Molly Ivins is a Wise Woman. The following excerpted from here.
Luntz described his methods with appealing pride. His job is to “set the context” and “frame the debate,” which he learns how to do through focus groups, polls and dial sessions. But he kept drawing the line at the word “manipulation.” No, no, he doesn’t manipulate people, he insisted, he merely gives them a context for the message, he merely discovers what it is they want to hear and how best to say it to them.
I’m listening to all this because this is what the shrewdies in Washington pay attention to – you can’t hardly be a political writer anymore without sources on linguistics, semiotics, message control and all this good business. It dates you something awful if you do old-fashioned stuff, like call politicos to find out how it’s going.
Luntz has discovered that the 4 percent of Americans who still have not made up their minds about this election to tend to be working women, younger, new mothers and fairly low-wage earners. I was pleased to hear Luntz explain how he’d uncovered the most interesting thing about these women.
[snip]
“You have to empathize,” he said. “The very first thing you have to do, it’s not about issues, it’s about empathy. They have to know that you care, that you understand them, that you understand the frustrations.” Say a candidate of his – say George W. Bush – is at a town hall meeting. He’d say, “‘Now I want to talk to the ladies in the room’ … ‘the women in the room’ is how I would put it … and you say: ‘Well, I’m gonna throw this out. I want you tell me if I’m right or not. Ladies here, I’d say that your lack of free time is one of the greatest challenges.’ And they’ll all sit there, and they’ll raise their hands, and they’ll all nod yes. At that moment, you have bonded with those women.”
Which is all well and good, except then I’m trying to envision what George W. Bush says to them next. The National Women’s Law Center released a study in April, called “Slip Sliding Away,” on the erosion of women’s rights.
[snip]
All in all, it’s kind of hard to see how Bush could convince “the ladies” that he has helped take stress out of their lives. Unless, of course, the lady is married to a guy who makes $1 million a year – then she’d have $92,000 extra a year to spend from the Bush tax cuts.
Go and read about how the quality of life for women is “Slip Sliding Away,” thanks to the manipulation of the Bush administration.
UPDATE:
Maybe we need to start a list of “BlogWomen Against Women” and put Andrea Mitchell, aka Mrs. Allen Greenspan, with her BusyBusyBusy at the top of the list. (Thanks to the Busy reference from Mr. Bill in the Comments at Brooke Biggs’ site.)

While I’m on the subject of women, a bunch of Stitchin’ Sedition knitters in Portland Oregon got really pissed off and put together this website to counteract the effort of the Bushites to try to claim that “W is for Women.”
Hee. Hee. They have a whole lot of pointy sticks and they’re not going to take it anymore, they say. They’re compiling a list of all the things that “W” really stands for in Bush country. If you’ve got some good ones, let them know.
(Got this from b!X. Now there’s a son a feminist mom can be proud of!)

Over at Blog Sisters Brooke Biggs asks for input about what we women have been doing wrong in trying to change our country’s policies — 200 words or less. Well, I couldn’t do it in even twice that many. But here it is, anyway:
It was 1975 and the first Stepford Wives movie had just come out, Ms Magazine was three years old, the book Fascinating Womanhood was getting big play, and the Vietnam War had just ended. I was a vocal feminist, a disgruntled housewife, a struggling mother, a war-protestor, and I thought that Gloria Steinham should rule the world.
Along with thousands of other women, I marched and argued for women

For me, the overwhelming complexity of what it means to be human is to let things be simple, to perceive as deep what seems so very uncomplicated.
My challenge is to be still of mind and heart long enough to notice.
Some things are taken care of before we even get there.
Sometimes we just walk in, laugh for a while, and kiss a baby hello.
My Blog Sister Jeneane writes (excerpted above) about watching her friend deliver her third child. Jeneane’s clear notice of life’s deepest moments is legendblogdary.
If only it were really that easy to “let things be simple.” It seems that they are for some and for others, well, not so.
I really do wish I believed in Karma, in some divine purpose. But every day is a crapshoot. We are at the mercy of those little steel balls in some quantum pin ball game.
Taking a deep breath helps. (Even though doing so also makes me cough these days.) Going with the flow; trying to enjoy what there is of the ride when it’s not being trying. Letting the things that take care of themselves take care of themselves. And then taking care with the rest. Escaping into another realily every once in a while. You know — headology.
My mother’s shingles seem to be coming back. She is 88 and tired of those random little steel balls. Everything hurts. I try to take care. I want to laugh and kiss a baby hello.

I used to be able to get to the NY Times online. All of a sudden, I can’t. I’ve make sure my cookies are enabled. I tried to register again, using another ID. Nope. So while I can’t get to this piece about the presidential candidates’ clash over values, I can link to it. I know it exists because it’s reprinted in my local newspaper today. The final paragraph of the article slips in this little bit of, it seems to me, important information:
On another front, the Pentagon said military payroll records that could more full document President bush’s whereabouts during his service in the Texas Air Natoinal Guard were inadvertently destroyed.
A further search leads to this AP article, which I can’t get to on the Times but I can on my local paper online. Included is this important reminder:
Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973, much of the time as a pilot, but never went to Vietnam or flew in combat. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential candidate, is a decorated Vietnam veteran, and some Democrats have questioned whether Bush showed up for temporary Guard duty in Alabama while working on a political campaign during a one-year period from May 1972 to May 1973.
I can’t wait for a movie of Bush’s devious life path to come out after he loses the electons. Down in flames.

