Entries for July 2009

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

I blogged earlier about the possibility of a so-called jobless recovery. Now CNN Money has a different term for the recovery that may or may not have yet begun, depending on which expert you speak to:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Following a mammoth media buildup of several days, the now-infamous beer summit came and went, and race relations in America seem to be the no better for it.

Sgt. Crowley told reporters afterward they spent more time talking about the future than the past. President Obama was more bartender than peacemaker. Not even Vice President Joseph Biden was able to perform his usual foot-in-mouth routine. What a snooze.

I was hoping for something meaningful to come of all this. I was hoping Harvard Prof. Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr. would talk about his Irish roots and their shared ancestry with Irish-American Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley. I was hoping they might agree on one thing: that only in America could an Ivy League, wealthy, world-renowned, globe-trotting black man accuse a lower-income, less-educated blue collar white guy of racial profiling. I was hoping the brainpower at that summit would emerge from the meeting with something earth-shattering and meaningful to tell the world.

Instead, it was just a photo op of four "regular" guys who happened to be at the White House.

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

A bit of hopeful news on the environment emanated today. Perhaps mankind won't deplete world fish stocks after all. Three years ago, a team of Canadian university marine biologists published a controversial paper in the journal Science, predicting the collapse of 90 percent of the world's edible fish species by 2048.

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

"This is what leadership looks like," said Amy Siskind of the New Agenda in an e-mail to me today. She included a link to this Washington Post story about Secretary of State Clinton going to the Congo next week as part of an African tour: 

As part of her swing through Africa next week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to visit eastern Congo, the epicenter of two wars in the past decade, and denounce the alarming rates of rape in the region, an official said Wednesday

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

HuffingtonPost.com has an interesting post about the fragmentation of the pro-life movement. The piece focuses on Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, and his work with pro-choicers to find common ground among those who oppose the right to abortion and those who support it.

For his work on a paper with a center-left think tank to try to find ways to reduce the need for abortion, he was thusly rewarded by his pro-life advocates:

Congressman Ryan was removed from the board of Democrats for Life of America, and with it, disowned by the pro-life movement at large. Pro-life publications have taken to qualifying his pro-life status as "allegedly" pro life or referring to him as someone "who claims to be" pro-life. Because of his support of prevention in 2007-2008 congressional session, Ryan received a "0" rating from National Right to Life Committee. According to the pro-life establishment's new standards, his support for prevention means he no longer qualifies as "pro-life." And that means very few pro-life Americans will either.

It may be news to some Americans that the vast, vast majority of pro-life ACTIVISTS (as opposed to Americans) are religious zealots who, when and if they ever get done banning abortion, have already begun to set their sights on banning contraception, too. Think about it: Would you devote your whole life to this issue, or any other issue, if you had anything better to do? My point is, the extreme fringe of both parties comprises a large percentage of full-time activists on many tough issues. The same is true here:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Kay Bailey, we'll miss you! Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson has made public her plans to leave Washington, D.C. and return to her home state of Texas to campaign for governor:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

As one who has suffered life-long from avoire du pois disease, I would say the answer to the question in the headline is, "Yes." Fat shows are both empowering and exploitative. But then, most of commercial cable TV is exploitation of one group or another, and with today's obesity epidemic, it's completely fashionable to exploit those who are overweight.