss was about. All of this ballyhoo made absolutely no difference. As Jody points out in her incisive post, the contest was only ever between new tech money (such as Google) and old media. Yes, Wikipedia’s blackout made an impact, too, even as a not-for-profit entity. But the real players here were the new tech giants, able to represent themselves as the engine of American capitalist innovation. This was not a triumph of citizen activism.

What’s more, the U.S. government already has the tools it needs to punish pirates. In fact, it already blissfully disregards due process. Initial reporting on the shutdown of Megaupload – a site with sketchy leadership that appears to have openly tolerated blatant copyright violation – gave me the impression that the government had proven its case. Not so! As Glenn Greenwald notes, all it’s got at this point is allegations, not a guilty verdict:

[I]t nonetheless sends a very clear message when citizens celebrate a rare victory in denying the Government a power it seeks — the power to shut down websites without a trial — only for the Government to turn around the very next day and shut down one of the world’s largest and best-known sites. Whether intended or not, the message is unmistakable: Congratulations, citizens, on your cute little “democracy” victory in denying us the power to shut down websites without a trial: we’re now going to shut down one of your most popular websites without a trial.

Yup. With the triumph of the “unitary executive” under Bush and its consolidation and elaboration under Obama, there’s no need to wait for legislation. The rule of law is so twentieth-century!

In case you, too, were wondering why SOPA/PIPA were so evil, here’s a great explainer:

And if you need a good laugh about it, Jon Stewart comes through:

My Christmas Note to Our Pres

Last week I got a holiday card from President Obama and family. I also keep hearing about how Michelle wants to invite me to dinner – or at least, I’ve got a chance of winning a seat at the table.

Since I’m still Facebook friends with Barack, I took the liberty of answering when he asked on FB what I’d like to talk about over a presidential meal:

WTF rule of law. WTF signing the new detention bill and not vetoing as announced. WTF civil liberties! WTF executing American citizens summarily, without trial, and forcing Bradley Manning to spend long hours naked. WTF habeus corpus and posse comitatus. And not least for us gals, WTF Plan B?!

I promise these topics will flow with pizzazz and charm over fine cuisine and the right wine.

That’s my little holiday rant, verbatim, sent directly to our Commander-in-Chief. Ah, the wonders of social networking!

What are the odds this’ll land me on a watch list of some sort?

(From I Can Has Cheezburger?)

What I Want for Christmas …

… would be a cat. But I won’t be receiving a kitty any more than you’ll be getting a pony. (Allergies in the family. Meow.)

So instead, here’s a wish that all kittehs get whatever their hearts – or paws – desire.

(If you can’t see the clip, click here.)

Quilted Caturday

I am not a quilter, though I often wish I were. These feline quilt blocks make me yearn for the skllz and the time. They come from a blog with the enviably goofy name Katinka Brusselsprouts. It’s a beautiful blog worth a visit even if you can’t thread a needle. Katinka will lead you to the original source for these patterns, Regina Grewe, whose site is also an Augenschmaus (treat for the eyes – yes, she’s German).

This one looks like a little imp – equal parts charmer and stinker. Such an adorable face!

This little guy looks like he’s sleeping in perfect repose in a perfectly alert posture – the ultimate Zen practitioner (after Shironeko, that is).

Little Miss Daisy (my nickname for her)  looks like the picture of pure innocence. But she’s a cat, so you know she’s got to be cooking up something.

And finally, the Cat before Christmas, who has his very own quilt. To be honest, I love the first three best, because their focus is so intently on the cat, without any distraction from the background. But this little guy is still sweet and seasonal. Merry Catmas to all! (Or should that be “Merry Quiltmas”?)

Time to Kill the Heartbeat Bill

When the Ohio Senate didn’t pick up the Heartbeat Bill immediately after the House passed it, I started to hope that it would be allowed to die a quiet death. No such luck. Last week, it was discussed in committee, and it’s liable to come before the entire Senate this week. If it passes this hurdle, Governor Kasich is almost sure to sign it.

Why is this a bad idea? Well, here’s what I wrote to my local newspapers:

This week, Ohio’s Senate begins deliberations on the so-called “Heartbeat Bill” (HB 125) – anti-abortion legislation so extreme that it failed to garner the support of Ohio Right to Life. [By now, it's "last week," and the bill has made it out of committee.]

Imagine you (or your daughter, or your sister) were six weeks pregnant and didn’t know it. This bill would take away your right to choose even at that early date. It’s very common for women to be unaware of their pregnancy when they are only six weeks along. For those women, the Heartbeat Bill would effectively outlaw abortion altogether.

Even in cases of rape, incest, or threats to the woman’s health, HB 125 destroys a woman’s right to choose. This is an extreme position that most Ohioans do not embrace, including many folks who have qualms about abortion.

Perhaps you’re sure you would never get an abortion yourself. But do you really want the government deciding instead of women? Should legislators be making medical and moral decisions that impact a woman’s health and future? That’s what I’d call big government.

Would you want to criminalize health care providers who serve women? This bill would make felons of doctors or nurses who help terminate a pregnancy unless they can document a “serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.” Medical professionals will be forced to weigh legal risks to themselves against the physical risks to their patient.

The Heartbeat Bill is so extreme, it’s almost surely unconstitutional. The framework set forth in Roe v. Wade (the 1973 Supreme Court opinion affirming a woman’s right to choose) says that states cannot ban abortion prior to fetal viability – the point when a fetus can live outside the woman’s body. Even with all our technological advances, viability occurs no sooner than the 22^nd week of pregnancy, much later than the six-to-eight week deadline set by the Heartbeat Bill.

If the Heartbeat Bill passes, it will be appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it’s nearly certain to be struck down. (That’s why Ohio Right to Life opposed its introduction into the House.) First, though, the state of Ohio would be exposed to a costly legal battle funded by us taxpayers.

This week [again - last week!], the Senate committee on Health, Human Services, and Aging is holding hearings on this extremist bill. I urge our legislators – especially Republicans committed to “small government” – to do the common-sense thing: vote NO on HB 125.

————-

If you’re an Ohio resident and feel moved to contact your senator, here’s a locator.

