Not Housebroken

So I guess feminists were simply using an incorrect approach when they sought to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

Robert Parry argues that a combination of Bush administration determination to expand its own power with the cooperation of a bloc on the Supreme Court is effectively amending the Constitution to enact a police state.

The credit squeeze is spreading throughout the economy as the very companies that have grown the most since 2001–on easy credit–now find conditions have changed. Of course the Wall Street Journal is worried about profits; credit restrictions mean less corporate expansion and fewer “buyouts of publicly traded companies by private funds, and buybacks of their own stock by companies themselves.” The article does not mention the impact of all this on jobs, which will surely become scarcer.

According to the Times of London, “Hillary Clinton believes that Barack Obama has finally handed her a real opportunity to win the Democratic nomination after his comments that ‘bitter’ small-town Americans ‘cling to guns or religion’, perhaps the greatest blunder of his presidential campaign.” So what did he actually say? That comes farther down in the story:

It emerged on Saturday that Mr Obama had, before an audience in the liberal bastion of San Francisco, tried to explain his trouble winning over white, working-class voters, the fabled “Reagan Democrats” who will be crucial in the general election.

He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

I have occasionally been hearing about, though not really noticing personally, how food prices are skyrocketing with fuel prices (associated with transportation of products to market) and a diversion of agriculture to biofuel production. But the government in Haiti has fallen due to soaring food prices. Even the World Bank and International Monetary Fund agreed that rising food prices undermine a “decade of progress.”

Why am I remembering Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in June 2006? Because it now looks like the recent attack on the Mahdi Army in Basra may be just as much an embarrassment. The Mahdi Army, “still in the process of retraining and reorganisation,” has inflicted a defeat that has U.S. authorities scapegoating Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for a “miscalculation” that couldn’t have occurred without U.S. involvement.

“The Olympic flame’s procession through San Francisco drew world-wide ridicule when the torch-bearers ran only a few yards before disappearing into a warehouse, only to re-emerge on a bus half an hour later,” according to Chris Ayres, reporting for the Times (UK). When a pro-Tibet activist was put in the back of a police van, protesters surrounded it, demanding he be released. But the cops had reinforcements, armed with clubs.

If you grumble as the price of gasoline approaches $4.00 per gallon (or exceeds that price for some grades at some stations), imagine what it must be like for those who make their living driving for a living.

Truck drivers have gone on strike:

More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to “take back America,” as one put it to me. “We continue to maintain this is not just about us,” JB — which is his CB handle and stands for the “Jake Brake” on large rigs — told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. “It’s about everybody — the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people.” Hayden mentions his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who’ve fought the Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of Carrollton. “We’re Americans,” he tells me, “We built this country, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie down and take this.”

Does anyone have a reply?

Bacteria that actually thrive on so-called antibiotics may be a lot more common than previously thought.

Surprised by how easily the microbes devoured the antibiotics, Church and colleagues did a broader test, exposing hundreds of microbes to 18 antibiotics representing most of the major classes of naturally occurring and synthetic antibiotics, including penicillin and the widely prescribed antibiotic ciprofloxacin.

“We could find … bacteria that could grow on almost all of them,” depending on the bacteria and the source of the soil, Church said.

The bacteria were in soil; a possible origin is manure from antibiotic-fed cattle.

All we hear about Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe in U.S. mainstream media is how he has mismanaged the country, fixed elections, and expropriated white farmers’ land. Interviewed by al-Jazeera, journalist Heidi Holland offers a different perspective:

I think he is a disillusioned man today. He is a man who came to office with a very utopian view of life and over the years he has had to accept that things have not worked out the way he intended.

Unfortunately, because he is a very intellectual man and not really emotionally grounded at all, his response to disillusionment, rejection and humiliation is anger.

Anger turns to revenge. I think that came through in his answers.

I think I got quite a good insight into quite a bitter man, a man with a lot of grievances; some of which I have to say are founded against the West, and Britain in particular.

Holland sees Mugabe as emotionally under-developed, brutal, and self-righteous, but not solely to blame for Zimbabwe’s problems.

Claims of an improved security situation in Iraq will ring more obviously hollow after “three US service personnel have been killed and 31 wounded by rocket attacks on the Green Zone and a base elsewhere in Baghdad.” Earlier today, an email from the imperialist and therefore misnamed U.S. Institute for Peace acknowledged that the security situation had only improved to “2005 levels.” I have previously passed along stories in this space illustrating how the apparent drop in violence followed an “ethnic cleansing” as Iraq was de facto divided into three countries. And I’ve seen other articles questioning the defensibility of the Green Zone.

Yet none of our major presidential candidates advocates a withdrawal now. Again and again I hear Iraqis saying that they can solve their own problems when the United States leaves. We cannot solve their problems for them. But empire is a hard habit to break, and both political parties are committed to it.