When mentioning Obama’s celebrity status, the ad flashes images of two of the most controversial celebrities in American culture, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Opponents of the ad claim that McCain is resorting to smear tactics by either directly or otherwise comparing a presidential candidate to oft-criticized Hollywood characters. This claim isn’t without merit. Spears is a (former) pop star and Hilton a rich California socialite, and anyone who hasn’t lived in a cave for the past decade know that both have had their share of bad press including leaked sex tapes, DUI’s, mental illness, potential child abuse, and generally embodying the loathed stereotype of the spoiled, rich, arrogant American. The McCain camp defends the ad, claiming that it was meant to demonstrate that Obama is cloaking his inexperience with the enthusiasm he’s generated. I suppose this is a legitimate point, but ask yourself if the ad would have generated this much hoopla if it had flashed images of say, Matt Damon, Daniel Day Lewis, or even Scarlett Johansson.

My beef with the ad isn’t so much that it attacks Obama or that it says nothing about McCain’s ability to transcend Obama’s alleged shortfalls (although I am miffed by both). I have a problem with the way it treats Obama supporters. This ad is yet another example of finger-wagging at young voters, black voters, Latino voters, independent voters, or just about anyone who has thrown his or her support for the candidate. Not only the GOP, but even Hillary Clinton and her surrogates in the primary season spoke exasperatedly of people being doe-eyed over a man who had only served a year in the Senate, had no foreign policy chops, etc. The ad merely punctuates the idea that people who support Obama are nothing but prattling Claire’s shoppers who give thumbs up to his candidacy simply because he’s darn purdy.

I’m not denying that some of Obama-mania is formed by people who are primarily excited by someone who doesn’t look like he’ll keel over at the State of the Union. But airing an attack ad that suggests that the majority of Obama’s supporters are merely charmed by his charisma rather than motivated by his message is insulting. Whether Obama is up to the task of the presidency is a very important question to ask, but the same question must be asked of John McCain. Either question can be posed without denigrating the voter, the lifeblood of democracy, to someone who splits time between politics and gawking at intoxicated Hollywood snatch-flashers. And although McCain’s exasperation is justified, the first rule of political success is avoid insulting voters, no matter how much they may deserve it. Celebrity is nothing without fans, and those fans might eventually sniff out the idea that this ad is more “shame on you” than “shame on him.”

Like many others, I have a beef with both current and past calls to open ANWR to oil and gas companies for exploration and extraction. While past proposals to open the region have been defeated handily with filibusters in times of relatively cheap energy prices on the market, the tendency of the average American to forego regard for the pristine wilderness in favor of financial relief seems poised to overcome longstanding political stonewalling. Thus, you have the current debate hinging not on growing the economy, but providing relief to ordinary folks.

It is because of this shift in emphasis that I even have a problem with the acronym ANWR being thrown about in public discourse the way it currently is. I understand it’s a mouthful to say the entire name of the region, but unfortunately to the layman, ANWR (pronounced ANWAR) sounds not like an area of pristine Arctic wilderness on domestic soil, but an Arabic word. Judging by the number of people who can’t even locate Iraq on a map, it seems plausible that many would misconstrue ANWR as that country’s Anbar province or at the very least, a place in the Middle East. Since Middle East to most equals two things; oil and Muslims, it is no wonder why anxious motorists are steamed that Congress hasn’t given the green light to tap the resource in a land where we’re already integrally involved.

Beyond skin-deep political maneuvering of this kind, the more pernicious aspect of the ANWR push has been its label as a remedy to the current energy crisis. This fantasy tends to operate under the belief that if approved, production will begin immediately and will only affect the relatively small 1002 area of the refuge that contains oil and gas, satisfying both customers and environmentalists. However, pushing ANWR exploration as a remedy for the short-term oil crisis and skyrocketing prices is like saying a family can move into a house before it’s built. Oil rigs and refineries are large capital undertakings that can’t be cobbled together in a couple of months. Even if emphasis was placed on drilling instead of refining in the short-term, the nearest existing refinery lies in Prudhoe Bay over 100 miles away. The notion of environmentally-friendly exploration is dissolved when in order to get the oil or refined gasoline out of the Alaskan interior, infrastructure has to be built in the form of pipelines and roads. This infrastructure would criss-cross a large expanse of not just the 1002 area, but of the Refuge at large in order to reach the sea or more populace centers like Fairbanks, disrupting the tundra through construction and both direct and indirect pollution.

