Recession: The Movie
HuffPo
Labels: Election 2008, George W. Bush, Iraq War, John McCain, Republicans
The Whirlpool
Thursday, March 27, 2008
HuffPo
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Best Music You've Never Heard
I'm not sure what happened to Slowex and his music, but I found this and thought it needed to be shared.Jake Shimabukuro LIVE Concert: Third Stream (finale)
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Hillary in Tuzla... could get some awards!
Labels: Election 2008, Hillary Clinton, YouTube
March Madness (or The Bush 4000)
On Easter 2008, we finally hit the magic 4000 American soldiers killed in Bush's War. 3 days after the 5th Anniversary and 4 years and 10 months after Mission Accomplished.Check your office pools. Who had March 23, 2008?
Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq War, War fatalities
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
I'll bet you think this is satire.
Labels: Diebold, Election 2008, Hillary Clinton, John McCain
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Why did Geraldine Ferraro Quit?
Former Vice-Presidential Candidate, Geraldine Ferraro quit her position with Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign. MSNBC's Headline is, "Clinton supporter quits over Obama remarks".
Call me a little sensitive, but what remarks did Obama make to cause her to quit? Shouldn't it read, "over her Obama remarks"?
Call me a little sensitive, but what remarks did Obama make to cause her to quit? Shouldn't it read, "over her Obama remarks"?
Labels: Election 2008, Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, Obama
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Elliot and the Hooker
Elliot Spitzer's antics bring up an oft repeated question:Why Is Prostitution Illegal?
By Emily Bazelon in Slate
When he was attorney general, Eliot Spitzer had no trouble going after a "sophisticated prostitution ring." As governor, he apparently had no trouble patronizing one. The hypocrisy speaks for itself. But what about the oldest question about the oldest profession: Why, exactly, is prostitution illegal?
The case for making it against the law to buy sex begins with the premise that it's base and exploitative and demeaning to sex workers. Legalizing prostitution expands it, the argument goes, and also helps pimps, fails to protect women, and leads to more back-alley violence, not less. This fight over legalization has been waged in the last few years over international human-trafficking laws and proposals to make prostitution legal in countries like Bulgaria, a movement that the U.S. government helped defeat. In 2004, the federal government expressed its position: "The United States government takes a firm stance against proposals to legalize prostitution because prostitution directly contributes to the modern-day slave trade and is inherently demeaning." The government also claims that legalizing or tolerating prostitution creates "greater demand for human trafficking victims." And yet, prostitution is legal in parts of Nevada, a companion to other cherished vices.
You don't have to be a moralist or a prude to buy the argument for banning prostitution. But if you're so inclined, it's an easy one to take apart. Martha Nussbaum, a law and philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, argues that lots of work involves the sale of bodily services and that lots of the work that poor women do involves bad working conditions. For her, it's all about context—there's a big difference between a street worker controlled by a pimp and a high-end call girl who picks her own clients, and the real question is how to increase poor women's access to decent and safe work in general. Legalizing prostitution "is likely to make things a little better for women who have too few options to begin with," Nussbaum writes.
The extremely pricey outfit Spitzer apparently used looks like an example of the high-end trade Nussbaum would distinguish from low-rent street work. The further defense of such escort services is that prostitution is inevitable and that conditions will be better for everyone all around if it's regulated (more condoms, fewer beatings). This parallels the argument against Prohibition or in favor of drug legalization: Illegality puts the bad guys and their guns in control. Women who fear prosecution can't go to the police for help. Better to give women more recourse to head off abuse and even inspect brothels for health-code violations.
Would legalizing prostitution increase trafficking? Not necessarily. "By this logic, the state of Nevada should be awash in foreign sex slaves, leading one to wonder what steps the Justice Department is taking to free them," writer David Feingold noted dryly in Foreign Policy in 2005. Countries in which prostitution is legal—Australia, Germany, the Netherlands—aren't cesspools. On the other hand, they haven't seen the demand for prostitution drop off, either, and sometimes it rises.