Save the Internet – Save the Kitty!

I’m coming out of dormancy to sound an alarm at the behest of Daisy Deadhead and ballgame. These two friends of mine have sniped at each other at times but agree 100% on this: The Internet as we know and love it is in serious danger.

Congress is considering an atrocious act, PROTECT IP (S. 968)/SOPA (HR. 3261), that would enable censorship of any website that provides copyrighted material. Those sites could be summarily shut down at a judge’s order; they could only be restored through litigation, which is bloody expensive. Not only the big guys like Google, Facebook, and YouTube would be affected. Itty bitty startups could be stifled, and even humble catty blogs such as mine could be shuttered.

I once celebrated the end of a basement flood by playing “Bridge over Troubled Water” on my piano and posting it to Kittywampus 1.0 (the old Blogger version). Perhaps fortunately, the link to that stellar performance is dead (has Box.net stopped serving bloggers?). Were it still live, I’d be committing a copyright violation – not that I imagine Simon and Garfunkel give a rip. Every mommy blogger who posts her child singing Lady Gaga could be shut down. And what of all the copyrighted content that we routinely embed, from SNL to Jon Stewart?

Here’s the bottom line (from the video below):

The ugly details, including potential five-year jail sentences:

What to do? Spread the word through your blog, Facebook, or Twitter account. Bay at the moon. And contact your congresscritter. They’ve not gotten much pushback, so they need to hear from worried citizens. I just called all three of mine.

I hope to get back to more regular blogging once I get my workload under control. Let’s not allow the Internet to be broken in the meantime!

Update 11/16/11, 2:45 p.m.: Daisy has lots more detail on SOPA/PROTECT IP.

Lisa Simeone, Our Friend – Fired for Peacefully Protesting in DC

Almost daily, I get email from friend-of-the-blog Lisa Simeone on novel ways that the national security state is eroding our liberties. But today, Lisa herself was the poster girl for the corrosion of liberty – and I read about it first on Alternet, then at War Is a Crime, not in one of Lisa’s emails. It’s typically, really, that Lisa is all about the principles while setting aside her private worries. Now, though, they’ve become a national cause celebre.

Lisa has been fired from her job as the host of the documentary program Soundprint, which is carried by NPR affliates. The reason? Her involvement in the October 2011 movement, a peaceful protest against militarism and corporate greed, which has joined forces with Occupy DC. Lisa was targeted by The Daily Caller, which accused her of conflict of ethics and possible ethics violations, suggesting she was bound by the NPR ethics code. But first, Lisa was only a freelancer, not an employee, and was evidently never warned that she could lose her job due to political activity. Moreover, Soundprint’s statement seems to have a pretty tenuous relation to reality:

Soundprint is a journalistic program and Lisa’s leadership role as a member of the steering committee and a spokesperson for the October 2011 protest activities, associated with the Occupy DC movement, conflicts with her role as the host of a documentary series. Soundprint adheres to the highest standards of journalism which include maintaining appropriate distance from marches, demonstrations and other political activity. These are standards held by many other journalism organizations, including National Public Radio.

Fine, but look at Soundprint’s current program: the tale of a deaf septuagenarian who wants to learn to fly, and a tribute to Sir Edmund Hilary. It’s obvious that Lisa couldn’t be objective about Hilary! Never mind that he died three years ago; were he still with us, he’d definitely be in the 1%! Lisa introduces the story, and I’m listening really hard for her left-wing invective. Listening … oooh, straining a bit … Wait! She just called him a “humanitarian”! Surely that has a political subtext?

Lisa’s other radio job, hosting the nationally-syndicated World of Opera program, is hanging in the balance as well, though so far it looks like its sponsoring station is resisting pressure from NPR.

Lisa points out in her interview with War Is a Crime that NPR is applying a wildly inconsistent standard, allowing some of their regular employees who actually report on current events to pontificate on Fox:

“I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen — the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly — on my own time in my own life.  I’m not an NPR employee.  I’m a freelancer.  NPR doesn’t pay me.  I’m also not a news reporter.  I don’t cover politics.  I’ve never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I’ve done for NPR World of Opera.  What is NPR afraid I’ll do — insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?

“This sudden concern with my political activities is also surprising in light of the fact that Mara Liaason reports on politics for NPR yet appears as a commentator on FoxTV, Scott Simon hosts an NPR news show yet writes political op-eds for national newspapers, Cokie Roberts reports on politics for NPR yet accepts large speaking fees from businesses.  Does NPR also send out ‘Communications Alerts’ about their activities?”

Yep, knowing Lisa, I think Madame Butterfly is about to be Occupied. (But there likely won’t be any tents involved. Like me, Lisa enjoys, needs, appreciates, and once again NEEDS a decent bed at night. I sometimes think a good mattress is one of the top three secret clues to vitality in one’s 40s and beyond.)

But seriously: It remains a mystery how Soundprint arrived at the conclusion that Lisa’s activism collided with the NPR ethics code. NPR denies having even contacted Soundprint. And vice versa. How to explain? Might I smell a whiff of Breitbart and his ilk? The earliest smear job I found on Lisa s a piece by Neda Samnani at Roll Call, dramatically dated “October 18, midnight,” insinuating that of course Lisa committed an ethical breach, because if she’s on radio, then she must be, well, a reporter.

Horseshit.

Ethics codes have a place in journalism, but Lisa was not exactly committing journalism. Lisa was doing cultural programming. Nor are ethics codes the be-all and end-all of media ethics. If they’re relevant to Lisa’s current work, they must equally apply to Ira Glass and Garrison Keillor at Lake Woebegone. The last time we heard about Keillor’s religious prejudices, there were consequences! ripple effects! an article in Salon … and not a blip in his contract.

So much still is shrouded in obfuscation. I am hoping Lisa will find time to fire off one of her emails, just like she does whenever she sees someone else’s rights being abrogated. I’m sure she’s pretty overwhelmed. There could also be a lawsuit brewing.

