Quirkus addendum

What have liberals done for you?

2005-07-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

Edit note: This entry is moved from my old political blog "Common Veil" posted here insted of Life, After All which focuses more on writing and media culture than the political/liberal sphere. This entry was originally posted well over a year ago. ~aaj

Gakked from Conceptual Guerilla, who also couldn't find a link:

"Liberal policies made America the freest, wealthiest, most successful and most powerful nation in human history. Conservatism in power always threatens to undo that national progress, and is almost always frustrated by the innate decency and democratic instincts of the American people...

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism -- with the support of the American people.
-- Joe Conason

And you should absolutely check out Defeat the Right in three Minutes

Edit: Atribution provided by Megan -- Here is the whole intro to the book "Big Lies" from which this is taken.

Money, Money, Money (musical edition)

2005-07-28T23:15:00.000-05:00

Well apparently people who participate in free music file sharing spend more money on their passion than those who don't fileshare according to this Guardian Unlimited story.

Computer-literate music fans who illegally share tracks over the internet also spend four and a half times as much on digital music as those who do not, according to research published today.

The survey confirms what many music fans have informally insisted for some time: that downloading tracks illegally has also led them to become more enthusiastic buyers of singles and albums online.

Online file sharers 'buy more music'

Owen Gibson, media correspondent

Wednesday July 27, 2005

And this in the same week that Sony forks over a $10 million settlement for payola

"even though state and federal laws bar record labels from paying radio stations for air time."

Damn those pesky publicly owned airwaves anyway.

Huh. Who'd a thunk?

mumble, mumble...something about glass houses...

Smackdown

2005-07-27T13:55:00.000-05:00

You have to give the neocon/conservative/fundamentalist/kill public education credit for chutzpah, if nothing else:

But I like it better when the other side gives him what-for:

Rick Santorum: Sister Liguori Rossner explains it all to you. (About halfway down the page.)

...Sen. Santorum teaches his children the following lessons:
1) Take advantage of the system whenever you can.
2) The little guy pays while the rich and powerful guy gets away with it.
3) As a Catholic, you have no obligation to pay your share to the common good in spite of Catholic social doctrine.

I always wanted to go to Catholic school.

New digs

2005-07-20T20:24:00.000-05:00

FTP issues have forced me to give up the old blog, not so much because it's bad as it's become nearly impossible to upload files, so the archives are still there, for anyone interested, but I'm hoping blogspot will prove to be more stable (And cheaper). I'm going to move some posts over (including one from 2002 just 'cause I like it,) but not all because I'm lazy.

I'm planning on touching base with some old favorites and will report on who is still active (and customize a bit). for me, life has settled some, the bills are getting paid, it's damn hot, but otherwise...

C'est la vie.

Surfacing (moved from previous blog)

2005-06-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

Although I seriously doubt anyone realized I was gone. As a socio-political commentator, I kind of suck. A political wonk, I'm not.

But during my hiatus I've been educating myself a bit. I've spent a fair amount of time at dailykos.com, and more recently, I've been paying attention to a lot of what LJ user ginmar has to say. At neither site am I in 100% agreement, but both have a lot of things to offer from a variety of viewpoints.

Some things that have caught my attention recently.

1.) While listening to NPR last night on the way home, they did a segment on think Tanks, and how a single issue (The Estate Tax) took on a life of its own once it was bankrolled by an Alabama business man who wanted to see it repealed. Now, the vast majority of Americans think the estate tax will affect them and their heirs when they die and the republicans have managed to repeal it temporarily. Expect it to be a permanent feature before the next presidential election. In truth, only estates in excess of a million dollars are taxable and while there are more people now who could conceivably have an estate that size to leave than there were when the tax was enacted (which was truly to curb the excesses of the robber barons) raising the limit would make more sense.

The point of the segment was how the ridiculous can become mainstream, how facts get twisted, rationales distorted and in this case how it got framed as the "Death Tax" and how utterly impotent the democratic leadership was in wresting the issue back.

