Tild sez: And I thought I was making a joke with this magazine cover two years ago.

To see the full-size version, click here.

Of course the real joke, if there is one in this nightmare, is that we’re now actually using  “enhanced interrogation techniques” described and proscribed by the Nazis.  How “apt” a pupil does that make the Bush administration, considering that the United States in 2007 is using “techniques” that we condemned as war crimes in 1948?

H/t to the Wege for the Scott Horton link.

Today, Andrew Sullivan reproduces the Gestapo memorandum which set the guidelines for verschärfte Vernehmung. One of the most striking things about it is that, compared with what Dick Cheney and company want, it is mild. The Gestapo memo forbids waterboarding, hypothermia and several other techniques that the Bush Administration permits. And it imposed strict limits on how these “enhanced techniques” could be used – requiring oversight and permits. But what happened in practice? As usual, there was a race to the bottom and the obstacles put in place were quickly overcome.

Sullivan reviews the Norwegian war crimes trials in which the use of verschärfte Vernehmung was established as a war crime, and a capital offense. He includes testimony of a Dachau survivor describing treatment which is within the limits of the “program” prescribed by President Bush. In my mind, this is mandatory reading, and more evidence of the depraved thinking of U.S. leaders who have pushed the “program” forward. Is it reductio ad Hitleram to even raise this? That will be the dismissive charge. And on this point, I’m afraid, we need to insist that the accused stand their ground and defend themselves on the merits:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture–”enhanced interrogation techniques”–is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

Scott Horton, Harper’s

Posted: May 31st, 2007 under Republicans, Torture.
Comments: none

“It’s tempting, at the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, to wonder whether he finally found what he seemed to be looking for. Whatever his personal faith might have been, Falwell’s public and very political spirituality seemed based on a belief in a vengeful God: AIDS was punishment for homosexuality, Sept. 11 was punishment (though he later recanted) for abortion, paganism and the ACLU. Oh yes, and homosexuality. So how might Falwell himself have characterized the sudden death, at 73, of a man who founded the Moral Majority and did as much as anyone to turn American Christianity into a divisive political movement?
But no. Falwell doesn’t deserve, any more than do the groups he scorned, to be held up as a target of divine wrath. His death is an occasion to contemplate not his prospects in the next life but his effects on this one.”

[Star Tribune Editorial]

Awww, not even a little, teensy weensy bit o’ postmortem Photoshop fun at Falwell’s expense? I don’t know about anybody else, but I personally get some brief but definite enjoyment out of picturing Jerry in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, being dragged down to everlasting Perdition by gleeful devils while a demonic iguana nibbles his femur. Sigh… good times!

The world is better off without Jerry Falwell. He was a hatemonger and a bigot, the symbol of an era that will soon be passed. Fifty years from now he’ll be remembered as a Father Coughlin–a hateful, spiteful man too focused on the motes in his brothers’ eyes to see the redwood in his own.

I wish I believed in Hell, so I could imagine Falwell enduring the eternal torment he wished on so many. But I believe that if there is a God, She is far more merciful and tolerant than the twisted sadist Falwell imagined. And so if there is a life after this, I wish no ill on Falwell–only that he understands the damage he did to his fellow citizens, his nation, and the good religion whose tenets he perverted.

[Jeff Fecke at Blog of the Moderate Left]

~~~

Also via Jeff: The Wit and Wisdom of Jerry Falwell. Clip ‘n save!

~~~

Late night TRex:

Yes, Falwell is the man we have to thank for the “Christian” Right’s ongoing assault on the wall between
church and state and the unconscionable incursions of religion into American public policy. The infringement
of snake-handling faux-Christian bigotry into government has placed our country years behind the rest of the
world in terms of personal liberty, women’s rights, gay rights, public health, AIDS treatment and research, and
education. (Not to mention stem-cell research, science education, and even the arts.)

Falwell made gay-bashing into a cottage industry and then into a corporate and political juggernaut. His
“ministry” provided the template for Empires of Hate like Pat Robertson’s multi-million-dollar television
network and associated enterprises, as well as the ever-vile Fred Phelps’s merry band of slope-headed funeral
crashers, and Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, as well as your Dobsons, Brent Bozells, and
even the smarmy lily-white preacherisms of disgraced Tennessee Senator Bill Frist.