Given that we may need to wait on the facts, it’s half-past midnight (see, we can do her detractors one better – nay, 30 minutes better!). It time to rally to her cause. I just wrote the following to NPR:

I know Lisa. She’s whip-smart and highly principled. Her work is consistently thoughtful, fair, professional, and easy on the ears. I was thus dismayed to hear that Soundprint fired her for her engagement in October 2011.  Despite her history of activism, she hasn’t let her personal politics bleed into her professional work.

I’m so pleased that WDAV has not yet bowed to pressure to fire Lisa, who has done nothing wrong. Please support WDAV in their loyalty to Lisa. And while you’re at it, might you ask Soundprint to reconsider their hasty decision to fire her? There’s a difference between a reporter who covers hard news and a radio host of cultural programming. Lisa’s work falls in the latter category. I respect the reasons why NPR has an ethics code (even though I also know that real media ethics are more complex than a mere set of rules). However, as a freelancer who didn’t report on hard news, Lisa should not be muzzled in her private life as a citizen in the name of “objectivity.” Doing so just makes her former employer/client appear petty and, frankly, scared of right-wing bloggers and pundits.

Bring back Lisa Simeone! [Okay, I admit to trying to play the diplomat. "Horseshit" tends not to fly as an actual argument, except from my dissertation advisor who made it work beautifully.]

You can contact NPR here. To their credit, WDAV seems to get it (way more than NPR does!), as you can read here. Thankfully, comments are running overwhelmingly in favor of Lisa. But don’t hesitate to add yours, too, if you’ve appreciated her comments here or her work elsewhere.

And also: Hugs to you, Lisa. Count me among your friends and fans who love you and will stand with you – chin up and boobs out, as a friend of mine loves to say. Brava, for your passion, commitment, principles, and love of liberty. This panic from our overlords? I read it as a sign that we’ve got them rattled.

I hope you’ll weigh in once the worst of the madness subsides. Until then, sending hugs and virtual chocolate while posting madly on Facebook about this travesty.

Troy Davis, Foucault, and the Nature of Modern Power

I didn’t think they really would kill Troy Davis. Surely, the worldwide campaign to spare his life would impress someone in Georgia. Surely, the Supreme Court would stop the process, once they’d delayed it. Surely, the work of the Innocence Project had raised enough awareness of the presence of innocent people on Death Row.

When I heard that they’d murdered him, after all, at 11:08 p.m. on Tuesday, I wept. I’m sure some of you readers did too. It is not true, as one of Davis’s nephews told Amy Goodman, that “we are all Troy Davis.” People like Goodman and me – white people blessed with education and elevated above poverty – are almost certain never to land on Death Row. Nor do I want to appropriate the grief of the people who knew Davis and loved him. And yet, tears of grief and rage seemed the only possible response to a rotten, festering system that committed homicide against a man whose only crime appears to have been being black in the wrong place on the wrong night.

All that is to say that I have no desire to over-intellectualize the murder of Davis. At the same time, I’ve been re-reading parts of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for a class I’m teaching. The first section of the book, aptly titled “Torture,” describes in excruciating detail pre-modern ways of punishing criminals. A man is drawn and quartered. Foucault forces us to look. Then he spends the rest of the book analyzing how the king’s power to maim bodies and take life has been supplanted in the modern era by the bureaucratic state’s ability to micro-regulate us through surveillance and, ultimately, self-surveillance, shaping docile bodies. We are disciplined, and we discipline ourselves. We are subjected to normalization, and we learn to conform to the norms. Modern techniques of power are all the more effective because they are subtle – and they are no longer confined to prohibiting behaviors. Where power had been merely repressive, it now has the ability to elicit behaviors, attitudes, identities, and reality itself:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. (189)

Foucault is surely right about the productive and proliferative aspects of modern power. But doesn’t he present a false dichotomy here? While European countries have abandoned capital punishment, the techniques of power in the United States remain deeply invested in repression. Of course, all of the productive aspects of power are in full swing here, too – often commingled with more repressive techniques, as in TSA routines that elicit docility. At the same time, torture is undergoing a renaissance. The spirit of Abu Ghraib courses through our polity.

As Troy Davis waited for nearly four hours while the Supreme Court took one last glance at his case, he was strapped to a gurney with the lethal needle already in his arm. That’s a form of torture that would have pleased the most bloodthirsty pre-modern tyrant. It would have warmed the heart of a postbellum Southern lynch mob. Without being naive about the more subtle forms of modern power, isn’t it time we renounced state-sponsored murder?

(Posted by a bunch of my Facebook friends, attributed to Randall Horton)

DSK Claims He’s Innocent – Should We Believe Him?

Emily Yoffe at State puts her finger on precisely why I can’t believe that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is innocent of sexual assault. It seems DSK has given an interview to French TV, trying to exonerate himself but providing no real answers:

Although we only have translated summaries of the interview, Strauss-Kahn acknowledges there was a sexual encounter between the two but says no force was involved and he didn’t offer her money.  … If there was no force, and no money, are we to believe it was his continental charm that caused Diallo to get on her knees and relieve a stranger?

(See the rest of Yoffe’s analysis here; also at Slate, William Saletan offers a tandem, equally skeptical analysis.)

Exactement! This was the weakest point in the prosecutors’ motion to dismiss the case – how to explain the sex if no compulsion was involved?

In that motion, the prosecutors note that the complainant, Nafissatou Diallo, lied repeatedly, thus shredding her credibility (and, I agree, almost certainly alienating every potential jury in the world). But the evidence in the case went beyond he-said/she-said. While injury evidence was inconclusive, DNA analysis indisputably shows that DSK deposited his semen in the complainant’s mouth – a point that DSK does not dispute.

And so we have to ask, what narrative could possibly explain this most unlikely mixing of fluids? What sort of unpaid, consensual encounter could take place in the span of 20 minutes or less, from first meeting to au revoir?

