Lakoff on Republicans and incompetence

excerpt from the article:

Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s “failures” and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault.

George Lakoff on freedom

excerpts from the article:

----Over more than two centuries Americans demanded successive expansions of freedom — progressive freedom. Expansions of voting rights, civil rights, education, public health, scientific knowledge, and protections from fear and want: these all made us freer to follow our dreams. These were the ideals of freedom that I grew up with. They are now all under threat, not by guns or bombs, but an under-the-radar redefinition of freedom and liberty to suit right wing ideology. And it is taking place under our noses, with the complicity of the media, where there has been little noticeable questioning of the President’s use of “freedom” and “liberty.” The media has not made an issue of it.

----Progressives: There should be a freedom to marry. The government should not be able to decide who can marry who.
Conservatives: “Freely elected” government officials should determine who can marry who. That’s what a “free country” means.

Progressives: Social security, the minimum wage, universal health care, college for all are ways to guarantee freedom from want.
Conservatives: Giving people things they haven’t earned creates dependency and robs people of their freedom.

Progressives: The 45 million working people who can’t afford health care cannot all pull themselves up by their bootstraps. An economy that drives down wages to increase investor profits creates a cheap labor trap. The trap works against freedom from want.
Conservatives: Economic liberty comes through the free market ; government gets in the way: government works against economic liberty in four ways: regulation, workers’ rights, taxes, and class action lawsuits.

Progressives: Freedom of religion includes freedom from having a religion imposed on you.
Conservatives: Freedom to practice religion for fundamentalist evangelicals means spreading the good news of the truth of the gospel, which implies school prayer, “under God” in the Pledge, the Ten Commandments in courthouses, and the teaching of Intelligent Design.

Progressives: The President’s spying on citizens without a warrant is a violation of freedom.
Conservatives: The President is just doing his duty to preserve our freedom.

The poor and politics

From Sept. 2005

We’ve recently heard people such as Michael Chertoff and Rick Santorum basically saying that the people in New Orleans were told to leave, and if they didn’t, they had made their own bed. The President’s mother insensitively opined that the evacuees had come from poor backgrounds and were enjoying better lives in the Houston Stadium. Supercilious Rush Limbaugh declared that the people in New Orleans should have saved some money for such a rainy day.

I’ve heard people defending the Bush family’s insensitivity to and neglect of the poor by saying that the Bushes were born rich and so don’t understand. It’s one thing for a Bush apologist such as Limbaugh to exhibit such ignorance, but in my mind it’s absolutely unethical for any political leader to not understand the plight of the poor. People from disadvantaged backgrounds often do not have credit cards, savings accounts, or cars. They don’t have people to lean on who do have these advantages. Furthermore, many have internalized society’s negative messages towards them and have grown up feeling hopeless, powerless, invisible, and unworthy. These people could not feel confident in their ability to hop in their SUV, fill it up with over $3/gallon gasoline, and drive to their second home to wait out the storm.

When one out of every 8 Americans lives in poverty (the highest rate of any industrialized nation), it is a moral and political imperative for our leaders to understand the physical and psychological environment experienced by many of the poor. Particularly since capitalism requires a lower class working for substandard wages, we at least owe the poor more than disdain.

We like to think we are the greatest nation because we have a handful of the richest people in the world. Perhaps a nation’s greatness would be better measured by how well it takes care of its less advantaged.

Do we even NEED lobbyists?

From February, 2006

The recent scandals involving lobbyists are very alarming. The most obvious method of addressing pending legislation would be for panels to present pro and con information to Congress as a whole. Each side would present its case, lawmakers could ask questions, discuss the issues, and then vote. A legislator who doesn't attend these sessions couldn't vote on the issue.

Highly paid lobbyists wining and dining legislators promotes bribery or arm-twisting. And groups that can't afford lobbyists are not getting a fair or equal opportunity for their issues to be heard. How difficult is it to see the problem with lobbyists presenting their interests to selected policy makers one-on-one? It's all about influence and no longer about balanced consideration of all options and their ramifications.

