Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. First celebrated in 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, International Women's Day is now an official holiday in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia. But this day dedicated to celebrating women's contributions to society is not officially recognized as a holiday by the United States government.
A lack of legal recognition won't stop us from celebrating the day at MOMocrats, though. In honor of International Women's Day, we offer you a list of awesome political blogs written by women whom we think you should be reading in addition to us:
August 18, 2010: combat troop withdrawal from Iraq began ahead of schedule. There are now 50,000 soldiers left behind in Iraq to oversee general security. By winning, I don't mean we won this war. I mean it's a victory for those who opposed the war that we elected a new president who did what he promised.
Now the brilliant Rachel Maddow has managed to lay out, based on facts gathered during her recent visit and live broadcasts from Afghanistan, what's at stake for America if we stay and why there are strong moral imperatives for us to leave. (The transcript to her opinion piece is here.)
Nation-building, or its more modest cousin, development aid, is not nor should it be a military objective. Why? Because the inevitable loss of life among our soldiers in pursuit of building a nation other than our own is too high a price to pay, and the inevitable loss of life among their civilians directly undermines the building of a peaceful civil society.
Tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT, 9 p.m. CT, the National Geographic Channel will air a documentary special on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, featuring exclusive video of the disaster and interviews with rescuers who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the explosion that caused the spill, and helped save the remaining crew.
As what may well be the worst environmental disaster in North American history continues to take shape, putting miles upon miles of ocean habitat and coastline ecosystems at grave ecological risk, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the explosion itself also took the lives of 11 oil rig workers and put over 100 more workers, as well as their rescuers, in mortal danger.
It's a terrible milestone to have reached. So much sacrificed by military families; so many deaths of Afghan civilians. How many years is too long? How many dead is too much to bear?
Yesterday the Lancet released a major study highlighting maternal morbidity and mortality in 181 countries from 1990-2008.
The United States ranks 39th with 16.7 deaths per 100,000. We're behind most of the OECD -- behind Canada, tiny Malta, Croatia, Serbia, and the United Arab Emirates. Instead of declining is accordance with Millennium Development Goal 5 -- the target is a 75%
reduction in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) from 1990 to 2015 -- the U.S. saw a 2% increase in MMR from 1990-2008.
I want you to gaze upon these picture for a few minutes:
I know this is hard to read but bear with me: Countries in blue, from very dark to light, have seen a decline in maternal mortality. Notice that the U.S. is in red. That's because instead of declining, our rate has increased. Our company in seeing at least a 1% increase, in descending order: Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, South Africa, Namibia, Côte d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Malawi, [United States], Cameroon, Denmark, Singapore, Georgia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Slovenia and Chad.
In2000 one of my all time favorite movies came out. The Contender stars Joan Allen as a female Senator tapped by the President to become the next Vice President of the United States after the current VP passes away. She then undergoes the long and painful vetting process where sordid details from her past come to light possibly causing her the job.
The sordid details? Pictures of her taking part in some sexual antics while in college at the age of 19. She takes the high road refusing to answer to the allegations one way or another, because they have no bearing on who she is today. In the years since this movie has come out I’ve come to love it more. It forces people to take a serious look at how women in politics are scrutinized and treated in a way men will never be.
I was completely disheartened over Martha Coakley’s loss in Massachusetts last night. How or why she lost is something we can speculate over and over again, but we won’t ever really know. Was the campaign not fought hard enough from the beginning? Was it because she wasn’t able to raise the same kind of money Scott Brown was able to raise, a constant problem for female candidates? Were people sick of the current state of affairs in Massachusetts or maybe wanting to stop health Care Reform any way they could? Or was it because she a woman?
Like I said, no one will ever really know for sure. But there is one thing I DO know. Had Martha Coakley posed nude for Cosmo, she never would’ve been able to run. In fact who’s to say she would’ve ever made it as Attorney General. Because a woman posing nude would spark the inevitable name-calling, questions of her morality and of her ability to hold office. But men don’t face that kind of scrutiny. Massachusetts proved that last night.
If you are a woman running for office or thinking of running for office, please don’t let Martha Coakley’s loss cause you to doubt your ability to win. Because you can. There has never been a better time for women to rise up. We are over half the work force, research has shown that we make better politicians; we strive to protect our children, our environment, and the world around us.
We are the change and the end to partisan bickering. We are the ones to make sure education is the top priority and that fairness and equality finds it’s way to every single American. Ladies, we ARE the true Contenders.
I'm afraid we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg at this point. Like the China earthquake, early reports and pictures are giving us a sense of the devastation, but as people and aid organizations actually get to Haiti, I'm afraid we will see much, much worse. My prayers go out to all people suffering through this first night without shelter or light, and those trapped in collapsed structures. These pictures offer a small sense of the damage done to people, structures and lives in an already-beleaguered nation.
Here are links to aid agencies and a couple of easy ways to help:
...awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to
strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The
Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work
for a world without nuclear weapons.
Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics.
Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis
on the role that the United Nations and other international
institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as
instruments for resolving even the most difficult international
conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully
stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's
initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting
the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and
human rights are to be strengthened.
We'll have more on the international and domestic response to the world's most significant humanitarian award to President Obama as it develops.
With all the media coverage of this month's courageous public protests against government corruption and election fraud in Iran, major clashes between protesters and governments in two other countries have unfortunately failed to garner the attention they also deserve:
In the city of Shishou in central China, after local government officials initially refused to allow the family of 24-year-old Tu Yuangao, who was found dead at a hotel under highly suspicious circumstances, to have an autopsy conducted on his body, a small group of local protesters surrounded the young man's body and refused to allow local police to take it.
As local police called provincial authorities for backup, the crowd of protesters grew, reportedly organizing via text messaging and Twitter. Rioting in the streets lasted for several days; reports of the final size of the protest vary wildly across different news sources; Reuters quotes one witness estimating the crowd at 10,000, but some estimates of the peak crowd have been as high as 70,000. Some protesters managed to circumvent Chinese government blocks on internet access to post video of the incident to YouTube:
Tu Yuangao's family and the protesters claim the young man was murdered by a business owner with ties to organized crime who is a relative of the town's mayor; his family reports his body showed signs of torture. and that the local government wanted to cover up the crime by cremating the body before an autopsy could be performed.
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