Then there’s the question of how much oil is actually contained within the 1002 area of ANWR and what impact it would have on the energy markets. A 1998 USGS study revealed a mean value of 7.7 billion barrels with 4.3 billion on the low end and 11.8 billion at the top end. As a small portion of U.S. supply (lower than 10% total), the mean level would sustain current demand levels for around a decade. However, what happens after that decade? Is opening ANWR geared to buy the U.S. time to modernize its energy grid with renewables in this time of peak oil and diminishing reserves or is it simply a means of shutting up voters long enough to perpetuate the bull market further relaxations of regulation?

The final statement is one that should be examined. Currently, politicians in favor of opening ANWR tout it as a remedy for the crisis for the American motorist rather than the Wall Street Energy Trader. Their reasoning hinges on the belief that the fundamentals of the current crisis are ones we’ve seen before in terms of supply and demand. However, the notion that ANWR will succeed in stabilizing energy markets because the current crisis is one of supply and demand is also dubious at best. While it is true that supply and demand dynamics are responsible in large part for skyrocketing prices at the pump, there are a number of other important factors that would be left unchanged even if ANWR oil was to be injected onto the market.

The first is speculation. Rampant speculation on energy markets has played a significant role in driving the price of oil ever higher due in part to a provision of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) known popularly as the “Enron Loophole.” Drafted by former Senator Phil Gramm at the behest of the then-functioning energy giant Enron, the loophole exempts from regulation most over-the-counter single-stock trades and trading on electronic commodities markets. The loophole makes energy crises very conducive environments for ballooning stock prices and commodity prices. Before Enron’s collapse under the weight of its own fraud and bad accounting, its traders fueled through speculation the company’s stock through the California Energy crisis of the early years of the decade. Since online trading is now much more important than it was in 2000 and the loophole has yet to be closed, the much larger global energy squeeze is presenting an even greater incentive for speculators in a largely unregulated exchange market.

Speculation functions integrally with a second important factor influencing gas and oil prices: disruption. Civil strife and anger over the exploitative practices of oil giants in the oil-rich Niger Delta have induced hiccups in the global energy market for the past two years and even the shutdown of a single Norwegian rig in the North Sea this week was able to push prices over the record threshold once again. Terrorist activity in the Middle East and Indonesia as well as the impact of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf States in the U.S. all have a hand in driving up the price of an already-dwindling resource.

Finally, one should look at supply and demand through a more panoramic lens. The high price of oil doesn’t have so much do with the increasing domestic demand, but demand from the rapidly-growing economies of China and India. Even wholesale conservation and reduced demand in the U.S. won’t affect global petroleum prices much because developing economies will pick up the slack to fuel their own growth. Likewise, unless ANWR was a second Saudi Arabia (which it isn’t), this breakneck economic growth in the Eastern Hemisphere would still make oil a hot commodity that costs an arm and a leg.

Proponents of opening ANWR to energy exploration need to be taken to task. By the time drilling and refining in area 1002 is up and running, the American driver will have spent months and even years under the financial duress of an energy commodities market gone wild. By the time one of the United States’ final untouched natural treasures is spoiled for the purpose of alleviating the price at the pump, one has to wonder over a landscape of financially-ruined middle and lower-class Americans who the exploration of ANWR was really meant to benefit. I bet you can guess.

While I’m not as starry-eyed over Barack Obama as many of my voting demographic counterparts, I am far more apt to actually get off my ass and do something he encourages me to do should he become president than I would if one of his competitors comes out on top. After eight years of frustration in which George Bush has merely inspired me to pen cynical and self-satisfying tracts, it would be refreshing to have someone in the Oval Office to respect and dare I say, idolize. Unfortunately, neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain exudes a capacity to move me. I have no qualms saying that a voter seeking inspiration is more important than a voter seeking answers. John McCain will never appeal to the former.