If our legislators have time to have lunch and play golf with lobbyists from one side of an issue, then they have time to listen to presentations about BOTH sides of the issues. Actually, it's nothing more than their job. If we don't insist on changes to the status quo, we are essentially partners in the corruption.

Are "patriotism" and "war" synonymous?

From May, 2006

Patriotism is:

...driving a fuel-efficient vehicle
...donating blood
...being an active and caring part of your neighborhood
...treating your less advantaged neighbor with respect
...supporting local farmers and merchants
...fighting for better schools for all neighborhoods
...volunteering in your community
...taking care of the environment
...appreciating the diversity of your fellow Americans
...mediating peaceful compromises with those around you
...being one with the world not superior to it.

Patriotism is exemplified by our personal lifestyle choices, not by our actions in a foreign country.

How did we let this administration define “patriotism” as being synonymous with “war”?

The new Christianity without Jesus

Humans are capable of a wide range of cognitive and emotional expression.
We can be aggressive, tender, introspective, competitive, peaceful, emotive, judgmental, or caring. At some point early in human development, however, societies became patriarchal, and strength and power became the most valued qualities.

Although women and men are more alike than different (more differences are found within gender than between genders), patriarchal societies tended to exaggerate and encourage those differences. Work was divided along gender lines, as were the human qualities we are all capable of. Females were assigned the more peaceful, communicative, and emotive qualities, while males were assigned the more aggressive, stoic, and cognitive qualities. Just as women were considered inferior to men, so the qualities assigned to them were considered inferior and unimportant.

An alternative approach would have been to let everyone develop all of their human abilities and express each one depending on the situation, such as showing nurturance to a crying baby or showing competition when in a race, regardless of gender. People would exhibit varying constellations of the different human abilities, but it would be based on their individual personality, not on their gender. Feminism enabled many women and men to move past their proscribed gender roles, but our collective societal beliefs still cling to the past.

A comparison can be made to the God of the Old Testament and Jesus of the New Testament. God is presented as similar to the masculine gender identity; he appears arrogant, interested in his own power, judgmental, and advocates aggressive solutions, speaking of “an eye for an eye”. Jesus, on the other hand, has qualities representative of the feminine gender identity. He was humble, and he spoke of “turning the other cheek”, taking care of the poor (nurturance and compassion), and accepting diversity. He is emotive and does not seem invested in his own power.

More interesting – and disturbing - is that our current Christian political leaders seem to have substituted God’s “masculine” identity for Jesus’ “feminine” identity. Our guiding “moral” principles seem now to revolve around aggressive national power (“my country right or wrong” and “might makes right”), self-centered personal power (“I’m going to make my own financial fortune and I don’t care about the less advantaged”), and discriminatory social power (let’s take rights away from people who are different than I am”).

We are still a patriarchy, and there is still a stigma of inferiority attached to so-called “feminine” qualities. Power is still seen as the most valued human quality and war is glorified. Could this be part of the reason that Christianity has been “de-feminized” ? The world is quickly becoming an extremely volatile place, and a cowboy administration based on a “masculinized” morality seems likely to further fan the flames, particularly as recognized states are increasingly resorting to terrorist tactics of pre-emption, disproportunate retaliation, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

As a secularist, I don’t believe that religion belongs in government, but if we must have it for two more years, I’d prefer our “Christian” leaders start focusing on what Jesus stood for. A government that focused on Jesus’ values, rather than on religious identification and power, may very likely be able to prevent World War 3. We need to finally agree that humans are capable of a range of behaviors, stop glorifying and overusing our “masculine” abilities, and start appreciating those behaviors previously assigned to the “feminine gender identity”. Those “feminine” qualities might literally be the saving grace for our world.

Such a shift would open up to us a whole new worldview, and enable us to finally envision (and desire) prevention of conflict, as well as non-violent resolution of grievances. A good place to start would be to address the poverty that most of the world’s citizens live in. Jesus would like that.

