Encore du mais soufflé S.V.P.

Pass the popcorn:

Le Conseil de Paris a donné son feu vert mercredi à une plainte en diffamation de la mairie de Paris, après la diffusion sur Fox News de propos selon lesquels la capitale abriterait des "no-go zones", des zones interdites où s'appliquerait la charia.

(On Wednesday, the city council of Paris gave the green light to the mayor's defamation lawsuit following a broadcast of remarks on Fox News, according to which the capital harbored so-called "no-go zones," forbidden areas where sharia law supposedly applies.)

The council vote wasn't unanimous, however. And one political leader declares that the lawsuit is making a mountain out of a molehill ("Il n'y a pas de quoi faire un fromage"). Another feels that the broadcast was "scandalous, malicious, and not a little ridiculous," but that the lawsuit looks more like a PR stunt on the part of mayor Anne Hidalgo, not "a useful operation for Parisians." Hidalgo has countered that even though the broadcast was risible, Fox News's claims of 750 no-go zones and the "improbable" map used to illustrate them are legally actionable lies because they were "insulting" and "prejudicial."

Christian governor Bobby Jindal continues to bear false witness about "no-go" zones

This is so utterly stupid. But why in christ's name do news outlets give people who call themselves Christians such a huge pass when they're caught in an obvious and plain lie?

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Monday stood by his criticism of so-called "no-go" zones in Europe, where sovereign nations allegedly cede authority to Muslim immigrants, a controversial idea that many critics say is overblown.

No-go zones are a lie. Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Governor Jindal is a liar and he even doubled down in that interview by saying he's "speaking truth."

In fact, he's a Catholic breaking the 8th Commandment. Won't somebody please, please call this out?

Gruesome, public Center City suicide mostly unreported

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MSNBC sees conspiracies in a mayors' teleconference

MSNBC reports breathlessly that a dozen-odd American mayors participated in a conference call last week, but that the mayors "deny colluding on 'Occupy' crackdowns." The call was part of near-weekly verbal communications that members of the United States Conference of Mayors regularly hold, and the conversation apparently naturally turned to the various Occupy actions happening in everyone's cities. And coincidentally, there were clear-outs and crackdowns in multiple cities between the teleconference and MSNBC's investigation for this report.

But investigation into what? Collusion about what? MSNBC begs a huge question here: that's it's improper or illegal for the mayors to talk about a challenge common to all of them and discuss solutions. And so what if they coordinated clearing out the encampments? So what if they "colluded"? What does colluded even mean here? Is there an accusation that mayors from different cities shared funds or police forces or matériel?

Perhaps the conversation went in the direction of, "I'll clear out my city's Occupy if you clear out yours," or "We'll use our pepper spray and riot police if you do, so nobody looks worse than anybody else." But even if it did, how is this "collusion"? And even if it is "collusion," how is this a problem? What laws would have been broken (outside of opening themselves up to §1983 liability for various police excess issues -- does MSNBC mean conspiracy to deprive Occupiers of their civil rights under §1983? Something tells me the article's premise is not that deep)?

And here I thought it was only radically politicized people and the insane who saw conspiracies everywhere.

BBC asks "why get married?" but omits pretty obvious answer

BBC Magazine article discusses the question of why a couple would get married after having kids, without suggesting the most obvious answer: for health insurance or legal or tax purposes. (Granted, marrying for the health insurance is perhaps not so obvious in a nation with socialized medicine.) But my point is that government- or authority-recognized marriage has only ever been an economic contract. The religious trappings and moral imperatives were added for solemnity -- to make the couple take the marriage more seriously, put them in mortal fear of their souls if they change their minds afterward, and provide some predictability in estate planning.

Anecdotally, I know an American couple who got married only for the health insurance. They've kept their marriage open, have had two kids, and are still together some dozen years later. From what I understand of their decision to get married, they flatly wouldn't have done it if one of them hadn't needed healthcare. Another acquaintance of mine has been married twice, and both times it was solely for health insurance because of a chronic condition. The first marriage was kind of predictably a disaster, but the second seems to be going well.

And in the end, that person moved to England for, as they put it, simply to stay alive. No American health insurance company, even the Cadillac insurance they got through the second spouse who worked for a Fortune 500 company, would pay for their preventive and ongoing care in a timely and reasonable manner, so they moved to a country where you just go to a clinic, get treatment, and go home.

As for marrying for legal and tax purposes, for crying out loud, what do you think the fight about gay marriage is all about? It's about hospital visitation rights, intestate inheritance issues, and mortgage interest tax deductions.

