From: Joseph Burgess [mailto:
Sent: Saturday, April 16, 2011 2:00 AM
Subject: For, of, by, or about women (and men)
The Green-Dog Democrat*
"It's hard to argue against cynics -- they always sound smarter
than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side."
Molly Ivins
April 16, 2011 -- For, of, by, or about women (and men)
Hello from the Green Dog --
Have you ever noticed that although a fair number of commentaries in Green Dogs over the years have been written by women, most of them have been written by men?
Well, they have been, Bunkie. But only because research has found more commentaries written by men than by women that have been appropriate for the specific or general topics or issues being considered in Green Dogs. The plea here is innocent of favoring the mature versions of what Danae in the newspaper comic strip "Non Sequitur" calls stinky booger-brained boys. [1]
However, among Green Doggers there are some doubters -- one in particular in a state in the northeastern quadrant of the U.S. -- who doubt the purity of the Green Dog personified's efforts to ensure commentary selection that is gender-neutral. That doubt occasionally is stated in e-mail replies to issues of this e-zine. So, there will be an effort to find and use more commentaries by women in the future -- Scout's honor. Meanwhile, this issue is for, of, by, or about women (and men). One of the seven splendid commentaries was written by a man -- a Texican, a gentleman of the southern plains -- but it is centered on two women and is too good not to include.
The commentaries that follow are about a wide variety of important, serious topics and issues, not pegged to any particular craziness going on in the affairs of the
Please be sure to forward this Green Dog to all the folks you can who are right or left or middle-ways or sideways politically. What's here is information that can make them better informed and better able to evaluate what they read and hear in the news media and so-called news media -- better able to separate the chaff from the chaff in ideology-based "analyses" they may read or hear -- better able to make sensible, intelligent demands of their U.S. senators and representatives and the president -- better able to debate the issues.
The Green-Dog Democrat
[1] -- See http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur -- GDD
The courage and compassion
of the late Geraldine Ferraro
By Connie Schultz
The (
March 30, 2011
WHEN WE MEASURE the impact of a hero, it helps to consider the difference between worship and admiration.
Worship promotes an illusion of perfection in one person, and relies on a belief in our inherent inferiority to keep the myth alive. Admiration, on the other hand, closes the distance. A person admits to overcoming everyday stumbles and major obstacles of ordinary life, and we're inspired to find our own courage.
Well, why not? we think. Let's give it a go.
Geraldine Ferraro, who died last week at 75, never tried to hide her real-life struggles and human imperfections. As a result, those of us who admired her -- and there were so many -- dared to see our own potential in her success.
First Major-Party Woman-Nominee
In 1984, the former stay-at-home mother became the first woman of a major party to be nominated for vice president of the
I was a stay-at-home mom in my late 20s, wondering if I'd ever again write for a living, when Ferraro came to
"I did all the things other homemakers do," she told Plain Dealer reporter Diane Carman in May, 1984. "I took care of my kids, participated in the local women's club, taught school one afternoon a week. I carpooled. . . . Being a mother is not an easy job." It was as if she were speaking straight to me.
Calm Response
Ferraro was bravely pro-choice, even though she was a devout Catholic and made it clear that she would never have an abortion. When she returned to
Plain Dealer columnist Brent Larkin described her calm response:
"I know you want to make your point," she told them. "It's made. I believe in free speech, but just give me an opportunity to speak this morning. . .. . [I]f you're concerned about life, it really must go and continue for those who are born as well. I accept your view. Please allow me to present mine."
It's one thing to be brave when the whole world is watching and you have the force of a political party behind you. It's another thing altogether when your battle is personal, and your life hangs in the balance. In 1998, after a losing bid for the U.S. Senate, Ferraro was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Doctors said she had, at most, five years to live. She outran that prognosis by seven years.
Compassion and the Mother Thing
Ferraro went public with her cancer to champion those who didn't have her resources. She testified before Congress, and in 2007, was interviewed on "The Today Show" as a $1,000-a-week drug dripped through an IV into her arm.
"It just is a very, very expensive thing to do, very expensive thing to do, and that's the one thing that bothers me," Ferraro said. "Having to come in twice a week -- that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that what's available to me is not available to every person who has cancer in this country and it should be. It should be."
