Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has a problem. He doesn’t like to pay taxes like the little people do:

ABC News has learned that the nomination of former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., to be President Obama’s secretary of health and human services has hit a traffic snarl on its way through the Senate Finance Committee.

The controversy deals with a car and driver lent to Daschle by a wealthy Democratic friend — a chauffeur service the former senator used for years without declaring it on his taxes.

It remains an open question as to whether this is a “speed bump,” as a Democratic Senate ally of Daschle put it, or something more damaging.

[...]

The Cadillac and driver were never part of Daschle’s official compensation package at InterMedia, but Mr. Daschle — who as Senate majority leader enjoyed the use of a car and driver at taxpayer expense — didn’t declare their services on his income taxes, as tax laws require.

During the vetting process to become HHS secretary, Daschle corrected the tax violation, voluntarily paying $101,943 in back taxes plus interest, working with his accountant to amend his tax returns for 2005 through 2007.

That’s mighty nice of him to do that; it would have been better had he done it in the first place. But I think the most telling thing of all is the reason he never thought to pay taxes on a car and driver provided to him:

“Mr. Daschle told committee staff that he had grown used to having a car and driver as Senate majority leader and didn’t think to report the perquisite on his taxes, according to staff members.”

That right there is simply mind-boggling, and really points out just how disconnected from the real world even center-left politicians like Daschle are.

Look, not only do 99.9 percent of Americans not have a car and driver provided to them by their work, 99.9 percent of us don’t even get the car.  Heck, about 20 percent of us don’t have health insurance, something that Daschle is supposed to be tasked with rectifying.

No wonder Congress is so tilted toward Wall Street — too many of even our progressive allies have no idea how the world works, or why it would be considered unusual for your company to give you a car — and why that would count as income.

Will Daschle go down in flames? No, of course not. He was a former caucus leader in the Senate, a Poobah Emeritus of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo. A few senators will make some partisan hay, but in the end, they’ll confirm him, because he’s one of them. If Daschle was some schmoe, he’d be doomed. But he knows the secret handshakes and everything. Plus, the GOP owes him for curling up in the fetal position during the AUMF debate. And I’m sure they’re hoping he will remain an invertebrate through the health care debate, when that comes along.

No, Daschle will go through. But let’s be honest, he probably doesn’t deserve to. At a time when Americans are suffering real financial pain from their health coverage, it’s ridiculous that the man who is supposed to fix that is as disconnected from that pain as can be.

There are spoilers ahead.

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Author’s Preface: GallingGalla’s comment on the third post in this series has made me think I should add this preface: I see each post in this series as one section of a single piece of writing, not as a discrete essay unto itself. As a result, while each section may contain its own argument, it is not really possible to know whether an issue that a reader feels is important, such as GallingGalla’s concerns about how accusations of self-hatred are also accusations of treason, will or will not be left out of the argument made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. As I said in my response to GallingGalla, I certainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoculation against critique, but given the modular nature of posting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find yourselves wondering, and commenting on, why I have not addressed something you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks.

To me, the point was obvious. Basing the Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own reading of the Hebrew Bible was asking the overwhelmingly non-Jewish world to accept as objective and incontrovertible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the implication that the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians was somehow the will of the monotheistic god. To assert that line of reasoning as an argument for Israel’s right to exist, I suggested, was self-defeating at the very least–even if, as a believing Jew, it was a cornerstone of your faith.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the colleagues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My husband,” she said, “would say you were an antisemitic Jew.”

I stared at my colleagues across a sudden gap of estrangement I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I understood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an antisemitic definition of Jewishness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teachers always used it to explain the antisemitism of non-Jews who were critical of Israel: To suggest that there might be a perspective from which Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many different ways, over and over again, was to suggest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a people ought not even to be.

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UPDATE: By request, here it is without the captions:

Original version after the cut.

