What the Stupak-Pitts coathanger amendment means for Americans

Bart Stupak, Democrat for Death, decided he hated women and he didn’t want women who needed abortions to get healthcare: he wants taxpayers who are women to be required to pay for government subsidies for health insurance plans, but he wants those health insurance companies to be allowed to deny those women life/fertility-saving healthcare.

The amendment will prohibit federal funds for abortion services in the public option. It also prohibits individuals who receive affordability credits from purchasing a plan that provides elective abortions. However, it allows individuals, both who receive affordability credits and who do not, to separately purchase with their own funds plans that cover elective abortions. It also clarifies that private plans may still offer elective abortions.

From a woman who had an abortion on Hallowe’en:

As much as I struggled with the sudden realization that the pregnancy was over, I also found myself trying to decide financially what I was willing to do. A chemical abortion would cost $40, but I would be alone, bleeding, and it could still be incomplete and I would require a D&C anyway, since my pregnancy was so advanced. Surgery would be quick, total, and under controlled circumstances, but would likely be our full maxed insurance amount of $1500. And of course, there was the free option of waiting for my body to finally realize I wasn’t pregnant, but after 4 weeks the risk of infection was steadily climbing, increasing my chances of future miscarriage, infertility, or even death. With a toddler at home, and still nursing hopes for extending our family some day, this was not an option.

I chose the quick and total route of the D&C, despite the costs, prioritizing my health and the health of possible future children. I was lucky, and could afford to make that choice, because currently, my insurance cannot chose to refuse to cover what the hospital as termed an abortion.

Thanks to the Stupak amendment, that can now change.

This is an anti-women amendement – the kind of misogynist crap that women-haters spew – but it is also a typically rich-bastard anti-poor people amendment. A woman who already has a good insurance plan – one that covers abortion – or who has the kind of income that can afford to pay a couple of thousand for an unexpected medical expense that her health insurance, she discovers, won’t cover – will be OK.

A woman who figures she can scrape together $40 for a chemical abortion and just hope that will do it? Or a woman who can’t afford anything but a coathanger?

Congressman Bart Stupak has decided such worthless women can die. Or become involuntarily infertile. Or whatever. Their lives, and the lives of the children they hoped to have, are of less than no importance to a man like him. He has an e-mail form here, if you want to let him know what you think. (You will need to provide him with a zip code inside Michigan’s 1st District, which you can do by looking a city up here and the zipcode for it here. )

Reading Andy Olmsted

Andy once referred to me as “my arch-nemesis Jesurgislac”, which phrase I’ve come back to a lot since he was killed in Iraq.

I heard that Andy had been killed on Obsidian Wings: I read the post twice before I was sure I’d taken it in and understood.

What I wrote in the first minute I knew what had happened was:

Oh jesus christ.

I didn’t even know him well, and christ knows I’ll miss him. He was

I want to say something like “he was a gentleman” and I don’t mean anything class-orientated by it: I mean he had the root of the matter in him, he was the kind of soldier I couldn’t imagine *not* trusting to behave well, the kind of guy that a pacifist like me can respect for his courage and his decency.

And he’s dead. Jesus christ, goddammit, what a bloody mess.

If anyone’s passing on messages to the family, I add my condolences, little as they can mean at a time like this. But he’ll be missed and his death regretted even by people who never met him.

I suppose it’s something we’ll all have to get used to, as the years pass, mortality being what it is: the loss of friends – and good enemies – whom we never met.

I was not Andy’s nemesis: that came with a bullet. I never thought of myself as Andy’s enemy: I thought of him, while he was alive, as a grand partner in the fencing game of blog: the kind of opponent who’s never bitter or mean. Now Andy’s dead, I just think: we should remember – we should take care, all of us who knew the Andy who was G’Kar, the person whom we knew on the Internet, to remember: to take care of our memories.

Hilzoy notes here that Andy is now in print:

As I think I’ve written before, Andy Olmsted’s parents have collected his Rocky Mountain blog posts from Iraq into a book. If you’d like to order it, it’s now available at 1-800-882-3273. Andy’s parents will use any money they make above the production costs to establish a scholarship in his name at St. John’s Academy in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where Andy went to school.

