Yes, people in other countries are startled to learn we have no federally mandated paid maternity leave. I just heard from a startled person on Twitter. Employers are free to provide it, but they’re also free not to.

NPR did a piece on the subject last July.

If you’ve been paying attention to the political news in the past couple of years, you know that the U.S. stands virtually alone in not mandating paid leave of any type for its workers.

It’s because we love freedom. We love the freedom of employers not to provide it, and we love the freedom of workers to be screwed over.

President Obama likewise brought new attention to paid leave this year as well, when he pointed out in his State of the Union address that the U.S. is the only advanced economy that doesn’t mandate paid sick or maternity leave for its workers.

He was right about that — it’s true that most American workers are covered by the Family Medical Leave Act, which allows workers up to 12 weeks of leave per year to care for family members. But that leave is unpaid.

I remember fuming about that during the Clinton administration (which is when the act was passed) – the media were making such a big deal of it but it was just unpaid leave. God we’re pathetic. We’re the only advanced economy that doesn’t. What a miserable distinction.

But of course our elections are sold to the highest bidder, so what do I expect?

The U.S.’s campaign finance system helps businesses keep these laws off the books, says one expert.

“Money plays a role in politics in many countries, but the extent to which the amount of dollars [is] spent on campaigns in the United States just dwarfs the amount spent in campaigns elsewhere,” says Jody Heymann, dean of the School of Public Health at UCLA. “The ability [to make] very large corporate contributions plays a much more substantial role in our elections than in other countries.”

Another miserable distinction.

Gulalai Ismail:

I had a wonderful start of the year, got to spend 1st of this year with amazing Hadiqa Bashir; a young activist from Swat who is fighting against child marriages in Swat, and she is just 14 years herself. She is very committed to the cause, and is an inspiration.

We in the US so easily lose sight of how awful we look to the rest of the world.

The UN gave three human rights experts from that rest of the world plane tickets to the US so that they could check out how women fare here. They were appalled.

A delegation of human rights experts from Poland, the United Kingdom and Costa Rica spent 10 days this month touring the United States so they can prepare a report on the nation’s overall treatment of women. The three women, who lead a United Nations working group on discrimination against women, visited Alabama, Texas and Oregon to evaluate a wide range of U.S. policies and attitudes, as well as school, health and prison systems.

The delegates were appalled by the lack of gender equality in America. They found the U.S. to be lagging far behind international human rights standards in a number of areas, including its 23 percent gender pay gap, maternity leave, affordable child care and the treatment of female migrants in detention centers.

Also domestic violence? Sexual harassment on the job? Sexual harassment everywhere else? Voice in government? Visibility in the culture?

The most telling moment of the trip, the women told reporters on Friday, was when they visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced the hostile political climate around women’s reproductive rights.

“We were harassed. There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,” said Frances Raday, the delegate from the U.K. The men repeatedly shouted, “You’re murdering children!” at them as soon as they neared the clinic, even though Raday said they are clearly past childbearing age.

“It’s a kind of terrorism,” added Eleonora Zielinska, the delegate from Poland. “To us, it was shocking.”

It is shocking.

Another main area of concern for the delegation is violence against women — particularly gun violence. Women are 11 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than in other high-income countries, and most of those murdersare perpetrated by an intimate partner.

Well, it’s like this – we love guns, and we hate women.

While the delegates were shocked by many things they saw in the U.S., perhaps the biggest surprise of their trip, they said, was learning that women in the country don’t seem to know what they’re missing.

“So many people really believe that U.S. women are way better off with respect to rights than any woman in the world,” Raday said. “They would say, ‘Prove it! What do you mean other people have paid maternity leave?'”

Look at it this way: that illusion probably cheers them up.

Ok so the Bundy men are Mormons. They think “God” is telling them to grab public land and threaten anyone who comes to evict them.

As roughly 20 militants continue to occupy a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon, observers are left scratching their heads. Why would an out-of-state rancher lead a self-styled militia in defending federal land far from home?

Because God told him to, Ammon Bundy said in a YouTube video posted Friday.

Oh yes? I wonder why God didn’t remind them to take plenty of food.

Bundy is a son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for his stand-off with the federal government over cattle grazing.

That is, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for threatening to shoot federal officials and getting away with it. Known for refusing to obey a perfectly legitimate order by duly constituted authority, using guns to back it up – and getting away with it without so much as a parking ticket.

In the video, Bundy, who is Mormon, said he believed God wanted him to defend Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, a father-and-son duo convicted of arson on federal land in Oregon.