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My favorite quote of the entire Blagojevich scandal goes to Illinois State Sen. James Meeks, D-Chicago: “We have this thing called impeachment and it’s bleeping golden and we’ve used it the right way.”

That’s some high-quality snark, my friends.

Rod Blagojevich is no longer the Governor of Illinois, thanks to a unanimous, 59-0 vote in the State Senate. He was also barred from running for public office in Illinois, though I assume that’s a formality, as Blagojevich polls just below pond scum in popularity.

I was born in Illinois, and spent the first six years of my life there; as my dad likes to say, it’s a good state to be from, as that means you’re not there anymore. While Blagojevich’s scandal was brazen and bizarre, it’s not unusual. As Gov. Pat Quinn now takes the reins, he knows that if history is any guide, he’s got a fifty-fifty chance of ending his term in jail. Three of the previous eight governors did, and Blagojevich appears likely to be the fourth. Illinois politics is built on the patched-up foundation of the Daley Machine, a cancerous, Superfund-worthy lot of patronage and corruption. And it’s not just on the Democratic side; the most recent Governor to go to jail was Republican George Ryan, who was also, until about 5 p.m. this afternoon, the most recent ex-governor.

That doesn’t mean that all, or even most, politicians in Illinois are corrupt. As in most states, most politicians are there for basically the right reasons, doing what they can to help their constituents. Those men and women now need to assert themselves — demand clarity and openness, demand that the men and women to serve in the state house are men and women of moral clarity. And the citizens have to demand it as well.

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Lani Silver, a native of San Francisco and an anti-racist teacher and activist, who founded the Bay Area Holocuast Oral History Project, passed away, just found out through San Francisco supervisor Eric Mar on his Facebook:

Lani’s work with the Holocaust lead to her discovery of Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara. Chiune was a Japanese diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews in the Holocaust while stationed in Lithuania in 1939. Sugihara is called the “Japanese Schindler.” Sugihara, with the support of his wife Yukiko, and in cooperation with the Acting Dutch Consulate Jan Zwartendijk, issued visas to Jews against the orders of the Japanese government. After the war Sugihara was dismissed from the Foreign Service for “that incident in Lithuania.”

Lani’s funeral is this Sunday, February 1, at Beth Israel Judeo, Brotherhood Way, in San Francisco. It will be at 12:30 PM.

Remember, you can own a paper copy of “Hereville” of your very own!

For folks that pay extra, I do a sketch on the title page. Each sketch is different. Here are three sketches I haven’t posted before; you can see a bunch more here.

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This cartoon was originally posted at Dollars & Sense, where my editor Chris Sturr writes:

Employment at the tippy-top is looking good for Black people in the United States, as Barack Obama ascends to the presidency and Roland Burris (finally) settles into Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat (net job increase: +1). The job picture for the rest of Black America? Not so good.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a sharp decline in nonfarm payroll employment in December and an increase in the general unemployment rate from 6.8% to 7.2%. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for Black men over the age of 20 rose from 12.1% to 13.4%. The official jobless rate for Black youth (ages 16 to 19) was even bleaker; it rose from 32.2% to 33.7% in the same period, while the unemployment rate for white youth increased from 18.4% to 18.7%.

The stimulus plan passed the House of Representatives last night by a comfortable margin, 244-188. Eleven Democrats broke with their party to oppose the measure. No Republicans voted for it.

This calls for a metaphor.

One of my favorite casino games is craps; oh, it’s risky and you can get yourself into trouble it you stay at a cold table too long. But a hot table? That’s fun — because most people at the table are betting on the same thing at the same time.

In craps, the most popular bets are the “Pass” and “Come” bets, which essentially are bets that you’ll roll the same number twice before you crap out. Since most people are betting the same thing, everyone gathered around the table is cheering for the shooter to roll a six before she rolls a seven. And when she hits that six, there is much high-fiving and cheering.