Writers make friends even after death: that too seems very like Andy Olmsted.

The day I killed

2nd May 1990. I got a phonecall from my best friend. Her cat was having kittens, literally, and so – metaphorically – was she. I arrived when they were only a few hours old, and I looked down at the litter and pointed out the one I wanted. Eight weeks later I took her home.

She was my cat in a way no other cat ever was or ever will be. She rode on my shoulder. She came to greet me when I came home, lifting her head to have her nose petted and, if I picked her up, twisting round in my arms to clamber on to her favourite resting place, couched like a cat out of heraldry across my shoulders: all my t-shirts had holes in them. Once she was out of kittenhood she never once clawed my bare skin. She hated vets, and would sit growling on the table as I held her with my face down by hers, assuring her that the nice man with the big needle wasn’t going to hurt her. (Once or twice vets warned me I shouldn’t have my face so close to her when she was growling like that: I assured them she wasn’t going to go for me.) She wasn’t a lapcat, but a few times in my life when I was emotionally distraught, she came and sat on me sympathetically. I could look over at her and say her name and she would start purring, even across the other side of the room.

She was beautiful and elegant and intelligent and I was her human and she was my cat.

She was getting older and more fragile, but still herself; playing dominance games with the neighborhood cats though they outweighed her (she used to be a fighter: a ragged ear and a ragged eye from the times she couldn’t get away , but both healed clean). But one day in August 2005 she didn’t come to the door to greet me. I went to find her, and she was curled up on my bed, looking as if moving was too much for her. I took her to the vet, and the vet x-rayed her and told me:

She had a tumour in the wall of her stomach. Inoperable.

“You can take her home. But don’t take too long.”

I don’t know how to tell you the next part. I killed her. I paid a vet to do it, but I did it.

I paid the housecall fee for a vet to come round: the day after the day after they told me. She spent the last morning of her life in the garden, in the sun, and once or twice she looked the way she had even six months ago, even a year ago: and I wished it wasn’t true but I knew it was. I’d called my manager and got the day off work: he was sympathetic.

The vet injected her with a sedative. I held her on my lap until she went to sleep. Then we put her on a towel and the other injection went in: she died after a few minutes.

I still think, sometimes: could I have done something if I’d known about the tumour earlier? By that time I was taking her to the vet for checkups every couple of months, and the vet hadn’t found the tumour last time. Could I have kept her alive longer? Did I have to kill her then?

I’ve been having arguments online with people who think late-term abortions shouldn’t happen for about as long as I’ve been online. They tell me a natural death is better, that it’s wrong to kill, that women who make the decision to kill a fetus that’ll never live or live a brief life in excruciating pain, are cowards and irresponsible – that they ought to want to give birth and watch as their baby dies in pain, because that’s the pro-life thing to do.

I know that deciding to kill my cat, after she’d had fifteen years of life, was not a decision on a par with having to decide about a late-term abortion. But I also know that decision was the one that caused me about the worst pain I’ve ever felt, that I still can’t write or talk about it without crying. It wasn’t easy. It was hard to decide, hard to do, it hurt to do.

I don’t even know if it was the right decision. I don’t think it was: I think that I had been put in a place where there were no right decisions to make. I had a cat, I loved her, she was going to die, and if I left making the decision too long, she was going to suffer horribly. The decision had to be made. I was the only person who could make it. There were no right decisions to make. So I decided to do what I knew would mean the least suffering for my cat: I had her put to sleep, then killed, when I was holding her.

And you can call that decision whatever you like. But all my cat knew was that she’d spent a morning in the sun, that I held her on my lap, that she went to sleep on the human she’d trusted almost since her eyes were open. I killed her. I was not pro-life. I chose for her to die, because she was my cat, and I was her human, and it was my choice to make.

Ryanair announces sex discrimination charges

I think Ryanair are going to find themselves in serious legal trouble if they try to implement their extra charges for men over 130kg but women over 100kg (or for men with a more-than- 45 inch waist but women for a more-than-40 inch waist): it’s normally not legal to announce that women and men will be charged different prices for the same service. They may also have a difficulty with BMI, as women and men vary on that so that a court may find that this is effectively sex discrimination even if not explicitly so.

