SC Prog Blog

By Becci Robbins

She’s only been on the scene five weeks, and I’m suffering severe Sarah fatigue. You know which Sarah. The one tapped by the McCain camp in a cynical attempt to shore up the crippled wing of his fundamentalist base. The one who has been winking and obfuscating her way through a tightly scripted campaign that is relying on style over substance, sound bites over sound public policy.

As a woman, I want to see Sarah Palin to do well, knowing that her performance reflects — fairly or not — on all women and our perceived ability to lead. As a feminist, I want to enroll her in a women’s studies program. If she knew her history, she couldn’t so easily impose her anti-choice ideology, wouldn’t presume to know what’s best for all women.

Palin holds an extreme position on reproductive rights, opposing contraception and access to abortion, even for rape victims. And yet she cried foul when reporters dared mention her unmarried pregnant teenage daughter — never mind that Palin’s abstinence-only agenda makes it a legitimate point of discussion. Our government has spent over $1 billion to fund abstinence-only sex education programs since 1996. That approach has failed countless young women, including, apparently, Palin’s own daughter.

Rather than talk about it, Palin simply said that her children should be off limits. But in the vice-presidential debate she repeatedly mentioned her son in Iraq and her special-needs child. She did not mention her pregnant daughter. Apparently it’s okay to talk about her kids as long as they serve the campaign’s interest.

Yes, Palin proudly touts her pro-life credentials. While she sits in her office on a couch covered with a bear skin, the head still attached. While she shows off photos of her and her four-year-old daughter posing with the caribou she shot. While advocating hunting wild game from the safety of a low-flying aircraft.

When Palin talks about life, she is referring to pre-born human life. Not the lives of grown women. Not the lives of children her running mate would deny health care. Not, certainly, the lives of the animals with whom we share this planet. Not even the life of the planet itself, which will continue to suffer the devastating effect of America’s petroleum addiction, which Palin advocates when she gleefully chants, as she did in the debate, “Drill, baby, drill!”

The debate was little more than cheap theater. The McCain camp had negotiated its terms, in effect dumbing down the debate. The contract limited the candidates’ responses to 90 seconds, discouraged the moderator from asking follow-up questions, and prohibited the candidates from asking each other questions. The format helped ward off the sort of embarrassment an unscripted Palin revealed in recent network television interviews.

Instead of an honest debate, we had Sen. Joe Biden biting his tongue — warned by his handlers to play nice — and Gov. Palin ignoring the moderator’s questions and providing instead well-worn one-liners, off topic and sometimes off the wall. She was like Chatty Cathy doll programmed with conservative talking points. Pull the string, and she spouts a few sentences.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one underwhelmed by her performance. A number of conservative pundits have grudgingly admitted that Palin is not ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Kathleen Parker’s Sept. 26 editorial, in which she suggested Palin pull herself out of the race, garnered the most attention. “If BS were currency,” Parker wrote, “Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.” If she were a man, she continued, we’d be laughing; but since she’s the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket, we can’t say the painful truth.

In earlier editorials, Parker was Palin’s biggest cheerleader. “Palin is everything liberals have always purported to want for women — freedom to choose, opportunities for both career and family, a shot at the top ranks of American political life,” she wrote. “With five children and an impressive resume, Palin should be Miss July in the go-girl calendar.”

In an editorial she wrote after the Republican convention, she gushed, “No one is going to be embarrassed by John McCain’s maverick pick.”

What a difference a few weeks make.

And in a twist of irony, the pundit who has made a career out of skewering the opposition with barbs aimed, more often than not, at women on the Left, got a taste of her own venom. After her editorial pleading for Palin to pull out of the race, she found herself on the receiving end of her party’s most rabidly partisan element. In her latest piece, she writes about being called an idiot, a traitor, about people writing angry and threatening letters.

Surprised and dismayed, she writes, “Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn’t sound American to me.”

Sadly, that is the America she helped create.

There are lessons here for us all. May we learn them before it is too late.

