Bush and Cheney in Wonderland

Bush and Cheney in Wonderland

Since the fifth anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq on March 19^th, 2008, both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have been working overtime to justify not only the reasons for starting the war in Iraq but also for claiming that it has been a success rather than a failure. These endeavors come at the same time as a substantial portion of the American public now judges the war to be “not worth” the efforts that were undertaken to launch it.

I do not use the “wonderland” metaphor lightly in describing the methods of the Bush Administration for justifying its action. In Lewis Carroll's fantastic tale, Alice literally falls down a rabbit hole (a seeming “dead end”) and finds herself instead in a world defined by logical inversions.

The first of these, with respect to Iraq, may be found in President Bush's assertion that Iraq is part of the “war on terror.” Now that it has been proven, unequivocally, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with directly supporting Al-Qaeda in the September 11^th attacks on the U.S., the Bush administration has been confronted by the awkward problem of trying to explain why our invasion of Iraq resulted in the creation of a new Al-Qaeda training ground and the creation of a new terrorist insurgency, hitherto unknown.

The response of the Bush Administration has been to claim that we are fighting the “war on terror” over “there” (Iraq and Afghanistan) so that we don't have to fight it over “here” (on U.S. soil).

The attractiveness of this illogic cannot be overstated. As long as there are no major terrorist attacks within the continental United States, the government can maintain that this is because we fighting a “terrorist” war elsewhere. This focus on the absence of a major attack on U.S. soil also allows the Bush administration to ignore the 607 percent spike in the average yearly incidence of terrorist attacks worldwide after the U.S. invasion of Iraq (28.3 attacks on average the year before and 199.8 attacks the year after) (See the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, http://www.terrorismknowledgebase.org/).

Even though most of these attacks occurred in Iraq as the result of an increasingly active insurgency, incidents of terrorism were up all over the world. The idea that we're fighting terrorists overseas to prevent them from attacking us at home obscures the fact that millions of dollars now have to be expended to fight a terrorist insurgency that we ourselves helped to create by our invasion of another country that had no intention of attacking us.

Indeed, in the intervening years since the beginning of the Iraq war, the American public has learned that nearly all of the information given by the Bush administration to justify the war has turned out to be wrong, including the most incendiary claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them at a moment's notice.

The mushroom cloud alleged by Condoleeza Rice, Vice-President Cheney, and President Bush, has vanished into thin air, and yet we still have hundreds of thousands of combat troops on the ground: not to fight Saddam Hussein, nor to liberate Iraqi citizens, but simply to hold together a nation that was patched together after World War I by European powers and that a coalition of U.S. and European allies now struggle to keep from the brink of civil war.

Many academics and policy analysts¹ now consider that some form of civil war in Iraq is inevitable and that the U.S. “surge” in troop deployments has done nothing more than keep the combatants at arm's length, a situation that cannot be prolonged indefinitely, although some politicians like presidential candidate John McCain, seem inclined to spend whatever it takes to keep this stalemate in place. Even the Pentagon's quarterly report issued on March 15^th, 2008 now uses the term “civil war” to describe the violence plaguing the country.

An even more recent example of the Wonderland logic pervading the White House was exemplified by the President's decision to send Vice-President Dick Cheney to the Middle East, in part to urge progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. "His goal is to reassure people the U.S. is committed to a vision of peace in the Middle East," Mr Bush said. (“Cheney to tour Middle East States, BBC News, March 10, 2008).

Reassure people, indeed, by sending the most virulent neo-con hawk still residing in the Bush administration to press for peace. One could only wonder what the President was thinking, except that Cheney's itinerary also included a four hour plus meeting with Saudi King Abdullah about high oil prices as well as a range of Middle East issues including Iran, which Cheney has long painted as an aggressor in the region (“Cheney Meets with Saudi King, Discuss High Oil Prices” The Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2008).

Cheney's most visible “wonderland” moment occurred in Baghdad. "If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor ... and it has been well worth the effort," said Vice President Cheney, after meeting with Iraqi leaders on March 17^th (“Iraq invasion was "successful endeavor": Cheney,” Reuters). A few days later, when confronted by ABS correspondent Martha Raddatz with the statistic that
“two-thirds of Americans think that it's not worth fighting,” the Vice President responded with a succinct and dismissive: “So?”

A few days later on Easter Sunday, when the number of American soldiers killed in the war reached the 4,000 mark, Mr. Cheney was a little more chastened but quicker to pass the buck, noting that “the biggest burden is carried by President George W. Bush, who made the decision to commit US troops to war.”

But Cheney, like his Commander in Chief, has clearly committed himself to tunnel vision when it comes to Iraq, and this view of the war brooks no inconvenience of opposing public opinion, loss of American lives, or facts on the ground, like the female suicide bomber who killed herself and forty others on the day of his visit, or his inability to venture beyond the “green zone” or the complete failure of the Iraqi government to meet any of its political power-sharing commitments: "It's important to achieve victory in Iraq. It's important to win, to succeed in the objective that we've established," says Dick Cheney, and nothing will change his mind.

Like President Bush, who prides himself on being the “decider” and feels that it is a “weakness” to second-guess any decision he has taken, no matter how ill-considered it turns out to be, Cheney has committed the country to a “stay the course” military adventure in Iraq from which neither he nor the President see any turning back, at least not while they remain in office.

One might almost admire their resolve and determination were it not for one small and painful fact: these same war hawks and self-proclaimed patriots have projected not one penny of appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond 2008. It's as if the war mysteriously disappears off the books the moment they leave office.

If you had any doubts that this administration really is living in Wonderland, just look at the way they pursue a war and then suddenly refuse to fund it, as soon as it becomes someone else's problem. NPR reporter Guy Raz noted that the Pentagon budget for next year, which was recently unveiled in Congress amounts to nearly $500 billion, larger than any military budget since World War II. “But one thing is missing,” notes Mr. Raz, and that is “most of the money to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense officials now say they'll only ask Congress to provide enough money to fund the wars through the end of the Bush administration,” “Pentagon Budget May Put Next President in a Pickle,” All Things Considered, January 28, 2008.

Why suddenly pretend the war requires no funding at the end of this year? Well, it is true that this administration has tried to fund the war “off the books” all along by requesting supplementary appropriations instead of having the budget reflect the true cost of the war, just as they have funded these appropriations by sending the nation deeper and deeper into debt instead of making today's taxpayers feel the real pinch of these expenditures.

