links for 2010-09-17

"A 28-year-old woman who said an unknown assailant threw a cup of caustic liquid in her face has admitted her injuries were self-inflicted, Vancouver, Washington, police said Thursday.

"Vancouver had searched for an assailant, described as an African-American woman with an athletic build and slicked-back hair pulled into a pony tail."

"'Why would you show a black American jumping into bed with a man's wife to promote basketball? I don't even know how someone could think up a commercial like that. You would never see any other sport in the world, that takes themselves seriously, portraying a black athlete that way.'

"NBL legend Darryl McDonald said: 'It puts black Americans in a bad light. That commercial has nothing to do with basketball. Nobody else would present their sport this way. It's supposed to be in fun but not everyone will think the same way.'"

"Voters were receptive to Obama's promises to be a post-ideological president who would defuse America's most explosive political elements.

"Yet in many ways, the opposite has happened. Today a particularly nasty strain of right-wing extremism is flourishing: draconian immigration policies, heated opposition to the establishment of an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, the Tea Party movement, claims that the president is a Muslim. As the sun set on the Bush years, it seemed like this brand of conservatism was becoming extinct — despite the persistence of talk-radio hate speech and the occasional right-wing crackpot politician. Now it's back, and it's more mainstream than ever."

"According to her manifesto, the artist is out to ‘hijabise’ advertising. She targets cosmetic brands like L’Oreal and models like Kate Moss, seeming to ask if hiding a face behind a veil is any worse than hiding one behind make-up and air brushing."

A fascinating video about former broadcast journalist Carol Jenkins, her daughter, and the choices they made about breastfeeding.–AP

[A]"n intriguing Stanford Business School study of 12000 environmental NGOs that found that “pragmatic” organizations failed more often than “pure” ones (i.e., those that did not compromise their principles to attract more revenue or profile), partly because their supporters preferred it that way. As a result, membership and fundraising is increasing in pure organizations and falling in pragmatic ones. “Social movements are most effective when they are purest, most radical, and most disorganized”, it concluded. (Irritatingly, the Stanford paper only seems to be available on subscription here – nothing very open source about that!)"

"The 14th Amendment, with its guarantee that anyone born here is an American, protected my siblings and me from being countryless. Today, in the growing clamor over illegal immigration, there have been calls to repeal this amendment, with the pejorative "anchor baby" invoked as a call to arms. The words suggest that having a child in America confers some kind of legal protection on illegal parents, that it gives them a foothold here.

But in reality, merely having a baby on American soil doesn't change the parents' status. As a so-called anchor baby, my existence did nothing to resolve my parents' situation; if anything, it only added to their stress."