Today I posted a few more drawings on my brother’s and my drawing blog, including these:
I’m planning to start drawing political cartoons again, separately from Minimum Security. Here’s one.
Here’s a drawing based on a story for a children’s book:
Over in the U.K., a small but vocal group of parents are whinging that the sight of kiddy TV host Cerrie Burnell’s disability is freaking out their kids. Burnell came into the world missing the lower half of one arm, and she has grown into a smart, charming and talented host of a widely distributed TV program for children (the BBC posts a clip here.) You’d think that would provide a positive example or a source of identification for children with disabilities, as well as children without disabilities who might develop sensitive and respectful attitudes about disabilities altogether.
As Lucy Mangan indicates, much of that relies upon the parents:
No, Burnell’s arm is likely only to give parents nightmares. It is they who do not want to confront disabilities, not now, not at teatime, not ever. To let your toddler be scared every day that Burnell has hurt herself rather than explain the truth is a failure of parenting, not an imposition by the BBC. And toddlers are frightened of lots of things. My two-year-old godson is currently terrified by trees (”Too scary! Too scary!”). His mother isn’t out felling all nearby arboreal horrors she’s taking him on extra visits to the park.
Interestingly, Disability Bitch blogs at the BBC site that she feels the controversy is completely overblown.
I had my doubts about this ’story’ from the off. For a start, Cerrie very clearly has more than one arm. She is not a ‘one-armed’ presenter. She has two upper body limbs. One of them is non-standard. That’s all. You can call me pedantic if you like, but reading beyond the headline, you will discover that a whole nine parents have made formal complaints to the BBC about Cerrie’s very visible disability. Nine. Out of hundreds of thousands of regular viewers. The subsequent media coverage has been immense.This is hardly a national outcry. This is not an army of parents refusing to allow their children to watch CBeebies because there’s a lady with a funny arm on it. It’s nine people. Nine very odd people, no doubt. Sure, there’ve been a few additional comments on internet forums, but people write all sorts of prejudiced guff on the internet, as you can see by looking at the comments section on any national newspaper site.
I appreciate Disability Bitch’s skepticism, as with every media controversy there should be taken a grain of salt. However, she goes on to complain that it does not rise to the level of news at all, that there are more important issues (like brush fires) that deserve attention, and should therefore not take up newspaper space. Two problems with this objection: 1) it’s the Information Age, so there is plenty of room in all of our information technology to place this story, however humble, so no need to marginalize disability issues; and 2) those nine official complaints are the tip of the iceberg of parental ignorance that BBC as a broadcaster must contend with. Beyond their business concerns, these people need a “teachable moment.” And even if they are too thick to teach, there are parents around them who are not and could use a refresher course in how to handle questions about sensitive topics from their children.
Frankly, I wish there was more diversity among children’s TV hosts. Back in the day, parents in the southern United States blew a gasket because “Sesame Street” featured black and Latin@ adults and children playing happily together. (I wish I had a source for that; I know that only anecdotally.) Today I’d like to see openly gay hosts or transgendered hosts or hosts wearing a hijab or a kafiyah I could go on. There is a whole world outside the TV frame that most children are missing. One day they’ll be adults. Wouldn’t we give them a better world if we prepared them for it?
| Originally published at mooreroom. |
President Obama has ordered the transfer of Ali Saleh Al-Marri from indefinite solitary confinement to the U.S. criminal justice system. Held without charge for 5 years and 8 months, Al-Marri’s case was yet another example of BushAdmin overreach of executive power and subversion of civil liberties. So we should all cheer Obama’s move, right?
His case sparked a contentious debate over whether an American president has the power to order a legal US resident like Al-Marri or even a US citizen into indefinite, incommunicado detention by the military simply by designating that person an enemy combatant.After years of litigation that issue is currently before the US Supreme Court, which is poised to hear Al-Marri’s case in April. A decision would be expected by late June. But now, given Al-Marris possible transfer to the criminal justice system, the Obama administration is expected to ask the high court to dismiss the case.