Hitching a ride on Rage Boy’s ragged coat tail and then letting go —
From the end of a very long paper, Ars Brevis, Vita Longa: The Possible Evolutionary Antecedents of Art and Aesthetics by John L. Bradshaw of
Monash University, posted here on the web site of the American Psychological Association’s Division for Psychology and the Arts.
We are left with one final possibility, depressing perhaps to the evolutionary theorist, but maybe somewhat reassuring to the artist who is primarily preoccupied with his or her art; it is that art may indeed be without any evolutionary significance or adaptiveness whatsoever – a mere by product (or “spandrel”, to use the marvelous metaphor of Gould & Lewontin, 1979) of a disengaged brain which enlarged under quite different evolutionary pressures (and see also Aiken, 1998). If so, maybe we should after all just sit back and enjoy it. Indeed, to deliberately misquote Plato:
A life without the arts is just not worth the candle.
Live long and prosper. And voice your art, no matter how fleeting and finite and financially futile.

Every afternoon around 3, my mother falls asleep in my deceased dad’s old ugly green frayed recliner. I let myself into her apartment to throw my laundry into the dryer, and she doesn’t hear me. (My apartment is too small to fit a washer and dryer.) She doesn’t even wake up when the dryer coughs into its grating hum. I stop and take a moment to make sure she’s still breathing. Shallow. But, yes.
I have seen a lot of dead faces in my life. My dad was an undertaker and we lived above the business. (Like in that move, My Girl.) Totally relaxed, my mother’s face is getting that look — that lips-tight-against-teeth, waxy-skin look. I make myself watch her. It’s how she’ll look someday in her coffin.
When my dad was dying from cancer, it was his eyes that I watched as they grew more and more sunken. It wasn’t his mouth; it was his eyes, hungry and despaired and so, so, sad. So much unspoken.
And now it’s my mother’s mouth. Closed.

Chris Locke is riding the bus. Long story. Very long sad cash-depleted, car-re-possessed story. Interesting to me because b!X has always ridden buses. His is also, a very long cash depleted story, but with a much different plot. My birthday present to b!X each year is paying for his monthly bus pass. “…another word for nothing left to lose..”
I’m picking up on Frank Paynter’s email offer of a ticket to ride Chris Locke about being what, to me, is one of the most crafted and consciously engineered blogvoices out there — a fact that, as Frank Paynter points out, blares in contradiction to what Locke purports to admire and advocate.
When he was riding up front on the Cluetrain, Locke make this statement:
“Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.”
Paynter sits hard on that statement, and I’m grabbing the seat next to him.
My voice that speaks through my fingers manipulating the keyboard sounds much different than it does when I open my mouth and manipulate my tongue. This visually arranged voice is carefully (at least usually carefully) contrived. And so it is with just about all of us whose thoughts ride through time and neurons and muscles and fingertips and little square buttons before they boom out into what becomes our blogvoices.
Frank’s piece is a great example, and he’s given us a ticket to ride this horse yet another time.
Giddyap.

There’s a message going around to
WEAR RED ON FRIDAYS IF YOU’RE ANTI-BUSH
Red. Blood. Passion. Defiance. Anger. Challenge. Pay attention!!!!
Wave the red flag. Ol

Diane Cameron, my favorite local columnist, had the following (excerpted) things to say about art in yesterday’s newspaper:
Art concentrates on thoughts and emotions. Artists see underlying truths and reflect them back to us.
Aritsts grab us by the front of our shirts and make us look. Right or wrong, pleasant or disturbing, they make us think. And it is thinking that is at the center of, and the true requirements for, citizenship and democracy.
Artists ask us to see what is and imagine what might be.
Art provides contrast to the dominant messages of our culture so that we can cleary see them.
To grasp the real life signficance of artists as political agents, we have only to remember Camodia, Russia, Chechoslovakia and China. In those countries, as in Latin America, the first citizens sent to the “re-education camp” were the artists.
She quotes Solzhenitsyn: “Art serves to battle lies and preserve the moral history of a society without the transitory and debasing rhetoric of bureaucrats.”
Michael Moore and his Farenheit 9/11 exist in Solszenitsyn’s “artist as social critic – artist as catalyst for change” arena. In Cameron’s words, they “made a point about the role that arts play in protecting our culture and society.”
So, where does that leave so-called artists like Thomas Kinkade, who was featured on 60 Minutes last night.
His fans would say (and did pretty much say on 60 Minutes) that he does concentrate on thoughts and emotions and see underlying truths and reflect them back to the viewer; and he does ask us to see what is and imagine what might be.
It seems to me that there’s no escaping the fact that we don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are. Those who collect and admire Kinkade see a much different world than Moore. But it’s the world that Moore sees and reflects back to us that is destroying any chance of idylls such as Kinkade envisions and his fans wish for.
I don’t really have anything against escaping into idyllic fantasies. As matter of fact, I’ve just discovered a whole new genre of “romance” novels that are set in the future and have kick-ass female protagonists. (Check out this one and this one and any of J.D. Robb’s “…. In Death” series. ) And, while I’ve never particularly found typical romance novels at all interesting, these offer a whole new escape hatch.
But I certainly wouldn’t consider them literature, just as I wouldn’t consider Thomas Kinkade an artist or any kind of catalyst for social change. What a world. What a world.