They may be able to charge for a second seat if a person doesn’t fit into just one (their fourth option) as that’s their only non-discriminatory option: but I noticed in the news that a Canadian court has ruled that in fact airlines simply have to swallow the cost of an extra seat, if they choose to provide seats that are too narrow for their customer base to fit into.

I like this better.

Lesbian and Gay Books Disappear

Years ago, in the city where I lived then, there was a gay bookshop. This wasn’t usual by any means in most UK cities, but my city had one. And then Waterstones came to the city. And they had the money to stock lots of lesbian and gay books – detective fiction, science-fiction, erotica, teenage fiction, humour – and they did. Instead of heading out of the way to a small bookshop that had a limited kind of stock, LGBT people could stop off at a mainstream bookshop and browse their way round a vast stock.

So when the gay bookshop went out of business, which it did, it didn’t seem to matter so much (well, lots of us were sad and angry, of course …. Waterstones wasn’t the only reason: but it was certainly a strong contributing factor: the main culprit was, as is usual with UK gay bookshops, HM Customs and Excise) …except that as soon as the gay bookshop had gone bust, Waterstones stopped stocking lesbian and gay books, and moved them. Instead of shelves out front for anyone to find, and a vast range of titles and genres – within a year, all the lesbian and gay books that Waterstones stocked were fitted into one shelving unit, in the basement, next to the heterosexual erotica shelving unit. I’m not joking. That’s exactly what happened. I may even have exaggerated how long it took.

Waterstones needed to stock these books when it was competing with a gay bookshop: when it was no longer competing, when we didn’t have a choice about where we shopped, or what books we could buy, Waterstones knew they could serve up crap. And they did. That’s the free market in action to diminish choices.

Amazon is most LGBT people’s gay bookshop of choice. Or rather non-choice: these days, unless you live in London, the odds are there is no where else you can buy gay books. There may be a shelving unit in Waterstones, somewhere at the back out of the way, or there may not.

And now Amazon have decided they want to do the online equivalent of pushing their gay stock to the back of the bookshop.

Mark R. Probst, author of The Filly, noticed something rather odd on April 10th:

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system? Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening.

And this is the answer he got, from Ashlyn D, at Member Services for Amazon.com Advantage:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

“Adult” materials, eh? Well: that apparently doesn’t include this:

With the first Centerfold, who just happened to be the radiant Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner masterminded a cultural icon: Playboy’s Playmate of the Month. Now, for the first time ever, Playboy has gathered together every Centerfold from every issue into one luxurious collector’s edition. That’s over 600 beauties. We’ve reproduced these Centerfolds exactly as they appeared in the magazine to create a full-size, deluxe volume. Paging through this colossal, chronological collection provides a breathtaking view of our evolving appreciation of the female form: from the fifties fantasy of voluptuous blondes to the tawny beach girls of the seventies to the groomed and toned women of today.

But perhaps Amazon think people only buy Playboy Centrefolds for the articles.

I’ve never read these novels – so I checked out the Amazon pages for a few I do know. The Fires of Bride, by Ellen Galford, a beautifully funny novel about a lesbian artist who goes to live on a Hebridean island. No graphic sex whatsoever. No pics of naked women. No sales rank on Amazon, either. But it’s out of print, so perhaps that isn’t surprising.

How about Desert of the Heart, by Jane Rule? Even less sex than The Fires of Bride, and it’s in print. But it has no sales rank. How odd. What about Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson? Well, well: that has a sales rank on Amazon.co.uk, but not on Amazon.com. (Perhaps the .co.uk webmaster went on strike when instructed to consider Winterson, who is quite famous as a literary writer in Britain, a “lesbian writer” all of whose books are “adult” material to be pushed to the back of the shop out of sight?) Of course this is disgusting that Amazon should be doing this to any writer, any novel, simply because the subject matter is LGBT. It wouldn’t surprise me if, next week, Amazon.com reverses its decision over many novels with famous writers or with pro-active publishers: but the less-known novels, the small-scale publishers (and most LGBT books are published by small-scale publishing houses and are less-known novels) will find themselves still relegated to the shelving unit, in the basement, tucked away out of sight where the decent men who buy Playboy Centerfold won’t be disturbed by them.

