WHEREAS there is no medical benefit derived from forcing sonograms on women who have already decided to terminate their pregnancy; and

WHEREAS  legislation mandating such sonograms has been introduced by individuals with no medical experience or training; and

WHEREAS this legislation further requires that said unnecessary procedure may only be performed by doctors or certified sonographers, an unprecedented requirement that only applies to women seeking to terminate a pregnancy;

WHEREAS these requirements are grounded not in science but in politics, and serve no purpose other than restricting women’s reproductive choices; and

WHEREAS doctors are already organizing civil disobedience and repudiating this legislation; therefore

THE LEGISLATION IS HEREBY AMENDED AS FOLLOWS:

All state-mandated pre-abortion sonograms to which the patient explicitly objects must be performed by a member of the state legislature that voted in favor of this requirements. Such legislators are hereby required to take, on their own time and at their own expense, any training necessary to become certified sonographers. Any legislator failing to meet this requirement within one (1) year will forfeit their seat.

Furthermore, no limitations on speech shall be imposed on the patient receiving the sonogram. The representative performing the sonogram shall not be permitted to wear headphones, earplugs or any other device that would impede his ability to hear the patient clearly. Such patients have the right, without limitation, to videotape or otherwise record any and all aspects of the sonogram procedure while it is being performed and to use, share, publish, and promote such video in any and all available forums. 

this is what these goddam right-wing control-freaks sound like to me.

i’m not satisfied with the latest message from Carbonite.

buried in this sideshow-to-the-sideshow is something that i believe is critical to getting us — politicians, corporaticians and everyday citizens alike — back on track in the good-old but bad-new US of A: making public statements and public choices in accordance with your own true values, whether for better or worse, come hell or high water. people don’t need focus groups to tell them right from wrong; companies shouldn’t need them either.

the message from dave friend that i addressed at length in a post earlier today, has since been updated. giving credit where it’s due, the new information that Carbonite is, in fact, pulling its ads off of limbaugh was posted as an update above the earlier blog entry, which remained as it was. Carbonite gets honesty points for that: i fully expected that yesterday’s post would have been pulled, or overwritten, altogether.

however, this attack of transparency only serves to illustrate the larger, more insidious dishonesty in Carbonite’s handling of the RushMouth affair.

yesterday, it was

I too am offended and very concerned about his comments.

today it’s

No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady.

i’m sorry, but you just can’t get there from here. it’s not as if any actual news came out between blog #1 and blog #2; the same excremental rhetoric continued flushing from the potty of RushMouth, it’s reasonable to assume that dave friend had the same daughters this time yesterday that he has today.

so what changed? looks like the tipping point for Carbonite arrived after more than half of limbaugh’s advertisers publicly jumped ship, leaving only a handful stranded in the sinking business-as-usual boat that a RushMouth media buy has become.

only then did dave friend evolve from being “offended and concerned about” to “no one…could possibly abide” the insult and abuse directed at Sandra Fluke.

does that mean that advertiser trends mean more to him than his daughters? pretty unlikely. i have no reason to doubt that dave friend loves his children, no reason to think he’s anything other than a good parent to them. he looks and sounds like pretty nice guy, based on his record and statements made while he was an independent (and very successful) New England entrepreneur.

it more likely means that he wasn’t willing to take a public stand on this for fear of losing the few dollars Carbonite might realize by getting a few new customers from limbaugh’s audience (though anyone stupid enough to listen to that steaming pile of conservatism is likely also too stupid to back up their data) or incurring shareholder displeasure.

in other words, business before principles.

and why? ah, now we’re in the belly of the beast: Carbonite only went public last summer. now they’ve got shareholders to answer to, and every move must be dictated by that heartless master, shareholder value. also known as wall street.

i know what that means; i waded through its sewage in my corporate hip-boots for over thirty years. on wall street, money — and only money — talks. brand image impacts earnings, therefore brand image also equals money, therefore maximizing the brand image trumps any principles you may or may not have.

so, david friend, here are my questions to you: if Carbonite had not been, at this moment in time, a publicly traded company, would your initial response to the limbaugh backlash have been as mild? or, conversely, did Carbonite only bail out of that advertising relationship after it was pressured by shareholders to do so? even more conversely, was Carbonite perhaps prevented by its shareholders (in their board-of-directors disguise) from making the stronger statement, and pulling its ads, in the first place?

i look forward to hearing from you.

