Are Lawyers The Best Way To Save The Earth?

Back in August Stephen Hockman QC proposed an interesting idea. Namely proposing that a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague be the supreme legal authority on issues regarding the environment. Hockman argues that for the lack of solutions at hand for addressing climate change, "only an impartial adjudicating body is capable of providing the catalyst for a global consensus as to the fairest way to distribute the burdens that accompany solutions to the climate change problem."

The understandable reluctance of developing countries to sign up to carbon commitments - unless the developed world is prepared to make an equitable contribution - calls for more radical options. Those options must be realised at state, regional and international levels, and they will require political, economic and legal solutions.

In this mix, international legal instruments are crucial. The existing tools lack the necessary jurisdiction, clout and transparency. The time is ripe for a serious consideration of an international court for the environment. Such a court was mooted in Washington in 1999, but sank without trace. Today, however, we cannot afford to drop the ball.

Hockman, who is also a trustee of Client Earth, a nonprofit environmental law group, argued that such an institution would also offer a centralized system, "an enhanced body of law regarding environmental issues, and consistency in the resolution of environmental disputes". He wrote that such a court should be compulsory and have its own scientific body to assess technical issues.

However some are skeptical as to whether this concept would work, as Environmental Capital notes:

But what about the two giants in that global economy? The U.S. and China together account for about half the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Any meaningful climate-change pact begins and ends with what Washington and Beijing decide. And while both presidential candidates are less hostile to the ICC, ceding control to supra-national jurisdictions generally gives the U.S. pause. Chinese leaders, meanwhile, have not traditionally embraced global law or institutions with open arms.

Concluded Environmental Capital: "Are lawyers really the best way to save the earth?"

Seeking Parity.

Well elections have come and gone both in Canada and the US, but some are asking -- but what of the goal of advancing women in political leadership?

How long will it take us? We already are well into the fourth decade since the contemporary women's movement of the 1970s spawned a generation that sought to claim an equal place in the halls of power.

Women make up 52% of Canada’s population, yet we represent roughly 20% of elected politicians on municipal, provincial and federal levels. Currently Canada sits in 44th place in the world on the Inter-Parlimentary Unions ranking of countries by representation of women in government. The breakdown is as follows:

Canada
Seats in the House of Commons - 308
Number of Seats held by Women: 65
Percentage - 21.1%

Seats in the Senate - 105 (90 currently sitting)
Number of Seats held by Women - 32
Percentage - 35.6%

Total - 24.4%

In Still Counting, authors Linda Trimble and Jane Arscott argue that:

an “electoral glass ceiling” is keeping women at or below the 25 per cent mark, restricting women to less than half of the seats that would be theirs in a democracy committed to balanced, equitable and fair representation. Moreover, little is being done to address this ongoing democratic deficit. Despite drawbacks, such as the “revolving door” for female party leaders and continued sexism in legislatures, women can, and do, make a difference in politics. That’s why it’s important to elect many more, and more diverse, women to Canada’s parliament and legislatures.

In our most recent election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper increased the amount of women his cabinet up from seven in the last session. Women now make up 29% of the cabinet, comparable to the ratio from Paul Martin's Liberal cabinet in 2003-04 (30%) and up from 22% in the last cabinet.

In the US, prior to 2008, the only female candidate to ever to run for national office on a major-party ticket, and was selected, not elected, as a vice presidential candidate was 1984 Geraldine Ferraro 24 years ago.

Both in the primary and the general election much has been debated about both the progress and regression this election cycle has created for women. But even as the highest glass ceiling in American politics came the closest it ever has to being shattered, in Congress it was business as usual: Women made a net gain of one seat in the Senate, bringing the total to 17 out of 100, and three seats in the House, moving up from 71 to 74 out of 435 seats, or 17%.

Not everyone thinks this is good enough news though:

But what this means is that as the class of 2008 enters the Capitol's marble halls, it will include less than half the number of women who first won office in 1992 -- the so-called "year of the woman."

