Amid the sea of noisy rock and indie pop, the music at SXSW took a decidedly more serious note on Thursday night when an A-list set of musicians gathered to celebrate the release of album filled with songs inspired by the film "Body of War."

The movie follows the life of Iraq war veteran Tomas Young, who was paralyzed from the waist down in his first week of duty in Iraq. It is an incredibly moving film; and the soundtrack is no less impactful. Thursday's performers included Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave), Ben Harper, Billy Bragg, Mason Jennings, and Serj Tankian (System of a Down).

The crowd reached a fever pitch at the end of the set, when Tom Morello sang an often-censored verse from the Woody Guthrie song "This Land is Your Land" (audio slightly distorted on video):

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office, I saw my people
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering
If this land's  still made for you and me

 

So I was on Facebook, procrastinating as usual, when I came across this group “Tips for all women… please join… and pass on.”   The group has posted safety and self defense tips for women, like if someone asks for your wallet, throw it instead of hand it to them  because you can run.  Or, if you are ever locked in a trunk, kick out the back window and waive your arm like crazy.  Or what to do if you are in a car with a gun held to your head.

I absolutely do not want to be insensitive to women who are victims of crime, and I definitely agree it is always better safe than sorry.  Raising awareness of how to be safe is always a good thing.  But I feel like I want to draw a line between being safe and being obsessed and having irrational fears.  Reading this Facebook page, I couldn’t help to think about when we stop becoming safe and start becoming irrational.  Advice for getting into a car in the parking garage:  “If you are parked next to a big van, enter your car from the passenger door.  Most serial killers attack their victims by pulling them into their vans while the women are attempting to get into their cars.”  I’m up for discussion, but I get the feeling that statements like this can create an irrational fear of serial killers in mall parking lots.   

What do you all think?  Do we create irrational fears?

A recent bill passed in Wisconsin, requiring hospitals to give emergency contraception to rape victims who request it, represents a duel victory. For one, this is victory for the women of Wisconsin. I believe that having access to birth control is a basic right for American women in today’s society, not to mention especially in the situation of rape. I wish the bill would require free access to ALL women who wanted the drug, but I suppose I must take one victory at a time.

I find it amazing that people today, including members of the organization Pro-Life Wisconsin, still believe that the Emergency Contraception pill is a form of abortion. While I do not support the pro-life platform, I can at least understand the complexity of the abortion issue. I can appreciate the arguments of the pro-life camp and know that it is not black and white, even questioning my own firm beliefs in my opinion at times. That being said, Emergency Contraception is a completely separate entity. The science of the drug illustrates that it prevents either the fertilization of an egg or the implantation of a fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus. Thus, this pill is not an “abortion pill” at all, but rather it is one that stops unwanted pregnancies—ones that may lead to abortion—from occurring in the first place. Is this not something that the pro-life camp would want?

Additionally, the passing of this bill is also a victory for partisan politics. Republican Representative Terry Musser was criticized by her party for her support of the bill. Despite their protests, Terry continued with her support and consequently received a special mentioning during the bill-signing ceremony. I commend Terry for being able to look past partisan politics and for putting the rights of American women first.

"The knowledge of future clarity makes my voice tremble with greater dignity," crooned Jens Lekman, launching into an hour-long set last night highlighting the best in Swedish twee. It's more than a sound: preciousness is a lifestyle. Consider that every member of the band was wearing keys. As in, a single key, tied on a string and hung around the neck, as if the group's den-mother had ensured that they're all able to make their way home after a night of rocking. Adorable!

Lekman himself—who could be the older, slighter, more upbeat brother of Billy Corgan—puts on a rather unapologetic show for a sound that's so pat. His ensemble surely draws comparisons to the reigning lords of twee, Belle & Sebastian, but at the live show, those comparisons fall away. Lekman's band doesn't strive to re-create the orchestral feel of the album, whereas at (say) a B&S show, nearly every instrument on the album is represented live.

