RachelRichardson.org

I was telling Brandon last night about how I will actually miss George Bush for the sole reason that while he lacks in foreign and domestic leadership, economic acumen, vision and decision-making and IQ points overall, he’s at least provided lots of comedy fodder. Fortunately, we have Sarah Palin to fill the gap. There’s nothing like ceremoniously pardoning a turkey while a turkey bloodbath ensues in the background.

If you’ve suddenly lost your appetite for turkey carcass, check out this Newsweek article about Thanksgiving Day’s forgotten and forlorn: vegetarians.

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Brandon and I are lucky in that the exorbitant gas prices haven’t affected us as much as, say, my brother who has a 45-minute commute each way to work every day. Brandon’s company is just 7 miles away and my office is usually my home office. His Jeep only gets about 14-miles to the gallon, so we usually take my car about town, which is much more fuel-efficient at 28-miles to the gallon. Still, the high cost of gas was enough to make us cancel a scheduled weekend trip to Chicago last month. The gas cost alone would rival that of our hotel stay.

But you really know gas prices are getting out of control when women resort to selling their bodies for gas – read story here.

Brandon’s been clamouring for one of the “new” Smart Cars (which have available in Europe for a decade). Last night, a local news channel took a look at them and I was surprised to find that they only get about 38-miles to the gallon and they’re a really rough ride. My sedan, which is probably three times as large as the Smart Car and very comfortable, gets just 10-gallon less per mile. You’d think in our infinite technological prowess that we’d be able to make cars that are more fuel-efficient. Or maybe they have, but as conspiracy theories would have it, the car manufacturers are in cahoots with the oil companies. Who knows. All I know is that that cute retro Vespa scooter is looking better and better each day.

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When Brandon and I got engaged, we both knew our wedding would be, to say the least, unconventional.

My ring is made of socially-friendly moissonite; Brandon’s is made of wood collected in an environmentally-friendly manner. I had already lined up the officiant: a Buddhist and pagan Catholic lay minister whom I met while writing a story on the opening of the spiritual retreat by her and her life partner. We would write our own vows. The setting was to be decided, but the ceremony was to be outside and any flowers to be in pots so I could throw them in my garden afterwards. The reception would be vegetarian and alcohol-free, prompting my brother to grumble about bringing in his own six-pack and bag of McDonald’s. In lieu of wedding gifts, we’d ask our patrons to donate to a non-profit charity.

It was after hearing NPR’s Talk of the Nation address contemporary weddings that we decided to elope. I planned the bulk of my wedding with three phone calls within two days. We got married a month after making the decision.

My mother was dismayed, of course, at being robbed of a chance to play mother-of-the-bride at the first wedding of our family, but I think even she enjoyed our garden-side ceremony in front of a Victorian mansion on an island forgotten in time.

Planning even a small wedding as mine was stressful, but memorable. I took great care to select things that meant something to us and would remember for a lifetime to come. I imagine the Bush family is experiencing that same kind of excitement in their family’s own first wedding this Saturday. The president sounds like every father about to walk his daughter down the aisle: flushed with pride, with a twinge of sadness as his child marks this next passage in her life. There is a tendency for people hold those in leadership positions to near superhuman standards, perhaps rightfully so. Still, it’s stories like that remind me of the humanity of even George Bush.

Weddings are joyful family events. As George Bush gears to celebrate his own daughter’s wedding, I only wish he would extend the same heady experience to everyone and not just those he deems worthy of the right to marry the one they love.

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The entire world seems to have covered and blogged to death the plight of the British school teacher in Sudan, Gillian Gibbons, who faced up to six months in jail and 40 lashes for allowing Sudanese school children to democratically name a teddy bear after the prophet Muhammed.

It’s on-its-face outrageous, and the blood-thirsty reactions of some so-called Muslim followers even more troubling. (Apparently its against Islam to name an object after the prophet but it’s perfectly acceptable and even reasonable to kill a woman whose only crime is of ignorance of the religion).

But in all the media coverage of the incident, the one issue I don’t see being raised is the apparent double-standard and contradictions of Sudanese law. Sure, the government pardoned Gibbons, but it wholeheartedly instigated and condoned Gibbon’s prosecution and sentence.

Of course, this comes from a government who attacked its own civilians with helicopter gunships and armed a local militia to raze villages and brutally rape and disfigure civilian women. Then, far from soliciting international help to deal with the humanitarian fallout, Sudan’s government blocked aid groups’ access to Darfur and enacted a policy towards the displaced people that would deprive them of food, sanitation and protection – in other words, to kill them.

