December 2004, Week 1

I put this here because it affects me and my kids... The reason I turned off to 'Sex Education" when I was a kid because it was primarily a bunch of misleading and self-serving crap. Bush's plan is no different, what's worse it's regressive...

SINCE PRESIDENT BUSH took office, federal funding for "abstinence-only" sex education has more than doubled. Abstinence-only programs, which encourage teenagers to refrain from sex outside marriage and provide no information about contraceptive options, are to receive $167 million this fiscal year, and the president wanted to give even more: $270 million. Whether these programs are effective in reducing unwanted pregnancy and whether they work better than more comprehensive sex education programs are charged questions. Advocates on both sides insist that the data resoundingly back their position, but in fact it's too early, and much of the work that's been done has been too loosely designed, to provide conclusive answers. That is troubling in itself: As the federal government devotes increasing funds to abstinence-only programs, it ought to insist on rigorous studies to determine whether they work.

What's gotten even less attention, though, is the content of the federally funded abstinence-only curricula. The government reviews only a brief summary about the programs it funds, and applicants must teach. Among other things they must teach; "that sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." Astonishingly, for most of the programs there's no requirement that the information they provide be scientifically accurate. In fact, a study released this week by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) cites numerous examples in which abstinence-only programs spread false or misleading information.

The study found that of the 13 most often used federally funded abstinence-only curricula, 11 contained "errors and distortions." Some of the cited statements were anachronistic, if not outright offensive. "Women gauge their happiness and judge their success by their relationships. Men's happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments," says one guide. Another offers a fable of a pushy princess who's dumped for a village maiden: "Moral of the story: Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess."

The teaching materials also exaggerate the failure rate of condoms and minimize their ability to prevent sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). "The actual ability of condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS even if the product is intact, is not definitively known," one guide says. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that "latex condoms provide an essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD pathogens." One guide states that touching another person's genitals "can result in pregnancy." Others warn that abortions result in increased infertility and premature births -- contradicting the teachings of leading obstetrics textbooks.

These kinds of misstatements shouldn't be tolerated in programs paid for with federal funds. It's good to encourage adolescents to refrain from having sex, and there's evidence this message is having an effect. The latest figures show a continuing drop in teen pregnancy rates -- the birth rate among girls ages 10 to 14 is at its lowest level in 60 years -- and a major part of the decline appears due to delaying sexual activity. That's terrific, but for those who don't abstain, there must be accurate information about how to avoid pregnancy and disease. Dissuading people from using condoms by suggesting they don't work is particularly counterproductive.

By Matt Taibbi, New York Press

We've got to repudiate, you know, the most strident and insulting anti-American voices out there sometimes on our party's left... We can't have our party identified by Michael Moore and Hollywood as our cultural values.
—Al From, CEO, Democratic Leadership Council

You know, let's let Hollywood and the Cannes Film Festival fawn all over Michael Moore. We ought to make it pretty clear that he sure doesn't speak for us when it comes to standing up for our country.
—Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank of the DLC

THE FIRST THING I thought when reading these passages—both taken from a "soul-searching" roundtable held by the Democratic Leadership Council—was this: Who the hell is Will Marshall?

I couldn't remember seeing his name at the top of anybody's ballot. I didn't remember which, if any, elections he had ever won. I was a little mystified, in fact, by the nature of his popular support—who he meant, exactly, when he used the word "we" to talk about whom Michael Moore does and does not speak for.

According to the last data I could find, Moore recently made a movie that was seen by tens of millions of people around the world and has grossed nearly $120 million in the U.S. alone. Furthermore, it was, according to exit polls, a much better demographic success than the actual Democratic party. A Harris poll conducted in July found that 89 percent of Democrats agreed with Fahrenheit 9/11, along with 70 percent of independents. That means Moore outperformed John Kerry among independents by about 19 points, if we are to go just by the data presented by bum-licking power-worshipper Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times at the DLC roundtable.

Moore's revenues come from millions of ordinary people paying 10 bucks a pop to see his film. In contrast, only about 200 people a year visit the DLC at the box office—only they pay thousands of dollars per ticket, and they all have names you'd recognize: Eli Lilly, Coca-Cola, Union Carbide, Occidental Petroleum, BP and so on.

Like Moore, Marshall is a media figure. He is one of the chief contributors to Blueprint magazine, the flagship publication of the DLC. Despite the fact that subscriptions to this magazine are included free with membership in the DLC, its annual circulation still lags slightly behind the gate for Fahrenheit 9/11, with about 20,000 readers per year.

An unfair dig, you say: Blueprint is a trade magazine. Seen in that light, it indeed appears a much better market performer, with only about six times fewer readers than the industry bible for horror makeup artists, Fangoria.

While it is not exactly clear who else Marshall is talking about in this quote, it is fairly clear that he means that Michael Moore does not speak for him personally. Which makes sense, of course.

In addition to his duties as the president of the PPI, Marshall kept himself busy in the last few years. Among other things, he served on the board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an organization co-chaired by Joe Lieberman and John McCain whose aim was to build bipartisan support for the invasion of Iraq.