But there’s always one guy in the corner of the table betting the “Don’t Pass” and “Don’t Come” line. Statistically, it’s the same bet, and pays the same. But still, nobody likes him. He’s betting that the point won’t come around again before the shooter craps out. He’s betting against everyone at the table. He’s hoping everyone else around the table fails, so that he can profit.

Last night, the Republican Party put all its chips on the “Don’t Pass” line. They’re hoping — indeed, gambling their futures — that the national economy is going to fail. They’re betting that the stimulus package will not help pull us out of the nosedive our economy is in. They win if the economy tanks, if everyone else around the table walks away poorer.

Mark Halperin aside, it’s pretty obvious to most people that the President worked hard to gain Republican support. He added a number of tax cuts to the bill, cut out reproductive health care and work on the National Mall when Republicans objected. He took a step their way, and reached out a hand, and they slapped it aside, because they don’t want to be in it together. They don’t want to be on the same side as everyone else at the table. Because if everyone prospers, the Republicans, relatively, don’t improve their positions.

And so the Republicans in the House have placed their bet: against Americans, for themselves. Like the guy betting “Don’t Pass,” they may win in the end. But if the table gets hot, the rest of us will win together — and the Republicans will find themselves out of money, out of hope, and out of power for a long, long time.

So the Coleman campaign put up a list of people whose absentee ballots have been rejected, so that the people who committed ballot fraud can find out that their ballots were rejected due to the ballot fraud. And amazingly and shockingly, the traffic is just so incredibly huge that it totally crashes the site! Because, you know, after pornography the most exciting thing on all the internets is seeing if your vote for Dean Barkley was rejected.

What? You say that seems a bit unlikely? You say that a web site designed to take hundreds of thousands of hits a day should be able to deal with the mild increase in views a trip to Hannity should add? You think that Coleman faked the “crash” in an ill-conceived plot to generate traffic? Well, yeah — that is, in fact, exactly what they did:

1. colemanforsenate.com has handled much, much more traffic before. (Note that each “visitor” generates numerous “hits.”) Why is it a problem now?

2. Their website has been configured to point at the IP address “1.1.1.1,” which goes nowhere. This isn’t a mistake. They also set the “time to live” on that for only 600 seconds, which means when they choose to switch it back, most servers should only take 10 minutes to refresh. It’s an intentional move so they can manage their timing of the switchover. Most records like this have a much longer time to live. In short, they have configured their website to intentionally point at nothing. This does not happen by mistake and it is clear what they are doing. Reporters: ask any IT professional.

Yep! It turns out that Team Coleman actually altered their site’s DNS address to make it appear that the demand for their site was just so incredibly big that the internet itself quaked in terror, its tubes clogged with justice. Or some other substance.

Upon hearing this, I said to myself, “Self, this sounds awfully familiar. Like at some point in the past, the Minnesota GOP tried similar shenanigans with their websites in a Senate campaign.” But when? When indeed….

But the breathless hyperventilating from the right has reached its apex, with the downing of Mark Kennedy’s website for security purposes:

We were informed last evening of a serious security breach of sensitive Kennedy campaign information by a senior member of Amy Klobuchar’s campaign. Due to the fact this information was accessed via the internet, we are taking precautionary measures to protect our campaign information. We apologize for the inconvenience. The full features of our website will be restored once this matter has been resolved.

Well, except for his contributions page. That’s too important to take down.

And Pat Shortridge’s blog.

And except for the fact that the site isn’t actually down at all.

Note: I doubt all those links still link anywhere, but the story’s the thing — in 2006, in response to a breach of the Mark Kennedy for Senate web site by a liberal blogger, the Kennedy campaign shut down their site, “for security reasons.” Except they didn’t. They just plugged in some generic code that made the website look closed — but they left the contributions page up.

The Coleman campaign tried to take a page out of the Mark Kennedy playbook, because hey, when you think losing Senate candidates, you think Mark Kennedy. And they would have succeeded, except their ruse was only slightly less transparent than Kennedy’s.