But there may be an even more cynical reason for the funding sham – At the beginning of the year, President Bush unveiled a $3.1 trillion budget plan for fiscal 2009 that will leave deficits of more than $400 billion this year but claims to bring that deficit to zero by 2012 – by once again leaving the war funding off the books.

So Bush and Cheney go on living in Wonderland, certain that history will vindicate their invasion of Iraq, and apparently even believing that they can hoodwink the public into thinking that they can have their cake and eat it too – fight a war and not acknowledge its costs – at least until they can ride off into the sunset like the cowboy heroes they imagine they are.

1See James D. Fearon writing on “Iraq's Civil War” in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2007) or Kenneth Pollack, “Apres-Surge: The Next Iraq Debates,” The New Republic, December 2007.

Supporting the Troops

Supporting the Troops

Every day I drive my car around town and observe cars with those ubiquitous slogans in support of our military. Often they take the shape of yellow ribbons; other times they use the standard rectangular bumper sticker shape. Either they state unequivocally: “Support our troops” (and these often also sport a military affiliation) or they say “Support our troops. Bring them home” (and these may have more explicitly anti-war stickers as well).

I have nothing but respect for those who feel their support for the women and men serving in Iraq and Afghanistan strongly enough to make such a public statement in favor of those fighting the war, no matter how they feel about the war itself. But lately, after five years of this fighting overseas and enough time to see what has become of returning veterans, I have begun to wonder: What actual good do these bumper stickers do?

These professions of support for the troops have come to seem increasingly “gestural” -- they acknowledge a debt to those serving our country, they may assuage the conscience of those left behind or those who have chosen not to send their sons and daughters to fight, but ultimately they have little tangible effect on the fates of the soldiers fighting in the field, and more importantly on the lives of the soldiers returning home.

Today's Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will not suffer the fate of those who served in Vietnam and returned to domestic hostility on U.S. soil. They will not be spat upon; they will not be called “baby-killers.” But they are just as likely to be subject to the insensitive question - “How many people did you kill?” or to the equally insensitive response, “Oh, you served in Iraq. That's great” --followed by silence and indifference.

But beyond the ways that we greet these soldiers upon their return, I also can't help wondering about a more fundamental economic question: how ready are these vets to find a job?

As someone who has been on the hiring end of the job market these past few years, I can tell you that I have received many resumes from returning vets, and most of them wanted to make me weep. They usually arrived without cover letters and with an emphasis on “leadership” as their leading job qualification. I never doubted the leadership skills of these job-seekers, but I did wonder who in the world was advising them on how to seek a job in the private sector, when these generic resumes were so clearly setting them up to fail.

In addition to the hope of finding a better job when they return home, many of those serving in today's military signed up, at least in part, because of the promise of educational benefits. Serve your country today, these young people were told, and you'll get enough money to go to college. That too has turned out to be a less than reliable promise.

My fourth-grade teacher served in World War II and was designated as two-thirds disabled after losing his leg to a land mine. He attended Yale University on the G.I. Bill and went on to become the headmaster of a fine private school (he was teaching my fourth-grade class in his “retirement.”)

By contrast, today's vet has a snowflake's chance in hell of attending an Ivy League university on current G.I. benefits. Those same benefits that were created to allow World War II vets to attend college without incurring substantial debt, now cover only sixty percent of a public college education in 2008. Attending a private university is out of the question under these circumstances, when the maximum payment per year is $9,600 for each returning vet, and the average cost of a public college education is $16,000 per year, even for in-state students.

For Thomas Sim, a Korean-American, who returned to attend UC-Irvine after his service in Iraq, the transition from military to college life has proven to be considerably more difficult than he had anticipated. “The GI bill is--to be blunt—it's chump change...School is very expensive and as much as the GI bill helps, I still have to rely on myself,” Sim told NPR correspondent, Alex Cohen. Sim has also been surprised by how little students talk about the war outside of his classes: “I would rather have someone, even an antiwar demonstrator, I would rather have someone come up to me, and start ranting to me...I would rather confront that than confront a shrug of the shoulders and someone saying, 'Marines, oh that's cool” and then have them walk away with their iPod,” (“Marking the Transition from Serviceman to Student,” Day to Day, March 17, 2008).

For as much as our political and military leaders voice constant and often vociferous support for our active military, their policies, and the bureaucratic decision-making that determines how disabled a returning veteran might be, have sent a far different message, not just with respect to a diminishing support for college education benefits but also with respect to more basic needs like health care.

For example, because of medical advances, today's soldier is much more likely to survive the explosion of an IED (“improvised explosive device”). These soldiers will receive state-of-the-art medical attention in Iraq and later when they are removed from the scene of an attack to Germany for immediate surgery.

The problems for these soldiers come later when they reach the stage of needing follow-up care, particularly if that care involves psychological as well as physical trauma.

Daniel Zwerdling, a veteran NPR reporter, first broke the story of how returning soldiers were being denied and even punished for requesting help with mental help problems, especially PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), as early as December 2005. That ground-breaking reporting led to Congressional investigations of problems at Fort Carson, Colorado, as well as sub-standard conditions, including infestations of rats and roaches, at Walter Reed Hospital.

However, these scandals have proven to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the obstacles put in the path of veterans seeking care for disabilities incurred during their military service. For example, a recent NPR report discovered that “Colonel Becky Baker of the Army Surgeon General's office told the Veterans Administration to discontinue counseling soldiers on the appropriateness of Defense Department ratings [of their disabilities] because 'there exists a conflict of interest,'” (“Document Shows Army Blocked Help for Soldiers,” Morning Edition, February 7, 2008).

The Defense Department's reluctance to rate soldiers' disabilities accurately may be explained by the realization that medical care for a returning vets over his or her lifetime may be as high as $700 billion according to a recent Harvard University study. Over 200,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at VA medical facilities thus far, with 900,000 still deployed on active duty. The Harvard study predicts that the cost of medical care and compensation benefits for returning veterans will skyrocket once those troops return home, (Linda Bilmes, “Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disability Benefits,” (http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-001).

So if you support the troops because you believe the Iraq War is worth fighting, or if you believe we simply need to bring our troops back to the U.S. and end the fighting in Iraq, you can do something that will truly benefit them.

Write your representatives and demand that our federal budget include sufficient appropriations to cover the treatment of psychological as well as physical damage to these men and women; demand that the military stop underestimating the disabilities of returning vets, and finally, ask that the GI bill cover the full cost of education at a public university.

The least we can do for the women and men returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just to meet them with yellow ribbons, but to insist that our government provide them with the medical, psychological, and educational services necessary to help them make the transition to civilian life.

