18 Days to Go!

Today I need to link one exceptional piece from RHRealityCheck.org that really made me uncomfortable. And I watched Standard Operating Procedure last night.

In "Can There Be Justice for Pregnant Women if the Unborn Have 'Human Rights?'" Lynn Paltrow challenges the complacency that I think too many of my generation swing to- throwing support behind the right to choose to keep or abort, but losing interest there. The slippery slope of restricting the right to choose is now inextricable from the rhetoric debate seeking to define the moment of citizenship. My discomfort while reading the cases Ms. Paltrow presents went from mild frustration to downright anger, knowing that in some areas of my country, being pregnant would obstruct my civil rights.

The complacency affects comfortable twenty-somethings who support the right to choose on principle (many principles, really), and forgo that there are many choices still very precious to us women (and our families), and the right to make those choices are often taken away. I sat back and thought, of the women I know who have given birth in the last year, how many of them were forced out of their birthplan? The answer was 4 out of 6.

Like Laura Pemberton, "who wanted to have a vaginal birth after a previous delivery by Cesarean surgery. Because no hospital would admit her unless she agreed to deliver again by surgery, she stayed home to give birth. While there, in active labor and near delivery, an armed Sheriff knocked on her door. He had orders to take her into custody. He strapped her legs together and brought her to a hospital to determine whether she could be forced to have the Cesarean surgery. A lawyer was appointed for the fetus, but not for Ms. Pemberton. Ms. Pemberton vehemently opposes abortion, but she nevertheless believed in her right to evaluate medical risks and benefits to herself and her unborn child. She was forced to have the unnecessary surgery. When she later sued for violations of her civil rights, was told she had none."

Keep reading.

Internationally, those pesky borders are just really getting in the way of the War on Terror. Juan Cole, as usual, offers his adroit evaluation of the U.S. talking points. Here's a taste:

Washington also tends to over-estimate the importance of individual leaders such as al-Zarqawi and al-Mazidi. Mostly they are fairly easily replaced. It is not as though they have been through a military academy or anything. When al-Zarqawi was killed, it changed absolutely nothing with regard to violence in Iraq. Others than Mazidi can smuggle North African volunteers into Iraq.

Here are some links I wanted to post last week:

First, The New Yorker once again has an excellent political piece, this time on Biden, the forgotten VP, and the seat of Vice President in general. I enjoyed the review and the perspective.

Second, Bob Herbert is my hero. This is everything I wanted to say, but more concise and kinder than I could ever manage.

Alright, back to work.
And please, wear red on Thursday the 30th for the Be Bold Wear Red campaign to Stop the Violence Against Women of Color!

Not as sick as the economy...

But the polls are lookin' good!
I gotta say, checking out fivethirtyeight first thing in the morning has done wonders for my mood.

So on this gorgeous New England, autumn Friday, I am comfortably writing my first entry in bed. With a snazzy laptop and despite an awful cold, I couldn't neglect the blog any longer.

Reading the New Yorker's excellently concise if unbalanced (for the sake of brevity) endorsement of Barack Obama for prez, I was reminded once again that he spoke last March about stuff. Searching for a speech Obama gave in New York in March 2008 results in articles from papers in New York reporting on the famous (which I believe is a good thing) race speech he gave in Philly. Search deeper, and there is the speech given a few weeks later on the economy. I watched it this morning, and am now conflicted both with a 'na na na na na na' third grader's response and the disappointment one feels when faced with prescience like this. Here's an excerpt via the campaign website:

[T]he American economy does not stand still, and neither should the rules that govern it. The evolution of industries often warrants regulatory reform - to foster competition, lower prices, or replace outdated oversight structures. Old institutions cannot adequately oversee new practices. Old rules may not fit the roads where our economy is leading. There were good arguments for changing the rules of the road in the 1990s. Our economy was undergoing a fundamental shift, carried along by the swift currents of technological change and globalization. For the sake of our common prosperity, we needed to adapt to keep markets competitive and fair.

Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one - aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner take all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy.

Deregulation of the telecommunications sector, for example, fostered competition but also contributed to massive over-investment. Partial deregulation of the electricity sector enabled market manipulation. Companies like Enron and WorldCom took advantage of the new regulatory environment to push the envelope, pump up earnings, disguise losses and otherwise engage in accounting fraud to make their profits look better - a practice that led investors to question the balance sheet of all companies, and severely damaged public trust in capital markets. This was not the invisible hand at work. Instead, it was the hand of industry lobbyists tilting the playing field in Washington, an accounting industry that had developed powerful conflicts of interest, and a financial sector that fueled over-investment.

A decade later, we have deregulated the financial services sector, and we face another crisis. A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business has changed. But by the time the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.

Since then, we have overseen 21st century innovation - including the aggressive introduction of new and complex financial instruments like hedge funds and non-bank financial companies - with outdated 20th century regulatory tools. New conflicts of interest recalled the worst excesses of the past - like the outrageous news that we learned just yesterday of KPMG allowing a lender to report profits instead of losses, so that both parties could make a quick buck. Not surprisingly, the regulatory environment failed to keep pace. When subprime mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn, a patchwork of regulators were unable or unwilling to protect the American people.

The policies of the Bush Administration threw the economy further out of balance. Tax cuts without end for the wealthiest Americans. A trillion dollar war in Iraq that didn't need to be fought, paid for with deficit spending and borrowing from foreign creditors like China. A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting - coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement - allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long term consequences. The American economy was bound to suffer a painful correction, and policymakers found themselves with fewer resources to deal with the consequences.

