Friday Cat Blogging: Two In a Row

It really is "Two in a row" day for this Friday's entry. First off, clearly I haven't written anything since last Friday Cat Blogging. Hey my new laptop is shipping. Soon instead of watching TV, I will be blogging.

Secondly, you may have seen these kitties before. Its a return appearence for both Rex and Oscar, previously featured Portland cats (now currently back in Olympia, Wa with their giant family of cats and humans).

But since it's Two In A Row Friday, I thought I would feature a bonus Friday Cat Blogging picture. Little Rex and Oscar as kittens. Enjoy!

Friday Cat Blogging: Al Loves Macs

It's been a while since I posted a Friday Cat Blogging picture. That's Keeper of the Cats behind Al. Now I guess I could have submitted this to Cats Love Macs, but really, I think Al will likely love my Dell XPS M1330 (Product red) just as much. *sigh* Still another two weeks to go.

Oh...That Explains Why Bush Disappears In August

He's got to put on his cap and cowl.

The stupid, it burns!

(Bonus: so this is what passes for pop culture analysis in the Wall Street Journal? I know high school bloggers who come up with more sophisticated analysis than "Our president is a superhero! He's like a *Dark Knight*.)

Hat tip Sadly, No!

All Birth Control Is Now An “Abortion?”

I’ll admit that in the beginning even I was a bit skeptical about the idea that the anti-abortion was going to have any chance of success in taking away woman’s birth control. Sure they’d make some noise and make a lot of people nervous, but it wouldn’t really *happen.*

But the evidence is starting to pile up that they might have some success in, if not completely outlawing contraception, they can make it a lot more difficult to get.

The New York Times has a story about a leaked proposal that Health and Human Services (HHS) was circulating that would redefine all hormonal contraception as an “abortion.” Cristina Page writes about it here and here.

Now the reason why HHS would take this route is that by redefining contraception as “abortion” it gets around the Weldon and Church amendments, two laws that prohibit any agency receiving federal money from being required to offer abortion services. So if birth control becomes the same as abortion, there are a lot of ways this will have an effect on women’s ability to get contraception.

One of the main effects is that in 27 states there are laws requiring any employer that cover s prescription drugs to also cover contraception (because it’s not an “elective,” its not a cosmetic. It’s a regular part of health care for women and hence, if you cover diabetes medication employers should also be forced to cover birth control.) HHS’s proposed redefinition would then wipe out the state laws.

It would also immediate overcome any state rules about requiring pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception, or requiring hospitals to offer it to rape victims.

Now here’s the thing about the so-called “right” for pharmacists to refuse to dispense medication, Susan Paynter in the Seattle PI has a lot of good examples of what happens when you allow pharmacists to suddenly make snap judgments about their customers.

And, at a pharmacy in Seattle, a woman's prescription for a cervix-dilating medication was refused by a pharmacist who suspected she was on her way to have an abortion. Not that it ought to matter, but the woman's physician prescribed the drug because she was about to have surgery for uterine fibroids.

And, in Yakima, a pharmacist refused to dispense syringes to a diabetic, assuming he was an IV drug user. And there are more infuriating scenarios, says Nancy Sapiro of the Northwest Women's Law Center.

I don’t understand why moralists who think that requiring pharmacists to dispense birth control – even if they don’t like their customers – is any different than refusing to sell condoms (or disposable syringes) to “certain people” because, well you just don’t like them. Pharmacists are regulated by their own boards (and many state and federal laws) that say you don’t get to pass judgment on your customers.

Meaning you are not allowed to discriminate against people because of their gender, skin color or religion. What if some atheist pharmacist refused to dispense heart medication to the local pastor because he/she didn’t like their sermons and wanted him to get sick and die. Isn't that part of the atheist's religious freedom? Can’t the local pastor just go SOMEWHERE ELSE to get his necessary medication? Wouldn’t that be infringing on the atheist pharmacist right to not sell to only people whose lives he approves of? Oh wait that's a ridiculous example you say? But is it?

Deborah Kotz has more.

FYI -- I'm thrilled habladora has asked me to contribute to Feminist Underground.

--cross-posted at Feminist Underground.

Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain

I was going to write about the deeply depressing ancedotes that the Washington Post has been finding about people who tell lies about Barack Obama.

And I was wondering why isn't there any similar group that tries to smear John McCain in a similar way.

Then I found out there was.

I don't actually agree with such campaigns. I know where anger it is born from, its the same place that people wanted to say John Kerry didn't deserve his Purple Hearts. It's the idea that someone's entire reputation is built on a (believed) foundation of lies, and only YOU know the truth. And if this was John McCain's first run for Senate I would say maybe its something to examine. But the man is 72 years old. Whatever his qualifications for president are, they aren't hinged on what he did for the Navy. Anymore than John Kerry's qualifications for president started and stopped with the idea that he saved Jim Rassmann's life.

I had a professor in U.S. History one time bring in a guest lecturer who for an hour tried to make the case that Newt Gingrich cheated his way to his ph.d. And the lecturer even had a pretty good theory. But in the end I said "So what? He'd not be the first person who didn't deserve his Ph.D." It's not like if you prove he didn't deserve his doctoral degree, you could change history and Gingrich doesn't become Speaker of the House.

Friday Cat Blogging: Al & Lena Cuddling

I realized it's been a while since I posted a joint picture of both Al and Lena together. Unfortunately the Glowing Cat Eye of Evil somewhat ruins the effect of what was a very sweet moment of watching the two of them together.

Mike Erickson: Hypocrite For Congress

So imagine you are a Republican candidate for Congress in Oregon, and you decide to run on a strict “morals” platform -- you know the deal, anti-abortion, abstinence-only education, anti-gay marriage. Then an ex-girlfriend turns up and says, you know what, that dude saying he’s against abortion and is god’s gift to babies, well when he and I dated and I got pregnant, he specifically told me he didn’t want to be a parent, so he gave me $300 and drove me to the abortion clinic, but then wouldn’t even go inside to comfort me.

What do you do if the woman can provide medical records and witnesses to back up her account? Do you deny what she said? Claim that you used to be pro-choice but after having an ex-girlfriend go through an abortion you changed your mind?

Or do you baldly lie about the situation, and say things like “I knew her pretty well but not like -- it wasn't my girlfriend -- but it was somebody that I had a relationship with” and “She asked for some money to go have a doctor's appointment -- not knowing what that was -- and whatever happened, happened, I guess. I didn't even know she had an abortion.”

It’s weird watching someone lie as badly as Mike Erickson is attempting to do.

Hat tip to apieceofwork on Feministing’s new community-based blog

Richard Cohen: McCain is Better Because He Was Tortured

I guess because I spend a lot of time reading op-eds I always look for the clincher. What is the ultimate point, the real “take-away” from the column the writer wants you to know.

Richard Cohen’s point is that no matter that John McCain has reversed himself on too many issues to count, because he was once tortured it proves he’s got some backbone. (Likewise since Obama hasn’t been tortured, well we just don’t know about the guy...)

But here is the difference between McCain and Obama -- and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It's not just that he's been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It's also -- and more important -- that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This -- not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express -- is what commends him to so many journalists.

I guess Cohen never read the McCain “the man who once was tortured” also voted to allow the CIA to engage in torture. Then he backed the White House when the White House was pushing the line that waterboarding-wasn’t-torture. He might have said it was “unfortunate” but the fact remains by standing with the White House, he showed where his line in the sand is. Getting elected.

Washington Post Once Again Tries to Divide Women

I really wish I could understand the minds of the editorial page editors of the Washington Post when they picked up this column by Charlotte Allen. But really Charlotte Allen is just a prop for the Washington Post to once again try to start a fight between women. After all, why not elevate a writer who doesn't know what she's talking about as a way to lambast "feminists." So what exact was their thinking?

NCMR Photos & Minneapolis

I've been promising for a while to post some photos I took during my trip to Minneapolis for the National Conference for Media Reform. The only conference-specific photo I had is one of the infamous polar bear suit. He was a symbol of the conference, but I'm not quite sure why.

However I did managed to snap some picture of a photographer taking a cover shot for a magazine to be released during the Republican convention. I'm not quite sure what the set up they were going for, but here's how it looked.

