Glenn Greenwald vs. the corporate war machine, or How Brian Williams gets his news
Salon's Glenn Greenwald
published a scathing indictment this morning of NBC News, and its on-air promotion of retired General Barry McCaffrey as a neutral commentator in the rush to war with Iran. McCaffrey is neither neutral nor objective as he has promoted the rush to war in private meetings with NBC executives (Greenwald links to the General's Power Point) and has vested personal financial interests in the war industry.
It's amazing to me how a military official so adroit at public relations and war profiteering could simultaneously be so dumb as to not return phone calls from Greenwald before publication of this report. You may not have heard of Greenwald, but somebody in McCaffrey's position certainly should have. After the fact, NBC's only recourse is a dishonest news release attacking Greenwald, charging inaccuracies in his report but failing to list them, boasting of the editorial input of officials without a conflict of interest, but failing also to name those.
I suggest reading the linked Greenwald article above for a better understanding of how the concept of "unavoidable war" is sold, by drum beat, to the American people.
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Quote of the day: Mullah Santorum, on higher education...
President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image."
Already suspicious of the man, I had been wondering exactly which books Santorum wanted to burn. Now we know: all of them.
Oscar moments 2012 & other items
My four favorite Oscar moments:
1) Alexander Payne and "Community"'s Jim Rash ("Dean you later") both being given a statuette for their collaborative script adaptation of "The Descendants."
2) Jennifer Lopez's dress cut in front almost to her belly button. I like how she and Cameron Diaz quoted Edith Head on stage-- "(a dress) should be tight enough to show you're a woman, but loose enough to show you're a lady"-- while Lopez was wearing
this.
3) The camera cutaway to the cringed look on Steven Spielberg's face when the Iranian director accepted his Oscar for Best Foreign Film, saying, "At a time of talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, the people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment."
4) Chris Rock being awesome. Rock, introducing the award for Best Animated Film, referenced his own experience working in the genre, "If you're a white man, you can play an Arabian prince... If you're a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra."
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Firing shots over patriotism and birth control, this is how the Republican Party ends-- not with a whimper, but with a bang. Let's go to our sideline reporter Matt Taibbi, who has an update on the self-destruction, now late in the second half of the game.
Matt...
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Mitt Romney, a man who wears magic Mormon underwear to bed, thinks drug testing welfare recipients is a great idea. I agree. Now I'm assuming that he wants to start with bankers and stockholders that get a federal bailout...
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The "class war" exists. And it's at least as old as the first moat.
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I have never watched a single piece of television programming on the USA cable network. Not a movie. Not five minutes of a movie. Not an episode of a show, or part of an episode of a show. Not in 30 years. It hasn't been on purpose. It's just crappy-looking programming all the time.
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Can we get Jimmy Carter to referee this whole Elton John/Madonna thing? It's gotten entirely out of hand... the sniping back and forth, now
competing post-Oscar parties? It's so obvious that they're really in love with each other.
Might and Braun
Ryan Braun, guilty until proven innocent, has had his 50-game steroid suspension for this season eliminated through legal appeal, apparently because of embarrassing-awful testing procedures by the league. Not good news for Braun's division-neighbors, the St. Louis Cardinals, competitively, but color me thrilled.
The steroid hunters are pissed, of course. The Brewers' Braun had a pre-Division Series test turn up positive this winter after winning the MVP award in November for the National League, and the specifics don't matter to this bunch. Fans, and most sports journalists, know nothing about the testing process of course, how often players get tested, how they're tested, what substances they're tested for, what the alleged substances do, how accurate the tests are, what could conceivably cause a false positive, none of it. The process has had no transparency to it whatsoever over its almost first near-decade, and a majority of the major and minor leaguers that have tested positive and faced suspension have been foreign-born players from non-English speaking countries that are decidedly not stars of the caliber of Ryan Braun.
Players have everything to lose by juicing, and little to gain other than recovering faster from injury, which everybody should be rooting for. Heightened testosterone does nothing to increase bat speed or the ability to increase the frequency of contact between a bat and a baseball. A scientific link between steroid use and statistical performance in baseball, or any sport for that matter, has never been proven by scientific study. Yet many are convinced that Ryan Braun is a cheater whose entire career should now be considered illegitimate, despite those facts and this verdict.
