-
Palin: Rogue or Rouge?
By Betsy Reed
Failed GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose new memoir, set to be released on Nov. 17, emphasizes her supposedly "maverick" tendencies with its title Going Rogue, has just dipped her toe into New York State politics. By endorsing a right-wing third party candidate, Doug Hoffman of the Conservative Party, in the Nov. 3 special election for the state's 23rd Congressional district seat, she has indeed bucked the party establishment--in order to advance a hard-line social conservative agenda. In the nonsensical Palin universe, that's what "rogue" means: walking in lockstep with the Christian right.
The Republican Party's candidate in the race, Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and has pledged to support the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act. While Scozzafava has been depicted as a radical leftist in the right-wing blogosphere, in fact she is a centrist with conservative leanings. The net effect of Palin's "rogue" intervention may be to split the conservative vote and help elect the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens, who maintains an edge over the other two candidates in the polls. Still, Hoffman has been gaining momentum, and--in a testament to Palin's enduring appeal to her devoted base--he's been raking in the campaign cash in the wake of her endorsement.
In her Facebook posting announcing her support for Hoffman this past Thursday evening, Palin wrote, "Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a ‘time for choosing.'"
(126) CommentsOctober 24, 2009
-
The "O" in Socialism
By Betsy Reed
Just recently, things were looking up for socialism. In April, a much-discussed Rasmussen poll reported that only 53 percent of Americans expressed a preference for capitalism. The poll didn't define either system, so one could surmise that the right's desperate strategy of branding a popular Democratic president as a "socialist" had backfired: If Obama's a socialist, then a good number of the 69 percent of Americans who viewed the President favorably were apparently ready to sign up. Perhaps this new openness to alternatives wasn't deep, but it seemed promising.
Now, the Obama=socialist meme, which was once just laughable, has gone viral.
It's still hard to take it very seriously, given how far Obama's policies are from even the mildest form of social democracy--recall how he explicitly rejected the idea that the United States should emulate Sweden's highly effective response to its early 90s financial meltdown, when it overcame the crisis by nationalizing the banks.
(122) CommentsJune 12, 2009
-
The Gender-Bending Recession
By Betsy Reed
Are men opting in--at home? Maybe, but mostly because they have little choice, and they're not altogether happy about it. That was the gist of a story the other day in the New York Times--based, it appears, on a somewhat sturdier foundation than the paper's claim a few years ago that upper middle-class women had embarked on an "Opt Out Revolution," fleeing the rigors of the corporate boardroom for the joys of the kids' playroom.
As noted in my previous post on gender and unemployment, the current recession is hitting men hard--they've lost four out of every five jobs in the downturn. Studies from past recessions have found that laid-off men are not nearly as likely as women to spend their newfound free time with their children, and in fact, they often end up spending even less time with the kids than they did while they were employed. It's quite possible that, overall, this pattern still holds. The Mr. Moms of Westchester County may be a fascinating subculture but a statistical anomaly. We don't yet know.
But there are some signs that the dynamics may have shifted. In addition to the grim stats about lost jobs, each month brings new numbers that show how many people are dropping out of the labor force completely. And what's interesting is that, unlike in past recessions, when laid-off women were much more likely than men to stop looking for work and turn to caregiving and other pursuits, men and women have been quitting the labor force in roughly equal numbers. As this Forbes.com column notes, "the increase in the number of women dropping out from December 2007 to March 2009 was 38%. The increase in the number of men dropping out was 90%." That's pretty striking. Over at Slate last month, Emily Bazelon collected some tantalizing anecdotes suggesting that this time round, jobless men (or at least a "significant minority" of them) are pitching in at home.
(27) CommentsApril 25, 2009
-
GOP to New Orleans: Liberals Did It
By Betsy Reed
One of the more deeply twisted--and, one would have hoped, now thoroughly discredited--right-wing storylines of the Bush era is currently enjoying a comeback: all that chaos and suffering after Hurricane Katrina, all those people stranded on rooftops, left to die in jail cells and swelter in the Superdome, that was big government's fault! Writes the Washington Legal Foundation's Daniel J. Popeo in the Washington Examiner, "From the Hurricane Katrina response, to ongoing dysfunction in providing adequate medical care to veterans, to keeping out illegal aliens, the federal government has done little to inspire public confidence."
The Katrina disaster, in this telling, had nothing to do with Bush's decision to gut FEMA and hand the reins to the incompetent former International Arabian Horse official Michael Brown; instead the problem was that the citizens of New Orleans were foolish enough to expect the federal department of emergency management, to, well, manage an emergency.