Marshall also signed, at the outset of the war, a letter issued by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) expressing support for the invasion. Marshall signed a similar letter sent to President Bush put out by the conservative Social Democrats/USA group on Feb. 25, 2003, just before the invasion. The SD/USA letter urged Bush to commit to "maintaining substantial U.S. military forces in Iraq for as long as may be required to ensure a stable, representative regime is in place and functioning."

One of just a handful of Marshall's co-signatories on that letter was Bruce Jackson, who also happens to be the head of the PNAC (whose letter Marshall also signed) and the founder of the aforementioned Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Jackson is not only a neo-con of high rank and one of the chief pom-pom wavers for the war effort. He was also a vice president in the weapons division of Lockheed-Martin between 1993 and 2002—meaning that he was one of the implied targets of Bowling for Columbine, which came out in Jackson's last year with the company.

Clearly, Marshall was thinking about the good of the Democratic Party, and not the integrity of his grimy little network of missile-humping cronies, when he and Al From made the curious—and curiously conspicuous—decision to denounce Moore, Hollywood and France at the DLC meeting in early November.

There were a number of things that were strange about the release of this obviously coordinated series of sound bites from the DLC heavies.

For one thing, people like Al From, Donna Brazile and DLC president Bruce Reed—event speakers who are all high-level political heavyweights whose instinct for spontaneity died with their souls 100 years ago, and would never say anything without first calculating its potential impact—would seem to gain very little by mentioning Moore's name at all in the conference.

To say openly in front of a roomful of reporters that the party has to disavow Michael Moore is to remind a roomful of reporters that the Democratic party is still currently linked to Michael Moore. This would be like George Bush Sr. using the word "wimp" in public, or John Kerry using the word "effete" or "snob." No alert political operative would recommend it, under normal circumstances.

Furthermore, as both Marshall and From surely know, there was no effort whatsoever even this time around by the Democratic Party to associate itself with Michael Moore. Excepting the brief and mostly unrequited love affair between Moore and Wes Clark, most of the party candidates recoiled from the fat director as from a diseased thing throughout the entire campaign season. They've already kept him at arm's length—why talk about the need to do it again? Why bring him up at all?

Well, that's easy. It's one thing to avoid public appearances with a Michael Moore, and to accept his support only tacitly. But it's another thing entirely to openly denounce him as anti-American, which is what Al From did last week.

What From, Marshall and the other DLC speakers were doing last week was not just ruminating out loud about the need to shy away from certain demonized liberal icons. They were, instead, announcing their willingness to embrace the other side's tactic—I hate to lean on this overused word, but it is a McCarthyite tactic—of branding certain individuals as traitors and anti-Americans. What they were doing was sending up a trial balloon, to see if anyone noticed this chilling affirmative shift in strategy and tactics.

Well, I noticed. I also noticed that unless something is done about it, this unelected bund of corporate pawns is once again going to end up writing the party platform and arranging things to make sure that no antiwar candidate is allowed to compete for votes in the primaries. It will push one of its own—probably Harold Ickes, or Brazile—in next year's election for the chairman of the Democratic Party. And when that person wins, the tens of millions of Democrats who opposed the war will have to get used to people like Will Marshall referring to them as "we" in front of roomfuls of reporters—Marshall, who this year wrote, in Blueprint, an article entitled "Stay and Win in Iraq" that offered the following view of the progress of the war:

"Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor."

Uh-huh. And Michael Moore and Hollywood are the problem with the Democratic Party.

Reprinted from The New York Press:
http://nypress.com/17/48/news%26columns/taibbi.cfm

One's first response to the report by the International Red Cross about torture at our prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is denial: "I don't want to think about it; I don't want to hear about it; we're the good guys, they're the bad guys; shut up. Besides, they attacked us first."

But our country has opposed torture since its founding. One of our founding principles is that cruel and unusual punishment is both illegal and wrong. Every year, our State Department issues a report grading other countries on their support for or violations of human rights.

Yes, it's true -- we did sort of know this already. It was clear when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in Iraq that the infection had come from Guantanamo. The infamous memos by Alberto Gonzales, our next attorney general, and by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's "Justice" Department pretty well laid it out.

In a way, Abu Ghraib, as bizarrely sadistic as it was, is easier to understand than this cold, relentless and apparently endless procedure at Gitmo. At least Abu Ghraib took place in the context of war. At Guantanamo, there is no threat to anyone -- Americans are not being killed or hurt there.

The Red Cross report says, "The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment, and a form of torture."

Our country, the one you and I are responsible for, has imprisoned these "illegal combatants" for three years now. What else do we expect to get out of them? We don't even release their names or say what they're charged with -- whether they're Taliban, al-Qaida or just some farmers who happened to get in the way (in Afghanistan, farmers and soldiers are apt to be the same).

If this hasn't been established in three years, when will it be? How long are they to be subjected to "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions"?