Most of the time, follow the money. Marriage qua marriage is an economic and legal question, and that's all it will ever be. Consider how easy it is to get married, compared to how complicated it is to get divorced. And have you noticed that, once you are divorced, you tend to have to identify yourself as "divorced," not "single" again? A marriage that ended years or decades ago follows you forever!

The way to less sodium in your diet is to eat less processed food

An article at MSNBC discusses the problem of too much sodium in American diets, but gets to the next-to-last, below-the-fold paragraph before mentioning a huge way to reduce one's sodium intake: eat less processed food. Quit the TV dinners, quit the junk food, don't eat out so often, get out of the habit of "convenience" foods, and you'll get less sodium in your diet.

A frozen dinner or shelf-stable lunch from a box looks cheaper than a from-scratch dinner or sack lunch until you feel hungry again one hour afterward. Old-fashioned oats cooked in the microwave, topped with raisins or brown sugar, is cheaper and healthier than ready-to-eat box cereal or instant oatmeal from a packet. MSNBC should have offered views from CDC and Center for Science in the Public Interest way, way before talking to flaks from ConAgra, Kraft, Cargill, General Mills, and Campbell's.

In short, there's a reason behind the cliché "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."

The paper apologizes, but for what?

Religious zealot newspaper Di Tzeitung published an apology for doctoring the Situation Room photo.

That's what they apologized for: doctoring the photo, against the clear proscription from the White House against manipulating the image.

The statement speaks for itself.

Heaven forbid women should serve at the highest levels of government

Did you hear the one about the religious zealots who are so upset at women serving at high levels in the national government that they illegally wipe them out of official photographs in which they appear?

Brooklyn's Hasidic newspaper Di Tzeitung printed, on the front page and above the fold, the White House's official photo of President Obama and his security team watching the bin Laden raid. You've seen the photo, I'm sure. But the image you've seen isn't the one the newspaper printed. Rather, they censored it, removing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who is in an office that is "three chickenbones" away from the Presidency) and national security official Audrey Tomason, Director for Counterterrorism.

Trying to figure out why the newspaper editors cut the two women from the photograph. Tomason's shirt was too low-cut? Both women's heads were unshaved, and uncovered at that? Did the newspaper find that they hadn't yet had their post-menstrual mikveh and their panties checked? (BTW, that second link there makes for some fantastic lunch break reading. Start at page 1 of 9.) That is to say, presumably, the newspaper wiped them from the photo for religious woman-hating reasons. But isn't there also a religious admonition against deceit?

So here's the censored photo, via Failed Messiah, the blog that I understand to have first broken this story. I can't seem to find the Di Tzeitung newspaper online (because the Internet is too contaminated by all the immodest, unclean women who use it?) EDIT: because everybody misspelled it, and differently, so I couldn't successfully Google it the day I wrote this post:



And here's the original, which a few people have pointed out was released with the express instruction from the government that it not be "manipulated in any way":



And here's one that's been making the rounds, proscription on manipulation be damned:



But my point, and I do have one, is this. Imagine if women had not been oppressed for the past 5,000 years. And I don't mean to say that there is zero oppression of women any more; for just the latest example, see Indiana's plan to cut off its federal family planning dollars nose to spite its face, or recent figures of the ratio of men to women in engineering education (some 20%). But just imagine. If girls and women had been allowed into schools of philosophy, medicine, sciences, and engineering over the centuries, how far along in technology would the world be now? Would we still be spinning our wheels with fossil fuels? How many problems, challenges, wars could have been resolved more quickly, and intellectual advances been made sooner, if half the world's population had not been barred from participating on account of their sex?

Take that Audrey Tomason, for instance. I don't know what a Director for Counterterrorism does, or even exactly what agency or office her directorship is in. But I assume that she was the most qualified individual for the job. And something about her job and her expertise won her a ticket to be in that room to watch the live video of Navy SEALs popping terrorists. My guess is that she, or the people she directs, were indispensable for the operation to succeed, or actually probably simply to take place. What if she were barred from her job merely because she's a woman? What if the next most qualified person were also a woman? In other words, what if the most qualified man for the job had gotten the directorship over Tomason and who knows how many other women due solely to his sex, even though he wasn't as well qualified for the work as Tomason? The President stated that the mission had barely more than even odds of succeeding. Who wants to make the odds worse by not allowing the best people to fill the highest posts in the government?

Religious zealots, that's who.

Di Tzeitung published the doctored photo on Friday. Will any mainstream news outlets call them out on their front-page lies, or will it just be low-level bloggers like me? Oh, and the New York Daily News.

