Recently in Politics Category

I'm really surprised and curious about this. Though she claims she's explained herself, I feel like there is a lot of obfuscation here. What is her real reason? How is she going to "affect change from the outside?" Any guesses?

Every politician who decides they won't run for another term while in office is in the position of maintaining motivation without the muse of pleasing voters for the next go round. It seems disingenious for her to act like the honorable thing is to "pass the ball" so she's not a "lame duck" governor, rather than just, well, not being a lame duck governor. If she's all about what's good for the peeps of Alaska, why can't she finish her term honorably and then move on to other things?

I think there's something fishy going on here, and it's not just she and Todd out on the lake with a couple a reels.

And check out her daughter, Piper, playing with her flip flops. She's the same little firecracker who licked her brother's hair down during the Republican National Convention. I love that girl's irrepressible quirks.

A military coup in Honduras this weekend deposed President Manuel Zelaya. The Honduran Congress has stripped Zelaya of his office and appointed the president of the Congress, Robert Micheletti, to be head of state. It is Central America's first military coup since the Cold War.

Eva Gollinger in Caracas, Venezuela reports:

The text message that beeped on my cell phone this morning read "Alert, Zelaya has been kidnapped, coup d'etat underway in Honduras, spread the word." It's a rude awakening for a Sunday morning, especially for the millions of Hondurans that were preparing to exercise their sacred right to vote today for the first time on a consultative referendum concerning the future convening of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution. Supposedly at the center of the controversy is today's scheduled referendum, which is not a binding vote but merely an opinion poll to determine whether or not a majority of Hondurans desire to eventually enter into a process to modify their constitution.

Such an initiative has never taken place in the Central American nation, which has a very limited constitution that allows minimal participation by the people of Honduras in their political processes. The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration' s dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras' Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today's scheduled poll was not binding by law.

Kim Pearson has a great summary this morning over at BlogHer.

I'm left wondering about the safety of the women in Honduras during military coup and state instability--these are often the times when sexual assault increases, women struggle to get access to the medical help they need, not to mention all the other basic resources that are necessary to keep families going. We'd love to hear from readers with family in the area...

There will be a protest of the military coup of Honduras at the United Nations today from 3 to 6 pm for those in the New York area.

Update: Christy Thornton, the head of NACLA, recommends this post on the subject. She'll be writing something for us tomorrow on the topic.

Vice President Biden announced the appointment of Lynn Rosenthal as the first-ever White House Advisor on Violence Against Women on Friday.

From the Family Violence Prevention Fund:

In this new position, Rosenthal will be a liaison to the domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy community; coordinate with the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women on implementation of Violence Against Women Act programs; coordinate with the Department of Health and Human Services on implementation of Family Violence Prevention Act services (including the National Domestic Violence Hotline); coordinate with the State Department and USAID on global domestic violence initiatives; and drive the development of new initiatives and policy aimed at combating domestic violence and sexual assault with advocacy groups and members of Congress.

Rosenthal's expertise includes housing, state and local coordinated community response, federal policy on violence against women, and survivor-centered advocacy. She most recently served as the Executive Director of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and was Executive Director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence from 2000 to 2006. She partnered with The Allstate Foundation to develop a highly successful national initiative to promote economic empowerment for survivors of violence.

Conservative Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in Canada Doug Elniski has been catching a ton of shit for posting the text of a speech that he gave a couple of weeks ago to junior high school students on his blog, where he supposedly told the girls that "men are attracted to smiles":

Part of the posting included advice to girls saying, "Ladies, always smile when you walk into a room, there is nothing a man wants less than a woman scowling because he thinks he is going to get s--t for something and has no idea what."

It continues, "Men are attracted to smiles, so smile, don't give me that 'treated equal' stuff. If you want Equal, it comes in little packages at Starbucks."

Elniski's blog was taken down on Monday afternoon.