Here’s how the prosecutors laid out the timeline in their motion to dismiss:

The relatively brief nature of the encounter between the defendant and the complainant initially suggested that the sexual act was not likely consensual. Specifically, key card records from the hotel indicated that the complainant first entered Suite 2806 at 12:06 p·.m., and telephone records later showed that the defendant had placed a call to his daughter at 12:13 p.m. Accordingly, it appeared that whatever had occurred between the complainant and the defendant was over in approximately seven to nine minutes. But in light of the complainant’s failure to offer an accurate and consistent narrative of the immediate aftermath of the encounter, it is impossible to determine the length of the encounter itself. That the defendant placed a brief phone call at 12:13 p.m. is not dispositive of when the encounter took place, how long it lasted, or where the complainant was from 12:06 to 12:26. Any inferences that could conceivably be drawn from the timeline of the encounter are necessarily weakened by the inability to solidify the timeline itself. (pp. 23-4)

But the prosecution hasn’t actually shown that the timeline is shaky. Not at all! DSK checked out at 12:28 p.m. (p. 6). The longest time span during which he and Diallo could have occupied the same space is 20 minutes. The prosecution has established this very ably indeed. Questions about what Diallo did after 12:26 – and inconsistencies in her testimony about her immediate reaction – don’t change the fact that the sexual encounter must have occurred in 20 minutes or less. (There is some question about the accuracy of the hotel’s clock and the key-card records, but the two-minute discrepancy described in footnote 25 would suggest an even shorter timeframe.)

Given that we’re taking about a 20-minute encounter, here is what we must believe to hold DSK innocent: We must imagine that a conspiracy set Diallo on DSK to entrap him and ruin his career. Or we must believe that Diallo was a prostitute – a possibility that both she and DSK have denied. Or we must presume that Diallo initiated the encounter in an attempt to sue DSK and get rich. All three of these theories are far-fetched on the face of it. And if you think any one of them aren’t totally bird-brained – well, consider that DSK was practically heading out the door. A few minutes later, and Diallo and DSK would have never crossed paths. That’s a piss-poor way to plan a conspiracy or entrapment.

Or, of course, we may choose to believe that DSK’s charm and charisma alone will bring any woman quite literally to her knees, with no desire for reciprocity. This charm. This charisma.

(Source: The Guardian)

Okay, that’s not quite fair. There are more flattering photos of DSK. But he’s no beauty. He’s a jowly man on the cusp of old age. I’m much closer to him in age than Diallo is, and yet I can’t imagine even eating potato chips with him in bed, fully clothed.

I don’t think any belief about what happened in Suite 2806 can be held “beyond reasonable doubt,” and in any event, the case will never come before a jury. But since DSK is appealing to the jury of public opinion, it’s fair to ask: Which is more plausible? Were two strangers overwhelmed by by lust? Or did a rich and famous man opportunistically assume that room service included gratification of his every whim?

(As an aside: the motion to dismiss notes that four other stains in the hallway – not the bedroom! – were found to contain semen from men other than DSK. And here I thought bedbugs were the only reason to avoid New York hotels. I know the Sofitel caters to the privileged, but can’t they at least avoid splattering the wallpaper?)

Cat-Came-Back Caturday

About three weeks ago, I informed the Sungold universe via Facebook that I was in love. No, not that I was in a relationship. Not that I’d gotten divorced. (Indeed, my dear mate and I were enjoying a local high point.)

It was, um, far more complicated. I was smitten with a kitten. And my husband is allergic. Like, asthmatic allergic, which is cruel, since he loves him some kittehs.

On August 11, a thin orange cat with stunning mackerel markings walked up to me as I was pulling scuzzy weeks from my driveway. He said, plaintively, “Meow?” as cats tend to do. Of course I answered in kind.

Within moments my kids informed me that this little guy could be Little Lion, a much-loved cat their friends had lost earlier in the summer. I held on to Orange Kitty until Little Lion’s family confirmed that we hadn’t found him. We then checked to make sure OK wasn’t an escapee from our friends across the street, who at one point had had two orange/ginger cats. No luck.

That night, Orange Kitty drifted off to sleep in the comfort of our porch furniture, seemingly secure in the knowledge that these silly humans who’d fussed over him all evening and provided stinky fishy cat food would carry on their tuna-scented gravy train in the morning.

But (cue Dragnet music or Darth Vader’s theme): The Ditch Witch arrived sometime between 7 and 8 the next morn. Despite the absurd, even cutesy name, this digger is the H-bomb of the construction world. It commenced to tunnel under roads and sidewalks, preparing the way for 21st century gas delivery. (My town is the poster child for the urgency of infrastructure repair.)

By the time I checked on Orange Kitty, he had vanished, like any intelligent kitteh would. And he stayed vanished for a full four weeeks.

This very last Thursday night, I spotted him in our backyard at 6:20 p.m., evidently hot on the trail of a mouse. He broke off his hunt to issue his trademark pathetic meow and allow us a whisker rub. I was elated. He greeted me! He came trotting up to me! He begged to get in the back door! But my kids were about to be late to music lessons, so I couldn’t dally. By the time I sped back home, the only orange was a streak in the sunset.

But hey, at least we knew he was alive.

Yesterday, Friday, he appeared in once again in the early evening. I was sitting on my front porch – just in case – as I’d done faithfully all those weeks before.And yet he took me by surprise. (Which is actually not surprising, in light of the dozens of porch-hours logged in vain hopes of finding him.) He came meowing up to the porch, instantly seizing my attention.

We were ready this time. We wined and dined him like the prodigal kitten. (And no, we didn’t overfeed him – he’s very thin and we want the food to stay inside him – plus the wine was for me. Obviously.) He again fell asleep on our porch furniture after a few longing glances toward the living room.

Today, I went onto the porch around noon to call him. No kitteh. I slipped back into the house and commenced a samba-esque rendition of “Just the Way You Are.” I got to a rest … and heard “meow! meow!” in the key of G#. A Billy Joel fan?

We’ve spent the rest of the day with this charming pumpkin. I bought him toys and food and worm pills. Two of the three were a grand hit. I figure I’ll need to take him to the vet this week, which will take care of the de-worming. I’m fully aware the vet visit could bring heartbreak. (I notice Orange Kitty is breathing too fast, though his gums look pink to this rusty observer, and he doesn’t seem to be sneezing or coughing, nor is he evidently in pain. He eats well and likes to play.)