I met Geraldine Ferraro only once, in the summer of 1984, when she came to
As soon as I saw her, I did the mother thing: I pushed Andy in front of me, hoping she'd see him. Ferraro did the mother thing, too: She stopped, grabbed his outstretched hand and leaned down to ask his name.
As she walked away, Andy turned to me and whispered, "My knees feel weak." I pulled him close, and felt a whole new kind of strong.
© 2010 Cleveland Live, Inc.
Some 'crazy' solutions
for a world where madness reigns
By Caroline Arnold
(Kent/Ravenna,
April 3, 2011
THE MOST FREQUENT phrase I hear from my friends and neighbors these days is "The world's gone crazy." I can't argue with them.
Internationally, with a Japanese nuclear power plant near meltdown, we are debating ways to clean it up and make nuclear power safer. The
Nationwide, governors are using revenue shortfalls – caused by tax cuts for the rich – as a weapon to kill collective bargaining rights for public employees. (Rationale: If they're not at the table, they can be on the menu.) The governor of
Assorted Crazy Bills
State legislatures, egged on by tea partiers who want to drown all government in bathtubs, are introducing assorted crazy bills: to authorize the use of helicopter gunships to shoot wild pigs (KS), to require all adults to own guns (SD), to allow businesses to refuse service to married gays (IA), to make killing abortion-providers justifiable homicide (SD), to ban Sharia -based law in a state with 200 Muslims (OK) and to require payment of all state debts in pre-1965 gold or silver coins (GA)
So, as a crazy citizen following the day dedicated to fools and folly, I'd like to make a few equally crazy proposals. In no particular order:
-- Post the annual income/net worth after the names of all public officials, political figures, executives, writers of op-eds, experts interviewed by media, etc.,. e.g.: Barack Obama ($3,220,592/$10,110,978.)
-- Address both renewable energy and personal fitness with hand or pedal-operated generators and chargers for TV sets, computers, audio equipment, and small electronics. All ages could benefit; time would be saved and energy consumption reduced by not driving cars to gyms and fitness centers. Fitness-freaks might also support an ad-free TV channel that gets its revenue from excess power fed back into the grid.
-- Similarly, develop power-assisted pedal technology for family cars, vans, and busses – with pedals for all passengers.
-- Instead of trying to capture and prosecute Julian Assange, the CIA could hire him and put him in charge of spying on
-- Bradley Manning could be sent (or sentenced) to the Pentagon to find out where all that missing money has gone; or to the FEC to uncover corporate interference with elections; or to the GSA to uncover waste, duplication, abuse and fraud.
-- Develop far-out innovative ways to solve real world problems, like the task-allocation algorithms derived from the distributed problem-solving, multiple interactions and decentralized control practiced by ant colonies or the collective, democratic decision-making practiced by swarming honeybees.
-- Women could deny sex, Lysistrata-style, to male warmongers and anti-abortionists until they change their behaviors. That could reduce population, improve women's health, and might even end some wars.
-- Minimize our use of banks and credit cards; using cash whenever possible. It would leave fewer tracks and will make it harder for predatory private marketers or public officials to find out how we spend our money.
-- Readers may make up more crazy ideas.
Meanwhile, we blame each other, scoff at others, flagellate ourselves with mea culpas, propose unstudied and untested remedies, judge our neighbors to be lazy, stupid, greedy or criminal; we tolerate or demand cruelty, torture, or assassinations of selected bad guys. We address problems we don't want to pay for by passing the costs off to those with less money and less power; what we can't solve with money we fix with military hardware. We're running on remedies cobbled together by wealthy individuals or corporations with private agendas and investments.
Structural and Systemic Failures
Our nation is not broke financially – there is plenty of money. But it's broke through structural and systemic failures of society and how we do democracy.
Our society is broke when we are not outraged by Newt Gingrich's infidelities or scornful of Donald Trump's arrogance but thoroughly enjoy them, and reward them generously. It's broke when we tolerate Gitmo and the torture of an accused but untried soldier, or cheat our teachers and safety officers of their rights.
Our democracy is broke when only half of us vote. It's broke when we are willing to send workers away from the bargaining table in order to give tax-breaks to the rich. It's broke when people believe that cutting taxes creates jobs, despite no evidence that it does and ample evidence that it doesn't.