McCain’s style is that of an old Paul Harvey radiothon, with squeegee elf voice evocations of landmark events of the mid 20th century and constant references to “my friends.” John McCain is not my friend, and I find it patronizing that he address all Americans as such. A friend is someone I can kill a six of Mickey’s with as we shoot pixilated gun-toting ducks on Gamecube. Even if McCain could hold his own in such a compact, I wouldn’t want a president to possess those qualities. A president is meant to be someone better than you. He or she is supposed to be smarter, more tactful, more tenacious, more learned, more adaptive, and more able. As McCain crows that this generation might be the first one that has a worse lot than its parents, the reason might just be that the office of the presidency is now being offered pass-fail.

While I’m sure McCain possesses some worthy qualities, most get lost in the woodwork behind his constantly touted military service. One can hardly change a channel without hearing about McCain’s tenure in Vietnam. One of the most popular internet banner ads features a 30-years younger McCain striding in salute alongside a beaming admiral. Even recently on the House floor, the blandly partisan trifecta of John Boehner, Roy Blunt, and Duncan Hunter seemed to use the proposal of a Vietnam vet benefits bill to sing the praises of the senator and presumptive Republican nominee. Despite the constant flood of information cajoling me to do so, I don’t view John McCain as a war hero in the way I view Eisenhower or even Kennedy as such. I view him as a war survivor. While I cannot fathom the fortitude and courage it must have taken to endure years of systematic torture in a Vietnamese prison camp, McCain’s war experiences and subsequent drive for public service do not inspire me. They give me a cold, uncomfortable feeling, the kind you might get if a first date thrust up her sleeve to reveal a roadmap of cigar burns, track marks, and unsuccessful suicide attempts. Ultimately, McCain’s war experiences make me feel sorry for him more than anything else. One thing these past eight years have taught me is that it’s not a good sign if you feel an inclination of genuine pity for the leader of the free world.

While some bemoan Obama’s soaring rhetoric as a candy shell obscuring an empty center, the ability to orate is perhaps the most important tenet of the presidency alongside adherence to the Constitution. McCain’s rhetorical style is severely lacking. His talking points begin with the tenor of an 8th grade student council nominee promising a foosball table before petering out to a lower, reassuring tone that reminds octogenarians in rocking chairs of the good old days. Even McCain’s particularly-styled language of inspiration fails to hit any contemporary chords. A good example is when he touches on the need to address climate change. Although I’m happy McCain at least acknowledges the world is fucked if it ignores global warming (much more than I can say for many of his dimwitted colleagues), his constant use of the phrase “New Manhattan Project” doesn’t exactly inspire the youth of America to save future generations’ asses. While it’s true that Oppenheimer’s lovechild gave birth to countless technological advances, the image that most tend to associate with the original Manhattan Project is of thousands of blackened and irradiated Japanese. Not the best way to reach a generation perhaps indefinitely soured by conflict and unwilling to serve due to our latest Mesopotamian misadventure.

Ultimately, John McCain is an old man who appeals to old people and clamshell voters who would sooner castrate themselves than vote Democrat. Admittedly, these are significant portions of the electorate, but they’re not people who are going to make things better for America. As much as I hate to resign the future of America to iPod-toting, text-messaging leavers of disparaging YouTube comments, they will nonetheless determine the fate of our nation as it plows towards an incendiary future. And if you accept that fact, you damn well better believe that inspiration isn’t just a fad.

For anyone who has watched the evolution of White House press conferences over the past eight years, you know they’re marked by a continuing devolution into the pit of obfuscation. From the arrogance of Ari Fleischer to the actual cognitive deficiencies of Tony Snow and Dana Perino, the once vital function of Executive transparency to the media has eroded into dust. Remember Plamegate? While I’m sure that most Americans never really understood what the hell that scandal was all about and that the improper, but overblown vendetta didn’t really deserve the “gate” status, it’s hard to believe that McClellan was a chivalrous knight sidelined by ignorance of the facts or coerced hush-hushing by his superiors. If you watch video footage of press conferences during Plamegate (yes, Youtube has that stuff), you’ll notice through his answers that McClellan is either a doddering moron or actively barring reporters from information. He does look very uncomfortable as his mind is no doubt trying to swallow the gristle of misinformation and obstruction, but his obedience is nonetheless victorious over lofty principle.

