John Edwards, we hardly knew ye

Enough already with the handwringing by the traditional news media about whether or not to report on the John Edwards love child story (check here for a blogosphere discussion of why this hasn't made the 6:00 news yet). I'll admit that I myself was skeptical. When the rumors about the Enquirer chasing Edwards around a hotel at 2am after he met with his supposed former mistress first started circulating, it sounded like utter crap to me. I resisted passing on what seemed to be unfounded accusations in the assumption that within the week Edwards would have issued a stinging rebuke the Enquirer, complete with a plausible explanation for his actions and a denial of the love child allegations. That denial hasn't exactly been forthcoming. In fact, as Kausfiles points out, Edwards has been studiously avoiding speaking to the media about the issue at all.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and the folks who should be figuring out just where that rottenness is coming from are sitting on their hands. Just because this man is no longer a presidential candidate doesn't mean he is immune from public scrutiny.

To the mainstream news media, I say: Prove it or disprove it, but get to work doing your job - reporting (not avoiding) the story.

Obama cancels visit to Landstuhl

A story published yesterday at NYTimes.com caught my eye. Headlined "A cancelled Obama visit, and the story behind it," the short piece highlighted a campaign story I had otherwise missed - that Senator Obama had scheduled and then cancelled a planned visit to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (the main US Army hospital in Europe where soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated and stabilized before being sent stateside) to visit wounded troops.

According to the Times, the original plan had been for Obama and a campaign advisor - sans photographers and journalists, as is Army policy - to tour the facility and meet with troops. However, the campaign cancelled the trip at the last minute when the Army decided that the campaign advisor set to accompany Obama, a retired Air Force major-general, was told he could not go along. Here's how Obama spun the decision to pull out of the visit:

That triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as
political, and the last thing that I want to do is have injured soldiers and the staff at these wonderful institutions having to sort through whether this is political or not or get caught in the crossfire between campaigns. So rather than go forward and potentially get caught up in what might have been considered a political controversy of some sort, what we decided was that we not make a visit and instead I would call some of the troops that were there.

I admit I'm really not sure what to make of all this. However, in general I would say that this excuse seems like utter crap. How could visiting some troops minus reporters (thus no handy photo-ops) possibly be viewed as politicizing wounded soldiers? This excuse seems especially lame since Obama had already visited wounded soldiers in Afghanistan the week prior without any handwringing about politicizing their injuries.

That said, I'm sure that Obama cares about wounded soldiers. Which just makes the fact of the cancelled visit all the more puzzling. It makes him look like a schmuck. It's almost impossible to spin the cancellation in a way that comes off as positive. So why cancel?

"...a new generation of fat-hating, heternormative ---holes"

Man. I wish that line were mine.

Sadly, it's not. To see its true origins, head on over to Yahoo! Games and its article on a new video game set to be released by Sony and which debuted at E3 not long ago. The game's title, "Fat Princess," pretty much sums it up, managing to be - and this hardly seems possible - just as bad as you think it's going to be. The premise? Get the once-svelte princess as fat as you can by stuffing her full of cake, thus making her harder for your enemies to abscond with.

*sigh*

Fat-hating, heternormative ---holes, indeed.

Obama's not the only one

For those of you unfamiliar with the scope of my dissertation, a lot of what I write about concerns the power of representation - the depth of cultural meaning that fictional versions of real-life actors can be imbued with in the public conciousness. And, based on this campaign season so far, it seems as if I'm not the only one with the power of representation on the brain. I've written several times about Barack Obama's representational efforts (remember the Brandenburg Gate and the faux presidential seal?), but a recent article in the New York Times points out that it's not just Obama who's trying the mantle of most powerful man in the free world on for size.

In all fairness, I have to acknowledge that McCain has a case of Pennsylvania Avenue envy, too. But I still believe in my heart of hearts that Obama has it much worse. My evidence? Little (Freudian?) slips like the one Obama made last week and which the NYT handily parses for us:

It did not go un-snickered upon within the McCain campaign, for instance, when Mr.
Obama said Wednesday that he wanted to acquaint himself with foreign leaders “who I expect to be dealing with over the next 8 to 10 years.” Not only did Mr. Obama seem to be assuming victory in November but also re-election in 2012 and, for good measure, the option to extend a second term by two years.

I can forgive him the grammatical error (not "who I expect to be dealing with" but "with whom I expect to be dealing" - must I be the grammar police for the world?), but I'm not sure I can forgive him the naked presumption. It's just unseemly.