If we are truly patriots, we will be stop at nothing less than this.

Gender Matters: What Evolutionary Biology Can (and Can't) Tell Us

Gender Matters – What Evolutionary Biology Can (and Can't) Tell Us

With the recent resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer because of sexual scandal and the admission by the incoming Governor Patterson of his own sexual infidelities, pundits and scientists have raced to give the American public their views on why men so often stray even when the risks of discovery are so high. “Why do they do it?” the public wonders, and psychologists and evolutionary biologists are quick to provide answers, if not always nuanced ones.

It is true that recent studies of sex differences in genetics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience show that biological differences between the sexes are real, although what those differences mean in a species affected perhaps as strongly by culture (nurture) as by selection (nature) is a vexed question.

But both the researchers and the media who relay these findings in “sound-bite” format are all too ready to apply them with a broad brush. This can lead to rash generalizations about men and women that reinforce long held stereotypes, without any consideration of the extraordinary complexity of the contexts in which human beings now live and reproduce.

For example, in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece, David Barash, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, notes that the discovery of “extra-pair copulations (EPC)” among animals long thought to be monogamous, can offer one explanation of Governor Spitzer's sexual infidelity. He argues that human males who are sexually unfaithful to their mates are “responding to the biological pressures that whisper within [them]” (“Want a Man or a Worm?” March 12, 2008).

While Barash specifically states that his characterization of homo sapiens as EPC-inclined does not justify adultery, because humans “are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses,” his argument still suggests strongly that adultery, at least among human males, is “natural,” and something that human females should accept unless they marry a truly “monogamous” creature like the parasitic worm, Diplozoon paradoxum, whose body literally fuses with that of its mate upon their first copulation.

However, in his opinion piece, Barash enacts a sleight-of-hand elision between species and sex that is telling of a cultural tendency to take male behavior as paradigmatic. Professor Barash refers first to EPCs among animals in the general sense but then goes on to give only male examples of EPCs in creatures ranging from elk to seals to chimpanzees, and, of course, humans. What Barash doesn't mention, doesn't even apparently think worthy of mention, is what role female EPCs play in the evolutionary biology of these different species.

For presumably, these male “adulterers” are having sex with a female partner, and let us not forget that many biologists have also found evidence of opportunistic female infidelity among different species. With apologies to Barash and Spitzer, it's not just the males who fool around when they get the chance.

However, there is something more insidious in Barash's application of evolutionary biology to human behavior than his simple occlusion of the role played by females in his examples, and his assumption that what males do suggests a paradigm for the entire species.

Professor Barash also commits the logical fallacy of comparing apples and oranges, when he suggests that elephant seal harems, Maori tribesman, and modern-day call girls' sexual liaisons with high-status men can all be compared without doing violence to the many important cultural differences between them.

For what separates humans from other animal species is not simply biology but culture. The egg/sperm differential that puts a biological premium on males to spread their seed as widely as possible, and the opposing care that females take in choosing who may fertilize their eggs are important factors in how humans choose a mate, but the social and cultural contexts in which this reproduction takes place are equally important.

In a state of nature, humans may only be concerned with ensuring the success of the species; but at the level of the tribe, the village, and the state, human societies are also concerned with reproducing social structures, and in particular, the family unit.

At the species level, it doesn't matter how many sex partners a male has as long as he reproduces with as many females as possible; in society, the sex partner does matter, because societies are just as concerned with the inheritance of livestock, goods, and land, as they are with the generation of children.

At the societal level, the impulses of evolutionary biology run headlong into the biological fact that for most of human history, only maternity could be known for certain; a man could merely assume that he was the father of his children and his legitimate heirs.

It is this cultural organization that creates what anthropologist Gayle Rubin famously called the “traffic of women” in a seminal article of the same name (“The Traffic of Women: Notes on the political Economy of Sex” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, 1975).

Rubin noted that women were traditionally the means of exchange that cemented ties of kinship and that this exchange ensured the reproduction of a family structure based on patriarchy. A father chose a husband for a daughter based on the family's best interests, not her individual desires, and it was the woman who became part of the husband's extended family upon her marriage. Such relations also created the ideal of female “virginity” and female “chastity” in order to ensure that a “legitimate” heir inherited the family wealth and not the progeny of some other male interloper.

Patriarchy also tended to legitimate both sexual and physical violence against individual women, since the family's “honor” was now invested in the “honor” of the woman whose sexual desires were subordinated to the family's interests. Rape, abduction by another man, even being in the wrong place at the wrong time, could all make it “appear” that a woman's chastity was in question and thus justify her punishment and even death at the hands of her husband, or her own family.

Further, the very subordination of women's individual sexual desires in this system of patriarchy generated a cultural fear that women might not be able to guarantee their own chastity out of physical weakness or that they might fall prey to their own suppressed and therefore uncontrollable sexual appetites.

Thus a French churchman, Michel de Pure, wrote in the 17^th century of the Roman heroine Lucrece, who was said to have committed suicide to restore her family's honor after she had been raped: “Her blood was nothing more than the color of pride that she poured out over her unbound desire to deceive us and make us believe that she had not died of pleasure,” suggesting that even one of the most-cited examples of a woman defending her chastity with her life, was nothing but a hypocrite and a fraud.

It is no accident either that as late as the eighteenth-century in England, rape was literally a crime of property, and the injured party was not the woman, but the man legally responsible for her – either her father, husband, or male guardian. For centuries women had scarcely any legal identity at all: they could not initiate a divorce, own property, or maintain custody of their children, much less cast a vote.

“What does this have to do with men and women in the U.S. In the 21st-century?” you may ask. Well, scratch the surface of contemporary discourse about sexual relations in this country, and you will find the same prevalent sexual stereotypes underlying both Professor's Barash's commentary (it's “natural” for men to cheat) and media coverage of Governor Spitzer's “high-priced” call girl (what does she have to complain about – she was getting paid).

Hardly any reporters asked how much of the money Governor Spitzer spent actually made it into the hands of the young woman in question, or raised the issues of physical violence many sex workers endure, or even asked why these women were selling their bodies (a number of the call-girls in the ring turned out to have serious drug habits). Thus what seems like a simple sexual exchange – high status man pays beautiful young woman a lot of money for non-reproductive and possibly unprotected sex – turns out to be a more complicated tale--not just of biological “whispering” but of cultural taboos, that both men and women violate at their peril, even in the free-wheeling twenty-first century where the sexes are presumably equal.