McClellan’s tenure as White House Press Secretary is telling in terms of how we should feel about his latest admissions about the Bush administration. What I see is either a man who acquiesced to cover-ups and self-described “propaganda” or who was too spineless to let his conscience accept the consequences if he actually stood up. Hearing this doughy bureaucrat blurt crap out his ass like “I have a loyalty to the truth” years after his eviction from position makes me sick. To admit the dirty secrets of a shadowy administration actively pursuing cloak and dagger tactics a mere eight months before that clan of con artists is finally wiped clean from office is not a noble undertaking. It is a way to sell books and salvage a shred of reputation.

Where was McClellan’s loyalty to the truth five years ago? Where was it when it actually mattered? The blunt truth of the here and now is that this admission is little more than a fart in the wind. It’s crying wolf after the pack has gutted the sheep pen and already shit out the digested remains. Bush will get away with saying how disappointed he is in little Scotty and retire to his ranch in safety and comfort while the U.S. withers under his irresponsibility. People like Scott McClellan had every chance to fight against this malfeasance and they didn’t. And now the rest of us not only have to suffer that, but also the belated audacity of this coward? Puh-lease. And to think that people burn Harry Potter books…

As Nixon strove to divert public attention away from incinerated Vietnamese children, the modern War on Drugs was born. It is no surprise that peyote was included in the list of hippy candy that made up the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. But whereas the protests against illegal weed and acid could be quashed by terrified suburbanites supporting Nixon’s bullshit, certain protests over the psychedelic cactus were not so easily ignored. The most pernicious griping came from southwestern Native American organizations that objected to the prohibition of a substance central to their spiritual belief system for generations. As a reaction to the claim that crimilaizing the cactus violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, a loophole was formed in federal drug policy regarding peyote. Currently, peyote cultivation and use is protected under a 1990s court decision that stipulates exception from Schedule I status on the condition it be used as part of “bonafide religious ceremonies.”

Although any step towards decriminalization is a positive one in my book, there are few court decisions more profoundly idiotic than this. As things stand right now, while individuals belonging to the Native American Church can chomp the psychedelic cactus and trip out under the desert night with impunity, anyone who doesn’t belong to the various facets of this animist cult could face jail sentences just for nibbling on the little green monster or holding it in a pocket. How is it that someone who has done extensive research on and is well-informed of the chemistry and effects of peyote is not allowed to ingest the plant simply because he or she doesn’t belong to a religious organization? This is no different than saying only Catholics can drink wine because of its use in the Eucharist or only Jews can eat matzo. Admittedly, neither of those victuals provide a psychedelic experience, but to license the use of a particular commodity to a specific group of Americans based on belief is decidedly un-American.

The willingness of the Native American Church to accept members into its fold who are curious about peyote is immaterial here. The point is, there should not be a metaphysical prerequisite for people who want to put something into their bodies of their own volition. The only prerequisite should be a willingness to deal with whatever happens following ingestion. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I don’t need a government nanny or a member’s only card in a sect to fulfill that.

Matthew’s guest was conservative Radio Host Kevin James and the subject of the interview was the recent speech made by President Bush in the Israeli Knesset to help mark the nation’s 60th anniversary. The point of contention came in the second half of the speech when Bush stated “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Bush then opened his cheeks and pinched a belittling fudge dragon on the Greatest Generation once again by bringing Hitler into, at best, a remotely-applicable contemporary situation. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” Bush continued, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The appeasement comment has been viewed as a thinly-veiled attack on Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama who has mentioned a willingness to host talks with unfriendly nations as part of his foreign policy. That particular connotation doesn’t much concern me. Obama is a big boy and can handle himself in the face of a man that begs the invention of time travel to expedite his exit from office. What concerns me is the way the “appeasement” argument has become a meme in media discourse to describe a certain brand of foreign policy that involves anything but carpet bombing without anyone so much as nudging out a clarification of the position. Above all, catch-phrase discourse concerns me.

