Small Blawg

Awww, isn't this a great logo? I will always be proud of my NOW background and grateful for the schooling I got from the organization back in the ERA days.

I could not go to the parade in downtown DC today, but I pitched in for the cause by creating a lengthy biographical piece in Wikipedia for a gay rights activist. More on that anon... meanwhile, enjoy the image and click for more info!

Teabaggers Phony Photo

The teabaggers (tea baggers?) had an event on the Smithsonian Mall which police are informally estimating at 40,000-50,000 attendees; one unofficial guesstimate is 70,000. The Baggers, however, are claiming one to two million, and are circulating a photo showing the Mall completely packed with people who seem to mostly be dressed in white.

This afternoon, MSNBC and several blogs published the photo and pointed out that it lacks the Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004. All the white makes me wonder if it was one of the rallies sponsored by NOW (the National Organization for Women) about the Equal Rights Amendment or about reproductive rights — NOW often asks attendees to wear white in honor of the suffragists who won the vote for most U.S. women* in the early decades of the 20th century.

See HuffPo for more on the story, and a gander at the phony pic. PolitiFact's coverage notes the photo has construction cranes in front of the Natural History Museum, when the NHM was installing its IMAX theater. The theater opened in May, 1999, so the photo is somewhat older than that.

August established the Right's willingness to lie to reporters on a scale not seen since Joe McCarthy's day. But this... so easily checked... can only be matched by the series of phony birth certificates produced by the Birthers this summer.

*Native American women and men did not get the vote until 1924.

Joe Wilson's Disgrace

Meanwhile, Screamin' Joe Wilson says he will not apologize to the House for breaking its rules while yelling at President Obama during his health care speech to the Joint Session last Wednesday. He says he's apologized to Obama's chief of staff, and that should be enough. Reporters are not pressing him about the fact that the outburst violates the House's own rules, and violates Section 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well. Wilson is a colonel in the reserves and is legally bound by the UCMJ to show basic respect to the Commander in Chief.

Though Obama has said the incident is over as far as he's concerned (what else could he say?), House Dems are preparing some sort of resolution of condemnation or rebuke. Though this allows Wilson to pretend he's being victimized, it's sadly needed, lest the House floor become a haven for right-wing hooligans as the August town hall meetings did.

Knowing that the speech was getting world-wide coverage, what good does Wilson imagine he was doing our national image when he insulted the President on camera? Is it more important to this slug that he get his fifteen minutes of fame, than it is for the world to see our President treated with respect and our legislators behaving with dignity?

And within 24 hours, Wilson was using this incident in a fund-raising letter, showing no remorse and continuing to publish his own falsehoods about the bill, absurd claims which have been debunked by every professional, neutral political analyst who has written about them. So much for the sincerity or truth of his mealy-mouthed "apology" to Rahm Emanuel, whom he spoke to Wednesday night in lieu of the President.

The tantrum of this no-name lout from South Carolina stepped on the night's two serious news points: Obama's refutations of the phony scare stories promulgated by the corporate-funded agitators during August; and Senator Ted Kennedy's final words to his fellow senators on the issue he worked on for fifty years.

What a pity that, by crowding Kennedy's letter out of the news, a mannerless brat such as Representative Wilson was able to undermine Senator Kennedy's final service to his country.

Shannon Moore of the Huffington Post, trying to be polite for a G-rated audience, told Keith Olbermann tonight on his show that Sarah Palin is "guano crazy."

So, permit me to coin "guanomania" for this affliction, and "guanomaniac" for the afflicted.

Earlier this week, I'd heard someone use the phrase "batcrap crazy" as a slight bowdlerization of the typical construction, but guanomania is something you can say in front of the kids. I like it.

With the passing of Teddy Kennedy, the assassinations of his two brothers are much in the news again, and Vanity Fair has a long article about JFK biographer Manchester's struggles with the family to tell the story as he learned it. There's a lot I didn't know about the murder in this piece by Sam Kashner:

“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.”

A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.”

A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

Manchester discovered that in a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, the students in a fourth-grade class burst into applause.

Those who do not remember history... Chris Matthews of MSNBC had a guest point out yesterday that the Glenn Beck crowd—and not just commentators, but congressmen also—are using language that all but calls directly for this bit of history to be repeated.