Let's be clear-- Braun has not been exonerated on a mere technicality, an undotted 'i' or an uncrossed 't', as it were. A three-member panel cleared the slugger, who has passed 25 other drug tests during his career, including three last year, because of what was considered to be substantial doubt about the physical handling of the particular test. It has been acknowledged that Braun's sample sat in a Wisconsin man's refrigerator over a weekend last fall when Major League Baseball's local pee collector in Milwaukee didn't know the shipping hours for the nearby Fed Ex/Kinkos.
The CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency called the panel's decision a "kick in the gut," and termed it "the technicality of all technicalities," but then that organization is also opposed to vitamins, and the man wouldn't have much of a career without the cottage industry of drug testing that now surrounds sports at almost all levels. Major League Baseball, with its typical and almost preternatural impulse to defame its own stars and its own product in a way that no other organized sport does, "vehemently disagrees with the decision," according to a media release. Nabbing a league MVP for committing performance fraud immediately following the 2011 playoffs was proof positive that baseball team owners take drug testing seriously, even if said-MVP does play in far away Milwaukee. As Gabe Feldman of the Tulane Sports Law Center points out though-- if the "chain of custody" of urine samples is a mere "technicality," it wouldn't be mentioned 33 times in the league's drug policy. What does an impure handling process also say about the alleged purity of the chemical analysis? How many lesser players than Braun, down to the lowest levels of the minor leagues, haven't had the same legal backing to challenge the accuracy of their positive test?
Of course, club owners are all for drug testing. They're not subjected to it. Nobody comes to the ballpark to see them, though they keep roughly $5 billion of the league's $8 billion annual profit. Their business couldn't exist without players. Yet it could do just fine without them, and they know this fact down deep. The union's mistake, as its first executive director Marvin Miller has always maintained, was agreeing to drug testing in the first place. Unions should never be bargaining away Constitutionally-protected privacy rights, and it should never be an employer's job to be policing drug use. Miller has predicted that a player will ultimately wind up in prison as a result of testing, and the Department of Justice went to the wall to try to do just that to Barry Bonds (at least in a related perjury case). Incidentally, your government can't order random drug testing of individual Americans. Congress can't do it, the president can't. Why is Major League Baseball even concerning themselves with this? Its teams haven't suffered financially during any part of the so-called "steroid era," in fact they've thrived. The argument that fans equate steroid charges in the media with unfair competition runs counter to the reality of gate receipts, and television, radio, and internet profit. Oh yeah, but there is that little fear among club owners that the league's antitrust exemption might be removed if they don't bow to Congress at every turn. At some point, somebody in power in Washington might capriciously decide to right that odious wrong.
This was a happy week in baseball. Spring workouts began in Florida and Arizona, the reigning NL MVP was, indeed, exonerated,
by definition, of the alleged use of banned performance enhancers, and the league's outrageously intrusive drug policy got dented like a middle-in fastball off the bat of Ryan Braun.
The Descendants
When this blog debuted in December of 2004, the first entry I posted was a tribute to film director Alexander Payne, an Omaha native who makes nuanced, well-observed, and humanist films, enlivened by wit and vulgarity. His movies have always felt personal to me. The first three, "Citizen Ruth," "Election," and "About Schmidt," took place just across the state line here in Iowa, and where about people and places I knew. Then the Oscar-winning "Sideways," the film whose prospects I was boosting online back in '04, moved in setting to California's Santa Barbara County, where my dad's brother and his family coincidentally live.
Seven long years later, Payne's follow-up to "Sideways," "The Descendants," is up for Best Picture, and thought by many to be the money favorite. This one felt personal too as it has to do with a man (George Clooney) having to decide the future of a plot of land that's been in his family for generations, a decision not unlike one the Moeller cousins will have to make some day.
I'm pulling for some big "Descendants" victories on Sunday night, for best picture, actor, screenplay, director, whatever else it's up for. You've probably heard a vile rumbling that the picture panders to Academy voters. There's a tearjerker of a scene involving Clooney near the end that's been accused of Oscar-stroking. If you've seen the film, however, you have to admit this is hooey. The movies that pander are uplifting, inspirational-- like that crap "Million Dollar Baby." They play like an epic. The characters are more endearing, less boring, more superhuman than human. If a viewer was caught up in the emotion of "The Descendants," it's because it was written and performed as small, specific, and real.
