Later On

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to have another go at the Kell’s Original Amber shaving soap because yesterday’s lather was not so good as previously obtained from this soap. And indeed with the Rooney Style 2 Finest, the lather was once again excellent. Obviously, the brushes are different, and for me the Rooney works much better than yesterday’s brush (which, admittedly, cost far less than the Rooney).

The Apollo Mikron did a great job—don’t recall the blade, but it’s undoubtedly one of my regulars. I just checked: it’s a Polsilver Stainless.

And Acqua di Parma was a great finish.

This one’s a must-read:

Who is Barack Obama?

Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.

Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.

Mr. Obama’s campaign mantra was “change” and most of his supporters took that to mean that he would change the way business was done in Washington and that he would reverse the disastrous economic policies that favored mega-corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

“Tonight, more Americans are out of work, and more are working harder for less,” said Mr. Obama in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. “More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.”

Voters watching the straight-arrow candidate delivering that speech, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, would not logically have thought that an obsessive focus on health insurance would trump job creation as the top domestic priority of an Obama administration.

But that’s what happened. Moreover, questions were raised about Mr. Obama’s candor when he spoke about health care. In his acceptance speech, for example, candidate Obama took a verbal shot at John McCain, sharply criticizing him for offering “a health care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits.”

Now Mr. Obama favors a plan that would tax at least some people’s benefits. Mr. Obama also repeatedly said that policyholders who were pleased with their plans and happy with their doctors would be able to keep both under his reform proposals.

Well, that wasn’t necessarily so, as the president eventually acknowledged…

Continue reading.

ThinkProgress:

Fox News has been one of the biggest supporters of James O’Keefe, who is infamous for dressing up as a pimp and videotaping ACORN staffers offering to help the supposed pimp and his prostitutes secure funding for a brothel. The network constantly replayed coverage from his operation. In September, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace named O’Keefe his “Power Player of the Week,” calling him an “undercover reporter” and a “fascinating character.”

Yesterday, the FBI arrested O’Keefe and three others — “charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony” — saying that they were plotting to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office (D-LA). One of the other men, Robert Flanagan, is the son of William Flanagan, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. Two of the men “dressed as telephone company employees” and showed up to Landrieu’s New Orleans office, saying they had to “fix phone problems.” O’Keefe was already there and was “positioning his cell phone in his hand to videotape the operation”:

After being asked, the staffer gave Basel access to the main phone at the reception desk. The staffer told investigators that Basel manipulated the handset. He also tried to call the main office phone using his cell phone, and said the main line wasn’t working. Flanagan did the same.

They then told the staffer they needed to perform repair work on the main phone system and asked where the telephone closet was located. The staffer showed the men to the main General Services Administration office on the 10th floor, and both went in. There, a GSA employee asked for the men’s credentials, after which they stated they left them in their vehicle. The U.S. Marshal’s Service apprehended all four men shortly thereafter.

Fox News aired a report about the arrests shortly after the news broke. However, reporter Tim Vaughn tried to downplay the news:

VAUGHN: [It's a] very weird story that probably needs a lot of context and a lot of looking into, which is what we’re going to do here. I just wanted to get it on the record with it right now.

SHEP SMITH: So, they’re saying basically, they’re in there — It sounds as if what they’re saying is, they’re looking for some ACORN hanky panky and they try to tap into Mary Landrieu’s telephone to get it.

VAUGHN: That could be one way of looking at it, yes.

Watch it:

Ironically, at the end of the Power Player segment in September, Wallace said, “O’Keefe says he wants to do more undercover films, and he has some targets in mind. He says his friends always tell him the next sting will never work.” “I disagree with them,” replied O’Keefe. “I think that I’ll come up with a new strategy and I’ll get them to say yes.” Looks like O’Keefe’s friends were right.

UPDATE: Andrew Breitbart’s site Big Government, which helped make O’Keefe a star and pays him to be a contributor, claims that it had no knowledge of what the four individuals were up to. Michelle Malkin writes, "They are, of course, presumed innocent until proven guilty. But for now, let it be a lesson to aspiring young conservatives interested in investigative journalism: ‘Know your limits. Know the law. Don’t get carried away. And don’t become what you are targeting.’" Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey said, "Journalists don’t tap phones, and if that’s what he tried, he’s an idiot."

