Thank you Bloggyland!!! Your team is awesome!!!

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...sometime during this next week, assuming all goes according to plan [crosses fingers, knocks on wood], the contents of this blog will be migrated to a new site. The new site will have, once we get things configured and formatted, some features that I think everyone will appreciate.

For example, the most recent comments will scroll down a section of the screen, and no matter how old the relevant post is, you will be able to see that there is a new comment. In addition, you'll be able to find/search for other posts by someone whose work you like (or perhaps don't). We'll also be able to keep important stories, or even just ongoing features, prominently displayed on the "front page."

The conclusion of Riverbend's most recent post at Baghdad Burning...

[...] And the world wonders how "terrorists" are created! A 15-year-old Lebanese girl lost five of her siblings and her parents and home in the Qana bombing… Ehud Olmert might as well kill her now because if he thinks she’s going to grow up with anything but hate in her heart towards him and everything he represents, then he's delusional.

A law enforcement source says Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, "What do you think you're looking at,

[....] The whole point of the exercise was to come up with a bill that might force some Democrats to vote for an estate tax cut they would otherwise oppose, and enable Republicans to claim they weren't really the Dickensian grotesques that many of them in fact are. Which may be why the Republicans' midnight orations in favor of raising the wage bore minimal resemblance to, say, the Sermon on the Mount. Their tone was best captured by Tennessee Rep. Zach Wamp, a Mayberry Machiavelli if ever there was one, who could not restrain himself from telling House Democrats, "You have seen us really outfox you on this issue tonight." [emphasis added]

However, rather than paint too negative a picture, lest we forget how to get up in the mornings... Meyerson is careful to mention some hopeful markers to hearten us:

When I arrived there, there were a number of, maybe 20, 30 children, the corpses of children, lined up outside the government hospital, hair matted, still in their night clothes.

"The moving, inspiring memoir of one of the great women of our times, Shirin Ebadi, winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize and advocate for the oppressed, whose spirit has remained strong in the face of political persecution and despite the challenges she has faced raising a family while pursuing her work.

I was reading a Broadsheet story this morning, and then tonight found myself wondering... What if the Iraq War were compared with an abusive man/woman relationship?

An already powerful, but still power-hungry, man with plenty of women of his own, sees an exotic and beautiful woman of substance and culture, and decides he wants her too. And not just because she's rich, either, but because he thinks he can convince them both that they are soul mates. Really, he thinks of himself as Higgins to her Eliza, but he cannot say that metaphor out loud without risking being humiliated by his buddies.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

"Regrettably, Suzanne Swift is not the first," says Anita Sanchez, communications director of the Miles Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides services to victims of military violence. "There have been several young women who have been declared AWOL for seeking treatment due to sexual assault, but most of them are too scared to speak out." ... Another recent case involved a young American woman who was raped by an Afghan soldier in a rural area. Sanchez says it took two weeks to get to a one-room medical facility in Kabul. "They had no facilities to do a rape testing, so they couldn't test for pregnancy or HIV. An American doctor literally handed her high dose antibiotics and told her, 'This will kill anything you've come in contact with.'" The young woman is now recovering in the states.

...matches up women from around the world with their sisters in war-torn countries in order to support them in their efforts to recover and become self-sustaining citizens, as well as advocates for other women. What does it take? Just $27 per month for a year, to help a woman get back on her feet. Not only that, but her children benefit, and so does her community. But any donation is welcome. Read just two paragraphs from their site, on the page where they explain "Why we do it:"

Women all over the world-- as a group-- have the most skin in the game when it comes to wars, even if they aren't formally fighting on the front-lines... Children they have already born and raised are expected to become cannon fodder-- willingly; children they are still raising may become cannon fodder merely by accident; and yet, women are are expected to be innocent enough to be eternal optimists, expected, as such, to reproduce even more cannon fodder, in order to keep the machines of war (and its attendant industries, for that matter) humming along. *

Under Saddam, women played little part in political life but businesswomen and academics travelled the country unchallenged while their daughters mixed freely with male students at university.

Feminism, as you've probably been reading for the last 20 years, is dead. Most women today want to smash through the glass ceiling, run for the Senate, and buy contraceptives at will (not to mention abortions, at least if the fetus they're carrying turns out to be "defective.") But feminism? It's just a bunch of hairy-legged, man-hating, harridans screaming slogans that were already obsolete in the era of Charlie's Angels.

The latest nail in the coffin comes from Ana Marie Cox, the famed blogger known as "wonkette," in her snarky review of Katha Pollitt's new book Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Times. (New York Times Book Review, July 2.) All right, I have a personal stake in this: I wrote a blurb for the book, I'm a friend of Pollitt's, and I'm a little on the strident side myself.