That's just five minutes of the half-hour speech. Oh, and if you haven't yet, why not go on and watch his speech on education.

So it would appear, as the polls are favoring the Obama-Biden ticket, and the press, anxious to make a living, follow that lead, there is room for hope. That's not to say that my generation isn't sick with worry about all these old white guys talking about taking your money out of the stock market. My generation, er, peer group, doesn't have any money in the stock market, but we want to some day, and also would like to believe that we can someday move out of our parents' house. To someday, thanking the American Dream, put our parents into assisted living. But perhaps the economy, despite the crises, is salvageable. Perhaps the Bush era can be buried along with tax breaks for the wealthy, interventionist overspending overseas, lackluster incentives for renewable and hybrid energy, while regulation rises from an early grave and the socialism we know and love can reinvigorate our schools and repave our roads. And we won't have to wear barrels held up with suspenders for long. (*big inhale*)

Comics curmudgeon has a fantastically witty cartoon guide to our great New Depression on wonkette.
A Children's Treasury of Poverty Iconography

Also thanks to my new fav site, the so-called classy conservative, Christopher Buckley, son of William F, and author of "Thank You for Smoking," has written that he'll be voting Obama. Not on his family periodical, the National Review's backpage, due to the reaction of readers (12,000 of them, he asserts) to Kathleen Parker's icky, but still timely denouncement of Palin, he writes at a fresh new blog, "Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama". Which is funny, because he seems assured that his readers, or at least those that share his party affiliation, are scary, and should not be upset, like a great vile mob of "gut" reactionaries. As wonkette writes, "mid-20th Century conservative intellectualism... is 100% dead forever now." Huzzah!

*****

Remember Bush's urge to push weight against the Paulson plan, foreshadowing "financial panic" and a "distressing scenario," because fear-mongering never fails?! Well thank goodness a plan passed, because I guess the $700 bil already worked! Nothing to see here! Please move along! Bush today urged Main St Americans like me and you to resist fear, because all this bad stuff that's happening on Wall St is because of uncertainty and fear. And that's no place for sissy behavior. How irrational! Not only is there nothing to worry about anymore, because the government has the tools to fix the problem (I love it when his analogies reference things I understand like tools and shopping rather than illuminating what's actually going on down there in the Executive Bunker of Silence and Secrecy), but everything will go back to normal "swiftly."

And that crafty still-president reminds me that the wool has been over my eyes for some weeks. Remember all those other countries deserving the world's immediate attention? Yeah, me too.

Worldly Roll-Call:
Zimbabwe: Despite power-sharing agreement, leaders' dialogue leaves a lot to be desired.
Iraq: McClatchy covers daily violence.
Thailand is a regular shitstorm.
India: The nucear deal with America is featured in an interesting analysis at BBC, highlighting the spread of this odd idea- that nuclear energy is totally clean. I have to say, McCain's idea to build, like, another nuclear reactor for every state, brought the question to mind: does NASA get enough funding to send nuclear waste to the moon? Where are we going to select 4 more Yucca Mountins? The Times piece brings up something rather predictable: subsidies, tax credits, and pork.

Desperately trying to bring this behemoth of a thing full-circle, I present you with Laura Rozen's look into how lobbyists tie the most interesting people together! Well, one lobbyist in particular.

Enjoy your long weekend everyone.

Broken economy, broken computer.

My PC's processor passed a few nights ago, which means that I only get internet at work. Surprisingly, I have not been staying current, preferring to stay productive at work than sneak news in between memo-writing and stuffing envelopes. I know, my job is so glamorous, what kind of choice is that anyway?

As always, check out fivethirtyeight for current polls and poll analysis. Things are looking good.

But there have been a few articles I've appreciated recently, and my blog was neglected, so here's a quickie:

Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect has an interesting and rather brief article comparing 1929 to today, and he has some good, albeit broad, ideas.
Learning from 1929

Here are some related commentaries from fav sources Talking Points Memo and Mother Jones:
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: More Notes on the Bailout
and here is the TPM Cafe link he references in the beginning, keep reading for his chilling insight about 3 megabanks: A "Bailout" is Cheaper than the Status Quo
Drum gets all psychoanalytical about Paulson's better nature, which puts a lot of faith into a stereotype without really addressing how dangerous it could be to make Paulson "The Decider of Decisions". And as Ezra Klein reminds us, that first draft was really scary.

For those of you who actually follow any of my links, I hope you don't mind that the scale is favoring the economy. I am over my head with this crisis, and have so little at my disposal besides gut instinct (which doesn't seem to work so well for predicting good policy, if you ask me or Stephen Colbert) to make informed decisions. Instead, I fill my brain with enough commentary from people with souls who seem pretty knowledgeable in hopes that my gut will no longer be so stupid.

Most offer similar recommendations for strengthening the bailout plan, so the next step is finding an economist who writes about why the plan will not be amended with said recommendations.....

p.s. Eddie Murphy's prophetic bit (that bank scene has me cringing) also helped steer my opinions.

*****
I just got a link to another take on Palin, who I'm really tired of hearing about (read: being disappointed for the species all the time), this one from Salon, so I'll share it pre-read: The Sarah Palin pity party: Everyone seems to be oozing sympathy for the fumbling vice-presidential nominee. Please. Cry me a freaking river.

And to finish, without having covered anything international, again, here's a widget thingy to compare the health care policy plans of the two candidates. Thanks to Ezra, of course.
http://www.health08.org/healthissues_sidebyside.cfm