July 2006 – Page 18

New York Disappoints

Nowhere did gay marriage seem like a natural fit more than New York, where the Stonewall uprising of 1969 provided inspiration for the gay rights movement and where a history of spirited progressivism had led some gay couples to envision their own weddings someday.

Yesterday’s court ruling against gay marriage was more than a legal rebuke, then — it came as a shocking insult to gay rights groups. Leaders said they were stunned by both the rejection and the decision’s language, which they saw as expressing more concern for the children of heterosexual couples than for the children of gay couples. They also took exception to the ruling’s description of homosexuality as a preference rather than an orientation.

Plagiarizin’ Annie

They do say that what comes around, goes around.

Ann Coulter’s spittle-flecked invective has long been known to be poorly supported by facts as well as, in Tom and Ray Magliozzi’s phrase, “unencumbered by the thought process.” Al Franken had a team of Harvard students fact-check her book Slander and its 780 footnotes for his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Surprise! Mostly crap, and a substantial number of lies and misrepresentations (like, for instance, her lie that the New York Times ignored Dale Earnhart’s death when they in fact put it on the front page).

But now we have confirmation that Annie doesn’t even make up all her own bile. The Rude Pundit, rudely smelling a rat, started taking a closer look at her new polemic, Godless, with backup from Raw Story. And lo and behold, Annie’s been stealing from other authors.

Oh, and remember how I said that you don’t fuck with the Jersey Girls, lest even the New York Post turn on you? This is where that going-around-coming-around thing comes in. The Post, piqued about Ann’s slamming of the 9/11 widows known as the Jersey Girls (who are, after all, local heroes for getting the 9/11 Commission going) in the book and on Larry King, hired a plagiarism expert, John Barrie, who found that several chapters in Godless and some of Ann’s syndicated columns were riddled with lifted passages. (MSNBC also spoke to him.)

If that number sounds low, it’s not an indication that she only plagiarized a few times. Oh, no. It’s an indication that she tries men’s souls. As Barrie told TPM Muckraker’s Justin Rood:

“The next day, [NYPost reporter] Philip Recchia called me and said, Ann Coulter’s book. . . let’s run that through,” Barrie told me. But his company does its analysis by computer, so the book had to be scanned into a digital format. “The New York Post, at their expense, OCR’d every damn page of that book.

“Oh, my God, how long is that book?” Barrie added. “By the way, if I never read Ann Coulter again, it will be too soon.”

The paper also scanned in the last 12 months of Coulter’s columns for Barrie to analyze.

It didn’t take long to find evidence of plagiarism, Barrie said. “After we found three in the book, we called it quits. I think we found four of her syndicated columns that had problems.” But the task proved draining, he said — on himself, not his technology. “After combing through Ann Coulter for a while, it doesn’t take long before you want to call it quits. I want to prove the technology, but I don’t want to make my eyes bleed.”

Coulter’s column is syndicated through Universal Press Syndicate, which called Barrie twice and asked for his “report,” but as he’s already published his findings and the Post paid for the proprietary technology, he’s told them that they’ll have to pay as well — he’s not giving it away for free. Presumably, however, UPS will conduct an investigation. Whether she’ll get the Box Turtle Ben treatment remains to be seen.

Bravo, Rude Pundit. Even if you’re not getting the credit you deserve for being the first one on this.

Undeserving

From Rivka at Respectful of Otters (who’s blogging again! Hopefully now with more cute baby pictures!), an article at the Washington Post about Medicaid documentation:

A Medicaid rule takes effect tomorrow that will require more than 50 million poor Americans to prove their citizenship or lose their medical benefits or long-term care.

Under the rule, intended to curb fraud by illegal immigrants, such proof as a passport or a birth certificate must be offered at the time a person applies for Medicaid benefits or during annual reenrollment in the state-federal program for the poor and disabled.

Critics fear that the provision will have the unintended consequence of harming several million U.S. citizens who, for a variety of reasons, will not be able to produce the necessary paperwork. They include mentally ill, mentally retarded and homeless people, as well as elderly men and women, especially African Americans born in an era when hospitals in the rural South barred black women from their maternity wards.

Meat Culture

Angry Brown Butch linked to this post entitled, “The Internet Ate My Subculture:”

One of the characters in a book I’m reading publishes an underground paper. I used to do that- it was pretty okay. We covered a lot of local news, distributed newspaper-looking newspapers in churches and convenience stores, made a fairly good show of staying on top of stories in the scene and out. I don’t think I could do that again. Not the hours or the arguments, that part was fine. I just don’t think enough people read. Or rather, I think they read blogs instead, mostly written by their friends, and regardless of the value of the content. I don’t think you can get anyone’s attention any more. And that was five years ago. What happened?

(snip)

Is it totally trite to blame MySpace? Or Friendster? Or hell, livejournal? The timing is right. They keep everyone “connected” without having to, y’know, do anything together except catechise our daily living and fuck. Memoirs are now the best-selling genre of new book. Coincidence? We can get all the kudos and sexiness we need without ever leaving the house, without ever extending ourselves beyond our individual choices of which job, which identity, which sound card, which sex act we prefer. Narrativize it, publish it, let the appreciative comments pour in…

That Paralegal Certificate…

Is looking pretty good right now.

On July 1, interest rates on student loans experienced the greatest jump in history, with the variable rate on common Stafford loans shooting up almost two percent for students and graduates. The rate hike comes as a result of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which was signed into law by President Bush on Feb. 8, 2006 as part of an effort to save the federal government more than $22 billion over the next five years. (By comparison, the Department of Defense spends approximately $8.1 billion a month in Iraq).

