OMFG!

From Islamabad, Pakistan:

A Pakistani lawmaker defended a decision by southwestern tribesmen to bury five women alive because they wanted to choose their own husbands, telling stunned members of Parliament this week to spare him their outrage.

“These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them,” Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Baluchistan province, said Saturday. “Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid.”

The women, three of whom were teenagers, were first shot and then thrown into a ditch.

They were still breathing as their bodies were covered with rocks and mud, according media reports and human rights activists, who said their only “crime” was that they wished to marry men of their own choosing

Zehri told a packed and flabbergasted Parliament on Friday that Baluch tribal traditions helped stop obscenity and then asked fellow lawmakers not to make a big fuss about it.

Many stood up in protest, saying the executions were “barbaric” and demanding that discussions continue Monday. But a handful said it was an internal matter of the deeply conservative province.

“I was shocked,” said lawmaker Nilofar Bakhtiar, who pushed for legislation calling for perpetrators of so-called honour killings to be punished when she served as minister of women’s affairs under the last government.

“I feel that we’ve gone back to the starting point again,” she said. “It’s really sad for me.”

The incident allegedly occurred one month ago in Baba Kot, a remote village in Jafferabad district, after the women decided to defy tribal elders and arrange marriages in a civil court, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission.

They were said to have been abducted at gunpoint by six men, forced into a vehicle and taken to a remote field, where they were beaten, shot and then buried alive, it said, accusing local authorities of trying to hush up the killings.

One of perpetrators was allegedly related to a top provincial official, it said.

There are just no words …

Repression in Minnesota

Goodness.  And everyone critisized China for suppressing free speech, human rights and peaceful protest during the Olympics!

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a “hippie house,” where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with “peaceful kids” who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as “Do you have Terminator ready?” as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.

To see that video and read the rest, go here

Sarah Palin Sexism Watch

Melissa McEwan’s #4 at Shakesville.  Wow.  Explosions of misogyny.

And see Historiann’s analysis of the Palin choice, excellent as always.

Woman Poet Series

The Daughter Goes To Camp

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning—
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly’s wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to reassemble the hot
gritty molecules in the car, to
make you appear like a holograph
on the back seat, pull you out of nothing
as I once did—but you were really gone,
the cab glossy as a slit caul out of
which you had slipped, the air glittering
electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

Sharon Olds

Sally Mann

“At Warm Springs”

Sally Mann

For more on Sally Mann, see Art:21

And a review of the biographical documentary, What Remains, at NYT

Palin and Same Sex Benefits

From County Fair:

In an August 29 article, the Associated Press reported that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin “opposes gay marriage — constitutionally banned in Alaska before her time — but exercised a veto that essentially granted benefits to gay state employees and their partners.” However, the AP did not note, as the AP had previously reported, that the bill she vetoed in December 2006 was a response to a 2005 Alaska Supreme Court ruling that the state’s policy of denying spousal benefits to same-sex partners of public employees violated the Alaska Constitution. The bill would have prohibited state officials from granting such benefits despite a 2006 state Supreme Court order requiring them to issue regulations granting benefits pursuant to the 2005 decision by January 1, 2007. Further, the AP did not note that Palin stated that she vetoed the bill because the Alaska attorney general had advised her that it was unconstitutional, not because she believed same-sex partners of public employees should receive benefits. Indeed, Palin’s office stated in its veto message: “The Governor’s veto does not signal any change or modification to her disagreement with the action and order by the Alaska Supreme Court.” Further, the AP did not note that as a candidate for governor, Palin also reportedly supported a ballot question banning benefits for same-sex couples.

Read the rest here

The Beauty of Balconies

From Newfoundland writer Kathleen Winter’s  ”Montreal Journal” at the St. John’s Telegram:

I once watched a bird making a nest, and understood how the circle (and by extension, the half circle, the spiral, the curlicue, and all the variations visible in wrought iron and other decoration) comes not from whimsy but from tender toil and a lust for survival. The bird stands in the chaotic mess of leaf and fibre, and it turns, standing in the same spot, its body a compass and its beak the point of that compass. The circle arrives though the bird does not think about making a circle. The circle is an unconscious result of standing in one place and turning around, just trying to make a sympathetic space to bring up your young.There is something tender about the delicateness with which Montreal staircases cling to the sides of the triplexes of St. Denis and Papineau and all the other streets of the city: if you look at them from even a short distance, the stairs and balconies appear very fragile and slender, which adds to the feeling that the whole story of the street is about ascension. The whole street points toward the sky; the city wants you to rise up off the pavement and float in the air.

And there’s another thing: a likeness, in the calligraphy of wrought iron, to the alphabet itself, as if the balconies and staircases were trying to write a letter to the person who is cycling or walking on the street below.”Dear one,” says the letter, “can you count the stairs, the balconies, of Montreal? There is no counting them, because they are part illusion. Do you really think a city needs this many balconies, this number of stairs? If you look away from the staircase above the patisserie on Rue Belanger, it disappears. Do you know who put it there, and why?”

