Trans/plant/portation

I’ve devolved as a news-watcher over the last 25 years. If I waited until the evening to get the news, during dinner with my parents in the late 1980s, I hardly ever see broadcast news now. The promise of American 24-hour news channels never came to pass, in my opinion; instead of thorough coverage from news desks around the world, it’s mind-numbing commentary from uninformed talking heads who seem much more interested in their own product placement contracts than in communicating about our global goings on. Those news syndicates and news desks in other countries have dried up, but what was their other option after years of little funding or support from the channel executives? Now big name news outlets like CNN use amateur video–even solicit it openly–to serve as content providers. So it is that people’s backyards were frequent film footage sources during every large snow of the winter last year.

The GOP primary race has put me over the edge, though. On top of the sensationalized headlines, anemic interest stories, vapid policy analysis, and over-reliance on technology gimmicks (I’m looking at you, hologram interview), now there are countless stupid sound bites from what looks like little more than well funded bigots running to disassemble the Office of the President. Read More…

By now, chances are you’ve seen the news that the Susan G. Komen Foundation defunded its support of Planned Parenthood, which it had established in 2005. Pressure for the foundation to stop the support began almost immediately, and the national Susan G. Komen board resisted this pressure until yesterday. I spoke with Gina Popovic, Executive Vice President of the Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, who stressed that Komen is not the bad actor in all of this, the anti-choice activists are.

“We don’t want a pink on pink war,” said Ms. Popovic.

One of the first thoughts to cross my mind when I read the headline on the Washington Post about Komen’s PP defunding was the completely inaccurate statement that Senator John Kyl made last April:

Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. Read More…

Every single Republican who threw their hat into the 2012 Presidential election season has been mocked mercilessly by the press and the general public. Many of them *cough Pawlenty cough* have looked like little more than a deer in headlights or like a raving lunatic (read: Herman Cain), with ideas either too bland to capture anyone’s imagination, or with statements so fringe nobody could take them seriously. The litany of horrible one-liners that came out of the nonstop GOP debate schedule made all of these contenders look completely unqualified or incapable of running the White House office supply order, much less the country. And poll after poll showed President Obama significantly ahead of not just the field of self-named candidates, but ahead of a generic Republican opponent.

Many of us have asked, what is going on here? Surely there are informed, reasonable Republicans with solid experience who could be in this campaign–not that anyone comes to mind in the ten seconds I’m willing to think about it. But out of 313 million Americans, isn’t there someone with foreign policy experience, a non-reductive reading of the Constitution, and a willingness to work in a bipartisan way in Washington, DC? Read More…

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Erm, maybe not happy. We are, after all, thinking about a civil rights leader who was assassinated. But hey, it’s a great day for a furniture sale! Or a quick trip to KMart to see what’s been price-slashed.

I mean, we’re post-race in this country, right? So there’s nothing race-related about calling the First Lady “Mrs. YoMama.” There’s no race in any of the billboards that have popped up across the nation of President Obama in a turban, or in the incessant, it’s-been-proven-wrong notion that he was not born in the USA. There’s no racism in saying that black city kids should become janitors so that they can learn a work ethic. Of course Rick Santorum wasn’t racist when he went on the stump and said he didn’t want to give black people taxpayers’ money. They were “blah people,” he said in a correction. Read More…

I’ve pondered how to write this post for a while, at least since the third debate of this long GOP primary season, but in all honesty, I don’t know where to begin. We’ve seen one ludicrous statement after another:

April, 2011: Why did it take him two and a half years if it was no story? I made the assumption, and I think a lot of Americans did, there must be something that he wants to hide, there must be something on his birth certificate he doesn’t want people to know. If it was an issue, why wouldn’t you just put the issue away? –Rick Santorum, speaking about the President’s birth certificate

June 7, 2011:  I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table. –Herman Cain

Here’s another guest blog post from the always insightful and heartful s.e. smith; today the focus is on the death penalty and Rick Perry’s problematic framing of the issue.

A moment of fireworks occurred during the GOP debate this week when the moderator asked Texas Governor Rick Perry if he ‘struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of [the 234 Texas inmates executed in modern times] might have been innocent?’ Before the moderator could even finish the question, the bloodthirsty crowd broke out in applause, raising eyebrows among many observers. The section of transcript describing the interrupted question and subsequent applause has been widely circulated.

What hasn’t been as widely discussed was Perry’s answer,which was honestly more chilling than the applause: ‘No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all.’ Read More…

With summer comes the spate of anti-gay sentiment, or at least it feels that way to me. Maybe it’s because state supreme courts are wrapping up their year and the toughest decisions come out in June, or thereabouts. Of course this summer season we have the GOP primary jockeying, so as candidates are scoping for uber-conservative votes, they’re more than willing to say things like “gay families aren’t families.” We could blame the incessant “heat dome” for frying people’s brains and in their heat exhaustion, causing chronic foot-in-mouth disease. Whatever the cause, I am beyond sick of it. Let’s call a scapegoat a scapegoat. In this time of financial strife and political cowardice, I think it’s fitting to look at all the ways in which people crap on the “gays,” and excuse me, Dan Savage, but I’m using it as an umbrella term for queer, not a reference to your clique in Seattle. Read More…

Walla Walla suffered its first homicide of the year with a gang-related drive-by shooting on Tuesday night. Also, it was the first gunshot death in the city as far back as anyone can remember, which makes it ipso facto the first for us residents. When 20-year-old Julio Cessar Martinez was rolled into the emergency department at St. Mary’s Hospital, I can only imagine how the trauma team responded. They’re much more likely to come across a farm machinery accident, drug overdose, car crash victim, or domestic violence survivor than this. Presumably, this is a foreign moment to Walla Wallans, who are bent on creating a wine economy to draw in the nouveau rich from the West Side. As the economy sluggishly picks up speed, still in the shadow of the 2008 credit collapse, downtown is springing up all kinds of new shops and eateries to cater not to local folks so much as the weekenders who need a break from their hectic lives at Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

This violence is unheard of. Or is it? Read More…

I’ve said it before, and I suppose I’m saying it again; I don’t think there’s a progressive movement. I mean, of course, there’s a progressive movement, in that there are causes on the liberal and radical left that push specific interests. But the idea that a broad left wing will show up to march through the Mall in Washington, D.C. on a single issue, with no major fracture points on display, or that we’re beholden to a single figure who is speaks for even a majority of us, is dead on the vine. Read More…

We took you to Seattle this weekend to meet up with some old friends and celebrate a union of two women we know. It was sunny if not warm, but you probably didn’t notice any of that. We’ve learned to appreciate what the late-day light looks like as it filters through a cumulus cloud and falls on gently moving water from the Pacific. We know to watch it when walking on old wood, or to hold onto a handrail as we lean over the sound and crane our necks to spy on a lone sea lion who has wandered near us and who makes us giggle as he snorts when he comes up for air.

I’m not sure about the world into which you’ll be born, and I apologize for that, little one. Read More…