Equal Justice Initiative has released a short preview of the upcoming film Cruel and Unusual: Sentencing 13- and 14-Year-Old Children to Die in Prison.

Find out by clicking here.

Deconstructing Bunk Reporting in Five Easy Steps
By Beth Skwarecki
Bitch Magazine

British scientists have uncovered the truth behind one of modern culture’s greatest mysteries: why little girls play with pink toys. Is it because toy companies flood whole store aisles with the color? Or because well-meaning relatives shower girl babies with pink blankets and clothing? Nope. According to the men in lab coats, it’s purely biological.

Apparently, women are hardwired to like pink because our cavewoman foremothers spent their days gathering red leaves and berries amongst the trees while their husbands were out hunting. Later, women needed to notice red-faced babies and blushing boyfriends. And why do men like blue? Because it’s the color of the sky.

This evolutionary just-so story takes up three pages of a 2007 issue of Current Biology. To back up the assertion that pink is a universal girly preference worth examining, the authors refer to a 1985 study finding that little girls use more pink and red crayons in their drawings than little boys do.

Dig further, however, and the story completely falls apart. British women do prefer pink, but the author’s claim of a “robust, cross-cultural sex difference” turns out to be neither. The scientists compared British natives with Chinese immigrants to Britain, and glossed over the differences. For example: The girliest color in the British results, a purplish-pink, was in fact the Chinese men’s favorite.

Nowhere do scientific findings get more mangled than when they’re about the differences between men and women. According to the science pages, women aren’t just biologically hardwired to prefer pink to blue. We’re also predisposed to backstab one another in the workplace, cry in the boardroom, and have both lower iqs and less of a sense of humor than men.

Some misleading stories come from bad science, where the study authors’ conclusions aren’t supported by their own data. Others are well-conducted studies whose conclusions mutate upon contact with the mainstream media. Newspapers and websites are prone to playing fast and loose with their reports on studies, often neglecting to reveal salient facts about a study’s sample group or methodology.

The fact is that science articles aren’t designed to be read by non-scientists. College and grad students in the sciences are trained in how to do it: They review papers and discuss them in journal clubs; learn how to question methodologies (Is that sample really big enough? Was that the right test to use?); and learn how to be critical of authors’ interpretations (Do the results really mean what they say they mean?). Students also know to look at context for each study, looking up previous papers on the subject, reviewing the authors’ previous work, and searching out any evidence of bias that might color a study’s findings.

Journalists looking for a quick story, however, do little such research. And in an age where news sites, wire services, and blogs pick up stories with lightning-fast speed, bad research gets around. When London’s Sunday Times reported on a 2007 study claiming that men get dumber in the presence of blond women, the paper got the name of the journal wrong, citing the Journal of Experimental Psychology rather than the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Nearly every subsequent news article repeated the error because they were content to simply reword the Times’ version of the story rather than finding and discussing the study itself.

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Congressional Democrats are moving rapidly on legislation aimed at overturning a controversial Supreme Court ruling they say eviscerated pay discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Within weeks of the May 29 court bombshell, Congress held hearings on proposals to restore equal pay provisions in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to the status before the ruling, written by the court’s newest justice, Samuel Alito. On July 31, the House of Representatives voted 225-199 to pass a bill, and a Senate companion bill is expected to get hearings this fall.

The business community has lined up against the measure, however, and President George W. Bush pledged a veto if it passes Congress. That could make the issue part of the 2008 presidential campaign.

So far, votes are mostly along party lines: only two House Republicans voted for it, Representatives Chris Shays of Connecticut and Don Young of Alaska. All but six House Democrats voted for it. Two powerhouse Republicans are lead sponsors in the Senate, however: Senators Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Olympia Snowe of Maine, leading Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center to predict a more bipartisan prospect there.

“The leadership in both the House and Senate are committed to move this very quickly because the decision has caused an unacceptable gaping hole in civil rights laws,” she said.

