Politics, Business and Economics
July 2, 2008
Believe Him, It's Torture
Well, if Christopher Hitchens, who has been an ardent supporter of the Iraq war, can admit that waterboarding is not "extreme interrogation" but instead is "outright torture," the rest of us should find it easier to accept that, especially after watching this video of what he underwent, the controlled nature of his experience with the technique.
Posted by Holly at 7:54 AM | Comments (1)
June 22, 2008
More Proof That Sexism Is Tolerated in Political Campaigns and the Media, While Racism Is Denounced
The guy who created that horrible racist button I mentioned earlier has apologized and withdrawn it, and the Texas Republican Party is DONATING TO CHARITY (probably the only time in the history of the organization it has ever done such a thing) the money it collected by leasing a booth him at the party's convention.
But all his nasty pins insulting Hillary and her gender? Those you can still buy.
Posted by Holly at 9:12 AM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2008
They're Voting Republican
In case you didn't see it:
Posted by Holly at 7:17 AM | Comments (1)
June 18, 2008
"Affectionate" Racist Toy from Utah Couple No Longer Available, But Maybe You Can Still Buy a Racist Button in Texas
Uh....
Well....
Turns out a couple in Utah created an Obama sock monkey doll, but these Utahns claim the doll isn't racist. No! Aimed at Obama supporters, it's "a charming association between a candidate and a toy we had when we were little," and something that helps us "really try and transcend still existing racial biases." They're shocked and hurt that so many people are REALLY offended by this horrifically offensive doll, and have concluded sadly that "there is an element of naviete [sic] on our part, in that we don't think in terms of myths, fables, fairy tales and folklore."
The one bit of good news in this particular story is that according to the company's website, they will not proceed with the manufacture of this toy.
I don't want to ignore the fact that this toy is REALLY gross. But I do want to point out that the reaction to the toy supports Katie Couric's contention that truly egregious racism against Obama isn't tolerated by the mainstream, while truly egregious sexism against Hillary is shrugged off as no big deal. (You paying attention, Mr. Nighttime?) As she says, if Obama regularly confronted attacks equivalent to those Hillary endured, "the outrage wouldn't be a footnote; it would be front-page news." Indeed the sock monkey story was the lead story for the ABC news station I link to, and at the time I'm writing, the video of the news clip is the website's most popular clip.
There is one, uh, mainstream-ish venue, however, where racism is tolerated: the Texas Republican party. At the state convention, you could buy a button reading, "If Obama is President... will we still call it the White House?"
The answer to the question, is, of course, obviously YES. I mean, despite all the blockheads who've worked in the Pentagon, it's still referred to by a name denoting its five sides.
Posted by Holly at 8:11 AM | Comments (1)
June 12, 2008
More On Why I'm Glad Hillary Ran, and Hope We Keep Talking About Gender
Katie knows what she's talking about:
Posted by Holly at 11:18 AM | Comments (11)
June 11, 2008
I'm Glad Hillary Lost, But I'm Also Glad She Ran
I liked this little editorial from Salon:
Posted by Holly at 6:48 AM | Comments (0)
June 2, 2008
A New Form of Piracy
Most days, I manage to love my country enough to be able to live in it, because A) even though it's done some really shitty things throughout its history (and especially of late), it's done some great things as well, and I keep hoping that the balance will be restored again; and B) it's my country, and loyalty works that way.
But this morning I read about these prison ships the government is doing its best to keep secret, and I don't even know how to feel or what to say about this latest atrocious barbarity, except OH MY GOD.
Posted by Holly at 8:40 AM | Comments (2)
April 23, 2008
Some Stuff From Yesterday
First of all, I'm bummed that Obama didn't win the Pennsylvania Primaries, but the despair I feel about the future of my country is currently more diffuse than the anxiety I feel about certain other topics, so I won't dwell on it. The one thing I liked about yesterday's election was the "I Voted" sticker I got after voting. Sometimes they're really lame but this one was cool: it was big and square and had this parchment colored background, with a picture of the flag and the script of "We the People" from the preamble to the constitution. OK, it's not really all that important, but these days I'm grateful for small pleasures.
Next, did you know that you can ship live birds through the mail? I didn't, until I went to the post office yesterday and a guy was doing just that. If you scroll down on the PO's special handling page, you'll find instructions on how to do it. You can also send bees.