Video Contest!

with my head exploding over right-wing idiocies such as the komen foundation defunding planned parenthood and the new rape-by-ultrasound-wand proposals floating through several anti-choice, anti-female red states, i wrote & recorded a song.

The New Back Alley needs a video as fierce and edgy as itself. i know that one of you has the chops to do it. so here’s the deal:

Prize: $500 cash.

Guidelines:

• no restrictions on content or form
• must have the rights to any footage or images that are used
• original content preferred; Creative Commons content (with attribution) is also fine
• feel free to incorporate text of all or some of the lyrics into the video if you like (kinetic typography rocks!) or feel free not to use the lyrics at all
• include a brief caption at the beginning with the song title (The New Back Alley)
• include a brief credits screen at the end — credit yourself for the video, of course, and credit the song as follows: “The New Back Alley / Jackie Sheeler & the Wordrock Project”
• no entry fee, though it would rock if you made a small donation to Planned Parenthood

How To Enter:

• upload your video to youtube
• put these lines in the video description: “The New Back Alley, music by Jackie Sheeler & the Wordrock Project / http://www.reverbnation.com/jackiesheeler
• put your youtube link in the comments below, and also add it to The New Back Alley page on Facebook (you’ll get an email to confirm your entry was received & met the guidelines)
• deadline to enter is March 25th
• winner will be notified by March 31st
• winning video will be featured on this blog, on the Wordrock Project site, on several Facebook pages, and on my YouTube channel

What’s the Catch?

well, at least ten people have to enter the contest. with ten videos there’s sure to be one that feels right to me. that said, if only three people enter but i LOVE one of the videos, then they’ll win. whereas if only three people enter but none of those videos are working, then there’s no winner.

winning videographer grants me non-exclusive worldwide rights to use the video to promote the song and the pro-choice effort. and of course you’ll be credited for the video production.

questions? holler back! and let your camera-loving friends know about the contest!

good luck!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E01n1HviBbQ

i’ll let the video speak for itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuHOvEfHxbc

if this piece resonated with you, please share it with your network.

i had to run a couple errands on my lunch hour yesterday, which was also my first day of not smoking, after having taken up the filthy habit again a couple of months ago. i was not at my most serene.

so on the way back from guitar center (which didn’t have two of the three things i needed) i stopped in baskin-robbins for the tiniest possible rum-raisin ice-cream cone. i have no business eating ice cream with this fat ass of mine, but the nicotine detox simply cried out for some kind of reward.

lo and behold, sugar cones now come wrapped in their own little cone-shaped paper condoms. more than 200 years after the invention of the ice cream cone, which millions upon millions of human beings have safely and enjoyably eaten naked, baskin-robbins now finds it necessary to clothe their cones in paper that makes the cone harder to eat. even if you use the cone to build an edible stereo speaker, you have to take the wrapper off and throw it out.

irritated by the delicious but wastefully and unnecessarily condomized cone, i swung through the doors of ever-irritating bed, bath & beyond to buy a mop. i needed a new mop because the previous mop, supposedly a most excellent mop that never needed replacing because you could just put a new mop-head on it, refused to keep its head on. yes, after paying extra for this supposedly more environmentally-correct mop i now had to buy a plain old incorrect mop to replace the nonworking newfangled piece of shit that the original mop had turned out to be. i wonder how long one of their $250 floor-washing robots would last.

there’s nothing to increase one’s irritation level like having to nod and smile (or at least nod) fifteen different times when fifteen different bb&b workers brightly say “Hi! How are you!” as they are now required to do anytime a customer passes within five feet of them. what marketing genius from hell thought that one up? imagine how much the workers hate greeting every fucking body all the day long, when most customers find more than three minutes of it intolerable.

