SC Prog Blog

Valerie Plame Still Wants to Know
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
13 Nov.

Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson would still like to know the identity of the CIA official who passed her name to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney in the spring of 2003, and “under what circumstances.”

That’s just one of several unanswered questions Plame Wilson has been trying to figure out in the years since several senior officials in the Bush administration leaked her name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and a handful of other journalists. That leak ended her two-decade CIA career.

“I’d like to know, why did Novak go with my maiden name, Plame, in his original article?” Plame Wilson said during an hour-long, two-part interview with Truthout. “I always thought that was strange. When I married, I took my married name. And then he [Novak] used Valerie Plame [in his column]. It was only the CIA who knew that I worked for them, and my maiden name.”

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A report released today estimates that the cost of the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is double what the Bush Administration has directly requested. The Joint Economic Committee’s majority staff report, War at Any Price? The Total Economic Costs of the War Beyond the Federal Budget, includes “hidden” costs such as the drain on economic growth as a result of war-related borrowing, the disruption of oil markets, the future care of injured soldiers and repair costs for the military. The report projects the total costs of the wars to amount to $3.5 trillion between 2003 and 2017, $1 trillion higher than the Congressional Budget Office forecast.

So far, President Bush has asked for $607 billion for the Iraq War, 10 times higher than what the administration estimated before launching its “shock and awe” campaign.

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Bring Them Home Now Tour vigil, Columbia, Sept. 14, 2005.

The Times Vs. Feminism
By Susan J. Douglas
In These Times

Don’t become a feminist. I mean it. Because then you might end up like Katha Pollitt. Wait, isn’t Pollitt an award-winning poet and columnist? Isn’t her “Subject to Debate” column what most of us turn to first when The Nation arrives? As the sharpest feminist commentator in the country, doesn’t Pollitt make feminism seem cool?

Not if you’re the New York Times Book Review, which has rarely met a feminist it liked. The former ballerina Toni Bentley, author of a book on the delights of crotchless panties and the epiphanies of anal sex (I quote: a “direct path … to God”), was assigned to review Pollitt’s latest collection of essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, and apparently didn’t like it. Fair enough. But Bentley, possibly disappointed by the lack of sodomy, used her review as an opportunity to trash feminists and to trash Pollitt for both being one and not being one who is stereotypical enough.

“Groaning and moaning from clever, sassy women has become a genre unto itself,” writes Bentley of feminist writings, “the righteous revenge of the liberal, pre-, during- or postmenopausal woman,” meaning that even feminists cannot escape from being governed by their hormones and their wombs. Feminists, as we know, are always angry and “shrill”; they are “enraged, educated women” whom Bentley labels “vagina dentate intellectuals.”

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OpenSecrets.org now features updated campaign finance profiles for members of the House and Senate. The site offers a wealth of information about who is greasing whom and for how much.

Find out who’s financing your legislators by clicking here.

Woodstock May Have Saved Sen. McCain’s Life
by Sheldon Richman

John McCain scored a standing ovation at the last Republican presidential debate when he attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton for proposing - unsuccessfully - to spend a million taxpayer dollars on a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock festival, saying,

“Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time. But the fact is, my friends, no one can be president of the United States that supports projects such as these.”

It would be easy to criticize McCain for politically exploiting his five-and-half years of suffering as a captive of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. But there’s a more important point to be made.

Had McCain simply attacked Clinton’s attempt at pork-barrel spending - the museum is set to open next year in Bethel, New York - that would have been fine (although McCain, too, has some pork-barreling on his record). Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to support any kind of museum.

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Monday, Nov. 5: National Day to Call the Senate to ban use/export of cluster bombs, which kill and harm civilians. (Over 98% victims are civilians.)

Call your Senators today. Urge them to cosponsor S.594 - the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act.

Take action now! Call: 1-800-352-1897 (a toll free number just for Monday)

Cluster bombs are indiscriminate killers that spew deadly shrapnel over large swathes of land, and leave behind fields of landmines. Over the last 40 years 98% of cluster bomb casualties have been civilians.

More than 80 governments have agreed to negotiate a ban on these killers in the coming year. The U.S. government is not one of them; they say that the military’s need overrides humanitarian concerns. However, these weapons are a liability for the military as well: unexploded bomblets impede troop movement and kill our own troops (dozens of them in Iraq).

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Police Intimidation Threatens Peaceful Protest of Fund-raiser
Wade Fulmer, Columbia

On Friday, Nov. 2, activists had arrived by 10:30 on the sidewalk across the street from the entrance to the plantation on Garners Ferry Road where the Republican barbecue fund-raiser was being held. Participants ranged from college students to an 80-year-old WWII veteran, and were citizens or representatives of various peace groups. Activists and protesters were orderly, quiet, and held signs in protest of the Iraq War, to advocate for the care of our troops, and to insist that Bush-Graham politicians do not rush to still another war with Iran.  

At about 10:45, Columbia police suddenly demanded that all protesters were to move down the hill to the far end of Woodhill Mall, which would take us and signs out of the view of traffic and politicians entering the barbecue. Upon asking an officer why, he said that the order was given to officers this morning by their captain. As an organizer of the demonstration, I asked why was such an order given. I reminded officers that Columbia city police have agreed and cooperated with us for four years in the exercise of our right to assemble and protest as long as there is no disturbance or interference with traffic. I asked to speak to the officer in charge. He approached and spoke angrily that we must move. He then told me that I had 10 seconds to move to the bottom of the hill. 

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Today at a press event in Charleston, plastic surgeons masquerading as humanitarians announced the launch of a calendar featuring topless women in what they call a “bold visual approach to education about post-mastectomy options.”

Here’s their press release:

Women with Heriditary Predisposition for Breast Cancer Pose Topless in Unique Educational Calendar Launch

WHAT: Launch of a unique calendar of women who are members of FORCE (Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered), the nation’s largest community of women who carry a BRCA mutation or other high-risk factors for breast cancer. In the calendar, titled “Life is a Carnival,” 14 women whose faces are festively masked, pose topless in a bold visual approach to education about post-mastectomy options.

Meet some of these brave women, most of whom have the BRCA gene mutation, and learn about the options they chose; meet the founder of FORCE, which has 11,000 members and whose website gets 1.5 million hits/month; meet prominent reconstructive surgeons and a geneticist; and, obtain a free copy of calendar. 

This event provides an opportunity for editors, reporters, producers, on-air hosts and writers to, in an informal setting, meet the women, the founder and director of FORCE, and surgeons who perform microsurgical breast reconstruction. Refreshments, hors d’oeuvres. The event is open to the public, RSVP to 843-513-1010.

WHEN: Thursday, November 1, 5:30 - 7:30 PM

WHERE: The Historic Rice Mill Building, 17 Lockwood Drive -Charleston, S.C

WHO: Sue Friedman, DVM, Executive Director / Founder of FORCE / Calendar model (Born and raised in NY, lives in FL)

FORCE members and Women With BRCA gene (from South Carolina and, elsewhere), some of whom had mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.

James E.Craigie, M and; Richard M. Kline Jr, MD of The Center for Natural Breast Reconstruction;  members of a breast reconstruction team in SC who use microsurgery to transfer live, soft tissue from the abdomen to shape a live breast mound; a procedure growing in popularity as an alternative to breast implants.

Steven Shapiro, M.S., D.M.D., M.D., medical geneticist who provides genetic counseling and testing for BRCA mutations.