If granted, the action would leave undisturbed existing legal precedents in the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond upholding open-ended detentions of enemy combatants within US borders.
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Some analysts question whether the administration is seeking dismissal of the Al-Marri case at the high court to avoid a potential landmark defeat and/or to preserve its own power to designate and hold enemy combatants.
“This is deja vu all over again. What the Bush administration did with Padilla, the Obama administration is trying to do with Al-Marri,” say Jonathan Freiman, a Padilla lawyer and Yale Law School lecturer.
“Transferring Al-Marri out of the brig is the right thing to do. Moving to dismiss the case is not,” he says. “It’s just a calculated political move to avoid taking a position on what Justice Stevens called ‘nothing less than the essence of a free society,’” Mr. Freiman says.
So is this a step in the right direction or a weasel move by No Drama Obama? As reported recently by Jane Meyer in the New Yorker, the power of the ObamAdmin to prosecute Al-Marri has been complicated by the BushAdmin’s order to put Al-Marri in the brig:
Before agreeing to transfer Marri to the brig, however, the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were dismissed with prejudice, to protect Marris right not to be placed in double jeopardy. As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marris lawyers offer a deal. Benjamin, the former prosecutor, insists that “there is a whole bag of tools for dealing with truly bad guys — there are many other statutes that the government could explore, including material support of terrorism, conspiracy charges, and mail- and wire-fraud charges.” But, he suggests, “by taking Marri outside the regular criminal system there’s no doubt they made all kinds of problems for themselves.”
Read further on in the Mayer article, one finds that Al-Marri was a “hard case” he kept insisting that he is innocent. What if, just for the sake of conjecture, he is?
| Originally published at mooreroom. |
I designed two new t-shirts that are carried at the ComicSpace Store. It’s a limited run, so buy ‘em while you can. There are also great t-shirts by James Kochalka (American Elf), Box Brown (Bellen!) and others.
Mine are these two:
(In case you can’t read it: “Television. Sex. Desperately trying to ignore the collapse of civilization so I can focus on TV and sex.”
(”The U.S. Economy: Drugs. Porn. Fast food. Nail salons. Video games. Flights of Fancy. Illusions. Will ‘o the wisps. Subprime mortgage-backed securities. Denial.”)
From an article in Gourmet magazine:
Lucas’s “room” turned out to be the back of a box truck in the junk-strewn yard, shared with two or three other workers. It lacked running water and a toilet, so occupants urinated and defecated in a corner. For that, Navarrete docked Lucas’s pay by $20 a week. According to court papers, he also charged Lucas for two meager meals a day: eggs, beans, rice, tortillas, and, occasionally, some sort of meat. Cold showers from a garden hose in the backyard were $5 each. Everything had a price. Lucas was soon $300 in debt. After a month of ten-hour workdays, he figured he should have paid that debt off.
But when Lucas—slightly built and standing less than five and a half feet tall—inquired about the balance, Navarrete threatened to beat him should he ever try to leave. Instead of providing an accounting, Navarrete took Lucas’s paychecks, cashed them, and randomly doled out pocket money, $20 some weeks, other weeks $50. Over the years, Navarrete and members of his extended family deprived Lucas of $55,000.
Taking a day off was not an option. If Lucas became ill or was too exhausted to work, he was kicked in the head, beaten, and locked in the back of the truck. Other members of Navarrete’s dozen-man crew were slashed with knives, tied to posts, and shackled in chains. On November 18, 2007, Lucas was again locked inside the truck. As dawn broke, he noticed a faint light shining through a hole in the roof. Jumping up, he secured a hand hold and punched himself through. He was free.
What happened at Navarrete’s home would have been horrific enough if it were an isolated case. Unfortunately, involuntary servitude—slavery—is alive and well in Florida. Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented, mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried.