Without taking anything away from the reality that black citizens still face a great deal more police harassment than white citizens, I feel that the confrontation in the kitchen and on the porch of the Gates home July 17 was not so much about white v. black as it was Blue v. Everybody Else. He was dragged off in handcuffs to an afternoon in prison as extrajudicial punishment for the crime of contempt of cop, not disturbing the peace.

Obama referred to the cop "act[ing] stupidly" and was trounced for it, though it is true. Social commentator Touré protests that the Beer Summit was an unwarranted gift to Sgt. Crowley which put a cop guilty of misconduct on the same level as the injured party and the President of the United States, and that's true too — though the scene in Obama's garden was the only sensible way to try to put the story to rest, or rather, put the story to use as a model of reconciliation.

Having Joe Biden present was another example of Obama's deft and thoughtful hand. So why does everyone think that Obama spoke carelessly in his initial remark? He knew the question was coming and he chose his words knowing that they would inflame police sentiment and tromp his health care presentation — the latter no real loss, as it was the first pitch he's made which didn't make it to home plate, and deserved to fall unremarked out of the news cycle.

So far, only Margaret Carlson has suggested* that "Obama doesn't make rookie mistakes. It's like Larry Bird missing a free-throw." Obama "calibrates" all his language with precision, and this was no exception. This was the nation's first black president choosing to step away from his studied affectation of serenity on race to not only address that "part of my portfolio" but also remind his multi-colored electorate that even a President knows what every dark-skinned American is up against, every day.

In defense of Sgt. Crowley: he asked Gates to step outside simply as a pretext for arresting him on the grounds that "outside" — Gates' own porch — was a place where Gates could "disturb the public" (the possibly seven neighbors who were watching the six cops). Pretty shabby. However, there are some situations in which police responding to a false alarm follow a protocol of getting the resident outside in order to be certain they are not under duress of some sort, say from an intruder holding some other occupant hostage elsewhere in the home. Sometimes, in what seem to be false alarm cases, it is not just appropriate but important to ask the resident to come out into the open even after their tenancy is verified. Crowley's conduct works against using that as an explanation, but for what it's worth, there it is.

And for what it's worth, here it is, the full text of the now-infamous "jungle monkey" email from Boston cop Justin "I Am Not A Racist" Barrett, who repeatedly uses "ax" for "ask" and repeatedly insists that his ungrammatical screed represents better writing than that of Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham, whom he suggests—again, repeatedly—should be serving him breakfast Sunday mornings as some sort of a house slave, or maid, or waitress; it's not clear. He was so proud of this foul mess that he sent it to his entire National Guard unit. And he's not a child (chronologically, anyway); he's 36.

Before I leave this for now, I have to go back to Crowley and ask: in a radio call in which he says the lone man in the house has identified himself and is the homeowner, why does he tell the dispatcher to "keep the cars coming"? And did he say "uh, cooperative" or "uncooperative"? Gates is 5'7", slender, 58, has a hip replacement (which wasn't visible) and uses a cane (which was). This was a wealthy neighborhood in broad daylight, and Crowley already had at least a partner at the scene, and already had met with Gates and gotten his i.d. Was Crowley trying to enhance the size of his blue audience? If not, then what?

Officers breaking the law to punish "contempt of cop" are a serious problem nationwide and it's getting worse. It's not just beat-downs like Rodney King or spurious arrests like Henry Louis Gates. Tasers, promoted as a way to reduce the use of lethal force, are being misused as if they were cattle prods or canine shock collars and people are dying. I can see why Obama wouldn't want to open that discussion this week, but I hope Holder can spare a team at DOJ to start addressing the issue, not just with prosecution, but with an attempt to introduce a new ethical standard for cops on the street at every level of jurisdiction, via a strong public relations stance, official guidance, and subsidized retraining.

*Near the conclusion of Andrea Mitchell Reports shortly before 2 pm ET on CNN today. Margaret Carlson also wrote about it for Bloomberg News.

Full Statement of Henry Louis Gates
Press Conference of Sgt. Crowley (tiny excerpt of "agree to disagree" — where's the whole thing?)
No Beer for Caller
Audio of Call and Transmissions "___ cooperative" at 4:29-4:31

Oh, gah! This was simply dreadful. You can tell from her script that, at the moment, she doesn't have a single political professional from the big leagues as her coach.

She's either on her own,* or using provincial "talent," and it's... it's... it's a paean to socialism, among other things. Seriously. When she brags about how she was able to extract money from the corporate pillagers who are extracting Alaska's natural resources, she's touting expanded socialism as her greatest accomplishment, without using the "S" word. And "beware of government largess," she says, to the residents of the only state where every citizen gets a gummint check just for breathing.


