first term blues

the coup in honduras and the almost definitely mishandled election in iran (as well as the violent handling of protesters) has made for a shaky couple weeks in democracy internationally. not knowing enough about either of these complicated situations (even though i've read quite a bit), i have to say obama's strong condemnations and multilaterial rhetoric have been the best that i could hope for from the US.

on domestic issues, however, i'm having trouble (again) with obama's middle road. many of the articles i have been reading lately about these issues (environmental, torture, gay rights, etc) have cited the administration's strong desire to hold onto independent voters. yes, they are a section of the voters that elected him, but they elected him when he was not middle-of-roading these issues. as my co-blogger has said "promises were made." the inside strategists may be right, but it's disheartening to think that decisions are being made based on re-election.

are we going to have to wait until obama's 2nd term (please let there be one...) for some of the huge policy shifts he promised. in other words, was west wing (the tv show) right, again? does the ability to be elected twice make presidents more accountable or less?

for your viewing pleasure, here is a video with the current administration in the west wing intro and a great moment in west wing during president barlett's re-election campaign. what's next?

Thank God for Pride!

I just wanted to take a moment and say thank God for the multitude of Gay Pride Parades happening around the country and all the wonderful Pride things that go with it. Gay Pride Parades are meant to be both serious and fun, they are a moment to reflect upon how far the Gay rights movement has come and how far it still has to go. I am happy to say that I have now lived in two cities with very large Gay Pride Parades and that each year the Gay rights movement moves our culture (and cultures around the world) towards more acceptance of people's life choices and acceptance of the diversity of life in general. So thank you God for wonderful Gay Pride and the fantastic Gay rights movement! Holla!

aw mj...

no one's music is surer to get the hotties on the dance floor than michael jackson's. there's no denying that the man had some issues, many of which we will hear more about in the days/years to come. but there is also no denying that he had so much talent and style. if this video doesn't move you, you might not be human:

Monetary incentive for not getting pregnant?

Wow, this is taking it to a whole new level. Apparently there is a now a program, College Bound Sisters, that is paying girls for not getting pregnant right here in the good ol' US of A. That's right, you heard me, paying them to not get pregnant. The three main goals of the program are avoiding pregnancy, graduating from high school, and enrolling in college. While this program has some positive aspects like giving the girls activities to be a part of, helping them realize that going to college and getting good grades are important goals to have, I can't help but be somewhat dismayed about the way these goals are being monetarily incentivized. The girls are given $7 a week that is put into a saving account for them, but if they get pregnant, they don't get the money. I mean seriously, how much research needs to be done to show that while incentives may work in the short term, they are not good at creating lasting change in people's behaviors. And most often don't work at all. Additionally, if you are going to try to get the teenage girls to not get pregnant maybe you should also consider doing a little sexual education along with your program. I mean seriously people, WTF?

CNN Video

let the good be the enemy of the mediocre

if you haven't heard the phrase yet, the obama admin has a mantra floating around: "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." in other words, don't wait for the perfect policy (i read this as the most liberal policy, but that's up to your discretion) be the enemy of a good policy.

BUT, no or weak public health insurance option in a health care bill! WTF. this isn't obama (though we'll see what he says in his press conference today). this is the senate finance committee's bill FIRST DRAFT. here's a list of the members. if you feel as strongly about this is we do, please:
WA: call maria cantwell 202-224-3441
NY: call chuck schumer 202-224-6542
OR: call ron wyden 202-224-5244

and tell them: "A health care bill without a strong public health insurance option is completely unacceptable." (script from moveon.org ;) )

i also wrote senator cantwell last night. this is not my best letter but feel free to use it when emailing your senators. really it doesn't matter what you say, so long as they register that you want a public health insurance option:

Dear Mrs. Cantwell,
There absolutely needs to be public option for health care reform. Please do not let this option slip away. Please take some initiative and do not rely on "co-ops." Group Health-like HMO's cannot catch all people without insurance and will be very hard to regulate nationally. The majority of Americans want a public options, please listen to them.
Thank you.

to prove my last line see graphic below...


info from washington post on finance committee

Thank God for Dads!