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The Oscars telecast will suck this year, Billy Crystal or not. I have nothing against Crystal (except for his love for the Yankees). I loved the guy as a teenager, but now have little interest in his stage and screen work even from that time period. The show will suck, as it almost always does, because the audience in the Kodak Theater sucks. For a comedian at this point, playing this house of stiffs has to be considered on par with playing the White House Correspondents Dinner. Over two decades, the two best broadcasts were the ones hosted by David Letterman (in '95) and Chris Rock (in '05) because those two entertainers made the most direct attempts at puncturing the pomposity and self-congratulation of the setting. Want a good show? Bring back one of these two, or give us Ricky Gervais or Sacha Baron Cohen. Or Louis C.K. Or Larry David. Or Donald Glover.
Why I didn't donate $50 today to the ACLU
The national board of the ACLU needs to rethink its support of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in 2010. America's leading defender of First Amendment rights and of some of the nation's most unpopular speech-- opponent of censorship in all forms-- has been arguing for some time that limits t0 campaign contributions violates free speech rights, a position that puts the group in the same legal corner as Justices Scalia and Thomas. But where does "speech" end, and "corruption" begin?
With the spending caps effectively removed by our highest court, we've seen the campaign contributions of just a handful of individual Americans dwarf much of the rest of the nation's combined, and in a very short time. Newt Gingrich's sugar daddy is Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate who cut Gingrich a check for $10 million this month on top of millions he's already contributed to Gingrich PACs. Foster Friess, an investment manager who believes that women should put aspirin between their knees to avoid getting pregnant, gave Rick Santorum a million dollars the day after the New Hampshire primary.
What democracy do we have left when elections are sold at auction? The First Amendment has no meaning without a democratic system. My speech and your speech have no meaning when it can't be heard, and that's what these outrageous financial contributions are doing-- they're diminishing... drowning...
our speech. The Supreme Court-- and the ACLU-- are effectively arguing that money amplifies speech. If it does, it's doing it to the point of distortion.
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Quote/paraphrase of the week: from a commenter on Deadspin, "ESPN Boston. That's like saying Fox News Conservative."
Talkin' Softball
Good golly, what can you say about a winter during which the St. Louis Cardinals stand as World Champions and it never really snows? That's pretty great.
And now I'm declaring an early end to the season. What the hell-- if Republican presidential campaigns can transport us back in time to an age before the sexual revolution, then I can pretend the next four weeks don't exist. The Cardinals held their first official workout of 2012 yesterday in Florida and the new season dawns.
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It was 20 years ago tonight-- February 20, 1992-- that "The Simpsons" aired a baseball-themed episode called "Homer at the Bat" featuring nine baseball greats or near-greats. Around the horn they were Roger Clemens, Mike Scioscia, Don Mattingly, Steve Sax, Wade Boggs, Cardinals Hall-of-Famer Ozzie Smith, Jose Canseco, Ken Griffey, Jr., and Homer Simpson, er, I mean Darryl Strawberry. Tonight, Deadspin's Erik Malinowski has the inside story, recalling that magical evening when "The Simpsons" bested "The Cosby Show" in the Nielsen ratings for the first time, and bettered CBS's coverage of the Winter Olympics just for good measure. It was a very different time than the one we live in today. The first George Bush was president, long "rabbit ears" were needed to dial in Fox Television where I lived in rural Iowa, Steve Sax was still a well-known ballplayer, and "The Simpsons," up to that point, had only aired 51 other episodes.
BP "wants (its) life back"
BP was responsible for the worst off-shore drilling disaster in U.S. history in the spring of 2010. In 2011, the multinational corporation posted a $24 billion profit. The trial begins February 27th in New Orleans, and President Obama is
rushing to make a settlement. What will it entail? Will the public interest be protected? I know what
would serve the public interest. A trial.
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Unspoken in the news reports about Rick Santorum's rise to the top of the polls in the Republican race is that voters have kind of stopped participating in the process.
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Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter died today of brain cancer at the age of 57. He caught more big league games than all but three men. He was the best player on the best team in the history of two franchises. He rocked a perm. This is what his last at-bat looked like in 1992.