The photographer was trying out some poses. Here was on of him taking a photo of another guy taking a photo (while I'm behind him taking a photo.)

Finally I can't resist posting "Big Dog, Little Dog." There is a park next to the convention center and they were having a Bar-B-Que/Blues fest which attracted crowds. I got this one of a chihuahua owner trying to introduce his dog to a sweet-faced Great Dane.

Friday Cat Blogging: Olive Oil And Fur

It's been a while since I've posted a Friday Cat Blogging post, and this week's picture isn't much to look at. The reason is that Al managed to sit on a little dish of olive oil this morning. Here's a closeup of the effected area.
I'm not sure Al even yet knows he's due for a shampoo although I've heard that olive oil is good for making hair really shiney.

Barack Obama's skin is the color of AMERICAN SOIL

Maybe you've heard of a new website that has sprung up to combat the really horrible lies about Barack Obama? But sadly the best way to fight smears isn't to correct them (which involves repeating them) but actually to simply make up a whole bunch of new "facts" to push the smears out of your brain.

Some of you have read Christopher Beam's brilliant Slate piece to that effect. But my friend John Pinsonneault decided it needed to be much more patriotic. He encourages everyone to send this around and continue bumping up the bald eagle quotient. I'm sure Stephen Colbert would agree.

******************************

There are many things RED-BLOODED AMERICANS do not know about BARACK OBAMA. It is every American's SACRED duty to read this message and pass it along to all of their FELLOW PATRIOTS and CHURCH GOERS.

Barack Obama wears a FLAG PIN at all times. Even WHILE SERVING FIVE TOURS OF DUTY IN IRAQ SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Barack Obama says the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE every time he THINKS ABOUT an American flag WHICH IS ALWAYS. He also ends every sentence by saying, "WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL." Click here for video of Obama quietly mouthing the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE while READING THE CONSTITUTION.

A JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILM exists of Michelle Obama saying the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE at a conference on PATRIOTISM.

Every DAY, Barack and Michelle take the daughters OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION HUNTING FOR TERRORISTS.

Barack Obama is a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN. He has one HAND over his TWENTY PURPLE HEARTS at all times. He occasionally switches when one NUCLEAR arm gets tired, which is almost never because he is AS STRONG AS AMERICAN STEEL.

Barack Obama has the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE tattooed on his SIX-PACK ABS. It's upside-down, so he can read it while DOING KEG-STANDS.

There's only one COUNTRY MUSIC artist on Barack Obama's iPod: FRANCIS SCOTT KEY.

Barack Obama is a DEVOUT CHRISTIAN. His favorite book is the BIBLE, which he has PLAYING ON A BOOM BOX NEXT TO HIM AT ALL TIMES. His name means HE WHO LOVES JESUS in the ancient language of THE FREEMASONS. He is PROUD that Jesus was a FOUNDING FATHER.

Barack Obama goes to WALL MART every morning. He goes to WALL MART every afternoon. He goes to WALL MART every evening. He is IN WALL MART RIGHT NOW.

Barack Obama's new AMERICAN BUILT F-15 TOMCAT includes a NASCAR TRACK, a MCDONALDS, and a MEGACHURCH.

Barack Obama's BLOOD is the color of AN AMERICAN FLAG. HE BLEEDS RED, WHITE AND BLUE.

Barack Obama buys AMERICAN STUFF. He owns a FORD FACTORY WHERE HE EMPLOYS OVER 50 MILLION AMERICANS, THE MLB, and ALL OF SILICON VALLEY. He travels mostly by BALD EAGLE.

Barack Obama says that Americans SPREAD GUNS and RELIGION THROUGHOUT THE WORLD because they were INVENTED BY GEORGE WASHINGTON.

Friend's Blogs

Occassionally I try to turn the attention of my dozens of readers to friends' blogs and other worthwhile causes.

Today I wanted to point everyone to my friend Dave William's blog Autumn Rain. Dave is the author of the fabulous sci-fi novel Mirrored Heavens, a novel about space-based terrorism. Check it out ya'll.

American Is What We Say It Is, Damn it!