Which leads me to another ridiculous and improbable thing: 2.) Senator Kay O'Connor of Kansas is seeking the GOP nomination for Secretary of State. For those of you who have never heard of her, she's the dufus who in 2001, questioned the right or advisability of women to Vote. Yup, she questioned the wisdom of the 19th ammendment:

"I think the 19th Amendment, while it's not an evil in and of itself, is a symptom of something I don't approve of," she said at the time. "The 19th Amendment is around because men weren't doing their jobs, and I think that's sad. I believe the man should be the head of the family. The woman should be the heart of the family."

I'm sorry. I keep trying to pull on my feminist, humanist, rationalist boots every morning and then I read or hear about someone like this moron and wonder why I bother. I don't however, any longer wonder if I should have had kids. I mean does the irony of this woman seeking an elected office totally escape her? In some ways, women are our own worst enemies.

A lot of people would accuse me of being more equalist than feminist and they are probably right. My definition of feminism is pretty basic: Women are people too and anything: person or policy that treats them as less than entirely invested human beings isn't equality.

3) in better news, the most recent Scientific American has an article aobut obesity being an overblown issues, especially in older people. Now, by anybody's standard, I'm obese, but at the same time, I'm infuriatingly healthy (or so my doctor says). I absolutly need to lose another 50 pounds, no question, but my bp, cholesterol and lung capacity are all pretty well normal or better. I'm at risk for diabetes, although less so since changing my diet (and I've lost a few pounds, but not significantly.)

It's like the old scare about cyclymates, that years later proved to be not a significatn risk for cancer... it's hard to know what to believe. I totally conceed that most Americans eat too much and exercise too little. But some small part of me is thinking that this is less a health issue than it is a silent protest against the rail-thin and waifish models of both genders being presented as beautiful and perfect specimens of humanity.

Maybe we're on the verge of returning to more Rubinesque standards of beauty: full figures, nice curves, the return of flowing fabrics.

If so, I'll be ahead of the curve. so to speak. [*G*]

Failing the Litmus test (moved from previous blog)

2005-06-01T19:00:00.000-05:00

I have posted little or nothing here since before the last election...but this just left me stunned. It's not that I don't believe it,or that I'm not aware that the vast majority of women are under-employed,underpaid, treated as less than human, less than equal. I know it, you know it...most of us try to deal, make it better where we can but otherwise find ourselves just trying to get through each day...and I'm pretty much aware that I, personally, am a lot better off than a lot of women I know and a million times better off than most women on the planet.

A few weeks ago a male co-worker and I got into a discussion about societal views on women, it was lively but civil and like most men I know, he's a fairly decent guy but has a hard time wrapping his brain around the idea that he is still trapped in a sexist mind-set despite his desire to see equality between men and women. He plays the exception card a lot and I have to take it apart. The fact that he keeps coming back for more, gives me hope. But, during one conversation he said (in a cop out) that "American women are better off than most women in the world as far as equality goes..."

I did point out to him that despite the fact that women make up 52% of the population in this country, we are undrepresented in government by a huge margin and that most women, in addition to having to fulfill the "traditional" women's roles, more and more are having to (not getting to) take on their share of the breadwinning.

Well, according to a 2005 report put out by the World Economic Forum (http://www.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/Reports/gender_gap.pdf) both he and I were very, very wrong.

Out of 58 countries, the US ranked 17th. We ranked 46th in Economic Opportunity and 42nd in Health and Well-Being...

But you know what? [begin sarcasm]...we're better educated.[/end sarcasm](Rank of 8). There were five indicators in total -- we ranked 19th in both Economic Participation and Political empowerment.

I am just flailing here. And all I can think is I'm so very glad I never had or ever will have a daughter.

Read the whole report. It's not that long.

We have seen the enemy and it is us (moved from previous blog)

2003-11-20T04:05:00.000-05:00

I am scaring myself here.

I'm weirding myself out just by typing this header...but it's been bugging me for days and even more so since the Mass. court passed down its ruling. I was brought up in a fairly traditional and highly orthodox religion -- Anglo-Catholic, whcih is about as close as you can get to being catholic without the Pope.