Whitney
Last Friday, my cable television and internet provider confused me with a neighbor that had moved to New Orleans and asked to terminate her service. Tonight, after six days of near-silence in the house (save for some "Moonlighting" episodes on DVD), I'm back online. I was probably the last to know about the death of Whitney Houston. I didn't find out until Sunday night. What a terrible loss.
I've linked
this before, but here is Whitney on Letterman promoting her first album a quarter century ago. Watching the magic here, at this point in her career, is what I imagine it would have been like to see Muhammad Ali ascend to the top of the boxing world against Sonny Liston in '64. Disciplined, beautiful, undeniable. A performer fully aware of her substantial power.
Why the idea of modern-day capitalists as "job creators" is bullshit
From Naomi Klein's book "No Logo":
Consider the case of Sara Lee Corp., an old-style conglomerate that encompasses not only its frozen-food namesake but also such "unintegrated" brands as Hanes underwear, Wonderbra, Coach leather goods, Champion sports apparel, Kiwi shoe polish and Ball Park Franks. Despite the fact that Sara Lee enjoyed solid growth, healthy profits, good stock return and no debt, by the mid-nineties Wall Street had become disenchanted with the company and was undervaluing its stock. Its profits had risen 10 percent in the 1996-97 fiscal year, hitting $1 billion, but Wall Street, as we have seen, is guided by spiritual goals as well as economic ones. And Sara Lee, driven by the corporeal stuff of real-world products, as opposed to the sleek ideas of brand identity, was simply out of economic fashion. "Lumpy-object purveyors," as (business management author) Tom Peters would say.
To correct the situation, in September 1997 the company announced a $1.6 billion restructuring plan to get out of the "stuff" business by purging its manufacturing base. Thirteen of its factories, beginning with yarn and textile plants, would be sold to contractors who would become Sara Lee's suppliers. The company would be able to dip into the money saved to double its ad spending. "It's passe for us to be as vertically integrated as we were," explained Sara Lee CEO John H. Bryan. Wall Street and the business press loved the new marketing-driven Sara Lee, rewarding the company with a 15 percent jump in stock price and flattering profiles of its bold and imaginative CEO. "Bryan's shift away from manufacturing to focus on brand marketing recognizes that the future belongs to companies-- like Coca-Cola Co.-- that own little but sell much," enthused one article in Business Week. Even more telling was the analogy chosen by Crain's Chicago Business: "Sara Lee's goal is to become more like Oregon-based Nike Inc., which outsources its manufacturing and focuses primarily on product development and brand management."
Cutting jobs raises stock prices. The only motivation of the piranhas is to raise stock prices.
Barr 2012
Sound the bell: Roseanne Barr is officially a Green Party candidate for president! This is not a joke. Our war criminal president, his loopy Republican challengers, and the entire patriarchy should be running for cover. There is no national debate when Democrats and Republicans agree on the topic-- and Democrats and Republicans agree on Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Guantanamo, drones, eavesdropping, detention, whistle-blowers as terrorists, due process-free executive assassination orders, the killing of Muslim children,
target bombing of rescuers and funeral mourners, the bailouts of casino banks, corporate taxation, the transfer of American jobs to slave economies, dirty energy, drug laws, health care for profit, schools for profit, prisons for profit, poverty as a crime, gays as sub-straights, the war on labor, the war on science, ballot restrictions, and the auction of elections. Maybe now we'll hear some debate!
Fogle fresh
Sometimes on "The Cosby Show," Cliff and Claire Huxtable would argue (playfully) about Cliff's diet. When his wife was too busy with her work of balancing a lovely home and family with a full-time legal career, Cliff would sneak into the kitchen and build himself a giant hoagie sandwich. "Hoagie" is a Philadelphia-in-origin colloquialism for the submarine-style sandwich, and Cliff, I think, was from Philadelphia. For sure, the famous comedian who portrayed him was from Philly.
Point being, this was the 1980's and sub sandwiches, as evidenced by the actions of the characters on America's most popular show, were not considered good for your health. (The joke was that Cliff, a physician who should know better, couldn't keep himself away from these tasty foodstuffs and thus, aggravating his high blood pressure.) A funny thing started happening in the 1990s however. A large corporation called Subway came along, and began competing head-on with the existing fast food chain restaurants, the largest of which were primarily offering fried, preprocessed beef patties. My recollection of the conventional wisdom during that time period before Subway supplanted McDonald's as America's "leading" fast-food provider is that the Subway-brand sandwiches weren't necessarily healthier, but they were, we were told, at least "fresher."