Watch CBS Videos Online
There's more, of course. There are incoherent references to soldiers like clumps of unmixed lard throughout this very heavy biscuit. There are her usual gripes about reporters. Really, there was no news at all except for what I said above: this was a script written without professional muscle, and that says something about how the right-wing king-makers feel about Citizen Palin right now.

She is great with a professional speech in her hands. When she opens her mouth on her own, nothing but toads and word salad comes out.

LATE EDIT: Bless the good souls at Vanity Fair, they did what anyone who reads and writes English for a living must long to do: they copy-edited her speech. Not the final one on July 26; the earlier one, July 4 weekend, when she announced she was winning the Iquitarod.

Also, Daily Kos has a brief look back at the Sarah Palin Hall of Shame, lowlights from the past year or so.

*SECOND EDIT: On Hardball tonight, MSNBC reporter Norah O'Donnell told host Chris Matthews that Palin had grown so paranoid in her last weeks, she'd stopped communication with her own staff, and would not even tell her press aides where she was going in her final days. "They didn't even know she was in a camper coming up here with her kids." ("Here" being Fairbanks, Alaska, not the Appalachian Trail — that's some other governor who lied and hid from their own staff.) So apparently she wasn't relying on local talent, either, but was giving us a speech July 26 which was pure Palin - purely pitiful.

CNN and Faux News have been running a scare-tactic ad the past few days in which a Canadian woman stares into the camera and tells you the Canadian health system would have killed her because it wouldn't treat her "brain tumor" quickly enough.

But it turns out it wasn't a brain tumor and she knew it; it couldn't have killed her and she knew that too; and she's being financed by right-wing loons up in Canada because, surprise surprise, she's one of them.

And she can't blame that on a brain tumor, either.

Thanks to my Canadian friend pyat for the heads-up. Looks like Kos and HuffPo already have the story... how long will it take to make it to CNN and Fox, who are getting paid to spread this garbage? The New York Times covers the fakery here and here

Also, delicious... Jon Stewart nailed Lou Dobbs of CNN last night for Dobb's July 20 birther rant about Obama's birth certificate by pointing out that Kitty Pilgrim of CNN had done a several minutes debunking the whole birther business on July 17... while she was guest-hosting Dobbs' own show. Boy, when Lou takes a vacation, he really takes a vacation... from reality, and from even a tivo glimpse at his own billet.

No comment on the relationship between the two, except to remind you that Meghan McCain famously said she will not comment about Sarah Palin at all, ever — thus providing a pretty clear comment. And in fact, Ms. McCain tries to squirm out of commenting on a great many things. But before we get into that, I need to share a metaphor I've never heard before, provided by Republican consultant Mark McKinnon on an appearance with Rachel Maddow July 7:

[Palin] may be crazier than an acre of snakes.

Hissssss! He surely has a point. Palin keeps forgetting that erstwhile almost-son-in-law Levi Johnston has access to a national microphone whenever he wants it, and that he lived in her daughter's bedroom for lo, those many months while they were waiting for their child to arrive (something which Palin tries to deny for fear of alienating her berserker moralist base.) Johnston nailed her this week by telling the press precisely why she quit the governorship early: based on what he heard living in her house, she wanted the money for the book, and there's a possible reality show in the offing. And then, showing off her distinctly non-Presidential chops, Palin sent a snarky spokeswoman out to accuse the 19-year-old father of her grandson of engaging in "fiction" and "acting."

Meanwhile, the press has been making much of Republican candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia indicating a vigorous disinterest in having her appear on their behalf.* What she buys them is far less than what she costs them in the sort of electorate those two states have. Governor Rick Perry of Texas is eager to have her; he shares her husband's secessionist inclinations.

I caught Meghan McCain on Real Time with Bill Maher last night; it was a re-run of the June 19 show. She wants it both ways: at 24, she wants to be taken seriously, and to have the weight to appear with the likes of Paul Begala, also on that night's roster. Maher pressed her several times about the way Palin lied about Letterman's recent joke about Bristol, tagging him as a rapist and child molester, versus the way her own father was lied about by Bush 43's campaign in 2000, being accused of fathering "a black child out of wedlock and crazy from the 'Nam," and she'd chirp at him that she just wants to move on, move on, MOVE ON ALREADY MISTER OLD GUY. Maher said, "Isn't that the same thing, telling lies about somebody?" In a Valley Girl whine, she responded,

I'd love to look forward in politics, and 2009 and the Obama administration. I hate talking about 2000, it was nine years ago, I was in puberty when it happened, like I'd love to move on and talk about my career now, that's what I'd love to do.