Hi! How are you! … no wonder employees call the place “blood bath & beyond“.

then i saw it. the oxo soap-squirting dish wand (NOT to be confused with the soap-squirting dish BRUSH, which requires a different kind of refill).

that’s right. squirting a little palmolive straight out of the container is now as unthinkable as eating a naked ice-cream cone. in fact, the entire act of squirting soap out of a container has become so distasteful to so many americans that for only $50 you can get an auto-sensing self-squirter that can be used when soap-squirting dish wands simply will not do the trick. just wave your dainty hand before the sensor.

do people really want this shit? i mean, was this shit created in response to some kind of demand, or did the shit come first (conceived, no doubt, by the same evil marketing genius who told all the clerks to greet people to death the minute they walk in the goddam store), followed by some kind of desire-manufacturing campaign?

all this shit has piled up so gradually that we hardly even see it any more. i’ve been in bb&b many times — last year i found myself ranting about their uber-annoying umbrella condoms — but yesterday it hit me like an avalanche. all this beautiful, gleaming, expensive and entirely unnecessary SHIT that is packaged within an inch of its life and most likely, like my frigging supermop, soon fails to work. soon needs to be replaced. one more, another, and another, and more shit, More Shit, MORE SHIT.

there are people on this planet who would consider it a lucky day to find one intact tupperware bowl washed up on the beach. people for whom merely having a bowl might make the difference between being hungry or not being hungry on a particular day. between having and not having a way to wash their face. and so on. i am not exaggerating.

imagine what it would be like to walk through bb&b with such a person, explaining what all this shit is for. why we can’t squirt our own soap onto our own dishrag to wash our plenitude of bowls. why all these items are packaged tighter than the roof of their family shanty, and why we throw all that sturdy packaging straight into a landfill the minute we get to our gleamingly overstocked homes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wUayAI1YAQ

get ready. we’re going to see and hear of more scenes like these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y14a1paBiDo

it reminds me of mantadhar al-zaidi throwing his shoes at dubya. (al-zaidi just received a three-year prison sentence for that brave and creative protest, though he continues to be viewed as a hero by the people of iraq. and by me.)

and it reminds me very much of a scene from network, a thirty-some-year-old movie. i saw it when it first came out, at a theater in the village with a big crew of friends that included david peel, who was quite a wild guy at the time, fronting a punk band in the heyday of CGBG’s and patti smith.

when we got to that famous scene in the movie — which none of us knew was coming, it was a brand-new release and there was no internet then handing out spoilers like lollipops at the dentist — david stood on top of his seat and started screaming along with the window shouters. by the end of the scene, half the people in the theater were doing the same thing.

it’s like patti smith says: the people have the power. sometimes it takes just one voice to get things rolling. it’s happening all over france. it’s happening in barcelona. it’s happened in chicago. and we’ve only just begun.

we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this any more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08

the times had this to say about obama’s plan for hapless homeowners:

It could ultimately cost taxpayers as much as $275 billion — $75 billion in direct spending to keep people in their homes and the rest in additional financial backing for the government-controlled mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But analysts and administration officials alike cautioned that it would not come close to halting the tidal wave of foreclosures. Nor would it provide much help to millions of homeowners who are “under water,” or holding mortgages that are bigger that the market value of their houses.

as a taxpayer, i’d rather hand hundreds of millions to homeowners than trillions to the goddam banks that are at the root of today’s economic disaster. you know, those banks who suddenly decide they may not need bailout money after all if it means accepting some very generous limitations on how much their execs can be paid. (limitations! sorry, but i can’t quite see a half-million dollar salary cap as a “limitation” of any kind.)

but i have to question the…plight?…situation mentioned in that second paragraph, homeowners who are underwater because the present value of their house is less than their mortgage total.

if you buy a house that you plan to live in, and you know that it will cost you X dollars per month for the next X years in order to own it completely, then what difference do either of those numbers actually make? it’s only if you bought the house as an investment rather than as a home that this really matters. right? you know, physical things tend to lose, rather than gain, value over time. think about buying a new car. five minutes after you drive it out of the showroom it drops like 20% in value. the day after you get it you can’t sell it for anywhere near what you paid. we all know this, and it doesn’t stop anybody from buying cars (though it might be a helluva good thing for our rapidly deteriorating environment if it did).

