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. more this way»
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. more this way»
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.
You might not recognize the words at first, but it's still the same old tune. And if we get this one right, our Bilderbergershandlers 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
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:
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That is why we had to fight WR Grace and USDA to revoke the NeemPatent, we had to fight Ricetec to prevent them claiming our basmati as their invention. And we have successfully fought
The rules of The World Trade Organization were designed to impoverish poor people and poor countries, transform their biodiversity and water commons into corporate property so that seed multi-national corporations like Monsanto could sell us our seeds for $1 tr. per year and water giants like Suez and Bechtel could sell us our water for another trillion. And the free trade rules of agriculture are robbing Indian peasants of $1 trillion per year through falling prices because of $400 billion subsidies in rich countries distorting trade by distorting prices.
This is not just a recipe for poverty, it is a recipe for genocide. In the free trade world that Bhagwati upholds, peasants sell kidneys to pay debt for poisons, displaced rural women sell their bodies to feed their children, hospitals become centers of organ theft, and India which sold the finest fabrics and tastiest spices to the world becomes the dumping ground for the toxic wste of 9/11 and the exploded and unexploded shells from the war in Afganistan and Iraq.
Free trade is becoming a mechanism to take our wealth, our biodiversity, our minerals, our brains and give us trash and toxic in exchange. It is an exchange of "bads" for "goods". This is not comparative advantage, it is loot. Which is why we say, "Our World is not for sale".