UPDATE: The AP reports that a magistrate "set bond at $10,000 each after they made their initial court appearances wearing red prison jumpsuits. None of the defendants commented on the allegations in court. ‘It was poor judgment,’ Robert Flanagan’s lawyer, Garrison Jordan, said in a brief interview outside the courthouse. ‘I don’t think there was any intent or motive to commit a crime.’" [Isn't an illegal wiretap placed on a Senator's phone a crime? – LG]

It’s pouring rain, but eventually I need to go out. Lots of cleaning up to do.

I suspect there will be little in the way of blogging today.

An excellent talk by Lawrence Lessig (click that link to see the video—I couldn’t embed it), via Open Culture, where Dan Colman writes:

Public confidence in the U.S. House and Senate is at an all-time low, and, after last week’s Supreme Court decision, it’s bound to sink even lower. On January 19th (the day before the decision), Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig returned to Stanford and highlighted the degree to which “institutional corruption” — in the form of lobbyists and corporate influence — pervades Congress, dictates legislation, and brings large sums of money to campaigns and, yes, even representatives’ personal bank accounts. (Roughly 50% of U.S. Senators become lobbyists, working for industries they once assisted politically, and earn substantial incomes.) The talk, accompanied by a rapid fire PowerPoint presentation, runs a solid hour and details various instances in which lobbyists have shaped unfathomably bad legislation. Happily, the talk also ends with Lessig outlining possible solutions. Policy changes can offer some answers. But, a lot of it comes down to this: getting the passive privileged to rein in a corrupted elite.

Note: To see Lessig’s immediate response to the SCOTUS decision, look here.

Interesting article by Tara Parker-Pope in the NY Times:

Can something as simple as the timing of recess make a difference in a child’s health and behavior?

Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess — sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.

Schools that have tried it report that when children play before lunch, there is less food waste and higher consumption of milk, fruit and vegetables. And some teachers say there are fewer behavior problems.

“Kids are calmer after they’ve had recess first,” said Janet Sinkewicz, principal of Sharon Elementary School in Robbinsville, N.J., which made the change last fall. “They feel like they have more time to eat and they don’t have to rush.”

One recent weekday at Sharon, I watched as gaggles of second graders chased one another around the playground and climbed on monkey bars. When the whistle blew, the bustling playground emptied almost instantly, and the children lined up to drop off their coats and mittens and file quietly into the cafeteria for lunch.

“All the wiggles are out,” Ms. Sinkewicz said.

One of the earliest schools to adopt the idea was …

Continue reading.

I had LASIK a few years ago. It didn’t fully work—I still need glasses, but the correction is substantially less and I can get around well without my glasses. Still, I now need a slab-off on my right lenses so I can fuse the images through my bifocals, and progressive lenses no longer work for me, a bit of a pain. But some people have much worse experiences. Abby Ellin, for example, who writes in Salon.com:

The other day I got a prescription for eyeglasses. This is not newsworthy in itself except for one thing: More than two and a half years ago I had Lasik (laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis), specifically so I could toss away the spectacles I wore for near-sightedness. I knew that eventually I would need reading glasses, but I would, I was assured, be able to see long-distance for a long time.

Problem is, I can’t.

Not only is my vision blurred, but as I wrote in a 2008 article for the New York Times, I still see halos, and not the kinds with angels attached. It takes a good 10 minutes for my eyes to adjust to dimly lit rooms. My eyes are scratchy and as dry as the desert. Yes, before I got the surgery I signed an "informed consent" saying I understood all the possible side effects, but I certainly never knew that they might last indefinitely, and that they would be more than "annoying," as my doctor promised. But nearly three years later, they are still here. And while I could get an "enhancement" — that’s industry parlance for another surgery to correct errors — frankly, the only thing I want near my eyes is mascara.

According to the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, most of the 13.6 million people in the United States who have had Lasik surgery since the first lasers were approved by the FDA in 1998 are pleased with the results. But others have experienced similar, if not worse, problems than I have.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. The attack occurred while she was out with a “small group of Halliburton firefighters,” just four days after her arrival in Iraq. After taking a few sips of her drink, she later woke up in the barracks, “naked” and “severely beaten.” Her “breasts were so badly mauled that she is permanently disfigured.”

In an apparent attempt to cover up the incident, the company then put her in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” Even more insultingly, the DOJ resisted bringing any criminal charges in the matter.

Jones tried to sue the company for failing to protect her, but KBR argued that Jones’ employment contract — created for the company by then-CEO Dick Cheney — warranted her claims being heard in private arbitration, without jury, judge, public record, or transcript of the proceedings. Basically, KBR argued that Jones’ brutal rape was a workplace injury — nothing more. But in September, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Jones. “Jones’ allegations do not ‘touch matters’ related to her employment, let alone have a ’significant relationship’ to her employment contract,” wrote the court.