During Matthews’ interview, James began an impassioned tirade about Obama’s “questionable” Israel policy which segued into the core of Bush’s appeasement jab. After James shouted for several minutes in a voice usually reserved to hark used cars on a commercial for a Podunk Suzuki dealership, Matthews finally stepped in and demanded James tell him what Neville Chamberlain did at the Munich conference in 1939. His answer was…well, he didn’t have an answer. After attempting to sneak off the usually lubed-up Hardball hook by saying “it all goes back to appeasement,” James spent the next several minutes trying to overcome Matthews’ attempts to get him to clarify the events that led to his belief that Obama was resurrecting Chamberlain. The man didn’t know.

It doesn’t surprise me that Kevin James doesn’t know dick about World War II beyond maybe what a M-1 Garand sounds like in a video game. If one bothers to examine 1939 European politics, there is very little connection with Chamberlain’s dealings with Hitler and the current situation in the Middle East. A far more applicable situation (if it had turned out that way) would have occurred in 1991 if George H.W. Bush had given a free pass to Saddam Hussein’s illegal invasion and occupation of Kuwait. If indeed George W. Bush is trying to paint Obama as the mawkish Chamberlain and Ahmadinejad as the aggressive Hitler, the dynamics hardly match up. Iran is clearly up to more than its petulant mauve-blazered president claims, but as irritating as the country is, it has not made such an audacious move as Hitler’s Anchluss, the reason for the Munich Conference that eventually spawned the term “appeasement.” In the event that Iran actually annexed a neighboring territory based on a claim similar to Hitler’s with the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, I highly doubt the global response would be Chamberlain’s.

James’ ignorance and the appeasement analogy itself really play second fiddle to Matthews’ display of rare form on cable news, ie. calling out bullshit. As the analytical trend moves towards two polarized guests vying for a chance to beat their chest, it is even more difficult to separate fact from fiction. It appears as though speaking in a loud voice or using a term that seems weighty in a historical or political context is tantamount to truth, or at the very least, a supported argument. This, for lack of a better word, is bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.

Before penning penny posts, I was a student of history. Though I glutted my time with enough pot and Mario Kart to cast a pallor over the field’s reputation, I nonetheless managed to complete my major with an A average. Why? Because I understood the importance of tying the flexibility of historical writing and presentation with indispensable respect for what is contained in the documents. You can say whatever you want, but if the writings of the contemporary humans in question do not support the statement, you’re writing historical fiction, not history. In the licensed era of enshrined idiocy we find ourselves, historical reductionism of the kind aforementioned and pervasive in popular discourse is particularly dangerous and should not be tolerated. At a time when the world itself potentially wanders on a knife edge, if the adage of “learning from history” is squeezed down to “learning from colloquial history,” it won’t just be the viewers of a ranting televised idiot who suffer.

This is the reason I take offense to the schlock that people like James fart out their palettes on a daily basis on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC and that people like Chris Matthews tolerate with inexcusable frequency. If you hurl historical aphorism without providing context or source material, you are providing legend, not history, vagaries, not analyses. One should fear the day when contextual accuracy becomes the road less traveled. We may already be there.

The latest celebrity “scandal” involves television star Miley Cyrus. In a recent Vanity Fair photo spread shot by famous nudity fusion photographer Annie Liebovitz, Cyrus is seen clutching a sheet to her likely topless body. Her back, arm, and face are exposed. While the primary thing I found disturbing about this photo was Cyrus’ horrid likeness to her fame-aping father underneath a makeup job out of the “Underworld” movies, apparently I missed the real scandal. Yes, word on the street is that the 15-year-old Cyrus is being a poor role model revealing her nipple-less back in an artistic photo shoot. Mind you, this was merely a climax in a lurid series of photos that surfaced last week involving a fully-covered breast and a reclining position. For SHAME!

