Magpie

Saturday, March 6, 2004

Ending same-sex marriages in Oregon.

Over at the Portland Communique, The One True b!X walks us through all the different ways that the current flurry of lesbian/gay marriages in Multnomah County could be brought to a halt.

The Portland Communique is an excellent blog, by the way. Even before this week's events, we've been finding ourselves reading it more and more often.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:59 PM | Get permalink

Friday, March 5, 2004

Flashback Friday is back!

And MB's time machine has collected a whole bunch of goodies. To no surprise, March 2004 is eerily like March 1992, when Dubya's daddy was in office:

DETOURING THE RECOVERY
Boston Globe Editorial
Published on March 5, 1992

It would be unfortunate if the mildly optimistic appraisal of the economy presented by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan worked as a drag on the recovery rather than as a form of encouragement. Congress and the Bush administration are in a position to avoid that hazard. Greenspan's hopefulness on two major issues lies at the heart of the problem. His statement that inflation will not be a problem for the time being was particularly impressive, coming from someone whose public career...

THE GULF GLOW FADES
Mark Shields, Washington Post
March 6, 1992

President Bush's reelection strategy of focusing on his victory in the Persian Gulf War has at least one major problem: The Persian Gulf War does not loom quite so historic in Americans' minds when the battle now is here at home, and the stakes are nothing less than our children's future.

For the rest of the headlines, you'll have to visit Wampum.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:55 PM | Get permalink

A happy day in Portland.

As we posted earlier this week, Multnomah County in Oregon is issuing marriages licenses to lesbian and gay couples. Earlier today, this magpie accompanied two of our best friends to the county building down at Hawthorne and MLK in east Portland. We stood in line with them (and a couple hundred other couples), in the rain, for hours while they waited to get their marriage license.

Waiting to get the license

License in hand, Miriam & Sunny crossed the Willamette River and were married this afternoon at Keller Auditorium in downtown Portland, where Basic Rights Oregon is providing officiators and facilities for wedding ceremonies.

We never really thought we'd see a day like today. Even if the right wing is successful in their attempt to stop further weddings and invalidate the marriage licenses that have already been issued, the fact remains that — at least for a time — lesbians and gay men were able to excercise the same right to marry their beloveds that most people in the US take for granted.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:36 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, March 4, 2004

Dubya vs. Dubya.

Susan at Suburban Guerrilla thinks that John Kerry's campaign ought to be using this clip of President Bush debating Governor Bush. [RealPlayer required.]

We'd never seen the clip (from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart) before. But after taking a look at it, we agree with Susan. It's devastating.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:51 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

Unemployment strikes again.

They've laid off Godzilla.

Via Japan Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:44 PM | Get permalink

Why southern whites vote Republican.

Kevin Griffis of the Atlanta (GA) weekly Creative Loafing took a drive around the South, talking to rural white people, and trying to figure out why they vote Republican when the GOP doesn't do a thing for anyone except the wealthy.

Watching him light up Winstons or ramble up the drive to his home in his heavy-duty pick-up, you might pigeonhole [Carlton] Sparks with a glance — typical NASCAR dad. You'd be wrong. He defies easy categorization. True, one minute he's doling out the Fox News/talk radio cliches about "big government" and school prayer, but in his next breath, he's telling the stories of his neighbors and coworkers, talking vividly about the death grip squeezing rural middle class America, the battle he watches, in person, every day. It has nothing to do with affirmative action or the pledge of allegiance.

In Sparks lies the great conundrum of modern Southern politics: The average white male, for whom the system has always worked, is having an increasingly difficult time making ends meet — as if consumer debt recently topping $2 trillion for the first time wasn't enough of a clue. His wages have dropped when adjusted for inflation. His health insurance premiums have skyrocketed (if he has health insurance). He and his wife both have to work, and they pay astronomical childcare bills. His younger kids' schools are crappy and under-funded. His older kids' college tuition jumped (14 percent in the last year, on average). And heaven help his children if they don't go to college, because they're bound for a near-feudal system of working for wealthy people in low-paying service sector jobs. Moreover, if the average Joe is like Sparks, 30 percent of what he stashed away for retirement evaporated in a stock market fiasco fueled by corporate greed that a bit more government oversight could have prevented.

So where's the anger? Why isn't he pissed that he's not getting more bang for his taxpayer buck? And why in the world is he going to vote for a president based on a side issue like gay marriage?

Via AlterNet.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:26 PM | Get permalink

The Rights of Man.

I don't know about you, but The Rights of Man was one of the very first tunes we tried to learn, largely because this hornpipe is one of the commonest tunes played at Irish music sessions. We'd always assumed that 1) the tune was Irish and 2) nobody knew who wrote it (as is true for most traditional tunes). We were wrong on both counts.

It turns out that The Rights of Man — as well as The Scholar, Beeswing, and a number of other well-known session tunes — were all written by fiddler James Hill in the mid-19th century. Apparently not much is known about Hill, other than he was born in Scotland and spend most of his life in the Tyneside area of northeast England.