[Dong Dong and All That]

~~~

Digby on Falwell as movie producer: “He Thought It Would Be Dramatic”

~~~

Rick Perlstein about Falwell: “He was, of course, a monster.”

~~~

And I leave the final  penultimate line to Avedon:

I’m not going to pretend I share anyone’s feelings of loss. He was a hateful man who did evil things.

Hear, hear.

Posted: May 17th, 2007 under General, Religious Right.
Comments: none

“Mother Nature” by Carter Goodrich

This is one of my favorite New Yorker covers of all time, if only for the wildly divergent jumble of reactions it elicits in me. Sometimes I can only identify with the Earth Mother, sometimes I feel completely like Career Girl, and other times I cannot see anything of myself in either one.

Apparently this cover hit a nerve with a lot of people. In her introduction to Covering the New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers from a Literary Institution , Françoise Mouly recalls:

A recent (May 15, 2000) Mother’s Day cover, by Carter Goodrich, of a Mother Earth type and a skinny woman sitting side by side on a bench (page 124) elicited the following range of responses: “Carter Goodrich is a genius.” “I LOVE this cover of the fecund Mother Earth and the pale angular New York career girl looking on with disgust and desire.” “A gross trivialization of motherhood.” “Working women everywhere will feel uplifted by the message that their professional endeavors are nothing compared to the ability to reproduce.” “Does the tortured expression on the face of the unhappy career girl signify aversion and disgust–or overwhelming longing for a child of her own?” “I’m surprised that so sophisticated a magazine would engage in such a stereotypical illustration.” “Carter Goodrich’s ‘Mother Nature’ is brilliant. It epitomizes the kind of social observation that The New Yorker considers its eminent domain.”

Of course, in real life nothing is ever as all-or-nothing simple. To be or not to be a mother: that is a question. Lots of choices, lots of possibilities, and despite what the forced-childbirth movement wants for all of us, there are no one-fits-all right decisions other than the decision to be true to one’s self, and the decision to trust one’s own judgment.

If you are a mother, or are in process of becoming one, if your mother is still alive or only lives in your memory, here’s an early Happy Mother’s Day greeting and an assortment of interesting links for your weekend reading pleasure…

Mother’s Day Proclamation

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have breasts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,

Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

–Julia Ward Howe, 1870

[Mother's Day for Peace]

~~~

What’s a Mother’s Worth?

This Mother’s Day let’s give mothers what they really need: a more secure old age. If you’re a woman, or a man who cares about his mother, sister, or daughter, there’s something you need to know. In the United States women over the age of 65 are twice as poor as men in the same age group.

There’s a reason poverty so disproportionately hits women. Most of these elderly poor women were, or still are, caregivers — and according to most economists, the people who do the caring work in households, whether female or male, are “economically inactive.” Of course, anyone who has a mother knows that most caregivers work from dawn to dusk. And we also know that without their work of caring for children, the sick, the elderly, and maintaining a clean home environment there would be no workforce, no economy, nothing. Yet current economic indicators and policies fail to include this work as “productive work.”

[What's a Mother's Worth?]

~~~

My Response to the McCain Campaign’s Attacks on Planned Parenthood

By Cecile Richards, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted May 11, 2007.

A McCain staffer has called Planned Parenthood “one of the most radical pro-abortion groups in the country.” Here’s Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards’ response.

John McCain’s presidential campaign has taken a troubling turn. This week, the Los Angeles Times reported that John Weaver, a strategist for John McCain’s presidential campaign, verbally attacked Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading reproductive health care advocate and provider. Weaver called the 90-year old provider of birth control, cancer screenings, sex education and abortion services “one of the most radical pro-abortion groups in the country.”

For the record: Ninety seven percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are focused on prevention, including family planning, contraception, and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. Three percent of Planned Parenthood services are abortion care. The remark was an attack driven by the McCain campaign’s need to score political points. So, I’ve fired off a letter to Senator McCain in response to his campaign’s incendiary remarks:

[Read the whole thing, including Cecile Richards' letter to John McCain, here.]