On this Father's Day I would like to give a big thanks to God for my dad. He has always been supportive of me, there to make me laugh, and to listen to my off-the-wall ideas. He keeps me honest and has taught me how to be critical of the world around me and yet able to give people the benefit of the doubt. As I am sure many of you out there in bloggerland would agree, I would not be the person I am today if it were not for my dad. So thank you God for fathers around the world, and just like mother's day, thanks for having a fake hallmark holiday to celebrate them!

i fear fear

fear-mongering can lead people to do crazy things. here's a video that a friend sent me a few months ago. then to make everyone feel better after hearing it's fear-mongering, extremist views, i also posted obama's cairo speech, which preaches close to the opposite. it's long, but it really worth a listen if you haven't seen the whole thing yet.

Isn't the truth worth anything these days?

The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, decided today that convicts do not have a right under the Constitution to obtain DNA testing to try to prove their innocence after being found guilty. Basically indicating that even if the advanced DNA testing now available would be able to prove a person's innocence after the fact, people who are already in jail do not have a right to it. WTF?

One of the major issues brought up in this argument, was that the defendant who brought this before the Supreme Court was not very lovable or believably innocent. As was stated in the NYT article:

Justice Scalia said he was struck by the absence of a full-throated declaration
of innocence from the defendant, and quoted from a sworn statement Mr. Osborne
had submitted to the state courts: "I have no doubt whatsoever that retesting of
the condom will prove once and for all time...”

Here, Justice Scalia
observed, a listener would expect to hear the words “my innocence.” But the
defendant did not say that, saying instead “either my guilt or innocence.”

But I would argue that in fact the defendant was exactly correct in what he said. The more accurate DNA test would in fact prove once and for all time whether a defendant was guilty or innocent. And wouldn't information of either sort be useful to the courts? If a defendant is found guilty, once and for all, then maybe they would stop the insanely time consuming and expensive appeal process they are probably going through. If they are found innocent then maybe they will be able to actually clear their name and walk out of their wrongful imprisonment. Either way, it seems to me that to enable the truth to be found through DNA testing is a win-win for justice and the court system in the long run. So seriously Supreme Court, why would you want to deny people the right to more accurate evidence?

NYT Article

bodywatch, WTF "people"

i picked up a waiting room copy of people magazine and WTF, there is now a section of the magazine called "bodywatch"! it's all about weight gain and loss of celebrities (probably 99.9% female).

i've seen all the covers in the supermarket of celebrity magazines that highlight these weight changes, but i didn't realize that magazines were so blatantly f'ed up to make it a regular segment of their magazine.

i assume you, readers, understand how demeaning and unhealthy this focus is, but i was thinking, what if they highlighted any other segment of the population: kids or elderly, and stalked them about their weight issues. they would never do that, of course, b/c it's so obviously f'ed up. why are women 18-50 supposed to be immune to this hurtful focus?

i hate to give you the link... but here it is

Obama Defends the Defence of Marriage Act

On Friday the Obama administration put out a brief that very explicitly defended the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA), which basically prevents couples in states that recognize same-sex unions from securing Social Security spousal benefits, filing joint taxes and other federal rights of marriage. Seriously Obama, how many campaign promises against the LGBT community are you willing to take back? As a friend of the blog, Hotplate, suggested, this is a major WTF!!!!!

Huffington Post Article

AmericaBlog Post

Human Rights Campaign Response

cascade bicycle club rules

not only did the cascade bicycle club host the fabulous "flying wheels" ride, that i did this saturday, but they have also tireless fought to fix the dangerous area of road/bike-lane where i went down last halloween (see previous blog post) (aka "the missing link"). and it looks like it's finally gonna get done. yay!

see press release here and if you feel compelled at all to donate to their legal fund for the "missing link" project please go here
cascade.org

Supremacy is a fallacy.

At 12:40pm on Wednesday the 10th, a racist, antisemitic, "hardcore" supremacist, 88-year old man walked into the lobby of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and shot a security guard. This man, James W. von Brunn, was arrested in 1981 for walking into another government building with a gun and a goal of shooting a guard. He seems to have spend a fair amount of his life writing hateful things on the Internet, such as describing his prior arrest and conviction in 1981 as being "convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge." Clearly this is a man with a lot of anger and a lot of issues, who somewhere along the lines began to believe that he was superior to other people and that violence was the only way to make that clear. So he walk into a sacred space to help people remember the horrors of violence that occurred to one group at the hands of another who thought they were superior, shoots a security guard who had never seen nor done anything to him before, injures a couple of other people, and he is still alive at a local hospital. Seriously, readers, when will people learn that violence is not the answer and that no one is superior to anyone else? WTF?