Why are people representing our government, paid by us, writing filth on the Qurans of helpless prisoners? Is this American? Is it Christian? What are our moral values? Where are the clergymen on this? Speak out. Speak up.

If you have neither the imagination nor the empathy to envision yourself in such circumstances, please consider why the senior commanders in the military are so horrified by this. It's very simple: Because if we do this, if we break international law and the conventions of warfare, then the same thing can be done to American soldiers who are captured abroad.

I suppose one could argue that we're fighting people who chop off the heads of their prisoners, so there. Since when have we taken up Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a role model? In the famous hypothetical example, you might consider torture justified if you had a terrorist who knew where a bomb was planted that was about to go off. But three years later?

Some people have got to be held accountable for this, and that would include Congress.

AUSTIN, Texas — Goody, goody, gumdrop. We could get Phil Gramm back again, this time as secretary of the treasury. Oh how I've missed that little ray of sunshine, the bleeding heart from Bryan, the man who thinks poor people are all fat. As author Jim Hightower used to say, if you need a heart transplant, try to get Phil Gramm's — it's never been used.

Just what we need for treasury secretary: the banking industry's errand boy. The man who helped bring us Enron.

According to The Washington Post, President Bush wants a new economic team. Can't imagine why. Oh, here it is. It's "part of Bush's preparation for sending Congress an ambitious second-term domestic agenda." He wants someone "who can better relate to Congress and be more effective in dealing with financial markets and television interviewers."

There you have it — Phil's perfect for the job. Mr. Charm. And he knows how to talk those seniors into getting rid of Social Security. He's in practice. He's been back here in Texas lobbying to make it legal to sell "dead peasant" life insurance to the Teacher Retirement System.

"Dead peasant" insurance is such a deal that Wal-Mart and lots of big companies do it. See, a company like Wal-Mart takes out life insurance on low-wage employees (that would be Texas teachers), then it gets to deduct the premiums from its taxes. And when the employee dies, the company gets a benefit between $64,000 to more than $250,000.

Gramm is currently vice chairman of UBS Investment Bank. Under the UBS plan, the Retirement System would buy annuities and life insurance policies on retired teachers and keep the proceeds when they die. Of course, the investment and insurance industries would profit from the premiums and brokerage fees.

Those of you who are regular readers know that I do not pick on the wives or children of politicians. I bring up Wendy Gramm because she is a player in her own right and also because this is a classic example of How Things Work in Texas.

Those who believe the entire nation is being Texasified should pay extremely close attention. Those interested in history will recall that W. Gramm was on the board of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission when it made what many regard as the key decision to set up the Enron scandal. She resigned from the commission a few days later and joined the board of Enron a few weeks after that.

But she has another legal case on her hands, State Farm Mutual and Wendy Gramm vs. Lopez, to be heard by the Texas Supreme Court, which is known here as the Dollar Docket. Texans for Public Justice, an excellent public interest group, keeps track of cases before the court every month and notes on its website the corresponding contributions to the justices from the parties and/or attorneys involved. This keeps us amused on slow days.

W. Gramm was on the board of State Farm Mutual Auto from 1994 through 2001. A policyholder lawsuit alleges that Gramm and other board members stiffed them on dividends after the company reported a $37 billion surplus in 1997.

Even though we elect justices in Texas, Gov. Goodhair Perry gets to make an appointment when one resigns. Phil Gramm gave Goodhair's campaign the $612,000 he had left over from his Senate campaign fund when he retired prematurely from that body after Enron collapsed. Goodhair had appointed Wendy Gramm to the Texas A&M board of regents a year earlier.

Gov. Goodhair in turn is close to James Leininger, who is the big sugar daddy of the Texas right wing. Leininger also created the Texas Public Policy Foundation (not to be confused with the Public Justice people), which is dedicating to shaping public policy here in the state. Leininger is particularly keen on school vouchers and abstinence education. He not only gives generously to members of our legislative and executive branches, but also to candidates for the Texas Supreme Court. Wendy Gramm is the chair of Leininger's Policy Foundation.

Now, Goodhair Perry appointed the current chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, Wallace Jefferson, who was sworn in by Antonin Scalia, who is rumored to be on George Bush's list for chief of the U.S. Supremes. Goodhair has also appointed three other Texas justices, making four out of the nine.

You will be further amazed to learn that Goodhair Perry and James Leininger are such good buddies they went sailing together in the Bahamas last spring. Also, Perry's insurance commissioner has filed two amicus briefs for State Farm. His predecessor gets paid more than $200,000 to lobby for State Farm. There's more in this snake's nest of interlocking interests, but I wouldn't want to bore you.

Based on experience here in Texas, I can already tell you how this all comes out. Not only will Wendy Gramm and State Farm win the case, but the Republican legislature will then try to take away everyone's right to sue over anything like it, and you won't even know what happens after that because it will all be in sealed records. And anybody who objects gets accused of aiding the terrorists. Don't say I didn't warn you.

December 5, 2004

Jingle Bell Schlock