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And now for the good news: The “State Secrets Protection Act of 2009,” was introduced in the House today by John Conyers. And over in the Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced the 2008 State Secrets Protection Act, slow-walking courts through the cases in which the government asserts the state secrets privilege. This is how the system is supposed to work: They blow it, we fix it!
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In the audio version of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama takes on the role of his best friend in high school, "Ray." At upscale Punahou School in Honolulu, Obama and "Ray" were among the few multiracial students, and their friendship was an important one in terms of shaping Obama's racial identity in the making.
If you're interested in finding out what it sounds like when Obama swears, "Barack Obama is @#$% tired of this @#$%!" offers an earful. Between "Sorry-ass motherfucker ain't got nothing on me" and "Sure you can have my number, baby!" I think I just found my new ringtone.
Amid the motherfuckers and the shits, though, there's another provocative line: "You ain't my bitch, nigga! Buy your own damn fries!" So, I'm wondering: Is it OK if this POTUS uses the N word?
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Eve, I wish Portfolio had been a little more specific in their recession belt-tightening survey. "Stop coloring hair" is a pretty limiting response that doesn't factor in some other options to save money on maintaining that hair hue. Women (and men) who want to save money might come to terms with their roots and go longer between touch-ups. They could downgrade to a cheaper colorist or even buy a DIY hair-dye kit from the drug store. And if you're selling your home, chances are that your financial problems are too critical to be solved by forgoing lattes and trips to the salon for a few months.
I was initially struck by the claim that only 4.1 percent plan to donate less in 2009, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that a study foresees just a 3 percent to 5 percent drop in corporate giving this year. No word on how much individuals plan to reduce or increase their personal donations, but hopefully Portfolio readers tend to give a little bit of that money saved on lattes and vacations.
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Conde Nast Portfolio polled its readers to ask "where they've already cut back or where they plan to in the coming year." The results provide a little bit of an unsettling look at our priorities. The top and bottom results, with a selection from the middle:
Stop eating out: 29.4%
Move in with parents: 8.1%
Stop buying clothes: 7.3%
Sell eggs or sperm: 5.4%
Sell home: 1.8%
Let go of housekeeper: 1.6%
Stop coloring hair: 1.1%
Stopping buying clothes is a more upsetting prospect than moving in with the 'rents? Selling one's entire home is less depressing than laying off the household help? And five times more people insist they would sell their eggs than say they'd stop dyeing their hair?
P.S. Reader MK notes that "the unusual distribution probably has less to do with relative
preferences between dissimilar solutions and more to do with how
desperate people are," suggesting that it's a different class of people contemplating selling their home than considering stopping coloring their hair. Very true, and related to the point Torie made. Still, this wasn't a random survey; it was a poll of readers of Conde Nast Portfolio, whose financial situations are probably more alike. I'd reckon a majority of women who answered that poll color their hair. The finding struck me, too, because it jibed with a (yes, small and random) anecdote I heard at the place I get my hair cut, which does a big business in "color." The stylists at this salon reported a recent uptick in requests for coloring, not a downturn.
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Just a quick cold-water dump on the "25 Random Things" Facebook craze, which I see is being breathlessly tracked on Slate and deconstructed for its social implications in the Wall Street Journal. (Click on either link if you are logging on from Xingu National Park after six months lost in the Amazon and have somehow escaped an encounter with this trend yet.)
Look, the sudden profusion of these "25 Random Things" notes is sort of odd and irritating if you don't want to fill out your own, but it's nothing new. Their evolutionary ancestor, the quiz, was a huge thing when I was in middle school in the '90s and everybody was getting into chain letters: The quiz was a chain letter asking things like, "What is your greatest fear?" and "What's your favorite color?" The answers were more prompted than in "25 Random Things," but the yield was the same: weird tidbits about folks you normally wouldn't have known unless you were best friends. The original "profile" feature in America Online—which asked you for random information like your "favorite quote"—and profiles on social networking Web sites provide a permanent outlet for the same kind of quirk oversharing. A ramble through my Facebook friends' profiles yields "interests" that are less how anybody actually spends most of their time and more like tidbits they might put on a "25 Random Things" note: "C-SPAN radio," "listening to acorns," "skeletons," "penguins," "debunking the pythagorean theorem." I don't think the "25 Random Things" craze says much about our particular moment—it's more like a randomly (sorry) mutated expression of a desire that's been that's been out there for ages.