The Mohawk outdoor patio was easily the happiest place on Earth when Lekman launched into "The Opposite of Hallelujah," a sweet and wordy ode to familial estrangement—specifically the awkward responsibility older siblings feel to pass on whatever bit of wisdom they've received to their younger siblings. (Before the urge to criticize takes over.) The lyrics, which couldn't be wordier or more aggressively earnest, distinguish Lekman's act. In fact, his closest lyrical cousin might be The Fall's Mark E. Smith—whose wordy ironic punk schtick was recently adopted by Art Brut. Perhaps it's the stage's close quarters or the stripped-down presentation that performance after performance from one side of town to the other calls for, but something about Lekman's show rocked in an unexpected way. There were the violin and viola, which sound like pop-orchestral flourishes in recordings—live, though, they sounded like a guitar solo over the bridge. The drums were live, loud, and synchopated. Mellower performances benefit when the tempo rises and the drums get frisky at the live shows—even the most twee routine in rock knows this score.

It seemed last night as though more than a few fans saw a good show coming. The line out the door was impressive, and the half-hour wait to enter (even for folks with credentials) was only salvaged by the sounds of Bon Iver, a fantastic and forceful singer/songwriter who performed earlier.

There are a lot of problems with the Bush administration’s argument that civil liberties have to be restricted for the duration of the War on Terror.  The first is that the War on Terror is necessarily endless; how can we ever say it will be over?  The second problem is related to the first, that because it’s really unclear who exactly the enemy is and because governments tend to use their power as expansively as possible, it’s inevitable that there will be abuses of these new powers.  Just think, if you’re an FBI agent, and you have this sweet new authorization to get warrants with less stringent judicial oversight, wouldn’t you try to use that power as much as possible?  Well, they have been:

The FBI has increasingly used administrative orders to obtain the personal records of U.S. citizens rather than foreigners implicated in terrorism or counterintelligence investigations, and at least once it relied on such orders to obtain records that a special intelligence-gathering court had deemed protected by the First Amendment, according to two government audits released yesterday.

The episode was outlined in a Justice Department report that concluded the FBI had abused its intelligence-gathering privileges by issuing inadequately documented “national security letters” from 2003 to 2006, after which changes were put in place that the report called sound…

A report a year ago by the Justice Department’s inspector general disclosed that abuses involving national security letters had occurred from 2003 through 2005 and helped provoke the changes. But the report makes it clear that the abuses persisted in 2006 and disclosed that 60 percent of the nearly 50,000 security letters issued that year by the FBI targeted Americans…

In total, Fine said, the FBI issued almost 200,000 national security letters from 2003 through 2006, and they were used in a third of all FBI national security and computer probes during that time. Fine said his investigators have identified hundreds of possible violations of laws or internal guidelines in the use of the letters, including cases in which FBI agents made improper requests, collected more data than they were allowed to, or did not have proper authorization to proceed with the case.

Bush on Afghanistan. From Reuters, via reddit:

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

No bleeping comment. 

The empirical evidence that any specific cultural celebration of violence - violent music, tv shows, movies, wrestling - actually causes real violence is vague at best.

In fact, there is good empirical evidence that events like Combat Zone Wrestling can actually reduce violence.  The way this works out is that a whole lot of criminal violence - assaults and the like - are caused by the combination of two volatile elements.  Crowds of young men and alcohol.  Any place where you have young men drinking, the likelihood of there being some violence is pretty high, relatively speaking.  Ever seen a bar or night club closing (not that I have…)?  And so anything that can take young men, especially those who would be more likely to be violent after a few drinks,  out of bars and into an environment where they will spend a good portion of the night not drinking, you are basically sure to see a reduction in violence.  Two University of California economists did research looking at the effect of large showings of violent movies and had some encouraging results:

Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.

“You’re taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters,” said the lead author of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.”