~~~

Come Back Tomorrow

[the door opens and woman in white coat sweeps into the small examination room, and she looks at her clipboard] Hello, Ms. . . . Ms.?
[a slender, nervous young girl looks up at her] Roe.
Roe?
Yes. Jane Roe.

You’re kidding.
No, really, that’s my name. Is something wrong?

Nothing’s wrong. That’s just a pretty famous pseudonym to a doctor who performs abortions. You know that, don’t you?
Not really.
Ok. Just tell me a little bit about your situation.
Well, I’m from Frosty Falls, up north. I left my waitress job a little early last night to hitchhike here with my boyfriend Jason. It took us most of the night. Jason works in the lumber yard and he’s missing work today. He’ll probably get in trouble for it.

Tell me about the pregnancy.
I didn’t mean for it to happen. I just feel so bad. Jason and I have been going together for a while now, might get married someday. Jason’s sweet. It’s my fault, really. We never meant to do it, you know, but one night we just got carried away. I didn’t think I would get pregnant the first time. We were just so ignorant about everything. I’ve missed two periods now.

It’s not your fault any more than Jason’s.
I guess.

You’re nineteen. Do you still live at home? Do your parents know you’re pregnant?
Are you kidding? I’m sorry. My Dad would kill me if he found out. See, me and Jason and our folks all go to the Solid Rock Pentecostal Church in Frosty Falls. Dad’s a deacon. My folks—and Jason’s folks, too—would be so ashamed if they found out. That’s why I gotta take care of this now.

[Read the whole thing at The Cucking Stool]

~~~

Why I won’t stay silent anymore

By Frances Kissling

May 11, 2007 | I spent my final 10 years at Catholics for a Free Choice refusing to take press calls about the “partial-birth” abortion ban. It seemed a no-win proposition. Rational arguments about protecting women’s health, preventing tragic births when the infant’s brief life would be filled with unbearable pain, and the doctor’s need to decide what type of abortion would be safest for her patient were simply too abstract to compete with even a measured and accurate description of what happens during this procedure, known medically as an intact dilation and extraction (D&X) abortion. The 20-plus-week fetus’ physical resemblance to a baby was the debate closer.

Even staunch pro-choice legislators had trouble when they looked at visuals of the D&X procedure. The late Catholic Sen. Daniel Moynihan first voted against banning it in 1995 and then voted for it in 1998. Moynihan said the procedure was just “too close to infanticide.” Fellow pro-choice Sens. Patrick Leahy and Joseph Biden, also Catholic, joined Moynihan in voting for the ban, with Biden recently repeating Moynihan’s oft quoted “infanticide” phrase on “Meet the Press” this April after the Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. Carhart that the ban on D&X procedures is constitutional.

Apparently the five Supreme Court justices in the majority, all of whom are Catholic, agreed with the senators. Their opinion upheld the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which prohibits the performance of a rare abortion procedure, performed most often in the second trimester of pregnancy, in which a doctor extracts the fetus intact, pulling out its entire body through the cervix and vagina, piercing the skull so that the head can pass safely through the cervix. The bill, or state variations of it, had been ruled unconstitutional by various courts, including the Supreme Court. None of these bills included an exception to allow the procedure to be performed when the woman’s health was threatened, which Roe and subsequent Supreme Court decisions held essential. Gonzales v. Carhart was closely watched as it was the first abortion case the post-Sandra Day O’Connor court would decide.

The opinion, written by Anthony Kennedy, who is considered the least orthodox of the five, was devastating. Beyond outlawing a method of abortion it deemed only possibly needed by a few women, the decision injected orthodox Catholic teaching into the interpretation of constitutional rights. Kennedy’s opinion, which affirms “the government’s right to use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman” as it cavalierly dismisses the need a few specific women might have for this procedure, could easily have been written by the late Pope John Paul II or the current Benedict XVI. Women are invisible in this decision as they are invisible in the writings of recent — and not so recent — popes. Now it’s impossible for me to remain silent.

The orthodox Catholic preoccupation with the morality of physical acts to the exclusion of the context in which those acts occur is evident in the amount of space the Kennedy decision gives to the description of the medical procedure (approximately eight pages), with only a few paragraphs on the possibility that banning the procedure would “subject [women] to significant health risks.” Kennedy and his cohort are satisfied that this is a “contested question” and “medical uncertainty” places no ethical or legal requirement on the court or legislature. Nowhere in the decision are the health reasons that lead doctors to perform this procedure rather than others discussed. No ambivalence exists. No competing values need to be weighed.

After all, the Catholic hierarchy still forbids assisted reproduction in large part because sperm is collected by masturbation. The good of enabling an infertile couple to conceive does not outweigh the evil of spilling one’s seed. It still prohibits the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV because the condom is also a contraceptive. In the same way, the reasons why a woman might need the D&X procedure, such as when a deformity truly inconsistent with life is discovered late in a wanted pregnancy, are totally irrelevant to orthodox Catholic anti-abortionists and are absent from Kennedy’s opinion or concern.

[Read the whole thing here] — must watch brief commercial first, unless you’re a Salon Premium member