We need to ascertain, too, that no one has lost him. Surely, he was once loved and fed with kindness; otherwise he’d be skittish and feral instead of sweetly social.

But my heart can’t help but leap – nay, pounce! – at the hope that we might have ourselves a part-time kitty, one who could live outdoors due to my sweetie’s allergies, yet enjoy lots of mutual love. And feeding, which would be a whole lot less mutual unless he starts sharing his mice (ugh). (Ideally, I think cats belong indoors, but when the alternative is life as a stray, an outdoor gig might be a decent compromise.)

Whatever happens, I take the appearance of Orange Kitty as blessing in my life. A mitzvah. An arc of grace (at least until he falls off the porch furniture; it seems I still attract rather clumsy cats).

Oh, and my statement that we might just have us a part-time cat? Scratch it. We all know who “owns” whom – on whatever temrs he chooses.

Night-night, sweet Orange Kitty. May you please favor us with your presence tomorrow, the next day, and all the days thereafter.

And it not: Well, the cat came back. Not once, but thrice. Reason for hope, even if – as one of my friends has suggested – OK is just one of those “nonmonogamous” kittehs.

(Click here if you can’t see Laurie Berkner singing “The Cat Came Back.” Yes, she’s a “kids’ singer,” but not only – not in the least.)

Empress Sungold’s Plan for Economic Recovery: An Open Letter to the Supercommittee

My Republican senator, Rob Portman, is soliciting public input for the congressional supercommittee in charge of cutting the federal budget and (mostly likely) ripping our economy to shreds in the process. Channeling Don Quixote, I wrote him to say what I’d do if Empress Sungold were put in charge. It’s more wonky  - and more earnest – than is typical for Kittywampus. If you get through it without snoozing, I’m interested in what you would do as a member of the supercommittee. (If you’re an Ohio resident, you can give Senator Portman a piece of your mind, too.)

Here’s Empress Sungold’s plan (edited to add a few links):

In a word: Jobs. Reviving our economy and stimulating employment has to come before austerity.

Our economy is still stagnating. Unemployment remains very high, both in Ohio and nationally. It would be a dire mistake to introduce spending cuts right now. In the short run, we need revenue increases. Please listen to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates when they say that the very rich must pony up; they’re right! There is no excuse for tax breaks for corporate jets when Medicaid and school funding are being cut.

In addition to closing loopholes and raising taxes on those who make at least a half-million per year, we need targeted stimulus. There’s much still to be done for our conventional infrastracture (just check out the potholes here in Athens sometime). We also need a massive forward-looking investment in non-conventional infrastructure, including renewable energy. We already have great solar and wind companies right here in Ohio, but the sector needs to be vastly scaled up, with your S. 1000 being a good start, but only a start. We need investments in our schools. We need to fully fund Medicaid, Head Start, and women’s health services such as Planned Parenthood, because an emerging generation of sickly and ignorant Americans will not be able to build a strong country – and because short-term cuts too often lead to greater expenses in the long run, when diseases are diagnosed and treated only at a later stage. These are just a few of the areas where investing in our country through a second stimulus program will both address structural weaknesses in our economy and society, and put people back to work.

We need to bring unemployment down not only because it’s right and humane, but also because our economy requires a kick-start. As Henry Ford knew way back in the early 1900s, workers are also consumers who will drive demand. Without a rise in consumer demand our economy is doomed to years more of stagnation.

To address the crisis that brought down our economy in the first place and prevent a reprise of it, we need more stringent controls on Wall Street. Unbelievably, the big firms are more deeply invested in derivatives now than they were in 2008! At the same time, we need relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, helping them refinance their mortgages and possibly also write off part of the mortgage in cases where they’re underwater. This, too, would enable consumers to spend, helping stimulate a recovery, while also reducing the burden of toxic securities on the banks.

Plans should be made to control the deficit over the long-term, with deficit reduction taking a backseat to recharging our economy. An aggressive short-term policy of austerity would kill any chance at recovery; this is basic macroeconomics.

Deficit reduction must be done through a combination of revenue increases and selective cuts. Revenue should come primarily through raising taxes on the rich (as described above) and through the increased tax receipts that will come with people being back to work. The current payroll tax cuts should be maintained past January for their stimulatory effect; once the economy is growing again, the regular rates should be reinstated, and the ceiling above which income is exempt from FICA should be raised, perhaps to $150,000.

The main area where we can cut without harming our citizens is military spending. No country in the world spends anywhere near what we do on “defense,” which has become a code word for empire. We need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to scrutinize which military expenditures really help keep us safe within our borders, and which ones predominantly allow us to project our power.

Thanks for listening to my ideas, Senator Portman! I wish you luck with your difficult task.

 

When “Too Pretty” Is Also “Too Creepy”

If you read feminist blogs, you’ve surely already seen this gem of a T-shirt, which JC Penney was hawking until they (sensibly) withdrew it in response to public protest and apologized for its sexist nitwittery:

Available in sizes for girls in roughly grades 1 through 8, the T-shirt sports the pseudo-sassy phrase, “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”

Feminist bloggers have rightly slammed the shirt for its obvious sexism. Recalling the notorious “math is hard” Barbie, feMOMhist snarks:

What person would want to encourage a little girl to think that beauty and intellect are mutually exclusive?  Clearly no one who has met moi!

The shirt is a disaster aesthetically, politically, and intellectually. It’s part of a larger phenomenon of T-shirts with attitude, mostly marketed to boys; this particular specimen adds sexism to the mix for a little extra charm. It reinforces the idea that girls and women have to trade sex, sexiness, and prettiness for security and success, an idea that you’d think would be moribund by now but just refuses to die: see Laurie Penny’s hilarious takedown of a new book by LSE researcher Catherine Harkin, who makes exactly that argument.

At Feministe, Caperton questions how “every employee who touched it between wholesaler and Web site” could have thought the shirt innocuous. I’d add that the design team, too, brings to mind the fine fellows from “Dumb and Dumber.”