House sponsors named their proposal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 to honor the Alabama woman who sued Goodyear Tire Company after belatedly discovering she had been paid far less than virtually all her male factory co-workers. A jury found Goodyear’s bias to be so pervasive it awarded $3 million to Ledbetter, who had gotten a top performance award from the company in 1996. Because of a 1991 law capping damage awards, that $3 million was reduced to $300,000.

Then the Supreme Court, now under Bush appointee Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled against her, agreeing with a Bush administration argument that she had filed her lawsuit too late; she would have had to file charges within 180 days of the first discriminatory paycheck she got from Goodyear. The Ledbetter legislation would restore the traditional standard, enunciated by most federal courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that pay discrimination claims had to be filed within 180 days of any discriminatory paycheck - including the last one.

When Ledbetter testified before the House Committee on Education and Labor, she said it would have been impossible for her to meet the Alito-Roberts criteria. She had been hired in 1979 as a line supervisor and said she worked hard for 19 years, did every job the men did, but had no clue she got much less money for the same work.

In her final years at Goodyear, “I got the feeling I was being paid less than the men but there was no way to know. Pay levels were kept strictly confidential.” An anonymous note told her the brutal truth. “I found out I was making $3,700 a month and all the men were earning $4,300 to $5,200 a month.”

The business community was thrilled at the ruling, one of the most favorable they have gotten so far from the Roberts court, but their opposition to the Ledbetter bill is proving to be a tricky sell. The labor policy chief for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Michael Eastman, told the Washington Post that it is a tough issue, since “everyone is opposed to unequal pay for equal work.” So far, business - and the bulk of congressional Republicans - are making a more technical argument: that the Democratic bills would lift the statute of limitations and subject businesses to frivolous claims filed decades after a problem.

The American Bar Association debunked that notion. ABA President Karen J. Mathis said in a June 1 op-ed that the ruling would make Title VII “almost useless in combating pay discrimination in the workforce” because “it is difficult, if not impossible, for an employee to know within six months that pay bias has cheated him or her of a fair paycheck.”

In an Aug. 14 policy position, the ABA urged Congress to overturn the Supreme Court ruling “to ensure that in claims involving discrimination in pay, the statute of limitations runs from each paycheck reflecting an improper disparity.” It said the Supreme Court’s reading of the law “will engender confusion and unfairness. It will deny remedies to many victims of discrimination, encourage subterfuge by employers, precipitate unwarranted claims and generally frustrate the purposes underlying Title VII.”

What happens next depends partly on whether Lilly Ledbetter becomes a household name - and whether grass roots groups connect with the issue. A DakotaWomen site posted a blog recently that criticized Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) for saying if the bill passed, corporations wouldn’t hire women out of fear they would be sued 40 years from now.

Ledbetter’s House committee testimony was posted on YouTube. People for the American Way posted another of her statements on a separate YouTube site, gambling that the blatant pay disparities she suffered will resonate with many people.

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Ledbetter says her own experience confirms that connection. “Since the court decision, everywhere I go, women come up to me in the grocery stores, in church, just out in the park and they tell me they understand how I feel. They’ve been there. The same thing happened to them. Because of their sex, they did not get paid equally as the males.”

Peggy Simpson, The Women’s Media Center
12 Sept. 2007

This photo of Sen. Lindsey Graham was posted on TMZ’s site, of all places. Almost as interesting as the image - which may or may not be real (consider the source) - are the comments from the rabble. Yikes.

Brett Bursey talks about clean elections at a Columbia CLC picninc on July 14. For photos of the event, see our photo gallery on this blog.

Also, send us a photo of you or a friend wearing a penny pin to scpoint@mindspring.com and we’ll post it here.

In the July issue of Jolie, a magazine insert The State newspaper markets to women, Editor Sarah Gilbert Fox writes in her letter to readers, “This month everyone will celebrate the 4th of July, gather at the beach, have BBQ’s, knock back margaritas, and, well, worry about their weight. Which makes me wonder how much independence do we really have? I’m beginning to think we don’t much like freedom, because when we have it we just end up subjugating ourselves to something else, such as the perfect-body image. So what if we’re a size 12, which used to be an average size. If we can’t fit into a size 4, we’re doomed.”