As promised, my Keith Olbermann crush link

For all of you who don't watch The Soup, shame on you. But here's the link I mentioned in Friday's post anyway.

All bands should make decisions this way

Thanks to Anthony for posting this entry about how to randomly choose the name for your band, title of your album, and cover art.

I freakin' LOVE my band.

Band name: Colin Vaughan
Title of first album (I swear I am not making this shit up): We Counted Our Spoons
Album art:

Keith Olbermann is officially my hero

...and if you saw The Soup tonight, you know why. If you missed it, I'll try to get the clip posted as soon as it shows up on YouTube.

In other news, expect to be inundated with news stories about the Wisconsin delegate, previously pledged to Hillary Clinton, whose delegate-status was stripped in a unanimous vote after she told a Milwaukee newspaper that she was instead considering supporting John McCain. Whether you feel that voters who previously supported Clinton are ridiculous or principled for throwing their support behind McCain, I find it pretty damn annoying that the state party organization was so quick to throw her out on her butt. I understand their desire to protect the party, but the least they could have done was agree to allow her to attend the convention and support Clinton. Removing her delegate status only draws attention to the story (although McCain was doing a pretty good job of that by himself, obviously) and gives it even better legs. Kinda dumb, Wisconsin.

What's Obama up to these days, you ask? It seems he's been busy demonstrating to much of Western Europe what we in the U.S. should have figured out long ago - that he has no discernible platform. Can anyone else visualize what the first year of an Obama administration would like on a policy front? Of course there would be Iraq and economic policy changes (because a trained dolphin elected to the presidency this year would have to come up with some new policy on those two issues), but what else would he do? What does he actually care about? Hillary Clinton cared about health care; McCain cares about foreign affairs. What does Obama care about? And I'm not asking what his policy papers say; I'm asking what he actually talks about in his speeches. What, based on those public statements, matters to him - other than getting elected?

The Dark Knight indeed

If you're looking for something to do this weekend, you could do a lot worse than spending eight bucks at your local cineplex on the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan has truly surpassed himself with this amazing film, a deeply felt and deeply allegorical work that examines the concept of terrorism perhaps more deeply than has been done since this country experienced it first hand on 9/11.

This may seem like hyperbole - after all, we are only talking about a superhero movie here. But Nolan's story is more than just Saturday morning bravado made dark and brooding for Saturday night audiences. Nolan has managed to combine two deeply felt concepts in a single work - an examination of the infinitesimal distance that defines the difference between good and evil, and the often equally subtle difference between terrorists and those who fight against them. Admittedly, one of the movies most frequently used tropes is hardly new - the idea that 'you die a hero or live to see yourself become a villain' was expressed just as succinctly in Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Nevertheless, Nolan's take on these concepts is worth your time. And the performance by Heath Ledger - an actor I had never much felt strongly about one way or another before this role - is absolutely breathtaking in its calculated lunacy.

When your PhD originally was packaged as a prize in a Cracker Jack box

With all due credit to the people at Language Log - who published it first - and the folks at XKCD webcomics - who created it in the first place - I have to offer you this little gem. The post at Language Log where it originated is worth a read for its discussion of Labov's test.

Even better - if you're looking for a little satire - is this passage Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media by Susan J. Douglas:

I am a professor of media studies. You know what that means. I probably teach entire courses on the films of Connie Francis, go to academic conferences where the main intellectual exchange is trading comic books, never make my students read books, and insist that Gary Lewis and the Playboys were more important than Hegel, John Dos Passos, or Frances Perkins. All I do now, of course, is study Madonna. The reason I chose media over, say, the Renaissance or quantum mechanics is that I don't like to read, don't know much about history, and needed desperately to find a way to watch television for a living.

The Brandenburg Gate? Really?

Does anyone else find weird the news that Barack Obama is not only going overseas to campaign (did someone give France and Germany a vote in the upcoming election?) but is also planning on giving a major foreign policy speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate? That famous site of Ronald Reagan and "tear down this wall" and all that?

Whether or not the speech will actually happen there is yet to be seen. Angela Merkel has been notedly cool towards the idea (although the mayor of Berlin seems stoked) and there has been some suggestion that it takes an invitation to make such a speech and such invitations are really given to other than major heads of state.

It just seems to me that this is presumption at a whole new level. I mean, the guy isn't even the nominee for the party yet, much less a president-elect, and he's campaigning overseas? He can't fake it as a member of the Senate on a fact-finding mission, either. This is pure theatre. And I, for one, find it to be really annoying theatre.

Anybody else?