I don't know what to do about it. I am perennially suspicious of Grand Plans – like "trickle down" – which don't work and have serious unintended consequences. And yet, I don't see how we can manage the world without some overarching common moral values, some universal common goals, and some worldwide consensus that we humans are all in this together, and that it is possible to live together without killing one another.
How crazy is that?
Copyright Record Publishing Co, LLC. 1995-2011.
Caroline Arnold ($20,000/ $70,000) retired after 12 years on the
http://www..commondreams.org/view/2011/04/01-2
Are women in politics making
two steps forward, one step back?
By Ruth Marcus
The
April 5, 2011
AT FANCY
Mrs. Graham, mercifully, put a stop to that fusty custom. Last weekend, though, I was at a
The men, bless their sports-addled brains, watched basketball. The women talked politics — specifically, gender politics. Our group included veterans of Geraldine Ferraro's vice presidential campaign, so the question naturally arose: Have things turned out better or worse for women in politics than we expected back then?
Half-Full Glass?
Way worse was the unanimous conclusion of our group — a hospital administrator, a civil rights lawyer, a business school professor and a recovering Senate staffer. Who would have thought, in the heady days when "It's a Girl" cigars were being passed out on the convention floor, that 27 years later there would not have been a woman president or vice president?
Not me, although I adopted the glass-half-full attitude. Absent the phenomenon of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton would have been president — and the arc of gender politics would have taken on a far rosier hue. In 1984, when Ferraro was tapped to be the vice presidential nominee, there were only 24 women in Congress, including two senators. Today, there are 88, including 17 senators (the most senators ever). The overt sexism that Ferraro encountered — questions about whether she could bake muffins or, alternatively, pull the nuclear trigger — is inconceivable today.
On the other hand, the number of women in Congress fell this past year, although slightly. Perhaps more alarming, according to the Center for American Women and Politics, the number of women in state legislatures, a breeding ground for national politics, dropped by 81, a full percentage point.
What has me more rattled is a new report by Princeton University about the declining number of female students serving in leadership positions there (student body president, newspaper editor) or winning academic prizes and prestigious post-graduate fellowships.
"We had assumed . . . that after the pioneering years of undergraduate coeducation at
During the 1990s, for instance, 22 women served in such resume-burnishing roles. In the following decade, that number fell by nearly half, to 12 — even as the proportion of women in the class grew to nearly equal numbers. Only one woman has been elected president of the student government since 1994.
This backsliding is not a Princeton-specific phenomenon. Harvard hasn't had a woman head of its undergraduate council since 2003. Yale has elected one woman as student body president in the past decade. Despite the stellar credentials required for admission, women arrive at
Political Gender Gap
The
And, the explanation most persuasive and disturbing: Women don't win these offices because women don't run for them. They're more likely to do the behind-the-scenes grunt work.
This finding echoes a 2008 study by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox concluding that "women perform as well as men when they do run for office." The problem occurs beforehand, with "a substantial gender gap in political ambition." The numbers of female candidates grew during the 1980s and 1990s but has since leveled off.
I can understand that women juggling work and family might be deterred from seeking the political life. But college students? Among the most accomplished college students in the country? If they're not pushing their way to the front now, what happens after graduation?
The Ferraro aftermath notwithstanding, it's unimaginable that, sometime in the next 27 years, there won't be a woman elected president. Or is it?
© 1996-2011 The
Why aren't you married yet?
By Monica Potts
The American Prospect
April 8, 2011
AT A MARCH luncheon celebrating the release of the new book Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, it wasn't long before things got really personal.
"Before [today], the fact is that primarily, a 20-year-old woman would have been a wife and a mother," author Kay Hymowitz told the crowd of about 100 for the Manhattan Institute event in
What, exactly, does the modern 20-something's "fake life" consist of? For women, it's chasing a career in law, public relations, or journalism -- just like Carrie in Sex and the City, the archetype of what Hymowitz calls the "New Girl Order." She says in her book: "'Writer' represents the fairy tale career for young romantics, as prized as Mr. Big himself." Living with roommates in D.C. and working as a writer? Is Hymowitz talking about me?