Why are they doing this? I’m really not sure. I suppose when your legal strategy isn’t panning out too well, you try to play on public sympathy.

In a final irony, the Coleman gambit left donor information available for several hours on Wednesday night. Yes, the stupid, transparently false attempt at garnering sympathy didn’t just backfire, but it put donor information out onto the internet in world-readable format. At some point, the recount will end. But I hope not too soon — this is too hilarious right now.

You stay classy, Dick Armey:

For the YouTube-challenged, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, was on Hardball discussing tax policy opposite Salon’s Joan Walsh. Given the state of things, Walsh was arguing basic, unassailable points, like the fact that Republican tax and spending policy has been tried and found wanting, while Armey was reduced to ad hominem attacks, first against an unnamed female Republican senator (Olympia Snowe? Kay Bailey Hutchison? The mind boggles!) and then against Walsh herself. Unable to actually refute anything that she was saying, Armey spat out, “I am so damn glad that you can never be my wife cause I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day.”

Walsh, to her credit, said, “That makes two of us.” I, for one, can’t fathom wanting to be married to a guy who’s so insecure about debating a woman that he has to reduce her statements to “prattle,” and her professional career to whether she’d make a good wife.

I simply can’t imagine why Republicans seem to be so unbelievably unpopular.

I had this really cool dream about historical China, complete with multiple POV shifts and a very complex storyline. At one point, I informed the main character that I wouldn’t be writing his story because it wasn’t the sort of thing I do and I was worried that too many of the details were historically inaccurate.

So photos recently surfaced of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Giselle Bündchen on vacation in Mexico together, hanging out and being schmoopy and generally doing the kind of things one does when one’s on vacation with one’s significant other, except that since this was Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen we’re talking about, they’re doing it much more attractively than the average couple would.

At any rate, that’s not really a big story, unless one of the shots showed Brady missing his knee, which he didn’t appear to be. So you’d think that the news of a supermodel and her athlete boyfriend going on vacation wouldn’t be a big deal. But you wouldn’t be Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who sees in the basic human emotion displayed in these pictures a difficult truth: Tom Brady is totally dickless, yo.

Now, you might think that’s insane, given that the proof of Brady’s emasculation appears to be his ability to be in a mutually loving relationship with the highest-paid supermodel on the planet, which when last I checked was supposed to be the goal for all manly men to aspire to.¹ But you see, Gisele appears to love Tom back, and that will never do:

Yesterday was the last straw. You know what I’m talking about. You opened your newspaper (or perhaps viewed online) and saw the photograph of Gisele Bundchen feeding Brady at poolside in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

That did it. The tipping point. The coup de grace. The shark jumped.

She was feeding him.

Uh, yeah, she was:

Horrible, ain’t it? Two human beings who are in a long-term, committed relationship, one of whom is offering a potato chip to the other. You see two human beings in a caring relationship. Shaughnessy sees wimpiness:

We put up with a lot. We were OK with Tom as Gisele’s errand boy, Tom bringing home the flowers, Tom walking Gisele’s dog. We were good with Tom and Gisele canoodling in the candlelight, holding hands coming out of a restaurant.

But you simply cannot have your quarterback being fed like an infant at poolside. Remember, people - this is a football player we’re talking about. This is your quarterback. Think there’s any photographic evidence of Johnny Unitas being spoon-fed? Bet Slingin’ Sammy Baugh’s wife never tried to sling any hash into his mouth.

Yeah! Take that, Brady! A real man simply steals the potato chip off his girlfriend’s plate, and then laughs when she said she wanted to eat it! A real man tells his girlfriend, “Screw you, I don’t want your frakkin’ potato chip!” A real man is an asshole. Come on, Brady, you were doing so well with the dumping of Bridget Moynahan when she got pregnant. Where’s that spark of jerkiness now?

Ever see a high school player injured in the middle of the game and have his mother run onto the field to hover over him? That’s what this is like. A guy might never recover.