But there’s one point that I haven’t seen other commentators skewer, and that’s the idea that a girl’s brother ought to be swayed by her prettiness. Am I the only one creeped out by this? Why should a brother be inspired to do his sister’s homework just because of how she looks? I mean, this shirt is encouraging boys to look at their sisters in a way that verges on incestuous. Ewwwww.

It goes to show that in a world where sexuality is seen basically as transactional, even young sisters and brothers are pushed into that paradigm. While actual brother-sister incest is (obviously) a real thing, it’s relatively rare, compared to adult-on-child incest. In most families, brothers and sisters are either indifferent to each other’s looks or insult them. I imagine this T-shirt slogan refers to brothers because most girls in the target age group don’t have boyfriends yet. Its dumb-and-dumber designers probably didn’t think through its incestuous implications. That doesn’t make it any less twisted. Ewwww, again.

 

Finally, Some Sweet Health News

Proof, at last, that chocolate is a wonder food! Yes, I know I’ve thousands of words debunking bad science and bogus ideas about health and bodies. (Offline, it’s upwards of a thousand pages.) But I’m also on record as supporting the health benefits of red wine and coffee (oh, and more on coffee here and here, for nervous new moms). And now, with chocolate, we’ve got the trifecta! A yummy, healthy hattrick!

From Moonstruck Chocolate in Champaign, Illinois, posted by Flicker user eszter, used under a Creative Commons license.

The bottom line is that a meta-study just published in the British Medical Journal found that the people who ate the most chocolate were  37% less likely to have cardiovascular disease and 29% less likely to suffer a stroke. No consistent, measurable impact was seen on diabetes or heart failure. Popular reporting on the new findings has actually been mighty thin, beyond the gleeful headlines. The New York Times and the medical newswire Ivanhoe both offered up the bare bones: the good news, plus a few cautionary phrases about the need for further research and a disclaimer that you shouldn’t just go hog out on chocolate because OH NOES, THE FATZ!

So I took a peek at the study, which is freely available on line. As all important research should be! I don’t care if we historians have to go through a library; the people who want to read my work know where to find me, anyway. But health is a public good, such research is often publicly underwritten, and most medical journals are part of a rapacious oligopoly raking in 40% profits on other people’s work. Earlier this week, the Guardian compared these journals to Rupert Murdoch, except with extra, surplus, bonus evil. Kudos to the BMJ for bucking this trend and letting regular folks view the full text without ponying up $35 or more for the privilege.

On to the study itself, which is a review of seven earlier studies that were mostly observational in character. None were randomized and controlled, so probably the whole lot would be discarded as rubbish by the Cochrane Review. They largely relied on questionnaires administered to patients, which raises the specter of recall bias. (I often can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday.) As in any meta-study, comparison is difficult because the individual studies relied on different measures and methods. But they weren’t crap science, either (that was the point of excluding other studies that weren’t adequately rigorous or informative).

Importantly, most of the studies under review did make serious attempts to control for confounding variables (even though this reader was prepared to forgive just about any methodological flaw):

Five of the seven studies included in this meta-analysis reported a significant reduction in the risk of developing cardiometabolic disorders associated with higher levels of chocolate intake (one on cocoa intake), even after adjustment for potential confounders, including age, physical activity, body mass index, smoking status, dietary factors, education, and drug use. Although we did not find any experimental studies (randomised controlled trials) evaluating the effect of chocolate on hard cardiometabolic outcomes, our findings corroborate those of previous meta-analyses of experimental and observational studies in different populations related to risk factors for cardiometabolic disorders.

In other words, the literature is pretty consistent: chocolate is good for the heart and your whole cardiovascular system. And contrary to how some commenters at the Times were trying to spin it, those benefits were not negated by fat, whether in the chocolate or in the human consumer. They accrued even in people who ate the cheap, sugary stuff (though this is one area where I’d like to see research, which would no doubt confirm my own prejudice in favor of very dark chocolate). I am not surprised by this, since chocolate milk has already gotten the Dr. SunGold stamp of healthy hedonism.

Another way in which this strikes me as pretty good science: The authors point to a couple of plausible biological mechanisms that could make chocolate protective, which include “increasing the bioavailability of nitric oxide, which subsequently might lead to improvements in endothelial function, reductions in platelet function, and additional beneficial effects on blood pressure, insulin resistance, and blood lipids.” Nitric oxide, as you may recall, is the linchpin behind the effectiveness of a certain little blue pill. Viagra was initially under development as a cardiovascular drug that just happened to have felicitous effects on blood vessels located further south.

So in conclusion, if your chocolate bar is still rigid after 4 hours, you may want to consult your physician. Or you could just take it in hand and nibble it ’til it softens. Melting it into a hot fudge sauce is another medically advisable option. And remember: all that erotic enjoyment is good for you!

As for me, I’m trying to get a syllabus together this evening, so no cocoa-inspired sexytimes for me! But I just poured a glass of red wine and broke out oa square of the dark stuff. For breakfast, it’ll be my classic homemade mocha with Snowville milk. Now some intrepid researcher just needs to reveal the wonder nutrients in cheese.

From Chocolatier Blue in Lincoln, Nebraska, taken by Flickr user J. Paxon Reyes, used under a Creative Commons license.

Scary Caturday

If you thought last week’s Caturday post was alarming, this week’s is downright scary:

(Click here if you can’t see the clip.)

And yes, I realize this blog is in danger of turning into a mere catblog. That’s what the Kittywood conspiracy is all about. I’m hoping, though, that with the kids back in school I’ll have a little more time to devote to writing about gender and politics.

Flying While Black

Did you know that reading a book about vintage aircraft now falls under the umbrella of suspicious activity for airline passengers? Actually, it’s safe to say you can probably get away with it if you look like me: white, female, not visibly Muslim (my suspicious skirt notwithstanding).

If you’re male and black? Well, you can expect to be hauled off the airplane and interrogated.

Earlier this month, singer Vance Gilbert was waiting for take-off at Logan when he was asked by a United flight attendant to move his fanny pack from behind his ankles to the upper bin. He suggested shifting it in front of his feet, to keep his wallet at hand. She agreed.