I used to think and still do that a little moment of silence and prayer in schools was not a big deal. The argument's been around so long, I just keep thinking what can it hurt?

and then we have the fight about the 10 commandments in public buildings, and people like Judge Moore and Fred Phelps carrying their message of hatred and intolerance to every news wire that will pick it up. We have Texas trying to force the education board to teach the story of divine creation. The insistence of the far right that America is a "Christian" state, a "Christian" country...

Then we have the gay marriage/civil union isue and the conservative base and the GOP and the president swearing to make this the fight of the next election. The undermining of women's rights. The "Concerned Women of America" encouraging women to give up their careers to stay home and be wives and mothers.

The arguments of the liberals and the democrats about gay marriage, about abortion and the right to choose, about the intrusions of religious ideology into our schools and our courts and our legislature...those are only symptoms of what we're really up against as people thrashed it out on the gay marriage thread.

The Taliban, or the American version of it, is here, in out extremist, fundamentalist religious sects. I'd seen the parallels before but only as incidentals. I'm not talking metaphors here. We invaded Afghanistan to take them from power...we invaded Afghanistan because their radical, extremist, fundamentalist views were oppressive and intolerable and their methods were of terrorism and keeping people uneducated and focing them to adhere to religious tennets that they may or may not have believed in.

If we're framing a fight over the next year, it really isn't about politics at all. the religious right (and I do mean the far right) are talking over and influencing everything we do -- every ocnversation we have, every policy our government makes.

The enemy isn't in the middle east. It's here. and it scares me silly in a way it didn't before tonight. Before tonight it was about policy and politics...

This is something bigger. and I have no idea how to fight it at all.

Women Who Aren't Stupid (moved from previous blog - yes, old)

2002-04-23T13:45:00.000-05:00

Which isn't to imply that the vast majority of women are stupid, but it rings true for me on certain women, often denounced as being idiots...because they eschew more common sense than common society can bear to listen to.

So, I finally caught up with Molly Ivins, who is most definitely not stupic, idiotic or even terribly emotional. She is both intelligent and articulate and she has balls enough to speak her mind, albeit, it's unlikely the people who most need to listen are reading her.

On 4/19/2002 she posted a colum on Moral Ambiguity and all things considered, including the fact she is from -- and lives and works in -- Texas, is not particularly supportive or flattering to our current president.

I told you she wasn't stupid. Like Molly, I don't particularly think George W. is stupid either. I do think he's reactionary, and dangerously comitted to the idea that Being Right is more important than being smart...and that's a little scary.

The fly in the face part of this, of course, being, that Molly is a political columnists. Which doesn't make her an expert, but it does make her a tad smarter than most, because understanding the whole political system is kind of her stock in trade.

Another woman who isn't stupid is the Misanthropic Bitch, who is as about in your face as you can get and sometimes, her vitriole requires a great many galsses of wine to dull...but underneath it all, her rationale is sound. Crude, not particularly empathic, but sound. Aptly named. Her last posting is form February, addressing the inequality if not greed of some of the survivors or families of those killed in the 9/11 attacks. Check your unbridled patriotism at the door -- unbridle it and let it graze...because has has a point. That metaphorical 35 year old housewife with two kids who lost her husband to cancer isn't any better or worse off than the 35 year old housewife with two kids who lost her husband in the bombing of the Trade towers, or the crash in Pennsylvania, or in the crumbling bowels of the Pentagon...both of them, if lucky, have some life insurance coming. Both of them, if lucky have some familial support. One of them might be eligible for additional aid from the 9/11 relief fund. the other one doesn't have a shot in hell of additional aid from anywhere.

I'm not immune to the losses and the tragedy of 9/11. I'm certainly not oblivious to the changes that are happening around us every day as our rights are soft-filed away, and our government continues to make ill-advised, if not out-right bad decisions in matters both financial and diplomatic. Where disagreeing with the policy of the current administration is just as likely to bring down accusations of treason, or anti-patriotism as be ignored.

The lack of public outcry bothers me immensely. It's entirely likely that I've written my congress people and my senators more in the past six months than ever in my life.

And for the first time in my life...I'm paranoid enough to worry about it, which doesn't say much for my confidence in my political leaders or in my lawmakers.

and you know, I'm not a stupid woman either.

Think.