“The Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds,” Bundy said in the video. “If we allowed the Hammonds to continue to be punished, there would be accountability.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just grow up for a change? He might as well say Santa Claus wasn’t pleased; it would make just as much sense.

Bundy’s rhetoric, though consistent with scripture and early Mormon teaching, is now considered extreme, and [scholar Susanna] Morrill is skeptical about attributing his motives entirely to faith.

“While the Mormon stuff seems important, it also seems like these folks just have their own agenda and may be using Mormonism for that,” she said.

Church leaders issued a statement Monday condemning militants’ actions:

“Church leaders strongly condemn the armed seizure of the facility and are deeply troubled by the reports that those who have seized the facility suggest that they are doing so based on scriptural principles. This armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis.”

But the Bundy gang can just say the church leaders have fallen into corruption. There’s no way to check this kind of bullshit.

Still the strangely placating, gentle, tactful note when law enforcement talks about the armed men occupying an isolated federal building in rural Oregon.

The FBI has taken charge of the law enforcement response to an armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, saying that it will work with local and state authorities to seek “a peaceful resolution to the situation.”

“The situation” – aka the violent takeover of a government building by armed men. I say “violent” because the men are armed, which is unmistakably a threat of violence.

The occupation of a remote federal wildlife refuge followed a peaceful march and rally held over the weekend to support two local ranchers convicted of arson.

It wasn’t peaceful. They should stop calling it peaceful. The marchers were armed. Can you imagine what would happen if lefty marchers started showing up armed? Nobody would call it peaceful and nobody would back off and wait politely for them to go home.

Bundy’s father, Cliven, is a Nevada rancher who has sparred with the government for years and who in 2014 had an armed standoff with federal agents trying to prevent him from illegally grazing his cattle on federal land.

So much tact! Cliven Bundy pulled a gun (or many guns) on federal agents who were attempting to enforce the law. He didn’t “have” an armed standoff, as one “has” a cold or an appointment. He violently resisted legitimate law enforcement – because he wanted to go on stealing grazing from federal land.

#TamirRice

This guy Spencer Sunshine researches white supremacist groups and he has some tips for understanding the fascist uprising in Oregon.

One, it’s a land grab.

Despite the talk about supporting the Hammond family in Burns, Oregon, the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters is actually part of a long-standing campaign by radical right-wingers to dismantle federal land ownership in the West. Some elected officials are working through mainstream channels to get lands transferred to state or county governments, or to allow them equal say over their use. But the Malheur takeover seems to be an attempt to spread a tactic of armed federal land takeovers. These armed groups are part of the “Patriot movement”—the successor to the 1990s militia movement—which has seen a rebirth since the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Armed robbery, in other words.

They’re conspiracy nuts. Their roots are in white supremacist movements, even though most of them are not (he says) ideological white supremacists themselves.

Four, federal policies have allowed this to happen.

Although there is no written federal rule that is publicly known, those who study the radical right largely believe that the federal government has a policy not to directly confront armed right-wing groups. The disastrous handling of the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges in the early 1990s apparently convinced the feds to take a softer approach. This seemed to have paid off when the Sovereign Citizens at the “Justus Township”surrendered peacefully in 1996. But after 9/11, even as the feds have cracked down hard on all kinds of radical political activity—for example, many eco-saboteurs who never killed or injured anyone were sentenced under terrorism laws—the radical right has received almost a complete pass.

Yeah, I’ve noticed.

The April 2014 standoff at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch—when Patriot movement activists came to the aid of a radical right-wing rancher who refused to pay his fees for grazing on public land and trained rifles on federal agents—was taken as a green light for similar actions. The federal government has not prosecuted Cliven Bundy or his allies for anything that happened there. This has apparently convinced the Bundy family (three of whom reportedly are at Malheur) that the feds will acquiesce to armed takeovers.

Well EXFUCKINGACTLY. Could they please pull their heads out of their asses and stop doing that now? Could they please for instance prosecute Cliven Fucking Bundy? Do they not realize that we can see them? That we can see law enforcement come down like a ton of bricks on scary shit like a guy selling single cigarettes while black, and waving a cheerful bye-bye to Cliven Fucking Bundy?

Sorry, but this stuff gets up my nose. I think it’s wrong and evil.

On Twitter:

Hari ‏@_har1_
NYT pieces on secular Bangladesh bloggers censored in Pakistan

Pic 1: Pak edition
Pic 2: original
via @salmanmasood

Another visit to the history files (via a remark by webmaster Josh Larios on Facebook) – the occupation of Colman School in Seattle.

