This is it. The Bush administration is poised to issue a
last-minute regulation that will impose harsh new restrictions
on women’s access to reproductive health care any moment now.
Will you help stop them? Click here.
The new rule is Bush’s parting gift to the anti-choice
extremists who have supported him for the last eight years. The
rule could allow health care organizations that receive federal
funding to redefine abortion to include the most common forms of
birth control — and then refuse to provide these basic
services. For any health care provider to intentionally withhold
information about widely embraced health care options from a
patient is absolutely unconscionable under any circumstances.
The federal government has no business funding providers who do
not abide by this most fundamental standard of care.
But that’s exactly what the Bush administration is proposing.
More than 35,000 Planned Parenthood supporters have already
signed our petition demanding that the Bush administration
withdraw the proposed regulation. And just moments ago, Sen.
Hillary Clinton and Sen. Patty Murray joined the uproar over the
proposed rule. Sen. Clinton said,
“In the final days of his administration, the president is again
putting ideology first and attempting to roll back health care
protections for women and families. This HHS rule will threaten
patients’ rights, stand in the way of health care professionals,
and restrict access to critical health care services for those
who need them most. Senator Murray and I are standing up once
again to the administration against this rule and will continue
to fight for women’s reproductive rights.”
It’s so important to have prominent allies like Sen. Clinton and
Sen. Murray speaking out, but we also need to continue to raise
the voices of citizens everywhere. Join them in speaking out
now. Click here.
The Bush administration promised not to release any new
regulations after November 1. Sneaking this regulation through
at the last minute could have a devastating effect on countless
individuals who rely on their health care providers to provide
complete and accurate reproductive health information. Tell the
Bush administration: Keep your word. Stop the attack on women’s
health.
With the economy in such bad shape, more and more people are
being locked out from receiving complete medical care. This is
the worst possible time to undermine patients’ ability to access
the comprehensive health care they so desperately need. This
proposed rule would force women and families who already have
limited health care access to pay a dreadful price for the
administration’s anti-choice ideology. Please, tell President
Bush: Keep your word. Stop the attack on women’s health. Click here.
Thank you so much for your help today on behalf of the millions
of women, men, and teens served by more than 880 Planned
Parenthood affiliate health centers all across the country.
Sincerely,
Cecile Richards, President
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
In a recent article discussing Sarah Palin’s future and her prospect of banking approximately 7 million in possible book deals on her experience as the Republican VP pick, Camille Paglia, the super conservative faux or anti-feminist feminist made this comment:
Camille Paglia, the radical feminist, declared that she had “heartily enjoyed [Palin’s] arrival on the national stage”. She had been subjected to “an atrocious and sometimes delusional level of defamation”, Paglia added. “I can see how smart she is and, quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones.”
This comment comes several paragraphs after this:
She [Palin] scoffed at untrue reports that she initially thought Africa was a country and that she didn’t know members of the North American Free Trade Agreement. She said much of the criticism levelled at her came from “bloggers in their parents’ basements just talking garbage”.
First of all, to the Times Online that referred to Paglia as a “radical feminist,” it looks like YOU’RE stupid and don’t know anything about feminism. Radical feminism is a specific branch of second-wave feminism that was revolutionary and challenged the existing tenants of feminism at the time, namely the dominant branch of Liberal Feminism associated with Betty Freidan and N.O.W. Radical Feminism challenged feminism to push the envelope, move beyond legislation and the goal of incorporating women into the inherently flawed andocentric status quo. In doing so, it developed a richer and more diverse feminist agenda that certainly looks nothing like and has nothing in common with Paglia.
Second, Camille, we’ve seen Palin’s botched interviews, the inability to answer questions and the recycling of her campaign speeches post election. We’ve heard her made ludicrous comments and insult the American public by being or acting dumb as a representation of the citizens of this nation. To say she’s smart and everyone else is stupid makes it clear that you like her because you see much of yourself in her. A conservative mouthpiece that does not contribute to feminism or women’s studies.
Dr. Nancy Gallagher is a professor of Middle Eastern and North African history and chair of the Middle East Studies Program at UCSB. She is co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. Her recent book is Quakers in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Dilemmas of NGO Humanitarian Activism. She is currently working on two new books.
