HA

Just misread The New York Times Book Review: Back Issues, as The New York Times Book Review: BAD Issues. That's the job I want, compiling that edition.

Health Insurance & Fat Phobia

The pickyeater weighs in with a note to the Obesity-Industrial Complex.

Capitulation

Mona Eltahawy on Yale's Misguided Retreat

In deciding to omit the images from a book it is publishing about the controversy sparked by Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, Yale University Press has handed a victory to extremists
...
Speaking at a conference that Khader hosted at the Danish parliament a year after the cartoons' publication, I warned of two right wings -- a non-Muslim one that hijacked the issue to fuel racism against immigrants in Denmark, and a Muslim one that hijacked the issue to silence Muslims and fuel anti-Western rhetoric.

Sadly, both groups are celebrating Yale's decision because it has proven them "right."

Oh, Glorious Cuba!

[Links added]
So I was in this little pan-Asian grocery store a couple of weeks ago to buy Thai basil and tofu for a curry when I overheard a conversation between a French woman and the female Vietnamese owner about how to cook and serve yucca. I jumped in with my two cents, saying that it's really delicious with a Cuban mojo sauce, basically a lime vinaigrette with garlic, cumin and cilantro thrown in.

After the French woman said, delighted with the multicultural exchange, "This is how life should be. I share, you share. All of us peacefully sharing with each other," I got into a discussion with the Vietnamese woman who was equally thrilled to talk about Cuba, a country she just adores, so beautiful, the people so wonderful.

It had, as usual, the fingernail on chalkboard effect with me, and I gave my stock answer. "It's a very complicated place." And because I've been following Cuba lately through news and blogs said, "People have been suffering a lot lately. Especially since the last hurricane. There's a lot of hunger."

And for a minute she concedes that maybe what tourists see from their resorts and tour buses isn't the whole picture. But she can't help herself. She declares that Cuba is much more beautiful than Viet Nam. No pollution! And I give up, not telling her that environmentalists worldwide have been sounding the alert for years, and when I was there a man told me the people of his region were forbidden to fish. The water was too polluted. Though he thought maybe it was just one more way they were being screwed with by the government.

But who gives a shit, really, when Cuba offers such a handy hook on which to hang all our hopes and dreams of beauty, revolution, life under a perpetually shining sun. Cubans, conveniently muzzled, have few ways to wake us up. When they can, they write blogs no one reads or are denounced as the work of spies, as are occasional critical, though measured, articles in the global press.

Meanwhile the regime does whatever it can get away with. Including, in 2006, setting up a deal with a Curaçao dry dock to fix up American cruise ships with barely paid labor in trade for payment of a debt.

Besides grueling double shifts, the workers did, after all, get two whole pairs of overalls, a set of boots, a helmet and a certain amount of food depending on how hard they were judged to have worked.

Goshdangit, they should have been grateful instead of escaping from the docks and bringing suit for forced labor. Especially since the dock's production manager was Manuel de Jesus Bequer Soto Del Valle, the nephew of el comandante's wife, Dalia Soto Del Valle.

Lies, of course, all lies, by imperialist spies.

Here's an account of the case in Curaçao recounted by the most biased of them all, the nefarious Christian Science Monitor.

The judgment for the plaintifs was reported in The Miami Herald. While they were awarded several million dollars, it's unlikely they'll see a penny; the Curaçao company walked out of the U.S. court and cannot be forced to pay. The only repercussion might be for U.S. cruise companies to be shamed into not dealing with them in the future.

Video: I'm not a lesbian

So funny.

Legalizing Rape, Abuse in Afghanistan

No doubt hoping to appease the Taliban in the midst of an ugly election season, that epitome of backbone Hamid Karzai is allowing the passage of legislation -- with only slightly softened language -- legalizing the rape and abuse of women. One provision apparently allows husbands to deny wives food if they fail to obey sexual demands. According to The Guardian

The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

"It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her," the US charity Human Rights Watch said.

H/T The F Word.

Women Getting It Done

It would be an exaggeration to say I'm thrilled to see women in combat, because I'm not happy to see anyone there. But since they are there, I'm glad they're showing their mettle and getting recognized for it. I look forward to the day, they're (we?) are fully supported by Congress, along with them pesky gays.

The rules governing what jobs military women can hold often seem contradictory or muddled. Women, for instance, can serve as machine gunners on Humvees but cannot operate Bradleys, the Army’s armored fighting vehicle. They can work with some long-range artillery but not short-range ones. Women can walk Iraq’s dangerous streets as members of the military police but not as members of the infantry.