The Pacific Northwest African American Museum, located in the old Colman School, at 2300 Massachusetts St. in Seattle, opened on March 8, 2008, with an estimated 3,000 visitors.  The surrounding neighborhood was swarming with cars and hundreds of people on foot converged from all directions.  Elected officials who took part in the opening included Governor Christine Gregoire, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, U. S. Representative Jim McDermott, Mayor Greg Nickels (b. 1955), King County Executive Ron Sims (b. 1948), and King County Councilman Larry Gossett (b. 1945).  It was a happy day for the African American community, which had dreamed of a museum for more than two decades.

It was an occupation that made it happen. The occupation lasted from 1985 to 1993.

In 1981, the Community Exchange, a multi-racial coalition, proposed an African American museum to  Mayor Charles Royer (b. 1939).  Three years later, a task force was formed to establish such a museum and included community members Omari Tahir Garrett, Mona Bailey, Esther Mumford, Ann Gerber, P. Razz Garrison, and Janice Cate.  In November 1985, disillusioned by the tardiness of the task force in finding a museum location, a group of African Americans moved into the vacant Colman School after it was closed when nearby Interstate 90 was expanded.

(Just weeks before, the Black Heritage Society had petitioned Walt Hundley (1929-2002), Superintendent of Parks and Recreation, for use of a room in the Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Center for a small museum.  He instead offered the small shelter house built by the WPA on the Colman playfield. The society decided against accepting this.)

The core group of activists occupying the building, which included Earl Debman, Omari Tahir-Garrett, Michael Greenwood, and Charlie James, stayed for more than eight years. The Seattle School District, not wanting a confrontation, told them they were trespassing but made no effort to dislodge them.  This has been said to be the longest act of civil disobedience in the country.

During those years the group, known as the Citizens Support Committee for the African American Heritage Museum/Cultural Center, used several rooms in the building for displays of books, artifacts, and art work and sponsored community activities including a forum on Aids and Racism.  The individual members of the group sacrificed much to keep their dream of a museum and cultural center alive. The building was cold and it cost them $500 a month to keep the gas-fired generator running.  A bucket of water was used for bathing or they went to homes of friends for showers.  Neighbors brought in plates of food and a few dollars were collected from black churches.

Notice it wasn’t about demanding the right to exploit public lands for personal profit.

In 1993, the occupation ended when the City of Seattle agreed to fund the museum.  Then came much discussion and disagreement between two groups, the activists and the more traditional leaders, who purported to represent the museum effort.  Robert Flowers, Vice President of  Washington Mutual, and James Fearne, an official with the Seattle Office of the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, both chaired the museum board at different times between 1993 and 2000.  It was fostered under the guidance of Denice Hunt (1948-1997), liaison to Mayor Norm Rice (b. 1943).  By 2000, Fearne said, “It’s been a really difficult thing to work with.  There have been lawsuits, there have been fist fights.  There has been so much difficulty and controversy about a museum at this site.  Maybe it’s better to regroup and look someplace else than keep fighting these battles” ( Ervin).

In 2003, The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, under the leadership of James Kelly, the executive director, bought the building from the Seattle School District for $800,000 for a museum and 36 units of affordable rental housing to be known as the Urban League Village.

Nothing about giving public lands to ranchers for $0.00, for some reason.

The 19,000-square-foot ground floor houses the museum with three galleries, a genealogy research area, an artist’s work space, a workroom, office space, a gift shop, and a cafe operated by St. Cloud’s Restaurant. There is an acknowledgment, at the entrance, of the sacrifices made by the activists and credit given to their vision that made the museum a reality.

No mention of guns or shoot-out or armed standoffs.

Robert Fisk in the Independent on the New Year’s explosion of executions in Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia’s binge of head-choppings – 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the executions – was worthy of Isis. Perhaps that was the point. For this extraordinary bloodbath in the land of the Sunni Muslim al-Saud monarchy – clearly intended to infuriate the Iranians and the entire Shia world – re-sectarianised a religious conflict which Isis has itself done so much to promote.

All that was missing was the video of the decapitations – although the Kingdom’s 158 beheadings last year were perfectly in tune with the Wahabi teachings of the ‘Islamic State’.  Macbeth’s ‘blood will have blood’ certainly applies to the Saudis, whose ‘war on terror’, it seems, now justifies any amount of blood, both Sunni and Shia.

It’s like this: the Saudis are our bastards, while IS are not. Loyalty is a virtue, right?

