thoughts, issues, links, and musings collected (and sometimes analyzed) by E.
Sojourners
Working for Change
feminist.org
NARAL
themiddleclass.org
Images hosted by IMGSpot.com
What can I say? We suck.
Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.
posted by elizs @ 4:26 PM
On February 7, Rev. Peter Gomes will be presenting the Harvey Lectures at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. I can't make the 4pm speech, but I'm going to try the 6:30pm one.
The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes, widely regarded as one of America's most distinguished preachers and Christian thinkers, will present the 2005 Harvey Lectures at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest on February 7.
The overall title of his Harvey Lectures is "The Bible -- America's Iconic Book." His 4 p.m. lecture will explore "How Did It Get That Way?" while the concluding 6:30 p.m. talk will focus on "Which Way the Future?" Professor Gomes will also preach at the Monday noon service in Christ Chapel.
Both lectures in Knapp Auditorium are open to the public without charge but persons coming from off the seminary campus are requested to make a free reservation at 512.439.0330.
Gomes notes that Americans have taken the Bible seriously since the landing of the Pilgrims. It is as iconic an American book as Huckleberry Finn or Uncle Tom's Cabin. How did a book written in Hebrew and Greek become "our" book in English, and what happens when we disagree as to what it means and says? Is there such a thing as "Biblical values?" If so, is that good or bad?
posted by elizs @ 11:56 AM
Very disappointing. I really like Buster. I didn't even know he had his own show on PBS. Apparently lesbian couples don't qualify as families he can visit, however.
. . . [O]n Tuesday PBS decided not to distribute to its roughly 350 PBS stations an episode of "Postcards From Buster," which was scheduled for Feb. 2 and included lesbian mothers, even though a few days earlier PBS officials, among them PBS's president, Pat Mitchell, viewed the episode and called it appropriate. That was before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings denounced the program, starring Buster Baxter, a cute animated rabbit who until now has been known primarily as a close friend of Arthur, the world's most famous aardvark. Ms. Spellings said many parents would not want children exposed to a lesbian life style.
Buster joined another cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, as a focus of the nation's culture wars. SpongeBob was recently attacked by Christian groups for being pro-homosexual, though SpongeBob's creator said it was all a misinterpretation. Buster's offense was appearing in "Sugartime!," the undistributed "Postcards From Buster" show, in which he visits children living in Vermont whose parents are a lesbian couple. Civil unions are allowed in Vermont.
posted by elizs @ 8:54 AM
I'm posting David Batston's complete editorial from this week's SojoMail (with my bolded emphasis):
The "Democracy Option" disappears in IraqI can't believe we are considering this option. To let your elected officials know you disagree with this proposed plan, go here.
by David Batstone
The Pentagon is clearly worried about a deepening quagmire in Iraq. Nearly two years after the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, the presence of U.S. forces does not appear to be moving Iraq toward a stable, civic society. A frustrated Pentagon is exploring new strategies.
Newsweek magazine reported last week that Pentagon insiders are touting a plan code-named the "Salvador Option." The plan refers to the secret support of the Reagan administration in the 1980s for hit squads in El Salvador that targeted rebel militia and their civilian sympathizers. Many Pentagon conservatives credit these so-called "death squads" with turning the tide against a strong revolutionary movement in El Salvador.
I worked in human rights in Central America for nearly 12 years. My tenure began in the early 1980s when I launched and then ran a non-governmental group concerned with economic and community development.
Death squads roamed freely in El Salvador and Guatemala at the time. In these two countries alone, they assassinated or "disappeared" more than 150,000 civilians. They targeted anyone - church pastors, literacy teachers, community development workers - who appeared to support social reform.
My organization arranged for volunteers from the United States to live with civilians threatened by the death squads. Our effort was successful because the death squads were made up largely of members of the military or police working clandestinely. They realized that brazenly killing civilians through official channels would threaten U.S. aid. More risky still would be the murder of U.S. citizens - the temporary cessation of U.S. military aid to El Salvador after the rape and murder of four U.S. religious women in 1980 proved that point.
All the same, I witnessed countless cases of military abuse. The security units regularly justified the murder of civilian suspects as a necessary defense in the fight against "terrorists." The military acted as judge, jury, and executioner. The police worked hand in hand with the military. The police investigated community leaders working for social change during the day, and would turn that information over to the army hit squads who made the civilians "disappear" in the middle of the night.
