Over 1.3 million Iraqis have been killed in an illegal war that is damaging our economy and decimating theirs. Can we really be satisfied with Obama's proposal for a partial withdrawal in 16 months?
The organization behind the estimate, Just Foreign Policy, has a lot of excellent Action Alert items on their home page. They are an important activist's resource.
Rick Warren's heterosexual supremacist bigotry is getting long overdue scrutiny after President Elect Obama made the shocking and horrifying decision to have one of the nation's most notorious religious extremists give an unconstitutional invocation at the upcoming inauguration. This is important. Yet, I wonder.
Why has there been so little discussion of Warren's fanatical misogyny in the corporate media?
An obvious manifestation of Warren's viciousness towards women involves his efforts to oppose the basic right of women to choose on abortion. Trying to reduce women to the legal status of incubators is as dangerous as it is hateful. Warren wants to live in a world where men have enormous and abusive power over women. In that sense, and many others, he reminds me of Iranian President Ahmadinejad.
The following are excellent examples of why blogs and other Internet media are so important in exposing people to points of view which the corporate owners censor from their media. I will be excerpting briefly, but I encourage you to view the entire articles. The subject of Rick Warren's misogyny is a sadly large one.
Most of the outrage surrounding this choice focuses on Warren’s opposition to gay marriage and reproductive rights. But there’s something else about Warren, something the women of America might like to ponder as they watch this worthy pray aloud at our new President’s swearing-in: this is a man who believes that wives should be subservient to their husbands. Marriage is not an equal partnership, in Warren’s view, but a dominance hierarchy, a union between a superior and an inferior. Kind of like a boss with one employee.
Warren has equated to the grotesque logic within his mind that women who have abortions are Nazis much like the SS in the death camp of Auschwitz.
In an obvious sexist form of belief, Warren emphasizes that women should be basically barefoot and pregnant and subservient to their husbands wishes. Warren even discourages divorces even in cases of physical abuse. I guess that it's okay in Warren's Church for a woman to get beaten to a pulp by her husband. Perhaps the Orange County District Attorney's Office should look into this.
Today, we are disheartened that one of the voices that may be privileged to be part of this historic moment is that of Rick Warren. His delivering the invocation would be an insult to all of us, women and men, who support women's right to self-determination. His presence is offensive to all of us, gay and straight, who support equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.
We understand your desire to engage people from opposing sides of many issues. But dialogue requires treating your opponents with respect. Rick Warren has compared abortion to the Holocaust and stated that he would not vote for a "Holocaust denier." He implies that those of us who support abortion rights are equivalent to Nazis.
The Nazi analogy of Warren's is bitterly ironic, given that Hitler was fanatically anti-choice.
Here's the sexist Bible quote that the Saddleback Church/Box Store uses to teach its values on marriage:
“You wives must submit to your husbands’ leadership in the same way you submit to the Lord. For a husband is in charge of his wife in the same way Christ is in charge of His body the Church. (He gave His very life to take care of it and be its Savior!) So you wives must willingly obey your husbands in everything, just as the Church obeys Christ. And you husbands, show the same kind of love to your wives as Christ showed to the Church when He died for her, to make her holy and clean, washed by baptism and God’s Word; so that He could give her to Himself as a glorious Church without a single spot or wrinkle or any other blemish, being holy and without a single fault. That is how husbands should treat their wives, loving them as parts of themselves. For since a man and his wife are now one, a man is really doing himself a favor and loving himself when he loves his wife! No one hates his own body but lovingly cares for it just as Christ cares for His body the Church, of which we are parts. (That the husband and wife are one body is proved by the Scripture, which says, “A man must leave his father and mother when he marries so that he can be perfectly joined to his wife, and the two shall be one.”) I know this is hard to understand, but it is an illustration of the way we are parts of the body of Christ. So again I say, a man must love his wife as a part of himself; and the wife must see to it that she deeply respects her husband—obeying, praising, and honoring him.” Ephesians 5:22-23 TLB
"I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Here's another quote I also adore.