The article also discusses tomato pickers who, although not enslaved, are nonetheless working in terrible conditions for extremely low pay. Workers have been able to make some progress by organizing:
Even though the CIW has been responsible for bringing police attention to a half dozen slavery prosecutions, Benitez feels that slavery will persist until overall conditions for field workers improve. The group has made progress on that front by securing better pay. Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, the rate for a basket of tomatoes remained 40 cents—meaning that workers’ real wages dropped as inflation rose. Work stoppages, demonstrations, and a hunger strike helped raise it to 45 cents on average, but the packers complained that competition for customers prevented them from paying more. One grower refused to enter a dialogue with CIW hunger strikers because, in his words, “a tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run the farm.” The CIW decided to try an end run around the growers by going directly to the biggest customers and asking them to pay one cent more per pound directly to the workers. Small change to supermarket chains and fast-food corporations, but it would add about twenty dollars to the fifty a picker makes on a good day, the difference between barely scraping by and earning a livable wage.
The Campaign for Fair Food, as it is called, first took aim at Yum! Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s, and A&W. After four years of pressure, Yum! agreed to the one-cent raise in 2005 and, importantly, pledged to make sure that no worker who picked its tomatoes was being exploited. McDonald’s came aboard in 2007, and in 2008 Burger King, Whole Foods Market, and Subway followed, with more expected to join up this year. But the program faces a major obstacle. Claiming that the farmers are not party to the arrangement, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an agricultural cooperative that represents some 90 percent of the state’s producers, has refused to be a conduit for the raise, citing legal concerns.
The entire article is well worth reading. It ends with advice for people purchasing tomatoes; you should buy at Whole Foods if you can (they’ve made an agreement with the CIW), or if you shop elsewhere avoid tomatoes from Florida or Mexico.
Most of the comments following the article are reasonable, but one reader wrote:
I found your article “The price of tomatoes” by Barry Estabrook offensive. You are asking me to feel sorry for people who knowing broke our laws to send money home to Mexico. ARE YOU CRAZY?
Curtsy: Boing Boing.
I love television. That’s why the shitty parts hurt me in my soul. It hurts so much, I’m going to eat some Leno-approved Doritos.
Next Week: Hunting Season
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was recently given a dead by dawn diagnosis from Senator Jim Bunning after she had surgery for cancer.
Matt, noting a “both sides suck” article in the Times, writes:
Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article <a target=”_blank” href=”http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/02/25/revkin-dead-wrong/”>painting Will with the same brush</a> as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in <em>The New York Times</em>.
Matt’s correct, of course. But Matt didn’t note another way in which Gore has acted better than Will — a way that reflects, I think, Gore’s superior approach to science. What did they do once the errors were pointed out? Gore acted responsibly; Will and the Washington Post did not.
The critique of Gore’s chart (a new addition to his presentation) came out earlier this month. Gore, presumably because he or his staff felt the critique had merit, removed the chart from his presentation.
Tigerhawk says that’s embarrassing, and I agree, it is a bit embarrassing — but only a bit. Occasional mistakes are inevitable when a book or presentation draws evidence from hundreds of sources. What would be seriously humiliating is if the error were fatal to Gore’s larger thesis, or if Gore refused to correct the error once it was credibly pointed out. But that one chart isn’t the foundation of Gore’s argument about global climate change. And by promptly correcting the error,1 Gore has demonstrated how responsible writers act.
In contrast, George Will and the Washington Post have, so far, refused to admit, let alone correct, Will’s errors. Instead, the Post has compounded Will’s errors. And as for a prompt correction — it turns out Will has been repeating more or less the same error-filled column since 1992.
In another thread, Ron said “this recession is actually less severe than either of the last two in terms of the percentage of people out of work.” I think Ron’s understating the severity of the current situation.
I found this graph on Time’s econ blog. As you can see, we’ve already had greater job loss this recession than we did in either the 2007 or the 2001 recessions; you have to go back to 1981 for a recession that was worse than this one. And this recession hasn’t even reached its nadir yet.
(There’s an even scarier looking graph floating around, but the graph you see above is more accurate because it’s measuring by percentage, rather than absolute numbers that haven’t been adjusted for the growing population.)
