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roe vs. world
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roe vs. world
sex(ism) and politics
Related: Hillaryland At War [Vanity Fair]
"I Don't Want To Get Spanked By Mama" And Other Clinton Camp Sexism
If Gail Sheehy's article Hillaryland at War is to be believed, Hillary Clinton did face a ton of sexism — from inside her own circle of advisers. From her advisers admitting that "nobody knew how to run a woman as a candidate for President" to the title quote to Mark Penn insisting that she couldn't show "weakness," aka, any kind of emotion or female-ness, to Bill Clinton insisting "you can't run as a woman," it seems like Hillary faced as much sexism from within her inner circle as from without. Could she have run a credible campaign as a woman instead of running, as Penn and her husband reportedly insisted, as the "toughest man in the race"? Millions of women would probably say yes, but, then, by Indiana, Penn was courting white men anyway.Related: Hillaryland At War [Vanity Fair]
intramural (bad) sports
•Related: Hill, Yes! O., No! [Washington Post]
When Spite Trumps Common Sense, A Resentful Clinton Supporter Is There
The six weeks since Cynthia Ruccia announced that sexism would force her to support John McCain in the general election haven't, as many had hoped, made her any more reasonable. Like many a Clintonista, Ruccia — the co-founder of Women For Fair Politics who appeared on Larry King Live last night (see clip above left) — is still spitting mad and not going to take it anymore: she's going to vote for John McCain! See, John promised her personally that he'll appoint lots of women to jobs in his Administration (you know, like how Bush appointed feminist leaders Christine Todd Whitman, Ann Veneman, Elaine Chao, Condoleezza Rice, Mary Peters and Margaret Spellings to his Cabinet) and that trumps the cunt thing, reproductive rights and other issues that Ruccia, a lifelong Democrat, holds dear. Because in the battle to combat sexism in the media, it's important to show that women have a voice that can be used to show that Clinton supporters are crazy, spiteful bitches who will sell out their own political ideals to nurse a grudge. Way to strike a blow for us ladies, Cynthia!•Related: Hill, Yes! O., No! [Washington Post]
"Jokes" About Domestic Violence Are Never Funny
For a candidate who's trying to woo women voters, John McCain sure acts like a sexist piece of crap sometimes. In an wide-ranging interview yesterday with the Las Vegas Sun, he was asked why didn't appoint the scandal-plagued piece-of-sexist-crap governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, to be his state chair. The reporter asked, "Maybe it's the governor's approval rating and you are running from him like you are from the president?" and McCain responded: (Chuckling) "And I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago…" That's the kind of humor that will get the P.U.M.A.'s growling, for sure. [Las Vegas Sun]
crappy hour
North Korea To Eat Again!
Yo citizens! North Korea was just about to celebrate its 20th anniversary on our State Sponsors Of Terrorism list when Condi Rice went and pulled them abruptly off it. Now she's telling everyone we'll be sending them food and shit!! Megan is skeptical about this, but with food prices where they are right now and all the international finance institutions tipped off to North Korea's phony money and the lid blown off their whole deal with Syria, maybe Kim Jong Il himself started feeling hungry. I don't know, he's been hiding from he paparazzi lately, but it's a thought. Anyway, so you think ending the Cold War was a good idea? How do you chemically castrate someone? Why do some polls say Obama is like 29 points ahead and others say it's a tie? Now that the Supreme Court is starting to look like they're sort of "over" killing people, how'd they rule on the DC handgun ban? And now that he's dissed Scarlett Johansson, what beautiful and lofty thing will Obama sell out next? Those questions (and many dumber ones) answered after the jump. More »
If All You Have Is A Nucleus, Can You Really Be a Citizen?
As we're all well aware, one of the many prongs in the fundie battle for control of our uteri is to call the contents often found within a person. Well, in a slight glimmer of hope for those of us who don't think that this one cell can be called a person or a life, they've failed in Montana. State Representative Rick Jore was spearheading the fight to get Constitutional Initiative 100 onto the ballot in November, which would've defined fertilized eggs as people and conferred all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship onto them. Jore needed 44,000 signatures by yesterday and got less than half. Even the Catholic bishops in the state think there are better ways to make abortion illegal, while others pointed out that it would also have made IUDs illegal, opened women who have miscarriages up to criminal investigation and potentially forced women undergoing in vitro fertilization to carry all the eggs fertilized in the procedure to term. But, hey, the zygotes would've been Montanans. [The Missoulian]
very bad men
What's This Guy Doing On The Blog? Just Fucking Up The World, Folks!
One of the cool things about writing for a "women's" blog that actively rails against the ghettoization of women's voices in the "women's" media is that it gives me the only excuse I can really think of to draw your attention to the work of a woman journalist who has succeeded in resisting said ghettoization, the New Yorker's Connie Bruck, who this week profiled Sheldon Adelson. Adelson, a right-wing Zionist ideologue, is the owner of a slew of casinos in Las Vegas and Macau and plows billions of dollars of the world's blackjack losses into supporting President Bush; smears the reputations of rival casino magnates and Israeli politicians who favor any sort of peace-type solution with Palestine, makes an effort to get American officials to relax any loyalty they might have to the concept of "human rights" — not tough in the case of Tom DeLay — so as to nab a highly-coveted casino license in Macau/cause more Chinese to lose more money, and insinuates himself into every level of Israeli politics and discourse and sues the shit out of anyone who gets in his way. More »
Mike Erickson is a Republican running for Congress on a pro-life platform so it probably won't surprise you that he's paid for an abortion in his day. Or that she didn't really want to do it but he sort of made her, or that he didn't go to the clinic and left her bawling in the parking lot, or that he lied about it all later… etc., etc. The one interesting detail is that the Oregon Right To Life committee, which investigated the rumors back in 2006, called him out on changing his story. Read executive director Gayle Atteberry's letter denouncing Erickson by clicking douchebag's face. Note how she manages to muster a sense of shock at a pro-life politician's hypocrisy that somehow eludes us! [Oregonian]
We wanted to bring your attention to New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt's column in which he examined his paper's record on sexism and Hillary Clinton. While mostly an examination of all the sexist things Maureen Dowd has said about Clinton (and way in which she insulted Obama by calling him girly), Hoyt did agree with criticisms of the Times' coverage of Hillary's laugh and its incessant need to specify that she was wearing pants. Jason Zengerle of The New Republic strongly disagrees that calling attention to Clinton's attire is sexist. Um, the whole point of calling it a pantsuit instead of a "suit" is to call attention to the fact that the supposed norm for a woman is a skirt. Because, you know, a woman's place is in a skirt or something. [NY Times, The New Republic]
crappy hour
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Just Made Some Pakistani Farmer's Life $25 Million Better. Here's Hoping He Invested In Big Corn!