That's a disappointment for advocates of legalization, and lately there's another favorite model. In 1999, Sweden made it legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it—only the johns and the traffickers can be prosecuted. This is the only approach to prostitution that's based on "sex equality," argues University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon. It treats prostitution as a social evil but views the women who do it as the victims of sexual exploitation who "should not be victimized again by the state by being made into criminals," as MacKinnon put it to me in an e-mail. It's the men who use the women, she continued, who are "sexual predators" and should be punished as such.
According to this Web site for the Women's Justice Center, Sweden's way of doing things is a big success. "In the capital city of Stockholm the number of women in street prostitution has been reduced by two thirds, and the number of johns has been reduced by 80%." Trafficking is reportedly down to 200 to 400 girls and women a year, compared with 15,000 to 17,000 in nearby Finland. Max Waltman, a doctoral candidate in Stockholm who is studying the country's prostitution laws, says that those stats hold up. He also said the police are actually going after the johns as ordered: In 2006, more than 150 were convicted and fined. (That might not sound like many, but then Sweden has a population of only 9 million.)
For feminists like MacKinnon (with whom Waltman works), this sure looks like the solution: Go after the men! Take down Eliot Spitzer and leave the call girls alone! On the other hand, the group SANS, for Sex Workers and Allies Network in Sweden, doesn't like the 1999 law. The network says it has brought more dangerous clients and more unsafe sex, rather than the other way around. Waltman says that there's a lot of debate in Sweden because some people inside and outside the industry still want straight-out legalization but that no systematic studies have shown that the law has made sex work worse or riskier.
In the end, this seems like the most salient question: Forget Eliot Spitzer. Shouldn't prostitution laws come down to working conditions—and the laws that would lead to better ones for sex workers? According to a recent working paper (PDF) by economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh*, despite all the fighting and all the preaching, we apparently don't know that much about the specifics of the structure of the sex market—how much prostitutes make on average, how many tricks they turn a year, how frequently they and their pimps and johns actually get arrested.
To start filling in the gap, Levitt and Venkatesh looked at data from the Chicago Police Department. They found that women working the streets were making $27 an hour but less than $20,000 a year (they don't log a lot of hours). The risks of the trade were serious: "an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex." There was also a "surprisingly high prevalence of police officers demanding sex from prostitutes in return for avoiding arrest." That looks like another argument against the bans on prostitution—presumably women wouldn't be caught in this particular trap if they weren't worried about going to jail in the first place. Levitt and Venkatesh also offer up this statistic: Prostitutes get arrested about once per 450 tricks, and johns even less frequently. Two lessons here: 1) A law that isn't being enforced much may not be worth having; and 2) Eliot Spitzer looks really, really unlucky.
Labels: Crime, Elliot Spitzer, prostitutes, Sex
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
We Have a Winner!
John W McCain wins the Republican nomination!
So will this be a "Death of a Thousand Cuts"?... "Dance of a Thousand Cuts"?
Labels: Election 2008, George W. Bush, John McCain, Republicans
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Bill Clinton's Commercial for Obama
h/t Progressive Daily Beacon
Labels: Bill Clinton, Election 2008, Obama
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." — John F. Kennedy
Subscribe in a reader
| The Gross National Debt |
Earlier in The Whirlpool
- Imagine
- Wise words.
- Couldn’t happen to a bigger AssHat! Allen West, Co...
- The Final Debate
- Origins
- Why Willard Hates the Affordable Care Act
Sit on These Links and Spin
- Addicting Info
- Atrios
- Billboards Worth A Double Take
- Blue Gal
- Brad Blog
- Buzzflash
- Countdown
- CounterPunch
- CrooksandLiars
- Daily Kos
- DemocraticUnderground
- Employment For All
- Freeway Blogger
- FireDogLake
- Horsesass - NEW!
- Hullabaloo - by Digby
- Just a Girl From Homer
- Liberaland - Alan Colmes
- MyDD
- My Left Wing
- No More Mr. Nice Blog
- Peace Takes Courage
- Ring of Fire
- Seeing The Forest
- Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly!