(snip, and the bottom line)

As of last Saturday, the new variable rate for Stafford loans will be 6.54 percent for students and 7.14 percent for graduates. In the 2004-2005 school year, the rates on the same loans were just 2.77 percent for students and 3.37 percent for graduates, and in 2005-2006, the rates were 4.7 percent for students and 5.3 percent for graduates. The interest rate hikes are estimated to add an additional $2,000 in loan payments to the average borrower’s debt.

And financial aid is more vital than ever, because tuition has increased with interest rates:

The rate hikes are only the latest blow to students trying to overcome the economic hurdles of earning a post-secondary degree. As a new report by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s (D-MA) office [PDF] explains, “The cost of attending a public four-year college increased 32 percent between the 2000-2001 and 2004-2005 school years. The cost of attending a private school has also risen considerably — a 21 percent increase — and has reached nearly $26,500 a year.”

More depressing statistics at the link. In short: a bachelor’s degree is becoming increasingly unattainable, and so people are opting out of college and out of the careers a college degree allows you to enter:

The gap in enrollment rates between low-income and high-income groups is distressing. The graduation rate for high-income students is 60 percent higher than the rate for low-income students. It is estimated that between 2001 and 2010, 4.4 million low- and moderate-income [PDF] academically-qualified students will opt not to enroll in a four-year university, and 2 million of them will forgo college entirely — all because the cost of a college education is beyond their reach.

More on Housing the Homeless

Off of Jill’s post, here’s another New York Times article about housing-first policies for homeless people, which I received via email from a friend and sometime feministe reader:

The “housing first” policy that this city adopted last year is part of an accelerating national movement that has reduced the numbers of the chronically homeless — the single, troubled men and women who spend years in the streets and shelters — in more than 20 cities.

In this campaign, promoted by a little-known office of the Bush administration, 219 cities, at last count, have started ambitious 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness.

The cities include New York, which is stepping up efforts to house the estimated nearly 4,000 people huddling on sidewalks or sleeping in parks, and Henderson, N.C., population 17,000, which recently counted 91 homeless people, 14 of them chronic cases.

Its not an ignorant person.

Brownfemipower on the joys of moderation:

I got this comment in my box recently, and I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it–should I set it on fire? Send it back to the commentor until he fixes all the spelling errors? (can’t do that, my spelling is as bad as his is). Translate it into 500 different languages then shoot it into space for aliens to find? I am glad that he don’t hate niggers, though. What a scary world if he did.

I’m tempted to put up a rogues’ gallery of comments from the feministe cue.

Speaking of “wishy-washy Muslims,” I was just thumbing through the Jack Chick website, which is basically one big troll catalogue. “Protect children against being recruited as Muslims. Li’l Susy explains that only Jesus can save them.”

She-Male!

In other, happier news, I went to a Camp Trans benefit last night at femina potens. Charlie Anders did a dramatic reading of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. It was better than I could possibly have imagined. I think there should be a Transsexual Empire opera, or possibly a series of Transsexual Empire Jack Chick tracts, and belledame thinks there should be a Transsexual Empire musical.

I also won three vintage trashy smut books as raffle prizes, along with one slender trade paperback entitled, The Sex Lives of Northern American Mammals, or something close. And a subscription to Bitch magazine, so I can stop feeling guilty about camping out with it in the store until I’ve read it cover to cover for free.

Birth of a Playstation

Sony apparently wants to capture the insecure-white-supremacist demographic. Or something. Here’s a link to all three parts of the ad. I can’t tell if this is provocation for its own sake, or if the ad’s creators honestly didn’t think the connotations of the ad were particularly offensive. Either way, what the hell?

Islam and Sexual Violence

A must-read essay on marital rape and Islam.

The communal reaction to a Sunday afternoon lecture (taleem) delivered at a Ash Shaheed Islamic Center in North Carolina in May of 2006 served as the motivation for this publication. At that time, a well-respected and learned Imam visiting for the weekend appeared to trivialize the possibility that a husband could “rape” his wife . Neither he nor I realized how wide is the gulf that separates those who characterize forced sexual intercourse within marriage as rape; those who believe that the institution of marriage affords husbands free access to their wives at any time, under any condition; and those whose ideology places them somewhere in between. Neither of us, I’m sure, was aware of the extent of pain and ignorance that exists around this issue among both Muslims and non-Muslims. As with other human affairs, religious teachings (including those aligned with Islam) often greatly influence the extent to which wives are viewed as individuals with agency and choice in regards to how their bodies are used or as property to be controlled by their husbands. In response, Islam & Sexual Violence attempts to:

(1) address, foremost using the Qur’an and other Islamic religious resources, what appears to be profound ignorance and confusion about the reality of marital rape, or forced marital sex – both within Muslim communities and the larger society.
(2) encourage dialogue among Muslim women and men about the nature of marriage, spousal privileges, gender justice, and the language we employ in our descriptions of the directives Allah(SWT) has established for the development of healthy communal life.
(3) empower Muslims who have been victimized by both physical and ideological attacks to gain the courage and support so that we may relate to others and ourselves with the justice, peace, and freedom that lies at the core of the revelation given to the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alei wasallam).
(4)help eliminate the “climate of fear and ignorance that makes family violence possible” as articulated in the mission statement of Baitul Salaam Network, Inc.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to Ali for the link.