Professor Dahl and the paper’s other author, Stefano DellaVigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, attach precise numbers to their argument: Over the last decade, they say, the showing of violent films in the United States has decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend, or 52,000 a year.

Replace “violent movies” with “Combat Zone Wrestling” and I imagine the effect is identical if not even more pronounced.  So how does this effect our moral or cultural evaluation of CZW?  What do we value more: vague, unsubstantiated claims that Combat Zone Wrestling is bad for our culture because we feel icky about it, or empirical evidence that things like Combat Zone Wrestling actually have a real effect of reducing violent assaults?  I don’t  know the answer, but this research is definitely something to keep in mind next time anyone talks wrestling or any public display of violence as some kind of cancer on our culture.

I guess at this point, the Bush administration doesn't even care how cravenly it ignores the advice of the professional staff in the executive branch so as to push through more industry friendly policy. First we had the unprecedented denial of a special waiver for California to have stricter auto emissions standards, and now the EPA is refusing to listen to its own staff in setting up ozone emission regulation:

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday limited the allowable amount of pollution-forming ozone in the air to 75 parts per billion, a level significantly higher than what the agency's scientific advisers had urged for this key component of unhealthy air pollution.

While this is certainly the bad part about allowing the executive branch to effectively write laws, it's still refreshing that Stephen Johnson's bid to rewrite the Clean Air Act so as to consider the interests of polluters more in the emission-standard setting process still has to go through Congress. And with Barbara Boxer being the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, it's unlikely that industry favorable statutory language is going to be passed by Congress anytime in the foreseeable future.

What's really annoying about all this is how the President personally intervened to overrule the unanimous opinion of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which initially wanted a 60 ppm standard and at worst a 70 ppm. Johnson, is statutorily not allowed to consider the costs of setting a new emission standard and is supposed to just consider what is the best for protecting the health of the population. And the scientific evidence seems to indicate that there are real gains between a 75 ppm and 70 or a 60 ppm standard. So he clearly was considering the costs - some 8.8 billion - of compliance. Now say what you will about the way the EPA formulates its standards and what it's supposed to consider when writing regulation, but it's pretty damn obvious that Johnson isn't following the spirit or perhaps even the letter of his own agencies guidelines. Of course, I can't say I'm all too surprised.

A new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal shows, with a 3.1 percent margin of error, that 13 percent of Americans believe Barack Obama is Muslim.

Beyond my obvious dismay that Americans don't know much about the people they're voting for, I'm troubled that insinuating that a candidate is Muslim is the fodder of a smear campaign. Apparently operatives have moved on from the Swift Boat/illegitimate black baby breed of underhanded tricks and decided to degrade politicians by implying their connection to a religion practiced by over a billion people worldwide. Great.

via Faith in Public Life.

Ezra Klein has a post up on the at-times disturbing effect of sexual arousal on male rationality:

Sometimes, the percent answering "yes" to a certain practice [while aroused] jumped by as much as 420 percent (sadly, that question was "would you slip a woman a drug t increase the chance that shed have sex with you?"). More often, kinks became more arousing (22 percent of masturbating males found cigarette smoke to be an aphrodisiac, while only 13 percent answer affirmatively in the cold state) and behavior grew riskier (lower adherence to condoms, etc).

It makes sense--arousal, like new love, essentially drugs us with a hot mess of potent hormones. Ezra made a graph comparing non-aroused and aroused answers to a couple of the questions. While the influence of sex on specific action is certainly troubling, I’m more concerned that when they weren't aroused, dudes in the study were more into sex with a 12-year-olds than sex with a 60-year-olds.

 Here is an excerpt from Ralph Nader's recent article in CounterPunch:

According to The Nation magazine, the great Israeli human rights  organization B’Tselem, reports that the primitive rockets from Gaza,  have taken thirteen Israeli lives in the past four years, while Israeli  forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied  territories in the past two years alone. Almost half of them were  civilians, including some 200 children.