Currently the US sits in 71st place in the world with the follow breakdown:

United States
Seats in the House of Representatives - 435
Number of Seats held by women - 74
Percentage - 16.8%

Seats in the Senate - 100
Number of Seats held by women - 17
Percentage - 17%

Total - 16.9%

While these numbers are disappointing, there is some progress being made:

At the state level, the pipeline into federal office, there were some bright spots in 2008: A record number of women, 2,328, ran for state legislatures in a presidential election year, surpassing the previous presidential-year record of 2,302 set in 1992. (The overall record was set in 2006, when 2,429 women ran. More state legislative seats are up for election in non-presidential election years.)

“So 2008 was a record, and it managed to get us from 23.7 percent of women serving in state legislatures to 24.2 percent,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Another bright spot emerged in New Hampshire, where women now hold a majority in the state Senate, 13 out of 24 seats – the first state legislative body in US history to be majority female. New Hampshire, and New England in general, has a history of electing women to office, owing to a tradition of citizen part-time legislators. In New Hampshire, the annual pay for legislators is $100, plus travel reimbursement.

Overall, when the totals of each state’s legislative bodies are combined, Colorado ranks No. 1 for female representation, with 38 percent. Vermont has 37.8 percent, and New Hampshire, 37.7 percent.

“Once we drop the decimal points, we know that women will have arrived,” writes former Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin in a blog. In an interview, she notes that the citizen-legislator model of her state is what allowed her to get into politics when her four children were young.

In contrast, South Carolina now has no women in its state senate.

On the higher end of the Inter-Parlimentary Unions list, Germany sits at 32% and Sweden at 47% - however no country in the world represents the female populace at 52% where it sits around the globe. So where does that leave us?

In Canada, we set a record of success this election. And the US? According to Marie Wilson, president of the White House Project, an organization working to advance women in leadership.

“At this rate, it will take us till 2063 to reach parity. I mean, come on! We have to speed things up.”

For more information on the advancement of women in politics, please visit Equal Voice and The Center for American Women in Politics

Netroots: Do they Matter?

As a marketer I have noticed some interesting trends in recent months. Namely that traditional media (print, radio, TV) has started to decline in both consumption and advertising revenue. Here in Canada, budgets are being slashed by international accounts and belts are being tightened.

What is interesting is that not 5 years ago, media outlets were 'throwing in' internet advertising as a bonus with a traditional media buy. Well those days are long over. As a medium, the internet has exploded bringing with it much good and bad - especially in the political scene.

Which naturally leads us to the effect of the Netroots, which is described as follows:

Netroots is a recent term coined to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. The word is a portmanteau of Internet and grassroots, reflecting the technological innovations that set netroots techniques apart from other forms of political participation. In the United States, the term is used mainly in left-leaning circles.

Further - the origin of the term is suggested to be traced to:

In a December 2005 interview with Newsweek magazine [4], Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos, described the netroots as "the crazy political junkies that hang out in blogs." He is also the co-author (with Jerome Armstrong) of the book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics (ISBN 1-931498-99-7).

William Safire explained the term's origin in the New York Times Magazine on November 19, 2006:
“ ... the Nation's Web site [5] cited the unabashedly liberal Jerome Armstrong's praise of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee "for reading blogs and being ready to work with the netroots." From these citations and a few of the million and a half others in a Google search, the word netroots has a left-of-center connotation. The earliest use I can find is in a Jan. 15, 1993, message on an e-mail list of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from an "rmcdon[ell]" at the University of California at San Diego, apparently complaining about an internal shake-up: "Too bad there's no netroots organization that can demand more than keyboard accountability from those who claim to be acting on behalf of the 'greater good.'" ... Popularizer of the term — unaware of the obscure, earlier citation when he used it — was the aforementioned (great old word) Armstrong on his blog, MyDD, on Dec. 18, 2002, as he went to work on the presidential campaign of Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont.... headlined his entry “Netroots for Dean in 2004” and told Internet readers where to get the first inkling of a groundswell: “O.K., so Dean is still polling 1 to 4 percent nationally, so what. Look at the netroots.”[1]

Whatever its origin, the Netroots most certainly has had an effect on the media.

Clearly, bloggers aren’t a monolithic group. But it’s fair to say that liberal bloggers — and the more activist-oriented members of the Netroots within that group — have been calling out the media’s campaign coverage with far more regularity than just four years ago. And it’s not simply because there are more activists who know how Moveable Type works.

