Happy Emancipation Day

One hundred and fifty years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Here’s the money quote:

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

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If You’re Looking for Signs of the Apocalypse

Franklin Graham must not read Rolling Stone, because this is worse than four horsemen, or even a black President.

Also, too: nice pearls. Are they cultured?

Post Debate Punditing Without A License

I’m going to do something I very rarely wish to inflict on y’all.  Usually, I like to invoke at least a schmear of empirical evidence to drive an argument, but just this once I’m going to go all pundity…

….which means, I guess, that I gotta start with a Penetrating Glimpse of the Obvious:

Last night’s debate was a poor showing for President Obama and those of us who see the prospect of a President Romney as a clear and present danger to the Republic and our kids’ future.

Which leads to the equally obvious (but true) pivot:

No campaign is a single event. Counting today there are 32 full days to go before the polls open on Tuesday, November 6.  Last night’s farrago will become part of the river of stories that flow towards that day — but it is the sum of those tales, not any single shiny moment, that will determine the outcome.

Already, some folks — partisans for now, to be sure — are trying to draw attention to what Romney actually said, and in doing so, identifying the significant vulnerabilities this debate exposed for the Republican cause.  For example, I agree with Mistermix that Romney’s signal mistake was to open himself up for a renewed assault on his Medicare position — and that link to Krugman shows it ain’t just us DFH’s paying attention.   I also think Romney’s tripling down on his tax plan will allow a lot of people, and not just wonks, to remind folks of the gap between arithmetic and all the BS Romney and Ryan have thrown out on this one.

As Josh Marshall says in that second link, this is the kind of thing that takes several news cycles to build.  But recall:  we were all enraged at the brazen embrace of easily refutable lies in the Ryan RNC Convention speech.  We didn’t have faith in either the MSM or the Obama campaign (Democrats after all!) to take on the deceit with anything like the attention needed to defuse such weaponized ruminant excrement.  But they did, and (with some help from the marathon man himself) Ryan has become at least a bit of punchline ever since.*

So:  President Obama missed many opportunities last night, perhaps most significantly in not drawing a sharp enough line between the “you’re on your own” Romney vision and the “we’re all in this together” music Obama has played to such great effect in the past (and I’m sure will again, soon).

But the real test of the Obama campaign will be what it does over the next week with the actual missteps Romney made last night.  How will they use his internal contradictions in the ads?  What will Obama and his surrogates say to local news folks?  How quickly can their operation drive the mainstream media to go to town on stories like this one? (Shorter: it took almost no time at all for a Romney aide to contradict Romney’s core claim about pre-existing conditions and Medicare.)  No guarantees exist, but I have to say I’ve been damn impressed with the side of the Obama campaign that pursues such ends.  (Note also that Fallows reminds us that (in his view) debating is the best campaign technique for Romney.  Obama’s operation has been superior to his rival’s in every other phase so far.)

To repeat the cliché — holy hell, if I’m pretending to be a pundit I’ve got to hammer those too — but campaigns are marathons, not sprints.  Romney’s performance last night was like ripping off an 15 second 100 yard dash in mile 18th on the way to the Back Bay.**  Yup, he won that stretch of road.  Now comes the time to reel him in.

Which leads me to my last thought, the one I hope y’all take home: 32 days, peeps. It’s not just Obama and the grandees of the profession, the Axelrod’s and the Plouffe’s who can’t let themselves get too much sleep between now and then.  There’s the rest of us.  There’s me.

I have to confess — I’ve been less involved in a boots-on-the-ground kind of way in this election than the last, and by a good margin too.  My wife and I have been giving money on a regular basis, but I used to be a phone bank hero, and then got into door-to-door as my preferred mode of participation.  Haven’t done that this year; pretty much all I’ve done that requires me to upgrade from a bathrobe in front of a screen in my basement*** is to show up at a couple of Warren events.  That’s not enough — if there is one true lesson to be gained from the debate it is that nothing is in the bag, not the Presidency, not the Senate, surely not the House.