Propagandistic vs. investigative journalism

excerpts:

So now we know for sure. Those "highly placed Bush Administration sources" anonymously quoted over and over again in front-page and cover stories are, in fact, the likes of Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. The Valerie Plame affair has not only outed the chronic propaganda leakers in the Bush Administration; it has also exposed for the public to see the corrupt relationship between the White House and leading members of the national press corps.

It's no wonder George W. Bush has such contempt for the media. His cronies must laugh regularly about how easily they manipulate reporters. Driven by ego and competitive pressure, they are willing carriers of the Administration's propaganda, blinded by feelings of false power because they are close to the people actually pulling their strings.

As the New York Times said in a recent editorial (July 19) defending Judith Miller, if Rove and other officials are "concerned about getting out the truth, all they would need to do would be to stand up in public and tell it." That is exactly right. What a different world it would be, right now, if most reporters for mainstream media refused the corrupt bargain and were willing to write stories spun by the Administration only if the sources were on the record and accountable. Shouldn't that be the standard practice, with rare exceptions, instead of the opposite? As Americans consider what is happening in Iraq and at home, they keep asking why no one is held accountable, why no one seems to be responsible. A major reason is the habitual granting of anonymity to the executive branch by the Washington press corps.

We need a national shield law, but not to protect promises of confidentiality to some of the most powerful people In the world. We need it to protect reporters who place their jobs on the line--and frequently lose them--when they take the risk of exposing abuses of power by those inside government and without.

No, the first lesson of the Valerie Plame affair should not be about how better to protect reporters like Judith Miller, although reporters clearly need better protection. Instead, let's first make it an occasion for soul-searching about how the mainstream media covers the President of the United States.

More on Hiroshima

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Hiroshima Cover-up Exposed

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/23914/

Excerpts:

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was ... because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people.

At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years "the world ... knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction."

Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.

"Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there," Sussan later told me. "We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust. ... I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud."

Along with the rest of McGovern's crew, Sussan documented the physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world.

Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, few in the U.S. challenged the consensus view that dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its "first-use" nuclear policy: Under certain circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn--in the sand. The U.S., in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on other occasions.

"Original Child Bomb" went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win a major documentary award, and this week, on Aug. 6 and 7, it will debut on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage will finally reach part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Only then will the Americans who see it be able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race -- and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.

Hiroshima, cover-ups, and the nuclear race

AlterNet: Lessons Learned, Lessons Not Learned

http://www.alternet.org/story/23915/

Excerpts:

Sixty years ago tomorrow, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the military dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki.

These are the only two nuclear bombs ever used in war, and with good reason. The devastation from the bombs was unfathomable, and as the extent of the destruction became public knowledge, the bombs themselves became a symbol of the atrocity of war.

Immediately after the bombs, once Japan had surrendered unconditionally, the U.S. military instituted a blanket ban on reporting about the effects of the bombs. It took seven years for the first photos to surface in Japan, and many more for the larger world to learn what happened on those two days.

Sadly, the threat of nuclear weapons seems to have faded from the public consciousness, even as the fear of terrorist attacks looms large. With all the talk of "dirty bombs" and "suitcase bombs," the fact is that more than 30,000 nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the eight countries that admit to having any. As Walter Cronkite says in a new radio documentary, "Lessons from Hiroshima: 60 Years Later," "some 4,000 of these are on hair-trigger alert."

One of the most interesting and damning points you make in the documentary is that if the cover-up had not happened, then possibly there would not have been an arms race, that nuclear weapons would not be the threat that they still are today.

Yes, you certainly have a strong argument about that. Obviously, no one knows for sure, and one of the journalists in the program makes the case that the arms race wouldn’t have happened. But without a doubt the debate would have been different. In the United States there was no debate about the legitimacy of having nuclear arms, the only argument was "Oh my God, how did the Soviet Union get it? The Rosenbergs must have stolen it." That was the only debate; it wasn't about whether it was legitimate to have these weapons, or for the U.S. to test them. Certainly it would have changed the nature of the debate.