KBR is now petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling. The contractor is personally going after Jones’ integrity to argue that she shouldn’t have a fair and open hearing. Stephanie Mencimer from Mother Jones reports:

On Jan. 19, it petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing Jones to press her case in a civil court rather than in arbitration. Among its many arguments in favor of a high court hearing: that Jones is a relentless self-promoter who has “sensationalize[d] her allegations against the KBR Defendants in the media, before the courts, and before Congress.” … KBR also suggests that much of Jones’ story is fabricated. The company says in a footnote, “Many, if not all, of her allegations against the KBR Defendants are demonstrably false. The KBR Defendants intend to vigorously contest Jones’s allegations and show that her claims against the KBR Defendants are factually and legally untenable.”

The Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010 signed into law by President Obama in December contained an amendment by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) — inspired by Jones’ story — that prohibits defense contractors from restricting their employees’ abilities to take workplace discrimination, battery, and sexual assault cases to court. Mencimer notes that in its petition, KBR is “clearly miffed about the Franken Amendment, which it credits Jones with getting passed.”

I really like the fragrance of Kell’s Original Amber, and I got a good lather with the little badger brush from VintageScent.com—though not so good as I’ve had before. I’m going to try the same soap tomorrow with a different brush to see if the brush may be at fault.

Very nice shave with the Lady Gillette, though the blade  (a Swedish Gillette) seems to be nearing the end of its excellence.

A splash of Aquarius, appropriate to the season, and I’m good to go.

Got some photos, but I think I’ll post them tomorrow. I’m sort of pooped: first the weights (with increases in just about all the weights) and then the walk (1 block farther, running a total time of just over 24 minutes—getting to be a real walk).

I must say that I enjoy the weight training.

Meghan O’Rourke in the New Yorker:

One autumn day in 1964, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, was working in her garden and fretting about a lecture she had to give. Earlier that week, a mentor of hers, who taught psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, had asked her to speak to a large group of medical students on a topic of her choice. Kübler-Ross was nervous about public speaking, and couldn’t think of a subject that would hold the students’ attention. But, as she raked fallen leaves, her thoughts turned to death: Many of her plants, she reflected, would probably die in the coming frost. Her own father had died in the fall, three years earlier, at home in Switzerland, peaceful and aware of what was taking place. Kübler-Ross had found her topic. She would talk about how American doctors—who, in her experience, were skittish around seriously ill patients—should approach death and dying.

Kübler-Ross prepared a two-part lecture. The first part looked at how various cultures approach death. For the second, she brought a dying patient to class to talk with the students. Asking around at the hospital, she found Linda, a sixteen-year-old girl with incurable leukemia. Linda’s mother had just taken out an ad in a local newspaper asking readers to send Linda get-well and sweet-sixteen cards. Linda was disgusted by the pretense that her health would improve. She agreed to visit the class, where she spoke openly about how she felt. The students, Kübler-Ross observed, were rapt but nervous. They avoided dealing with the source of their discomfort—the shock of seeing an articulate, lovely young woman on the verge of death—by asking an abundance of clinical questions about her symptoms.

Soon afterward, as her biographer, Derek Gill, relates, Kübler-Ross took a job as an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago. Four students from the Chicago Theological Seminary learned that she was interested in terminal illness and asked if she might help them study dying people’s needs. Kübler-Ross agreed to try. At Chicago’s Billings Hospital, she began a series of seminars, interviewing patients about what it felt like to die. The interviews took place in front of a one-way mirror, with students observing on the other side. This way, Kübler-Ross gave the patients some privacy while accommodating the growing number of students who wanted to watch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan:

Conor Friedersdorf disagrees with Joe Carter’s dismissal of the Gitmo “suicides” and acceptance of the official investigations. Carter has a spirited back and forth in the American Scene comment section. Carter:

Let’s be clear: [The guards Scott Horton talked to] can’t prove: (a) the existence of any CIA black site, (b) that any prisoners were moved at all that night, (c ) that the prisoners who died that night were the prisoners they claimed to have seen, (d) that the prisoners were not carried to the medical facility.

The fact is that they have no firsthand knowledge of any of the events that deal directly with the prisoners. They also did not feel it worth coming forward for three years to claim that the official narrative was wrong.