c_smith_author writes:

Please note that just before this, Erastes’ Transgressions and Alex’s False Colours were topping out the rankings. Also note that The Filly is a YA Books, and therefore I would suggest one of the more important books to have out there for kids questioning their identity, and Transgressions and False Colours are being shelved with the Romance section of Barnes and Noble. Though as Mark points out, that is of no fucking importance because this is homophobic bias pure and simple.

I have no idea what to do about this except spread the message. If anyone has any ideas on what to do, tell me. Because I am not letting this lie. As vashtan said, they are happy to take the money, but not happy to give these books the recognition they rightly deserve.

I don’t know what to do either, beyond publicise Amazon being homophobic gits.

Update: Nicola Griffiths speaks out:

Amazon’s policy is idiocy of the highest order. Some thoughtless manager OK’d the low-hanging-fruit approach. (“Hey, if you want to protect Moral Americans from na-s-s-s-ty sexual content, then deleting all queer books from the rankings—and therefore the bestseller and some search listings—will get lots of ‘em at once! Woo hoo, straight Christians will be safe!”) That manager should be fired.

And then I want a public apology from Jeff Bezos.

This is important. A quick and quiet revocation of the policy is not enough. I want a public acknowledgement and a pledge to never again try to shove queers under the carpet. It’s the only way to counter the perception queer readers and queer writers don’t count.

Being invisible is dangerous. It ruins careers and it puts young readers at risk.

Nicola Griffiths is the award-winning writer of Ammonite and Slow River and other books with many lesbian characters. As far as I can see, all her novels had their sales ranks removed in the Easter wipeout, and though Amazon is restoring some of the high-profile books, they’re evidently not in a hurry to do that for all of the titles blocked from sales ranking.

I agree with Nicola Griffiths, wholeheartedly: the least that should happen is that the “glitch” is fixed, and fast, and then Jeff Bezos should publicly apologize for wiping so many LGBT books off the listings at Amazon.

Below the fold: Screenshots of the page for Playboy Centerfolds on Amazon.com (which is evidently not “adult” material, as it has a sales rank) and the page for Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, on Amazon.com, with sales rank suppressed on account of it being “adult” material. Also compared: Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, by Nathaniel Frank, with Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. One’s about DADT, one’s about young straight men beating each other to a pulp; guess which one is considered “adult”?

Update: Amazon Rank Open letter on Booksquare Amazonfail on Twitter.

Dan joins RaceFail Writers for 2009 Fail

I’m sad and mad: I’m savage. Dan Savage, one of my no-kidding favorite writers, just joined RaceFail 2009. (Debunk Tank, March 12th).

Apparently, Dan says, 3.89% of voters who voted for Yes on 8 is a landslide… because that 3.89% (58% of the 6.7% of the Californian population) are black.

Why does Dan Savage care so much about kicking that 3.89%? Who contributed the millions? Who made the lying ads and web campaigns? Who’s got the power, the political voice, and the funding? Who’s paying Ken Starr? It’s not that 3.89%. Why does Dan want to focus on that small group and call them a “landslide”?

From The Advocate:

The night before Election Day, a black woman walked into the San Francisco headquarters of the No on Proposition 8 campaign. Someone had ripped down the No on 8 sign she’d posted in her yard and she wanted a replacement. She was old, limping, and carrying a cane. Walking up and down the stairs to this office was hard for her.

[Michael Joseph Gross] asked why coming to get the sign was worth the trouble, and she answered, “All of us are equal, and all of us have to fight to make sure the law says that.” She said that she was straight, and she told me about one of the first times she ever hung out with gay people, in New Orleans in the 1970s. “I thought I was so cool for being there, and I said, ‘You faggots are a lot of fun!’ Well, that day I learned my lesson. A gay man turned on me and said, ‘A faggot is not a person. A faggot is a bunch of sticks you use to light a fire.’ ”

She puts Dan Savage to shame: I’m ashamed of him, if he’s not ashamed of himself.