Anti-choicers are not fighting for the "babies"

Amanda Marcotte at AlterNet brings up a point I've danced around since I started doing clinic defense: anti-choice protesting isn't about the "babies" and preventing unwanted pregnancies and their termination; it's about an obsession with women and girls having sex.

If it were truly about the "babies," the protestors would show up during snowstorms. But at the clinic where I escort patients, they stay away in bad weather. The big crowds come out only once per month, and the really big crowds come out only in the summer. News flash: the patients still came in for their procedures when there was snow and ice on the ground.

If it were truly about the "babies," the protestors' car wouldn't have a bumpersticker that reads CHASTITY, they wouldn't hand out anti-sexuality literature to patients and staff, and they wouldn't yell, "Save yourself for marriage!" at the young women going inside. But this is what they do at the clinic where I escort patients. News flash: by the time those young women are entering the clinic, it's too late for them to save themselves for marriage.

If it were truly about the "babies," the protestors would spend their time, money, and energy in programs that help women with unwanted pregnancies. They would adopt unwanted babies and welcome foster children into their homes (some 3000 per year in Philadelphia alone come into the system). They would spend time with their own kids and grandkids instead of yelling at the young women and their support persons -- partners, parents, and friends -- seeking healthcare.

If it were truly about the "babies," as Marcotte writes, the anti-choicers would actually seek to fund Planned Parenthood and other family planning services more. This is because abortions happen when women have unwanted pregnancies. Comprehensive sex education and contraception reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that women have, which reduces the number of abortions that women seek.

I won't even link to Ross Douthat's recent NYT piece about monogamy and his thesis, at best strained and at worst just bizarre, that there is a direct, causal correlation between sexual activity among post-sexual revolution unmarried women and their unhappiness. That he gets a sounding board for his judgmental rants on the Newspaper of Record is simply sickening. At least the commenters have taken him to task for twisting the results of a few studies, cherrypicking statistics, and drawing illogical conclusions from them to fit the point he was trying to make. Because if it were truly about the "babies" for Douthat, he wouldn't argue against funding family planning, which gets more women out of the labor and delivery room and into college.

Oh, wait, I just figured out why the NYT keeps Douthat on staff. Remember that awful story from Texas yesterday about the 18 guys accused of gang-raping an 11-year-old girl? The New York Times investigated and asked "What was she wearing?"

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

. . . and then quoted a local who says,

These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.

WHAT.

Call a spade a spade: tea partiers are "xenophobic," "racist," and "crazy"

So a high muckety-muck at NPR has been caught on tape saying the following:

The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian. I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of movement.

He also said that Tea Party people are

[x]enophobic, I mean basically they are; they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people.

So the muckety-muck, one Ron Schiller, has quit and this was a huge breaking story on MSNBC all highlighted in red and stuff.

But what's wrong with the statement? It wasn't broadcast as factual news. It was the dude's opinion. And you know, it's a pretty darn accurate characterization of the facts. The GOP's platform over the past 20 or 30 years has been taken over by evangelicals and other Christian fundamentalists. This was Jerry Falwell's goal for the Moral Majority, and he won. Tea partiers continue to obsess over the crazy idea that President Obama was born in Kenya and talk about "Second Amendment remedies" against people in Congress that they perceive as problematic. The Tea Party Caucus is insisting on cutting, cutting, cutting domestic programs, cutting upper-level income taxes, and urging military action on Libya without realistically considering that even a small increase in billionaires' tax bills, plus quitting one or two wars, would solve quite a few budget dilemmas in very short order.

This is crazy talk, and tea partiers do it with lies about Planned Parenthood and how the pensions of unionized government workers are paid. It is not unreasonable to call tea partiers "scary."

Beck vs. DeBella on the "killing streets" around Independence Hall

Glenn Beck's radio show was canceled here in Philadelphia, so last week Beck went and complained that Philly "sucks" and that it's not safe to walk around the "killing streets . . . right there in front of Independence Hall," because it's "not a place you want to be" at 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. So the other day, local radio personality John DeBella took Beck to task with a cute little stunt:



When I fetch my daughter home from school in the evening, we get off the El at the 5th Street station and walk south -- directly past Independence Hall -- eerily, at precisely the timeframe Beck was talking about, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. The only thing dangerous about Independence Hall at dinnertime on a school night is the Jersey-bound commuters blocking the box or ignoring the "no turn on red" signs at 6th and Chestnut.