I’m not Tim F.  I can’t match his gift for catalyzing action.  But action is needed, so here’s my pledge.  I’m going to do something every week from now through Monday, 5 November.  I’ve got the day job and I’ve got the kid and there’s some real life stuff happening in my extended family, so I can’t do what I did when I was a mere pup, and just take off for New Hampshire for the last two weeks of the 1992 election.  But I’ll be heading north to canvas this weekend and everyday I can liberate from my daily round between now and the 6th; I’ll be tossing more bucks in the pot today, and no doubt on days to come; I’ll keep looking for useful tasks that I can tackle.  I really don’t want to do this — I’m becoming more misanthropic and generally grumpy with each passing year — but that’s what’s required, so I’m just going to kick my ass out the door as much as I possibly can.

You?

Update: Just to show it ain’t just my rose-colored monitor screens making this argument, here’s a dispatch from the inner sanctum of the Village, NBC’s First Read:

*** Who wins the post-debate? If Romney won the instant reactions from last night’s debate, it is more than possible that the Obama camp can win the next 24 hours. Why? Because Romney said several things that could make life difficult for him today or in the next debate. First, Romney declared, “I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.” But in addition to supporting the extension of the Bush tax cuts, which are skewed heavily to the wealthy, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center says that Romney’s tax plan would give the Top 0.1% an average tax cut of more than $246,000. Next, he stated that “there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit.” While he has said his plan will be paid for, he’s yet to lay out any SPECIFICS on how he’ll pay for it. Romney also said, “I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plan to cut education funding.” But the Ryan budget plan, which Romney has said he’d sign into law, leads to long-term spending reductions in education. And Romney also didn’t disagree with the description that his Medicare plan would consist of “vouchers” for future retirees. Winning a “debate” is always a two-part deal — the night itself, and then the aftermath. This is now an opportunity for Team Obama and a challenge for Team Romney.

Update 2: And on cue, here’s an opening shot from Team Obama (via):

<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/xZniwrAwZGY” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>

None of this is to say all is well.

It isn’t.

This election is a month away and it really, truly ain’t in the bag yet.  So what I said above:  If the idea of waking up on November 7 to the words President-Elect Romney gives you the cold sweats, listen to the man — and don’t just vote, put mind, money and muscle behind the campaign to get your friends and neighbors to follow your lead.

*Via DeLong, a new game:  Where’s Waldo Paulie?

**Boston stuff — never mind.

***Not intended to be a factual statement.

Image:  Franz Marc, The Yellow Cow, 1911.

Cross posted at Inverse Square

I like a series of skirmishes better than a war, turns out

We made some Obama organizing calls last Tuesday night, before pundit-gate, so I’ll go ahead and give you my take on the war on women because I haven’t seen it anywhere. Maybe I’m alone in this, who knows.

We had five callers Tuesday. Four were women. All of the women mentioned the war on women. We were all smiling benevolently and constantly at this guy, too, in a mildly creepy way that might have made him uncomfortable, because, you know, he’s helping us. He was not actually there to do that, help women win the the war on women, specifically. For all I know he came because he’s concerned about marginal tax rates but we just collectively decided he was there for us:

I think the response to the onslaught of commands targeted at women was one of those things that bubble up. It had the slow-build feel to me of authentic anger that comes from ordinary people, slowly but surely. That’s why it was so heartening (and really interesting) to watch it develop, here locally, on the site and elsewhere. In purely practical terms, I think the state-by-state nature of the thing helped. Women were watching this crazy single-minded focus in state after state after state, where they live, for close to two years. When it blew up nationally, with Komen and then Obama versus the council of clerics and Rush Limbaugh, they, we, a lot of us, were already halfway there. I know that Democrats and political pros saw it and named it and pushed it, I recognize all that, but I think that was a collateral assist to something authentic that was actually happening “on the ground”. Too, female congressional Democrats are constantly talking about these issues, and they’re usually completely ignored. This was different.