P.S. As is often the case, Slate does it best. Make sure to check out Chris Wilson's hilariously scientific article on the epidemiology of the "25 Random Things" "infection."
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Glenn Greenwald does a great job of eviscerating the lame argument—about how the government is just buying time—in defense of the Obama administration's blanket defense of the blanket state-secrets privilege on Monday. When lawyers want more time, they ask the court for a continuance. When invoked to dismiss a case, as opposed to prevent disclosure of particular documents or other forms of classified evidence, the state-secrets doctrine is the government's big gun for getting rid of lawsuits it doesn't like. Obama and Biden objected to the Bush administration's use of it as candidates, as Dahlia points out. If they'd stuck with that position in court, what would have happened, anyway? The case would have gone back to district court. Jeppesen DataPlan (the defendant in the suit—more of the facts here) would have argued against disclosure of the same documents that the government preemptively blocked access to. There would have been a year or two of wrangling. The judge would have reviewed the documents and, if they're really as sensitive as the government says, kept many of them secret. In the meantime, the less sensitive material would probably have come out in one of a variety of other ways—via congressional subpoena, or voluntary release by the Justice Department, or in another lawsuit.
Why then did the Obama administration stick with state secrets? This makes most sense I think viewed in terms of Obama's perceived need to prove himself to the CIA. After the election, there was the flap over whether Obama should name John Brennan to head the agency, a name he withdrew. Then he picked Leon Panetta instead—the opposite of a CIA insider. If DoJ had abandoned Bush's position on state secrets in the Jeppesen case, CIA agents and officials would have had one more reason to be nervous about the new guy in town.
It's also worth recognizing that this case is a big deal, historically speaking. Litigants haven't ever, as far as I know, successfully sued the CIA (which is what's really at stake here, even if Jeppesen is formally the defendant) over torture, which is what this case comes down to. The state-secrets doctrine has been the government's customary tool for getting courts to dismiss somewhat parallel accusations, like the 1970s suits that followed the revelations about wiretapping that led to the Church Commission.
But you can duly note all of that and still see the Obama administration's move as the wrong one, because of the smothering blanket nature of invoking this privilege in this way, and because doing so seeks to end a discussion about accountability that we should be only just beginning. If we haven't had successful lawsuits involving CIA torture before, maybe that's because we haven't had torture on the scale that the Bush administration perpetrated. Obama has made it clear every time he is asked that he's not eager for criminal liability. If his lawyers cut off the avenues to civil liability as well, doesn't that mean that they've legalized the torture of the past? Yes, their promise not to do more torture and detentions going forward matters more. But it's not the only thing that matters.
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Both Us Weekly and People put falling star Jessica Simpson on their covers this week, where they're defending her from nasty Internet chatter about her recent weight gain. (The smack talking was set off by these photos. Obviously, if the haters were going to be mean about something, it should have been the belt.) People went the uplifting, school-marm route ("She's Proud of Her Body: Stop calling her fat! Inside the bold choice to lead a real life") while Us practiced it's more typical schizophrenia, simultaneously sympathizing ("Jessica's Agony: Bullied for her weight") and twisting the knife ("Suddenly back with a trainer"; "She's tortured by food"; "Did Tony cheat?")
While I can't help but feel some sympathy for Simpson—I'm sure getting skewered for looking like a regular person isn't pleasant—when I think about how tiresomely manipulative the whole drama is, my compassion dissipates. Bottom line: Getting called fat is the best thing that could have happened to Simpson’s career, which is in desperate need of a boost. (The photos that started it all were taken at a chilli cookoff where she was performing.) As Oprah has taught us, nothing generates goodwill quite like courageous, highly public struggles with one's weight. The tabloids and Simpson have taken note and jumped on some Internet trash talk, hoping to reap the benefits in copies sold and minutes in the spotlight.