There are feminist men among us and Michael Messner is one of them. Well known for his work on gender and masculinities, USC professor Messner is slated for a guest lecture at California State University, Northridge. He will be exploring the existing gender divisions in sports and athletics.
University of Southern California sociologist and gender specialist Michael Messner will explore these gender divisions during a presentation, “It’s All for the Kids: Gender, Families and Youth Sports,” at Cal State Northridge on Thursday, Nov. 20, at 2 p.m. in the university’s Little Theatre on the southwest corner of the campus at 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge.
“His topic should be of interest to many as it touches on activities that are the cornerstone of so many families’ lives. His research reveals how these activities in many ways influence and affect individual understanding of gender relations as children grow up,” said CSUN assistant professor of sociology Alex Bierman, who is helping coordinate Messner’s visit.
Messner has spent the past seven years researching the shift in gender relations and tensions that have accompanied increased participation of girls and women in sports.
“I look at persistent gender divisions of labor among parent volunteers, and ask how is it that most youth sports coaches are men while most of the ‘team parents’ are women,” Messner said. “I will discuss how these gender divisions of labor among adults mesh with the persistent tensions in families and work places, and how they impact children as they shape their ideas about gender and begin to imagine their future work and family lives.”
The blog, Feminist Allies, features a current post with a biography of Messner and excerpts from his influential work in sociology, masculinities theory and women’s studies.
Books include:
It’s All for the Kids: Gender, Families and Youth Sports; Out of Play: Critical Essays on Gender and Sport; Gender Through the Prism of Difference; Men’s Lives
This is just so unbelievably disturbing. A new Japanese augmented reality (AR) software program features a “virtual girlfriend” that literally allows you to hit her with a paddle her until she cries.
All she seems to do is sweep the floor until you undress and paddle her until she cries herself into a fetal position, in which then you give her a teddy bear so she’ll become happy again.
As information diversity shrinks in a media landscape that is owned by fewer and fewer entities, a call for media reform has been an overlooked political issue.
In May 2008, The Nation reported on the media crisis and Obama’s presidency as the opportunity for media reform:
Recently we have seen an acceleration of the collapse of journalistic standards. Veteran reporters like Walter Cronkite are appalled by the mergermania that has swept the industry, diluting standards, dumbing down the news and gutting newsrooms. Rapid consolidation, evidenced most recently by the breakup of the once-venerable Knight-Ridder newspapers, the sale of the Tribune Company and its media properties and the swallowing of the Wall Street Journal by Murdoch’s News Corp continues the steady replacement of civic and democratic values by commercial and entertainment priorities. But responsible journalists have less and less to say about newsroom agendas these days. The calls are being made by consultants and bean counters, who increasingly rely on official sources and talking-head pundits rather than newsgathering or serious debate.
The crisis is widespread, and it affects not just our policies but the politics that might improve them. There are two critical issues on which a free press must be skeptical of official statements, challenging to the powerful and rigorous in the search for truth. One of them is war–and in the case of the post-9/11 wars, our media have failed us miserably. (Even former White House press secretary Scott McClellan now acknowledges that the media were “complicit enablers” in the run-up to the Iraq invasion). The other issue is elections, when voters rely on media to provide them with what candidates, parties and interest groups often will not: a serious focus on issues that matter and on the responses of candidates to those issues. Instead, when the Democratic race was reaching its penultimate stage, the dominant story was a ridiculously overplayed discussion about Barack Obama’s former minister. Before the critical Pennsylvania primary, studies show, the provocative Rev. Jeremiah Wright got more coverage than Obama’s rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton. And forget about issues–the most covered policy debate of the period, a ginned-up argument about whether to slash gas taxes for the summer, garnered only one-sixth as much attention as Wright.
Viable democracy cannot survive, let alone flourish, with such debased journalistic standards. Despite some remarkable recent victories by grassroots activists, our media still fail the most critical tests of a free press. This is an impasse that cannot last for long, and in all likelihood the outcome of the 2008 presidential election will go a long way toward determining which side, the corporate owners or the public, will win the battle for the media. The stakes could not be higher.
The next President will make two important decisions. The first will be whether to accept media reform legislation or veto it. There is little doubt that Congress has shifted dramatically as a result of popular pressure. Corporate lobbyists who used to worry only about battling one another for the largest slice of the pie know the game has changed. The 2008 elections will almost certainly increase support in both houses and from both parties for media reform.