I was in Hiroshima just after the 55th anniversary, and the city is incredible; it's a monument to peace, there are paper cranes everywhere, there's a Peace Museum, and it's full of memorials. So in 55 years they'd turned from being the aggressor to being a proponent of peace, and in some way you could make the argument that if the war hadn’t ended like that ...

Sure, but do you have to put people through that kind of death and destruction in order to become a monument to peace? It's a credit to the people of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki both, that they've drawn on those lessons and they've made their cities leaders in the movement for peace, but you don't wish that on anyone.

When you mentioned that the Japanese argument in WWII for invading Asia was to liberate them, do you see any other parallels between that war and what's going on now with American policy?

Of course. Ironically, the U.S. has been encouraging the Japanese military and government to increase the sizes of its army and navy, including sending troops to Iraq. And that's why it's so telling that this Japanese soldier [is] completely opposed to sending troops to Iraq, because how is it any different from what they did in Asia?

But on a broader level, what the U.S. is doing now in Iraq is using a lot of the same logic, which is "We're going there to liberate Iraq from a horrible dictator." Of course, that's not what they told us at the time. At the time it was to stop the weapons of mass destruction and to stop nuclear expansion [laughs], and when those arguments turned out to be totally phony, they came up with this latest one. It's the logic of every aggressor, the aggressor never says "We're going there to benefit from your oil and expand our military bases and our geopolitical position." They go there and say "we're fighting for democracy and to liberate you."

Hip clothing and sweat shops

http://www.alternet.org/wiretap/23867/

excerpt:

If this summer's fashion trends can tell us anything, it's that the world is definitely getting smaller. Standing on Broadway in fashion-crazy lower Manhattan, the scene on the street is more Global Village than Greenwich Village: women running in and out of stores in saris and Native-American-inspired footwear, vendors selling African-style wooden beaded jewelry, and paisley-clad hipsters each trying to look more citizen-of-the-world than the next.

The only problem is that the ethnic patchwork is contrived. Young women who have never traveled out of their zip code are dressing like they just came back from a whirlwind tour of Nairobi, Prague and the Khyber Pass. While some girls really did get that embroidered blouse in the former Soviet bloc, most of them have patched together their summer wardrobes at the Gap, Urban Outfitters, or United Colors of Benneton. And most of them have done so in blissful -- or willful -- ignorance of where their clothing actually came from.

Most people are at least vaguely aware that much of our clothing is produced in conditions antithetical to the values of "one world" bohemianism. Aside from the "Made In ___" tag that identifies its country of origin, it's impossible to tell just by looking at a piece of clothing whether it was manufactured by sweatshop workers. But odds are that it was.

George Lakoff - War on Terror, RIP

excerpt:

War on Terror, Rest in Peace
By George Lakoff, AlterNet
Posted on August 1, 2005, Printed on August 2, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/23810/
The "War on Terror" is no more. It has been replaced by the "global struggle against violent extremism."

The phrase "War on Terror" was chosen with care. "War" is a crucial term. It evokes a war frame, and with it, the idea that the nation is under military attack -- an attack that can only be defended militarily, by use of armies, planes, bombs, and so on. The war frame includes special war powers for the president, who becomes commander in chief. It evokes unquestioned patriotism, and the idea that lack of support for the war effort is treasonous. It forces Congress to give unlimited powers to the President, lest detractors be called unpatriotic. And the war frame includes an end to the war -- winning the war, mission accomplished!

The war frame is all-consuming. It takes focus away from other problems, from everyday troubles, from jobs, education, health care, a failing economy. It justifies the spending of huge sums, and sending raw recruits into battle with inadequate equipment. It justifies the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. It justifies torture, military tribunals, and no due process. It justifies scaring people, with yellow, orange, and red alerts. But, while it was politically useful, the war frame never fit the reality of terrorism. It was successful at consolidating power, but counterproductive in dealing with the real threat.

Colin Powell had suggested "crime" as the frame to use. It justifies an international hunt for the criminals, allows "police actions" when the military is absolutely required, and places the focus and the funding on where it should go: intelligence, diplomacy, politics, economics, religion, banking, and so on. And it would have kept us militarily strong and in a better position to deal with cases like North Korea and Darfur.