Blog gone or not, the real damage was done to the female students he reached that day. While Elniski clarified that the comparison between equality and a sweetener wasn't actually said at the speech and publicly apologized for the "stupid, inappropriate" comment on his blog, his creepy reference to smiles was said. He actually defends that one, claiming he was merely trying to say that "men and women should be friendly and approachable in dealing with others."

Nice try, dude.

So you may have heard that yet another prominent Republican politician, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, admitted to having an affair today.

** Insert snark about Republican leaders "defending" marriage here **

Then go read Shark-Fu's post on the subject. (It's actually about Nevada Sen. John Ensign, but the sentiment applies to Sanford, too.)

Sanford has been booted from the speakers line-up at the uberconservative Values Voter Summit this year. And speaking of values, I have to quote my colleague Tim Fernholz, who makes an important point:

It took an admittedly sensational story about Governor Mark Sanford's personal life to get the national press to converge on South Carolina and declare his political career "over" due to "values" issues. (Whatever, he wouldn't be the first southern governor to be a come back kid after marital infidelity). But when he attempted to deny much needed unemployment funding to people suffering under the recession while cutting school funding and the social safety net, in the name of an economically-baseless austerity policy that involved telling his weakest constituents to effectively drop dead, well, those decisions didn't threaten his political career or reflect on his values. That made him a "star" in the GOP. Priorities, priorities.

Word.

Finally, I was glad to see neither Ensign's nor Sanford's wife did the ol' "stand by your man" routine at the mea culpa press conferences. Hope this is a new trend of politicians standing on their own when they apologize for their personal indiscretions.

...but is he really the only one? Public moral outcries of elected officials sexual behavior is complex, often tedious and not really in the name of justice. The prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, likes to hire woman to attend parties and do who knows what else. Barbara Montereale, one of the women in the much reprinted picture of two women photographing each other in Berlusconi's bathroom sent the pictures to the press to be published for the truth to come out. She was paid and flown down to spend time with him. The Italian authorities are starting an investigation according to the Telegraph UK.

The three women, whose accounts of their evening with Mr Berlusconi apparently largely corroborate each other, have been questioned by police in Bari who are investigating Mr Tarantini for allegedly inciting prostitution.

Mr Berlusconi faces increasing pressure to explain whether he knew if the women were being paid to attend his parties and whether he slept with a prostitute.

He is under attack not only from the press and the opposition but also the Roman Catholic Church.

I don't actually care what the Catholic church deems moral and immoral, or what makes them upset. This is not a matter of morality, but a question of exploitation and the use of women by men in power. And this is not the only story, it is a trend with men in power to hire women to do whatever they want with and their bloated sense of self and ego that comes with having so much power creates a vacuum where anything is for sale and purchase. Isn't that what happened with Eliot Spitzer?

I find moral panic and outrage over the often grotesque, exploitative sexual behavior of politicians hilarious. My instinct is to suggest that it is a private matter, just as I don't want you to talk about my private sex life, I don't think anyone's should be fodder for news material. On the other hand, that fact that stories like this come up over and over again merely shows us what men in power think is legitimate behavior. This is not a matter of "i gotcha," but more about the ways entitlement plays out with our beloved "statesmen."

Sam Brownback holds up a 7-year-old's drawing of an embyro to argue against stem-cell research.

This is pretty big news that has stayed under the radar: Uber-conservative Sam Brownback is looking more and more likely to be the next governor of Kansas -- which means really bad things for reproductive rights in that state. Dana Goldstein breaks it down:

If elected, Brownback will have an enthusiastic, Republican state legislature to work with on rolling back reproductive rights. It's worth remembering that Sebelius' HHS secretary nomination was almost derailed by that body, which forced her to deal with a series of divisive abortion-related bills during her Senate confirmation hearings. Brownback would certainly unleash those forces, moving forward on legislation that would require doctors performing late-term abortions to submit, in writing, exactly what medical risks "justify" the procedure. In April, in one of her last acts as governor, Sebelius vetoed that bill, which also would have allowed the husbands and parents of patients to sue abortion providers if they suspected the pregnant woman's health wasn't really at risk. The bill was intended to intimidate Dr. Tiller and his brethren out of business, and would stymie the work of Dr. Leroy Carhart, the physician who has promised to begin offering late-term abortions in Kansas in Tiller's stead.