Please tell me why I’m supposed to be outraged. Are eight-year old girls suddenly going to wrap sheets around their topless bodies? Are we to infer that Liebovitz took the picture after Cyrus had done speedballs and completed coitus with two costars of “Hannah Montana?” Is the mere combination of Cyrus’ mullet-addled genetics, pasty back, and satin bedding threatening to give pastor John Hagee the apocalypse he craves?

Celebrity scandal is hardly complete unless the main character shows remorse at the events leading to it. Cyrus herself expressed dismay at the photo shoot and the story, though I’m fairly certain it was because of pressure from her network rather than her own preoccupations. Her outrage would be plausible only in the event of utter obliviousness about its implications. If she was that concerned about her viewers’ perception of her, why did she agree to do a Vanity Fair shoot? Did she not even run Liebovitz’s name through wikipedia to get a handle on the kind of shoot she’d be doing? Did she not bother to ask her father about a magazine that’s banked its success over the past 15 years on featuring suggestive shots of celebrity women? How exactly did she THINK she was going to look topless with a sheet mashed up against her breasts?

A far more plausible explanation for this recent rash of “suggestion” is that Cyrus knew full well what she was doing and did it for a reason. In all likelihood, the 15-year-old is discovering her own sexuality and probably doesn’t want to be roped into playing a goofy tween machine on a Disney show for the rest of her life. Just as Daniel Radcliffe tried to shed his Harry Potter typecast when he appeared nude next to a horse last year, the Miley Cyrus thing should be taken for what it is: a girl growing up. Sadly, neither a rabid media nor a nation of apathetic parents demanding that television play surrogate role model will accept such an expression of individual choice and maturation.

The only disturbing aspect of this controversy is the fact that less than 1% of Cyrus’ audience would even know about this bullshit unless the media pumped it out in such a concerted fashion. Now, instead of Cyrus appearing in a magazine that her fans would merely see in fleeting periphery on the way to Claires, everyone with an internet connection and a finger can and WILL see it. Before you know it, we’re going to have Rick Santorum stumping on the need for America to clothe teen backs before fornication devours us all. And some of us who sanely pass over such inane crap will unfortunately be privy to insane reactionary application whether realized or merely suggested.

If at this point people fail to draw a connection between the marketability of our country’s attachment to Puritan sexuality and these manufactured scandals, they should put themselves on a waiting list for a cerebral cortex transplant. Has anyone ever wondered why modern Americans are expected to be shocked by nudity that would fail to raise even a Victorian era boner? It sells magazines and ad space. Why? Because idiotic parents are too uninvolved to tell their daughters that Cyrus did an artistic photo shoot with a photographer who fuses nudity into her art medium. When Cyrus has to wear long sleeves to hide her gangrene track lines in a few years as your daughters head to college rather than into gonzo porn as expected, there will be a real scandal that goes underreported. Panicky parents who bought the story killed the protagonist. This time, her name won’t be Britney.

The issue of occupational pay equity should not be a political issue. Paying a man one salary and a woman another for performing the same job to the same degree is not in keeping with American values of equality and nondiscrimination. However, as the Republican vote demonstrated, the claim that feminism has somehow done its job and men and women are completely equal is insulting. Even presidential hopeful John McCain opposed the measure. “I’m all in favor of pay equity for women,” remarked McCain during a campaign stop in New Orleans, “but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.”

While McCain will get his just desserts for publicly stating what amounts to a carbon seal of approval for neo Jim Crow norms affecting gender rather than race, it should be noted that the reasoning he gives does not hold up under scrutiny. In this case, the lawsuit hysteria does not hold up because employers would be able to circumvent legal risk and actually save money in the long run by simply complying with law, just as they are forced to do under nondiscrimination measures. While that claim is easy to debunk, McCain’s follow-up statement requires a bit more effort and a bit more data.

To give grounding to his position apart from the fear of a cadre of Harvard suits and ties descending on corporate America, McCain said that “they (women) need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households.” This claim makes it seem as though American companies aren’t paying its women as much as its men because of a disparity in their training and income. While that might be true in isolated cases, the broader body of data makes this a statistical impossibility.