There have been some efforts to get more recognition for Hill's work: Fiddler Tom McConville recorded 'Fiddlers Fancy,' an album of tunes by Hill in the mid-1990s (info here). And, more recently, Graham Dixon published The Lads Like Beer, which contains the little that's known about Hill as well as music for most of his compositions (info here).

You can view scans of early manuscript copies of some of Hill's tunes here. (And if you aren't familiar with The Rights of Man, you'll find audio files and sheet music for the tune here.)

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:12 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, March 2, 2004

Wow.

Oregon's Multnomah County will start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples tomorrow. The county includes Portland, the state's largest city. (Multnomah County is also where this magpie makes our nest.)

Roey Thorpe, executive director of Basic Rights Oregon, said the group has been working with county commissioners on a policy "in regard to issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples."

"I know a lot of people who are going to get licenses (Wednesday)," she said. "It's impossible to tell what the response will be; I would guess there will be hundreds of couples. Many of these couples have been waiting decades, and this is the first time they've been seen as equal under the law."

Multnomah County Judge Linda Bergman told KGW-TV that she will schedule and perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples if they have a license when they make an appointment.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:49 PM | Get permalink

What's the connection?

Between this shirt and this Republican senator?

Patrick Nielsen Hayden explains.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:43 PM | Get permalink

Monday, March 1, 2004

Ooooooh, shiny!

We haven't done a shiny here at Magpie for awhile, since we spend a lot of our time at The Other Place.

But from the moment we saw it, we knew that this collection of 19th century street literature compiled by the University of Alberta was obviously a Magpie shiny, not a Pacific Views shiny. The collection contains all sorts of documents from political tracts, to penny dreadfuls, to joke books. Although the indexing of isn't particularly good (something the U of A folks admit), a browse through the documents will uncover all sorts of gems.

Given our interest in traditional music, we zeroed right in on the broadside ballads:

19th cent. broadside ballad

You can go directly to the ballads by following this link.

Via wood s lot.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:53 PM | Get permalink

Not doing the right thing.

In mid-February, the US Food & Drug Administration back-pedalled on an expected decision to make emergency contraceptives (the so-called 'morning-after' pill) available over the counter, without a doctor's prescription. Writing in The Nation, Katha Pollitt has a few choice words about how the right-wing is trying to roll back women's access to contraception:

You would think that anti-choicers would leap to embrace emergency contraception, which, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, already prevents 51,000 abortions a year, making it a significant, if little-noted, factor in the decline in abortion. This is the Bush Administration, though, in which science and women's rights and the actual, factual lessening of the need for abortion are all less important than "values"--i.e., the narrow ideology of the Christian right. In December, forty-four Congressional Republicans sent a letter to the FDA advisory committee urging its members to reject OTC status: EC "stacked casually on shelves next to toothpaste and cough drops" would allow "our schoolchildren" easy access to a drug that, according to Jesse Helms, is an "abortifacient." After the committee endorsed it, forty-nine Congressional Republicans sent another letter, this time expressing alarm at "the impact this decision will have on the sexual behavior of adolescents." On February 16, FDA head Mark McClellan (brother of Bush press secretary Scott McClellan) postponed the agency's decision; now he's leaving to take charge of Medicare, and EC risks being delayed again by future appointees.

Years ago, pundits scoffed when prochoicers argued that antis would target birth control too if they could. EC primarily works by preventing ovulation and fertilization, but like the birth control pill, it may also prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the womb. As Gloria Feldt, head of Planned Parenthood, pointed out when I spoke to her by phone, "antichoice people are trying to redefine pregnancy to begin at fertilization rather than implantation," which is the medical definition of pregnancy, and EC is the wedge. If EC is a "human pesticide," so are the Pill, the patch, injectables. If "schoolchildren" ought not purchase EC without parental supervision or knowledge, nor should they be able to obtain those forms of contraception without parental permission, as current law allows. And if being able to purchase EC like "aspirin or hairspray" promotes promiscuity--studies suggest, by the way, that it will not--the same can be alleged of birth control in general. In fact, contraception has always been attacked as promoting loose morals among women (curiously, "schoolchildren" excepted, one hears less about the fact that condoms promote loose morals among men--why not make them available only by prescription, too?).

Have you ever noticed that whenever someone in the US justifies a government action on the basis of 'protecting our children', they're almost invariably talking about taking away someone else's rights?

Via Working for Change.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:56 PM | Get permalink

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Too bad.

That they made all of this up.

Bush takes XTC, goes to rave
New York Times - 12 hours ago

"He was jumping around, blowing a whistle, and kept asking me if I had any chewy," says Alison, 19, who danced with the President and his team of advisors at an unnamed club until 4am. "Rumsfeld gave me a kick-ass back rub."

Rumsfeld 'a bit tired' the next day but otherwise okay, say doctors CNN
Bush "satisfactory" after swallowing glow-stick Christian Science Monitor

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:28 PM | Get permalink