The Israeli government is barring most of the trucks from entering Gaza  to feed the nearly one million Palestinians depending on international  relief, from groups such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency  (UNRWA). The loss of life from crumbling health care facilities,  disastrous electricity cutoffs, gross malnutrition and contaminated  drinking water from broken public water systems does not get totaled.  These are the children and their civilian adult relatives who expire in  a silent violence of suffering that 98 percent of Congress avoids  mentioning while extending billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel annually. UNRWA says “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their  growth is slowing.” Cancer patients are deprived of their chemotherapy,  kidney patients are cut off from dialysis treatments and premature  babies cannot receive blood-clotting medications.

The misery, mortality and morbidity worsens day by day. Here is how the  commissioner-general of UNRWA sums it up, “Gaza is on the threshold of  becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of  abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would  say-encouragement of the international community.”

Last week, the assistant principal, Steve Thomas Rooney, 39, allegedly molested a student at the new campus, Markham Middle School. He was arrested and charged with five counts of forcible lewd acts on a child, stemming from allegations that he sexually assaulted the 13-year-old girl March 1 and at least one other occasion.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials declined to comment Wednesday about how Rooney had been reassigned to Markham last fall, saying they are conducting an internal investigation and citing a policy barring them from speaking publicly about cases under those circumstances.

District policy requires officials to conduct their own investigation into employee misconduct regardless of whether the allegations result in criminal charges. Officials would not say Wednesday whether such an inquiry occurred in the earlier case.

Some of you may remember the Oklahoma state representative we blogged about last week. Her name is Sally Kern, and she was caught on tape arguing that gays and lesbians in the United States are more dangerous than terrorists, that they are infiltrating the government, and that they are invading schools to brainwash America's youngsters.

Some fun updates: The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund is circulating an open letter to Kerns (hint: it's not a letter of support) that you are invited to sign, if you so please. It already has about 827,000 signatures.

In more gossipy news, Perez Hilton is reporting that Kern's son is actually gay (I guess the gays are infiltrating her family, too!) and that the lawmaker has lied about receiving death threats.

Last, Ellen Degeneres took it upon herself to call Kern on her show this week. Kern didn't pick up, but it was still a funny segment.

As a University of Texas alumnus and a native Texan, it's a little unnerving to come back to town for Southby. That's the time when Austinites clear out of town, as American Apparel–clad hipsters descend like a swarm of locusts on the capital, which is to say nothing of the plague of A&R execs that follows. After all, Austin's the Live Music Capital of the World; shows at every club every night is nothing new.

But it was a different circus that was the subject of complaint at Gonna Gonna Get Down 3, the party hosted at the Mohawk by Justin Cox and the folks at Austinist. In attendance were Catherine Andrews of Washingtonian magazine, as well as Reihan Salam of The American Scene. (Whose interpretive take on Samantha Powers's "monster" gaffe will gain new context if he follows through on plans to see R.E.M. perform tonight at Stubb's.) At the party, I met Dan Grant, a candidate for Congress who recently lost his contest for the Texas 10th District in the March 4 Texas primacaucus. Grant says that the hubbub that surrounded the Democratic presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had consequences beyond the contest itself—particularly for down-ballot contests.

The contest attracted an unprecedented number of new voters and Democratic Party registratants. However, the hype didn't do much to enlighten the issues surrounding the other twenty contests on the ballot. The lack of information, he says, was astonishing. Grant—who lost the primary to Larry Joe Doherty—explains that new voters who showed up at polls to affirm their support for either Clinton or Obama were not necessarily aware that other contests were even at stake. Those new voters ticked off the first name to appear in each of the nonpresidential contests, claims Grant, lending weight to candidates whose names appear first in the alphabet. And in the end, D comes before G. Alpha-deficient Grant explains that there was a striking difference between results at those polls where the Doherty and Grant campaigns supplied literature and those that went unstaffed.