There are some comparisons that fit, I think. One that comes to mind is Issue Two in Ohio, where a really massive majority rejected gutting collective bargaining. Unions ran a great logistical campaign, but all they did is focus what was already there. That’s not nothing, what unions did, it doesn’t matter how many grim and determined people one has if they don’t have a path to translate that into something productive, but the union organizing and spending on ads was tapping into what was there. I passed petitions and held events, but I wasn’t doing any persuading. I was quite literally just collecting signatures and holding events.

The Culture of Corruption (2006) was another one that felt this way to me. The GOP Congress that year was really corrupt, and people really did know that. The state issue here in Ohio, the thing that bubbled up from below, was that the state-level Republicans were ALSO incredibly corrupt in 2006. By the time Culture of Corruption was national, big majorities here were wholly convinced. National Democrats named and pushed something that already existed.

These issues had a nice, us against them, underground feel to me, talking to people here. It’s like there’s this “national conversation” (everyone hates unions, rightfully, because everyone knows unions suck; women are whiny sluts and most people will side with the bishops; Tom Delay isn’t THAT corrupt, both sides do it) and then there’s this whole other conversation going on. I love when that happens, because those issues are ours, they belong to us, if only for the time before the professionals grab them and frame them. When that happens, when we become pundit-fodder, they’re all but proclaiming that hostilities have ended and they’re pushing us back into some boring, comfortable groove that they love like The Mommy Wars, something safe and familiar, because, Jesus, talking about mandated trans-vaginal ultrasounds and aspirin between our legs is uncomfortable. That’s a little too…real. It couldn’t last.

The war on women was over for political media the moment Mitt Romney’s handlers came up with a strategy, and Ann Romney and professional pundits then began discussing, framing, defining and then redefining the issue. They’re done with ordinary women and what I believe was our authentic anger on this. It’s now in the hands of the pros and it will be put into context and watered down and explained away. I think it was inevitable. It was just a matter of time and the right opportunity. It doesn’t necessarily mean the authentic ground-level energy goes away, but I was still sad to see it happen.

Queen City Shuffle

Across the river in local election results, Cincinnati voters made some major changes to the City Council in the wake of city and Hamilton County employees taking major budget cuts over the last year.

Voters ousted four incumbent Republicans from Cincinnati City Council on Tuesday night, choosing instead seven Democrats, a majority of African-Americans, the first openly gay candidate and enough support to move forward with the streetcar project.

The outcome clearly was the result of the turnout generated by Issue 2, the measure to repeal the collective bargaining reforms of Senate Bill 5. The issue was expected to draw a lot of Democrats and union supporters to the polls.

Issue 2 lost in Hamilton County big, the Nos getting nearly 60% of the vote, and it was a bloodbath for Republicans on the ballot, but they’re blaming Issue 2 for their crushing loss and rightfully so.

Ousted: Chris Bortz, Leslie Ghiz, Amy Murray and Wayne Lippert.

“Issue 2 seems to be dragging the Republican Party down,” said Lippert. “This is transformational, but not in a positive way for the city.”

Hamilton County Republican chairman Alex Triantafilou said the results left him “concerned for the future of the city.”

“No question that Issue 2 played a significant role in this,” he added.

The new council means Cincy’s streetcar project can finally move forward unimpeded by Republicans and that the city can now take steps to fix the city budget without sacrificing police, firefighters, and teachers.  It’s a start.  We’ll see what Mayor Mark Mallory can do with the kind of support he’s always wanted, like from Cincy’s first openly gay council member, Chris Seelbach.

He worked for former Vice Mayor David Crowley and modeled his candidacy after the lessons Crowley taught him. He promises to carry on the goals of his mentor, who died early this year of cancer. Crowley taught him to look for “issues of justice in everything you do.”

