I Totally Agree

Bitch Ph.D. says that the Supreme Court Hates Women. She's so right. But then, we maybe should've seen this coming when the Senate confirmed five white dudes to decide how we should live our lives.

Canvas

This is totally random, but the topic of discussion came up last night centered on this image:


One could argue that it portrays women as purely sex objects. They are faceless, and therefore only suited to be blank canvases for the work of men. Thoughts?

Mexican Radio Silence

The WaPo's foreign desk today had a great story about how bad it's gotten for reporters in Mexico:

More than 30 journalists have been killed in the past six years in Mexico, including a television reporter in Acapulco and a print journalist in the northern state of Sonora in the month before López and Paredes disappeared. Countless others have been kidnapped in a campaign of intimidation largely attributed to the drug cartels.

As more reporters die, journalism itself is suffering. A newspaper in Sonora said last week that it was temporarily shutting down because of attacks and threats by criminal gangs. Top editors at the two largest newspapers here in Monterrey, Milenio and El Norte, said in interviews that they no longer ask crime reporters to dig deeply on their stories.

"I don't know how to do investigations without getting people killed," Roberta Gomez, Milenio's executive editor, said during an interview at a Monterrey seafood restaurant where gunmen opened fire during the lunch rush not long ago.

Crime reporters have begun requesting anonymity on stories, and rarely delve deeper than police reports. The suppression of the fourth estate through violence is bad for Mexican democracy, and gives too much power to both the government and the drug cartels.

UPDATE: Whoops. Forgot to link to the article.

What Is the World Bank?

All this talk about Wolfowitz got me to thinking about the World Bank and how we classify it. The definitions Google came up with ranged from amusing to overly-rosy. Its short history makes it similar to the UN, created in the wake of WWII and aimed at both European reconstruction and prevention of future disasters. But what category it falls into is somewhat more complicated. It's not in possession of any one government, even though "by tradition" an American is appointed as its leader by our president. I've certainly seen enough documentaries explaining why the World Bank is evil -- making exorbitant loans to corrupt governments and then squeezing repayment out of already-poor countries. What's scary is that there's no oversight on the World Bank except that which it supplies itself. Perhaps that's why it's easier to take out Wolfowitz with a personal scandal.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Veterans

It seems that Hell's Angels can be a powerful lobbying force -- if they're also veterans, that is. This year a record number of former soldier motorcyclists came to DC, possibly because there are more veterans this year than there have been in a long time.

Helvetica

Slate has an amusing slideshow story on this ubiquitous font of the 21st century.

No More Dion

I'm reluctant to write about a race that I haven't really been following, but Jeff Dion's dropout from running for the 51st district of Virginia's state legislature caught my eye. It even made the WaPo and NPR. Apparently, right-wing blogger attacks on Dion, primarily centered on his sexual orientation caused him to write a good-bye letter on his website that attributed his dropout to a "toxic atmosphere." From what I can tell, Dion was a target for being a leader in prosecuting hate crimes in his role on the Criminal Justice Services Board and because of his gay.com profile. (I didn't bother to try looking up his profile, but it seems likely he's since altered it or taken it down at this stage.) Apparently local Democrats then began to question his chances of winning and asked him to step down.

The fact that bloggers could affect such change on the local level is astonishing to me. It's true that netroots take a lot of credit for getting people involved at the grassroots level, but it's so hard to understand why s Furthermore, because Democrats (at least now) view themselves as so favored to win in the next election, it seems they're shying away from fighting difficult races like what Dion's race would have been had he stayed in.

Ultimately I'm unsure of whether Dion was a "good candidate" or not, but I certainly support having someone to speak for those that are the victims of hate crimes. We need more people that are willing to make this their primary issue.