Washington Post Article

really? you really still think obama might be muslim? really?

thanks to a tip by my friend js, i give you this crazy wrong article
editorial in the washington times

a quote: "This is not to say, necessarily, that Mr. Obama actually is a Muslim any more than Mr. Clinton actually is black. After his five months in office, and most especially after his just-concluded visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, however, a stunning conclusion seems increasingly plausible: The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich."

my friend also points out that the washington times is actually owned by the unification church (a.k.a. "the moonies"), who i did not know much about until i looked them up on wikipedia ... and that did not make me like them anymore.

p.s. and, so what if he is

what's rational about homophobia?

the supreme court decided not to hear a case about the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the US's military forces. it did so with the obama administration's blessing.

a quote from the AP article:" In court papers, the administration said the appeals court ruled correctly in this case when it found that 'don't ask, don't tell' is 'rationally related to the government's legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.'"

rationally? see our earlier blog post on how much we disagree with that.

i like the idea of democratically-elected bodies passing the laws that rid this type of discrimination from our system (and that includes gay marriage), but it bothers me that the highest courts are refusing to see that this an issue of equality pure and simple. to frame it any other way seems irrational to me.

Thank God for the end of the school year and the beginning of summer!

OK this is a totally self serving thank God, but I just have to say that after my first year in my new grad program I would like to give a little shout out to God for the end of it and the beginning of summer. It is a tough but totally awesome program and let me just tell you, I am super excited about the prospects of actually seeing my friends again and not reading 100-150 pages of psychology theory every day. So thank you God for making it the end of the school year, and here's to an awesome summer! Holla!!!!!!

60% of bankruptcies!!!

... are at least in part due to medical expenses. wtf. the percentage is growing over time too. furthermore, "most medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations." if you think about the people you know or maybe your own medical history, perhaps this isn't too surprising. but i believe it is wrong, don't you?
article in reuters
abstract in the american journal of health (and more if you have access to journals)

and if you haven't read atul gawande's piece on healthcare costs, you should. in it he makes a point that the medical community is being split: "..you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine. Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor. And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue...." and the latter appears to be winning, even if there are shining examples of the former throughout the country (including the mayo clinic and seattle, compared to other cities).

he also points out that whether we go with public insurance or stick w/ private, the culture of medicine will need to be changed either way, but am i alone in thinking that it will need to be public for actual incentives to be in place to reduce costs across the country?

We all deserve a second a chance but seriously, Bristol Palin for Abstinence?

I know this is a month old at this point, but I keep coming back to this stupid idea. Bristol Palin as an ambassador for abstinence? As I am guessing many of you remember, this is the same teenage girl who was pregnant during her mother's campaign for the VP position with McCain and now she is touting abstinence as the only "100% foolproof way you can prevent pregnancy". Which is true, if you can remain abstinent, then yes you will not get pregnant. But the research has shown time and time again that abstinence is not a realistic option for most teenagers (which both mamma Palin and ex-fiance Levi have said) and that in fact teens who proclaim abstinence are just as likely as other teens to engage in sex but are more likely to fail to use birth control (ahem Bristol, does this sound familiar to you at all????). Abstinence is not an effective birth control option for most teens and to have a girl who I suppose is "born again abstinent" touting it as the only option does not make the situation any better. Seriously, WTF Bristol? Do you even believe the crap you are trying to sell? You ex-fiance Levi and your mom sure don't! And do you really want to prove that they are smarter then you?

Huffington Post Article

bling hunt!

u.k. cops have a new campaign. report on your neighbors if they have too much nice stuff (aka bling). wtf. i think the part that bothers me the most about this is the neighbors ratting out neighbors (certainly not always correctly).

surely, this is one of the exploratory tactics that police use all over the world, but having people crime-watch by "too much bling" seems subject to major issues. according to a criminologist at king's college in london, "the campaign encourages racial profiling." what do you think readers? does this policy bother you? do you think it could ever happen in the US? does it remind you of a monty python sketch too?
campaign's website
npr marketplace report
daily mail article about it