All this talk about satire

...has me wishing for a bit of satire I could actually enjoy. If you have the same hankerin', check out this new video from the good folks at JibJab.

Tasteless and Offensive?

In separate statements during the last few days both the Obama and McCain camps have called the July 21st cover of The New Yorker "tasteless and offensive" for depicting a Muslim President Obama giving a "terrorist fist jab" to his afro-sporting, gun-toting wife in the Oval Office while burning a flag in a fireplace decorated with a picture of Osama bin Laden. Whether or not the picture was good satire is up for debate; however, it must be clear to nearly everyone that the cartoon was most definitely satire. Which begs the question - if The New Yorker is guilty of tasteless and offensive cover art, what about Spy, Radar and The New Republic? Why no outrage over these covers?

Cute baby - now get your butt back to work

Coming off the tail end of Matt's two-week block leave from work, we're both having a difficult time getting back into the groove of a regular schedule again. However, as I was reminded in this article from last month on Slate.com, there are worse things in the world than that transition back to work from vacation. Worse things like having no vacation at all.

In talking about his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse highlights one of the more disconcerting facts about corporate America - that America is the only one of the industrialized nations that does not guarantee its workers any paid vacation or sick time. Worse still? In Greenhouse's own words,

According to a study of 173 nations worldwide, the United States is one of just four that does not provide paid maternity leave. The others are Swaziland, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea. That's not the usual company we keep. (In Britain, women receive 39 weeks paid maternity leave.)

This disparity seems to target two groups of workers specifically - the lower class and women. Lower class because it is those jobs that pay the least where paid time off (and decent health insurance and a retirement plan, etc) are viewed as a 'perks' well above the workers' pay grade. The disparity more obviously affects women - allowing a woman little or no paid maternity leave places an undue strain on a woman in a myriad of ways: potentially impacting a woman's health depending on the invasiveness of her birth experience, sending her back to work before she can appropriately bond with her baby on an emotional level, and - perhaps most importantly - forcing her to make the difficult decision between losing income by taking unpaid time off or going back to work and spending the entirety of her paycheck on daycare. And that's without the added insult of unpaid sick leave which for many women with young children is used more often to care for sick children than to see to their own health.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum, highlighted in a recent issue of Time magazine. Some corporate offices are now allowing women to bring their babies to work with them. I've actually read a few articles like this lately and I have to say the idea makes me want to gouge out my own eyeballs. I appreciate those businesses that are forward-thinking enough to try new solutions to the age-old childcare problem, but I can't imagine how a horde of children in the workplace is good for anyone: not for babies who simply can't be engaged and occupied effectively while Mom is trying to crank out a report on a deadline, not for Mom who must feel the strain of her dual roles all that much more keenly with a fussy baby right at her side, and not for the childless co-worker in the next cubicle who's forced to deal with all the negatives of child-rearing (the screaming, the smelly diapers, the copious bodily fluids on all available surfaces) while experiencing none of the positives.

Honestly, I have to say that the more I think about it, the more the idea of taking your baby to work seems less a benefit of positive corporate initiative and more just a cheap way to avoid manning up to the real solution - giving women paid time off to care for their children when they need it and ensuring that affordable childcare solutions are available for all.

Oh. And we childless people want paid vacation, too.

Wild hairs

Matt and I got a wild hair this weekend and have replaced the misty rain of the Pacific Northwest for the torrential downpours going on in our hometown for a few days.  Hope everyone else is enjoying their long Fourth of July weekend.  We know we are.

South Dakota hates women

A great article on Slate.com detailing a 2005 "informed consent" abortion law in South Dakota that is about to take effect following a ruling by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. South Dakota's definition of "informed consent"? Telling women that the fetus they are about to abort is "a whole, separate, unique, living human being" with which they have "an existing relationship" that is constitutionally protected. Not to mention that doctors are required to give all significant risk factors of the procedure, including depression, suicidal ideation and suicide.

Let's get beyond the big obvious issues that I have with this law - the fact that women are not children, that it is the rare woman who approaches abortion lightly, and that whether or not a woman has an "existing relationship" with her unborn child is not only beyond the realm of legislation but also none of anyone else's damn business.

The real issue here, as Slate.com points out, is the forced speech which doctors in South Dakota are being forced to engage in. It's one thing to give a patient informed consent about risk factors associated with a medical procedure. It's quite another to require a doctor to give what is in essence a scripted description of an otherwise philosophical issue - the definition of 'human being'.

The good news? There's only one abortion clinic in the entire state of South Dakota that this ruling will affect. One. In the whole state.