Dan Froomkin's column has just some gems of Bush speak. He's been in Europe the whole week and therefore subjected to journalists questions. And not softball ones either.

Reading Bush always angries up the blood, but this week's column is chokful of Bush's-Theories-of-Americanism.

My (least) favorite snippet. Judge American not by what we do, but what we do.

"My only point to you is, is that yes, I mean, we certainly wish Abu Ghraib hadn't happened, but that should not reflect America. This was the actions of some soldiers. That doesn't show the heart and soul of America. What shows the heart and soul of America is the sacrifice of our troops willing to defend our country and liberate 50 million people, or the generosity of America when it comes to providing money for HIV/AIDS in Africa, or the fact that America feeds more of the hungry in the world than any other country. That's the true America."

America: Our good outweighs those torture pictures, really!

I think if I had the time I could demostrate that every single one of those statments is actually demostrably false in a way. "Liberate 50 million people." From their homes and sense of security maybe. Money for HIV/AIDS, as long as you don't include anything about family planning.

But Bush still won't own up to the fact that Abu Ghraib was actually "gov't" policy. The only part that wasn't was the picture taking.

The Not-For-Women Drugstores

The Washington Post has an article about a new type of pharmacies that refuse to stock any kind of contraception, from condoms, to birth control to emergency contraception. The Post doesn't have any kind of numbers as to how many pharmacies of this type they found, there's clearly one in Chantilly, VA, Gray, LA, and Grand Rapids, Mich, mentioned in the article.

It's all about the wah-wah, poor pharmacists who might have to provide health services to women they disapprove of. (Which have we not been warning people that the disapproval doesn't not stop at abortion...it's your birth control they are after). It's not a religious freedom issue. No one is telling them they have to stock alcohol and skin mags. But to become a pharmacists you undergo more training than to become a sales clerk. You don't get to decide who you want to treat. Individuals (and their religious leaders) do not get to decide what professional standards they should follow. That's why they are licensed.

I'm really concerned about creating this exemption for religious doctors (and medical personnel) who decide they don't want to provide full care for women. Not to mention that the STORES ARE NOT LABELED! The pharmacist the Post interviews clearly say they don't refer anyone to the normal "for everyone" drugstores. So anyone in Chantilly want to track down this place and survey how they handle requests for birth control, verses requests for condoms?

NCMR Day 2: Greenwald and Fox News

I'll have a fuller update later, but remember how I mentioned that Fox News was around filming for what will likely be a less-than-admirable segment on the conference (on monday, here's a teaser from Bill O'Reilly). Filmmaker Robert Greenwald called them out to the audience!

The panels I attended are swimming in my head. The one I actually want to go back and watch the video of is the FCC panel because I thought it had some of the most concrete information about the upcoming fights in Congress over spectrum. Watch HR 2802 and hope it passes.

The constant praise of "family owned newspapers" like the Seattle Times is grating to me. In 2000 Frank Blethen overode his own editorial board to endorse George W. Bush for president. Why? Because the abolishment of the estate tax is VERY IMPORTANT to the Blethen family. In 2001 I recall a five-day front page series on the Estate Tax which was all about how bad it was for small business owners (like millionaire publishers). The Seattle Times also behaved very differently during the 2001 newspaper strike than did the "corporately owned" Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (I promise to find links to these assertions later...)

For other takes on the day's panels Local MN Blog has a pretty good rundown.

National Conference for Media Reform: Day 1

So I’m writing this from my hotel lobby in Minneapolis where I’m in town for Free Press’s annual conference for Media Reform. This is my first time at the conference (and actually my first non-DC conference) and I’m amazed at the size!

The first panel I attended, Media and Elections: Covering 2008, was in a room large enough to have an entire conference in. One thing that I noticed right off the bat, everyone from participants to panelists are constantly referring to “the media” as if it’s a singular entity that has a brain. As in “the media does this.” During the panel Dave Sirota started to say that we talk about the media in a paternalistic way, which for a moment I thought he was about to talk about the fact that “the media” is not one big clockwork, but closer to saying “the blogosphere” than people might think. I wish Jay Rosen was at the conference so he could explain this in person.

