U.S. politics

The Godsend that is Google


All my life I have been plagued with a compulsion to know more. Television shows, movies, newspaper or magazine articles and books sent me running to the library to find more information on whatever, or whoever, struck my odd fancy.

I remember one blissful summer during university when I lived right across the street from the public library.

Right across the street!

The hours I whiled away in the non-fiction stacks, thumbing through tomes on subjects so trivial I might as well have been aspiring to a career on Jeopardy. But it was heavenly.

While I still love researching “by hand”, I am more likely to google something today than not.

“Google it.”

Bestowing action on a noun. Did that become commonplace with the rise of the search engine? Or have we always been inclined to morphing words?

My latest search topic is Edward R. Murrow and McCarthyism.

I don’t recall spending a lot of time on Sen. McCarthy in school. Most of what I know about the blacklisting and persecution of that time, I learned through the movies and reading about the entertainment industry. For example my googling today is a result of watching Good Night, Good Luck last evening. Well, watching half of it anyway. It’s not riveting but so much of history – the really important stuff – falls into this category it seems.

The movie, and the era it chronicles, has modern day implications.

Instead of a black list, we have a no fly and watch lists.

Instead of the media calling American’s attention to the misuse of power and pointing out how easily it could happen to anyone, our media distracts – when it doesn’t aid and abet.

The movie is drier than dust and unless you know that time period, and the industry, it’s hard to figure out who the players are aside from Murrow, Fred Friendly and William Paley. However, the irony of the fact that it was the media using McCarthy’s own words to bring him down, and the fact that this first use of “sound-bites” is what is now killing democracy in the U.S. by inches and yards, makes it worth slogging through.

The movie starts with a 1958 speech Murrow gave that all but ended his career at CBS. My research indicates he was not unaware of the effect he’d had on the television news industry and was uncomfortable even with the tools he helped pioneer. The speech reflects this when he accuses television, in so many words, of being an opiate of the masses* when it should be a tool of enlightenment for them.

A good movie for election year viewing and a not uninteresting mini-research sojourn either.

*A little irony in my choice of phrases as Karl Marx first used it to describe religion which I guess you could say television replaced.

Sarah Palin: My New Piece at Moms Speak Up


Thinking about Sarah Palin today and the fuss about her daughter. Apparently it is heating up the long simmering “mommy wars” again, much to the delight of the media, but what does being an elected official have to do with parenting? Isn’t there a divide between career and family that shouldn’t be crossed when deciding what is important – really important – about the future POTUS and his/her running mate?

Check out my article and let me know what you think.

Say Goodbye to Self Control


In honor of the Democratic Convention, I am breaking my No POTUS rule to remind everyone (and by everyone I mean women) why Obama should be elected this coming November.

The Bush Administration has decided to unilaterally redefine what constitutes an abortion based on religious tenets rather than accepted medical/scientific fact. The unilateral part shouldn’t surprise anyone. When hasn’t the Bush Administration pandered and subverted in its own best interests?

What should alarm us, even those of us with sincere religious beliefs, is that the definition is so broad that it will effectively bar women from obtaining prescription birth control and will have a profoundly negative effect on research into a variety of health issues from infertility to stem cell therapy to cancer.

I have thought all along that the Pro-Lifers’ real target was the denial of birth control to as many women of child bearing age as possible. The conservative right cannot hope to force us back to the never existed at all hey-day of Reagan’s imaginary America if women are able to control their own reproductive processes.

It’s all about shoving the horse back through a closed barn door, people. It won’t be pretty. And don’t think for a minute that a McCain regime will roll any of this back.

The right in the U.S. are all about stripping women of any and all rights we have gained since the early 1970’s, and McCain especially is hoping that women aren’t looking up his real voting but instead are blinding by his ad campaign. The man is not a maverick. He is a slave to his party and its base – ultra conservatives – and a religious right so fanatical that Islamic jihadists could learn things from them.

Freedom is at stake this election but not in Iraq, ladies.