She giggled and snickered like a Kathy Najimy character, complete with Najimy's head fakes, inflections, and postures. Maher kept kid-gloving her, as she is, after all, still quite the kid and working hard to maintain that image. Giggle! Snicker! Wiggle!

Paul Begala finally put a smack down. Young McCain was opining that Obama, not yet six months into his administration, needs to quit "completely blaming everything on its predecessor, completely... I'm sick of hearing, 'We were handed this, we were handed this...' I know, everybody knows, but we need to move on." (The press, btw, has made note that Obama does not do this; that he rarely mentions Dubya at all, in any context). Begala said he felt Dubya had not been blamed nearly enough, and remarked that "Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter every day for eight years." McCain piped up winningly: "Well, I wasn't born yet, so I wouldn't know."

"Well, I wasn't born during the French Revolution, but I know about it," Begala snapped back. She deserved it. Despite her modest self-deprecation in her intro, she seemed to want to be treated as an expert who was literally born yesterday year, someone born full-grown with a blog in the 2008 election, like Venus from the waves or Athena from her father's thigh, who should be permitted to pretend ignorance of all that went before.

Not all of the ignorance is pretense, however. Meghan McCain, youthful and pretty, made a big titillating splash with the weary journalists who'd been covering her septuagenarian papa when she boldly announced some months back that she's not a virgin and the Republican party needs to loosen up about sex. She tried to defend her remarks on Maher's show by explaining that the Party either considers a woman a "pius" "holy virgin" and abstinent, or at least "meant to be abstinent," (a reference to Bristol Palin's leadership of Candie's abstinence campaign after the birth of her son) or a "skank...a perverted sex addict," and that this isn't fair; "unhealthy, especially for young women."

Yes, dear, we know. Don't expect anything else from the Republican party, in which legislators keep mistresses or patronize prostitutes without any political consequences, while staunchly voting against sex ed, birth control, abortion, and gay marriage. Ms. McCain, how did you make it through college without ever hearing about the Madonna-Whore dichotomy? Or did you assume it was just another slam at the singer? How could she make it through the conversation without using the phrase "double standard"? It seems more than passing likely she's never heard either phrase, or understood them if she has. McCain acted the fluffy bunny to the extent that Maher took on a distinctly kind and avuncular role, even literally leaping up to defend her when Begala treated her like a grown-up, as well as gently telling her she'd done well before launching into his concluding monologue.

Maher had a nice line to close the show: "Over the last thirty-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the Right has moved into a mental hospital." And that's a nice line to close this post with, as it circles right back 'round to Palin and the acre of snakes.

*This may be in Virginia, where gubernatorial hopeful Bob McDonnell has welcomed the following parade of 2012 hopefuls: Haley Barbour (MS), Mike Huckabee (AR), Mitt Romney (MA, sort of), and Bobby Jindal (LA).

Now, I loathe the woman as much as I loathe the Republican Party as a whole, which is a whole lot of loathin' goin' on.

However.

It occurs to me that there is one way that Palin can be actually useful in a big way and do her party a huge service: she can quit the party itself.

No, I'm not being rude. I mean it. If Palin quits and tries a third-party candidacy, a lá Ross Perot, the Republican primary could benefit by having her draw off the worst of the hard-core loons — that is, her base.

And if she draws the nutballs out of the Republican primary, the Republicans might actually nominate a person who does not adhere point-by-point to the radical religious right's agenda. This would be bad for the Democrats, though in 2012 at least, the Obama juggernaut should still be good enough to steamroll whomever the goppers prop up.

As far as I'm concerned, though, I'd like the Republicans to continue to nominate candidates who are conspicuously crazy and unfit for the job. I fear "moderate" Republicans (what are those? the ones who want pregnant women seeking abortions just imprisoned instead of executed?) as much as the far right does, but for different reasons. As long as the book-burners and gay-baiters get their way in the primary, I get mine in the general.

Palin admitted in her resignation speech that she's going to trot around the Lower 48 collecting help-me chits from candidates desperate enough to invite her — desperate enough for the support of Palin's core constituency to ignore her significant negatives from all other segments of the party. That serves her well whether she runs as a Republican or as the candidate of the Palin Party.