Deeney on the local papers and TV news not doing their job in Kensington

Over at Phawker, Jeff Deeney on the media dicking around with the Guardian Angels yet not investigating how long rapes and OD's were occurring in Kensington before the serial killer showed up:

What is completely absent from the media coverage of the case is any serious discussion of the prevalence of sexual violence against prostitutes in Kensington that long predated the arrival of the Kensington Strangler. There has been no discussion of police attitudes towards prostitutes who work the Avenue, who universally testify to having previously attempted to make reports about rapes and assaults to unsympathetic cops who told them such reports were a waste of time because prostitutes were making them. Rape and assault, the women are told, is all just part of that "lifestyle choice."

There is a cause and effect between lax societal attitudes towards protecting sex workers and the increasingly violent environment sex worker are forced to work in. [...] Men know they can go to places like Kensington, pick up a girl, rape her, beat her up, and dump her back on the Avenue with little fear of consequences.

Same with Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), Robert Picton (the pig farm murderer in British Columbia), Dahmer, Bundy, and countless others. Their victims were drug addicted women and prostitutes -- but law enforcement has to be made to understood that there is no such thing as an "unsympathetic" victim.

The reports of the death of the American streetcar are greatly exagerrated

CNN article about the pros and cons of streetcars begs a huge question in its headline ("Can streetcars save America's cities?" assumes that America's cities are all dying or in decline), and omits any mention of Philadelphia, where multiple trolley lines began operating in the 1890s, and where the system has been running its subway-surface lines continuously since the tunnel between City Hall and West Philadelphia was completed in 1906. The Victorian rowhouses that comprise much of West Philly were constructed in this era, when the neighborhoods were built up as some of the first "bedroom communities" in the U.S. Now they're federally recognized as the West Philadelphia Streetcar Suburb Historic District.

Dig an interesting annotated history of the 34 trolley at the website of Studio 34, a yoga and wellness center on the Baltimore Avenue line.

Of course, many of Philadelphia's streetcars have been replaced by buses since the olden days -- the #23 bus is a huge example: though its rails are still in the pavement and its catenary wire is still overhead, the trolley route was was changed to bus service in 1992. But then again, SEPTA put "heritage" streetcars back on Girard Avenue's route 15 in 2005, after they'd given it the Route 23 treatment.

Philadelphia's subway-surface lines provide one of the easiest, quickest routes to get from Center City to multiple points in West Philadelphia: the hospitals (CHOP, UPenn, the VA, Presbyterian, and Penn's veterinary hospital), movie houses, Penn/Drexel/USciences, Clark Park, and any number of interesting restaurants, cafés, and gastropubs. Go a little farther out and you can get to Bartram's Garden; a few historic cemeteries; drug territories patrolled by thugs on ATVs; and Darby, birthplace of W.C. Fields. And that's not even mentioning the interurban lines: the 101 and 102 trolleys serving the towns of Media and Sharon Hill, and the 100 light rail serving Norristown. These vehicles carry tens of thousands of people around southeastern Pennsylvania daily (PDF). While a lot of Philadelphia's streetcar service was replaced long ago by diesel and now hybrid-diesel buses, I think it's a significant omission to leave out Philly's heavily used trolleys in a national news article about streetcars.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: The Newsweek Daily Beast Company -- I'm sorry, who's trying to boost their credibility here? I guess at this point Newsweek, which lost some $30 million in 2009 alone, just has nothing left to lose.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Why I don't have cable TV

Hard-hitting, incisive, important commentary here at Glomarization Central today. Cable TV!

Subscribers are fleeing cable television in droves. But because cable providers appear to have given up on the theory of supply and demand, rates are still going up. Around these parts, basic cable plus internet starts at about $150 per month after a promotional period.

I have two reasons why I don't have cable TV, other than the obvious problem of price. One, my local providers don't offer CBC, CTV, or Radio-Canada. Two, you can't get à la carte service.

See, no Canadian channels means no Hockey Night in Canada, no extensive French-language programming, no non-U.S. news analysis, no comedies that aren't Two And a Half Men, and no Don McKellar. And also we're stuck with NBC or their Windows-only website for Olympics coverage.

But that's almost OK. I can catch up on a lot of Canadian TV and movies by scouring the local independent film screenings -- few and far between though they are -- or dig deep into Netflix/Hulu/iTunes, or look for Olympics stuff on the BBC website. The bigger issue for me is that you can't pick and choose what channels you want to have.