What was the single biggest event that caused the Subway brand to go into orbit while America was becoming increasingly diet- and nutrition-educated? A golden narrative fell into the company's proverbial lap in 1999, as if from the sky. Jared Fogel, a dweebish, almost-completely uncharismatic 22-year-old Indianapolis man reported that he had lost more than 200 pounds on an all-Subway sandwich diet. A Chicago franchisee picked up on the story after Men's Health Magazine confirmed it, and already by New Years Day 2000, Jared was the star of a national television advertising campaign. That first day, home audiences tuned in to college bowl games got a glimpse of an objectively average-looking man that no longer fit snugly into his 62-inch "fat pants."
The diet elements of this story have never interested me that much, and I don't pretend to be an expert. From the beginning, we were told that Jared (can I call him "Jared"?) had also sharply reduced his portion sizes since his experience at other chains. He cut way back on the condiments and began vigorously walking. Also, consider that Subway's structured competition in this corporate pissing match has always been the Whopper, the Big Mac, the Double Quarter-Pounder, and more recently, something called the Double Down, a sandwich that doesn't even bother with the pretense of a bun. Subway has never considered its competition in this contest to be your neighborhood organic gardener or grocer. That food is too "slow" to be considered a hassle.
What interests me more about it all is the now decade-long corporate branding of a man named Jared Fogler. It's more polite to call Jared a "spokesman" for Subway, as opposed to a "brand," but both labels are apt. He's a unique individual in American advertising. He's not playing a character. He's also not trading on the celebrity of a previous life lived in front of the public. Kirstie Alley could do a thousand commercials for Jenny Craig and never be the 'Jenny Craig lady" the way that Jared is positioned to forever be "the Subway guy."
Most Americans would trade places with Jared Fogler in a Madison Avenue minute. He did even one better than a massive weight loss that in and of itself could improve his quality of life for years to come-- he also spun that loss into a lucrative job, into fame and fortune. He's been Subway's public representative at the Olympics. He runs in marathons where he finishes in 36,968th place but everybody hears about it. More than 12 years after his public ascendency, you could place a safe bet that he would be a visible presence at tomorrow's Super Bowl even if it wasn't being hosted by his hometown. After all, Super Bowl Sunday, America's annual Corporation Day, was invented for brands like Jared.
But what has Jared sacrified? Take a look at
this one-minute interview on YouTube from a couple years ago. Remember that Jared is never playing a character. This is his public identity, his reputation among his fellow humans. A very innocuous interview that, superficially, has nothing to do with sandwiches devolves into the image of the man having to spark up and prostitute himself once more for his "sugar daddy" (or should it be his "sodium daddy"?). I find this clip very depressing to watch. We're looking at a broken man.
Nobody begrudged Jared's grab at the treasure chest a decade ago. He was a trumpeter swan unveiling his pure white plumage. I would have surely gone for that deal myself. Take the money and run. You all probably think of me as just a Trotskyite blogger, but I enjoy the creature comforts of life. Where is Jared in his life now though? I'm sure it's fun to banter with Terry, Howie, and the boys on FOX NFL Sunday, and a little of that high-end tail that's magnetically-pulled to large corporate events is probably still there for the taking. Am I right, Jared? But is it really a positive for this guy's emotional health at this point to still be hugging hoagies on television?
The competitive world of fast-food marketing never slows down either. They just keep raising the bar. It's not enough anymore for Jared to just be the decent man he projects to be. Now you see him bouncing around on these commercials-- acting the clown, as my buddy Rob described it. I swear that late one night last week, I saw Jared wearing a diaper on my flat screen, but that might have just been a mirage brought on by the Irish Cream I was sipping.