Finally, something else I learned at the post office yesterday: did you know that postage rates are going up again? A first-class letter will soon cost 42 cents. (I just noticed that there is no cents character on my keyboard.) So rush out and buy as many of those "forever" stamps as you can afford, though at least some of the new $.42 stamps are cool: there are some featuring the face of Martha Gellhorn, whom I totally dig and admire--her essay collection The Face of War is pretty damn amazing.
Posted by Holly at 10:30 AM | Comments (3)
March 21, 2008
JS on "the Speech"
In case you didn't see it:
For the record, Obama's my man. I am praying he wins the nomination.... And lately I've been thinking about what else I can do besides requesting that vague powers somewhere in the universe help us put the right person in the White House, particularly as Pennsylvania has one of the few remaining primaries. So when someone from the Obama campaign called me yesterday and asked me for a donation, I gave it, and asked for a volunteer packet as well.
Posted by Holly at 8:20 AM | Comments (2)
September 22, 2007
shock doctrine, the movie
Posted by Holly at 9:55 AM | Comments (2)
August 17, 2007
No Surprise for the Dickster
via Salon
Posted by Holly at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)
July 12, 2007
How Reading War Literature Helped Me Know Our Current War Was a BAD Idea
People are sometimes surprised or disappointed by my interest in war literature. It's gruesome and depressing; why would I want to study stuff like that? Maybe because then I already know about stuff like these "routine atrocities" reported by The Nation and can try to prevent it happening again.
Posted by Holly at 12:08 PM | Comments (1)
May 30, 2007
My Blog Roll and the Supreme Court
First off, something is wrong with my blog roll and I don't know how to fix it.... I used to have all these links to all these great blogs, and they're still there, somewhere in the html.... but they don't show up on my actual blog. This is what I get for neglecting the place for the better part of six months, isn't it.
The same can be said for the Supreme Court. I remember a conversation I had at a barbeque in Iowa City back in the summer of 2000, in which the members of the Green Party I was talking to argued that it really wouldn't make any difference for anyone in the long or short term if a Republican instead of a Democrat was elected president. And then, we read something like this in today's NY Times, all about the recent ruling limiting the time an employee has to file a lawsuit regarding pay discrimination:
As with an abortion ruling last month, this decision showed the impact of Justice Alito’s presence on the court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he succeeded, would almost certainly have voted the other way, bringing the opposite outcome.
What can I say but "I told you so."
Posted by Holly at 9:37 AM | Comments (4)
October 10, 2006
Voter Fraud, and What to Do about It
Here's a message that arrived in my inbox this morning and absolutely sickened me. I'm reprinting the whole thing with permission--and you can too--because I'm linking to www.blackboxvoting.org
It's going to be up to us to make the case. We can't solve a problem if we refuse to look. Citizens are fed up with black box elections, and are mustering up evidence of improper behavior that will swing the pendulum back in the direction it belongs.
Examples of the astonishing evidence uncovered by candidates and extraordinary citizens follows.
At first, we proved that the machines "theoretically' could be tampered with. Then, in experiments in Leon County and Emery County, citizen-led investigations machines could ACTUALLY be tampered with.
At first, public records requests from Black Box Voting and others proved that election results were not authenticatable using available audit records. And now, Black Box Voting and citizens are coming up with audit records that show strong indications of improper behavior.
Be aware that we are not going to see a Perry Mason moment. Proof of corruption will be incremental, but it will come.
In 2006, your job will be to embark on the biggest citizen evidence-gathering expedition in history, to take this past the tipping point and achieve real change. Nothing will do but a reversal of the pendulum, back to citizen ownership and oversight of our own government and its electoral processes.
Let's take a look now at some of the evidence citizens -- and Black Box Voting -- are uncovering:
1. Memphis: Candidates in Memphis asked Black Box Voting for help securing public records from the Aug. 3, 2006 election. Black Box Voting recommended getting a copy of the Diebold GEMS database, along with the Windows event log. What we found shocked us: The sheer number of legal and security violations in the event log were horrifying, and it also showed that Shelby County -- or someone -- was accessing the file during the middle of a Temporary Restraining Order prohibiting this.
- A remote access program called PC Anywhere was found resident in the system
- Evidence of insertion of an encrypted Lexar Jump Drive was present
- Evidence of attempts to alter or write HTML files (used to report results) was present
- Apparently without a firewall, the GEMS system was opened up to the County Network
- A prohibited program, Microsoft Access, which makes editing the election chimpanzee-easy, was installed on the system AND USED shortly after the election.
Read more about Memphis.