[Update: and with this, 3 days later, Savage Love goes off my blog roll. I'm sadder yet about that: but there is a limit to the amount of racist crap I'm going to read, and Dan Savage just used it all up.]

Kathryn Cramer: fail, fail, and fail

Back in February, Kathryn Cramer announced (Stupid Things People Say On the Internet 4690) that all of us who use pseudonymous identities are “criminals and conmen”. I read, I mocked, I moved on.

(Warning: don’t click on the link from my post to her blog. Kathryn Cramer did something bizarre to it that ensured anyone trying to click through to there from here ends up at one of those spam-friendly sites that promise you FREE MONEY IN YOUR OWN HOME.)

Kathryn Cramer, regrettably, found herself unable to move on. She picked on one specific person active in a recent discussion of racism/cultural appropriation on livejournal, who blogs under the id CoffeeandInk, and decided to out her real name on www.kathryncramer.com. (I’m not linking directly to Kathryn Cramer’s blog: I see no point, if she’s decided that people who try to check out her blog from mine will be redirected. Update, 3 – In fact Kathryn Cramer, using her pseudonym of Pleasantville, had already outed Coffeeandink on the feministsf wikipedia: when Coffeeandink complained about that first outing, Kathryn Cramer then outed Coffeeandink on www.kathryncramer.com.)

This wasn’t an accident: Kathryn Cramer knew that CoffeeandInk preferred to be identified online only by her chosen pseudonymous identity, and not by her real name.

Following an outpouring of sympathy for CoffeeandInk, and criticism of Kathryn Cramer, the entry in which CoffeeandInk was outed has now been password-protected so that only friends of Kathryn Cramer can read it.

(Warning: don’t click on the link from CoffeeandInk’s post to Kathryn Cramer’s blog; Kathryn Cramer did something bizarre to it that ensured anyone trying to click through to there from here ends up at one of those spam-friendly sites that promise you FREE MONEY IN YOUR OWN HOME.)

A couple of people took screenshots (with CoffeeandInk’s name redacted) of Kathryn Cramer’s post before she password-protected it.

Kathryn Cramer’s outing of CoffeeandInk – cache of the googlecache”

So yeah. She did it. Kathryn Cramer decided to out someone’s RL identity, linking it with her online handle, knowing that this person did not want it to happen, because – Kathryn Cramer justifies this – she feels CoffeeandInk was insufficiently respectful and nice to two people with whom CoffeeandInk worked thirteen years earlier, at a company where Kathryn Cramer’s husband now works. Kathryn Cramer used her privileged information about CoffeeandInk’s legal name, because of some Kathryn Cramer Thing about how one ought always to be polite and respectful to people for whom/with whom one once worked, at all times and under all circumstances.

(Will Shetterly, who is in his own estimation a well-known writer, also outed CoffeeandInk, because she wrote a post quoting things he said and linking to the posts in which he said them and linking to his rebuttal of her post, which in Will Shetterly’s world is called ‘misrepresentation’) but then changed his mind and deleted her legal name, though he’s been protesting ever since that he was jolly generous to do even that.)

Honestly: I think that even if I’d agreed with Kathryn Cramer in all respects up until the moment she did this, at the point she did this, I’d have to quit supporting her. Because… people have all sorts of reasons for wanting to maintain a pseudonymous identity online. And, no matter how much I disagree with them politically, no matter how rude or offensive they are to me or to people I care for, I know I have no idea what pressure they may be under to keep their online identity covert – whether being outed will lose them their job, lose their marriage, lose their children, lose their life, even. I just don’t know. I have no right to bust in and potentially do damage I can’t measure, to people whom I’ve never interacted with.

So, I consider that a minimal standard of decency in debate: if for any reason or none you happen across information that enables you to link someone’s legal identity to their online handle, you just don’t do it. Not just out of respect to that person’s right to privacy: but out of respect to all the other lives that person’s right to privacy may be protecting.

