Salon.com > Heather Michon

Pussy Riot denied bail

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:20:00 +0000

The following originally appeared on Heather Michon's Open Salon Blog.

A Russian court yesterday ruled that three members of the feminist punk rock collective known as Pussy Riot will remain in jail, a crushing end to a day of rumors, reportedly out of the Kremlin, that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich would be released on bail.

The three activists were arrested in March after allegedly staging a flash mob-style protest at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on Feb. 21. Dressed in the group's signature scanty clothing and brightly colored balaclavas, Russian authorities say they and another performer walked up to the altar and launched into an impromptu performance of their anti-Putin, anti-church "punk prayer."

Parishioners and church officials hustled the women off of the altar in less than five minutes. A few days later, Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich were charged with "hooliganism." If convicted, they face up to seven years in prison.

Can a super PAC be a force for good?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

With the presidential race looking like a dull Obama-Romney plod to November, the most memorable thing about this election cycle may end up having nothing to do with the candidates.

Instead, 2012 seems poised to go down in the history books as the Year of the Super PAC.

Look at the figures: As of Monday, independent expenditure committees had spent over $38 million on the Republican primary candidates. That’s already over three times more than candidates themselves spent on broadcast advertising during the entire 2008 Republican primary season.

The avalanche of outside money is worrying political parties, making candidates anxious and just plain depressing the socks off the rest of us.

But at least one of the hundreds of registered independent expenditure committees out there is trying to use the system in a different way, and maybe – just maybe – building a model for the future.

DSK case is no “victory for justice”

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:01:00 +0000

Rumor has it that New York City prosecutors are preparing to drop the charges against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Last week, officials went to court to loosen the tight restrictions placed on Strauss-Kahn during a bail proceeding last month, citing new evidence that his accuser, a maid at the luxury Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan, had lied about several aspects of her life and her actions on the day of the alleged rape. While all the physical evidence points to a sexual encounter of some kind, it has devolved into a "he said, she said" case, unlikely to stand up in court.

The outcry has been predictable: The rich get no respect! Americans are prudes! Immigrant women lie about rape to stay in the country! She's a hooker! Why, we should give poor ole DSK the French presidency just to make up for all his suffering.

Was Obama henpecked into war?

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:30:00 +0000

As the bombs began falling on Tripoli this weekend, a cry was heard on blogs and Op-Ed pages and chat shows throughout the land: President Barack Obama had been -- for want of a better phrase -- pussy-whipped into war by three women.

The emerging storyline is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Advisor Samantha Power stampeded over the (male) heavy-hitters like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Adviser Thomas E. Donilon to convince Barack Obama to take military action in Libya.

Even neutral-to-favorable stories about the events leading up to the U.S. joining in the establishment of the no-fly zone over the embattled North African nation betray a sense of discomfort over this display of female dominance.

"Boys against girls over Libya?" asks a representative headline in Politico.

"A 'gender gap' in Obama administration's approach to war?" queries the Christian Science Monitor.

Journalists are citizens, too

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:30:00 +0000

As America tucked into bed last night, a light went on somewhere in NBC News headquarters in New York. A computer was booted up. A statement was tapped out and released into the wild:

After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night's program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy. We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night.

"Several days," of course, meaning the roughly 48 hours of media chatter following the suspension of MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann for his failure to clear $7,200 of political donations with NBC, in violation of corporate policy.

In those two days, more than 300,000 people signed a petition to get Keith back on the air. Pro-Keith Facebook groups were launched. Blog posts were written. Comments on said blog posts reached into the thousands. It was discussed and written about on other news networks and newspapers.

Virginia textbook claims blacks fought for Confederacy

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 01:01:00 +0000

I can file this one under: "Glad I don't have a kid in Virginia public schools."   The Washington Post is reporting that a new fourth-grade textbook called "Our Virginia: Past and Present" contains a passage that states: "thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson."   Joy Masoff, author of more than a dozen books for children published through Scholastic Books and its subsidiaries, says she found the information through Internet research and would have gladly removed the sentence had historians asked her to take it out.   (Paradoxically, she also tells the Post: "As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write. I am a fairly respected writer.")   