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

Today Senator Barack Obama gave a powerful speech to a small group of his supporters in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” Unfortunately, the topic the Senator had to address was not about unity or compassion, but about racial division. He was there in Philadelphia to publicly repudiate some remarks made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who had used what Obama termed “ incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.”

Yet even though Senator Obama unequivocally rejected the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, he did not reject the man. Instead he said, “As imperfect as he may be, [Jeremiah Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.” Senator Obama said that he could no more reject the man, Jeremiah Wright, who had been like a father to him, than he could reject his white grandmother, “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Like many Americans, Barack Obama has a family he loves deeply, but whose members may well hold racist attitudes that do not accord with his own. And who among us has not had the same painful experience of hearing loved ones voice opinions at the dinner table that make us cringe, even as we debate whether or not to challenge them or to let things go in order to preserve family harmony or at least not to raise a long, painful, and ultimately fruitless subject of debate? We may not be able to convince them that their views of those with a different religion, or ethnicity, or skin color are wrong, but we cannot help but love them just the same.

I loved and respected my parents, but I recognized their racist attitudes even as a young child. It was brought home to me painfully one afternoon, when the son of our neighbor's black maid drove up beside me to ask if he had the right address for the home where his mother worked.

We all loved his mother, Rosa, who was one of the kindest, warmest human beings I ever knew. But here I was on the sidewalk confronted not just by a stranger, but by a black male stranger with a Southern accent I could barely understand. I took one look and all of my parents' underlying fears of blacks, particularly young black men in the late 60's took hold of my heart, and I fled like the devil was at my heels.

My mother was mortified and scolded me heartily in front of everyone- Rosa, her son, and our neighbors. But I looked at her and saw the fear and the hypocrisy written on her face. If this young man weren't Rosa's son, she would have fled at my heels just as fast.

In later years when I heard Mollie Ivins say, "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything," I remembered that moment and realized I had found a kindred spirit.

At that moment as a young girl I started to question, if only in my head and my heart, what my parents said about Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics – just about anybody who didn't belong to the “right” group – German Lutherans (and even then they had to be “Missouri” Lutheran).

Yet I was also struck by the contradictions Senator Obama noted in his former pastor because they suggested the same contradictions I saw in my parents: “Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect," Senator Obama said of Jeremiah Wright. "He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.”

My parents also often treated individuals of different races, creeds, and ethnicities, far better then they talked about those groups in general. When the first black family moved in across the street from us in our modest home on the east side of Detroit, I trembled at how my mother would behave. But she walked across the street, welcomed them, and mentioned that she had been a school teacher and was available for tutoring if any child needed her. My father's funeral was attended by men he had worked with who were from other races and religions, even though he supported the candidacy of a man like Alabama Governor George Wallace because of his stands against integration of public schools.

It was as if my parents could kept two concepts of race simultaneously balanced in their minds and hearts-- their negative views of Blacks, Latinos, Jews etc. in general-- and the exceptions that they made for so many individuals in those groups whom they welcomed as colleagues and even friends.

It is for this reason that I sympathize with the dilemma of Senator Obama who will have to pay a political price for the snippets of Pastor Wright's sermons that get played over and over on YouTube.com and Fox Television.

But before Americans condemn Senator Obama for his loyalty to his former pastor, they should ask themselves: How many family dinner conversations would I be comfortable posting on YouTube.com? How many racist comments by family members have I let slide? Can we ever get past the issue of race without acknowledging that many of those we love and respect as individuals occasionally express views we would disavow, even though we could never reject them as members of our family?

If we begin to consider such questions honestly, we may have a chance of going into the 2008 presidential election without making a race a divisive issue but rather a fruitful one: an opportunity to address our past and our prejudices openly and without fear, no matter what the color of our skin.

Sex, Lies, and Poetic Justice

Sex, Lies, and Poetic Justice

Yesterday to no one's surprise, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after evidence surfaced from a federal wire tap that the governor had made payments to a call girl. At first glance, this seemed like just another sex scandal, and a particularly juicy one, given Spitzer's self-representation as a crusader against corruption.

But Spitzer's downfall is revealing a far more complicated picture of the man and the ways in which he fostered his own vulnerability to getting caught in a kind of behavior that may be as much about “catch me if you can” thrill-seeking as it is about sex.

For one thing, Spitzer does not appear to be a big fish caught in the net of a corruption probe against prostitution rings. Instead, in one of the many ironies of the case, it was Spitzer's pattern of making financial transactions that triggered a flag from a software program designed to root out money-laundering.

Whereas transactions over $10,000 used to raises such suspicions, since 9/11, banks are using more sophisticated software programs to search out patterns of repeat transactions under that threshold that add up to large sums, a requirement that Spitzer himself demanded financial institutions in New York State implement. This means that Spitzer was the target of the wire-taps all along, not simply a random client caught in a prostitution sting.

Even his supporters readily admit that the governor is often arrogant and abrasive and has made himself more than a few enemies during his short tenure in Albany. The same brashness that made Spitzer a great prosecutor have not served him as well as an executive. For this reason, many have compared Spitzer to those heroes of Greek plays with their tragic flaws, or in a comparison closer to home, to the minister John Dimmsdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tragic morality play, A Scarlet Letter.

In an interview with Catherine Gallagher, a Professor of English Literature at the University of California-Berkeley, NPR Day to Day reporter Anthony Brooks noted the parallels between Spitzer's life and great works of literature and asks Professor Gallagher to explain the connections.

She pointed out that in both cases there is a kind of “poetic justice” or “some neat symmetry between what one is guilty of and what the instrument of the punishment will be,” particularly because “great literature is interested in the psychology behind” such hypocrisy. Gallagher also observed that such ironies show up at those moment in a culture where there are “Puritan forces” trying to reform things in society and that the most zealous crusaders of such reforms can be presumed to have “some kind of personal interest in this themselves, that is that they are either trying to prosecute something because they want to root it out of themselves, or they are trying to prosecute something because in fact it will help them personally. So very often the Puritan is seen as the primary kind of hypocrite,” (“What We can Learn from Hypocrisy in Literature,” March 12, 2008).