Second, the next President will appoint a new FCC chair who will command a majority of the commission’s five members. This is a critical choice. The right majority would embrace the values and ideals of the thousands of media critics, independent media producers and democracy activists who will gather June 6-8 in Minneapolis for the fourth National Conference for Media Reform. Dissident commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, who have battled the FCC’s pro-Big Media majority on issues ranging from media ownership to net neutrality and corporate manipulation of the news over the past four years, will both address the conference. If Copps, the senior of the two, is named chair, this savvy Washington veteran is prepared to turn the agency into what it was intended to be by Copps’s hero, Franklin Roosevelt: a muscular defender of the public interest with the research capacity and the authority to assure that the airwaves and broadband spectrum, which are owned by the people, actually respond to popular demand for diversity, competition and local control. After years of battling to block rule changes pushed by corporate lobbyists, Copps has called for a New American Media Contract, saying, “I’m sick of playing defense.” In these pages on April 7, he urged that we “reinvigorate the license-renewal process” by returning to standards set during Roosevelt’s presidency, when “renewals were required every three years, and a station’s public-interest record was subject to FCC judgment.”
Why Barack Obama’s administration has the ability to reform:
Barack Obama is different. Obama’s campaign has produced the most comprehensive, public-interest-oriented media agenda ever advanced by a major presidential candidate. Like Hillary Clinton, the Illinois senator has been an outspoken defender of net neutrality. The Obama camp’s position paper on media issues echoes Copps when it says that as President, he “would encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation’s spectrum.” In a recent speech Obama called for strengthened antitrust enforcement, specifically warning against media consolidation. An Obama presidency would, he and his supporters say, use all the tools of government to promote greater coverage of local issues and better responsiveness by broadcasters to the communities they serve. Like Copps, Obama favors investment to connect remote and disenfranchised communities to the Internet and to make public broadcasting a more robust voice in the national discourse.
While a President Obama would almost certainly be different from a President McCain on media issues, the extent of the difference remains open to debate. Would Obama actually make Copps or someone like him FCC chair? Would Obama move immediately and effectively to break the stranglehold of media lobbyists? That is by no means certain. While his stated policies are encouraging, competing forces are struggling to influence the candidate. Industry money is going to Obama in anticipation of his victory. He is a self-styled party centrist, and in recent Democratic Party history, “centrism” has usually meant putting the demands of moneyed interests ahead of those of rank-and-file citizens. The good news is that many of Obama’s younger advisers are products of the media reform movement or have been influenced by it. The bad news is that others, like Clinton-era FCC chair Kennard, have records of compromising with the telecom industry. So while some Big Media will be betting on McCain, they won’t give up easily on Obama.
What Obama’s candidacy offers, then, is an opening and–if we dare employ an overused word from this campaign season–a measure of hope. The proper response to that opening is not celebration but vigilance and determination. Obama’s positions, while sometimes vague, do allow us to imagine securing increased funding for public and community broadcasting, a broadband build-out that allows all Americans to realize the promise of the Internet, and a new approach to the licensing and regulation of the people’s airwaves that respects the public interest more than Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line. We can anticipate the development of creative policies to promote and protect viable independent journalism and local media. The right President will make achieving all these ends easier. The right Congress will make the task easier still. But above all, we will need the right media reform movement–one that is aggressive in its demands regardless of who sits in the White House, savvy in its approach to the FCC and Congressional committees, bipartisan and determined to build broad coalitions, and focused not just on playing defense but on shaping popular media for the twenty-first century.
In a culture saturated with media outlets that spit out similar versions of truth, information diversity and media ownership becomes a valid democratic issue. Obama has been regarded by media reform activists as the first viable choice to tackle these issues.
Free Press issued a statement in it’s newsletter yesterday that, if Obama lives up to his promise, the nation could experience an authentic shift in the media in the United States.
Free Press spells out those possibilities:
Unlike George W. Bush, the president-elect is a strong supporter of Net Neutrality and universal, affordable Internet access. He is opposed to further consolidation of media ownership, and he is a friend to public broadcasting. Obama’s election represents a sea change in leadership that allows us to go from playing defense to offense. These are exciting times.
