Poli Sci

Sixty or so protesters have gathered outside of the CNN building on Sunset Blvd. They are protesting what they say is biased reporting by the news network of the debate over a public health insurance option.

CNN is expected to run coverage of the angry (but peaceful) crowd outside its doors later tonight.

Similar rallies took place outside the CNN headquarters in New York and Atlanta. The protests were organized by The Young Turks and Democracy For America.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the reason for the protest.

Ousted HP exec, former John McCain adviser, Sarah Palin bus throw-her-underer - Carly Fiorina has announced her candidacy for Senate. She's seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Senator Barbra Boxer next year.

Fiorina now joins former eBay exec Meg Whitman in running for a political office. Whitman is seeking to slum it the governor's mansion in Sacramento as a Republican.

We spot a trend. It really makes us wonder who is less popular right now - Republicans or CEOs. And if combining the two neutralizes or enhances the stigma. Will a state, home to the county with the highest unemployment rate in the US want to give golden parachute eligible women gigs on the government payroll?

We're staying tuned.

Previously on FBLA: Gavin Newson Drops Out Of Governor's Race

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has withdrawn from the 2010 race for California Governor. Earlier this year Newsom formally announced his candidacy on Twitter. Today Facebook helps him end his campaign-

Newsom hasn't updated his Twitter page yet.

At last night's party for the bestselling book Half The Sky, co-author Nicholas Kristof called the fight for women's equality "the cause of our time." We found ourselves thinking such a sentiment that would surely rile any number of activists that hold other issues - poverty, the degradation of the environment, the scourge of war - closer to their hearts.

With this in mind, we re-read an article Kristof wrote for the New York Times back in August, where he made a strong argument for prioritizing the fight for woman's equality:

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. "Women hold up half the sky," in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that's mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it's not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There's a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That's why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren't the problem; they're the solution.

Read the full article at the New york Times website.

After California cut all funding to the state's domestic violence shelters, electronica musician Moby started a campaign to raise awareness and funds. Shelters recently got a temporary financial reprieve from the government - undoubtedly thanks in part to Moby's efforts - but they still lack permanent funding.

The story in the Sunday L.A. Times called "How a girl's stark words got lost in the Polanski spectacle" by Joe Mozingo is not an easy read. The details of Roman Polanski's rape of a 13 year old and the subsequent whitewashing of the crime are cringe-inducing. But may be the most informative, factual and agenda-free piece to be written about the crime in 32 years:

Samantha's testimony that day was unequivocal: She had kept trying to get away from him, putting her clothes back on, saying no repeatedly. She had made up a lie about having asthma to get out of a Jacuzzi. He persisted. She was scared. She did not physically fight him off. He began to have sex with her, then, concerned she might get pregnant, switched to anal sex. When he drove her home, he told her not to tell her mom, adding, "You know, when I first met you, I promised myself I wouldn't do anything like this with you."

A generation of spectacle would follow: Polanski's indictment, his plea deal, his flight from the country, allegations of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, his decades of exile and critical success, his Oscar, a sympathetic HBO documentary last year, his rearrest in Switzerland last month.

Along the way, various people would scrub the core allegations into something more benign -- a probation officer would deem the crime a "spontaneous" act of "poor judgment," a prison psychiatrist would call it "playful mutual eroticism."

Rush Limbaugh put in a bid for the Rams football team and then comedian, Greg Warren made it even funnier.

In 2005, Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones was violently gang-raped by her co-workers while in Iraq. After she reported the crime, KBR ordered her to be held prisoner in a shipping container by armed guards. She was denied food, water and medical treatment for over a day until outside forces intervened to have her released from KBR custody. KBR "lost" the rape kit and other evidence collected in the case.

Finally safe, Jones found that she was not allowed to sue because her employment contract said that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration - a process that overwhelmingly favors the employers.

Her plight inspired Senator Al Franken to introduce an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill. The amendment would keep the government from doing business with contractors that provided legal loopholes for rapists. And... well, we'll let Jon Stewart tell the rest of the story:

Over at his True/Slant blog "L.A. Flaneur", our friend Matthew Fleischer has some charming highlights of the battle by Malibu residents to prohibit camping on public campgrounds:

Says Fleischer:

God, why don't the Freestaters - you know, the radical libertarians who showed up fully armed at a recent Obama event - ever get involved with these types of public discussions?

I can't think of anything better than watching a bunch of Malibu millionaires square up against a posse of armed, angry, libertarian rednecks demanding 24-hour access to their taxpayer funded public land. Wonder if Malibu residents would have the balls to shout down that opposition?

More info at L.A. Flaneur and The City Project

This is a video from the group at rescuemarriage.org. It's about time someone said something. And it's about time someone got actors to do it.