No one is claiming that any conflict occurred. If you read the comments at the link, Lisa Simeone (frequent commenter on this blog) vouches for Gilbert’s character. So does Robyn Ochs, who I “know” through her work on sexuality. Both Lisa and Robyn have known Gilbert personally for years. They and others describe him as a calm, kind man who wouldn’t overreact. We are talking about a graying 50something guy who sports Hawaiian shirts who’s a doggie-dad to two standard poodles.

But moments later, evidently alarmed by the fact that Gilbert was perusing a book about airplanes – we’re talking cutting-edge machines made in Poland circa 1946! – flight personnel diverted the plane from the take-off queue and had a group of state police and TSA officers remove Gilbert from the plane. He was whisked back into a breezeway where he was questioned by police. Here’s how Gilbert describes it on his blog:

Policeman: “Did you have a problem with your bag earlier?”

Me: “No sir, not at all. The flight attendant wanted it secured elsewhere other than behind my feet, and I opted to put it under the seat in front of me. It’s my wallet, even though there’s only 30 bucks in it…And all that was done without belligerence, or words for that matter…it was all good.

A few beats…

Policeman: “Sir, were you looking at a book of airplanes?”

Me: “Yes sir I was. I am a musician for money, but for fun I study old aircraft and build models of them, and the book I was reading was of Polish Aircraft from 1946.”

Policeman: “Would you please go get that book so that i can see it?”

I go back onto the plane – all eyes are on me like I was a common criminal. Total humiliation part 2.

After a couple of minutes he says, “Why, this is all Snoopy Red Baron stuff…”

Me: “Yes sir, actually the triplane you see is Italian, from 1921 a little after World War 1…”

Policeman: “No problem here then, you can go on back on to the plane, sorry to inconvenience you…and have a nice flight”.

“Inconvenience” is hardly the word. The flight was delayed and Gilbert missed his connection. He was out money and time, as were numerous other passengers. But far worse, he was shamed in public. He was frightened. He was reminded that in all the blather about keeping “us” safe, “we” and “us” are always construed as white. (The title of this post isn’t original; it comes from Gilbert’s realization that he was singled out – racially profiled – for flying while black.)

And the persecution of “flying while black,” like “driving/walking/BREATHING while black,” is only intensifying in the post-9/11 era. This isn’t coincidental. It’s built right into our society, from the cult of “Homeland Security” to the concentration of MP-style police ops in non-white neighborhoods. In her book Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the ‘War on the Terror’, Gargi Bhattacharyya details how the WOT isn’t just demonizing and victimizing brown men abroad. It’s also heightening and militarizing the oppression of brown and black men here in the United States.

Gilbert’s ugly experience is just one quotidian example of how the WOT is being brought home to men who aren’t protected by Whiteness. (Brown women are singled out, too, but mostly for the perceived infraction of “flying while Muslim”). It’s also a classic instance of covert racism; every white person involved can point to the manifestly DANGEROUS sketches of Snoopy’s dream plane. No racism here, no-sirree, moving right along …

Gilbert is fighting back. He has contacted the ACLU. United is making apologetic noises (though not yet issuing the abject apology Gilbert deserves). I think they might have messed with the wrong Snoopy/Red Baron aircraft geek, judging from his music:

(Click here if you don’t see the clip.)

A change is gonna come. A change has gotta come. The alternative is a racist dictatorship of the Tea Party-military complex.

On a wholly different plane (ahem), I think one good thing may have come out of Gilbert’s ordeal: wider awareness of his music. It was new to this humble blogger, anyway. So here’s one more … “Some Great Thing.”

(Clickety click if need be.)

Vance Gilbert, I hope you will get your measure of justice. I hope you can take your story to a national audience. Now, could you just add Athens, Ohio, to your tour schedule, pretty please? You truly are Some Great Thing.

(Hat tip to Lisa Simeone for alerting my to Gilbert’s ordeal, and kudos to her and his other friends for jumping to his defense.)

Conspiracy Caturday

Ever wondered if there’s an elaborate plot for kittehs to take over the Internets? Well, here’s the expose we’ve all been waiting for.

(If you can’t see the clip, click here.)

“If you don’t want to do your job and put Maru in a box, I’ll find someone who can!”

Perhaps more alarming than the conspiracy is the fact that I recognized nearly all the kittyvids mentioned in the clip.

Oh, I believe! And so should you! The kitteh conspiracy is real. Just be skeptical when they say that kittens don’t dream. We all know they do.

Still Skirting Real Security at the TSA

Earlier this week, coming off a wonderful visit with family in Northern California, I was about to board a flight home from Sacramento, my two kids in tow. We walked through the metal detector without a beep. Better yet, no Rapiscan in sight! Our luggage rolled right through the x-ray machine without a glitch. But then, just when I thought we were home free, I was summoned for a pat-down.

Aside from my principled objections to invasive and needless patdowns, I feel an extra layer of anxiety when I’m pulled aside while traveling with my kids, especially as a (temporarily) solo parent. What if the officers decide to separate you from the kids? This had happened to us once in Berlin, when my husband was hauled off to the bomb-detection room; fortunately, the whole family was traveling that day, so the kids were never left alone.

The TSO who conducted the search informed me that the kids had to stay with our luggage and I couldn’t touch our bags or, for that matter, my kids until she was finished with me. I have to say that she was warm and reassuring as well as professional. I have no beef with the Sacramento TSA personnel, who acquitted themselves well. My gripe is the TSA’s silly policy, obsessed as it is with security theater.

I asked the TSO why I’d been singled out. She said, “Because you’re wearing a loose skirt.”

Behold the skirt of terror!

The astute reader will have already noticed that this skirt contains four of the five colors from Homeland Security’s sadly defunct terror-threat color chart: blue, green, yellow, and orange. Logically, the red must be somewhere, too … perhaps under my skirt?

No, the TSO didn’t inspect my underwear, and the patdown stopped just short of the “enhanced” standard. She did not move her hand up my thigh until she met “resistance.”  My ladyparts were left undisturbed. She also didn’t search above my waist.

But the patdown was still an exercise in foolery. Being separated from my kids would have been stressful if my younger son were still of the age where he routinely ran away in public. The delay, too, would’ve been irksome if we’d been short on time.

