Salon.com News | Atoning for Abu Ghraib

Salon.com News | Atoning for Abu Ghraib

This is a nauseating article about what happened in Abu Ghraib, but sometimes it is important to be reminded of the things that the U.S. is involved with. Salon has reprinted this from Der Spiegel. I wonder how things like this get published without being the most important news item of the week. How can items that are this important just be under the radar...

Carl Pope: Taking the Initiative: Can Anyone Explain This? - Sierra Club

Carl Pope: Taking the Initiative: Can Anyone Explain This? - Sierra Club: "Shortly after hurricane Katrina destroys the Gulf Coast and floods New Orleans, data emerges to show that the capital of California is likely to be the next American city flooded out. Its levee system is at risk of catastrophic failure. A bipartisan Congressional delegation writes to Governor Schwarzenegger to ask her help in obtaining federal funding to ensure that Sacramento is not the next New Orleans."

Apparently he then fires the entire California Reclamation Board... This is interesting -- I wonder if the CA press has been covering this?

Salon.com Books | "Being told we can't is making a lot of homos wanna"

Salon.com Books | "Being told we can't is making a lot of homos wanna": "'The problem for opponents of gay marriage,' Savage writes, 'isn't that gay people are trying to redefine marriage in some new, scary way, but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any logical sense to exclude same-sex couples. Gay people can love, gay people can commit. Some of us even have children. So why can't we get married?'"

A good review in Salon of Dan Savage's new book. Although I kind of feel like it summarizes it crisply enough that I don't need to read it. But it does sound funny, so for those of you looking for some humor...

AlterNet: The Changing Face of Sexual Harrassment

AlterNet: The Changing Face of Sexual Harrassment

I thought this article was interesting -- the best summary of where we are as a society in terms of sexual harrassment that I've seen for a long time. Justin Clark uses the American Apparel lawsuit as a springboard to discuss the complexities out there today. (As a side note, I personally despite American Apparel's ad campaign.)

AlterNet: Movie Mix: The Penguin Wars

AlterNet: Movie Mix: The Penguin Wars: "So we have sex with up to 20 partners in a lifetime, tolerance toward gay couplings, and males who take 'Go ahead and work late, honey, I'll watch the kids' to a whole a new level. Again, we'd bet these aren't the family values the Christian Right had in mind. But paid paternity leave? We'll take it."

Not a particularly extraordinary piece of writing, but Sheerni Avni summarizes well the absurdness of the right's claim on emperor penguins as well as the irritation I feel regarding the co-optation.

A Wimp on Genocide - New York Times

A Wimp on Genocide - New York Times: "But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an 'obligation' to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that 'We are prepared to take collective action ... on a case by case basis' to prevent genocide."

I have mixed feelings about some of Kristof's columns, but this one is very good. I do appreciate his willingness to be one of few in the mainstream media to fixate on the atrocities in Darfur. It doesn't seem like it would be such a controversial position to maintain.

On a side note, it appears that starting tomorrow, NYT is actually going to move their columnists to their pay service. I guess I can Lexis the articles (having the privilege of access to Princeton library resources), but it's annoying considering how much they do spur conversation and move discourse amongst the public at large.

David Gray and Dar Williams

Just a quick note to say that I bought David Gray's Life in Slow Motion and Dar Williams's My Better Self yesterday, and they are both excellent. They both absolutely sound like themselves on the albums (both are quite distinct), so you won't be converted if you didn't like their previous songs, but they are very good pieces of work for both of them. I expect them to be listenable for a long time before tiring of them, but we'll see... I've been finding music to be very disposable lately, in that I listen to new CD's a lot, and they lose my interest unfortunately rapidly.

Fwd: Couldn't Resist

This is horrible, but really, it's the funniest joke I've heard in a very very long time...

Question:

What is George W. Bush's position on Roe vs. Wade?

Answer:

He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

Giant Inflatable Penguin

Giant Inflatable Penguin

Can you believe this? Let me know what possible use you can imagine for this product. Possibly if you're the linux people with the penguin logo, I could see it. Please, send suggestions this way. I want an excuse to buy one. It can live on the far end of the driving range outside my window.

All the President's Friends

All the President's Friends - New York Times: "The point is that Katrina should serve as a wakeup call, not just about FEMA, but about the executive branch as a whole. Everything I know suggests that it's in a sorry state - that an administration which doesn't treat governing seriously has created two, three, many FEMA's."

It's interesting that Krugman discusses this, and so well. I was just talking about this with a bunch of classmates. Ah, cronyism and bureaucracy... You'd think Bush could at least find semi-qualified friends for these jobs.

March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder - New York Times

March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder - New York Times

Leave it to the goddamn conservatives to coopt and ruin a perfectly wonderful penguin documentary. This is a case where people see what they want to see and ignore the rest. Their evidence of proof of intelligent design could just as easily be proof of evolution -- how else but animals struggling, dying and adapting to survive continental drift into colder climes do we explain the absurdness of these creatures. The conservatives' focus on the monogomy of the penguins leaves out the fact that the film also pointed out that they change partners every year, and there are many documented cases of gay penguins discussed previously in this blog.

For fuck's sake.

Forever Young

In case you've ever wanted to download 6 versions of Alphaville's "Forever Young," now's your chance. They're really quite good.

As I deal with getting back into another school and generally trying to get over my quarterlife crisis, I've been finding legal free downloads a pleasant distraction at the least.

If only Hatch Magazine's "Soundtrack for the Quarterlife Crisis" came with the actual MP3's...

AP Wire | 09/10/2005 | Discord among gay-marriage opponents leads to dueling initiatives

Discord among gay-marriage opponents leads to dueling initiatives: "In the latest initiative struggle, a group called Vote Yes Marriage favors a detailed, multi-paragraph constitutional amendment. It would specify how it would rescind the steady stream of marriage-like rights lawmakers granted domestic partners over the last five years while preserving marriage itself as a union between a man and a woman."

A depressing look at what's in store beyond Mark Leno's bill getting the governator's veto. The initiative process is such a complete nightmare... You could pass an initiative in CA to enslave grandmothers with the right amount of money and PR.

TIME.com: How Reliable Is Brown's Resume?

TIME.com: How Reliable Is Brown's Resume?: "Brown was an 'assistant to the city manager' from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. 'The assistant is more like an intern,' she told TIME."

Perhaps I've overly internalized the American narrative regarding meritocracy, but I have to say, when someone gets to run FEMA by lying on his resume, I think that there should be serious criminal prosecution. Of course, the fact that he got the job even with the fake resume is astounding.

Salon mentions:
"Brown spent the largest chunk of his career as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, from 1991 to 2001."

As a complete aside, the Arabian Horse Association is working to "Help Horse Victims of Hurricane Katrina."

Fabulous.

Gay marriage up to governor now / Landmark legislation clears Assembly by narrowest of margins on second try

Gay marriage up to governor now / Landmark legislation clears Assembly by narrowest of margins on second try: "Sacramento -- The state Assembly, in a stunning victory for the gay rights movement, approved a landmark bill allowing same-sex marriage Tuesday night and sent it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "

Now we just have to wait and see what the governator does. But it's interesting to see progress and to watch as the CA politicians try to navigate the culture wars and figure out how to balance their beliefs and political pressures from both sides.