It just concerns me because how can you reform something if you misunderstand the flaws?

At another panel I attended Eric Deggans said “making allegations without backing them up is not good (media) criticism” a point I would love to stress. Complain all you want but gather real facts to back up complaints. I found it interesting that last week Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study of the media that demonstrated that, collectively, they did not treat Hillary Clinton harsher than either McCain or Obama (although coverage between media outlets might differ) but there still persists the sense that “the media” treated Hillary Clinton *worse* than Obama.

Other notes: I saw Fox News filming at the Media Critics panel. Meant to stop and ask them if they were a Fox local or Fox national. Bitch Ph.D apparently figured out they are here to show the conference as full of crazy conspiracy nuts.

Had a wonderful time at the Media Consortium’s mixer (excellent beer and I’m not even a beer drinker). Photos will have to wait until I get home, I left my camera cord at home. (Drat!)

I Spent the Weekend Urging Women Not to Write Like This

So right after I spent a weekend teaching women that the most effective op-eds rarely need the phrase “I think” in them and should have point, suddenly in the Washington Post’s Outlook section is the silliest, most pointless ode to Sex in the City. (Sunday’s Post was an ode to overly-long, overly-pointless odes to movies. There was also this “what does Indiana Jones mean” article, but at least it was in the style section).

I cannot for the life of me figure out what is the point to Ashley Sayeau’s article. It’s basically about how she relates to Sex in the City because once she wrote an academic paper about it. Which, fine, I know some things about writing academic papers about TV shows, but to be relevant to other readers it might have been useful not to use the phrase “I thought” or “I think” or “I believe” close to 30 times! It ends up being not about her research but just that she’s an academic who is a fan who squeals with delight seeing the movie premier. Great.

She’s not even a local writer. She’s a freelancer in London. Why does she get front page of the Sunday Outlook section to write what amounts to an overlong, fan-specific, blog post?

Combine this with the infamous Charlotte Allen “Women are dumb” op-ed you have to wonder what John Pomfret, Sunday Outlook editor wants his section to say to women. I don’t believe he’s not getting great, substantial Outlook submissions. I think he’s making his section reflect certain type of believe that women are shallow and dumb.

What’s Great About My Job

I know I haven’t posted in three weeks. (Has it really been that long? God I’m bad at this). Part of the reason is that work got busy. But I’m not complaining, in fact I actually wanted to rave about my job.

Twice a year my organization puts on these media trainings for women. We teach them how to get their message out in the media, but more specifically, how to write an op-ed, how to speak to the media, and how to present yourself on television and radio. And it’s a pretty intense two-day training. We’re helping people perfect the op-eds they write during the training, and putting them on camera and showing them how to speak. I really do think that without all these organizations specifically trying to get women’s voices into the pundit class, we wouldn’t even have the (bad enough) representation we do have. I’m not just talking about talking heads on TV. I look at the op-ed pages every day in the LA Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Women are barely 25% of the daily op-ed pages. And all-male opinion page isn’t rare but an all women page is practically a once-a-year affair. (And only if the news is about prostitution.)

And the thing we don’t really talk about all that much is we put on the training pretty much for free. We even help cover the cost of airfare and housing in DC because we want to train women outside the beltway to be able to become advocates for the causes going on in their states.

I met just an awesome collection of women this weekend. It was a total range of ages -- we had women from high school to the “when I was in high school women weren’t allowed to wear pants” ages. And there was a really diverse mix of jobs, interests and projects.

I was just so proud of not only how well it all came together but how happy every one was. These women will go back to their communities and hopefully in some small way we’ve given them tools to accomplish their goals.

It’s funny because as got home and jumped on my computer to catch up on my email I got a notice from Mediabistro. They are offering a $500 online course on how to write an op-ed. And I don’t want to entirely dump on Mediabristro because, whatever, its just a class. But people shouldn’t think that op-ed writing is only for “professionals” (who take expensive classes).

