(originally posted March 03rd 2008; reposted due to technical difficulties) Calling all serious civil libertarians! News you can use: The first political protest against sex offender civil commitment took place March 2. It happened in Coalinga, Calif., outside the grounds of a 1,500-bed state facility – the biggest sex offender civil commitment lockup in the [...]
Read MoreLarry Mathews in the Washington, DC area. Kurt Eichenwald in Dallas and New York. Bernie Ward in San Francisco. All involved in child porn scandals while working in the media. And now there’s Dennis Melanson, in Canada. His story has been covered extensively but superficially by the Canadian press, including the CBC. The clip I’m [...]
Read MoreNote: please also see a follow up article, based on reporting I did for The Nation in March, a month after the piece below was written. Click here. Who’s the bad guy: Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera or Nicholas Corbett? The first was a young Mexican man and four-year resident of California who was killed last [...]
Read MoreI’ve been too busy the last month to blog much, but developments in the Bernie Ward case prompt this post: Bernie Ward may have spent a generation in the news and media biz, but three years ago, it now appears, he was just a messed up guy with a computer and too much time on [...]
Read MoreBack by popular demand (including repeated requests from my daughter, Sophy): a hard-to-find story I wrote years ago, after working four months as a telephone psychic. (Sophy remembers breaking high school curfew and coming home at 3 a.m. but Mommy not caring; I was much too involved with my headset, doing frantic, wee-hours tarot readings [...]
Read MoreHey New York City! This Saturday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the feminist Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. I’m presenting my new book Pornography. It was published late last year by Groundwood, a Canadian children’s press. Children’s press? Porn for Kids?? Officially, Pornography is part of a “social issues” series for older [...]
Read MoreThis post has also been published as an article in the January 4, 2008 issue of El Paso’s Newspapertree.com. A version also appears in the Jan. 1-15 issue of CounterPunch. Lots of Americans have heard about the Mexican city Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas, and the 400 or so female murders [...]
Read MoreTwo thousand eight marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Billie Holiday’s great album, Lady in Satin. Add two years and you’re back to 1956, the year she sang “My Yiddishe Mame” at a rehearsal. Until recently, Holiday’s Yiddishkeit session was available only on Verve’s The Complete Billie Holiday: 1945-1959. But a Venezuelan guy [...]
Read MoreCounterPunch just reprinted a fascinating piece by Uruguayan journalist Raul Zibechi about Mexico’s Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer (Street Brigade in Support of Women). It’s part of the Mexican Sex Work Network collective, which works with prostitutes and transvestites. “This has meant transcending the ‘victim’ role and becoming people who want to be [...]
Read MoreBeen off the blogmobile for a couple weeks due to travel, mostly to the US-Mexico border. I’ll be writing more on that soon. Meanwhile, here are some interesting links. International bridge, El Paso, TX First, wonderful work from Feroze Sidhwa, a 25-year-old student at the University of Texas medical school in San Antonio. The US [...]
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