It worked for Tyra Banks and Jennifer Love Hewitt, who were both recently involved in "You call me fat, I earn public sympathy" kerfuffles. Banks appeared on the cover of People ("You Call This Fat?") in January 2007. Besides aiding Banks' ongoing, ultra-serious mission to become Oprah's heir apparent, it helped drum up interest in yet another cycle of America's Next Top Model. After pictures of Hewitt in a bikini made the rounds in December 2007, she landed on the cover of People ("Stop Calling Me Fat"), possibly her biggest brush with relevancy since Party of Five. Eight months later, Us Weekly put her on their cover for losing "18 lbs in 10 weeks" because, obviously, it's great to be comfortable with your body, but better to be a size 2.
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Feministing writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay is up in arms because the Los Angeles Times published Rihanna's name as Chris Brown's accuser. For those of you who missed it, Brown, Rihanna's boyfriend, was arrested Sunday for felony domestic violence. Mukhopadhyay argues that Rihanna's privacy has been violated and also posits that Rihanna "is a model to young women and they are affected by how she responds to this problem. This is a tremendous amount of pressure for anyone, let alone a young woman who is a victim of domestic violence."
Let's start with the first point, which is that Rihanna's privacy has been violated. Most newspapers do not print the accuser's name in sexual and domestic assault cases without the victim's permission, though it's Slate media guru Jack Shafer's anecdotal sense that the press tide has been turning on the naming of accusers in recent years. In the American Journalism Review, Geneva Overholser, Missouri School of Journalism professor and the Pulitzer prize winner for a series on rape, argues that "in the long run, we'll never get rid of the stigma if we don't treat these like regular crimes. ... It's just not ethical to make a choice about guilt or innocence, which is effectively what we do. It makes us look like we are assuming innocence on one part, guilt on another. ... We should not be determining who deserves our protection." It's also worth reiterating that this is a domestic violence case, and not a sexual assault case, and from what I've seen it's much more common for newspapers to print the names of domestic assault accusers than rape accusers.
But more practically, Rihanna is globally known as Chris Brown's girlfriend. The second Brown's arrest for domestic violence was publicized, the world would know that Rihanna was the accuser. To gingerly dance around her name would be ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the room to a nearly absurd degree.
As for the notion that Rihanna is going to be thrust into the position of unwilling poster child for domestic violence, I think that is a byproduct of the sort of squeaky-clean celebrity image she's so carefully constructed. And besides, as Jo-Ann Armao noted in the Washington Post two years ago, shame is for criminals. If Rihanna's the paid and willing poster child for CoverGirl, Totes umbrellas, Clinique, and Secret Deodorant, is it so terrible for her to be encouraged to speak out against domestic violence as well?
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My sister e-mailed me this morning with an interesting addition to our conversation about M.I.A's Grammy outfit. She's on Jessica and Nina's side that the get-up wasn't particularly revealing, especially by pop-star standards, and questions what's causing people like Marjorie to feel uncomfortable with it:
The only reason people are pearl-clutching over it is that the body underneath it is pregnant, and we're socialized to believe that a pregnant woman's body no longer belongs to her alone. Look at all the "think about what your future kids might think!" horror—like just because the fetus is in there right now, he's got some say over the exterior decorating. Sorry, but the fact that you don't give up ownership of your body (and the right to make ugly fashion choices) just because you're incubating is kind of a basic pillar of feminism.
There's also a great conversation going on in the Fray about this, with most posters agreeing that the polka-dot onesie was more kick-ass than indecent. And kak79 makes a good point that the artist herself was actually fairly M.I.A. in the Grammy performance:
I think what astonished me more about M.I.A's Grammy performance than her outfit was that she had such a small part to play in her own song. Was she not good enough to perform her own song on her own? Yes, I know the Grammys are big on pairings. So, I'll grant them the desire to do a remix with another performer. But, really, they practically wrote her out. It was her and four men and they held a good 95% of that performance. I think we should all be talking about that and not her crazy fashion choices.