Eighty percent of success is showing up. -- Woody Allen
You can argue until you're hoarse about Barack Obama's intentions, but the wisdom of the FDR quote applies in either case. As for Woody Allen's gem, it really shows the importance of acting rather than agonizing about which group or action is the most incredibly optimized.
Here are some resources where you can find specific actions to take on issues important to liberals.
On Change.gov, the Obama transition team site, there is an area where people can ask questions or vote up the ones they like the best. A question CODEPINK is asking that is especially important follows:
President-Elect Obama, you were elected in large part because of your promise to end the War in Iraq. Will you sit down with leaders of the peace movement to talk about bringing our troops home?
Here's how you can vote up the question. (Instructions adopted from CODEPINK email.)
1. Go to the Change.gov Open for Questions page 2. Sign In to your Change.gov account or register if you don't have one. 3. Search for the questions using the keyword: peacevoter 4. Vote by hitting the checkmark next to the question
After voting, you can submit your own question for Obama.
It sounds like the questions will be closed soon, so please don't put this one off.
Posted by
libhom
Monday, December 29, 2008
6
comments
The tremendous bigotry against Arabs and Muslims makes many people shut off their brains when the subject of the Israel/Palestine conflict comes up. Facts become evil, not just irrelevant. One fact that is largely censored is that Israel has been waging campaigns of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians for decades. Here are some examples of what Israel has done.
- Gradually seizing land in Palestine for Jewish only settlements.
- Requiring building permits for construction in Palestine, and routinely denying such permits to Palestinians. The locals who build without the permits by the foreign power, Israel, get their homes demolished.
- Putting Gaza under a long siege in order to try to drive the people out of there.
- Launching far more terrorist attacks against the Palestinians than the Palestinians have launched against Israel.
- Building a "security wall" in the middle of Palestinian territory, cutting off families and communities.
- Requiring that Palestinians go through numerous "security checkpoints" designed to destroy social cohesion and economic viability in Palestine.
- Claiming that Israel has rights to Palestinian territory.
- Dishonestly playing the role of the victim in order to justify what they are doing to the Palestinian people.
I'm not terribly fond of Hamas, but I know why they are so popular among the Palestinians. They are the only organization left that fights back against Isreal's ethnic cleansing campaigns.
These are ugly truths that are largely censored by the corporate media. But, we need to face them. Our country pays a major part of the bill to maintain this ethnic cleansing.
Posted by
libhom
Sunday, December 28, 2008
1 comments
It should be no secret by now that Rick Warren and his Saddleback Church/Box Store represent the most extreme fringe of the Christian Right, despite their efforts to put on a more benign public face on their hateful ministry. Anyone who is familiar with fundamentalist churches in Orange County, CA knows how that game is played.
Barack Obama's decision to invite Warren was just plain horrible. It will give Warren more power and prestige while aiding and abetting his fundraising. Giving such a prominent role to someone who has dedicated a significant part of his life to promoting discrimination and violence against women and queers is irresponsible and dangerous.
Why hasn't Obama taken back the invitation?
For eight years, we have had a Bush regime that has treated the slightest change of policy as weakness. Any admission of a mistake has been taken as a colossal surrender. This old style politics has frozen this administration in the most backward and counterproductive policies.
So far, Obama is following along in the politics of ego over common sense. If Obama can't admit that he was wrong to invite Rick Warren, will he ever be able to admit that he was wrong about anything?
Posted by
libhom
Saturday, December 27, 2008
4
comments
I'm catching up on my end of year giving, and I thought I would share the names some of organizations that I gave to in hopes of helping them out a bit. I know these are difficult times, but those difficulties are affecting non profits too. If you haven't been screwed over yet by the crappy right wing economy, I urge you to support some of these organizations or other groups working to make this world a better and more progressive place.
(American) Foundation for AIDS Research: I'm not clear if the word "American" is still in the title, but amFAR has been the most activist and research oriented of the big money AIDS organizations. They won't let people forget that the world needs a cure for AIDS. Treatments for AIDS are much better than nothing, but they aren't good enough.