Yes, that’s right: being fed potato chips on a beach while on vacation in Mexico by your supermodel girlfriend is exactly like having your parent be worried about you when you’re a kid.

Shaughnessy admits, of course, that he’s jealous (no!) of Tom for having an attractive, loving girlfriend, and complains a bit more about Brady being spoon-fed out of a Gerber jar, because, again, that’s exactly what’s this is like. And then he says something very telling:

The balanced view, of course, would be that Tom is secure enough in his own skin to let us see his sensitive side. He’s just a guy in love and he wants the world to know. It’s not his fault that the paparazzi dog his every move. He should be allowed to have private moments, just like everybody else. He shows tremendous restraint not punching out those TMZ guys.

But enough is enough.

Seriously, that’s a whole lot of screwed up there. Because yes, Tom Brady appears to be in love, and his girlfriend appears to be in love too, and the two act like they’re in love because — sit down — humans are capable of feeling love. Even the ones who are football players.

That’s what Shaughnessy objects to here. That Brady is screwing up the vibe. Men don’t love — everyone knows that. We lust, sure, we like to have sex. But love? Love is for homosexuals and women. Loving someone shows weakness. Because Tom Brady is in love, he’s now too weak to be an NFL quarterback.

Only if he proves he’s a scumbag, bereft of emotions other than lust and rage, can he be a worthy athlete. Only if he reacts to his girlfriend’s gesture of affection with cold disdain, or better, a closed fist — only then can he truly be the kind of manly man we expect him to be.

It’s a depressing way to look at the world. But it’s an all-too-common one. And that’s why this column, while repulsive, is all-too-unsurprising.

(Via Deadspin)

1. Yes, I’m being facetious (back)

A great little didy about the history of the internet in neat little animated form.

It’s rare that I post something mainly for the enjoyment of RonF, but this was too good to pass up.

Blagojevich Claims Behavior Was Just Elaborate Plan To Surprise Patrick Fitzgerald With Senate Nomination On His Birthday

Courtesy America’s Finest News Source, naturally.

In a speech, self-described “conservative feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers said:

Let me turn to my second major objection to contemporary feminism: its reckless disregard for the truth. In doing research for my books, I looked carefully at some standard feminist claims about women and violence, depression, eating disorders, pay equity and education. What I found is that most –- not all —- but most of the victim statistics are, at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate. [...]

I partly agree with Sommers: Too many feminists — including those we rely on to get facts right (such as academics and published writers) — have been careless about fact-checking their claims. Critiquing a textbook on domestic violence, Sommers writes:

Zorza also informs readers that “Between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency room in America are there because of domestic violence.” This claim is ubiquitous in the feminist canon. But is it false. There are two legitimate studies on emergency room admissions: one by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and another by the Centers for Disease Control. The results of both indicate that domestic violence is a serious problem, but that it is far down on the list of reasons women go to emergency rooms. Approximately one half of one percent of women in emergency rooms are there seeking treatment for injuries from domestic violence.

Sommers cites a second recent textbook, The Penguin Atlas Of Women In The World, which repeats the same error. And she’s right — it is an error. (Although, as I’ll show in a future post, Sommers’ counter-claims are just as false.)

I think this is the strongest of Sommers’ claims. Sommers is right to say that “false assertions, hyperbole and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism in general.” And many errors could easily be avoided if authors just checked primary sources — something that professional writers and academics should do routinely.

Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.

But although she has a point, Sommers is still substantially wrong, for two reasons. First, Sommers conflates unambiguous errors of fact — which will inevitably happen sometimes, especially in a movement the size of modern-day feminism — with well-reasoned disagreements. And secondly, Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.

In her lecture, Sommers writes:

Some of you are probably thinking –- the literature on feminism is vast and complex –- there are bound to be some mistakes. So what? But I and other investigators have not found “some mistakes.” What we have found is a large body of blatantly false information. The Domestic Violence Law textbook and the Penguin Atlas of Women in the World are not the exception. They are the rule.