The Texas 10th isn't an easy district to field. Midwived by former Republican representative (and one-time House Majority Leader) Tom DeLay during the Texas redistricting fiasco, the Texas 10th was once represented by Lyndon Johnson. As the Austin Chronicle explains, until the Austin district was carved up by DeLay et al., it was fortress to Rep. Lloyd Doggett (who is now castled in one of the three districts that comprises Austin, the Texas 25th.) Today, the Texas 10th stretches from Austin all the way to Houston. "I put 26,000 miles on a car I bought in June," says Grant, describing his campaign along the vast stretch of highway 290.

Grant's predicament falls in line with an issue that's an increasing point of media scrutiny: the situation of down-ballot contests as the Clinton/Obama race goes on. The opportunity cost to the continuing campaign, it has been said, is the lack of a presumptive Democratic nominee to speak on behalf of (and fundraise for) down-ballot contestants. (Like Larry Joe Doherty.) My conversation with Grant also came before Shearwater's set and during a party at which free barbecue and Miller High Life were being offered, prompting at least one observer to hint that DC visitors are a circus in and of themselves.

In just another example of why I do not like telling people where I am from, my home city of Philadelphia has given the world just one more reason to celebrate: Combat Zone Wrestling! Combat Zone Wrestling is an extremely violent spectacle, though the Philadelphia Inquirer notes that many young people attend the monthly shows. The official website of the organization itself makes no attempt to hide its emphasis on bloodshed, with the tagline being “Let’s get ultra-violent!”

I am not sure exactly what it is that disturbs me so much about these events, as objectively I do not think I have the right to judge what other people find entertaining. After all, one could hardly say that my obsession with “What Not to Wear” has any educational value. That being said, something about organizations such as Combat Zone Wrestling does not reflect well on American society as a whole.

I’ll give Combat Zone Wrestling this much, at least it does not claim to be a professional sport, like the WWF does. “Professional” wrestling implies that there is fair and honest competition at this level, something that is absent from wrestling. It is akin to the thankfully now-defunct XFL, a disgusting and sexist take on football. Calling these sports is an insult to all the real professional athletes out there. If Combat Zone Wrestling just claims to be entertainment for now, it will at least retain some sense of decency. Rather, it won’t further tarnish the legitimacy of professional sports in America today.

I'm not totally on board with this column in the New York Times today (i.e. that all women in prostitution are total victims), but it does make a few good points about Spitzer's particular situation:

The Emperor’s Club presented itself as an elite escort service. But aside from charging more, it worked like any other prostitution business. The pimps took their 50 percent cut. The Emperor’s Club often required that the women provide sex twice an hour. One woman who was wiretapped indicated that she couldn’t handle that pressure. The ring operated throughout the United States and Europe. The transport of women for prostitution was masked by its description as “travel dates.”

Telephone operators at the Emperor’s Club criticized one of the women for cutting sessions with buyers short so that she could pick up her children at school. “As a general rule,” one said, “girls with children tend to have a little more baggage going on.”

Whether the woman is in a hotel room or on a side street in someone’s car, whether she’s trafficked from New York to Washington or from Mexico to Florida or from the city to the suburbs, the experience of being prostituted causes her immense psychological and physical harm. And it all starts with the buyer.

The point here is that no matter how much a John pays for a prostitute, she's still a prostitute, which means people who handle the business get a large cut. She still is at risk for sexually transmitted diseases and rape. And, most of all, we tend to target the women who prostitute themselves while the pimps and the Johns usually go charged with nothing.

Sadly, the hope that the abstinence-only funding restriction in PEPFAR has been dashed. This from RH Reality Check:

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) of "DC Madame" fame, plans to amend the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to reinsert the 33 percent abstinence-only earmark.

Sen. Vitter, not exactly a model for abstinence, or being faithful, has the audacity to put his hypocritical ideology ahead of evidence-based public health strategies that tell us abstinence-only should be removed from PEPFAR. He puts ideology ahead of his own reality in the ultimate paternalistic perversion of "do as I say, not as I do."