Allow me to dispel McCain’s spurious claim that women are somehow not learning enough or getting trained adequately to do the work that men do and subsequently get paid on an equitable basis. Gender discrimination in compensation is not a debatable point in the United States. The U.S. Bureau of Labor itself made the discrepancies very clear in a 2006 study entitled “Median Weekly Earnings for Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers by Detailed Occupation and Sex.” I have compiled the following numbers from the statistics presented in that study, adapted from my aborted blog, “The Eyewash Station.”

Women earn an average of $71 less per week than men (11% less)

Compared to men in the following occupational sectors, women earn the following per week on average:

Management Occupations: $201 less, 18% difference

Business & Financial Occupations: $102 less, 11% difference

Computer and Mathematical Occupations: $123 less, 11% difference

Architecture and engineering: $183 less, 16% difference

Life, Physical, and Social Science: $112 less, 11% difference

Community and Social Services: $37 less, 5% difference

Legal: $243 less, 21% difference

Education, Training, and Library: $56 less, 7% difference

Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and media: $108 less, 13% difference

Healthcare Practitioner and Technical: $45 less, 5% difference

Healthcare Support: $6 less, 1% difference

Protective Services: $136 less, 20% difference

Food Preparation and Serving Related: $16 less, 4% difference

Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance: $43 less, 11% difference

Personal Care and Service: $19 less, 5% difference

Sales and Related: $141 less, 22% difference

Office and Administrative Support: $15 less, 3% difference

Service: $32 less, 8% difference

Farming, Fishing, and Forestry: $45 less, 12% difference

Construction and Extraction: $86 less, 14% difference

Installation, Maintenance, and Repair: $45 less, 6% difference

Production: $127 less, 23% difference

Transportation and Material Moving: $142 less, 26% difference

Needless to say, the facts speak for themselves. Women earn less in EVERY sector of our economy. Regardless of political persuasion, every American who believes in equality should be insulted by McCain’s justification for snubbing the pay equity bill and the party line vote in the Senate killing a bill that could have moved pay equity closer to better-late-than-never reality. When half the population of the United States is getting the shaft (literally), there is something seriously wrong and seriously shameful. And people should take notice.

Image Credit: All Posters

As 45,000 of my doe-eyed patriotic brethren pack into a baseball stadium to hear Ratzinger drone this morning, I know with certainty that they will not press him for answers. These are the very people whose families were bludgeoned and children’s development was stunted by the sanctioned buggery of the Catholic Church under the auspices of this pope’s predecessors. Ratzinger should have thrown himself on the ground upon arrival and demanded forgiveness for the deplorable actions committed by his subordinates. Instead, we got this. In a speech on Wednesday following an opening prayer in Washington, D.C., Ratzinger urged efforts to “address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores,” and to reassess the “values underpinning society.”

Maybe I’m not the typical American, but I take offense to an octogenarian former Hitler-youth member lumping me in with child molesters and taking issue with my sexuality. I watch porn, I go to sex stores, I talk openly about sex, and I fuck on the first date, but I don’t molest children, thank you very much. To suggest that a lack of adherence to the Vatican’s medieval view of sexuality is the driving reason behind the explosion of sexual abuse cases stemming from Catholic churches is not only insulting, it’s wrong in every sense.

By using the argument that the abuse occurred because of American’s “moral breakdown,” Ratzinger is either blaming the child victims of the abuse for being brought up in an increasingly-sexualized society or he’s tacitly absolving the frock-wearing molesters for falling under the same spell. This should not only be insulting to the children whose lives will be forever scarred by this abomination, but to any self-respecting human being living in America amidst the scandal. The main reason that there was such a wide horizon of sexual abuse in Catholic churches (aside from its willful harboring of known pedophiles) is because of the stubborn refusal of the Church leadership to allow marriage and normal sexual relationships within its ranks. If Catholic priests were officially licensed decades ago to marry, love, and have sex without fear of recrimination, do you honestly think that such an alarming number of abuse and rape allegations would have surfaced in the past five years?