A Personal Question
She certainly could have been. But it's more likely that Hymowitz's inspiration is her 29-year-old daughter. Introducing the talk, Christina Hoff Sommers, an American Enterprise Institute scholar whose work is a lot like Hymowitz's, commented on a trend she's noticed in her friend's oeuvre: "There are a lot of crises and social pathologies that seem to track with the age of her children," she joked. I've had this nightmare: My mom giving a public talk about her new book, Why Aren't You Married Yet?
More than half the audience members in the private club's walnut-paneled dining room were older men, and everyone except for me wore a work-appropriate suit. I wore what passes as a suit in my world, which gave me away as a liberal hippie from the get-go. "We have a bet going on," an attorney named Len said when I sat down at the table, "about which side you're on." (Hymowitz's book had already caused a stir, because it was excerpted in The Wall Street Journal.) I demurred and said something equivocal about being a magazine writer interested in gender issues. It was only later that I realized his question was a more personal one, aimed squarely at testing Hymowitz's thesis. He was really asking: "Do you have a man, or do you think men are worthless?"
Hymowitz argues that a generation of parents who spent their time empowering girls has left men adrift and unable to understand their proper place in society. The hypothesis that feminism is bad for boys has been floated before, most prominently by Hoff Sommers herself, but Hymowitz gives it a new spin. Feminism, she says, has created a perpetual child-man unable to grow up, leaving scores of women partner-less. Apparently, Hymowitz believes, positive stereotypically male traits -- courage, fortitude, stoicism -- can only be enforced through traditional family structures. Left to their own devices, men fall into their natural irresponsible state, unable to commit because society has sent the message that they are unnecessary.
Puerile Pool of Suitors
For this, she blames women! The Carrie Bradshaws (and, ahem, other writers who don't conform to a buttoned-down dress code) didn't just ruin things for men but, inadvertently, for themselves. In her book, Hymowitz says women still want romance, chivalry, and babies but wait too long to get them. They have only themselves to blame for the puerile pool of suitors too befuddled by feminism to perform. What else could they expect but loneliness after decades of striving for independence? Steve Harvey, the comedian turned relationship guru, talks to ladies in a more straightforward way: "Make a man be a man!"
Who is left to hold down society's fort? In Hymowitz's dystopian future, a surplus of single mothers depends on government largesse, and aging spinster aunts rely on their nieces and nephews to pay for hip replacements.
At the luncheon event, Hymowitz's evidence for the rise of child-men was a pop-culture montage of Adam Sandler movies, the 2003 frat-house comedy Old School, and an iPhone application that's supposedly the epitome of bro-ish fun: iBeer. The silver-haired suits giggled and shook their heads.
Right for the Wrong Reasons?
Sorry dudes, I didn't mean to ruin
Of course, even if Hymowitz is right, it's for the wrong reasons. If high-achieving women really are trying to settle down and struggling to do so, their frustration likely has more to do with continuing sexism and the schizophrenic messages society sends to them, not to men.
This, though, is what Hoff Sommers and Hymowitz call "gender feminism," as opposed to equality feminism. Women who subscribe to their brand of feminism can and should strive for equal opportunity, though they have already achieved it in most areas. The doors are open, and it's up to women to walk through them. What about the persistent pay gap -- Hymowitz calls these numbers "highly misleading" -- and the fact that men still dominate in corporate boardrooms and in politics, you ask? This is also women's fault. They just aren't taking advantage of all their opportunities.
Testosterone Re-defined
Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who recently wrote a book about how black people need to stop depending on the government and pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, asked Hymowitz why men still dominate in most of the fields we associate with power. Later, I asked Wax how she would answer her own question. "They have more testosterone," she said.
That's the explanation that conservative women often rest on, of course. Men succeed in the boardroom and fail in the bedroom because it's in their nature to do so. We can safely assume, then, that women like Hoff Sommers, Hymowitz, and Wax are just naturally better than their peers. They have the kind of testosterone it takes to be AEI and Manhattan Institute scholars and professors at Top 10 law schools. And they manage to get married and have children, too. Every other woman -- especially those of us living "fake lives" -- is just fodder for conservative cultural study.
© 2011 by The American Prospect, Inc.
Monica Potts is associate editor for the Prospect. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Connecticut Post and the Stamford Advocate. She also blogs at PostBourgie.