~~~

Lysistrata for the masses

In the last couple of years over 3,000 U.S. mothers have lost sons and daughters in Iraq. Over 26,000 have seen their kids injured there. Another nearly 400 have lost children in the invasion of Afghanistan. And for what? So they could fight terrorists over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here? Sorry man, stupid plot that it was, the planned Fort Dix attack shows exactly how successful that tactic has been. Not to mention the sharp uptick in terrorism worldwide and terrorism recruitment thanks to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I’m not anti-war because I realize things happen and sometimes it’s the only option…but none of this was necessary or even useful to the cause.

[Read the whole thing here]

~~~

And finally, I feel like revisiting a post about my own mother from a year or two ago…

Grace

Dad took this photo in 1954. My sister Diane’s on the left, then Mom, and — who said I’ve never been photogenic?!– yes, that is my adorable two-year-old self on the right.

Mothers…

hug ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.

Happy Mother’s Day, everybody.

Peace.

Posted: May 12th, 2007 under Being Female, Feminism, Mother's Day, Reproductive Rights.
Comments: none

And now, hollow-eyed and haunted, I roam the halls of Tildebunkport, wailing mournfully and tearing my garments. 

I don’t know why I’m so gobsmacked by this development.  Six years is a hell of a long lifespan for a cheap little laptop that for most of that time functioned with a mere 64 MB of memory. 

(In 2005 I added all the memory that could be added:128 MB, for a grand total of 192 MB.  Shazam!)

With the resulting lightning-like speed, the old thing gamely percolated along with nary a problem – until last weekend, when Kid 2  tried to run Starcraft  on it while simultaneously working on a term paper and  IMing the usual gang of buddies and…

Yep.  Laptop done blowed up.  Blowed up real good.   

So, for the next coupla months posting will be even more sporadic than before, while I save up the pengar and try to decide what kind of laptop to get this time.

Any recommendations?  

 

     

 

 

 

Posted: May 9th, 2007 under General.
Comments: 2

Tild sez: We haven’t checked in with retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong for a while.  Here’s the latest Spong Q&A to show up in my email box: 

Katherine Edman from Mason, Ohio, writes:
” Thank you so much for your series on the rise of fundamental Christianity. I particularly enjoyed the essay that described the Five Fundamentals and the one on the First Fundamental - the inerrancy of the Bible. I have wondered whether the Bible itself ever claims to be the inerrant word of God. I recognize the difficulty of this question, since the Bible itself is a hodgepodge of many books that have been bundled together over the ages. What I have found, however, is that discussing biblical scholarship with fundamentalists usually gets me precisely nowhere. They are unwilling to recognize that Moses could not have written the Torah, or that the gospels were written years after Jesus’ death. They continue to believe that the books of the Bible arose more or less intact in that particular order and mystically assembled themselves into a unit. They insist that the obvious contradictions or factual errors are just our misunderstanding of “the Word.” They propose that the “texts of terror” have been misinterpreted to justify the social evils of slavery, racism, and sexism, or - worse - fundamentalists continue to quietly believe that these social evils are indeed ordained by God! So, I want to take the argument back into their court. I want to challenge the fundamentalists to prove to me, via the Bible, that the Bible actually claims to be the inerrant word of God. If the Bible itself doesn’t claim it, why do they believe such an outlandish claim? And my question to you is: does the Bible anywhere make this claim?”

Dear Katherine ,
The immediate and short answer is no, though fundamentalists will quote various texts (like II Timothy 3:16) to prove it does. The problem with that text is that when it was written there was no such thing as the Bible as we now know it. The New Testament had not yet come into being. The fact is that even to ask the question the way you did makes a presupposition that is quite fundamentalist and thus plays right into the hands of this absurdity - for even if a particular book of the Bible were to contain that claim, the author of that book would have had no idea that his work would someday be included in a book called the Bible. The various texts that together we Christians now call the Bible were written over more than a thousand years between about 1000 BCE and 135 CE. It was not a single book by a single author but rather 66 separate books (and even more if we count the Apocrypha), written by a variety of authors. None of these authors believed that someday their words would be invested with either holiness or inerrancy. When the authors of the books that we now call the New Testament referred to scripture (Matt 12:10, 15:2,3, Luke 4:21, 22:27 and John 2:22, 7:38, 3:42, 10:35, 12:18, 17:12, 19:24, 19:28, 19:36-37, 20:9, and even the author of II Timothy to which I referred to earlier), they are referring only to the Hebrew Scriptures, since at that time there was no New Testament.
It is noteworthy that when the author of II Timothy wrote that all “scripture is given by inspiration of God,” he was referring to the Old Testament since again, at that time, there was no such thing as the New Testament.

So the claim that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is itself a non-scriptural term and indeed was imposed on the texts of the Bible at a much later time to meet the need of church leaders to have an ally in their struggles to clarify their authority. If the “Word of God” agrees with me then clearly my position is the correct one. There arose from that corruption of both truth and rationality the incredible number of abuses about which I have spoken so often in this column from biblically-endorsed racism, sexism and homophobia to biblically-endorsed war, persecution, and torture. Hope this clarifies your concern.

– John Shelby Spong