Pushback against the media has been aided by the growth of more sophisticated liberal news sites, such as Talking Points Memo and The Huffington Post. In 2004, TPM founder Josh Marshall didn’t have any paid staffers; this year he has nine. And Arianna Huffington’s arsenal of nearly 2,000 bloggers didn’t exist until President Bush was already six months into his second term. Not to mention, liberal watchdog group Media Matters — which provides ammo to many bloggers — has grown in that time from about 20 staffers to near 100, according to a source familiar with the organization.

This effect can be seen in driving MSM stories. Be that as it may, a particularly inflammatory article by James Kirchick entitled Barack Obama doesn't fear the enraged, impotent Netroots contends that:

Indeed, the only people who seemed to give a fig about Lieberman were the "Netroots." Along with abandoning Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda, punishing the "traitor" Joe Lieberman was their paramount concern (know that in the minds of Netroots, Lieberman hasn't only committed treason against the Democratic Party; a quick perusal of the more popular liberal blogs will also find the words "Zionist" and "Likudnik" attached to his name). Most Americans probably recognize Lieberman as the guy who ran with Al Gore in 2000. But to the Netroots, Lieberman is an obsession, an individual who inspires mania. He is the worst thing possible: not only someone who disagrees with them about foreign policy, but a liberal who disagrees with them on foreign policy.

"No matter what Joe Lieberman does," wrote Jane Hamsher, proprietor of the popular liberal blog Firedoglake, "the people who are protecting him hate you much more than they hate him." The Netroots are all about hate; its denizens are incapable of seeing shades of gray. (And Ms. Hamsher knows a thing or two about hate, having doctored a photo of Joe Lieberman in blackface during his primary battle against Netroots favorite Ned Lamont two years ago.)

Good for the Democrats for ignoring these people. Allowed to exercise more influence over the party than they already do, the Netroots would have the same disastrous effect that the presidential nomination of George McGovern did in 1972.

While the article reeks of disdain for 'liberal bloggers' Kirchick does raise a point worth examining...

The Netroots: Do they Matter?

The Underwritten story of the Campaign.

On C-Span 2’s post election Presidential Election Analysis Panel by the Smithsonian Associates. That's how Howard Dean put it. See below.



Some key quotes from the video:

“Washington doesn’t get it. They always get it last. This is the most underwritten story of this campaign… by the press… by the media.”

“Women my age, in my generation felt this really acutely. Because they were the ones that suffered all of the indignities that you suffer when you fight to win the battle for equality. As they did.”

“Nobody understood the agony that women, particularly of my generation, were undergoing about this…issue…and to this day, it has been swept under the rug and been forgotten because she didn’t win.”

"We thought we were past all this stuff and we weren’t. We weren’t surprised about the degree of racism or lack of it or whatever, that was endlessly examined. We did not examine the fact that we didn’t get, we haven’t gotten nearly as far ahead as we thought we were about equality between the sexes. And that ought to be revisited as a result of what happened.”

"and it happened to Sarah Palin too. All the stuff that happened to Sarah Palin, and I know God knows I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her political points of view, but a lot of the stuff that happened to her, as she pointed out, would not have happened had she been a man.”

Do you think an honest discussion of this topic is possible yet?

The Wingnut Strikes Back.

Back in July, it was more than confirmed what a wacko Michael Savage really is when he decided to direct his angry rants at autistic children. Well in case you were hoping that he went back under the big dark rock from where he came, sorry to disappoint - he’s at it again.

During the November 18 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage said:

"You haven't seen any of what's coming in this country. You are going to see the wholesale replacement of competent white men, and I'm targeting exactly the group that's gonna be thrown out of jobs in the government. And I'll say it, and I'll be the first to say it, and I may be not the only -- the last to say it. I am telling you that there's gonna be a wholesale firing of competent white men in the United States government up and down the line, in police departments, in fire departments. Everywhere in America, you're going to see an exchange that you've never seen in history, and it's not gonna be necessarily for the betterment of this country."

Here’s a listen if you feel like barfing a little.