Kathryn Cramer fails that basic test. Further, I am unimpressed by her attempting to take some kind of high moral ground about this – and yet doing things such as redirecting links to her blog posts to spam sites to avoid people reading the post in which she outed CoffeeandInk’s legal name. She hasn’t apologized for doing it; she hasn’t taken the post down; she’s just trying to stop people who disagree with what she did from linking to her blog.

We deal with each other on the Internet on a sometimes painful level of honesty, and often with poisonous vituperation. I’ve been awesomely rude to some of you reading my blog now, and frankly, I think I usually had good cause. (Feel free to disagree.) But, there is one thing I would not do, and that is the one thing Kathryn Cramer felt herself justified in doing: I would not link your legal identity to your online identity, unless you had made explicitly clear it was OK to do so. I would not link to a post in which I saw it done. I would protect the frame of our debate, our ability to exchange our views honestly and freely. I may loathe you, but I’ll loathe you on a level playing field.

Kathryn Cramer: fail, fail, and fail.

—
Update: Kathryn Cramer has posted a demand for an apology from the person she outed on her blog. I cannot link to her blog, because she has set up a redirect to a spam website. I e-mailed her to ask her if she would remove the redirect so that I could link to her demand for an apology: she responded instructing me to never contact her again and to remove the name Kathryn Cramer from my blog. I find this culmination of fail …strangely ironic, really.

–Update 2: Because I am a bad person who cannot resist a good story:

Teresa [Nielsen Hayden] recalls a Readercon Midnight Horror Panel showing that US pros know how to have fun. The title was ‘Is Violence Necessary?’, and ‘a dead-drunk and bizarrely dressed Kathryn Cramer first monopolized the discourse, pacing back and forth in front of the panel while ranting incoherently into her-friend-the-invisible-mike; then assaulted another panelist who’d been holding up signs (“HELP US PLEASE HELP US”) and intermittently suggesting she sit down and shut up (during the early phases of which struggle she inadvertently kicked David Hartwell in the face, whereat David went and sat in the audience); then capped it all when, upon the panelist’s extricating himself from her clutches, she toppled face-first from the dais, too drunk to even put out her hands to cushion her fall, and announced while lying there with her face in the carpet that said panelist was fired from The New York Review of SF. “I quit six months ago,” he reminded her. (That was John Ordover.) After that David collected her up for future use, and the panel ended.’ – Ansible 80, March 1994

You’re not allowed to kill civilians

I’m deeply impressed with everything Barack Obama has done in his first hundred hours as President.

Well, almost everything.

Obama, Biden says, is planning to “take the fight” to the Afghanistan/Pakistan region:

Against a background of widespread protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan over US operations since Obama became president, the vice-president, Joe Biden, said yesterday that US forces would be engaged in many more operations as the US takes the fight to its enemies in the region. link

The government of Pakistan has appealed to Barack Obama to halt missile strikes in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan after 22 people were killed. As they point out, killing civilians is “counter-productive” to the “war on terror” – and also, Mr President: illegal.

You’re not allowed to kill civilians.

Calling on the Obama Administration to review its policy for tackling terrorism and extremism, the Pakistan government said last night that it had already conveyed its concerns over the missile strikes to the US.

The move came a day after two missile attacks in North and South Waziristan tribal regions killed at least 22 people, including children. Up to eight suspected foreign militants were also killed in the attacks, media reports said.

These were the first missiles strikes carried out by the US-led coalition forces based in Afghanistan after Obama assumed office on January 20.

“We maintain that these attacks are counter-productive and should be discontinued. Pakistan urges the US and NATO to adopt a holistic and more effective approach to countering extremism and terrorism,” said a statement issued by the Foreign Office spokesman.

“Pakistan has consistently lodged strong protests with the US government against drone attacks, which constitute an infringement of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Yesterday’s attack in the Waziristan area which caused civilian causalities is a matter of great concern. These concerns have been conveyed to the US side,” the statement said. link

Did Obama order the air attack? Was it a holdover from the Bush administration’s policy? Who decided that the missiles should continue to fly at people’s homes in Pakistan, regardless of who they kill? The belief on the subcontinent (Times of India) is that this new attack was only the beginning: that the Obama administration would step up the missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In Pakistan, leaders complain that stepped-up missile strikes — there have been more than 30 since August — fan anti-American sentiment and undermine the government’s own efforts to counter Islamist militants.