So here’s Sommers’ argument:

1) Feminist writers sometimes repeat “blatantly false information.”

2) This errors are the rule, not the exception. This is documented in the works of Christina Hoff Sommers and “other investigators.”

3) Therefore, feminism, as a rule, consists of “a large body of blatantly false information.”

The trick here is in point 2. Sommers wants us to believe that her critiques of feminism, as well as those by “other investigators,” are filled with examples of feminists making unambiguous factual errors. But that’s not true. In Sommer’s book Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers does catch feminists making some unambiguous errors, but most of the book is taken up by subjective political disagreements, not by fact-checking.

In order to accept that Sommers’ work demonstrates that a “reckless disregard for truth” is the “rule,” “not the exception,” we’d have to accept that anytime a feminist disagrees with Christina Hoff Sommers — because such disagreements take up most of Sommers’ work — that is evidence of a reckless disregard for the truth. But of course, it’s no such thing.

So what do I mean when I say subjective political disagreements? By “subjective political disagreements,” I mean questions that reasonable, honest people, basing their opinion on well-founded evidence, can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers on.

I will focus on one example: the rape prevalence research of Mary Koss. Koss’ research is probably the single example that “conservative feminists” and their allies have used most often to “prove” feminist dishonesty, ¹ starting in the early 1990s in books like Sommers’ own Who Stole Feminism?, and continuing to this day (Heather MacDonald published an attack on Koss’ research just last year). According to the Independent Woman’s Forum,² Koss’ research is the “number one feminist myth” in America.

So what was Koss’ rape research? In the 1980s, Koss pioneered a new approach to surveying populations about their past experiences with rape. Where previous surveys measured rape prevalence by asking respondents a single, sometimes hilariously vague question (”Has anybody ever attacked you in any other way?”), Koss asked a series of comparatively specific questions (”Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of a physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?”) about respondents’ experiences.

Koss’ study of “hidden rape” proved three important facts, which feminists and criminologists had long suspected: that rape happened much more frequently than official numbers indicated; that most rapes aren’t committed by strangers; and that most rapes are never reported to police or other authorities.

Koss’ study, in the decades since, has led two parallel lives. In one life — a life lived in books funded by right-wing foundations, anti-feminist websites, and the like — Koss’ work is an enduring symbol of feminist dishonesty and deception, and is considered a discredited joke, trotted out for rehashed debunkings every couple of years.

In another life, however — a life lived among academic experts — Koss’ work has been amazingly successful. Decades later, her work is respectfully cited in peer-reviewed studies — a few years ago I found that just two of Koss’ articles had been cited over six hundred times.³

Although subsequent research has arguably improved on Koss’ 1980s work, her insight — that rape victims are more likely to recount their experiences in response to a series of behaviorally-specific questions — is accepted by virtually all published rape prevalence researchers. And Koss’ central findings (described above) have been replicated in study after study, including two major studies conducted by the Federal government.

By ordinary academic standards, a frequently-cited study which has been replicated multiple times is solid work. That’s not to say that Koss’ study was perfect — no study ever is — but citations plus replication is the gold standard.

Of course, reasonable people can sometimes disagree with professional researchers, and Sommers and other “investigators” are entitled to their opinions.⁴ But Sommers’ position on Koss’ research isn’t that reasonable people can disagree. Instead, she and other “investigators” have repeatedly used Koss’ research as their major example of feminist lying, even though Koss’ results are widely accepted by experts and have been replicated over and over.

This is the central dishonesty of Sommers’ thesis: She claims her work shows that feminists “as a rule” have “reckless disregard for the truth,” but most of her book concerns matters that an honest person could easily disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers about.⁵

Sommers has to frame all her disagreements with mainstream feminism as feminist lying, because that is the basis of her case against feminism. If she admits that reasonable, honest feminists can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers, she loses her claim that modern feminism consists of “a large body of blatantly false information… at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate.”