GOP's child labor legislation
threatens our daughters
By Susan Feiner
Women's eNews
April 12, 2011
IT'S EQUAL PAY DAY, a time to review the reasons why so many hard working women find themselves chronically running short on cash.
Women need to work 15 weeks into 2011 to earn what men earned in 2010. Think about all that work: 40 hours multiplied by 15 weeks. That's 600 hours. On top of that work, there's the cooking, cleaning, picking up, dropping off, dressing and bathing.
But this is not news. We've been trying to get paycheck fairness for years. What's more notable right now is the GOP-led attack on child labor laws that will affect female teens disproportionately.
Gender disparities in child labor are startling. In the 16-19 age group 176,000 boys in 2010 were paid below the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For girls last year the number was 304,000. Fully 12 percent of young women, versus 6.9 percent of young men, are already paid sub-minimum wages. These teens mostly work in food preparation or serving, with jobs such as burger flipping, hash slinging, French frying and soda jerking with the highest levels of teen employment and sub-minimum wages.
Republicans in several states (
The Ones We Don't Count
Studying child labor is difficult since the only way to know if workers are under 16 is if employers get work permits. Most states require work permits to make sure that younger teens are in school. But 40 percent of young workers were employed in violation of regulations requiring these permits, according to research published in the September 2008 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
The same public health study discovered that nearly 37 percent of surveyed youth were working in prohibited jobs or using equipment deemed too dangerous for young workers.
Currently teens can only work until 10 p.m. on school nights. Republican lawmakers, including
Risky Workplaces
And it doesn't appear that they know much about the risks that young women run in the workplace.
Professor Susan Fineran, a colleague here at the
Letting young women work one more hour at night is almost sure to widen that sexual-harassment window. Maybe that's the desired result? Why else would Missouri Republicans advocate letting children under 16 work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished? Currently such work is tightly regulated.
Fraction of Actual Violations
These fines are a tiny fraction of actual wage and hour violations. Nationally and in every state child labor laws are barely enforced. In North Carolina, for example, of employed teens nearly 37 percent reported a violation of the hazardous occupations orders, such as prohibited jobs or use of equipment, 40 percent reported a work permit violation, 15 percent reported working off the clock and 11 percent reported working past the latest hour allowed on a school night, according to the American Journal of Public Health study.
No wonder hundreds of thousands of 16- and 17-year-old workers are injured on the job every year. In 2006, 70 teens died from on-the-job injuries.
In spite of all this, a trio of conservative groups (Generation Joshua Project, the Home School Legal Defense Association and Parentsrights.org) oppose the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
What could be next? How about shortening the school day and using school buses to drop teens at their sub-minimum wage jobs?
Copyright © 2011 Women's eNews Inc.
Susan Feiner is a professor of economics and of women's and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine, and the author of Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work and Education.
Two unreasonable women
By Jim Hightower
Creators Syndicate
April 13, 2011
THEY'RE BACK. Actually, they never left, they just laid low while the heat of political anger blew over.
They are the schemers and scammers of Wall Street who devised the Phantasmagoric Money-From-Nothing Good Times Machine that was fueled by indecipherable derivatives and other financial fairy dust. If you're presently stuck in hard economic times, you have them to thank, for it was their hocus-pocus that — poof! — imploded our economy in 2008.
Responding to public outrage, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress passed a reform bill last year that tightened the rules on these tricksters. But now — with Wall-Street-hugging Republicans running the House and Obama himself turning into Wall Street's best buddy — the schemers and scammers are demanding that
Trust Us?
For example, the biggest banks are pressing hard for the Treasury Department to exempt a derivatives game called "foreign-exchange swaps" from any regulation. These gamble on the ups and downs of foreign currencies. Not only are they explosively risky, they're massive, with some $4 trillion being bet on them every day.
A hiccup in this speculative game can ruin the day of a whole country. But a handful of Wall Street giants rake in about $9 billion a year handling these high-rolling bets, and they don't want the public even seeing what they're doing.
"Don't regulate us," they insist, "trust us." After all, they say, this currency game is the one derivatives market that did not crash in 2008.
Not so fast, slick. The only reason the market for foreign-exchange swaps didn't crash is that the Federal Reserve poured more than $5 trillion into foreign central banks that year to prop it up.