Yet even this psychological reading of the puritan as hypocrite cannot fully account for Spitzer's motives in playing with fire as he both sought to criminalize the sex trade and engage in it himself. In one of the strangest twists of Spitzer's involvement with prostitution, Juhu Thukral, director of the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center, points out that while a coalition of groups were simply advocating for legislation against human trafficking in the sex trade, Eliot Spitzer pushed personally to create stronger criminal penalties for clients or “johns.” From her perspective, Spitzer's approach was counterproductive because it discouraged these clients from cooperating with authorities to protect women they suspected were being abused, even as it created a great legal liability for the governor himself now that he has allegedly been caught in the position of a “client” or “john,”

Perhaps the strangest reading of the Spitzer scandal has come from Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who claimed in an NPR interview that Spitzer should remain in office because what he did was a “private matter,” and in his view such dealings with a prostitute were really “a victimless crime,” (“Is Prostitution Really Such a Big Deal?” March 11. 2008. At least one NPR listener responded to this assertion by pointing out that Mr. Spitzer's wife and daughters might disagree that were no “victims” in this crime, but one should also consider how autonomous a party Mr. Spitzer's alleged prostitute was as well.

After all, unlike the adulterous relationship Mr. Dershowitz points to in the case of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Spitzer was paying a woman for a sex act she would probably not have chosen to engage in without this monetary compensation. Moreover, as those investigating the women who worked for this “call girl” ring have discovered, may of these women were not trading their bodies purely for financial gain but in many cases to support a drug habit or simply to make ends meet. The fact that some of the “call girls” were let go for leaving a “tryst” to care for a child or for having too debilitating a drug habit suggests that the women in these rings are not glamorous “pretty women,” a la Julia Roberts, nor even autonomous businesswomen, but in many cases, women who are desperate to earn money any way they can.

What conclusions can we draw them from the fall of Eliot Spitzer? Why did he risk so much for so little? Was it arrogance, hubris, thrill-seeking, a Puritan fatal attraction to the very sin he crusaded again, or some combination of all of these?

Whatever the answer, Mr. Spitzer's sudden departure from Albany draws the curtain on the first serious attempt to disrupt business at usual at the one of the most dysfunctional legislatures in the country. If for no other reason than this, we many find more to lament in Mr. Spitzer's political implosion than the pleasure we take in its exquisite poetic justice.

The FISA Catch-22

The FISA Catch-22

Tonight Congress meets in a secret session to try to work out a compromise between the Senate version of legislation on FISA that would give telecommunication companies immunity from prosecution for their cooperation with the government despite the lack of authorizing warrants, and a House version that strips that retroactive immunity from the bill.

President Bush insists that such immunity is necessary to ensure that telecommunications companies cooperate with the government in future terrorist investigations. According to the President: “Companies that may have helped us save lives should be thanked for their patriotic service, not subjected to billion-dollar lawsuits that will make them less willing to help in the future,” (“A Transcript of Bush Remarks on FISA,”The Washington Post, March 13, 2008.

This argument would carry more weight if the same Bush Administration were willing to reveal more about what citizens they encouraged telecommunications companies to spy on and why. But according to the White House, to do so would risk compromising “state secrets.” The American public, according to President Bush, should accept the White House's assurance that no one's privacy was unduly breached, no one's civil liberties trampled upon, and that every bit of spying was done purely in the interest of protecting Americans from terrorist attacks. The telecommunication companies who facilitated the spying are “patriots” -- any citizens who object to having their phone calls or email reviewed without a warrant are by implication unpatriotic and obstructionist, selfishly rendering other citizens less safe by their insistence that terrorist investigations be pursued under a system of judicial review.

The American public may be forgiven for questioning the White House's credibility on these assertions given its questionable record of finding “terrorist” threats from Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction to Jose Padilla's alleged plot to detonate a “dirty bomb” on U.S. Soil to the cases of mistaken identity that have rendered innocent men for torture and imprisonment in countries like Syria and Afghanistan.

In any case, whether or not these “warrantless” wiretaps were justified or not, is something we will never know until a full investigation is made, and that can only happen through an open government investigation or through class-action lawsuits. The catch-22 inherent in the legislation that the Bush Adminstration wants, according to Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers puts Congress in an impossible situation. According to Conyers, Congress “can't immunize against that which we do not know what it is we are granting immunity for,” (“Immunity Issue at Center of FISA Fight,” Morning Edition, NPR, March 13, 2008).

One of Americans' most fundamental Constitutional rights is the right to remain free from unreasonable search and seizure. Surely those Americans who fear that their Constitutional rights have been violated in this way deserve their day in court to determine at the very least whether or not their phone calls and electronic communications were monitored and why.

The Bush Administration has also failed to provide compelling evidence why the current FISA law, which allows warrants to be issued retroactively, cannot answer its needs to investigate and prevent terrorist plots. President Bush calls the current FISA structure “ a cumbersome court approval process that would make it harder to collect intelligence on foreign terrorists,” but he provides no hard evidence that the FISA law has impeded terrorist investigations in any way, and journalistic investigations of the actions of the courts implementing the FISA law suggest that very few requests for warrants are turned down.

So why the rush to secrecy and to retroactive immunity? Are we really protecting the American public from the threat of terrorism? Or are we protecting an administration that has repeatedly bungled terrorist investigations and sought to aggrandize executive power and to refuse any kind of oversight by the other two branches of government? Do we really believe that immunity for telecommunications companies has more to do with national security than with the potential for embarrassing revelations about just how much spying our government has engaged in with regard to innocent, law-abiding citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever? We'll never know the answer unless Congress sticks to its guns and demands accountability from an administration that considers itself answerable to no one.

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

John McCain: With Friends like These Who Needs Enemies?

As of the Texas primary, Senator John McCain was able to claim publicly that he had sewn up the Republican nomination. As one who is rightly proud of having made it to this stage in his political career by sticking to his convictions, it seemed more than a little odd for McCain immediately to make a pilgrimage to the White House to obtain the political endorsement and blessing of the very man whose campaign used very ugly tactics to knock him out of a bitterly contested primary race in the South Carolina primary of 2000.

President Bush demonstrated just how strange this meeting of two former foes really was when he observed in his inimitable prose: "If my showing up and endorsing him helps him, or if I'm against him and it helps him -- either way, I want him to win,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/03/20080305-4.html, March 5, 2008). Well, at least Bush has made it clear that he doesn't want to blamed for being the single greatest reason that Republicans are at their most vulnerable in a presidential election since Nixon's resignation in 1974.

McCain, for his part, was very gracious to his former rival: "I'm honored and humbled to have the opportunity to receive the endorsement of the President of the United States," he said and went on to declare his "respect and affection" for George W. Bush.

Yet McCain was also quick to state that he would welcome President Bush's help in his campaign by noting that the President could help him “as it fits into his busy schedule,” a caveat he repeated at least three times as if to signal his intention to distance himself from the White House as soon as this endorsement ritual was over.