* * *

Earlier this post, I said that “Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.” In my next post in this series, I’ll back that statement up, using her discussion of emergency room admissions as my example.

This post appears both at “Alas, a Blog” and at “Blog By Barry.” To facilitate intra-feminist dialog, the comments at “Alas” are only open to feminists, while the comments at “Blog By Barry” are open to all.

1. Think I’m exaggerating? Here is an incomplete list of books which rehash the “conservative feminist” arguments against Koss’ research: The Morning After by Katie Roiphe; The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism by Carrie Lukas; Dead End Feminism by Elisabeth Badinter; Lip Service by Kate Fillion; Tax-funded Politics by James T. Bennett; A Nation of Victims by Charles J. Sykes; Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising by John Feteke; The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order‎ by Rene Denfeld; The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell; Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? by Warren Farrell, Steven Svoboda, & James P. Sterba. It’s likely there are additional books I’m unaware of, not to mention dozens of articles and hundreds of website. (back)
2. A Sommers-influenced “conservative feminist” think tank. (back)
3. In Who Stole Feminism, Sommers claims that Koss’s work is frequently cited by activists but “not so much by established scholars in the field of rape research.” It would in fact be hard to name a scholar of rape prevalence who has been cited more often in the professional literature. (back)
4. To delve into the details of the debate, including detailed responses to the arguments most often brought up by Sommers and other “investigators,” see my past posts about the Koss controversy. (back)
5. It’s not just rape prevalence research; I could make similar arguments for how Who Stole Feminism? treats topics like domestic violence, education, the wage gap, etc…. (back)

For anyone who is interested I wrote an article recently in where I interviewed Dr. As’ad AbuKhalil and FAIR representative Peter Hart.  The article was about U.S. media bias on the coverage of Israel.  This is my original article which was translated by journalist Ashraf Allam.

If you’re a Battlestar Galactica fan like I am, you’ll recognize instantly the scene I’m about to show you. It’s from just two episodes ago, so those of you still plowing through the season 2.5 DVDs, don’t read further.

I post it not just because it’s awesome, but because the advertisement that follows is the worst-placed ad in the history of history:

So full of fail. And that’s without even considering that the commercial is set to Rare Earth’s “I Just Want to Celebrate.”

(Via Sully)

I know most of us have pretty much said what we need to say about the Feministe debacle, but there’s one more thing I want to address before I try to put it behind me.

There were a few bloggers and commenters who, when responding to David’s reference to gentile privilege (a concept that immediately made sense to me), stated, explicitly or implicitly, that they didn’t believe it exists. In doing so, they broke one of the fundamental rules of anti-oppression work: you never, ever dictate to a group what its own experience looks like. If you haven’t lived as a member of that group, you simply do not have the right to tell them how they are or aren’t oppressed. This, for me, was the most hurtful aspect of the whole debate. If you don’t think you need to understand anti-Semitism in order to understand why Israel launched an outrageous and inexcusable attack on Gaza - fine, I’m glad you’ve got it figured out. If you feel you have the energy to learn about Palestinian oppression or Jewish oppression, but not both - fine, I’ll see you at half the meetings. But I think it’s clear here that if you’re not acknowledging the existence of gentile privilege, then you’re not acknowledging the existence of anti-Semitism. Oppression cannot exist without corresponding privilege. It’s just not possible, folks.

I feel like I should be inured to it - after all, it’s not like it hasn’t happened to WOC, the disabled, Muslims, and countless other groups who thought that social justice meant justice for them, too - but it’s been bothering me for days. Indeed, looking over my last post on the subject, I’m reminded that I mentioned it there, too. I didn’t think for a second that the concept of gentile privilege would, in a feminist, anti-racist space, be controversial. I should have, though. (No wonder so many activists I know just don’t read comment threads at all.)

So: a checklist. Read the rest of this entry »