“It’s all rather shocking,” she writes, “this need to obtain a skinnier self at the expense of a happier self. And it’s a shame to know that these women’s children are constantly exposed to this talk. These daughters hardly have a chance to live a life of self-acceptance.”

She vows to “make a difference” by getting women to stop judging their bodies so harshly or to shut up about it if they can’t.

“I’m a former 82-pound anorexic,” she confides, “and it’s taken me 35 years to get to where I am right now: less boney for sure, but happier, more relaxed, and with enough energy to realize how much I’m really worthy, large or small. Don’t get me wrong - I’m still neurotic and out of touch with most things, but at least body image is not one of them.”

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How do you spell hypocrisy? F-O-X (alternate spelling: C-B-S).

This is a real head-scratcher. The same TV networks that have no problem running shows chock full of gratuitous sex and violence draw the line at running condom ads. What’s up with that?

Here’s a recent message from Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (Planned Parenthood Health Systems of SC is a Network member group):

Here’s a pretty telling story from the world of media. There is a new condom commercial on the airwaves that starts with a bunch of women in a bar surrounded by some men who happen to look like pigs. One of these men then shuffles to the men’s room, grabs a condom from a vending machine, and all of a sudden is turned into a regular guy. But the message at the end is what I like: “Use a condom every time.”

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If you haven’t seen the OreoMobile show, which has been touring South Carolina since early June, you have another chance on July 8. The rolling civics lesson will offer its short program at the Unitarian Church in Charleston, 4 Archdale St., at 11:30 Sunday morning. If you’re in the area, check it out. You’ll get some perspective on this country’s budget priorities, some free toys and Oreos. Bring your own milk.

The movable feast stopped at the Network’s board meeting June 9 in Columbia. It was entertaining and appalling in equal measure. The presentation was fun; the statistics frightening.

Activist Aaron Rubin launches a pack of Oreos into the crowd at the Network’s June board meeting in Columbia.

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So I read in today’s The State that JayBo is walking across South Carolina, with his sights set on San Francisco. He expects it will take him a year to walk the 2,800 miles and that he will emerge on the Left Coast a new, slimmer Bo. “I get to see wonderful things, meet new interesting people, and yes I will lose weight,” he wrote in his blog on his third day.

I love this story, and I am rooting for JayBo. I know how transformative a long walk can be. In the fall of 2002, I trekked solo across northern Spain. It took me a month to do the 500-mile pilgrims’ trail, known to seekers around the world as the Camino de Santiago. And while the trail was physically demanding - crossing two mountain ranges and the meseta, a vast moonscape that takes days to traverse - I found the biggest challenge was mental. The scariest part was not traveling alone or packs of wild dogs (which I’d read about in Paulo Coelho’s book The Pilgrimage), it was navigating the landscape in my head. With no distractions, no phone, no radio, nothing but the sound of my feet meeting the earth, there I was with myself. Hours upon end, just me and my thoughts.

Terrifying.

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A vigil to honor the life of 20-year-old Sean Kennedy was held tonight in Columbia. Friends and family shared songs, poetry, prayers and stories with the crowd that gathered at the State House to pay its respects.

It appears that Kennedy, who was beaten after leaving a club in the Upstate in May, was killed because he was gay. The 18-year-old accused of the crime is being held on murder charges in a Greenville jail. The assault has sparked public outrage and renewed pressure to enact hate crimes legislation in South Carolina, one of only four states without such protection. Rep. Seth Whipper (D-Charleston) introduced a bill in March; maybe this tragedy will generate enough heat to move the legislature to act when it reconvenes in January.

Sean Kennedy’s mother, Elke, and sister, Dawn.

Good news from SC Fair Share today:

The General Assembly has overwhelmingly overridden the Governor’s vetoes of additional SCHIP funding and the proviso expanding SCHIP eligibility from 150% to 200% of the federal poverty level.

This is a great victory for 65,000 children that has taken us a long time to get to. Thanks for everyone who helped today and over the years.

John Ruoff