~~~

Posted: May 5th, 2007 under General, John Shelby Spong.
Comments: 3

(With apologies to Fred Pohl)

Echidne found a nifty thingy that counts the number of  pages on a blog that contain the word “he”  and the number of pages that contain the word “she” and then compares the two to arrive at a degree of “gender bias”.  

His Wegeness took note and proceeded to measure some local and national blogs by this yardstick, with mildly interesting results.  Case in point: 

Note the exquisite symmetry:   71% - 29%, 29% - 71%. 
In other late-breaking developments:  I say “po-TAT-o”, Mitch says “po-TAHT-o”.
But could we expect any less of the king of all feminists?

I wouldn’t call myself Mitch’s “accuser”, tho.  I mean, really — I never even looked at the guy’s blog until a couple days ago,  much less knew what a titan of feminism he is. Yes, incredible as it sounds, I managed to spend nearly 55 years living my life in total ignorance of the existence of Mitch Berg.  How thoughtless of me.  How selfish.  O the shameful wantonness of living a non-Mitch Berg-centric life.  Eheu!   

Anyway, I’ll bet it’d take some time to wade through the dense morass of his gimlet-eyed erudition* to find something decipherable enough to  “accuse” him of ,  if I were inclined to do that kind of thing, which I am not.  I’ll leave that to those lucky enough to be better acquainted with his legend than I.  
   
Meanwhile, if you mere mortals want to check your own blog’s gender bias, you can do that here.

 

* Ooh, check out this smackdown!  

“No, it was detailed explication of the philosophical underpinnings of feminism.”  

Now, that’s some studly wordslinging. Have a lot of success with that line, do ya, Mitch?

 

 

  
 

Posted: May 3rd, 2007 under Feminism, General, Local characters.
Comments: 2

And here we all thought Mitch was just being a pontificating putz as usual when he said:

“I am the most feminist person I know.”

O us of little faith… Check out the awesome truthiness of his claim, as also proven by this totally unretouched photo taken by BFF Camille Paglia.

Mitch, we hardly knew ye. (And I, for one, am quite happy to keep it that way.)

Oh, and don’t worry about all the girl germs you picked up from those other great feminists in the photo. All they can do is make you a better man, hon.

Posted: May 2nd, 2007 under Feminism, General, Local characters.
Comments: 3