Gillian Gibbons might be free, but two-and-a-half million Darfuris remain refugees from Sudan’s regime.

I find it a tragedy that Gibbons’ case has sparked worldwide condemnation by the governments of leading nations, yet systematic brutalization and genocide does not warrant the same concern.

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A Florida man is facing a judge and jury for the high crime of feeding homeless people. Eric Montanez, 22, was caught feeding a group in Lake Eola Park earlier this year, violating Orlando’s ban on mass feeding in one area.

“The law itself should be illegal. Feeding people should not be criminalized. Being poor should not be criminalized,” Montanez said.

The city says it plans to posthumously prosecute Jesus next.

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President George Bush justifies the entire illegal invasion of Iraq with the tired line that it will bring peace and democracy to the Middle East, and liberate Iraqis from repression.

But these claims to be fighting a war to establish a democracy in Iraq are belied by the fact that Iraq is more theocracy than it is democracy, where the “peaceful” laws of Islam trump universal civil rights.

I have no love for Saddam’s brutal and sinister regime, but at least under Saddam, Iraq was a secular nation, one in which Iraqi women enjoyed freedoms unheard of in the rest of the middle east. But along with the death, mayhem and economic depression wrought by the U.S. invasion, women’s rights are experiencing a slow, agonizing demise.

The International Campaign Against Honour Killings recently reported on the beating and stoning to death of 17-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad, in northern Iraq. While law enforcement officials turned a blind eye, a mob of frenzied men murdered the young girl to death. Neighbors watched, recording the crime on cell phones.

What was Aswad’s crime? She fell in love with someone of a different religious sect her family did not approve of.

In the U.S., most people think this kind of brutality is exactly the kind of thing that U.S. democratization will stop,” says Yifat Susskind, communications director of MADRE, an international human rights organization. But, they’d be wrong.

“In fact, the opposite is true,” Susskind writes on the ICAHK blog. “Since the US invasion, “honor killings” have been on the rise across Iraq, due in large part to measures enacted by the US.”

CNN released video footage of the attack, and it’s been widely circulated on internet sites.

After destroying the Iraqi state, religious powers amenable to the United States quickly filled the legislative and political voids. Although the U.S. is responsible for the protection of all Iraqi’s human rights, honor killings are still rarely prosecuted and if they are, only carry a sentence as little as six months in jail, versus life in prison for murder.

These same religious leaders who operate with the blessing of the U.S. promote honor killing as a religious duty. Women are killed to protect the “honor” of their families, even if they are raped. In October 2004, Iraq’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs revealed that more than half of the 400 rapes reported since the US invasion resulted in the murder of rape survivors by their families.

The next time you hear Bush praising the new democratic system in place in Iraq, think of the Du’a Khalil Aswads in Iraq, whose murders are a direct result of American empire-building.

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Despite living in Kentucky for nearly a year and a half, I am still somewhat in a state of denial that I am now a resident of the Bluegrass State.  But the fact that I maintain my “official” address at my mother’s Ohio address isn’t so much the result of me being a loyal Buckeye as it is the in-state tuition at UC.

Brandon and I stopped by my mom’s house last week to pick up my mail and somehow, got roped into a conversation on Bush and the massive escalation he has in store for Iraq.  I call it a debate despite the fact that a debate usually entails two reasonably intelligent but opposing sides with articulable positions.

My mother still believes it was Iraqi’s who flew planes into the twin towers.

After arguing to no avail with my mother and feeling exasperated at her appalling and ignorant lack of historical knowledge, I was inspired to write on this very subject for my columns and review writing class.  The assignment was to write on something we considered to be “the elephant in the room.”

U.S. foreign policy yields bitter fruit

“…Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”

Matthew 7:15-16

In his State of the (Dis)Union address, President Bush proposed slapping a band-aid on the gashing wound that is Iraq with a “plan” to quell insurgent attacks and sectarian violence in Iraq by leading an additional 21,500 lambs to the slaughter at an annual cost of $27 billion.

Aside from the fact that anyone who honestly believes we intend to pacify a restive nation of more than 27 million people with a mere 21,500 additional troops probably failed third-grade math, throwing more troops at the Iraq problem is like dropping a few sandbags on New Orleans’ levees and hoping for the best come the next Katrina.

After all, despite miles of fence-building, fortification of the border with heat/motion detectors, raids by the INS and Minutemen vigilantes who’ve replaced white sheets with the American flag, illegal immigration remains at an all-time-high.

If we are ever to declare a victory in Iraq and elsewhere in the world, we need to stop beating around the Bush, both literally and figuratively.

(more…)

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