All he hears out of City Hall, he says, is what should be cut and not cut. He wants to turn the debate more toward what council can do to make Cincinnati more of a place sought out by young professionals and young families. He worked in 2004 to help defeat Article XII, which banned naming gay people as a protected class. He wants to make public transportation the top priority and move toward a fixed-rail system connecting all neighborhoods.

He’s 31, vice president and chief financial officer of The Seidewitz Group, a marketing and consulting firm. He lives in Over-the-Rhine, is an endorsed Democrat, and is the city’s first openly gay council candidate.

And that’s just how big of a disaster Issue 2 was for Ohio Republicans last night.  Expanding on what Kay was saying below, Kasich is toast, folks.  The failure of Republicans to coalesce around this issue not only backfired miserably, it had the completely opposite effect, creating an off-year grassroots surge that knocked the blocks out from under Cincy conservatives.  He cannot be jettisoned fast enough in the Buckeye State and Republicans in Ohio are now in a deep hole.  The network to bring Ohio back into the blue column next year is already in place.  The overreach was brutal, and a significant number of Ohio GOP voters jumped ship on this measure and mobilized Democrats to boot.

The coattails on the Issue 2 No vote completely reworked the government of one of the more conservative cities in the state and made it overwhelmingly progressive, not to mention creating a majority African-American council to back Mayor Mallory.  Between this and Dems rolling to wins in Kentucky as mistermix mentioned, yeah, Tuesday was a pretty good day for our side ’round my neck of the woods.

Also, the latest PPP numbers in Ohio are looking really good for the President, but I’m waiting to hear how the Issue 2 vote was meaningless because TEH YOONYUN THUGZ created tens of thousands of fake cardboard standee voters after raiding every Office Depot and Staples in the tri-state over the weekend for art supplies…

The Price of 9/11

The New York Times just published this graphic.

To gloss it here, it documents what we have spent — in money — to respond to the attacks of 9/11.

Here’s what it comes to:

The cost to al Qaeda of staging the 9/11 attacks?

About half a million dollars.

Cost to the United States incurred as a direct result of the damage done in the attacks and the immediate economic impact?

$178 billion.

Cost to the United States to implement the Homeland Security state?

$589 billion.

Cost of the wars fought in the wake of the attacks, current and to come?

$2.5 trillion.  With a “t.”

That would be roughly the size of the deficit reduction package agreed in the debt limit hostage crisis negotiation this summer.

The total federal debt?

Approximately $14.7 trillion.

The accumulated price in dollars of of 9/11 is in excess of one fifth of that total.  The price in lives lost and damaged?  I can’t even begin to count.

The first blow in the conflicts  that began on 9/11 were struck upon the United States by hostile antagonists.  Criminal thugs.

Those that followed?  Self inflicted and ongoing.

I’m not going to belabor the politics at this moment — I think the inferences are obvious, and for a day or so, I’d rather devote memory and feeling for the human consequences of what has transpired over this last decade.  Uncharacteristically, I’m just going to shut up here.

Image:  Paul Gauguin, Vendanges à Arles, or Misères humaines, 1888

Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 5, “Women’s Liberation”)

“A classic example of liberal mother-daughter conflict”
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… The movement’s various factions had little in common. The reformers did not want to overthrow the existing system — they wanted to throw open the gates so that women could become part of it. And they had little interest in changing the rules for private relationships between men and women… They envisioned themselves — and their daughters — marrying and having children while also sitting in corporate boardrooms or running for Congress. The leaders of the radical wing of the women’s movement wanted to go much further than simply leveling the playing field when it came to things like job opportunities. They were going to examine everything about American womanhood — in fact, about womanhood back to the time of the pharaohs.. And they were going to free women to be all they could be, even if that meant getting rid of capitalism or the nuclear family or the Judeo-Christian tradition, or anything else that got in the way.

