M. Loutre's blog

As has been widely noted, this past week marked the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unethical, immoral, and unwinnable war in Iraq. As the war enters its sixth bloody year, no end appears in sight. The fragile, fractious political situation in Iraq is no better now than it ever was. The public infrastructure is still shattered, with such basic necessities as electricity and potable water still widely unavailable in many regions of the country for more than a few hours a day. The so-called surge is stalled and its tenuous successes are failing to take hold. Everyday violence is still omnipresent, and the 3,000-year-old civilization of Iraq is still in shattered ruins. By any measure, George Bush's ill-advised Iraq adventure is an unqualified disaster.

Numerous comparisons have been made between the untenable situation in Iraq today and the equally untenable situation in Vietnam back in the 1960's. Not all of those comparisons are apt or accurate, but many of them are. America in the spring of 1968 was a very different place than it is in the spring of 2008, even though it's fundamentally unchanged in many ways today. Racial and political tensions were far higher then than they are today, with riots in the streets still in the news and bombings of banks and other public institutions still far too common for comfort. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were raw wounds in the shared psyche of America in 1968. And overseas, an endless war against amorphous insurgents continued to drain the hearts and minds and blood and treasure of our nation's best and brightest for the sake of a cause that no one could satisfactorily explain at home.

Everybody's eyes are on Pennysylvania these days. Thanks to the whipsaw nature of the Democratic presidential primary race this year, Pennsylvania's in the spotlight when it comes to electoral politics on the national stage. People everywhere are talking about Pennsylvania -- what it is, what's like, what it all means. Pundits are pontificating right and left about Pennsylvania voters -- who they are, who're they're for, what they're going to do on April 22. And, inevitably, most of them are wrong a lot of the time.

Pennsylvania is just like Ohio, the talking heads are telling us. Well, yes and no. Some parts of Pennsylvania are just like parts of Ohio, demographically speaking. Other parts, not so much. Pennsylvania is a very big place. And, like Ohio, it's a very diverse place, with different parts of the state displaying significantly different historical and sociocultural influences.

The Appalachian Mountains run diagonally through Pennsylvania from lower left to upper right, physically as well as demographically dividing it into several dissimilar environments. Fully a third of the state's 12 million residents live in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, which bustles along the Delaware River valley in the southeastern corner of PA and sprawls across the Delaware and New Jersey lines to include another 2 million of their neighbors.

Another 2-1/2 million Pennsylvanians live in the southwestern part of the state, in the greater Pittsburgh area, near the upper edge of some of the most rugged parts of the Appalachians. While the sociocultural roots of PA's two biggest population centers could hardly be more different, they are both large, sophisticated urban centers and day-to-day life for their residents is more similar than not.

Thank you, GV.

It's not just what happened on April 18 when the über-cons that Bush appointed to the Supreme Court set a dangerous precedent by refusing to consider risks to a woman's health to be a valid medical concern anymore. It's how and why it happened at all.

As Katha Pollitt points out in an excellently angry rant in her 'The Nation' column, it really does matter which party you vote for. A Democratic-controlled Congress would never have passed the draconian Partial-Birth Abortion Act. A Democratic President would never have signed it. And a pre-Bush SCOTUS would never have upheld it. (In fact they already didn't, once. But that was before people who really should have known better let the Rethuglican camel's nose into the tent.)

So, NARAL Pro-Choice America -- or whatever your latest bland, pandering brand name is -- maybe, much too late, you'll rethink your policy of supporting pro-choice Republicans, who made the majorities that set the agenda that led us to this very bad place. And maybe, Tom Frank and assorted liberal know-it-alls of the op-ed page and blogosphere who've been telling us to calm down because Republicans are all bark and no bite on abortion, you'll take a look at the real world. Sometimes politicians deliver on their promises. As for all you pro-choicers with qualms out there -- who think abortion is icky and "late term" abortion especially so, although you couldn't say exactly when that even is, and who wonder why women are so careless and shouldn't emergency contraception have taken care of this already? -- maybe it's time to start defending the right you say you believe in, instead of cutting the ground out from under it.

Yeah. What she said.

You might not recognize the words at first, but it's still the same old tune. And if we get this one right, our Bilderbergers handlers good friends in gummint have promised us that we can all hold hands and sing "Kumbayah" next.