But their protests have had few practical consequences, fueling speculation that Islamabad’s government has given tacit approval in return for political and financial support from Washington.

Obama has not commented on the missile strike policy. link

Time he did. Past time, in fact, to bring it to an end.

Message to heterosexual supporters of Barack Obama

Telling us you don’t think it’s a big deal that a homophobic bigot has been invited to give the invocation at Barack Obama’s inaugeration?

Because Barack Obama has got to reach out to those homophobic, sexist, racist evangelical Christians. And it’s not a big deal when in doing so he insults LGBT people.

What else are we good for, if not to be the group that people of all religions can insult? It’s not as if Obama needs to treat LGBT people with any respect: the sane ones know he’s better than any Republican alternative, the insane ones suck John Hagee’s dick in airport restrooms and thank him for the privilege.

Members of the Lesbian and Gay Band Association are going to have to stand there politely and listen to Rick Warren, who thinks their having the freedom to marry is like incest or paedophila. I bet they weren’t warned in advance that they would be required to do that.

I hope Nancy Sutley can arrange to be absent. It would be ugly for Obama to force her to attend as Rick Warren prays.

Now why didn’t Obama invite John Hagee? Hagee could have insulted Barack Obama, too, and then we’d all be even.

But people shouldn’t throw shoes!

On Sunday 14th December, an Iraqi journalist, Muntadar al-Zaidi, of Baghdadia Televison, threw a pair of shoes at George W. Bush.

- “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog.”
- “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq.”

Zaidi is 28 years old, a graduate of communications from Baghdad University: members of his family were arrrested under Saddam Hussein’s regime, and he himself has been abducted by insurgents once and also held twice for questioning by the US occupation. (BBC)

Personally, I don’t like people throwing shoes at anyone.

His brother, Dargham al-Zaidi, told the BBC that Muntadar deliberately bought Iraqi-made shoes, from a shop on al-Khyam street in central Baghdad: dark brown with laces.

For some reason, I found myself wondering what kind of shoes they were: a pair of rubber flip-flops wouldn’t do much damage; steel-toed Doc Martens would be a different story. Insofar as I could see anything about these particular shoes, a lot would seem to depend on whether or not they had wooden heels.

Bush dodged both shoes, and appeared quite insouciant about the incident. Abdel Karim Khalaf, the head of operations at the interior ministry, told Reporters Without Borders that Muntadar al-Zaidi faced proceedings under Articles 223, 225 and 227 of the Iraqi criminal code: he can be sentenced to up to seven years in prison for “insulting a foreign head of state”.

That said, I also wondered whether Bush would have had any sense at all of how angry a lot of Iraqis are had this not happened.

Bush’s response: “If you want the facts, it’s a size 10 shoe that he threw.” (BBC)

I’m not saying that that makes it OK; just wondering.

Muntadar al-Zaidi has (his brother says) suffered a broken arm, broken ribs and internal bleeding after being beaten in custody. But after all, it wasn’t OK for him to throw shoes.

All these preceding blockquotes are from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings.

Teresa at Making Light, in her Free Muntadar Zaidi now! post:

So, will someone please tell George that he has two choices? He can either grab a moment’s grace in the midst of the sorry spectacle that is the end of his administration, or he can have people sending shoes in his direction for the rest of his life.

But not Hilzoy. Obviously.

I wondered when Hilzoy took the gig at Political Animal if she would be infected by the same thing that got Kevin Drum: the need to have your political enemies praise you as “unpartisan”. I don’t know if she cross-posted this to Political Animal, but it’s a post Kevin Drum could easily have written, expressing such concern for Bush being the victim of having shoes thrown at him without harming him – without a word or a shred of concern for the man who threw the shoes, though it didn’t take much thought to know that he would suffer badly for what he did.

Update: Where to send your old shoes.