The opinion pages are not supposed to be a gated community. It’s not enough that there’s also a “Letters” page that just happens to be open to the public if they want to submit a point in 300 words or less. And most editors would tell you they want to get guest column submissions. I’ve talked to women, truly opinionated women, who think that op-ed columns are something that only someone like a Maureen Dowd can write. (Which by the way...can we vote her off pundit island and replace her with woman who isn’t all wit and no intellect.) Half the time if someone writes and op-ed the only thing that keeps it from getting it published is they didn’t have a friend tell them at 1,000 words it’s way too long (or at 350 words it’s way too short).

But I think some people think that only “professionals” get to be opinion-leaders in their newspapers. And that’s just not true. People who have something to advocate for should write, not just for their blogs, but yes for the “mainstream media.” It’s not as closed off as everyone thinks.

A Future Imagined by Conservatives

Washington Post Magazine has an imaginative article written by Marc Fisher about what life would be like in Washington, DC in 2025. Why 17 years and not a nice round 20? I guess because 2025 just sounded cooler than 2028.

Now I normally like this kind of imagine-how-we’ll-all-be-driving-flying-cars-and-have-robot-servants kind of thinking, but as I started reading between the lines I noticed there were an awful lot of straight up conservative ideology being passed off as “the inevitable future.”

Let’s start with Marc Fisher’s causal assumption in both future scenarios he envisions, which follow two families (both nuclear), one which is supposed to be have and the other a have-not, that the U.S. is besieged by waves of terrorist attacks. It’s the world of 24-OMG-terrorists. I suppose fear is important element to keep alive if you want people to give up all of their rights and liberties.

In scenario one Heath Shuler is president so we can see how all the democratic ideals to keep sprawl down will fail in every way possible.

Shuler's lure was the great open spaces that were now finally fully linked to AmeriWeb, the wireless information network that extended into every community in the land, the result of the most massive public works project since the construction of the interstate highway system.

The Second Age of Discovery, as Shuler called it, was designed to spread out the nation's population from the traffic-choked suburbs and therefore ease the road, rail and air gridlock that was strangling the economy.

Because Democrats are concerned about global warming, gridlock and making sure people have internet access.

What could be changed was the idea that the only way to keep housing affordable was for workers to live far from their jobs. The new acceptance of a more diffused population didn't do much to preserve open spaces, but Shuler and other politicians sold the idea by dangling before employers and workers alike the carrot of jobs and homes in close proximity. The idea was to engineer a significant drop in driving, which, coupled with striking increases in energy efficiency, would yield sharp declines in consumption of fossil fuels.

But what fools they were!

Alas, as the Ververs would learn, reality did not live up to political rhetoric. Finding a job near home turned out to be harder than the president's pronouncements made it out to be.

Journalism falls apart – left to a “ragtag crew of volunteers working out of their cars and bedrooms” ... shouting “Wolverines!” no doubt. Meanwhile Victor Verver’s job is monitoring blogs for government contractors in case “any opinion wildfire might be threatening the policymakers in his assigned sector.” Would that be Oceania or Eurasia?

However in the future (both scenarios) we don’t have to worry about those pesky Spanish-speaking brown people. Any brown people with a $1 million dollars – which really shouldn’t be all that much in 2025 – are allowed in and all the brown people from Central America leave.

Besides, Prince William's schools were imploding, losing an entire school's worth of Hispanic students each year as recent immigrants steadily left the county, an exodus fueled by both pressure -- tough enforcement programs aimed at illegal immigrants -- and the lure of the good money back home in Central America, where the service, hospitality and health industries were hungry for workers around the huge retirement colonies filled with septuagenarian boomers from El Norte.

Yes, somehow in the future FTAA has fixed the economies of poorer countries...I mean why else are people still sneaking in America. Didn’t NAFTA totally fix Mexico’s economy so no one wanted to immigrate anymore? But just in case it didn’t, we really totally cracked down on illegals this time!

Anyway there’s definitely one odd contradiction in this future. Somehow we fight a Total War for Energy Independence (because after all, how did our oil get under their land) but yes a mere four years later the “middle east” is now more welcoming and secular.

(To the great surprise of many, while energy prices soared steadily for almost two decades after the 9/11 attacks, in the past few years the cost of fossil fuels had stabilized. Depending on your political ideology, this was the result of either the Total War for Energy Independence that President Jeb Bush launched in 2021, or of Iran's velvet revolution and the new openness toward the West that the secular-friendly Young Islam movement was exporting across the Middle East.)