Free Press is leading the way in making sure that Obama fulfills his promise. If this promise is fulfilled, we should expect an unprecedented transformation in the way the media engine runs, the information that is disseminated and the people’s access to that information.
NPR interviewed Byron Hurt on All Things Considered this past Saturday. Have a listen as he discusses his latest web documentary, “Barack and Curtis,” which was released this past October. Hurt examines the style and expression of black masculinity through the presentation of self demonstrated by Barack Obama and 50 Cent. Now that Obama has been elected, Hurt is asked whether or not notions of black masculinity will become more diversified and les physical.
Momeni’s fellow students at California Sate University, Northridge celebrated the release of Esha Momeni today and posted celebratory announcements on blogs and social utility tools that have kept her supporters informed.
Unfortunately, in the wake of the excitement, word was just received that she was released on bail but will remain in Iran to face her charges. She is scheduled to appear in court tomorrow.
Esha Momeni, 28, a dual U.S. and Iranian citizen who was visiting Iran to research a master’s thesis, may not leave the country and must still stand before a political tribunal to face charges of “acting against national security” and “propagating against the system,” said Reza Momeni, her father.
Both are serious charges that can carry lengthy prison sentences.
In a brief telephone interview, Momeni said his daughter had lost about 15 pounds but otherwise appeared to be in good health. He said he had to put up the deed to his family’s Tehran apartment as collateral to win his Los Angeles-born daughter’s release.
“I hope she will go back to L.A. soon,” he said. “But for now, the authorities told us she is forbidden to go out. Tomorrow, we will be in court, and they will tell us what the next step will be.”
Posted on the CSUN website October 28, Mostaghim and Daragahi report:
Before her arrest, Momeni, a Cal State Northridge student, followed a path that differed from much of the rest of Southern California’s Iranian diaspora. While many Iranians fled their country to the United States after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, her family moved back to Iran from the U.S. in the early 1980s.
Reza Momeni, a U.S. citizen and father of five, was studying in Southern California at the time of the revolution. When war broke out between Iran and Iraq in 1980, he moved his family back home. He helped rebuild damaged sites, working in conflict-ravaged areas around cities such as Bandar Abbas and Bushehr.
Esha Momeni showed an early passion for the arts, learning to play the tar, a traditional string instrument, and delving into poetry and literature. She graduated from a Tehran college with a degree in graphics and in 2003 married a man her father described as a “male chauvinist” with emotional problems.
“She had a bad experience,” her father said. “Finally she managed to end her ordeal by divorcing him.”
The bitter breakup drove her from arts to activism, specifically women’s rights issues. She began participating in the One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality, a group that connects activists in Iran with diaspora communities in the West.
Activist organizations, many of which advocate peaceful political and social change, greatly irk authorities in the Islamic Republic. Iran accuses them of being fronts for Western powers seeking to topple the government using the “velvet revolution” tactics that contributed to the downfall of former Soviet states.
A report issued this month by a United Nations human rights watchdog raised concerns about “an increasing crackdown in the past year on the women’s rights movement” in Iran.
“Women’s rights activism is sometimes presented by the Iranian government as being connected to external security threats to the country,” the report says.
The other day I got an e-mail message saying simply this: Rosa Parks
sat in 1955. Martin Luther King walked in 1963. Barack Obama ran in
2008. That our children might fly.
The documentary chronicles the women’s movement in Liberia that helped put an end to more than a decade of civil war, rape and terror. Never underestimate the power of the collective.
Bob Mondello reported on the upcoming documentary and interviewed Gini Reticker and Leymah Gbowee:
In telling their story, Gini Reticker’s passionate documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell uses testimony from women who joined forces, with parallel efforts in the Christian and Muslim communities, to fight back with moral rectitude as their sisters and daughters were being raped, their husbands murdered, their babies maimed.
Leymah Gbowee recalls turning a dream she had — of gathering women to pray for peace — into public activism. Other women recount horrific tales of the ways in which gun-toting 10-year-old boys brutalized whole towns.
And Reticker’s camera follows along as the women slowly, patiently create a national movement that engages in increasingly dangerous confrontations with a ruthless dictator — and ultimately, at peace talks, with brutal revolutionary warlords who are at least as dangerous as the man they’re all fighting.