Oh, why can't everyone tell
A statesman from a thug
Who's got our telephones bugged
A frat boy who took drugs
Who Lays down with thieves
The one who deceived
About the Dubya MDs

How did you get us to trade
Our heroes for shrubs
Democrats for Repubs
A stain we never could scrub
A living, breathing oil spill
How did we reject
Surplus safety net
For nine trillion in debt

How I wish
How I wish you were Gore
It's been two lost terms swimming in a cesspool
Of malfeasance and shame
Trashing all of the Bill of Rights
And starting losing fights
With pre-emptive war
Wish you were Gore

http://www.myspace.com/vastleftdotcom

Well, not the entire city of Pittsburgh -- only 2000 people sitting in a big room in Pittsburgh.

They're all here for the same macro reason I am, which is to attend the Women's Health & the Environment Conference. Only a handful of them are here for the same micro reason I am, which is to live-blog the conference over the intertubes.

Rather than tie up this shared laptop by repeating here what's being said there, I'll just point you guys to a few of the live-blogging threads where we're doing the play-by-play, in case any CKers want to visit Pittsburgh by proxy too:

http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2007/04/live_blog_nati...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/20/94027/8000

http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/

Three things to make note of before we start wading into this blog entry together, folks...

But you know what? For those in the audience who've been wondering WTF a guy like me is doing posting to feminist blogs, this is a significant chunk of the backstory for that. So make of it what you will.

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One of the things that really, really chaps my ass is what a small percentage of the people bloviating away about abortions, on both the right and the left sides of the fence, actually have any first-hand experience with them.

I'm sorry, SCOTUS. And I'm sorry, Fux News Channel. But... if you ain't been there done that, then you can't know. You just can't fucking know.

(Day 3 on the THK Blog Tour belongs to the Democracy Cell Project, a website I've been known to frequent from time to time. This is the intro and outro to the Day 3 threader there -- to read the actual Q&A-with-THK portion of the program, visit the DCP blog and view it in its native habitat so I don't have to overwhelm CK by re-posting the whole thing here.)

Teresa Heinz Kerry is no stranger to the spotlight. She's been on stage in front of crowds larger than most of us can even imagine. But as far as she's concerned, her most important work takes place behind the scenes. As head of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, she has long been a leader in promoting responsible, sustainable social action.

One of Teresa Heinz Kerry's more visible projects is the ongoing Women's Health and the Environment Conference series. This year's keynote conference will be held in Pittsburgh on this coming Friday, April 20, and will feature a number of outstanding speakers, scientists, and activists discussing critical health issues facing women today.

We will be attending the Women’s Health & the Environment: New Science, New Solutions conference and will posting reports about it here at the DCP blog. Today, however, we're also participating in a special 17-stop virtual blog tour (see the complete tour schedule here). And that gave us the opportunity to ask Teresa Heinz Kerry a few questions of particular interest to members of the DCP community:

Yesterday's climate-change debate between current Senator Kerry and former Speaker Gingrich seems to have earned a big raise for all concerned.

It raised awareness of the urgent need to deal with the science of global climate change in a responsible manner.

It raised questions of why smart people from both sides of the issues can't work together more often to find mutually-acceptable solutions to common problems.

It raised the bar for reasonable, rational, respectful discourse between persons from different partisan political parties.

It raised eyebrows on the part of pundits who had been predicting a 'smackdown' but got a hug fest instead.

It raised the hopes of those who believe progressive politics is finally on the rebound in America.

And it raised the hackles of arch-conservatives who bitterly accused their erstwhile standard-bearer of selling out to those terrible tree-hugging leftists.

(I especially like that last aspect of it -- let the über-right wingnuts go choke on their own vile bile. Sorry, you whackjobs, Gingrich's goin' green. Deal with it.)

John Kerry and Newt Gingrich are debating the government's role in dealing with global climate change this morning at 10 am EDT, and enviromentally-minded netizens will be blogging about it in real time.

The debate, hosted by New York University’s John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress, will take place in the Russell Senate Office Building and will be broadcast live by C-Span and simultaneously webcast at http://c-span.org.

As TheHill.com notes, this event ought to be a thinking-man's matchup well worth watching:

Kerry, who bowed out of the 2008 presidential race earlier this year, has been dubbed an “environmental champion” by the non-partisan League of Conservation Voters. His website touts a long record of fighting for the environment. He and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry also recently wrote This Moment on Earth, which addresses climate change and preserving the environment.

"Newt’s a guy who has spent a lot of time wrestling with climate change and the environment. He reads about it, he teaches about it, he writes about it,” Kerry said Thursday. “We don’t see eye to eye about everything, obviously, but that’s what makes for a good debate.

“As a father, when someone tells me that within the next decade, if we don't deal with global warming, our children and grandchildren may deal with global catastrophe, that tells me I damn well better do whatever I can to help make Washington deal with this responsibly,” Kerry added. “We need these good old-fashioned debates and forums and discussions to get everyone thinking creatively on both sides of the aisle.”