In contrast, 52 guards and medical personnel gave sworn statements within days of the deaths. These statements are quite detailed about what occurred that night (the Seton Hall reports agrees that there is no question the dead prisoners were transported from the cells to the medical facility).

What motive would these 52 men and women have for lying? And assuming they were, how were they able to get their stories so similar to pull off such a massive cover-up?

From commenter “Chet,” who refutes Carter repeatedly:

[L]et’s take a look at the report in the light of your claim that “52 guards and medical staff were eyewitnesses to the suicide.” (One wonders how so many people could have personally eyewitnessed the discovery of these hanging corpses. Did they sell tickets?)

Let’s start with the first interviewee: “b3b6 advised that he was not present at Camp Delta when these suicides took place. b3b6 stated that he had no information to provide…b3b6 stated that he learned of the hangings by talking to people.” Oops! Not an eyewitness, then. (51 “eyewitnesses” left!) The next interviewee? The nurse who found the suicide note explains that on the night in question, he was “wrapping up the body of ISN 0093 for shipment” in the Detainee Acute Care Unit and “felt something he assumed was paper in the inside shirt pocket.” This was the suicide note, but notice that it was found on the body, not at the scene of the hanging. So scratch another eyewitness; the bodies had already been “cut down” when this individual discovered the note. (50).

Next (I’m just going down the pages until I find the next interviewee report), the Master Chief at Arms, who testifies that after hearing the alarm raised over radio, ran to Alpha block and saw “two guards holding 0093’s hands and feet. 0093 was lying on the deck in his cell and his eyes were rolled back.” Later, when the second body (588) was discovered, he arrived at that cell, only to find the body already lying on the deck as well. As well, when he arrived at the cell of 693, that body was also lying on the deck, not hanging from the noose.

So, another one of Joe’s “eyewitnesses” proves to never have actually seen any of the victims hanging from a noose. He did, however, see the first one with the rag stuffed down his throat. (49!)

The next interviewee? Informed that one of the detainees had “tried” to hang himself, didn’t actually observe the bodies until they were being carried out of the cell. (48!) The next is finally the first individual who personally testifies to the discovery of 0093 actually hanging by his neck, and the very next page after the record of his testimony is his notification of his legal rights and that he is “suspected of False Official Statements, UCMJ Article 107.) That’s pages 188-189, if you’re trying to follow my work. On the next page, apparently in response to suspicion of perjury, he amends his testimony to note that he at first did not see the detainee in the cell, but when another guard shouted “he’s hanging”, came into the cell to find that guard and the hanging body, with a surgical mask over the mouth and a rag in the throat. (How would a detainee get a surgical mask? How would a hands-bound man stuff a rag down his own throat and don a surgical mask, and why would a suicide need to do so?)

The next testimony is of another guard who only saw the bodies after they had been “cut down.” (47.) The next, the same. (46.) The next observed the bodies being carried out. (45.) The next concerns a guard not on duty at the time of the deaths who searched Alpha block and found nothing in the cells a detainee could hang himself with. (44.)

I’d go on all the way down the list but I think I’ve made my point. Joe’s disingenuous “52 eyewitnesses” claim is nothing but a mirage that evaporates on any kind of inspection. At the end of the day you have a great many guards and medical staff who were told that the detainees had hung themselves, and only 2 or 3 who actually testify to that fact, all of whom were notified of being under suspicion of giving false statements to investigators.

I imagine that Eric Holder and President Obama are already meeting on how to cover this up. They certainly won’t investigate: this occurred in the past, and they are looking to the future.

Interesting — and what is interesting is that climate change denialists are terribly sensitive to any sort of misbehavior by scientists (e.g., the sarcastic remarks found when the British lab’s computers were hacked, or the admission that the fate of the Himalayan glaciers was hyped), but seem totally accepting of any number of outright lies from those who are trying to deny the reality of global warming. Odd, isn’t it?

Source: Allianz, January 22, 2010

James Hoggan, the director of the James Hoggan & Associates public relations firm, has authored a book titled Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, in which he describes PR techniques that industry groups use to create the impression of a scientific controversy about climate change.

Industries set up front groups, Hoggan says, like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which tried to convince Americans in electoral swing states that coal is clean. Front groups like Americans for Prosperity, which organized the disruptive August, 2009 town hall meeting protests, started out by paying for protestors.

Hoggan reports seeing documents that show PR firms charged $1800 per protestor. “Companies can buy protestors, and if you are clever with your framing of the issue, these paid protestors attract real protestors,” Hoggan explains.