I spoke to the supervisor on the way out and asked him why long skirts weren’t listed on the TSA website as objects of interest. I said that if travelers were forewarned, we might choose to wear clothes that didn’t trigger a patdown. He, too, was warm and professional, but his response just floored me:

“Because we don’t want to let the bad guys know all about our methods. They might find someone who looks just like you and use that person to try and sneak through a bomb.”

Leaving aside the extreme shortage of blonde female terrorists since the demise of the Red Army Faction, what purpose does this faux secrecy serve? Blogger Bob at the TSA likes to emphasize that different methods are used at different airports to keep the terrorists off balance. That’s always been a transparent excuse for TSA excesses.

My own personal theory is that searching passengers with long, loose skirts is a way to target women who appear to be Muslims. Inclusion of a few blonde gals creates a smokescreen of plausible deniability in case anyone charges the TSA with racial or religious profiling. I’m positive the policy is motivated by xenophobia, but you can’t prove it.

All you can do is wear jeggings (eek!) the next time you fly.

Dan Savage Puts a Leash on Rick “Man-on-Dog” Santorum

Just when you think Rick Santorum’s “Google problem” had set a new standard for disgust, Dan Savage proposes a new meme far ickier than the one he has propagated as a neo-definition of “santorum”: “The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”

(If you can’t see the clip, click here.)

Because we really need a laugh after the “clusterfuck” (ballgame’s word) that was the debt-ceiling bloodless coup. And because I’d promised ballgame I’d lighten up.

My condolences if you happen to be named Rick. Or Ricky. Or Richard … Unless, of course, you’ve got your own “man-on-dog” issues.

Oh, and if you figure out the bleeped portions, please do share in comments! Filthy minds want to know.

Democracy Aflame

Monday afternoon, while driving along U.S. Highway 50 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, my family and I came upon two blazes consuming a steep hillside. The second fire was so hot, and so close to the road, we could feel the ovens of Satan through the car doors, from the far side of a divided highway.

The next day, I happened to bump into a couple of forest service firefighters at a community event, and they confirmed that these were not planned burns. They don’t know how the conflagrations started, but they got the flames under control before the fire could endanger the town of Placerville.

Evidently, a firebug is afoot.

The same ethos – a spirit of wanton, senseless, indiscriminate destruction – animates our Tea Party leaders. That rhetoric about financial “terrorism” and “hostage-taking”? It’s spot-on, and I hope Joe Biden won’t have to apologize abjectly for it. After all, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder had no trouble calling his seizure of local democracy “financial martial law.”

These guys know what they’re doing. The Tea Partiers and their enablers, both Repub and Dem, are simply following Grover Norquist’s blueprint for “shrinking government” until it’s small enough to “drown it in a bathtub.” They’re now backed by a burgeoning number of voter-suppression bills and anti-union legislation at the state level, intended to neuter the remaining sectors of the electorate still capable of kicking up a stink about Citizens United and the wholesale selling-out of democracy to the best-paid lobbyists and think tanks.

For now a global financial meltdown has been averted, but for how long? And at what cost? Even as Congress voted to back the economy away from the edge of a cliff, it was pushing democracy straight into the canyon. Into the flames.

The Tea Partiers just learned what many parents eventually learn through painful trial-and-error. If you give in to a child when she tantrums, screams, and threatens to throw all of her toys at you, you’ve got a problem. The child learns: Heh. The more bratty I act, the more my parents will cave! Note, in this scenario, the Tea Partiers are not the adults.

Most of us don’t become sociopaths. Most parents learn to set reasonable boundaries with reasonable consistency, most of the time. Most kids learn to play nicely with others.

A few kids don’t learn. They grow up to be firebugs. Or Tea Partiers. Or maybe both?

Barack Obama and the Democratic caucuses did exactly what a smart parent would avoid. They caved into bullying. They failed to set boundaries (the time for which would’ve been last fall, when the Bush tax cuts were on the table). They followed the recipe for creating a juvenile delinquent with “materials easily available at home.”

With this shit-sandwich – nay, “Satan sandwich” – of a debt ceiling agreement, we’ve averted a global meltdown in the finance markets. We’ve kept consumer interest rates at a reasonable level – for now, at least. We’ve also shot the recovery in the gut (hey, that terrorism metaphor is handy!) and ensured that job growth will be anemic or negative over the next few years. (The debt-ceiling’s terrible effects on the recovery – and on jobs, in particular – would belong in a separate post wherein I sing the praises of Keynesianism. Just go read Robert Reich, ‘kay? It’ll hurt less. And then watch this:)

But the economic impact of the deal, ugly though it be, is far from the worst of its repercussions. On a fundamental level, we have abandoned representative democracy. We’re left with a terrible spoof of Orwell in which all congresscritters may vote, but some congresscritters’ votes count more than others.

We’re also at the mercy of sociopathic brats. The next time the Repubs want to enforce their will, they need only promise economic Armageddon (or threaten Medicare’s very existence, or strangle the ongoing operations of the Federal Aviation Administration, which they’re doing right now as I write this). Yes, the Tea Partiers may – may – be voted out in the next electoral cycle, but since they don’t want to build or grow anything, they merely need to destroy. They can break an awful lot before they’re through. (Planned Parenthood, anyone? Which – perhaps not coincidentally – was firebombed this week at a Texas clinic that doesn’t even perform abortions?)

The Tea Partiers have learned that hostage-taking pays. Financial terrorism pays. They’ve made themselves over into unstoppable veto actors. The only question is: who – apart from the FAA – will be their next hostage?

Or as Robert Kuttner puts it (with metaphors only slightly less jumbled than my own):

Let us face the momentous truth: The United States has been rendered ungovernable except on the extortionate terms of the far-right.

(His whole piece is terrific.)

Ironically, the necessary advice du jour comes from Ronald Reagan – an ex-prez much disposed to driving up the debt: “Never negotiate with terrorists.” Despite his adulation of Reagan, Obama did just that. Now we’ve got government-by-terrorist-fiat.

Burn, baby, burn.

The financial terrorists have won.