Anybody else here remember Rita Mae Brown’s In Her Day fondly? When it first came out (from a small-press womyn’s publisher, of course), I found it both hilarious and true to life. My college dorm mates who were still part of the aspiring lesbian-separatist-marxist collective that had rejected me for insufficient seriousness were scandalized that the celebrated author of Rubyfruit Jungle should lower herself to washing The Movement’s dirty linen in public. Multiple meetings were held, to discuss whether Brown had sold out for the corporatist dollar, or if she had merely been driven temporarily insane by some cruel setback in her personal life; and if so, could the collective still support Rubyfruit as an acceptable softcore entertainment, or must it be discarded with extreme prejudice to demonstrate a commitment to revolutionary seriousness?

Boy, were we young and innocent, in those days.

The Atlantic City demonstration was, in retrospect, a huge success — after all, we’re still talking about it now as the moment when the women’s movement made its debut on the national stage. But when it was over, some of the protestors expressed regret about the tone of the event and said they should have been expressing solidarity with the sisters who were being paraded around in their bathing suits, not making fun of them. (Morgan herself called the sheep “not my finest hour”.) And everyone quickly grew to despise the term “bra burning”. The demonstration captured traits that would come to define the movement. It was didactic and playful, smart and sometimes sophomoric. The women who participated succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, then disagreed about whether or not the message was appropriate…

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Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 4)

The Decline of the Double Standard

There was certainly a lot more talk about sex, but it’s hard to tell how much of it translated into real-world activity. Women had never shared all that much information about their sexual behavior, even with friends. Maria Monsky, who was living on her own in Manhattan and working her way through night school in the early 1960s, hung out with a fairly sophisticated crowd. But she still doesn’t remember having a frank discussion about sexual experience. “There was a line you never crossed,” she said. “It was a privacy issue.” So it’s possible that what looked like a great deal of sexual freedom was actually just a great deal more sexual frankness.

Also, I suspect, a lot of the no-limit partner-swapping whatever-feels-good “free love” was actually constrained, at least among heterosexuals, by the size of one’s social group. When I was part of an avowedly “global” social subset (sf fandom) in the late 1970s/early 1980s, we considered ourselves extremely sex-positive and hangup-free. The advent of herpes, and then AIDS, demonstrated how much — despite our early alarms — all those “spaghetti-tangle Langdon charts”, daring as they seemed to us at the time, came down to the same relatively small pool of individuals partnering up with each other in multiple configurations. There were genuinely adventurous souls who stepped outside of the network, but sometimes it seems like most people treat sex the way they do food — picking whatever’s accessible, affordable, and familiar. Like all the people who buy lavish cookbooks full of gorgeous shots of exotic global dishes, and live off a combination of fast food and chain restaurant meals. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

The young Americans who took part in the sexual revolution were living at a very particular moment in time, a brief window in which having sex with multiple partners posed very little physical peril. For much of human history, syphillis had been a scourge, and a good deal of the Victorian hysteria about sex — and prostitution in particular — had to do with women’s fear that their husbands would stray and infect them with an incurable disease that could put them in peril of sterility, insanity, and death… the Victorian version of sex education involved lantern shows of pictures of the grisly effects of syphillis. Then penicillin, which became widely available during WWII, provided a cure. By the 1960s sexually transmitted diseases were being treated like a joke by middle-class people who, as the decade went on, began experimenting with group sex, wife-swapping, and other kinds of behavior that would have been regarded as near suicidal by earlier generations.
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And then there was the birth control pill, or — as the media called it in deference to its awesome powers — the Pill.