You can’t read it in the online version, but the magazine has several cutaway quotes that explain the thinking of the article’s consulted experts. So this passage:

Victor had suggested that she might be able to teach at one of the new, private Asian Academies that wealthy Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and Korean Americans had opened to train the children of new immigrants for jobs in the tech, health and communications sectors.

Is highlighted with a cutaway quote:

Our panelists are almost unanimous in declaring that the District’s public school system will have to be dissolved, sold off or otherwise disposed of. Not one of our panelists sees much hope for success in the reform efforts of the early 21st century. Gary Marx, president of the Center for Public Outreach in Vienna, foresees a decision to shut down industrial-age schools and reinvent education with a heavy emphasis on expanding the ranks of creative workers and diminishing differences across national borders.

Really, the roughly 223-year-old experiment in public schools is going to collapse in a mere 17 years?

It this part that made me wonder who all these “panelists” were and if they were shared in an libertarian/conservative ideology of privatization in everything? Because the ideas are certainly interspaced throughout the article. Businesses provide everything from housing to busing to workers who can’t afford to work for them otherwise. And this isn’t presented as a dystopian future...merely the byproduct of, well sprawl.

And that’s just scenario one (which I’ll spare you all the boring isolation-of-the-electronic-age bullshit. How people can’t even make real friends now that the internet exists).

In Scenario Two there’s still that Total War for Energy Independence and terrorism, a “beloved top general” was just assassinated (in battle? Cause wouldn’t that just be a causality of war then?) Oh yeah and there just happens to be a GIANT NUCLEAR HOLE IN MANHATTAN. Yet somehow the family of have-nots (this time called the Pinerios) lives are shaped more by air-conditioning than terrorism. DC has been turned into a Baghdad with a Green Zone. The poor Pinerios can’t afford the security clearance implants so commuting takes hours to cross checkpoints.

Once again, public schools barely exist. (Funny how that’s true in both scenarios).

Petra, being 15, was loath to leave her hard-won place at the District's Wilson High School, which was operated by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees government workers union. She didn't want to give up her post as president of the school's Anti-PED Campaign, which agitated for a return to the days before officially sanctioned performance-enhancing drugs had changed the face of scholastic athletics. But over time, Paula convinced her daughter that a new school would have a far superior academic program and more kids like herself. It's not that Petra had anything against the Chinese and Iranian immigrants who dominated Wilson's population; she just sometimes felt excluded from their social circles.

I take it to mean little Petra Pinerio is white. Damn those immigrants’ kids.

Still there are parts to scenario two that remind me a hell of a lot of the dystopian novel Jennifer Government who’s daughter bemoaned the fact she went the McDonald's schools cause they were so darned cheap. Everyone knew the Pepsi schools were the best.

In Konterra, Petra wouldn't be a minority -- no one is. Fed High, like all of Prince George's County, had no dominant racial or ethnic group. And with the entire county school system now operated by Google PeopleShaping, Fed High was free of all No Child Left Behind regulations, free to offer a full range of courses in subjects that the city's schools hadn't taught in decades, such as music and drama.

And once again we find that any fears about civil liberties were proven to be totally wrong.

Then there were the national ID cards that, once the controversy died down, really had helped to control the borders, redefine labor markets and reduce health costs.

Real ID cards also fixed the national debt, put a chicken in every pot and helped me find my car keys!

Anyway somehow despite all the superbrillant Chinese immigrants there still isn’t enough, ahem, “homegrown” workers to fill the need for workers. (Why, oh, why did we keep out all those talented brown people?)

But in the future women now get college grants if they pledge to give birth.

By enrolling in a Google-sponsored school, Petra would automatically qualify for one of the new Brin college grants for young women who pledged their intent to bear children -- a policy aimed at relieving the persistent shortage of well-educated, homegrown workers.

Plus DC residents will desperately cross the Maryland border for the ”fried food speakeasies.” People will just do anything for their oil fix, man!

So, in short, the future is racist, fearful, undersurveillance, privatized, and people eat Soylent Green.