Our Fearless Leader and Dick Cheney have conclusively proven that they really have nothing to hide at all, cross their hearts hope to die, in the Enron debacle, by refusing to turn over documents from secret meetings with Enron executives during Dick Cheney’s energy task force proceedings [New York Times]. Quod Fearless Leader:

We’re not going to let the ability for us to discuss matters between ourselves to become eroded, the president said this afternoon at a session with reporters. It’s not only important for us, for this administration, it’s an important principle for future administrations.

George, I hate to break it to ya, but not only is this just making you look like you’re dirty as hell, but it’s also offensive to basic principles of democratic governance. As a private citizen you have every right to secretive, closed-door meetings. As the President of the United States, however, you have a responsibility to conduct your affairs openly, under complete public scrutiny. Your ability to conduct meetings in smoke-filled rooms with your big-time campaign contributors is not more important than the American people’s right to open and democratic governance.

I can’t believe these idiots are probably going to waste the Supreme Court’s valuable time over this idiocy. If G.W. seriously thinks he’s going to avoid dirt coming out on his administration because of this, I have a few hundred documents in Houston I’d like him to shred.

The award for best summary of the Enron debacle and the administration’s stonewalling goes to Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury:

I did not have political relations with that man!

Scott Reents and Thomas Hill have written an interesting article on why political sites fail, and what they can do about it [Democracy Project]. Bottom line: political sites fail because they are based on the one-way model of traditional campaign media. As the authors put it:

In particular, current political sites are failing to adhere to the new rules of the "citizen-centric" Internet. Because the Internet puts citizens in control over the information they access, it requires that political organizations think and act as service providers to, rather than as mobilizers of online constituents. A citizen-centric campaign recognizes that it is most powerful when it practices the enlightened self-interest of true cooperation, ceding control to citizens as the most effective way to accomplish shared goals.

It’s worth noting that the most continually successful politically-oriented sites on the web are services such as Independent Media Center and Free Republic, Feminist Majority Foundation Choices Campus Community, and innumerable e-mail listservs all over the Internet, which center around forums for user-contributed content.

My hope is that the trends exemplified by Internet users here will successfully drive political candidates and groups more and more towards bottom-up, participatory democracy as the primary form of web interaction, that the mood of the Internet user will force them to adopt this strategy in order to survive. The Internet as it stands if full of limitations – we need to work hard at making Internet access and resources more available to people in poverty, making it a less toxic space for women, and developing software and hardware that empower users apart from mega-corps like AOHell-Time Warner and Microsoft and Netscape). But I hope and believe that it can also be opening up a horizon for truly democratic spaces in ways that traditional media have systematically ruled out. We have a great hope of winning this one, if we fight.

For further reading:

• GT 6/09/01 Misogyny of Internet Culture Betrays Promise of Democratic Spaces Online
• GT 5/30/01 Baltimore government expands Internet access to people in poverty
• GT 5/29/01 The Battle for a Grassroots Internet Experience
• Building a Global Grassroots Infrastructure by George Salzman

The End of Free is a weblog chronicling the dying of free/ad-supported content and the transition to fee services "and beyond." (Here’s hoping that the beyond includes a good micropayment scheme in the very near future, because if it keeps going the way of subscription services, the prospects are grim.

For further reading:

• GT 10/5/2001 Salon makes itself more useless to web readers
• GT 6/9/2001 Feed and Suck go under
• GT 3/23/2001 Salon announces death of free content on the web with the introduction of their for-pay premium service

For the past 5 years feminists have been doing most of the work in understanding and combatting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan is one of the largest and most firmly-established anti-Taliban resistance groups in the world. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan has been the authority in the US on the Taliban regime for nearly five years (Eleanor Smeal has given briefings to Congress on the topic and has testified before a joint hearing of two U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittees). Acclaimed journalist Saira Shah lived undercover as an Afghan woman (with the assistance of RAWA) to make her groundbreaking documentary, Beneath the Veil. Because the first victims of the Taliban were women, women and women’s groups, abroad and also in the U.S., are the most credible authorities on the Taliban regime.

And yet, somehow or another it ended up happening that only 12% of television programs have featured women as experts on the post-September 11 crises [FMF], even after the U.S. alleged the complicity of the Taliban in the attacks. Instead, they are trotting out the predictable crowd of old white male pundits: generals, retired CIA operatives, State Department cronies. In the time since September 11, I have seen networks, without a trace of irony, put Bob McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and Oliver North in front of the camera as experts on what we ought to do about international terrorism. Well, I guess they ought to know–when it comes to terrorism, maybe it takes one to know one!

So, while the media drumbeat for the war continues it’s the same old cock-swinging commandos droning on about Afghanistan. The same CIA and State Department cronies who propped up the Mujahedeen and the Taliban in the first place, who trained Osama bin Laden because they believed that foreign jihadi were more reliable opponents of the pro-Soviet regime than locals. And since women’s voices are being silenced, no-one much seems to be pointing out that Afghan women were the first and most horrifically victimized by the Taliban regime. That Afghan women, who are imprisoned in their homes and banned from driving or travelling without a male relative on pain of death, cannot escape the cluster bombs dropping over their heads. That women continue to be oppressed our equally thuggish allies in the Northern Alliance (who are nothing more than the old Mujahedeen). That women have repeatedly been cut out of the tribal councils on forming a new government, and the U.S. government can’t be bothered to give a damn whether or not equity for women is brought up as an issue in the formation and constitution of a post-Taliban State.

The mealy-mouthed monologue of the corporate/government-colonized newsmedia has been parroting the words of feminists that they ignored for years–deploying a weak brand of pop feminism against the Taliban to keep the war fervor high. And yet, somehow, it seems that the actual women are not being included in the dialogue, and the actual needs facing women in Afghanistan are not being discussed.

What a fucking surprise.

feminist media watch has returned with a new URL. Watch this space: the awesome woman that brought us FMW is hosting the returned FMW on her developing site, f-word.org. It’s sure to be very cool.