2. Alaska: In early 2006, the Alaska Democratic Party asked Black Box Voting for help. The election numbers simply didn't add up. BBV's Jim March urged them to fight for the right to obtain the Diebold GEMS database, which Diebold had until then been asserting proprietary rights over. After months of hard-fought battling, they prevailed. That database was released publicly at Black Box Voting here.
You can open it yourself in Microsoft Access, and when you do, choose the table called "audit." In this table you will see evidence that someone was changing things as recently as July 2006 -- after the matter was in court, before the file was released. The changes are substantial, and involve redefining ballot and candidate items, along with a reference to a second memory card.
If you don't have MS Access, here is a pdf copy of that controversial log.
3. In Georgia, Cynthia McKinney contacted Black Box Voting. Very odd things were happening in the 2006 primary and the runoff election that followed -- Democrats were being served up Republican primary ballots on the Diebold touch-screens, McKinney's name was left off some ballots, but reportedly appeared on other ballots nowhere near her district. The electronic poll books -- something Georgia voters never asked for and a whole new source of glitches -- were malfunctioning regularly.
Black Box Voting advised McKinney to seek the troubleshooter and pollworker logs. What we found on these shocked us -- in an election reported as "smooth" by the press, was evidence of dozens and dozens of voting machine malfunctions, electronic pollbook glitches, and most disturbing of all (given the dire consequences available based on the Hursti and Princeton studies), the seals for dozens of voting machines were missing, broken, and mismatched -- yet the machines were used anyway.
View a list of the problems in Dekalb County, Georgia.
4. In Ohio, Richard Hayes Phillips examined ballots from the 2004 presidential election. They'd been kept locked up for 22 months, and he was under immense pressure to look at as many as he could before they were destroyed. What he found shocked him: Patterns of tampering, as evidenced by statistically impossible overvotes, strategically placed and favoring George W. Bush. He listed his findings here.
This is the tip of the iceberg. The missing ingredient is, and has been, the active oversight of the citizenry. In 2006, please join the movement as an active participant in overseeing and authenticating your election. We'll help. Start here, with this pdf version of the Citizen's Tool Kit.
Posted by Holly at 2:30 PM | Comments (1)
September 18, 2006
It's the Thought That Counts, Which Is Why These "Gentlemen" Can F**k Themselves with a 2X4
So, um, yeah, it's embarrassing to admit, but sometimes when I'm too busy to devote time to my own blog, I neglect other people's as well, not reading for a few days and then catching up on entries in batches. Which is what I'm doing this morning. I found this entry on Rebecca...and all that entails about trying to find a decent print news magazine to subscribe to. She asks for recommendations, and someone recommended "The Economist."
Which prompted me to leave this comment, which I am reproducing here because I like the story.
The Economist? Oh god, no! Run away in horror from The Economist! What a load of conservative tripe. My father gave me a subscription to said horrorshow for Chirstmas 2004, explaining his decision to do so by saying, "They endorsed Kerry for president."
To which I replied, "Dad, the freakin National Review, the conservative rag started by William F. Buckley, godfather of contemporary American conservativism, endorsed Kerry for president! Virtually everyone in the whole freakin' world [The Economist is British] realizes that George Bush should not be president!"
So then I got The Economist every freakin' week but couldn't bear to open it. It just started cluttering up my magazine stand and one day I decided to open an issue and saw that letters to the editor all still began with the saluation "Gentlemen."
It's the freakin 21st century and there's still some horrible retro news rag stressing that it's editorial board is male.
So that was it; I had to cancel my subscription. I called the toll-free number and talked to a very nice young woman who had to ask why I was canceling. I explained about the "Gentlemen" thing, adding, "Jesus fucking christ, can't these guys not act like assholes?"
To which she replied, very warmly and sympathetically, "It appears not."
And then I had to explain that it was a gift and ask her not to tell my dad that I was in essence returning his Christmas present.
She had no problem with that and agreed to send me the check for the refund, which was in the neighborhood of 60-70 bucks, and this was late April! If only I had canceled in early January.
p.s. Dale, I included a semi-colon in this post just for you.
p.p.s. Here's a great editorial by my idol Karen Armstrong on why what the pope said last week was bad.
Posted by Holly at 9:16 AM | Comments (10)
July 6, 2006
A Slew of Inconvenient Truths
Much to my surprise, the theater in the rancid backwater I call home actually booked a few showings of An Inconvenient Truth--the movie arrived on Friday. Convinced it won't stay in town for long, I went to see it yesterday.
It didn't tell me much I hadn't heard before, and I was just so thrilled that the movie might be seen by people who might otherwise not think about this stuff, that it really cheered me up. But then I started thinking about how different the world might be if Bush had not stolen the White House, and I got really depressed.