McCain faces a difficult balancing act in the next few months before the Republican convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul. As the man many social conservatives love to hate, McCain is going to be tap-dancing away from positions he strongly espoused in his 2000 campaign and as recently as last year, namely: voting against the first two Bush tax cuts; supporting campaign finance reform; acknowledging that climate change really exists; and offering undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. Add to this that he has been a fierce critic of the administration's abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, and you have a man whom social conservatives find hard to stomach, even if he shares their convictions on abortion, the Iraq War, and increased military spending.

One reason that McCain has a problem with social conservatives is that he is not a fundamentalist Christian like Governor Huckabee, nor one to wear his religion on his sleeve like Governor Mitt Romney. In February 2000, McCain referred to leaders of the Christian Right as “agents of intolerance,” (Republican Says Bush Panders To the 'Agents of Intolerance' : McCain Takes Aim At Religious Right, International Herald Tribune, February 29, 2000).

In February 2008 McCain seems both desperate and slightly inept as he seeks the endorsement of a controversial televangelist like John Hagee, a man who refers to the Pope as “the anti-Christ” and who avows that Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution for a planned gay pride parade in New Orleans, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee). McCain's courting of social conservatives thus far has yielded mixed results as pundits like CNN's Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others have strongly rejected him, and many of them are not yet ready to forgive and forget, even in the fact of an acknowledged Republican front-runner, (“McCain’s Critics on Right Look Again,” The New York Times, February 1, 2008).

A second challenge for McCain arises from the support of independents, particularly independent male voters, who often claim to have as much interest in Barack Obama as they do in John McCain, and who are less likely to moved by McCain's shift to the right on social issues. Similarly, McCain's remark that he could envision having American troops in Iraq for 100 years is not likely to win him support among the many Americans who want to hear concrete proposals from candidates about how they plan to bring U.S. soldiers home as quickly as possible, (“McCain defends '100 years in Iraq' statement,” CNNPolitics.com, February 15, 2008).

So John McCain has a delicate balancing act ahead of him in the months leading up to his party's convention. How can he rally the Republican base without alienating independents, much less the majority of the country who favors an end to the Iraq War and who are more concerned about their own individual economic woes than moral issues like abortion or gay marriage? And if social conservatives stay home next November, or even if they favor McCain with an anemic turnout, will he be able to muster enough support among independents and cross-over voters to overcome the loss of at least part of the Republican base?

Finally, in trying to steer a middle course between social conservatives and independents who find McCain's “straight” talking attractive, does he risk undermining that very reputation for independence and integrity if he runs too far and too fast from positions he has held for the past four years?

Certainly McCain is currently trying to distance himself from at least some of his positions on taxes, immigration, climate change, and the use of torture against alleged terrorists etc. But if he changes his views too radically, he opens himself up to the same charges of “flip-flopping” that proved so devastating to John Kerry, another presidential candidate with a sterling military record. And if he hews too closely to the current administration policies in order to court the socially conservative wing of his party, he also risks being labeled John “McSame as Bush” as one independent anti-McCain advertisement has already charged, using images of Bush and McCain embracing as well as slow-motion Photo Shop exchanges of the two men's head shots to reinforce their assertion that McCain's famed independence is a myth, (“Anti-McCain: McSame As Bush,” YouTube.com).

So John McCain finds himself placed between the rock of political realties—voters are concerned about "the economy, stupid," and they also want out of Iraq now—and the hard place of social conservatives who don't trust him and who want complete capitulation on their core issues before they embrace him with anything more than a lukewarm endorsement.

McCain might well be asking himself: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Water: The Next "Black Gold"

Water – The Next “Black Gold”

While U.S. politicians, pundits, and military leaders debate how both established and emerging industrialized nations can curb their thirst for oil, many others around the world are beginning to talk about the emerging scarcity of another valuable commodity: water.

The value of water was brought home to me, literally, this past month, as I vacationed in the south of Chile on my husband's family farm. No one living on the farm can remember such a drought in this part of Chile, but for two years in a row now the farm has exhausted its natural supply of water. The farm sits on the edge of a large lake near the town of Villarrica, and its climate usually resembles that of the Pacific Northwest. And yet, even in southern Chile, where summers seem to bring rain as often as sunshine, the mountain stream on the farm had dried up, and the family had to resort to a completely new method of getting water: pumping water from the lake.

While we were in Chile, relatives spoke of the severe drought and half-jokingly alluded to “global warming” as the cause. Others have pointed to a persistent “La Nina” phenomenon of cold water in the Pacific and high atmospheric pressure that prevents rain from reaching inland. According to one journalist the resulting drought has “over half the country dangling by a thread,” (Cecilia Vargas, “Chile: Drought Raises Likelihood of Energy Rationing,” Inter Press Service News Agency, February 15, 2008).

Whatever the proximate cause of the drought in Chile, around the world local communities are waking up to the fact that water resources they had come to count on, are slowly, or in some cases, quickly, drying up.

Scientists predict that recent increases in global temperatures will have their most severe impact on regions near the equator, but even at high altitudes in these “tropical” latitudes, climate change is having a visible impact. For example, in Bolivia one of the highest-altitude “tropical” glaciers, Zongo, near La Paz, has been melting so fast that it has lost twenty-nine feet of thickness just since 2006. A ski resort that once billed itself as the highest in world at 17,000 feet no longer exists (“Global Warming Hits Tropical Glaciers in the Andes,” Morning Edition, NPR, March 10, 2008).

Why should this melting of “tropical” ice concern us?

For one thing, “local” water problems are no longer so local.

Climatologists in the U.S. have discovered that the dust generated in China can affect snow packs as far away as the Colorado Rockies. In 2006, scientist Thomas Painter observed a dust storm in a Colorado mountain pass and pointed out that “the Alps receive dust from the Sahara and the Taklamakan in western China, and the Gobi deposits dust into the mountain ranges in northwest China and Mongolia.” That would be just an interesting footnote in studies of snow and ice, if it were not for the fact that such “dusty” or “pink” snow melts much faster and much earlier than normal snow packs affecting “billions of dollars in agriculture, hydroelectric and recreation,” “Dust Storms Threaten Snow Packs,” Morning Edition, NPR, May 30, 2006).

As water becomes an increasingly scarce commodity across the tropics and across the world, we will all need to learn new ways to conserve this precious resource and perhaps begin to use water in increasingly creative ways: from rooftop gardens that absorb rain water and prevent runoff to “grey water” systems that use waste water for irrigation, to the formerly unthinkable projects in southern California that seek now purify “waste water” to standards that make it fit for human consumption.

