THE CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT WILL CONSIDER WHETHER TO RULE ON CRUCIAL PROP 8 ISSUE ON WEDNESDAY
The LA Times has the story.
The California Supreme Court will decide Wednesday whether to plunge back into the legal battle over same-sex marriage.
The state high court, meeting in closed session, will review a request by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to determine whether Proposition 8’s sponsors have legal authority to defend the ballot measure.
Depending on the court’s ruling, the 9th Circuit could either dismiss the Proposition 8 appeal on procedural grounds — limiting the case’s effect to California — or rule on federal constitutional questions that would affect same-sex marriage throughout the country.
UPDATE: THE SUPREMES SAID YES, THEY’RE GOING FOR IT.
LARA LOGAN IS BEATEN AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED IN CAIRO & THE LA WEEKLY REPORTS BADLY
Could the LA Weekly’s reporting on Lara Logan’s beating and horrific sexual assault possibly be any more staggeringly insensitive?
This is not the time for a hip, snappy tone, people. Good lord. The post felt creepily assaultive itself.
@GOOD ASKS WHAT THE ROLE OF THE PRISON SYSTEM SHOULD BE
Go and quickly tweet your answer to @GOOD, aka Good Magazine, and they’ll post the best of the answers later today.
A FRIEND OF BRADLY MANNING, SUSPECTED WIKILEAKS SOURCE, ALLEGES TORTURE
Torture comes in many forms, some of it legal.
Democracy Now has the story.
AFTER CUIDAD JUAREZ POET IS HERSELF FOUND DEAD, POETS RESPOND
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez writes:
It took the death of a poet for me to sit up and wonder what the hell is going on in Ciudad Juarez. I’d talked to the L.A. painter Victoria Delgadillo at length over the years about the unsolved murders of women in Juarez. She’d told me about the local artist she’d taken to Juarez and the art they’d created to memorialize the women and to stop the killings.
About a month ago a friend from San Diego emailed me a Mexican newspaper article detailing that Susana Chavez – the 36 year old Ciudad Juarez poet and activist who’d coined the phrase “Not one more death!” in outrage at the unsolved murders – had been found dead, her hand severed and a plastic bag around her head. That’s one of the signatures left in drug killings.
….They’re killing poets in Juarez???!!! WTF! It reminded me of the maddening story in Murder City by Charles Bowden. The cartels begin dumping bodies in a neighborhood park. A resident puts up a sign urging the killers to stop dumping bodies in the park. That resident is killed. The drug dealers know fear works.
What can we do? I asked the writer Gloria Alvarez when I ran into her a few days after hearing of the poet’s killing. Let’s organize a reading, we agreed. Eastside Café, the 8-year old El Sereno storefront community center hosted it last Saturday night….
Click here to read the rest—including much of the poetry presented Saturday night.
Photo by Raquel Salinas
Re: Lara Logan.
Good God, have these people no shame? All the media here is repsecting the family’s requested privacy. Can’t they do the same?
Thanks for the link to the Mexico story, Celeste, and Guzman-Lopez’s writing. I’ve been following the cartel madness ever since early last year when I wrote a mammoth essay for Popmatters, “The Name of This Land Is Hell: Mexico in Literature”, speculating on the seeds that have sown so much unthinkable carnage in that nation. Aside from Charles Bowden’s invaluable writings on the subject (how he has managed to stay alive is beyond me) Roberto Bolano’s “2666” is a good place to start, especially Book One of his herculean effort.
With reference to the Logan story: every major news web site I visited this story made announcements to the effect that they were forced to purge their comments boards of offensive and insensitive language. The jackals are controlling the dialogue.
Hi Rodger, Yeah, I love Chuck Bowden’s work on Cuidad Juarez.
I know this is an unfashionable POV, but weirdly I was left a bit cold by that part of Bolano’s 2666. Often fiction can get to a deeper truth, and that work is, as whole, is so remarkable, yet the not-so-disguised Cuidad Juarez section, specifically, the part with one death after another, distanced me, rather than bringing me closer, since the reality is so outsized and horrific it leans toward the operatic, as it is. Fictionalizing it felt unnecessary.
About Lara Logan: I so admire her for going back, and so understand why she did, even though she feared she would be targeted. I’d have done the same in her place, and I am heartsick and enraged that she paid such a price for her desire not to miss this amazing moment in history. I simply cannot understand what some people are thinking with their comments. It is deeply, deeply shameful.
The public reaction online to Logan’s story is firm proof that our collective IQ has been shrinking in double digits; we’re living in a time when dogma triumphs over reason and logic. From my side of the fence, one cause is that there is a stark void where art, beauty, and literature is concerned, the Humanities simply are not a part of our discourse in the modern West any longer, people are no longer prompted by something they read, or see in an art gallery, or hear in a concert hall that would prompt them toward moments of quiet introspection. In this intellectual vacuum it’s no wonder that citizens are rushing to find a corollary between Ms. Logan’s sometimes high-profile tabloid-style love life and a vicious assault by thugs with animosity toward the press — that’s the true horror of this story.
As for Bowden, when I was working on the Mexico story for PM, I was told by a good source that the reason he is still above ground is because the cartels enjoy his writing and believe that he helping to foster and promote their own cultural mythology in Mexico.
I thought our culture has risen above crass comments about women who’ve been sexually violated. Worse yet, the LA Weekly blog is written by a woman! How do we impart better values to the next generation if adults today behave like shrews? Shame on LA Weekly.
Where I’m rarely in agreement with Randy he hit it on the nose.
Thanks SF. Many years ago I had a girlfriend who had been raped several years before we met. The pain she had to live with was horrific and anyone who would make the least bit of lighthearted commentary about that is beneath contempt.
Please realize that the writers at the LA Weekly are neither Hip nor are they Snappy. The come off as snobish and pretentious. They feel that the world owes them and they are bitter about it.
A real tragedy what happened to Ms. Logan. What I take from it is how truly dangerous it is for foreigners, EVEN reporters in Egypt right now.