Sherry Chandler

Texas has lost another great woman. And the country has lost a voice it will dearly miss.

Texas Observer memorial here.

And the A.P.

New York Times obit.

Bill McKibbon on montaintop removal:

The search for similes occupies everyone who sees this landscape—it’s like the results of a slow-motion Katrina, a bomb blast or a scouring glacier. It’s mostly like hell, unredeemed by anything alive

Read his review in The Christian Century of Lost Mountain (Riverhead, 2006) and Missing Mountains (Wind, 2006).

Link courtesy of the Kentucky Literary Calendar and Newsletter.

Update: Everybody be sure to click on the comments to read Rosalie’s comment and her great poem about strip and mountaintop removal mining.

I guess they thing they’re already fighting the antiChrist. Anyway, here’s the latest incident, from No More Mr. Nice Guy:

The big story in the Phoenix area last week was the decision by a libertarian councilman in the Mormon-dominated, ultra-reactionary suburb of Mesa to abstain from the pledge of allegiance that opens every council meeting, until US troops are withdrawn from Iraq.

Well, you would think Saddam Hussein himself had risen from the dead and turned up in Mesa to burn the flag, spit on apple pie and gay-marry Bill Clinton, so vehement and vitriolic was the reaction. Tom Rawles’s symbolic gesture has been greeted with a massive wave of hysterical, blind, spluttering, apoplectic rage. There have been demands for his resignation, his ousting from the council, and even death threats, which forced Mesa PD to place him under 24-hour protection - although they withdrew their protection, rather prematurely in my view, last night.

Meanwhile, the berserk rage and hatred continues. Numerous death threats are posted every day in the Arizona Repulsive’s forums, and though the administrator deletes them, the Repulsive editorial board is predictably bloviating pompously against Rawles. And when a young lady speaks out and shows herself to be far more mature and intelligent than the outraged conservatives who are baying for blood, she is told to “go play in traffic”.

Read the rest here.

Taegan Goddard has a link to a New York Magazine article, Bush on the Couch, in which 16 notables take their turns at analyzing Mr. Bush. I was struck by Dahlia Lithwick’s — a woman whose work I admire — take, viz, Bush has won:

It sounds counterintuitive, but I think the president is thinking that he may have lost the battle but he’s won the war. The battle being the short-term fight in Iraq and maybe some political capital. The war being the endgame: enshrining a radical new vision of the scope of executive power. The president may be unpopular. His war may be a disaster. But in pursuing that war, he’s expanded presidential authority almost beyond recognition. The prison at Guantánamo may be futile, but he’s won the right to operate it. Abusive interrogation may yield no useful information, but he’s seized the right to do it. Warrantless eavesdropping may not catch terrorists, but he’s staked out the power to order it. If securing such power was always the endgame of this administration, the war in Iraq is nothing but a speed bump. And putting two justices on the Supreme Court who appear willing to sign off on an imperial presidency is the cherry on top.

Do you doubt this take? Then read this item in today’s NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

I will say this for the man. He — or Cheney for him — never recognizes defeat. He always acts as though he has absolute authority to do whatever he pleases.

But he is NOT our commander-in-chief.

Update: Kevin Drum asks a cogent question:

After all, Bill Clinton was no slouch at consolidating White House control of cabinet agencies himself. Bush has taken this to stratospheric heights — mainly in a backdoor attempt to gut laws that are too popular to get repealed in a straight-up fight — but it’s hardly an exclusively Republican preserve. What’s more, there’s a pretty reasonable argument that an elected president should have greater policy control over the rulemakers in our farflung executive bureaucracy.

So let’s find out. Are we really opposed to this? This is an executive order, after all, and that means the next president can rescind it at will. So let’s get all the Democratic presidential candidates on the record: if you’re elected, will you rescind this order? Who’s up for this?

Update: This little incident seems a bit harmless on the surface but I think it shows Bush’s incompletely masked rage and cruelty and his essential recklessness. He is not a nice guy:

“I would suggest moving back,” Bush said as he climbed into the cab of a massive D-10 tractor. “I’m about to crank this sucker up.” As the engine roared to life, White House staffers tried to steer the press corps to safety, but when the tractor lurched forward, they too were forced to scramble for safety.”Get out of the way!” a news photographer yelled. “I think he might run us over!” said another. White House aides tried to herd the reporters the right way without getting run over themselves. Even the Secret Service got involved, as one agent began yelling at reporters to get clear of the tractor. Watching the chaos below, Bush looked out the tractor’s window and laughed, steering the massive machine into the spot where most of the press corps had been positioned. The episode lasted about a minute, and Bush was still laughing when he pulled to a stop. He gave reporters a thumbs-up. “If you’ve never driven a D-10, it’s the coolest experience,” Bush said afterward.