Not to mention, Roe v. Wade. Which was implemented just as I was going off to college, and the new-fledged women in my dorm were so relieved that even if all other precautions failed, we’d have a reliable backup. We were too young to suspect the future backlash.
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Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 3)

[Rosa] Parks, an old schoolmate remembered, was “self-sufficient, competent and dignified” even as a child, a student who always wore a clean uniform, planned ahead, and never sneaked over to the boys’ side of the school like some of the other girls did. Even in defiance she was a perfect lady. When the Montgomery bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white man or be arrested, the petite, middle-aged seamstress calmly replied, “You may do that.” Later, when her husband begged her not to allow herself to be turned into a test case, she cooly went ahead… When she arrived for her court date, she wore a long-sleeved black dress with white cuffs and a small velvet hat with pearls across the top. “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” cried out a black teenager, who turned out to be absolutely correct…
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The [Montgomery bus] boycott was not spontaneous. It operated on two levels: a public leadership of male ministers, headed by the charismatic young pastor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and an organization of women volunteers, who did the behind-the-scenes work. The women, although unsung, were not simply following directions from above. They had long ago thought up the idea for the boycott, and they had been preparing for it for almost nine years.

Ella Baker was well into middle age when the students started raising hell… It broke her mother’s heart, but after college, Baker left home and embarked on a career as a community organizer — a job that involved travelling by herself in an era when women were still expected to have a male protector when they were away from home. Baker joined a long and distinguished line of peripatetic American heroines…
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In 1941 Baker was hired as an organizer for the NAACP, and two things quickly became clear. The first was that she was brilliant at the job… Unlike the many male organizers who behaved like visiting superstars, Baker had what the Richmond leaders called a “wonderful and outstanding quality of mixing with any group of people.”
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Her second defining characteristic was a dislike of top-down leadership. “She had an interest in the power of people,” said Lenora Tait-Magubane. “She never gave answers. Miss Ella would ask questions: What about this? Have you thought about so & so? And then let you fight it out… She felt leaders were not appointed but they rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge…
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Baker became one of the founders and acting director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was meant to keep alive the spirit of the Montgomery bus boycott. But the SCLC was defined by Dr. King’s charismatic leadership, and since Baker did not believe in charismatic leaders, she and King never hit it off. She was not offered the permanent directorship…
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Baker’s response was to form a charismatic leader-free organization that would reflect her ideas of what the civil rights movement should be all about. She threw her lot in with the students, helped them organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee… Unsurprisingly, SNCC was more open to women’s leadership than any of the groups that had gone before. Its heyday lasted only a few years, but while it did, SNCC was not fighting only fighting for civil rights but also struggling to create, within itself, a “Beloved Community” in which blacks and whites, men and women, poor and middle class, lived and worked together as equals…
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But Baker’s vision was far more demanding than a simple sharing of power. She was suspicious of quick fixes such as the lunch-counter sit-ins, or any strategy that involved appealing to the federal government to save black Americans from white racists. “People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves,” she said.

These women and their fellows — Septima Clark, Dorothy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, all the rest — were not adorable plaster saints, they were heroic warriors.

Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 2)

Reading these chapters, concerning events that took place during my early lifetime, I’m struck by how much I unconsciously conflated the vast improvements in “women’s lot” with the natural opportunities of a wider community that came as I moved from elementary school to high school school and away from my working-class urban community to a midwestern land-grant college. Sure, I was a proud “women’s libber” (helping with childcare services for the Womyn’s Music Festival, getting kicked out of a Marxist lesbian separatist working group for insufficient seriousness), but in hindsight I can understand that I had no idea how much of my exhilarating new freedom came through the hard work of women just 10 or 20 or 50 years older than I was, women who’d spent their lives doggedly unpicking locked doors so I could slam through them wearing my Ladies Home Journal “A Woman’s Place Is EVERYWHERE” t-shirt. And I’m sure I’m not the only under-60 woman (person) who’s made the same assumptions about how “easy” it was to break down those barriers…

Republican women tended to favor the Equal Rights Amendment, but it raised hackles among many Democrats because it would eliminate the protective laws they had struggled to pass during the last generation. Esther Peterson had spent much of her life working with desperate women who were crippled by the physical demands of their jobs, sexually harrassed by their supervisors, and deprived of enough time to be proper mothers to their undernourished children. She resented the “elite, privileged old ladies” who cared about only their own emancipation. “Are women better off being singled out for protection, or are they better served by erasing all legal distinctions between men & women? As the lettuce pickers & cafeteria workers know, it depends on your status,” she said.

