What Is Wrong With These Pictures?

On a day the Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is going to put more emphasis on placing women in top posts, a picture of 11 men appears above the fold on the front page of the Metro section touting federal commitment dollars for the Dulles Metro extension.

Maybe one individual with red hair on the back row is a woman. It's hard to tell, and her/his name, of course, is not supplied. Two African-American males did make it in.

(The story quotes U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood: “If this is not the greatest day for Virginia, I don’t know what is.” Good grief! And he is a cabinet official? That Virginians are celebrating a railroad track as "the greatest day"?)

In Women's History Month and the week the Washington Post reports that President Obama is going to place more emphasis on placing women in top slots, the Post carried a little one-paragraph story about the lashing and four-month prison terms of two men and a 75-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia found guilty of being together.

She is a grandmother. The men were delivering bread to her. One is the nephew of her late husband. Forty lashes for each perpetrator (for what? Delivering food to an old woman?) says a much lengthier story at YahooNews Canada.

Do we do business with Saudi Arabia? We know Bush and Cheney slept with Saudi Arabia.

By ignoring the plight of women in Saudi Arabia and other countries which actively discriminate against us, by remaining silent we condone its actions.

I wish the Obama administration, Michelle Obama, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Barbara Boxer, Valerie Jarrett and other powerful politicians and celebrities would pick up their telephones and microphones and from their bully pulpits beseech the government of Saudi Arabia to cease and desist exploiting, raping, pillaging women.

How can a civilized nation rationally continue doing business with a country which treats women like possessed animals?

I wish a powerful person would adopt the plight of women in the Middle East and do something besides talk, talk, talk to colleagues about raising the stature of women. I wish someone would act, act, act. Why not use their ammunition and aim their weapons of strength at readily identifiable targets? Like boycotting Saudi Arabia. Who needs its stinking oil anyway? We American consumers continue to show a diminished need for it. The actions of the United States would encourage other nations to follow suit.

Pass it on. And act. It's Women's History Month.

A wasted pulpit: Laura Bush

For eight years she commanded the rostrum. Or could have. But did not.

For eight years she could have visited classrooms, read to children, visited school libraries, drawn enormous attention wherever she went to the plight of reading among schoolchildren in this county, but she did not. Consider the press she would have attracted to the sad condition of thousands of school libraries!

But she did not. Why not?

It's too late now, Laura Bush. You, a librarian, who I imagine knows something about the poor performances of our children compared to those in other nations.

You whose husband shepherded the ill-fated No Child Left Behind to its certain death.

You wasted your pulpit! You gave up eight years to be a doormat and do absolutely nothing. Do you want your daughters to grow up to be like you?

Your chance is gone to help children read better, to show their parents how they could have read to their children for just ten minutes a day. You could have been a role model for mothers everywhere.

Michelle Obama is different from you, and I have not one shred of doubt that she will use the pulpit firmly planted in front of her, unlike you.