Had they seen the text before it was shipped out to schools, historians would have asked her to take it out.   The argument that many thousands of slaves willingly fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War has zero support in mainstream academic circles -- for the simple reason that it is not supported by the documentary record. There is evidence that a very few African-Americans joined the Confederate ranks by choice; the overwhelming majority were servants and laborers.

The activist roots of Mother’s Day

Fri, 07 May 2010 19:29:00 +0000

An unjust war being waged in a far off country. A mother moved to political action in the name of peace. It's a story as fresh as the morning headlines, and probably as old as warfare itself.

Political activism seems a world removed from the hearts-and-flowers sentiments of Mother's Day. But if 19th century poet and feminist Julia Ward Howe had had her way, the mothers of the world would not be spending the second Sunday in May being pampered and feted, but rather joining with other mothers in a global call for peace.

Howe was spurred to action in 1870 with the start of the Franco-Prussian War in Europe a conflict that lasted less than a year, but managed to inflict tremendous casualties in both the military and civilian populations, create both the modern German state and the French Republic, and start Europe down the path to the First World War, more than four decades later.

In defense of Dennis Kucinich

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:13:00 +0000

I have to admit: I adore Dennis Kucinich. In the 2008 primaries, my heart belonged to Hillary, but my philosophy was pure Dennis. He was the anti-Barack, the anti-Hillary, way the anti-Edwards... the guy who wouldn't say things he didn't believe just to get a vote; a principled man in a business that really doesn't value principle over pragmatism.

And if he turns out to be the vote that kills health care reform, I will stand up and cheer.

Kucinich is firm in his "no" vote on the final bill, despite what must be fearsome pressure from his Democratic leadership. Bart Stupak and his coalition can probably be bought off with a tweak of language -- and if not, don't believe for a moment that Team Pelosi cares more about women's constitutional rights than they do about being able to say we passed health reform. But what Kucinich wants is what virtually nobody on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue is willing to give: True universal health care.

Is it racist to report on looting in Haiti?

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:20:00 +0000

Criticism has been growing over the last few days over the Dread Mainstream Media's coverage of sporadic violence and looting in Port-au-Prince.

While most print and broadcast media have been careful to emphasize the word "sporadic," there have been reports of looting of stores and homes, tussles over food at distribution spots, gangs of young men wielding machetes walking down city streets and a few cases of vigilante justice where citizens have turned on looters and lynched them on the spot.

Most of the blogo-punditry has deemed any coverage or mention of looting or lawlessness as "racist," hearkening back to shoddy, race-tinged reporting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Theoretically, these critics would prefer the media make no mention of post-disaster violence and focus exclusively on the stories of people coming together in the face of catastrophe. Moreover, they'd prefer a narrative of lawlessness as a socially acceptable response to a desperate situation.

Don’t fear the e-reader

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:05:00 +0000

A version of this story first appeared on Hang a Question Mark.

I assume that I'm not the only writer who has "Publish a %$&*#^ book!" somewhere on their list of resolutions for 2010. Of course, it was also on my 2009 list, and maybe my 2008 list, but I have recently come to learn what a Mount Everest this seemingly modest resolution is to climb.

So it was with great interest that I read an editorial by Farrar, Straus and Giroux president Jonathan Galassi in the New York Times this weekend titled "There's More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen."

Galassi was responding to the announcement that William Styron's estate had sold the electronic publishing rights to "Sophie's Choice" to Open Road Integrated Media, a new e-publishing outfit founded in late 2009 by Jane Friedman, former president/CEO of HarperCollins.

It really got him thinking, he says. "Are e-books a new frontier in publishing, a fresh version of the author's work? Or are they simply the latest editions of the books produced by publishers like Random House?"