But the crime frame comes with no additional power for the president, and no way to hide domestic troubles. It comes with trials at the international court, giving that court's sovereignty over purely American institutions. It couldn't win in the administration as constituted.

..... click on link above for the rest of this excellent article


George Lakoff is the author of Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate' (Chelsea Green). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

Karl Rove and manipulating the masses

Now it appears that Rove "outed" Valerie Plame to punish her husband for "outing" the administration's lies in their march to war. This administration seems to think they are better than the rest of us. They are more interested in "getting their own way" through manipulation than they are in the truth or in democracy. A great country should not believe that the end justifies the means. The means should matter. This administration seems to only care about the end, and about getting the end that will personally benefit them.

When did we stop being a country that demands accountability, the separation of church and state, human rights, science, due process, honesty, and democracy?

Karl Rove and the "motives" of democrats

Karl Rove's recent statement about the presumed "motives" of democrats is merely the latest of this administration's orchestrated attempts to distract the public from the real negative realities by using misinterpretations to stir up public emotions. He said that after 9/11, conservatives wanted to go to war while liberals wanted to give therapy to the terrorists (necrotherapy?).

There was talk after 9/11 of wanting to understand the motives of terrorists, to understand the antecedents of fundamentalism and violence. Simply meeting violence with escalated violence only continues a cycle, only focuses on a "symptom" - it does nothing to guarantee the future safety of our world. Understanding (which doesn't mean agreeing with) how a terrorist is "created" can provide the information needed to focus on the "illness", rather than just on the "symptom". Rove took this sage and big-picture philosophy and twisted it; he took the desire to "understand" and translated it into "therapy". He once again exploited a national tragedy for political gain.

Rove's belittlement of therapy and maliciously twisted interpretation are in keeping with his seeming manner of interacting with the world. Making false and sensational statements has a short-term, spectacular effect, much as (sending other people's children to)war does - they both "work" until it's time for the next one. On the other hand, understanding the causes of terrorism, protecting the future peace by learning to prevent violence, has a longer-term effect, much as therapy does. But apparently it's more important to appear macho in the moment than it is to be wise in the long haul.

It's very maddening to see how this morally bankrupt administration can make such calumniatory statements from on high. It's terrifying that they have learned they will not be held accountable.

"National INsecurity cards"

An interesting essay by Bruce Schneier at http://www.alternet.org/rights/21977/

excerpts:

...It doesn't really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.

...And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen and the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down until it's restored?

...What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the D.C. snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

"Anti-war" must become "pro-democracy"

A really good article on alternet by Naomi Klein, "War on Iraq: How to End the War", http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21980/

First excerpt:

When I was in Iraq a year ago trying to answer that question, one of the most effective ways I found to do that was to follow the bulldozers and construction machinery. I was in Iraq to research the so-called reconstruction. And what struck me most was the absence of reconstruction machinery, of cranes and bulldozers, in downtown Baghdad. I expected to see reconstruction all over the place.

I saw bulldozers in military bases. I saw bulldozers in the Green Zone, where a huge amount of construction was going on, building up Bechtel’s headquarters and getting the new U.S. embassy ready. There was also a ton of construction going on at all of the U.S. military bases. But, on the streets of Baghdad, the former ministry buildings are absolutely untouched. They hadn’t even cleared away the rubble, let alone started the reconstruction process.

The one crane I saw in the streets of Baghdad was hoisting an advertising billboard. One of the surreal things about Baghdad is that the old city lies in ruins, yet there are these shiny new billboards advertising the glories of the global economy. And the message is: “Everything you were before isn’t worth rebuilding.” We’re going to import a brand-new country. It is the Iraq version of the Extreme Makeover.

Second excerpt:

In looking at democracy in Iraq, we first need to make the distinction between elections and democracy. The reality is the Bush administration has fought democracy in Iraq at every turn.

