![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A brief note on oil, then to politics; oil is currently acting like a mo-mo stock, hitting $126.25/barrel this morning. In the short term - heading into a recession - I think the momentum of the last month or so is unsustainable, even in a flat production environment. You're also seeing a lot of press idiocy about oil being up each day "on a weak dollar;" the dollar is actually stronger, very slightly, than it was when oil was hanging around $105/barrel, and has been gaining strength the last couple of weeks while oil shoots up to the moon. (The US dollar is up 2% against the basket as oil goes from $115/barrel to $127/barrel. There is cause-and-effect here, btw.) But hey, what's reality got to do with news?
Talking of news, Glenn Greenwald today reports on the broadcast media's continued refusal to cover the illegal domestic propaganda campaign waged by the Pentagon, no doubt because they helped so much. There's been a document dump, and amoungst the things you can trace in those documents are the locking-out of analysts who went off-message, and the co-ordinated attempt to discredit Amnesty International's report on conditions at Gitmo. I wonder how long the network news organisations can continue their silence on this matter?
Meanwhile, Senator John McCain continues to run for Chief Executive Bush's third term, claiming the problem with abuse of power in the Bush administration has been not any claimed powers of the executive (including but not limited to being above both Congressional Law and Constitutional restraint, being able to spend against Congressional law and to block spending by Congress, and, oh yes, editing laws at his whim), but "activist judges" who get in the Chief Executive's way.
This leads, in turn, to that latest attempt by various Democrats to revive retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreaking in illegal domestic spying by the administration. The ACLU has an action item up against it, along with more details than previously reported. The reported plan is to work it in to a "compromise" bill that grants Chief Executive Bush basically everything he wants, as always. As always, it's about closing down the last functioning route to investigate these crimes, and making clear and obvious lawbreaking retroactively legal. I strongly recommend you take action. (Pointer courtesy slashdot and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hubbit.)
In other politics, the American Psychological Association has, inexplicably, named two determined opponents of the transgendered to a work group assigned to revise the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in preparation for the DSM-V. On the Task Force assigning the workgroup members is Dr. Ray Blanchard, a proponent of the idea that people with gender identity disorder are actually paraphiliacs, or men who have a fetish for forced feminisation. (The proponents of this theory ignore ftm men - half the transgendered population - pretending and sometimes even stating outright that they don't actually exist.) He's assigned Dr. Kenneth Zucker to the workgroup as chair; Dr. Zucker is a proponent of "reparative therapy," a hobbyhorse of the anti-gay "ex-gay" movement, only this time applied now to gender identity disorder. There is, of course, no doubt that this would, if institutionalised against GID, also be used against lesbians and gay men.
[ETA:This story must be going around, aselfs also posts about it, and adds Obsidian Wings' coverage of an NPR story that follows two GID children, one getting okay-let's-deal-with-it treatment and one getting reparative therapy. Guess which kid is all screwed up? ;_; ]
And in other outrages, this story of gang-rape going unprosecuted will be disturbing to anyone sane. And apparently some are shocked! Shocked! that proponents of Michigan's anti-gay anti-marriage amendment would lie about its impacts on domestic-partner benefits. Blocking recognition and benefits for even the children of queers was the entire fucking point, and if you listen to them talking to their core, in their own media, they'd say things like that out loud. But, as always, the mainstream media takes liars at face value without the first hint of fact or consistency checking.
So there you are. Good morning!
Talking of news, Glenn Greenwald today reports on the broadcast media's continued refusal to cover the illegal domestic propaganda campaign waged by the Pentagon, no doubt because they helped so much. There's been a document dump, and amoungst the things you can trace in those documents are the locking-out of analysts who went off-message, and the co-ordinated attempt to discredit Amnesty International's report on conditions at Gitmo. I wonder how long the network news organisations can continue their silence on this matter?
Meanwhile, Senator John McCain continues to run for Chief Executive Bush's third term, claiming the problem with abuse of power in the Bush administration has been not any claimed powers of the executive (including but not limited to being above both Congressional Law and Constitutional restraint, being able to spend against Congressional law and to block spending by Congress, and, oh yes, editing laws at his whim), but "activist judges" who get in the Chief Executive's way.
This leads, in turn, to that latest attempt by various Democrats to revive retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreaking in illegal domestic spying by the administration. The ACLU has an action item up against it, along with more details than previously reported. The reported plan is to work it in to a "compromise" bill that grants Chief Executive Bush basically everything he wants, as always. As always, it's about closing down the last functioning route to investigate these crimes, and making clear and obvious lawbreaking retroactively legal. I strongly recommend you take action. (Pointer courtesy slashdot and
hubbit.)In other politics, the American Psychological Association has, inexplicably, named two determined opponents of the transgendered to a work group assigned to revise the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in preparation for the DSM-V. On the Task Force assigning the workgroup members is Dr. Ray Blanchard, a proponent of the idea that people with gender identity disorder are actually paraphiliacs, or men who have a fetish for forced feminisation. (The proponents of this theory ignore ftm men - half the transgendered population - pretending and sometimes even stating outright that they don't actually exist.) He's assigned Dr. Kenneth Zucker to the workgroup as chair; Dr. Zucker is a proponent of "reparative therapy," a hobbyhorse of the anti-gay "ex-gay" movement, only this time applied now to gender identity disorder. There is, of course, no doubt that this would, if institutionalised against GID, also be used against lesbians and gay men.
[ETA:This story must be going around, as
elfs also posts about it, and adds Obsidian Wings' coverage of an NPR story that follows two GID children, one getting okay-let's-deal-with-it treatment and one getting reparative therapy. Guess which kid is all screwed up? ;_; ]And in other outrages, this story of gang-rape going unprosecuted will be disturbing to anyone sane. And apparently some are shocked! Shocked! that proponents of Michigan's anti-gay anti-marriage amendment would lie about its impacts on domestic-partner benefits. Blocking recognition and benefits for even the children of queers was the entire fucking point, and if you listen to them talking to their core, in their own media, they'd say things like that out loud. But, as always, the mainstream media takes liars at face value without the first hint of fact or consistency checking.
So there you are. Good morning!