(If large-eared Texan Perot's symbol ought have been a large-eared Chihuahua perro, can you come up with a good totem for Palin's vanity platform? Maybe a riff on her "dead fish" comment in the resignation; an Alaskan salmon floating belly-up? Because whether the FBI is lying or not — and law enforcement is permitted to lie — there's certainly something fishy about the sudden quit which cannot entirely be explained by her unhappiness over the coincident Vanity Fair article.)

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, if Palin is in the primary, Huckabee can lay low and let Palin attack Romney's religious beliefs all by herself. The Christianists who dominate the Republican primary electorate doom Romney, though everyone pretends not to know it. But if Palin stomps off, taking her nutballs and fruitbats with her? Well, that's another story. It's possible that without Palin's cadre to augment his own faithful, Huckabee won't be able to come up with the numbers to trounce Romney's good looks and money. Romney has the corporatist vote sewn up. If the religious vote is either MIA or divided, that might be enough.

She and husband Todd have shown an interest in fringe politics for years. Though she may not believe it today, the grumpy old men of the Groaty Old Party are not going to touch her with a ten-foot pole after last week's fiasco. Karen Tumulty summed it up: Sarah wins the Iquitarod. She quit four colleges before graduating from a fifth. She spent her last year as mayor running for Lt. Governor. She lost, but was speedily appointed by the new governor to chair the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission. She quit the Commission in her first year. She informally dropped being a full-time governor in 2008 to run for Veep with John McCain, and she officially quit the governorship eight months later (16 months early) because... well, because being an author and speaker makes more money and is more exciting than bein' a dumb ol' governor on a stage which she now feels is too small for her, and which has grown slick with hurled fruit. The sheer freedom of the lame duck status she so despises apparently has not occurred to her. Lame ducks are free to peck and kick and pull feathers, to work for the common good without fear of partisan consequences.

And be damned to everyone who raised money, who gave money, who circulated nomination petitions for her, who knocked on doors for her, who made cold calls for her, who believed her when she said she wanted to be Alaska's governor.

When Newt Gingrich makes his next electoral run, I'm going to call up the Secretary of State or whoever tracks elections down in Georgia and find out what it cost to put on the special election when he quit in a pout just a few weeks after his voters turned out for him, just because the House Republicans didn't want him to be Speaker any more. It was a sum in the millions, I'm certain, all to indulge his tantrum.

Because the internet is so transient a medium, the entirety of the blog entry that led me to this is produced here behind the cut. In short, a judge possibly applying sharia law despite that the Maldives are signatory to the Convention Against Torture and the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, authorized the torture and possible execution via 100 lashes of an unmarried teen woman who had sex with two men. Though the judge asserts the intention is not to "cause injury," 100 lashes can kill. The woman has already been beaten and taken to the hospital. The men are not being punished. ( Full text behind the cut, with links and thanks to John Pettitt of CarnalNation, and Maldives reporter Maryam Omidi. ) The original July 5 story Pettitt bases his summary upon is by Maryam Omidi here, replete with even sadder details.

Latest statistics from the department of judicial administration’s website reveal that in 2006, out of 184 lashed for extra-marital sex, 146 were women. * * * * Judge Abdulla said the goal was not to cause injury to the offender and the person administering the punishment was not to raise his arm higher than his shoulder. * * * * Abdulla said public floggings were common in the Maldives, and the last one was carried out on 30 June. Further, around 200 people found guilty of extramarital sex were awaiting the punishment.

If you don't like it, you know what to do. I suspect courteous but passionate snail mail is more likely to be effective than phone calls, faxes, or emails. Mail which denigrates Islam or sharia will make things worse, not better, so choose your words carefully. Please reference the international horror at physical torture, at gender injustice, and at the way their signatory status to the Conventions was disregarded. It is probably unwise to mention any news source that would lead back to Maryam Omdi.

Ambassador Ahmed Khaleel
EMBASSY OF THE REPUBLIC OF MALDIVES
800 Second Avenue, Suite 400-E
New York NY 10017

Telephone: 212-599-6195
Fax: 212-661-6405
Email : info@maldivesembassy.us
Website: http://www.maldivesmission-ny.com/eng/

Possibly obsolete alternate fax: 212-972-3970
Possibly obsolete alternate emails: maldives@un.int    or    maldives@onecommonwealth.org