Why? Because if genuine democracy ever came to Iraq, the real goals of the war—control over oil, support for Israel, the construction of enduring military bases, the privatization of the entire economy—would all be lost. Why? Because Iraqis don’t want them and they don’t agree with them. They have said it over and over again—first in opinion polls, which is why the Bush administration broke its original promise to have elections within months of the invasion. I believe Paul Wolfowitz genuinely thought that Iraqis would respond like the contestants on a reality TV show and say: “Oh my God. Thank you for my brand-new shiny country.” They didn’t. They protested that 500,000 people had lost their jobs. They protested the fact that they were being shut out of the reconstruction of their own country, and they made it clear they didn’t want permanent U.S. bases.

That’s when the administration broke its promise and appointed a CIA agent as the interim prime minister. In that period they locked in—basically shackled—Iraq’s future governments to an International Monetary Fund program until 2008. This will make the humanitarian crisis in Iraq much, much deeper. Here’s just one example: The IMF and the World Bank are demanding the elimination of Iraq’s food ration program, upon which 60 percent of the population depends for nutrition, as a condition for debt relief and for the new loans that have been made in deals with an unelected government.

Feminism as counterterrorism

An interesting article on alternet by Barbara Ehrenreich, "War on Iraq: A New Counterterrorism Strategy: Feminism"

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21973/

excerpt:

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy: feminism. Or, if that's too incendiary, try the phrase "human rights for women." I don't mean just a few opportunistic references to women, like those that accompanied the war on the Taliban and were quietly dropped by the Bush administration when that war was abandoned and Afghan women were locked back into their burqas. I'm talking about a sustained and serious effort.

We should announce plans to pour U.S. tax dollars into girls' education in places like Pakistan, where the high-end estimate for female literacy is 26 percent, and into scholarships for women seeking higher education in nations that typically discourage it. (Secular education for the boys wouldn't hurt, either.) Expand the grounds for asylum to all women fleeing gender totalitarianism, wherever it springs up. Reverse the Bush policies on global family planning, which condemn seventy-eight thousand women to death each year in makeshift abortions. Lead the global battle against the trafficking of women. I'm not expecting such measures alone to incite a feminist insurgency within the Islamist one. Carmen Bin Ladin found her rich Saudi sisters-in-law sunk in bovine passivity, and some of the more spirited young women in the Muslim world have been adopting the head scarf as a gesture of defiance toward American imperialism. We're going to need a thorough foreign policy makeover--from Afghanistan to Israel--before we have the credibility to stand up for anyone's human rights. You can't play the gender card with dirty hands.

If this country were to embrace a feminist strategy against the insurgency, we'd have to start by addressing our own dismal record on women's rights. We'd be pushing for the immediate ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which has been ratified by 169 countries but remains stalled in the U.S. Senate. We'd be threatening to break off relations with Saudi Arabia until it acknowledged the humanity of women. And we'd be thundering about the shortage of women in the U.S. Senate and House, an internationally embarrassing 14 percent. We should be aiming for a representation of at least 25 percent, the same target the Transitional Administrative Law of Iraq has set for the federal assembly there.

Helen Thomas

A really good article:

The Guards are Sleeping, by Gael Murphy
posted at: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21904/


White House correspondent Helen Thomas speaks about the herd mentality of mainstream media and challenging the administration on its rationale for the war.

Excerpt: Democrats' New Spine

Mystery of the Democrats' New Spine by Robert Parry
posted at http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21878/

excerpt:

One explanation for the Democrats' turnabout is the rise of progressive media, most notably progressive AM talk radio which has expanded rapidly over the past several months. Finally, Democratic leaders can go on sympathetic radio shows and make their case directly to listeners.

Before, Democrats almost always would find themselves speaking in unfriendly territory. Sometimes they would appear on conservative media, such as Fox News, or they'd face mainstream pundits eager to prove they weren't liberal by being tougher on Democrats than Republicans, the likes of NBC's Tim Russert.

Faced with hostile questioning, national Democrats often sought a safe middle ground, which made them look weak or indecisive, opening them to attacks as "flip-floppers" or "lacking conviction." On the other hand, Republicans could count on friendly receptions from conservative hosts and mostly deferential treatment on mainstream programs.