I don't know how Al Gore would have handled the 9/11 attacks but I am convinced he'd be a better president than Bush--and even in 2000, when I had little affection or admiration for Gore, I still knew he'd be better than Bush--I KNEW Bush would be a disaster; I knew he was simply a bad, bad man. It was very painful for me to listen to my friends in the Green party insist that there was no difference between the two major parties' candidates, because there was so little difference between the two major parties.
One reason I suffer so from insomnia is that I have always been a worrier. I sometimes wake up out of a deep sleep, my heart racing and my mouth dry with panic over melting polar ice caps and destruction of wetlands. My primary obsession is the environment and I admit that I have long felt it should be everyone's because if our world is uninhabitable, what does the rest of it matter?
I became concerned with the environment because I started paying attention to it, after a couple of decades of being trained to think of the earth as a combination self-replenishing piggy bank and bottomless toilet: anything you want, take from it, because there will always be more; anything you don't want, just dump it someplace where you can neither see nor smell it and that's it, it's gone. Realizing how thoroughly fucked up that approach is was a big deal for me, and one that caused as much conflict in my family as my departure from the Mormon church. One of the ways my Mormon Republican father earned a living was suing the likes of the Sierra Club whenever they did anything that would inhibit the right of farmers to suck as much water as they wanted out of the local river, or inhibit the right of timber companies to cut down trees on our mountain, or inhibit the right of ranchers to kill any and all wildlife they didn't like. He was not happy when I joined the ACLU, but he said, "Just so long as you never join the Sierra Club."
I've lost track of how many environmental organizations I belong to (including the Sierra Club) but I feel it's a losing battle. I will continue to try to minimize and compensate for the amount of CO2 I produce, but we've just fucked so many things up--and so many people don't want to change. My neighbors, for instance, leave their porch light on all night and sometimes forget to turn it off in the morning--it drives me NUTS to see it burning there all day, giving off heat (because that's what incandescent bulbs do) and CO2.
Here's the thing: WE SUCK at our primary job as human beings, which is to take care of one another and the world we live in. I'm not much one for volunteering or activism any more--my mission kind of killed that impulse--but perhaps I must force myself to do it anyway. But what should I do?
It's not like simply knowing about shit really helps much: In early 2003, when it became clear that we were going to war no matter what, I became a news junkie. I began spending two to three hours every day reading half a dozen online newspapers, trying to understand what was happening in our world, as if understanding it could somehow mitigate its destructiveness. And then, after the elections in 2004, I forced myself to cut back. I got rid of my online subscription to the Washington Post and a few other newspapers. I even canceled my subscription to my local paper, which had endorsed George Bush for president. I felt so impotent and enraged and hopeless that I just couldn't bear it. Which is pretty much how I feel right now.
Posted by Holly at 12:40 PM | Comments (9)
April 16, 2006
Playing The Clash Made Him a Terror Suspect
Here's a story I would have only imagined could appear in something like The Onion, but according to The Daily Mail (which I admit sort of reminds me of The Onion), it really happened.
Some British guy got hauled off an airplane and questioned for three hours because he played London Calling by the Clash and Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin in a taxi, and these songs scared the taxi man. I admit the lyrics to "Immigrant Song" are scary, but only because they're so incredibly silly--I included a link to the lyrics so you can see for yourself in case you're unfortunate enough not to be thoroughly familiar with Zeppelin III.
Read it and weep: all you need now to be to be suspected of terrorist sympathies is a fondness for classic punk and rock.
Thanks to Spike for sending me the link.
Posted by Holly at 9:50 PM
April 4, 2006
US Criticizes Foreign Dude Who Fails to Care for His Own Country First
Here's an article in the NY Times criticizing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for--get this!--spending all kinds of money to fix things in foreign countries when there are still poor people in Venezuela. Thanks to this article, we learn that
Mr. Chávez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own country," said [Bush appointe] John Negroponte, the American director of national intelligence, in February at a Congressional hearing in Washington.
Can you imagine?! A president of some resource-rich country in the Americas, spending lots of money abroad while people in his own country go hungry, cold or naked, while there are children who are uneducated, people in their prime without work, and old people who are sick and alone? What would it be like to live in such a country? And what would it be like for citizens of other countries to know that their lives are shaped by the hypocritical meddling of a government eager to buy influence abroad, even at the expense of its own citizens' well-being?
p.s. Here's a response from Counterpunch that's pretty insightful.
Posted by Holly at 9:50 AM | Comments (3)