The United States and other world powers may also need to reclassify “water” as a resource worthy of being considered in terms of “national security.” As Tulane University law professor Eric Dannenmaier noted in 2001, “if a foreign plot threatened to poison a city's water supply or pollute an entire river, that nation's security forces would react quickly--but when a slower-moving but more predictable threat to environmental security is at work, governments are unlikely to bring the same force to bear,” (“Environmental Security and Governance in the Americas”).

Those government attitudes are beginning to change, at least in relation to global conflicts. In a Washington Post article of Monday, August 20, 2007 staff writer, Douglas Struck wrote that the “potential for conflict [over water] is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers...The United Nations has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan's Darfur region...and the World Health Organization says 1 billion people lack access to potable water.”

British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett used her country's chairmanship of the United Nations Security Council in 2007 to convene the council's first debate on climate change as a security threat, citing drought as one of the threats brought about by global warming. "It requires a whole new approach to how we analyse and act on security," Mrs Beckett said. "'The threat to our climate security comes not from outside but from within: we are all our own enemies.'She compared the struggle to contain climate change to the cold war, which also had to be fought on diplomatic, economic, political and cultural fronts,” The Guardian, Friday, May 11, 2007.

While politicians and diplomats debate the political consequences of battles over the increasing scarcity of water, we can all work to conserve and preserve clean water in our own backyards. First of all, we can stop buying bottled water in plastic bottles, and install a home filtration system if our water tastes bad and if we are concerned about about contaminants. Second, we can stop fertilizing our lawns to prevent chemical runoff into local streams. If local ordinances allow, we can use“grey” water from showers or washing machines to irrigate our gardens. “If it's yellow, let it mellow.” There's no need to flush every time we use the toilet. We can keep a glass of water to rinse our toothbrushes rather than letting the faucet flow. And finally, if we can afford it, we can buy appliances that use less water and apply for the rebates that many local communities are offering to encourage conservation (See http://www.h2ouse.net/ and http://www.water.org/ for more ideas about ways to conserve and to promote the availability of clean water worldwide.)

Given the uncertainties of climate change, there is almost no corner of the globe where anyone can afford to take water for granted. The average American uses somewhere between 100 and 160 gallons a day, depending on what activities you include. In rural India a family might use as little as 30 gallons of water per person, (“Water Diaries,” Living on Earth, PRI, August 17, 2007). But what is more striking than the disparity in consumption is just how much effort those living in developing countries have to make to obtain clean water, while most of us just turn on the tap without thinking about the consequences. It's time we that began contemplating how to conserve water before we find out the hard way that water can be as scarce and as contentious a commodity as oil, our current “black gold.”

The Tyranny of Texting

The Tyranny of Texting

If you're a parent of a teenager, you know exactly what I mean by the “tyranny” of texting. For this generation of kids over ten, actually using a cell phone to make a telephone call is “soooo yesterday.” They're not going to risk parents overhearing their conversations, even if they're holding them outside in sub-freezing weather.

No, this generation's teens prefers to hold their cell phones slightly to the right and down of the parental gaze as they are 1) allegedly doing homework on the computer 2) allegedly telling you about their day in the car; or 3) allegedly doing anything but what they're really doing---which is: TEXTING ALL THE TIME!

The term strikes terror in the hearts of parents who have received the cell phone bill and wondered what in the name of Jehosephat could possibly have increased their bill by hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

As one of that number, I can tell you that if you thought you had exhausted every reason to HATE your cell phone company, you just found another reason for ire.

Text messages cost telecommunication companies far less than conventional phone calls. Yet they have been delighted to find that they can rake in profits at both ends of the texting exchange, first by charging the sender for the negligible cost of sending the message, and secondly by charging the recipient for the dubious distinction of receiving the scintillating message: “Wassup?” For this both parties have their parents' cell phone bills charged anywhere from ten cents and up.

This may sound like a minor charge, but when you consider that many teens can send at least one hundred of these earth-shattering communications per hour, you have the situation of at least one shell-shocked parent who found that the monthly cell phone bill had gone up by $1,000 in a single billing period.

The solution that telecommunication companies offer to this texting frenzy(one might term it “blackmail”) is to tell parents that they can charge them a mere $15.00 per month or so for the privileging of having their teens risk repetitive stress injuries by using their thumbs to send thousands of messages per month.

In my case, the $150 of extra charges is being worked off by yard work and a decreased monthly allowance until every charge is paid off. Future texting is the financial burden of the teen sending said texts, but that doesn't change my outrage that telecommunication companies have found yet way to exploit a future generation of consumers and their patsy parents. In retaliation, I have to tell them that if they think of texting as “training wheels” for future consumers to use even more expensive options like ring tones, email, and video, they are just keeping this bill-payer from trying any service they offer and imagining them in the deepest circles of Dante's Inferno, just above Sowers of Discord, Falsifiers, and HMO's.

Holes in the Fence

Holes in the Fence

The most visible sign of the movement to stop illegal immigration in the U.S. has taken the form of legislation to build a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. President Bush signed The Secure Fence Act on October 26, 2006, and now Homeland Security is trying to implement the law, with Michael Chertoff asserting that if necessary, his agency will seize land from unwilling property owners in order to continue construction.

More than legislation to block access to education or health care, or to require that landlords check the immigration status of their renters or to impose sanctions against employers who employ undocumented immigrants, the proposed “fence” has symbolized the determination of some Americans to “keep them from coming,” that is to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants across the U.S. -Mexico border.

While many might assume that this hostility to illegal immigration stems from resentment over the off-shoring of U.S. jobs and the belief that these immigrants are taking away employment from U.S. citizens, David Kane, Chair of the American Conservative Union, offers a different explanation: “I happen to think that the American people's real problem [with immigration] isn't about jobs...It's not about the crime and all those things, although that exists. I think what the concern is, is that we've had waves of immigrants that have not been able to be absorbed; they haven't been assimilated, and as a result people are concerned about what they see as the balkanization of American culture and the American nation. And I think neither side really talks about it in those terms,” ( “Conversations with Conservatives,” NPR's Morning Edition, February 25, 2008).

In other words, in Kane's view, these immigrants persist in being “not like us” - their language, their culture, and their tendency to move back and forth across the border make them seem alien and resistant to mainstream American culture. However, what Kane's words really underscore is the fact that all the reasons usually alleged as a necessity for this fence don't really apply. For example:

1. Undocumented immigrants from Mexico aren't stealing American jobs. Kane explicitly says, “I don't know very many people who think that some illegal immigrant from Mexico is going to come in and take their job. That's not what happening.”