how did we get to a place where houses are expected to automatically, through no effort nor improvements on behalf of the owner, supposed to appreciate — and appreciate substantially — due to nothing more than the inevitable passage of time?

there’s your bubble. seems pretty clear that if people bought houses in order to live in them, rather than profit off of them, and then did just that — lived in the house and willed it to their kids — the market value of the house becomes entirely meaningless.

so don’t treat your house like a piece of preferred stock and you don’t have a bubble problem. right? or am i missing something here?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOaDrM3rMXs

our president gets it:

“It will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell,” he said, adding, “And it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford.”

when i was growing up in brooklyn, people who were fortunate enough to own homes (less than 50% in my neighborhood) took it for granted that they would stay there, and mostly took it for granted that they’d leave the house to their kids when they died. nobody obsessed over market values, nobody was stupid enough to take out a home-equity line of credit (not sure they even existed in the seventies) (i remember them being called the “lose-your-house” loans) and they threw little parties when the house was finally paid off. got drunk with their friends and barbecued the mortgage paperwork, a nice little ritual.

now, the house is supposed to make you a millionaire (or close to it), and finance your entire world-traveling retirement. or your home equity loan on house #1 gives you the deposit for house #2, which will “pay for itself” as you rent it before selling that one at double whatever you paid.

there is nothing normal about any of this. the shame is that so many otherwise-intelligent people fed into the myth of eternal growth and so destroyed their prospects. but if many of those same people change their expectations and just LIVE in the fucking house, and just PAY the fucking mortgage (as millions did without complaint for decades until now) then there is not a problem.

i’m not making light of the economic crisis here. there’s no doubt we’re in disaster mode. but i don’t include the class of “underwater” mortgage holders as a group that has been treated overly harshly by the bubble. unless you’ve lost your job, you should be able to make your payments. if you took out a mortgage with payments higher than you are able to make, then you’re an idiot (or a speculator), not a victim. and i’m glad we’re not handing you a get-out-of-jail-free card.

there is one exception to the idiot rule, and that’s for people who got these goddam complicated balloon payment mortgages and did not know enough to read (or understand) the fine print. there’s no doubt that fast-talking salespeople from corrupt lenders like countrywide got very good at talking people into financial commitments that were way over their heads and which they did not have the ability to comprehend. sorting those true victims out from the semi-speculator class might take a bit of homework. but it can be done and it should be actioned.

as for the rest of them? just stay where you are and pay your bills on time. there are far worse things happening in this world than a drop in the paper valuation of your house.

…and the drugs have won. yes, yes, i know i’m contradicting what george bush said. that alone should prove that i’m correct.

look, we simply can’t afford to keep putting people in jail for getting high. period. people are going to get high, people have ALWAYS gotten high, nothing is going to stop this. and why even try, when we’ve got things like global warming and total economic collapse to keep us busy?

here’s a sobering (ahem) piece of information from the alternet drug reporter, a sane and excellent resource for finding out about such things:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of the world’s prison population, incarcerating more of its citizens per capita than any other country in the world. We lock up more people on drug charges than Western Europe locks up people for everything, and they have 100 million more people than we do.

these are not just statistics. people’s lives are utterly and meaninglessly destroyed, particularly in states like NY with its evil rockefeller mandatory sentencing. the DEA is as corrupt as it is powerful — and that’s saying something.

our contradictory standards absolutely boggle the mind:

• you can get locked up if you do a line of coke at home to prep for spring cleaning, while it’s perfectly OK to get falling-down drunk at the office christmas party.
• you can go to jail, possibly for life, for running an authorized medical marijuana dispensary that doctors refer their patients to, a business that you pay taxes on and that — based on all the available current research — provides a drug that is demonstrably healing, without any of the side-effects of commonly prescribed drugs such as, say, oxycontin. hell, pot doesn’t even put you at risk for lung cancer.
• drugs that solve real medical problems are actually LESS likely to be approved for medicinal use if people enjoy the experience of taking them. wtf?

but medical marijuana is part of the problem, not part of the solution. as long as alcohol remains legal (and i believe it should, prohibition was a disaster the first time around and would be no less so if it reared its ugly teetotaling head again) it is immoral for any other recreational drug to be against the law. the negative parallels between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition (aka the stupid war on drugs) are inescapable.