- Talking Points
- TalkLeft
- Ted
- The Huffington Post
- The Nation
- Ann Coulter
- Drudge Report
- Sean Hannity
- RNC
- Rush Limbaugh
- Pajamas Media
- April 24, 2006
- April 29, 2006
- May 6, 2006
- May 10, 2006
- May 14, 2006
- May 23, 2006
- May 25, 2006
- June 3, 2006
- June 5, 2006
- June 13, 2006
- June 15, 2006
- July 7, 2006
- July 10, 2006
- August 11, 2006
- August 19, 2006
- August 28, 2006
- September 11, 2006
- September 19, 2006
- November 17, 2006
- November 24, 2006
- March 27, 2007
- June 26, 2007
- July 19, 2007
- June 5, 2008
- April 15, 2009
- September 8, 2009
The Deep End
The Shallow End of the Gene Pool
Share the spin...
link to The Whirlpool.
Let us know
and we'll return the favor.
The Stash Box
Cost of the War in Iraq
(JavaScript Error)
View blog authority
Ancient Whirlpool Muck
- 11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004
- 12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005
- 02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005
- 03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005
- 04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005
- 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005
- 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005
- 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005
- 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005
- 09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005
- 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005
- 11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005
- 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006
- 01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006
- 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006
- 03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006
- 04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006
- 05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006
- 06/01/2006 - 07/01/2006
- 07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006
- 08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006
- 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006
- 10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006
- 11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006
- 12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007
- 01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007
- 02/01/2007 - 03/01/2007
- 03/01/2007 - 04/01/2007
- 04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007
- 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007
- 06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007
- 07/01/2007 - 08/01/2007
- 08/01/2007 - 09/01/2007
- 09/01/2007 - 10/01/2007
- 10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007
- 11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007
- 12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008
- 01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008
- 02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008
- 03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008
- 04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008
- 05/01/2008 - 06/01/2008
- 06/01/2008 - 07/01/2008
- 07/01/2008 - 08/01/2008
- 08/01/2008 - 09/01/2008
- 09/01/2008 - 10/01/2008
- 10/01/2008 - 11/01/2008
- 11/01/2008 - 12/01/2008
- 12/01/2008 - 01/01/2009
- 01/01/2009 - 02/01/2009
- 02/01/2009 - 03/01/2009
- 03/01/2009 - 04/01/2009
- 04/01/2009 - 05/01/2009
- 05/01/2009 - 06/01/2009
- 06/01/2009 - 07/01/2009
- 07/01/2009 - 08/01/2009
- 08/01/2009 - 09/01/2009
- 09/01/2009 - 10/01/2009
- 10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009
- 11/01/2009 - 12/01/2009
- 12/01/2009 - 01/01/2010
- 01/01/2010 - 02/01/2010
- 02/01/2010 - 03/01/2010
- 03/01/2010 - 04/01/2010
- 04/01/2010 - 05/01/2010
- 05/01/2010 - 06/01/2010
- 06/01/2010 - 07/01/2010
- 07/01/2010 - 08/01/2010
- 08/01/2010 - 09/01/2010
- 09/01/2010 - 10/01/2010
- 10/01/2010 - 11/01/2010
- 11/01/2010 - 12/01/2010
- 12/01/2010 - 01/01/2011
- 01/01/2011 - 02/01/2011
- 02/01/2011 - 03/01/2011
- 03/01/2011 - 04/01/2011
- 04/01/2011 - 05/01/2011
- 05/01/2011 - 06/01/2011
- 06/01/2011 - 07/01/2011
- 07/01/2011 - 08/01/2011
- 08/01/2011 - 09/01/2011
- 10/01/2011 - 11/01/2011
- 11/01/2011 - 12/01/2011
- 12/01/2011 - 01/01/2012
- 01/01/2012 - 02/01/2012
- 02/01/2012 - 03/01/2012
- 07/01/2012 - 08/01/2012
- 08/01/2012 - 09/01/2012
- 10/01/2012 - 11/01/2012
- 11/01/2012 - 12/01/2012
- 12/01/2012 - 01/01/2013
- 01/01/2013 - 02/01/2013
- 01/01/2014 - 02/01/2014
- 02/01/2014 - 03/01/2014
- Current Posts