http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/nyregion/10cnd-spitzer.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

I am so fucking sick of being disappointed by elected officials. It makes me ill that our political culture is, it would seem, so universally corrupt.

I don't care if it's nothing new. It's pathetic.

It is terrible to be a woman in Afghanistan.

57% of marriages are to brides under 16--sometimes as young as six.
87% of women complain of abuse, half of which is sexual.
The rate of women who die in childbirth in Afghanistan is the highest in the world, up with Sierra Leone.
88% of women are illiterate.
5% go to secondary school.
Over 60% of marriages are forced.

The thing that shocks me the most? So bad is it that the rate of self-immolation has doubled from before we invaded.

Just to be clear, self-immolation means burning yourself to death.

From an NYT article about the growing unease in Iran's ruling elite that they're about to get swept in the upcoming elections--leading to repression of liberal elements:

Ms. Sherkat, a former religious revolutionary turned pragmatic feminist, has kept Zanan open for 16 years and 152 issues, despite financial and political pressures. She has managed to inform her readers without overly infuriating the mullahs — until now. According to reports from Iran, authorities said that the magazine was a “threat to the psychological security of the society” because it showed Iranian women in a “black light.”

The truth is, the magazine respected and celebrated Iranian women by offering articles on health, parenting, legal issues, literature and women’s achievements. One recent article argued that laws codifying unequal treatment of women in Islamic countries lacked justification under Islamic law and could be changed. The only psychological threat Zanan posed was to the regime’s authoritarian and anti-feminist pathology.

Sounds great to me. One problem: the word anti-feminist.

This is not a theoretical argument. It's not a matter of being anti-feminist; it's anti-women. You can say it's an unimportant point of semantics, but this kind of perceptive distinction is what implicit misogyny is all about.

OH MY GOD YES.

THANK YOU.

This is why I can't relate to Obamaniacs and why the more I think about this election the less excited I get.

I feel a personal need to vote for Hillary Clinton and a policy obligation, I think, to vote for Barack Obama.

Every time I tell myself I've decided one way or the other, my stomach turns over.



My prediction for tomorrow is that I will vote for Barack and then blub because I feel like I somehow betrayed Hillary; because I couldn't vote for her also.

It really is a personal thing, though. I feel like she's someone I know who has worked so hard and done everything right (not to say she's perfect or never made a mistake, but if your goal in life is to be President, she's been pretty damn well on track), and could never be good enough (see crazed detractors), and is coming so close--and whom I like and respect--and I will not have done what I could to get her there.

Not to mention I would really like to vote for a woman.

But I just feel a policy obligation to go the other way. I suppose IL was gonna go for Obama anyway (fucking electoral college), but but but meh.



I really hope after Super Tuesday I can stop reading election stuff for a while and, y'know, have some idea what's going on in the world.

EDIT: I suppose it's worth mentioning that I've been in a bit of a funk for the past few days and I have found myself more than usually willing to blub, and so the above angst should be taken with a grain of seasonal affective disorder or wet shoes or what have you.

Arne Duncan is getting the nod for Secretary of Education, it seems. Apparently, this is Obama refusing to take sides on the education reform war:

Mr. Duncan, a 44-year-old Harvard graduate, has raised achievement in the nation’s third-largest school district [as superintendent] and often faced the ticklish challenge of shuttering failing schools and replacing ineffective teachers, usually with improved results.

He represents a compromise choice in the debate that has divided Democrats in recent months over the proper course for public-school policy after the Bush years.

In June, rival nationwide groups of educators circulated competing educational manifestos, with one group espousing a get-tough policy based on pushing teachers and administrators harder to raise achievement, and another arguing that schools alone could not close the racial achievement gap and urging new investments in school-based health clinics and other social programs to help poor students learn.

Mr. Duncan was the only big-city superintendent to sign both manifestos.

That's as far as I read the article this morning, and I thought, Gee, maybe he just thinks we need both to save our rapidly deteriorating, already problematic school system. Maybe this is Obama saying we can and should have it all on this one.

But then every damn blog post I've read on this is all "Ooh, Obama's threading the needle again!" "Obama refuses to take sides!" This is the one that put me over the edge:

...apparently Obama decided he didn't really want to pick sides...[with the] pick of Arne Duncan, the latest in his almost unbroken series of senior staff needle-threading exercises. [...] There's something a little surreal about all this, though. At the risk of sounding like an idiot TV talking head, I'm beginning to wonder if Obama plans to appoint anyone who's even the teensiest bit controversial to his senior staff.

Dude, seriously. How is it so impossible that "not picking sides" is in itself controversial? Huh? Because it is. It's controversial to each side, which doesn't like the other. It's controversial to the people who want to know how we'll pay for all this. There's a story there, if you just read the damn NYT article a little further down:

In straddling the two camps, Mr. Duncan seemed to reflect Mr. Obama’s own impatience with what he has called “tired educational debates.”

In his last major educational speech of the campaign, Mr. Obama said: “It’s been Democrat versus Republican, vouchers versus the status quo, more money versus more reform. There’s partisanship and there’s bickering, but no understanding that both sides have good ideas.”

I MEAN, JESUS. I, for one, was excited about this until all these bloggo killjoys came along.