Science and Politics

Here’s a reality check the next time someone wants to tell you about clean coal: They're still cleaning up the biggest fly ash spill in U.S. history that occurred in December 2008, which occurred at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant. A dam holding back tons of slurry burst in the middle of the night, dumping more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry into Tennessee River tributaries. The sludge leveled entire communities with a four-foot-deep layer of coal ash slurry and killed off an unbelievable number of fish living in the rivers. The spill has been said to be one hundred times as large as the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) is wrapping up its 2010 conference in DC today. It's kind of like the Coachella festival of Conservative politicians. (So Mitt Romney's on stage 2 right now, but then at three we have to pick between Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft!) But these riveting speakers aren't the only exciting draw this year. Nope--there are some fly honies at the conference, and The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson's conservative news site, has put this video together (equally poor in editing as in taste) documenting the earth-shattering revelation that there are women at CPAC who aren't named Ann Coulter or Michele Bachmann.
He basically goes up to women and proceeds to have a conversation like this:
Daily Caller: What brings you to CPAC?
Women: ...You mean besides the obvious fact that I'm interested in conservative activism?

On Saturday night the House of Representatives narrowly passed a health-care reform bill, changing the way Americans will access health insurance. Included in the bill was an amendment from Bart Stupak (D-MI), which "prohibits federal funds for abortion services in the public option." Women seeking insurance coverage for abortions must seek a plan outside the enrolled companies. Sixty-Four Democrats voted to include the amendment.

While the bill is heralded as the biggest step in health care reform since the New Deal, the Stupak amendment serves as a monumental setback for reproductive justice.

Read on for thoughts from other bloggers, but please share your thoughts on the bill, the amendment, and the future of health care below.

Today, over twenty organizations in eleven countries will hold "simultaneous events and public demonstrations on topics like protesting customary practices such as honor killings and FGM/C, overturning discriminatory and life threatening laws like stoning or lashing of women, and calling for LGBT rights, the right to sexuality education and the right to bodily and sexual integrity of all people." On the eve of the One Day, One Struggle campaign, I spoke to WWHR campaign coordinators Pinar Ilkkaracan and Irazca Geray, as well as Vizla Kumaresan from Malaysia's Women's Aid Organization (WAO), about the goals of the premiere advocacy event.

I spent most of this past spring and summer rolling my eyes every time I heard a news story about the swine flu. Almost every day local reporters got hysterical about 5 or 10 or 20 confirmed cases. Entire schools closed in response to a handful of kids with fevers, and as if there were no war in Afghanistan, no economic crisis, and no other epidemics claiming ten times as many lives, newscasters talked about H1N1 (the proper name for swine flu) for hours.

I have a degree in public health and my work focuses on preventing rape and other acts of violence and supporting survivors in healing from abuse. When I see all the attention swine flu is getting, I’m jealous. Other than intermittent news stories about sex offenders on the loose or why women who accuse professional athletes of rape are lying, sexual violence rarely gets any widespread coverage. Certainly no state of emergency declared by the President of the United States.

What would our media, our public discourse, and our institutional responses look like if people cared as much about rape as they do about H1N1?

Nothing gets a person thinking deeply about health care faster--it turns out--than being home sick with something that started out looking an awful lot like H1N1.

 

In this corner, California: home to the Bay Area, which is probably among the most queer-friendly places in the world. Though notoriously "pro-H8," California has relatively comprehensive domestic partnership laws and the Bay Area, in particular, offers a host of legal and health services to the GLBTQ community.

These days everyone seems to be caught up in the Obama Peace Prize hullabaloo: He’s only been in office for 9 months! How do we know he deserves it? What if he surges the troops in Afghanistan? Personally, I couldn’t care less. By now, the Nobel Peace Prize is right up there with the Grammys in the respectability category (or lack thereof), and the prize has a history of rewarding American Imperialism. The original war-mongering president Teddy Roosevelt won one, for Pete’s sake. In the irony category, the prize in economics often seems to follow suit, so my jaded trust in the Scandinavian art of prize-giving was pleasantly proven wrong today when I read that Elinor Ostrom became the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.



This prize is exciting partly because Ms. Ostrom is the first woman to win it, but not just because of that. Her winning this prize will hopefully help to highlight women’s voices in a field that is desperate for them, and the noble work this Nobel is rewarding will hopefully change the way we think about economics in general.

 

 

You know what? I get it. The G20 is a symbol of everything that's wrong with globalized capitalism. Protesting their gatherings makes a lot of sense to me. This year the G20 is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and we are once again awash in apocalyptic images of police-state riot gear and angry college kids in bandanas getting arrested.