And, they can lead combat engineers in war zones as officers, but cannot serve among them. This was the case for Maj. Kellie McCoy, 34, a wisp of an officer who is just over five feet tall. As a captain in 2003 and 2004, she served as the first female engineer company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and led a platoon of combat engineers in Iraq.

On Sept. 14, 2003, her four-vehicle convoy drove into an ambush. It was attacked by multiple roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Three soldiers were wounded in the ambush. As one of the wounded stood in the middle of the road, bloody and in shock, Major McCoy ran through enemy fire to get him, discharging her M4 as she led him back to her vehicle. Then, she and the others returned to the “kill zone” to rescue the remaining soldiers. Insurgents shot at them from 15 feet away. But eventually, all 12 soldiers piled into one four-seat Humvee and sped away.

Health Care Debate to the Death II

So much for all those asshats that largely based their Democratic primary vote for Obama on the fact that he wasn't a divisive Clinton who inspired hate purely because of style and personality, nothing to do with ideology at all, class and white trashness, or in Hillary's case, gender.

Now, after the circus of "Health Care Debate to the Death II" I'm pretty sure I get the dubious satisfaction of saying, "I told you so." So, I told you so.

The best thing about her loss, as Kevin Drum noted in Mojo, is that

If Hillary Clinton had won last year's Democratic primary and gone on to become president, and then this year's town hall meeting had turned into insane gatherings of lunatics yelling about death panels, every single pundit in Washington — Every. Single. One. — would be blaming it on her. Their unanimous take would be: Democrats knew that she was a divisive figure and chose to put her in the White House anyway. It's hardly any wonder that conservatives have gone nuts, is it?

That narrative, as we now know, would have been 100% wrong. But that would have been the narrative anyway. Caveat lector.

With Obama maybe we finally understand, as Paul Krugman observed in Jan 08:

Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).

This doesn't prove Hillary Clinton would have made a better President, just that Americans on all sides are prey to wishful thinking, hate, and fear, and the media's guided by more of the same.

Hilarious Tasers

Using three cases from last week alone, Digby gets to the heart of how tasers

are routinely used by police to torture innocent people who have not broken any law and whose only crime is being disrespectful toward their authority or failing to understand their "orders." There is ample evidence that police often take no more than 30 seconds to talk to citizens before employing the taser, they use them while people are already handcuffed and thus present no danger, and are used often against the mentally ill and handicapped. It is becoming a barbaric tool of authoritarian, social control.

...

America's torture problem is much bigger than Gitmo or the CIA or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The government is torturing people every day and killing some of them. Then videos of the torture wind up on Youtube where sadists laugh and jeer at the victims. It's the sign of profound cultural illness.

And In Other Big News

I stubbed a toe this morning, apparently to distract myself from the headache.

Sotomayor Finally Confirmed

Finally, Sotomayor's confirmed. The NY Times reported that "when Judge Sotomayor returned to her West Village home Thursday night, she beamed and waved at neighbors who lined the sidewalks to clap and shout encouragement."

The Onion: U.S. Government Stages Fake Coup To Wipe Out National Debt

What Hate, Fear Look Like : Tel Aviv

San Francisco Sentinel

Grief, Fury in Tel Aviv

Updated:
Two kids are dead (Nir Katz and Liz Trubeshi) and more than a dozen wounded after a masked gun man opened fire at an LGBT center in Tel Aviv that was holding a weekly dance offering young people the chance to socialize or receive counseling and support. Most were still not yet out to their parents.

Hundreds marched in spontaneous protest.
h/t Lizzy the Lezzy.

Ugliness in Iran

Taking a page out of Stalin's books, like all the best dictatorships do, Iran is putting on trial 100 dissidents, the proceedings complete with tearful videotaped confessions.

On Saturday, prosecutors highlighted what they called a confession by Muhammad Ali Abtahi, a cleric who served as vice president under the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami. Mr. Abtahi, one of Iran’s most widely read bloggers, was arrested shortly after the election, and word later emerged that he had appeared in a tearful videotaped confession. Such confessions, which have frequently been used before, are almost always obtained under duress, according to human rights groups and the defendants themselves.

“I believe the reformists had prepared for two or three years for this election, in order to limit the powers of the supreme leader,” Mr. Abtahi said, according to a Fars transcript. “I want to tell all friends that there was no fraud in the election, it was just a lie to build the protests around.”

If there's any lie here, it's that Iran is anywhere near being a democracy.