Furthermore, Ratzinger’s claim that a sexualized culture has fueled the abuse is contingent on the idea that sexual abuse committed by the clergy is a new phenomenon. I loathe to think of how many children through the generations have borne scars of abuse and kept silent about it when pre-digital society was able to more easily sweep this under the carpet. And that’s something that Ratzinger did not address. It’s something that our complacent, fawning media has passed over during this entire week of pontiff-mania, when just five years ago, they were up in arms against it. The Church knowingly protected priests who were accused of abuse. In 2002, when the archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law, admitted to protecting a priest who he knew had sexually abused members of his church, it was just one instance in a parade of sex offender insulation in the name of God.

If Ratzinger’s words aren’t a textbook example of passing the buck when Eliot Ness busts down the door, then I don’t know what is. “What does it mean to speak of child protection,” Ratzinger went on, “when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” So, he’s arguing that since a kid can conceivably watch Aurora Snow licking Jenna Haze’s box on the family computer, that somehow it’s wholly impossible to protect those children from the groping hands of sexually-repressed men abusing their purported moral authority? Is he arguing that since children dress more provocatively now and talk more openly about sex, pedophiles are powerless to stop their disgusting hands? For the icing on the rotten cupcake of this whole charade, Ratzinger then went on to state that pedophilia is “not only in your dioceses, but in every sector of society.” Ask yourself, if a criminal argues the case that his murder was just a part of the larger problem of crime in America, would the argument hold up in a court of law? It seems only a pajama-clad medieval charlatan is afforded license to spew such contemptible nonsense in the country.

“Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships,” continued Ratzinger. “They should be spared the degrading manifestations and crude manipulation of sexuality today.” He’s absolutely correct, but the Catholic Church has long since lost its moral authority (if indeed it ever had any) to lecture Americans on sexuality. Until I see sweeping change attacking the root of the problem; the Vatican’s antiquated muzzling of natural human emotions and sexual relations, then I will just offer these words. Fuck you, Joseph Ratzinger.

The purpose of protest is to effect change by drawing others into your cause and to bring injustices to light. In turn, this demonstration’s purpose is to force action, mediation, or negotiation with those with the power to improve your lot or the lot of those you’re interceding on behalf of. If you can’t reach a larger audience through your actions, then protest has no purpose.

Code Pink appeals to…well, Code Pink. More aptly, the Code Pink model of protest appeals to white middle and lower-upper class college students and former students with a flair for histrionic displays of theater as the most potent way of getting attention from a world that shunned them in high school. Protest becomes an excursion for this clique of liberal arts sucklers who will settle into Ikea furniture and obsessive child raising after the ancillary interest in perceived injustice fades with the entry into the job market.

Thus, while Code Pink serves the needs of the Whole Foods hipster who has an ingrained yearning to live a realized Decemberists music video, few others take positive notice of the causes they are promoting or the organization itself. What people see on television is women wearing pink disrupting a committee hearing on Capitol hill. They see a parade of what looks like a herd of curmudgeon-y breast cancer activists berating marble buildings. They see San Francisco.

The final vision is by far the most damaging and the reason why anyone even mildly perturbed by domestic and international injustice should shun this organization. Fitting into Nixon’s liberal portent of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” or the rural hysteria purporting the Democratic leadership is trying to turn America into 1969 Haight Ashbury is the opposite of what the progressive movement wants or needs. When suburbia shakes its head and Congress simply draws the blinds on such boisterous displays, Code Pink and their spawn are frustrating those who protest the same issues, but do so with a modicum of respect for their gravity.

To allow Code Pink and modern American protest writ large to devolve into a plumage war is to cede defeat to the roadblocks to change. At this point, protest becomes an exercise in buffoonery when the often grave subject matter and impetus for demonstration is degraded to the level of an excuse for a costume party.

As an activist, I call upon this organization to halt its activities. It is an insult to the brave actions of historical resistance from Amritsar to Selma and to those who hold the banner of dignified civil disobedience for you to continue such trite political masturbation. Save the pink for community theater. Wear your best suit to protest.