2. There is no documented threat of terrorists crossing the U.S, Mexico border. Kane doesn't even deign to mention this common assertion to support the need for this fence, but rumors that international terrorist groups are rampant in rural areas south of the border have flourished since 9-11, according to one Texas television station. It is true that Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw claimed that arrests of alleged terrorists have occurred on the border, but the only confirmed case he was able to point out was the July 2004 arrest of a woman in McAllen, Texas, who reportedly had ties to insurgents in Pakistan. Houston Republican Congressman, John Culberson, also stated he saw an Al-Qaeda training camp across the border from rural south Texas, but authorities have never substantiated his claim.

3. Mexicans crossing the U.S. Border are not contributing in any significant way to crime in the U.S. Indeed, James Lynch, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, notes that studies have proved that "in the United States immigrants engage in common law crime at rates lower than the native population" (“The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation,” Immigration Policy Center, Special Report, Spring 2007).

This doesn't mean that there has not been an increase in violence along some parts of the border, but as a State Department alert issued on March 6^th of this year, such incidents are largely directed against Mexican nationals rather than U.S. Citizens and are “the product of a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade along the border. “

So if The Secure Fence Act isn't really about preventing terrorism or stopping crimes perpetrated by undocumented immigrants, why is the U.S. government building it? And how is it impacting American citizens and property-holders living on the borders?

The answer to the first question appears to be that the fence is a sop to anti-immigrant sentiment that naively assumes that we an solve the problem of undocumented cross-border immigration simply by imposing a physical barrier between “us” and “them.” The history of the Berlin Wall should give us some idea of how quixotic and ultimately how pernicious an enterprise such as this border fence may appear to future generations on both sides of the barrier.

But in the meantime, Americans should consider a more pressing issue: how does the wall affect U.S. citizens and property holders who are being asked, nay, whom the government is demanding, to yield one of their most fundamental right, namely the right to private property, in order to achieve this goal?

It would be one thing, if this 700-mile fence really were a contiguous barrier separating the U.S. and Mexico. But as recent reporting has revealed, the actual implementation of this fence by the Department of Homeland Security reveals plans to build not so much a “fence” as a segmented series of barriers, in which gaping holes, ranging from a few miles to more than a hundred miles, exist solely in order to benefit well-connected property-owners who don't want a fence spoiling their resorts, their golf courses, or their private reserves.

As first reported by The Texas Observer, many small land-holders like Eloisa Tamez, question why the proposed border wall is slated to go through her backyard and effectively destroy her home, and yet stop at the edge of the River Bend Resort and golf course, a popular winter retreat, two miles down the road. The wall starts up again on the other side of the resort. Other property owners, selectively impacted by the wall's course, include the University of Texas at Brownsville.

One of the most egregious examples, is the exemption of property owned by Dallas billionaire, Ray L. Hunt and his relatives, one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush, recently donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush’s presidential library. Hunt has recently transformed his more than 6,000 acres into a gated community of expensive homes with its own golf course and utilities. None of this property will be fenced off from Mexico.

So what does the Department of Homeland Security have to say to small property owners and public institutions like the University of Texas? Although Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, has been quite pugnacious in interviews, Bush Administration officials have become increasingly tip-lipped following lawsuits by angry property owners who want to know the reasons their properties have been selected for demolition, while golf course owners and others with high-level connections to the Bush Administration are exempt. Following the Bush Administration's tendency to use national security as a cover for maintaining secrecy, the Department claims that to reveal the methodology for choosing what properties are being taken for the building of the fence and those that are being exempted would compromise "national security."

In the meantime, the “security” fence, in its current configuration will create a barrier between the United States and Mexico that is dotted with holes, many miles in width.

So what good is a wall with holes miles wide? It is a question that every American who cares about both illegal immigration and about the basic property rights of American citizens should be posing to their representatives and to the current administration that still maintains that this pock-marked fence will be built in the service of protecting the American public from terrorism and that anyone who questions the reasons for it could potentially damage "national security."

Will (Do House)Work for Sex

Will (Do House)Work for Sex

Today's most emailed Yahoo news story carried the title, “Men who do housework may get more sex.” When I read this, my first thought was to echo John Cleese of Monty Python, “More research on the bleeding obvious.” Then I noticed that little word “may,” and I thought, May??!!” How can there be any question at all about this?

According to the news story: "If a guy does housework, it looks to the woman like he really cares about her — he's not treating her like a servant," says Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who is affiliated with the Council on Contemporary Families. "And if a woman feels stressed out because the house is a mess and the guy's sitting on the couch while she's vacuuming, that's not going to put her in the mood."

Any man who has heard, “Not tonight honey, I have a headache,” should seriously ask himself if his wife's reluctance (and exhaustion) has as much to do with the second shift of laundry, cooking, dishes, and putting kids to bed, as it does to a splitting head.

I was also struck by this headline because I had just returned from a three-week trip to the south of Chile where we had hired help to do all of the cooking and cleaning. I have to admit that if I had to choose between the gorgeous scenery, the warm weather, and the fact that for three weeks I didn't have to make my bed, wash clothes, or cook, I would seriously consider giving up the former rather than the latter.

When I entered the kitchen every morning to say, “Buenos dias, Emilina,” and give our resident cook a kiss and a hug, it was truly heartfelt because there was nothing more enjoyable than sitting down to a plate of eggs, coffee, and toast that I didn't have to prepare for myself or anyone else. And when I complimented her on how good her cooking was, it was a tribute not only to her skills in the kitchen but to my profound gratitude that I didn't have to demonstrate my own prowess with a skillet.

It's a commonplace among professional couples that husband and wives these days need a “wife” -- that is someone--anyone--willing to do the traditional female duties of cooking, cleaning, and childcare. My husband and I agreed on that long ago when his response to my complaints of unequal time spent doing chores was, “Okay, hire somebody.” My Protestant work-ethic protested loudly – why should I pay someone to do something I could fully do myself – but the reality of trying to write a dissertation, keep a house clean, and raise kids soon took care of those objections.

In the U.S, we can't afford the kind of live-in cooking and cleaning we enjoyed on our recent vacation in Chile, but even a little help goes a long way, whether it's a weekly cleaning service or a husband and kids performing some basic tasks like making their beds and taking out the dishwasher.

And guys, trust me, she'll be so happy to show you how grateful she is for a clean kitchen, clean clothes, and time off from the kids! "It's a real turn-on," said one mom at a local community center.

So skip the flowers and chocolates. Just get your apron on and clean house!