back then the bootleggers paid their vig to the local cops, now the cops rob high-rolling drug dealers.

and the high-rolling drug dealers rob one another. and people who can’t afford the outrageous markups those drug dealers charge and who do not intend to relinquish their drug(s) of choice, might someday rob YOU. as long as a ten-dollar bag of street heroin contains something like ten CENTS worth of opiates there will be robberies and murders and people living in cardboard boxes. and a HUGE missed opportunity to impose a tax, that — for once — people would be delighted to pay.

oh, but drugs destroy people, you say. well, check out The Agitator’s  list of successful potheads and pick up a few back issues of Rolling Stone for examples of successful cokeheads, dopeheads and meth-heads. amy winehouse is an exception, not the rule. alcohol is the drug that destroys people most effectively, more so than heroin, more so than cocaine. let alone a relaxing hit of pot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZmDWltBziM

anyway, you can’t make the argument that drugs should be illegal in order to protect people from themselves as long as you can pick up a legal pack of cigarettes anytime you like. and people are increasingly willing to make their wishes known — 9 out of 10 marijuana decriminalization ballot initiatives were approved during the last election. not “medical marijuana” bullshit, but straight-up decriminalization. in switzerland, junkies will soon get their heroin by prescription — just the way they get it now in vancouver.

president obama is in a unique position to do something about this, and to do it quickly. his popularity, the fact that he “inhaled” and admitted it and this didn’t even become an issue during his campaign, what he undoubtedly saw and experienced as a community organizer on the wrong side of the chicago tracks — he is more conversant with the needless victims created by drug prohibition than any american president before him. FDR saw the evils of alcohol prohibition and did something about it.

what a great example that would be for obama to follow.

if you think the american drug laws suck, don’t just sit on your ass and shake your head. get busy:

• Stop the Drug War
• Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (!!)
• Drug Policy Alliance Network
• NORML
• Students for Sensible Drug Policy
• Drug War Chronicle
• United States Marijuana Party
• SAFERChoice
• The November Coalition

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7s2sBbftes

hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of plastic convenience gizmos. little rectangular cups with peelback metallic lids for butter. wide round ones, sleek and low, for peanut butter. milk and creamer and those fancy little Irish whiskey flavored coffee whiteners in ridged round cups with peelback plastic tops holding just a few drops apiece. one is not enough for most rations of coffee, two or even three are needed.

on the hotel complimentary breakfast buffet table are metal wrapped squares of butter, round micropods of milk piled in a plastic bowl, tiny silver tins of Philly cream cheese, paper packets of sugar and equal and splenda. a triangular tower of single serving cereal: rice krispies and special K, heatsafe plastic cups of sweetened, cinnamoned oatmeal powder: just add hot water and stir. convenient.

I remember chunks of butter on a plate at the diner. I remember tall glass sugar shakers pouring Domino into ceramic cups the way sandgrains stream from a halved hourglass. I remember steaming big pots of oatmeal ladled into washable bowls with big silver scoops. I remember salt and pepper shakers, maple syrup in squat glass pitchers — rows of them lined up on the tables at the pancake house, each flavor a different, deep color: blueberry, strawberry, walnut like liquid jewels with the sunlight shining on them. I remember when hot dogs were handed out wrapped in a single napkin, and when go-cups were used only if you were going and didn’t come with an extra belt of corrugated cardboard to protect your delicate hand from the heat of your drink.

only a dozen or so of us staying at the larkspur have eaten breakfast. already, the three trash bins overflow with plastic plates and buttercups and milktubs and the torn open jackets of sugar and pepper and salt. styrofoam cups with their cardboard headbands. knives and spoons and forks bristle from a field of balled-up napkins striped stir-sticks.

and so our day, so most days in the squanderous country of waste, begins.

hundreds of thousands of millions and billions of single-use convenience items. the landfills bloated and groaning. the plastic lasting, strong under rain and snow and sunshine and tons of more of the same. the plastic outlasting most of us, lasting practically forever, gathered in the pits of waste and filth we make and remake every day.