Archive for the 'pi' Category

Warning: this post references sexual assault

Christopher Columbus was not a good man.  He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.  He directly and deliberately erased entire cultures.  Men under his command committed the most heinous of crimes against native Americans, including widespread rape, maiming, and enslavement.  Here’s a passage from Wikipedia that I believe was taken from Howard Zinn’s Peoples’ History of the United States:

During his second voyage, Columbus and his men instituted a policy in Hispaniola which has been referred to by numerous historians as genocide. The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved and murdered. Hundreds were rounded up and shipped to Europe to be sold; many died en route. For the rest of the population, Columbus demanded that all Taino under his control should bring the Spaniards gold. Those that didn’t were to have their hands cut off. Since there was, in fact, little gold to be had, the Taino fled, and the Spaniards hunted them down and killed them. The Taino tried to mount a resistance, but the Spanish weaponry was superior, and European diseases ravaged their population. In despair, the Taino engaged in mass suicide, even killing their own children to save them from the Spaniards. Within two years, half of what may have been 250,000 Taino were dead. The remainder were taken as slaves and set to work on plantations, where the mortality rate was very high. By 1550, 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred Taino were left on their island. In another hundred years, perhaps only a handful remained.

If the founding of America is to be celebrated at all, it should be celebrated with great regret for the crimes committed in its name, with great humility for the crimes which continue to be committed in its name, including, but by no means limited to:

• The widespread killing of innocent civilians being carried out in the middle east in the name of spreading “freedom”
• The violent suppression of the movement of native Americans from what is currently Mexico into territory which was violently taken from them, as if we have more claim to this land than Mexican citizens do.

If anything, tomorrow we should mourn the destruction of the Americas, not celebrate the founding of them.

Heart over at Women’s Space linked to a great post by Lucinda Marshall about the bailout bill.  It begins:

Call me a lazy citizen, but it is 9 am and I have not yet finished reading the 451 page bailout bill that the Senate passed last night.  But then again, I’m guessing that none of the Senators read it either.

How else to explain that suddenly on page 115 there is a section titled “Energy Production Incentives” that goes on for well over a hundred pages.  My favorite provision in that particular section pertains to top-loading clothes washers (page 223).

Read the rest.  And read the bill itself here.

It’s funny that this happened, after House republicans said they would make sure it was a “clean bill”.  I suppose they can blame the democrats.  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it is not possible to determine who lobbied Chris Dodd to get each one of those little extensions and revisions into this bill.  So I guess we can blame Dodd.

At first I was thinking he added all that to get the bill to pass, but the bill passed easily (263-171) so that doesn’t seem likely.  Although maybe those are provisions needed to get representatives to sign on.  That would make more sense, given it hasn’t yet passed in the house.  I never thought about that, but both houses of congress must need to worry not just about getting a bill to pass in their own house, but making it likely to pass in the other house.  Must be helpful to have friends in the other house.

“The trafficking of drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists,” said President Bush in December 2001.

Yeah, so why not make it legal for US businesses to produce and sell it, so that it will finance the US economy instead?

I saw a funny thing on Google News today:

If you look quickly you’ll see it’s still up in the Election section of Google News.

A headline from Fox News claiming “Conservatives Begin Questioning Palin’s Heft”?  A little surprising for a network that basically only reports the news that’s good for republican candidates.  The url in question is http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/28/conservatives-begin-questioning-palins-heft/, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to exist any more.  If you click on that link, Fox tells you “The request page doesn’t exist. Please double check to make sure you have the correct URL.”

But if you look at the text quoted on Google News, you’ll notice it’s the first line from this Politico post.  And if you go to this link, you’ll see a mirror someone made of the story off of foxnews.mobi, the mobile version of foxnews.

So it seems someone at Fox News not only re-posted the Politico article (a Google search shows it was listed as a “top story”), they gave it a fresh new headline.  Oops!

More screenshots: incriminating Google search, mirror on swiftmob

I just saw Michelle Obama’s post on BlogHer about Lilly Ledbetter, and was inspired to dig up some more details on the situation.

Backstory:

Lilly Ledbetter, who worked at goodyear for 20 years as a factory supervisor, and who earned as much as 40% less than her male co-workers for that entire period, sued her employer for discriminatory pay and won. However the supreme court overturned the decision, claiming that she had only 180 days to complain. Since the decision to set her salary at a lower rate than her male colleagues happened 20 years ago, the statue of limitations had passed and she was not entitled to sue.

According to the highest court in the land, the law says that it’s discrimination for your employer to set your pay at a rate lower than your male colleagues, but that actually paying you that smaller amount every month is NOT discrimination. Which means if you find out you’re being paid less than your male co-workers 181 days after your pay rate is set, you are screwed.

Thankfully, congress acted and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 which changes the law so that every paycheck would be considered a discriminatory act, and it was passed in the House on July 31, 2007.

But here’s the rub:

It moved on to the Senate, where it needed a 60/40 vote to go ahead in the Senate, but it was blocked by Senate republicans in a 56 – 42 vote on April 23 of this year. And Bush said he would’ve vetoed it anyway. The republicans claim that the poor companies would be swamped by litigation from all the women who are being shafted and they’d have to pay all that back pay, and it’d be bad for the economy.

Um, no, it’d be bad for the bullshit sexist patriarchal segment of the economy. And what’s wrong with that? While honest businesses have been paying their women employees properly, these shady companies have been exploiting women to get ahead in the market. Why shouldn’t they have to answer for that?

Anyway, the republicans introduced a bill this summer to try and solve the same problem, called the Title VII Fairness Act.

Let’s look at the differences between the bills:

The bill favored by republicans changes the law so that women have 180 days to file, starting “on the date when the person aggrieved has, or should be expected to have, enough information to support a reasonable suspicion of such discrimination.”

The bill favored by democrats says that discrimination happens not just when the pay rate is set, but “when an individual becomes subject to a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, or when an individual is affected by application of a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, including each time wages, benefits, or other compensation is paid, resulting in whole or in part from such a decision or other practice.”

The problem with the republican version is that it places the burden of proof on the employee. The employee has to prove that they could not have known about the discrimination, which opens up the door for employers to say, basically, “she worked her for 20 years, how could she not have known what other people were getting paid?”

The truth is, every time an employer pays a woman less than a man doing the same work, that’s discrimination. The democrat’s bill is a better bill because it reflects the reality of pay discrimination.

Seven awesome (or vote-grubbing?) republicans voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:

Coleman (R-MN), Yea
Collins (R-ME), Yea
Lieberman (ID-CT), Yea
Smith (R-OR), Yea
Snowe (R-ME), Yea
Specter (R-PA), Yea
Sununu (R-NH), Yea

If they are your senators, you may want to support them for that. The rest of the republican senators voted against, including John McCain. If one or both of your senators is a republican, know that they don’t think that unfair paycheck you may be getting every month is a crime.

One democrat voted against the act:

Reid (D-NV), Nay

If you live in Nevada, you may want to ask Harry Reid why he didn’t support the bill.

And if you are voting in the presidential election in November, know that when the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is passed in the congress (which it probably will be, given that there will be at least 56 democrats in the Senate next year), McCain will veto it.

Obama won’t.

And that’s a real policy difference.