While there's still time for Democrats to field a strong candidate and rally behind him/her, Brownback has name-recognition on his side after years of serving as a U.S. senator. (Interim Gov. Mark Parkinson, who filled Sebelius's shoes after she was confirmed as HHS secretary, has announced he won't run in 2010.)

As a reminder... Brownback equates reproductive rights with slavery, says rape and incest survivors shouldn't have access to abortion, has opposed contraception access for low-income women, supported the global gag rule, and has backed a whole host of abortion restrictions. So yeah, he'd be bad news for the women of Kansas.

Vanessa and I had the opportunity yesterday to meet with Former President Bill Clinton along with a group of fabulous bloggers to discuss his work around the Clinton Foundation including his work with his many global initiatives that deal with climate change, HIV/AIDs, health care, agriculture and education. He answered a series of questions from us on a variety of topics including health care, education, reproductive rights and even a bit on identity politics. Scott has a good post on Clinton's suggestions to push for health care reform and Chris Bowers on the climate change bill being held up currently.

Emily Douglas at RH Reality Check has a nice recap of everything he talked about including his response to her questions about reproductive rights and women.

When I asked what the Clinton Foundation does to promote women's rights and reproductive rights as a cornerstone of global economic development, Clinton observed that the "practice that has worked uniformly across all cultures and religions" to depress the birth rate, the rate of unintended pregnancies, and of abortions, is "universal access to education and universal access to the labor market for women."

"Part of the world's instability is rooted in inequality," Clinton observed.

To add to that, his consistent message was for us to push in the places we can actually affect change including on the issue of women's rights. It would have been interesting to hear what he has to say about access to reproductive health care in the United States where pushing where we will be most successful is not always an option.

Finally, it was so interesting to hear him talk about what he feels is the role of identity in politics and what I would call theories of nation building. He asked the question, "how do we build our own identity without making others look or feel bad?" in response to Armando from Talk Left asking, how do we continue to talk about diversity in the current historical moment. He said that the shift in power from oppressed to oppressor to a more interdependent form of state control allows disenfranchised greater access to the means to overthrow regimes, but is difficult to do if the tools are consistently hijacked by what he called "evil." I don't have his direct quotes, but this is what I took from what he was saying.

It was a very interesting experience and I felt honored to be alongside such amazing bloggers.

UPDATE: Another post from Eve at Daily Kos on the obstacles ahead for passing the health care bill and some other observations from the meeting.

I wish I was shocked by this.

A prominent South Carolina Republican killed his Facebook page Sunday after being caught likening the First Lady to an escaped gorilla.

Commenting on a report posted to Facebook about a gorilla escape at a zoo in Columbia, S.C., Friday, longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass wrote, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."

When taken to task for the racist comment - and after killing his Facebook page - DePass said, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."

Yeah - ha fucking ha.

Via Michelle Obama Watch.

Protests have been held in the streets of Iran since the disputed outcome of the presidential election. Community blogger Roja calls it a "nightmare."

People who have been disenfranchised are protesting in Tehran and other cities. You can see some photos on flickr.

Text messaging services were cut off on the day of election and ahmadinejad was declared as the victor only a few hours after the election was over. Election statistics were being announce in a very fishy manner with no detail about which cities and provinces were being counted (completely different from how things were done in all other elections in Iran). Campaign headquarters of other candidates were raided and military was present across Tehran.

...Today Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and most websites of other candidates have been blocked, cellphone connections were shut down in Tehran, political figures have been arrested and people have been beaten and bloodied in the streets. Meanwhile foreign reporters have been asked to leave.

The Guardian has great coverage of what's going on; you should also check out Global Voices Online for blogging coverage.

The post-election protests have also sparked a lot of conversation about the role of new media.