Notoriously, Bill O'Reilly made just this point while the city was still under water: "If you rely on government for anything, anything, you're going to be disappointed," he said, noting, moreover, that the lesson of Katrina that should be taught in school is, "If you don't get educated, if you don't develop a skill, and force yourself to work hard, you're most likely be poor. And sooner or later, you'll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help."
(26) CommentsApril 16, 2009
-
Unemployment: A New Boys Club?
By Betsy Reed
The LA Times is calling it the "he-cession." The stark facts show that the economic crisis is hitting men particularly hard: The official male unemployment rate just spiked to 8.8 percent, while the figure for women is on a slower rise, now at 7 percent. So we can add to the old-fashioned gender gap in wages (favoring men, who make one dollar to a woman's 80 cents for the same job), a new gender gap in unemployment, favoring women.
With women working more, there has been a role reversal of sorts, but it's hardly the kind feminists envisioned. As men lose their jobs, households are depending increasingly on the relatively meager wages of women to stay afloat. And the newly unemployed men aren't spending their freed-up time packing lunches and schlepping the kids to soccer games. According to an analysis of time use data by economists Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller, they're more likely to devote those hours to looking for new jobs--and sleeping more, and watching more TV.
The picture of domestic life that emerges is not the gendered suburban dystopia of Revolutionary Road. But vestiges of that old order persist, mixing in new and potentially combustible ways with the legacy of feminism (the increased participation of women in the labor force), its unfinished business (their lower wages, and the lack of social supports for working motherhood), and the vagaries of this particular downturn, which has been especially merciless in male-dominated sectors like construction and manufacturing.
(52) CommentsApril 6, 2009
-
Shamelessly Exploiting Natasha Richardson
By Betsy Reed
Now this is truly sick. "Canadacare May Have Killed Natasha" says the New York Post, trumpeting an article written by Cory Franklin, first published by the Chicago Tribune (and given splashy play by the Daily Beast). Just as we are gearing up to begin debate in this country over a much-needed public healthcare plan comes a story perfectly calculated to arouse the fears of Americans that "socialized medicine" would endanger their health. Leaving aside for a minute the baselessness of those fears--and the bad taste involved in this nakedly political exploitation of an admired (and progressive) actress's tragic death--there's one little problem with Franklin's theory. It's wrong.
Richardson, Franklin writes, "required an immediate CT scan for diagnosis" after the head injury she sustained in a skiing accident. But, he claims, the hospital in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, where she was treated, was not a "facility capable of treatment." Franklin notes that, while "it hasn't been reported whether the hospital has a CT scanner, …CT scanners are less common in Canada." And he goes on to say that people who criticize the private US system for having too many specialized services like CT scanners are ignoring that "it is better to have resources and not need them than to need resources and not have them."
So Franklin's argument is based on the assumption that the hospital in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts lacked the equipment it would have needed to diagnose Richardson, all because of the decrepit state of government-run medicine.
(131) CommentsMarch 26, 2009
-
A 'Clean' CEDAW
By Betsy Reed
In the coming months, the Obama Administration and the Senate will have the chance to right a major wrong of the Bush era: the US government's refusal--along with such beacons of women's liberation as Sudan, Iran, Qatar and Somalia--to ratify CEDAW, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted by the General Assembly in 1979.
What does CEDAW promise? Guaranteed maternity benefits. The right to equal pay. (And no, Lily Ledbetter didn't give us that. The right to sue after you've been discriminated against for years is not the same as the right to be free from discrimination.) A commitment, at the broadest level, to eliminate acts of discrimination against women--i.e., to prohibit them, and to punish them when they do occur.
It's good stuff. One of the best things about the treaty is that it requires governments periodically to review and evaluate their policies and programs relating to women's equality, provoking what Human Rights Watch's Marianne Mollmann calls "a democratic dialogue" about women's rights, which has already occurred in some of the 184 signatory nations, including Peru.
(31) CommentsMarch 12, 2009
- Atrios
- Arts and Letters Daily
- The Caucus
- Campus Progress
- Crooks and Liars
- The Daily Gotham
- Daily Kos
- Echidne of the Snakes
- Ezra Klein
- FAIR
- Feministe
- Feministing
- Firedoglake
- Glenn Greenwald
- Gothamist
- In these Times
- Hendrik Hertzberg
- Huffington Post
- Hullabaloo
- Matthew Yglesias
- Media Matters
- Mother Jones
- My DD
- New York Review of Books
- Openleft
- Pam's House Blend
- Pandagon
- Political Wire
- The Progressive
- RaceWire
- Real Clear Politics
- Roberto Lovato
- Romenesko
- Swing State Project
- Talking Points Memo
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Tapped
- Tech President
- Tompaine
- The Washington Note
- Utne Reader
- Wonkette
- ZNet
RSS