Robbers and Cops
Such runaway greed by Wall Street is why change is so desperately needed. The Powers That Be claim that it's unreasonable to regulate Wall Street. However, as George Bernard Shaw noted a century ago, "All change comes from the power of unreasonable people."
I think Shaw would agree to one small addendum to his sage observation, which is that such people are considered unreasonable only by the entrenched powers that always oppose change.
Let me offer two examples of people today who deserve our applause for rankling the establishment and, in turn, enduring its furious abuse: Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren. Both are daring to bring a stronger consumer and public-interest voice into the closed, cliquish and often self-serving world of banking.
Bair heads the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which gives a big helping hand to banks by insuring their customers' deposits. The FDIC is also supposed to help consumers and taxpayers by regulating banks. And — my goodness — unlike some of her predecessors, she has chosen to do both jobs, including providing tough enforcement of regulations to prevent bank failures, foster real competition and deter banker finagling.
Badgering Bankers
At a recent meeting, financial chieftains showed their appreciation for her work (and their ugly side) with a cascade of catcalls, guffaws, snorts and boos as she spoke.
Booed by bankers. I'm sure that's unpleasant at the moment — but what a badge of honor!
Likewise,
To add your voice in support of these two "unreasonable" women, go to Bankster USA: www.banksterusa.org. .
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
Pushing slutty garb for kids
pushes culture toward cliff
By Froma Harrop
The
April 13, 2011
AMERICA'S TAILSPIN toward the cultural abyss has gained speed with an ad featuring single-mother celebrity Bristol Palin. Bloggers unfriendly to her mother, conservative entrepreneur Sarah Palin, have bashed a charity for paying
A solid complaint, but one that barely plumbs the sickness of the Candie's Foundation ad campaign. The nonprofit is run by the executives of Candie's, a line of slutty apparel marketed to females age 7 to young adult. Some ads for the brand were so degrading that even Cosmopolitan magazine refused to publish them.
One Candie's promo showed Lil' Kim in a blond wig and yellow bikini dancing above a group of nuns. Another had actress Alyssa Milano opening a medicine cabinet full of condoms and a bottle of Candie's fragrance. The new Candie's brand video shows Fergie thrusting her cleavage at a young man holding a long-lens camera.
Twisted Merchandising
It's pretty twisted: A company that merchandises platform boots with 5-inch heels to young teens now urges them to avoid unwise sexual activities. (Older girls get 7-inch heels. They call them "hooker boots.") And its charity's celebrity spokeswoman is one who achieved stardom by becoming pregnant at 17 while having moralist Sarah Palin for a mother.
The Candie's Foundation describes its mission as follows: "To educate
As we recall,
A Star Is Born
Because
(Sarah insisted back then that
Anyhow,
In what bizarro universe does someone like her get to lecture young women on the "devastating consequences" of teen pregnancy? And how does a company that profits off selling streetwalker fashions to teenagers work up the hypocritical juices to also market itself as a foe of adolescent pregnancy?
High-Priced "Awareness"
The chairman of both Candie's parent company and the foundation apologizes for nothing –– including spending eight times more of his charity's money on Bristol Palin than on bona-fide social entities dealing with the crisis of teenage pregnancies. "That's not what we do for a living," Neil Cole said. "What we do for a living is create awareness."
Awareness for whom? At bottom this seems a marketing scheme to promote both Bristol Palin and the Candie's brand –– while enjoying a tax exemption meant for charitable organizations.
It's very hard to protect girls eager to attract boys from sexually unwise behavior –– not in the land of free speech and minimal parental guidance. Could we taxpayers at least not have to subsidize hawkers of provocative dress? This is one confused society.
© 2011 , Published by The Providence Journal Co.,
Froma Harrop is a member of The Journal's editorial board and a syndicated columnist.
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WHAT IS A GREEN-DOG DEMOCRAT? This kind of Green-Dog Democrat is a cross between a yellow-dog Democrat and a blue-dog Democrat -- a moderately progressive, thinking Democrat who is liberal on some issues, moderate on some, a little conservative on some, ambivalent on some. This Green-Dog Democrat is a retired public relations/marketing communications practitioner who lives in
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