The letter is torn here. A person can’t read the last part, because on this kind of calligraphy you have to walk to get the meaning. You have to walk on the lines and curl your fingers around the ribbons and tails of the lettering. You have to become part of the text; fragile, ascending. Like the bird who draws her circle, you help create the beauty.

 

Read the whole thing here

or at Kathleen’s blog, we drank cachaca and smoked the green cheroot

Food Related Illnesses in Canada

Professor Rick Holley, a food-safety expert at the University of Manitoba, critisizes the inability of the federal government to track foods that lead to food-born illnesses:

… in the wake of the deadly outbreak of listeria linked to ready-to-eat meats, he said Canada is ill-equipped to track food-related illnesses. The country lacks the surveillance systems that could lead to better detection of food-borne illnesses, he said, raising questions about whether health authorities are doing all they can to prevent sickness and death.

“We are hamstrung in our inability to identify risk,” he said in an interview. “If we can’t identify the risk, we can’t manage it. And if we can’t manage it, we have no control over what’s happening in terms of food-borne illness.”

[...]

Prof. Holley said Canadian officials will be just as unprepared for the next food-borne illness because they are not collecting information on what foods are most likely to make consumers sick.

This is in stark contrast to the United States, which takes a much more active approach to addressing food safety. Through a federal program called FoodNet, the U.S. monitors trends in specific food-borne illnesses, a process that involves tracking the health of 15 per cent of the population, or 45 million people. The program, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, allows health officials to collect data on what foods are making a certain percentage of the population sick every year.

Inspectors at the FDA recently traced a salmonella outbreak that left 1,437 people across the United States and five in Canada sick to a pepper farm in Mexico. In a report released this week, the CDC said jalapeno peppers were a major source of contamination and that tomatoes were a possible source.

Prof. Holley said there is nothing comparable to the FoodNet system in Canada.

“We really can’t get the overall picture,” he said. “We can’t focus on where there is a need for attention.”

The whole article is at the Globe and Mail

Transgender Complaint to War Crimes Court

From AFP:

A transgendered female survivor of the Khmer Rouge will lodge a complaint to the UN-backed war crimes court seeking the regime’s former leaders stand trial for sexual violence.

“This is the first complaint before the (Khmer Rouge court) concerning sexual violence under the Khmer Rouge regime,” said a statement on Friday by Silke Stuzinsky, a lawyer representing civil complaints by victims of the regime.

“To date, a widespread silence and/or confusion has covered up crimes of sexual violence,” the statement said.

The complaint, to be filed next week, will seek to hold senior leaders responsible for numerous rapes the woman — who had undergone a full sex change from being a man — suffered as well as her several imprisonments in re-education camps and prisons.

“She was punished for having committed moral offences and for behaving as a woman. She was forced to cut her long hair and to wear men’s clothing (as was the custom under the Khmer Rouge),” Stuzinsky’s statement said.

“She was threatened with death if she refused to marry a woman, and the Khmer Rouge ordered the performance of sexual intercourse as part of the marital obligation,” the statement added.

Five former regime leaders have been detained by the tribunal, which was convened in 2006 after nearly a decade of haggling between the United Nations and the Cambodian government.

Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed, as the communist Khmer Rouge dismantled modern Cambodian society in a bid to forge an agrarian utopia during their 1975-79 rule.

Public trials are expected to begin this year, but delays in the process have raised fears that the elderly defendants could die before going to court.

Silence Isn’t Golden

Glenn Greenwald on what didn’t get said at the DNC:

During that time [the last eight years], our Government has systematically tortured people using sadistic techniques ordered by the White House; illegally and secretly spied on its own citizens; broken more laws than can be counted based on the twisted theory that the President has that power; asserted the authority to arrest and detain even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and hold them for years without charges; abolished habeas corpus; created secret prisons in Eastern Europe and a black hole of lawlessness in Guantanamo; and explicitly abandoned and destroyed virtually every political value the U.S. has long claimed to embrace.

Other than a fleeting reference to such matters by John Kerry in a (surprisingly effective) speech which most networks did not broadcast, one would not know, listening to the Democratic Convention, that any of those things have happened. Even our unprovoked and indescribably destructive attack on Iraq, based on purely false pretenses, has received little attention. Those things simply don’t exist, even as part of the itemized laundry list of Democratic grievances about the Bush administration. The overriding impression one has is that the only things really wrong during the last eight years in this country are that gas prices are high and not everyone has health insurance. Those are obviously very significant problems, but they are garden-variety political issues which don’t begin to capture the extremism that has predominated in this country under GOP rule, and don’t remotely approach conveying the crises on numerous fronts the country faces.

Read the whole thing here

These are the things that have affronted the conscience for eight years and I’m damned pissed off that no one really went after Bush for his crimes.  I pretty much started blogging because I couldn’t bear my own silence about these crimes.  I didn’t think the DNC would be the place where anyone got called to task for any of this.  But it’s still unforgiveable that it wasn’t.  Silence is complicity.  The only complicity required of us.