CommonDreams.org I certainly complain enough about rightist bias in the corporate media. I might as well financially support independent media. Common Dreams is a wonderful progressive news and opinion aggregator. They also have a listing of press releases called Progressive Newswire which is great fodder for blog postings.
Democracy Now! This is the best radio/tv news magazine in the country. Amy Goodman and her crew get out more information than corporate media outlets with much larger budgets. Like a lot of liberal and progressive bloggers, I regularly quote Democracy Now stories.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF): There are lots of organizations that support state/church separation. One thing that sets FFRF apart is that they take state/church separation cases from plaintiffs who are atheists. Many other groups refuse to out of prejudice or because they are afraid that such plaintiffs cannot win. (They can and often do win.) FFRF also does excellent work educating the public about atheists and atheism.
NYC's LGBT Center: Like a variety of queer community centers in this country, this center in Manhattan provides a central place and meeting spaces for a variety of community groups. If you can, please support your local lgbt center. If you don't have one, try asking around and seeing if there are people working on bringing one to where you live. they make a huge difference.
Pride @ Work: This lgbt labor group has worked hard on including gender identity in ENDA, supporting union organizing, and teaching unions how to write lgbt supportive contract. Supporting Pride @ Work is a great way to accomplish a lot of things with a single donation.
WBAI Radio: This is one of the Pacifica Network stations in NYC. They have an excellent queer radio show, Out-FM. You can listen to WBAI online or at 99.5 FM in the NYC area to gain a variety of perspectives you won't get from corporate media outlets.
Don't give until it hurts, but please find worthwhile organizations to help get through these terrible times.
We keep getting a bunch of bull about "clean coal" from coal companies, pundits, and politicians. There is no such thing as "clean coal." Hat tip to Marc Crispin Miller for pointing to the video of Monday's enormous coal sludge spill in Tennessee.
Estimates for the amount of thick sludge that gushed from a Tennessee coal plant this week have tripled to more than a billion gallons, as cleanup crews try to remove the goop from homes and railroads and halt its oozing into an adjacent river. TVA officials originally said the cleanup would take four to six weeks. Now they say they aren't sure.
TVA officials originally said the cleanup would take four to six weeks. Now they say they aren't sure.
The sludge, a byproduct of the ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville. The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, according to the TVA.
TVA's initial estimate for the spill was 1.8 million cubic yards or more than 360 million gallons of sludge. By Friday, the estimate reached 5.4 million cubic yards or more than 1 billion gallons -- enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Environmental advocates say the ash contains concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic.
The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River. At least 300 acres of land has been coated by the sludge -- a bigger area than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Yeah, coal is really, really clean.
Here's the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy's commentary on the disaster (12/26/08 Press Release):
Knoxville, Tenn. (Friday, Dec. 26) – The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy is calling the recent TVA Kingston Fossil Plant ash spill a historical energy disaster, causing undetermined consequences to water, land, residents and wildlife in Roane County, Tenn.
“We are saddened by the environmental devastation brought on by the coal ash spill at the TVA site in Kingston, Tennessee,” said Dr. Stephen A. Smith, executive director for Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “SACE believes that TVA, TDEC and the EPA should be erring on the side of caution and encouraging residents and others at the site to avoid bodily contact with the ash, which when dried can become airborne. Along with the lead and thallium officially found in the ash, there is a strong probability that levels of arsenic, cadmium and potentially mercury will be found.”
Dr. Smith continued by stressing that safety precautions should be taken by residents in the affected area.
“This is clearly one of the most severe environmental disasters of East Tennessee,” Smith said. “There are multiple pathways in which people can become potentially affected by these heavy metals, including bodily contact, drinking water, air pathways and aquatic wildlife and fish, and we feel that appropriate warnings should be expressed to ensure the safety of Tennessee residents.”