Say I want to make a fruit salad. I figure I'd like today's salad to include an orange, some grapes, a kiwifruit, a banana, and a cantaloupe. I go to a grocery store, and at the store I can buy an orange, some grapes, a kiwifruit, a banana, and a cantaloupe. The store doesn't restrict me to a choice between the "preferred fruit salad combo" (pears, pineapples, mangoes, and maraschino cherries) versus the "premier plus triple XF fruit salad bundle" (yellow and ruby grapefruit, navel and valencia oranges, three varieties of apple, and a lime), neither of which packages includes the exact combination of fruit that I want.

Or say I want to paint a few rooms in my house. I want a green livingroom, a red bedroom, and a yellow kitchen. So I go to the paint store and buy a gallon each of green, red, and yellow paint. The paint store doesn't require me to buy a bundle of six cans of paints (green, red, yellow, as well as blue, white, and orange) -- or worse, two bundles with even more unwanted colors -- just so I can get my green, red, and yellow. And the one paint store in town is owned by the only grocery store in town.

But this kind of coercive bundling by a limited number of companies is exactly what happens with cable TV. Maybe all the TV I want is Animal Planet, Showtime, and Fox Soccer Plus. Animal Planet is part of basic cable, which includes a hundred other channels I don't want; Showtime is a channel you can get only with another cost-added bundle; and Fox Soccer Plus is available with one of the two local cable providers, but not the other. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but you'd have to be one seriously naïve cat to believe that the TV media giants don't discuss this kind of thing between themselves every once in a while.

Call a spade a spade: this isn't merely coercive bundling; it's called tying, and in any industry other than cable TV it's unacceptable, if not outright illegal under the Clayton Act. Though apparently the Ninth Circuit disagrees with me, I'm still not going to get cable TV until I can pick and choose my channels. I want my Hockey Night in Canada!

Cablevision vs. Fox TV

From today's Variety newsfeed (registration req'd but free):

Cablevision and Fox execs are huddling at News Corp. headquarters in Gotham today in an eleventh-hour attempt to hammer out a deal that would prevent Fox's New York and Philadelphia stations from going dark for Cablevision's 3 million subscribers at midnight tonight.

And this would be a problem . . . how?

Well, OK, maybe for that baseball game tomorrow night.

Muslims aren't against Christians, says Ahmadinejad; no response from Molly Norris

Two of these headlines don't go together:


Molly Norris, the (now formerly) Seattle-based political cartoonist who caused a furore with her proposed and then retracted "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," has gone ghost -- not exactly "witness protection," since it's not a court case, but the same sort of deal with assistance from the FBI. In a move that the FBI naturally can't comment on, Norris has had to give up her life, job, and identity and move somewhere else and live as a different person because an American-born Islamic cleric in Yemen has put her on a hit list. "Her proper abode," says smiling fanatic Anwar al-Awlaki, "is hellfire." In response, her editor at the Seattle Weekly has announced that "there is no more Molly."

Score one for religious fundamentalism.

On the same front page yet elsewhere in the Middle East, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proclaimed that Muslims don't actually hate Americans:

People (in Islamic countries) are against that ugly behavior [of burning Korans, or drawing Mohammed.] They are not against the people of the United States. They are not against Americans, they are not against Jews. They are not against Christians or Christianity.

If you can reconcile the two stories here, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

CNN mobile links frequently broken

Is it me, or are half -- or often more than half -- of the links from CNN's front page broken when you use your smartphone to read it? I swear I get more 404 Not Found messages from CNN mobile than from any other news website.

Reminder that BP's "good news" is only half the news

BP's siphoning kludge is "capturing about 15,000 barrels of oil a day," plus "methane and natural gas [that] is burned off [before the crude is] transferred to tankers and moved directly to refineries" (MSNBC). Yay! That's like 630,000 gallons of oil every day! That'll make a huge dent in America's daily oil consumption of 19.5 million barrels -- 819 million gallons -- per day.

But wait! Now that BP cut the kinked pipe, which was restricting the spew's flow like a kinked garden hose, in order to install their Rube Goldberg siphoning apparatus, the pipe is now releasing some 30,000 barrels (1.26 million gallons) of oil every day.

So remember that when BP crows about how much oil it's siphoning up (for refining and sale) through its dome contraption, BP is giving you only half the news. When news media report only BP's numbers, they're reporting only half the story. And it's also only half of what's continuing to flow into the Gulf of Mexico.

BP is keeping the oil it's siphoning. At this writing, crude is selling for USD 75.80/bbl (Bloomberg). If BP has a contract on this oil, it's making BP about $1.2 million per day on the recovery. The U.S. government can and should force BP to put all of this money into escrow. Call yer Senators and stuff.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Media analysts for French TV news are much better looking than their American counterparts. Discuss.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"