Ah, social/class shaming. Guilt — the first, best, most-often-used weapon against women. How can we privileged American women complain about being kept out of the White House, when women are still undergoing genital mutilation and being sold into childhood prostitution elsewhere? (I thought one of the most brilliant ‘needful words’ in Laadan was doroledim…)

It was a very old & very painful debate. The fight for women’s rights and the struggle for racial justice had almost always been linked in America. Abolition of slavery had been the first political issue that brought large numbers of women into the public world, and many of them pointed out the similarities they saw in the treatment of women & African-Americans. Black leaders were grateful for the support but tended to feel that however bad & repressive Victorian marriages were, they were not quite as grim as slavery & lynching. From the beginning, each cause was keenly aware that when they presented a joint front, critical support tended to dwindle away…

And the wealthy white men who control most political power have learned very, very well how to play the “there’s only enough room to slot in ONE minority” game. Works just great — for them — and us “minorities” are still falling for it!

Of all the forces of progress Smith wanted to stop, civil rights was at the top of the list. “Congressman Smith would joyfully disembowel the civil rights bill if he could. Lacking the votes to do so, he will obstruct it as long as the situation allows,” said a writer in the New York Times Magazine…
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“An NAACP for Women”
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Howard Smith’s decision to play games with the Civil Rights Act was an extraordinary example of unintended consquences. At the time he introduced his amendment, the idea of ending job discrimination against was on almost no one’s radar… But of course, once the CRA was amended, expectations rose. And when it became clear that the EEOC had no intention of protecting women workers as the law required, it created instant militancy…

If I had known, when I was 15 or 16, just how tenous a structure NOW was — a handful of women, widely dispersed, with few resources and even less support — could I have been as recklessly brave with my feminist credentials?

Or might it have made me act more usefully, if I wasn’t so sure that richer, more educated, more politically powerful “someones” would have my back?

Geeks assemble when a good man goes to war

The mid-series finale of Doctor Who is on BBC America at 9pm EDT, 8pm CT.

I know there are a lot of you on here, although many of you may have seen the episode already through the magic of internet intellectual property theft, but just in case let’s give this a go.

No spoilers please, for those of us who have waited like good boys and girls.

I have a 2008 Romney I’d like to sell you

Mitt Romney is in Michigan so I thought I’d read a Michigan newspaper and see how his campaign is coming.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney begins a swing through Michigan tonight with a dinner fund-raiser, followed by events in Birmingham and Grosse Pointe on Wednesday.

Democratic activists were holding a sign-making event tonight in Detroit targeting Romney for a column he wrote two years ago for the New York Times in which he argued against providing financial investment for Chrysler and General Motors. President Obama and the White House have been using the carmakers’ turnaround as a success story.

Here’s the 2008 NYTimes Romney column that’s getting the activists all worked up in Michigan.

Briefly, he loves cars, he loved his dad, he loved his dad’s cars, everyone everywhere should be either fired immediately or paid much less.

I thought this next part of the column was much more interesting than Romney’s boilerplate business blather.

Out of nowhere, there’s this:

I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration.

20 billion dollars a year in federally-funded research! Science and the like! This he believes. Deeply. I wonder if he’ll stick to it in 2011. If he does, it will be the first time he’s ever stood by anything he ever said or did, but who knows. This was the 2008 Mitt Romney, and he’s a different person now. People change. Some people change a lot, and frequently. Following him is going to be a lot of work. I suggest we identify which version of Mitt Romney we’re talking about by using model years: 2004 Romney, 2008 Romney, 2010 Romney, and finally, the newest model, the 2012 Romney.

Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 1)

Just like we (second-generation) feminists claimed back in the 1970s, changing the status of women would change everything, because women were everywhere…

In reality… by 1960 there were as many women working [outside the home] as there had been at the peak of World War II, and the vast majority of them were married… More than 30% of American wives were holding down jobs, including almost 40% of wives with school-aged children.
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Yet to look at the way Americans portrayed themselves on television, in newspapers, and in magazines, you’d have thought that married women who worked were limited to a handful of elementary school teachers and the unlucky wives of sharecroppers and drunkards…
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If all the working women were invisible, it was in part because of the jobs most of them were doing. They weren’t sitting… in the network news bureaus. They were office workers — receptionists or bookkeepers, often part-time. They stood behind cash registers in stores, cleaned offices or homes. If they were professionals, they held — with relatively few exceptions — low-paying positions that had long been defined as particularly suited to women, such as teacher, nurse, or librarian. The nation’s ability to direct most of its college-trained women into the single career of teaching was the foundation upon which the national public school system was built and a major reason American tax rates were kept low. The average salary of a female teacher was $4,689 at a time when the government was reporting the average starting salary for a male liberal-arts graduate fresh out of college was $5,400. (Women graduates’ salaries were significantly lower, probably in part because so many of them were going into teaching.)
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Another reason the nation ignored the fact that so many housewives had outside jobs was that working women tended not to be well-represented among upper-income families. The male politicians, business executives, editors & scripwriters who set the tone for public discussion usually felt that wives not working was simply better.

So many political threads to unpick in just a few short paragraphs! — from the way one class’s disenfranchisement [underpaid women teachers] supports a larger social benefit [widespread public literacy], to the media’s role in enforcing social norms, always at the service of the top economic earners…

I was born at the end of 1955, and by the time I was in high school, I was aware that having been born just a few years earlier or later would’ve made a huge difference in the way I lived my life. One of my smartest high school teachers was a nun with a PhD from Fordham — she was grateful to be teaching chemistry to tenth-graders because, she told us, until she ‘found her vocation’, her father was pressuring her to quit school at 14 and start bringing home a salary. She was quite serious about her religious calling (one of a small handful of the Christians I’ve met who actually try to live according to the precepts of that Christ guy), but she also wanted us teenage Catholic girls to know how privileged we were. On the other hand, tenth grade was IIRC when they gave us some nationally-rated Vocational Guidance test, many pages of timed multiple-choice questions, where my top ranking at around 65%, was for “Librarian [female]“… but when I looked at “Librarian [male]” my ranking shot up in the high 80s. Five years earlier, I probably wouldn’t have thought to compare, and five years later, I suspect the guiding authorities were recalibrating that year’s test package to eliminate [the abilty for testees to check] gender bias.

Open Thread: When Everything Changed

So, I will put up the first thread to talk about Gail Collins’ When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present on Wednesday, June 8, at 8pm EDT. Part I, the first three chapters, is just 60 pages, but we’ll see how far everyone gets…

My paperback copy reprints a Jezebel interview with Collins. An excerpt:

In your book… you write about two books, The Feminine Mystique and Sex & the Single Girl, both of which had a major impact on women’s consciousness. I wonder if it would be possible for a single book to have such an impact today.
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Both of those books were partly the huge things they were because they just caught a moment… It’s harder to do that now, because once a thought gets out there it gets devoured so much faster, by so many.
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Is that why there hasn’t been a clear successor to Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and other big names of the feminist movement?
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No, it’s the same reason there’s not a clear successor to Dr. Martin Luther King. There are these crystal moments in history when something that’s so obviously wrong gets tackled in the context of a society that’s ready to hear it, and it happens very fast and it’s very dramatic. Everyone who’s part of it remembers it for the rest of their lives.

What else is everybody up to, on this fine Sunday evening?