It will also present the West with that most embarrassing of Middle Eastern problems: the continuing need to cringe and grovel to the rich and autocratic monarchs of the Gulf while gently expressing their unease at the grotesque butchery which the Saudi courts have just dished out to the Kingdom’s enemies. Had Isis chopped off the heads of Sunnis and Shias in Raqqa – especially that of a troublesome Shia priest like Sheikh Nimr – we can be sure that Dave Cameron would have been tweeting his disgust at so loathsome an act. But the man who lowered the British flag on the death of the last king of this preposterous Wahabi state will be using weasel words to address this bit of head-chopping.

Our bastards.

I’m glad to see that NARAL hasn’t bought into the bullshit.

We believe that women should have the option to choose abortion. Today they can, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. But even though access to abortion is legal, our right to it is far from safe. Anti-choice groups attack our right to choose at every opportunity.

The Problem

Anti-choice people want to outlaw abortion, regardless of the woman’s situation. They will stop at nothing to make it harder for women to access abortion. They even target the doctors who provide abortion care.

Anti-choice people use many of the following tactics to reach their goals:

• Violent tactics that intimidate doctors and patients
• Abortion bans that block legal abortion at certain points in pregnancy or that block safe abortion procedures
• Insurance coverage bans that make it more difficult for women to afford abortion care
• Unnecessary regulations that target abortion providers in order to shut them down
• Restrictions on low-income women’s access to abortion and other health care
• Dangerous laws that jeopardize young women’s health and safety
• “Crisis pregnancy centers” that intentionally mislead women
• “Personhood” measures that would ban abortion
• Distortions of science to instill fear
• Restrictions on women’s access to RU 486
• Refusal clauses that deny women basic health services

At least NARAL still gets that the attack on abortion rights is a war on women.

Lady Mondegreen offered me a comment she made elsewhere as a guest post and I snapped it up.

If you insist that the meaning of woman can no longer be tied to biological sex (“a woman is an adult female human being,” where “female” means “body which produces egg rather than sperm cells,” or “body which most closely resembles those had by egg-producers,”) then how do you define it?

I’ve been told that a woman is “a person who identifies as a woman,” a circular definition that reduces “woman” to a self-chosen “identity.” It says nothing about why anyone would choose to be a woman. It also erases millions of women who never chose their identity as women, and certainly have no say in the social implications of being one–in other words, the class of people, worldwide, who are oppressed because they were born in bodies that produced ova rather than sperm (or were externally physically indistinguishable from them.)

When I was a kid, there was this thing called “femininity.” It consisted of the presumed attributes of a woman: passivity, gentleness, nurturing tendencies (including a deep desire to have and care for babies,) fondness for pastels, intuitiveness, and other qualities. Some of the qualities were negative: inferior intelligence (especially with regards to math and science,) relative lack of leadership qualities, indecisiveness, pettiness, a fascination with trivialities, a tendency to gossip. They were all normative.

I don’t think it’s enough to divorce the negative qualities from “femininity.” And I don’t think it’s enough to divorce “femininity” from “biologically female.” I think we need to divorce “femininity” (and its contemporary equivalent, woman-as-gender,) from “woman.”

But we do need to acknowledge the class of people who are despised and oppressed because they were born in bodies that produce ova rather than sperm. Furthermore, we need to acknowledge that they are oppressed, in large part, because of the bodies they were born into–however they identify (assuming they have the privilege to “identify” as anything, outside of what their society tells them they are.)

(And as long as saying the above triggers abuse [“TERF,” “bigot,” “cis scum,” “subhuman,”] the movement for equal rights for egg-bearers is going to have a problem.)

A friend of mine wondered about a targeted ad on Facebook, an ad so absurd I couldn’t believe it’s not a parody.

The guy from the Dos Equis ad, saying

  I don’t always buy candles

  but when I do I buy man candles.

Then a picture of a black jar holding a candle with exploding flames behind it.

SCENTED CANDLES MADE BY MEN, FOR MEN.

Scent is the first thing people notice and leaves a lasting impression. Make sure it’s a good one. Smoulder Wolf candles will ensure your place smells incredible, without the overpowering feminine scents from your typical scented candle.

So I had to know – is it parody or is it really that level of jackassery? I availed myself of the finest search engine, and found Smoulder Wolf.

GENTS. THE TIME HAS COME.

We are no longer limited to buying those ridiculous flowery smelling candles that females set fire to.

Made from 120% testosterone, our candles burn at a fearsome 1400°C releasing incredible scents.