Category Archives: Women & Girls

Two Unforgettable Recollections of Senator Dianne Feinstein

Fate played a cruel, unwanted hand in Diane Feinstein’s political rise:

On Nov. 27, 1978, at the end of her tether, Ms. Feinstein [then a member of the San Francisco city Board of Supervisors] told City Hall reporters that she intended to quit political life. Two hours later, shots exploded down the hall from her office. She ran toward the gunfire and, moments later, knelt beside a dying mayor. Mr. Moscone and Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay supervisor, who was shot in another office, had been killed by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor, who was quickly captured and eventually imprisoned.

The Board of Supervisors selected Feinstein to succeed the slain Moscone and from the mayoralty, Feinstein won a U. S. Senate seat in 1992. Continue reading Two Unforgettable Recollections of Senator Dianne Feinstein

A Long Read to Ponder: Biden in Vietnam & at the UN: Who Could Have Imagined?

An image from Vietnamese TV news, during Biden’s visit.

NOTE: Friends, this material just blows my mind.

Yes, that’s an outdated 1960s expression, but it fits here: this material is about the Vietnam War. And for me (plus, I figure, most of the remaining survivors of that era of national agony), having our minds blown was a thing.

Maybe initially it was fun, or mind-expanding. But for me, and for many, it happened too often back then, and it didn’t always mean by taking drugs. I didn’t do much of that, but had mind-blown fatigue anyway. Continue reading A Long Read to Ponder: Biden in Vietnam & at the UN: Who Could Have Imagined?

A History of NOW and its Women who Made History

The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

Katherine Turk has produced a must-read on the group which did so much for American women in the 1960s and 70s

Clara Bingham

Pauli Murray – an under-appreciated feminist-civil-rights-labor activist and thinker, also a founder of NOW. From a wall mural on a Durham NC street

What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.

Continue reading A History of NOW and its Women who Made History

Iran Marks Anniversary of 1953 CIA-Backed Coup

AP News: A CIA-backed 1953 coup in Iran haunts the country with people still trying to make sense of it

August 25, 2023
Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, 1953

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Seventy years after a CIAorchestrated coup toppled Irans prime minister, its legacy remains both contentious and complicated for the Islamic Republic as tensions stay high with the United States.

While highlighted as a symbol of Western imperialism by Irans theocracy, the coup unseating Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh — over Americas fears about a possible tilt toward the Soviet Union and the loss of Iranian crude oil — appeared backed at the time by the countrys leading Shiite clergy.

Continue reading Iran Marks Anniversary of 1953 CIA-Backed Coup

Garrison Keillor: Out with the old, in with the young

Out with the old, in with the young

The Column: 08.25.23

I am delighted by the court ruling in Montana that the state, by encouraging the use of fossil fuels, violated the constitutional right of young people to “a clean and healthful environment,” something no court has ever proclaimed before.

“Clean and healthful environment” is in the Montana state constitution. The legislature had forbidden state agencies to consider climate change when considering fossil fuel projects, and this decision would change that, but the state will appeal and likely the decision will be tossed away like used tissue, but still it’s an interesting idea: that we have legal obligations to our kids beyond feeding and clothing them and not putting them to work in shoe factories before they’re 12.

Continue reading Garrison Keillor: Out with the old, in with the young