At the corporate level, of course, he's still just a brand. Perhaps more so now. His bosses consider him that. Their competitors consider him that. The business analysts consider him that. They write in the trades about how Jared (the man) is being replaced gradually on television by "the offer"-- that well-publicized $5 footlong deal. As the U.S. and global economy drives nearer to collapse under the weight of the top, the advertising focus at Subway is now on promoting the inexpensiveness of the product, not nutrition-- just another piece of evidence that Subway is, at the end of the day, selling the same basic product that McDonald's is under each of those individual plastic sandwich wrappers. (And by the way, you can keep the plastic bag, gang. I'm just going to be walking eight feet away to eat this thing. The two-by-two foot heavy paper wrapper you've wound this in should hold up fine.)
How low will Jared go? Is he willing to stay around for the fight against the next fast food upstart chain, the one that challenges the current king? Subway's been good to Jared, but Jared has been a damned good thing for Subway too. Does he work for the man, or is this a mutually-beneficial partnership? Does Jared see himself as the one in driver's seat. I really fear he doesn't because Americans are programmed to think this way. Now that he has much greater financial resource at his disposal, what could his life become now? A decent, generally-grounded, curly-haired, white man in America, combined with a lucky break, should be able to write his own ticket. He just needs to be told-- or hopefully, simply reminded--exactly who it was that was actually responsible for taking off that weight.
What I didn't know
Much of the information I posted Wednesday about Planned Parenthood was information easily accessible online. I didn't already possess the specific statistics on the number of clients they represent, or the numbers on the services they provide, but finding those confirmed a general outline of what I already knew the organization to be about.
Now, here's
six things I didn't know until today, when the Susan G. Komen Foundation reversed its decision to stop funding the organization in the face of a powerful public backlash:
1. The treasurer of PP's first fundraising drive was Prescott Bush, father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush.
2. Federal funding for PP began with legislation signed into law in 1970 by Richard Nixon.
3. Barry Goldwater's wife, Betty, was a founding member of Arizona PP.
4. Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, donated $150 to PP in 1994.
5. When a Romney family member died from a botched, then-illegal abortion in 1963, the family asked that memorial donations go to PP.
6. That there is still a powerful political and social movement in this country to protect women's health and reproductive freedoms. Many supporters have just been in hiding. A relentless hammering away at such freedoms has gone too often unchallenged in the legal arena because of fears of what the current court would do to Roe v. Wade if given the opportunity. It's vital that pro-choice supporters fight back, however, to win what has been a losing public relations battle over the issue of abortion during the past two decades.
Why I donated $50 today to Planned Parenthood
There's no conceivable separation of the issue of women's health from the little matter of something called women's reproductive freedom. One simply cannot exist without the other. That's why the Susan G. Komen Race for a Cure organization has ceased to be about women's health by pulling its funding for Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screenings and services. Planned Parenthood, through its lobbying efforts, sex ed programs, birth control clinics, and maternal and child health services, is one of the most important resources that exists for women's health in this nation. They do a hell of a lot for men as well.
According to Wikipedia, the services of Planned Parenthood reach more than five million Americans each year, more than a quarter of which are under 19 years of age, and three-quarters living at 150% of the poverty line or below. PP is usually the only service option available for the young women living in the most dire economic situations. All sexually-active Americans have benefited in some form or another from the organization's extensive testing and treatment for sexually-transmitted diseases, and it is truly a
lifelong resource for women in regards to their health-- from pregnancy/midwife/prenatal services through menopause treatments, and of course, cancer treatments. The Komen organization has made the decision to cut off financially from an organization that conducts 830,000 breast exams every year.
Planned Parenthood has been a courageous public advocate for abortion rights, birth control accessibility, and comprehensive sex education in public schools. This work is monumental. Their counselors offer medicinal and health services to clients without soaking them in mysticism and superstition. In most locations where they operate, the only alternative available for the services they provide are religious cults disguised as hospitals.
The late Christopher Hitchens was right when he said there is only one known cure for poverty on this planet. That is, he said, "the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction." The Komen Foundation is willing to partner with fast food restaurants that pollute the bodies of women, with perfumes that have been laced with toxins, and with religious and social organizations that oppose the empowerment of women and that promote policies of systemic poverty and malnourishment, yet they're dropping ties today with Planned Parenthood because a Sarah Palin-clone graduated to the level of vice president in the leadership hierarchy.
Poverty has just the one known cure, and sadly, we have no known cure at all for crass political expedience and religious fanaticism. No, for those things, we don't yet have even a race for a cure.