The nonsense about "clean coal" has been refuted by a coalition of environmental groups at ThisIsReality.org. They have a list of facts which focus on coal, global warming, and other air pollution. When you add coal plant waste to the picture, it gets even more disturbing.
Then, there's the practice of cutting off mountaintops to get coal more cheaply, another dirty, yet common, practice. Don't forget that coal mining is terribly dangerous, and that green jobs are much safer.
The more you learn about coal, the more depressing it gets.
These lists of censored news stories should be cautionary to liberal bloggers. It is far too easy to let the subject matter of political blogs be driven too much by the corporate media, who themselves have a rightist bias.
Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s. Read More
Leaders of Canada, the US, and Mexico have been meeting to secretly expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with “deep integration” of a more militarized tri-national Homeland Security force. Taking shape under the radar of the respective governments and without public knowledge or consideration, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)—headquartered in Washington—aims to integrate the three nations into a single political, economic, and security bloc.
The SPP was launched at a meeting of Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox, and Prime Minister Paul Martin, in Waco, Texas, on March 31, 2005. The official US web page describes the SPP as “. . . a White House-led initiative among the United States and Canada and Mexico to increase security and to enhance prosperity . . .” The SPP is not a law, or a treaty, or even a signed agreement. All these would require public debate and participation of Congress. Read More
More than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect and provide information on fellow Americans. In return, members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public, and at times before elected officials. “There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate Total Information Awareness program (TIPS), turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” according to an ACLU report titled “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.” Read More
A resurgence of US-backed militarism threatens peace and democracy in Latin America. By 2005, US military aid to Latin America had increased by thirty-four times the amount spent in 2000. In a marked shift in US military strategy, secretive training of Latin American military and police personnel that used to just take place at the notorious School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia—including torture and execution techniques—is now decentralized. The 2008 US federal budget includes $16.5 million to fund an International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador, with satellite operations in Peru. With provision of immunity from charges of crimes against humanity, each academy will train an average of 1,500 police officers, judges, prosecutors, and other law enforcement officials throughout Latin America per year in “counterterrorism techniques.” Read More
President Bush has signed two executive orders that would allow the US Treasury Department to seize the property of any person perceived to, directly or indirectly, pose a threat to US operations in the Middle East.
The first of these executive orders, titled “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq,” signed by Bush on July 17, 2007, authorizes the Secretary of Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, to confiscate the assets of US citizens and organizations who “directly or indirectly” pose a risk to US operations in Iraq. Bush’s order states:
I have issued an Executive Order blocking property of persons determined 1) to have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq . . . or 2) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order . . . Read More
Commentary
Item 2 Lou Dobbs has gone on and on about a NAFTA highway. In the process, he has botched the real story here. That clown screws up everything he touches.
Item 3 The fact that the same corporations that own the government are supplying it with information on the private lives of Americans doesn't surprise me. However, that doesn't make it even slightly less dangerous.
Item 5 The policy of a possible seizure of assets of people who disagree with the Bush regime shows the growing totalitarianism in this country. No wonder the corporate media largely ignored this story.
Posted by
libhom
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
5
comments
It seemed odd that Barack Obama would embrace the divisiveness, bigotry, triangulation, and pandering to dangerous religious extremists which were so common in the old politics. Yet, that is exactly what the President Elect did by giving such an important platform at a presidential inauguration to Osama bin Warren.
It could be that Obama is just bigoted against women, queers, and non Christians. However, the timing makes me wonder.
Blagojevich, an Illinois politician responsible for choosing the individual who would replace Obama in the Senate, had been arrested on charges of trying to sell that Senate seat. Obama comes from the world of Chicago politics, an incredibly corrupt world indeed. Was Obama involved in Blagojevich's alleged crimes? Was Obama involved in other corrupt activities by the Illinois governor?
You have to admit the timing of the Rick Warren invitation is highly suspicious. When a politician appears to be engaging in the politics of distraction, it is useful to question what he or she is trying to distract people from.
Posts
Sigh.