How chilling that the Pentagon is seriously considering a plan to take us back to those dark days. According to Newsweek, "the Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support, and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria...."
The Pentagon's affinity for a "Salvadoran Option" in Iraq appears consistent with its broader shift to promote a strong state security apparatus internationally in the fight against terrorism. In a summit of Latin American defense ministers held in Quito, Ecuador, in late 2004, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld unveiled his campaign to reverse nearly two decades of military reform in Latin America. Though the summit went largely unreported in the U.S. media, we may look back at it in years to come as a significant watershed for American foreign policy.
Central to Rumsfeld's Quito doctrine is the re-integration of the military and police, reversing a major reform objective in the hemisphere during the last two decades. Both U.S. and Latin American human rights agencies deem that separation of powers necessary to bring military activity under civilian accountability.
During the drafting of the final summit statement, the Canadian delegation tried to salvage the gains for civilian freedoms once absent in the region's former security states. Backed by Brazil and Chile, the Canadian defense ministry introduced language that would reaffirm a commitment to international human rights and civil protections. The Pentagon team, however, successfully blocked this corrective from being added to the summit's final documents.
The nostalgia for the military strongmen of Latin America appears to be growing in Washington. Is it merely coincidence that President Bush appointed Elliot Abrams in mid-2003 to be his senior advisor on the Middle East? Abrams was a key player in the crafting of Reagan's "Salvador Option" in Central America. When confronted in the mid-'80s with a United Nations report that the vast majority of "atrocities in El Salvador's civil war were committed by Reagan-assisted death squads," Abrams energetically defended U.S. foreign policy: "The administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievements." Abrams soon thereafter was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, only to be pardoned five years later by President George H.W. Bush.
The invasion of Iraq was sold to the American public as a necessary means to arrest the spread of terrorism. We were told that Saddam Hussein could no longer be allowed to deploy security forces to terrorize the Iraqi people and eliminate movements for democratic reform. Yet here we are today, two years later, and the United States is on the verge of initiating its own death squads. I wonder at what point over the past two years we gave up on the "Democracy Option" in Iraq?
posted by elizs @ 1:36 PM
Jim Wallis (of Sojourners) will be on Fresh Air today to talk about his new book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. I read he will also be doing Inauguration coverage with Tim Russert for NBC. I'm not watching it, but if I chose to, I'd watch it for him. I was able to catch him on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday night. I think he did a pretty decent job, given that Jon Stewart seemed not to have much of a clue what his work is about.
posted by elizs @ 9:17 AM
The president of Harvard is defending himself against comments he made the other day, claiming they were misconstrued.
At Friday's conference, Mr. Summers discussed possible reasons so few women were on the science and engineering faculties at research universities, and he said he would be provocative.That's a pretty big faux pas, eh? I wish there was a transcript available, damn it. I can't believe an assumedly well-educated man would make such a comment.
Among his hypotheses were that faculty positions at elite universities required more time and energy than married women with children were willing to accept, that innate sex differences might leave women less capable of succeeding at the most advanced mathematics and that discrimination may also play a role, participants said. There was no transcript of his remarks.
posted by elizs @ 11:26 AM
Virginia Mayo is mostly why I love Danny Kaye movies. She's always the cheerful, beautiful blonde to his zany, red-headed antics (see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty). She appeared in many of Goldwyn's sillier movies, but also was able to show her stuff in The Best Years of Our Lives as a wife who can't get used to her husband being out of uniform (or the fact that he wants her to stay at home and not pick up men at nightclubs). It is disappointing that she wasn't given too many chances to show her chops, but I know we all appreciate her just the same. I think Virginia Mayo and Myrna Loy are more deserving of awards (neither received any acting Oscar noms in their lifetime) than some of the actresses we have around currently. Perhaps I'm a little biased.
posted by elizs @ 4:04 PM
You've probably already heard or read this by now, but the U. S. has officially given up on finding any WMD in Iraq. What more can I say that you don't already know? Bush is a liar, our soldiers are over there for no reason (and don't say Saddam was evil, b/c although I agree, there are worse people in power that we do nothing about), and we have invested way too much money in this quagmire.
posted by elizs @ 4:56 PM