On the other hand, maybe he’s just worried about his cojones.

I’m a Luddite about messing around with genes. What frightens me is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Patenting gene strings is also probably a bad idea, and one we should all probably be concerned about. Consider this from Sunday’s NYTimes:

A recent survey found that Americans overwhelmingly distrust government and industry to provide truthful information about biotech’s risks and safety. Yet equally important as risk — and more often overlooked — are the public’s equally real and unaddressed concerns about who is looking out for its interests as the genes of plants, animals and microbes, as well as entire organisms, become privatized through the patenting system.

Stephen Hilgartner of Cornell University said he believed that the economic and political challenges surrounding these so-called life patents would come to rival those of biotech risk, and he has come up with a sensible framework for starting a new conversation about them.

Read the rest.

We Compress Because We Care

(sign in the dressing room of a Comprehensive Breast Care Clinic)

When mama made hamburger patties
she put each neat round ball of meat
between two sheets of waxed paper
and pressed. So this x-ray tech
with the cropped hair presses my breast
between two plates of glass until
it’s flat as mama’s burger

The tough cops of fiction manhandle felons.
Freeze, sucker. Assume the position.
I can hear the handcuffs click
whenever I drive the hooks home
in the eyes, arms twisted behind me,
bent at the waist, breasts
dangling toward China. Granny
said that brassiere’ll ruin you
but my gynecologist said wear a bra
He was gray-haired, pink-cheeked,
and his name was Hymen,
the only man who ever looked
between my legs and said
what a beautiful vagina.
I don’t know what he meant.
I don’t know what Granny meant.
I didn’t ask.

The tech slaps my left breast on the glass
It’s cold. Her hands are cold. She’s telling
me a story. She says “I told them just go ahead
and cut the other one off, too. That way
I won’t have to worry with them anymore.”
This story started before I got here.
I missed the setup. I think she must tell
it on a continuous loop the way
the self-examination film
plays over and over in the waiting room.

Last night I dreamed I had a zucchini-
sized growth between my breasts,.
inflamed and sore. I covered myself quickly,
looked up from my buttons at my Lamaze instructor,
prophet resurrected to reclaim the apostate. They
are not labor pains, my dear. They’re contractions.
She hiked up her skirt, grasped the outer lips of her vulva,
stretched them into wings like a great manta ray.
Her inner lips quivered in the center.
She did a little dance then, flapping her vulval wings.
“I got something to show you,” I said,
snatched open my blouse. “I got a witch’s tit.”

The tech spreads my breast on the glass,
turns it, fusses with it, gets it just right,
adjusts my left arm on the rail,
my right behind my back, turns my hips
into a stance awkward as a fashion model.
The untied paper gown falls open. She reaches up,
pulls the top glass down. “Tell me,” she says
“when this becomes too painful.”

This poem won the Second Annual Betty Gabehart Award from the Women Writers Conference (2002) and was published in Parting Gifts (2003).

In response to my post on Barack Obama and the madrasa (or madrassa or madrasah), a reader sends a link to this Guaranteed Effective All-Occasion Non-Slanderous Political Smear Speech, which appears to have been written by Bill Garvin for Mad Magazine #139, December, 1970.

Here’s my favorite part:

I ask you, my fellow Americans: is this the kind of person we want in public office to set an example for our youth?

Of course, it’s not surprising that he should have such a typically pristine background — no, not when you consider the other members of his family:

His female relatives put on a constant pose of purity and innocence, and claim they are inscrutable, yet every one of them has taken part in hortatory activities.

The men in the family are likewise completely amenable to moral suasion.

My opponent’s uncle was a flagrant heterosexual.

His sister, who has always been obsessed by sects, once worked as a proselyte outside a church.

His father was secretly chagrined at least a dozen times by matters of a pecuniary nature.

His youngest brother wrote an essay extolling the virtues of being a homo sapien.

His great-aunt expired from a degenerative disease.

His nephew subscribes to a phonographic magazine.

His wife was a thespian before their marriage and even performed the act in front of paying customers.

And his own mother had to resign from a women’s organization in her later years because she was an admitted sexagenarian.

But I suggest that you peruse the text in its entirety here. Be sure and scroll down to read about the 1950 Senate campaign in Florida between George Smathers and Claude “Red” Pepper, where this kind of language played out in what you might call real time. For more on that, check this 1958 article from Time.

from today’s Washington Post:

BOSTON — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Friday that she dislikes being “all alone on the court” nearly a year after the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor.

After the fire has died I lie tangled
in the sheets with you, bake my aches
against the hot brick of your back.
Ambition dwindles
in the drowsy burr of your snore.

What need of belief to relieve
the black and white of winter,
the shudder of flesh like a branch
after the bird has flown. Coals blink,
then turn cold ash.

        from My Will and Testament Is on the Desk