Earlier in the segment, Savage said of President-elect Barack Obama:

"[W]hen you're socially promoted, you wind up as president of the United States. If you're socially promoted your whole life and nobody challenges you because you're of the proper constitution and composition and you look exactly right and no one's -- everyone's afraid to say a word to you, why, you then go to Harvard, you then go to the law review, you then get elected, you then get elected to the next level. This is what happens in a country that's intimidated by its own policies and its own fears."

During the presidential campaign, Savage repeatedly described Obama as an "affirmative action" candidate. And on his October 27 broadcast, Savage said that Obama "benefited from affirmative action, stepping over more qualified white men, I actually lost as a result of affirmative action, many times in my life. ... [W]e have America's first affirmative action candidate about to become president." and in February, Savage claimed that the Democratic presidential primary contest "is, or can be seen as, the first affirmative action election in American history." He added, "We have a woman and a multi-ethnic man running for office on the Democrat side. Is this not akin to an affirmative action election? Isn't that why the libs are hysterical, tripping over themselves to say amen and yes to this affirmative election vote?"

Media Matters also noted that Savage called "civil rights" a "con" and claimed that affirmative action stole his "birthright," and his "manhood."

There's only one way to describe this man's soul: UGLY

Ignoramus: Gay Marriage will....

In case anyone was jonesing for a some homophobia and well, douchiness in general should be sure to check out last Thursday's O’Reilly Factor. In it, O'Reilly does a segment on the protests in California over Prop. 8 and really does not disappoint in reaffirming that he is a number one ignoramus.

O’REILLY: So you can see the debate over gay marriage is now a full fledge national battle. As talking points said last night the election of Barack Obama has emboldened secular progressives who feel it is their time. Gay marriage just the beginning. Other cultural war issues will also be in display very shortly. These include limiting gun possession, legalizing narcotics, unrestricted abortion and the revocation of the Patriot Act.

All The Things That Women Are Interested In.

Back in June, I observed that political machinations reverted into the oldest stereotypes - namely that women should ONLY be depicted as wives or mothers. Unfortunately now that the transition is in place it would appear that we are headed back in that direction with Michelle Obama's recent visit to the White House with Laura Bush.



In an interview with CNN's WH Correspondent Elaine Quijano, Bush describes the meeting:

QUIJANO: The role of the First Lady is certainly something that I'm sure you discussed with Mrs. Obama earlier this week. How did that visit go? And could you tell us any anecdotes?

BUSH: Well it went great. It was very private, really. It was really much more, I think, two mothers talking about home more in this visit, because of course I showed her the rooms that are our girls' rooms now that I think are the perfect rooms for her girls when they move there.

We talked more about really making the White House a home for a family. And what I know from having lived here and from visiting my mother-in-law when she made this family a home and from reading about all the other families that have lived here is this house really can be a home. And I know that they'll make it that way for their little girls.

QUIJANO: Certainly, there must be some increased pressure, a lot of scrutiny, of course, living in the White House. I was wondering, did you share any advice with her as a mother who has been through it, having had two daughters spending some formative years?

BUSH: Not really. I think I showed her the closets, I showed her all the things that women are interested in. But I didn't try to give her a lot of advice. I know she knows that she can make it home.

And that's what she wants to do.

QUIJANO: Last question then. Your husband, the day after the election, talked about it being a stirring sight to see the Obamas because of the historic nature of having the nation's first African-American president. I wonder if you could share your thoughts on that, as well?

BUSH: Well I also think it's very, very important. I think it's important for American history. I think it's a message to everybody in the United States of what's possible. But it's also a message around the world because I know, because I heard from them, that there were leaders in the -- around the world who didn't think the United States would elect an African-American man. And so, I think it's a really important message about our own democracy to people around the world.

QUIJANO: Mrs. Bush, thank you so much.

BUSH: Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.

Watch:


And because its Friday and I cannot think of something positive to say about the meeting, or how pathetic this sounds in the year 2008, I'd like to think that the end of the meeting went something like this:

Maybe her and Michelle burned one in the Rose Garden and then Laura showed her where she grows her own.

Laura: The Secret Service NEVER comes in here. I tell George it’s where the government keeps Noriega and only Cheney is allowed in there. He just nods and pretends he knows it. HEY! Why don’t I just leave the equipment and sh*t for you?

Michelle: Girl, SOLID!

(fist bump between the two)