His book also reveals the strategy of framing global warming as a United Nations scheme, or a scam by international scientists, to appeal to people who “don’t like being told what to do by the UN or some foreigners.”

The most powerful tools used to manipulate public opinion, Hoggan says, are focus groups, which help PR companies understand how people think on certain issues. Another is the creation of “echo chambers,” that involve generating favorable news reports that are repeated over and over by media outlets until the public finally starts repeating it back.

“Get Dick Cheney and George Bush and Fox News and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to talk and then just keep repeating what they say — ‘the science is not settled, the science is not settled, the science is not settled’—  until the public starts repeating it back. It’s a frightening phenomenon,” Hogan says.

Tom Ricks at The Best Defense:

The commander of the 2^nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was relieved in Afghanistan, where the unit has been deployed since August. Both he and his command sergeant major were shipped home, reports the observant John Ramsey of the Fayetteville Observer.

Two things interest me about this. First, relieving a battalion commander in combat used to be pretty common, but has become increasingly rare in recent wars. Even General James Gavin, who thought relief was used too often during World War II, once gave an order to a battalion commander, who questioned it, so Gavin turned to the XO and told him he now had command of the unit. In my research on World War II, I have been struck at how swift relief was, but also how it wasn’t necessarily terminal. Off the top of my head I can think of two division commanders who were relieved in combat (Allen and Ward) only to get command of other divisions later in the war. What’s more, Brig. Gen. “Hanging” Sam Williams was not only relieved as an assistant division commander but also reduced to colonel—only to stay in the Army and eventually retire as a three star.

Second, the relieved battalion commander in question, Lt. Col. Frank Jenio, declined to comment to Mr. Ramsey, except to say that he is looking for a lawyer. Yow. I can’t imagine litigating command decisions like this one.

Brilliant. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Tina has a useful post at MakeUseOf.com. It begins:

To write a successful research paper, you should provide thorough information and tie it together into a conclusive story. While obtaining conclusive information tends to be rather difficult in itself, writing a convincing manuscript appears to be an even bigger hurdle. So what is the problem?

It seems that many authors don’t realize that a good research manuscript requires more than consistent and complete data. The central challenge of everything you ever write is to capture the reader’s interest and convincingly tell your story. In other words, you must understand your audience, what they expect, what they already know or where you need to fill them in. When writing a research manuscript, however, you must also follow a standard structure and apply the principles of scientific writing.

The following sites explain how to write a research paper. They reveal the rules of scientific writing, give practical examples, and guide you through the entire process of preparing a successful research manuscript…

Continue reading.

I have long advocated public financing of political campaigns, and now corporations are joining in the call. From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Last Thursday, “all five of the [Supreme] Court’s conservatives joined together … to invalidate a sixty-three year-old ban on corporate money in federal elections,” a move that Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said “opens the floodgates for the purchases and sale of the law” by big corporations. On Friday, in response to the Court’s decision, “dozens of current and former corporate executives” from corporations, including Delta, Ben & Jerry’s, and Crate & Barrel, sent a letter to Congress asking it to immediately pass the Fair Elections Now Act, which would publicly finance all congressional campaigns out of a special fund created by a fee levied on TV broadcasters. Even before the Court’s recent ruling, corporate special interest money was making a huge impact on the legislative process. From 1998 to 2009, the financial, insurance, and real estate lobbies spent nearly $3.8 billion in Washington, which helped deregulate Wall Street, pass huge tax cuts for the wealthy, bar Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices, kill mortgage cramdown legislation, and weaken financial and health reforms. According to polling done in November 2008, 69 percent of Americans support publicly financing all campaigns, including the majority of self-identified Democrats, Republicans, and independents. The bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act currently has six Senate co-sponsors and 125 co-sponsors in the House (President Obama was a co-sponsor when he was a senator).

Click here to sign the Fair Elections Now Act petition.

Its most significant use was in blocking civil-rights legislation. It has done little good and much harm. Time to kill it, if not the Senate. An email from the Center for American Progress:

While it is now taken for granted than any major piece of legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, this has not always been the case. Use of the filibuster — the minority’s tactic to halt action on a bill through endless debate — has skyrocketed in the past two decades, creating a de facto need for 60 votes to get anything done. It only requires 51 votes to pass any bill, but it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture to end debate and pass the bill. There are now double the number of cloture votes as there were a decade ago, and triple the numbers of 20 years ago. As evidenced by the ongoing health care reform debate, the filibuster cripples the Senate’s ability to make progress. The filibuster also gives a undue amount of power to individual senators and allows them to exploit the process for their narrow interests, dictating policy outcomes. For instance, Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) threat to filibuster health care reform forced the removal of the public option and the Medicare buy-in, despite their tremendous popularity. Moreover, as Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) noted, the filibuster removes electoral accountability by giving the losing party the ability to obstruct the winning party’s agenda. "It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure," Center for American Progress Action Fund fellow Matt Yglesias noted. Under President Obama, the Republican minority has repeatedly used and abused the practice of filibusters to obstruct the progressive agenda. The House was able to pass a health care reform bill with a robust public option, a clean energy and greenhouse gas pollution reduction bill to fight climate change, and a comprehensive financial regulatory reform bill with majority votes. However, because of the filibuster, each bill has languished in the Senate.

Read the rest of this entry »

The above sentiment has even been expressed in comments on this blog—but it’s fallacious. Here’s a good post by Daniel De Groot debunking the distinction, and he includes this quote from a commenter:

Basic familiarity with the terms of discussion might help.   (4.00 / 9)

‘The founders intended the country to be a republic’ is not incompatible with: ‘The founders intended the country to be a democracy.’

Because republics are not some different kind of government from democracies, in the way that dictatorships are.

‘Republic’ comes from ‘res publica’ which is Latin for the ‘public thing’. For something to be a republic all that is necessary is for the government to count as being owned or controlled by the public at large.

‘Democracy’ comes from ‘demos’ which is Greek for ‘people’ or ‘tribe’ and ‘kratia’ which is Greek for ‘power’. A democracy is literally a government in which the people have the power. There have been democratic republics. There have been aristocratic republics. There is no natural tension between something’s being a republic and something’s being a democracy. In fact you might think that the most natural way for a government to count as a republic is for it to be a democracy. After all the best way to insure that the government belongs to the people as a whole is to let the people as a whole run it.

So no, the founders did not, in setting up a republic, decide not to create a democracy. Is it true that the founders explicitly put up barriers to the public will expressing itself? Yes. Should we in any way respect that choice? No! That choice was made to keep the poor in their place. This is explicit in the federalist papers. And even if you want to engage in this founding fathers fetish, where you refuse to think and behave outside of the parameters a handful of old, dead, racist, sexist plutocrats set up for you, then you should keep in mind that the filibuster is not one of the constitutionally provided for barriers to the public will being done. So Madison isn’t going to be mad at you if you agree to getting rid of it. He will however be mad that you have acquiesced in the public selection of senators, since he didn’t think you should have that right.

by: PTM @ Thu Jan 21, 2010 at 02:18

Read the whole post.

Lynn Harris, writing in Salon:

Some girls came back from this past winter break with Christmas loot, ski tans, still more to say about "Twilight: New Moon." But others, women’s health experts suspect, came back with deep, and literal, wounds to heal. According to human rights advocates and service providers, families in the U.S. who have immigrated from countries where female genital mutilation (FGM) is practiced often take their daughters home, when school is out, to be cut.

Yes, FGM is practiced — or at least planned — on U.S. soil, on girls in immigrant families who were born and/or raised here. Perhaps even among people you know: Not long ago, a concerned mother posted on my Brooklyn-area parenting list-serv that she believed an eight-year-old friend of her daughter’s had undergone some form of the procedure in her home country in the Middle East (and appeared to be markedly traumatized). Archana Pyati, an asylum attorney for Sanctuary for Families in New York, has encountered dozens of FGM cases just in the past six months. "The majority of our African clients have been through it, and most often, they are fighting to protect their daughters," she says. (Older relatives with "seniority" often push for the procedure.) "It is our hope that by recognizing that FGM may be occurring under our noses we will become better able to respond to it, just as we would any other form of violence against children," she says.

Right now, though, that’s not happening. While numerous countries, cities,and villages on other continents have made significant strides toward prohibiting and preventing the procedure — and while it’s been outlawed by U.S. federal law since 1996 and is also illegal in 17 states — its practice by immigrant families here is, by all anecdotal reports, only increasing. Yet there remains practically no way to address it any way other than case by brutal, heartbreaking case. "The silence hasn’t been broken here," says Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of Equality Now. "It’s an issue that affects thousands of [U.S.] girls, some of whom were born here, and yet no one is really paying attention."

FGM refers to several different traditional rite-of-passage practices in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East that involve …

Continue reading. I think it’s legitimate to fight cultural practices that result in harm to people—e.g., the ritual cannibalism in New Guinea that results in the disease kuru.