Behold 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And note the Ashlee Simpsonesque transformation of his nose. Maybe people with the initials KLS are just vainer than most. And while the Guantanamo diet was good for the love handles, waterboarding leaves you bloated with bags under the eyes? In any case, something, it's hard to know exactly what, motivated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to finally tell us what was up with Al Qaeda. Easier to know is why we finally found him: some Pakistani farmer type wanted to win $25 million. Will the same tactic work for the auto industry? John McCain wants to offer $300 million — Fun fact: just under one thousandth the cost of that recent farm bill — to the first person to invent a 30% more efficient car battery. Holy mindfuck, right? Like, on one hand, he's appealing to humanity's most rational Smithean impulses! While at the same time, betraying a sinister distrust in the ability of the market to solve everything! Megan and I read a shitload of newspapers over the weekend so we could share an informed combination of disillusionment, disenchantment, disgust and depression over Zimbabwe, the SEC, the corn industry etc. after the jump. More »
media battle
Are Threesomes Really Normal? The National Review Enlists Three Bloggers To Debate Glamour
The late National Review founder William F. Buckley was a famous prude (even in his novels about fictional hedonistic boomer liberals, among whom he once described a sex scene as transpiring thusly: He didn't know then that his ejaculate had burrowed down into her ovum.) But now he's dead! And in a welcome distraction from all the pointless campaignfinance habeascorpus offshoredrilling static his old journal devoted three separate features this week to the subject of…how appropriate!…threesomes! The catalyst: a New York Times feature noting gay marrieds sometimes indulge in the odd menage a trois. So much for the argument that letting homos wed would release them from the deathgrip of their sick culturally-accepted perversities, says Maggie Gallagher. But wait! Media blogger Fred Schwartz thinks the straights have threesomes too! He read about it in Glamour… More »
I'm not going to be around for the morning Crappy Hour but the big news is apparently the "subtle makeover" of Michelle Obama's image currently underway. Like everything else spurred by the (ignoble, ignorant, inane) ideological right I'm sort of out of things to say about this. Like Thomas Frank to Tom Delay today I'm left (heh) to mainly gawk, unsure where to start. With the spooky readiness to believe educated black professionals readily throw around the term "whitey"? With the bizarre and near-inexplicable way an entire movement seems able, on the basis of her blackness and some egging on from the eminently soberminded quarters of their foremost Anglo enabler, to project their own festering rage onto her, while simultaneously professing to be shockedshockedshocked — and so deeply offended — that anyone would deign to label the white working class "bitter"? Oh Jesus I'm going to miss my plane. [IHT]
old-fashioned love story
Nursing-Home "Romeo and Juliet" Spark Furor
Slate's recent piece on the forbidden love of a couple suffering from dementia has hit a nerve. The pair (82 and 95, respectively) met at an assisted-living facility and embarked on a relationship that quickly grew passionately physical. When 95-year-old Bob's son walked in on his father receiving oral sex from his girlfriend, Dorothy, he pitched a fit, complained to the home's management - who separated them - and then summarily moved his father to another facility, citing concerns for Bob's health - after which Dorothy went into steep decline. More »
Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
Bill's Influence On Hillary's Campaign Was Equal Parts Hindrance And Help
Clintonistas will be arguing about what felled Hillary's campaign for months to come. Some will say Clinton lost the nomination because of pervasive sexism; others will argue that she appeared appeared paranoid and divisive, especially when compared to Obama; still others will reason that Clinton went too negative when campaigning against Obama. She likely lost because of a combination of these reasons, the alchemy of which will never be entirely clear, but in reading the postmortems, something else became illuminated: the nature of Bill and Hillary's partnership. In yesterday's front page New York Times article, "The Long Road to a Clinton Exit", writers Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg described the sometimes playful, sometimes destructive, sense of competition that transpired between the Clintons. Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell told them, "The president wanted to know exactly what the returns were in the places he had been and Hillary hadn’t been… He kept showing Hillary, and she would laugh.” More »
appreciations
What Hillary Did
I have been trying to figure out how to phrase an appreciation to Hillary Clinton that doesn't come across as too eulogistic, since obviously she's not "officially" done with the Presidential race, she's far from done in politics, and, well, she's definitely not dead. But a lot has been said today (and in days past) about her candidacy and its effects on the women coming up behind her, the feminist movement, the Democratic party, the fate of the free world, and the coming of the Rapture... (kidding on that last part.) What's sort of been ignored is one of the reasons everyone basically agrees that her candidacy was ultimately unsuccessful: she ran for months wearing the mantle of the experienced Washington insider (aka, the establishment) candidate. Please read that one more time, just on it's own. She ran as the establishment candidate. But think about what that means for a second, and what it means that the only female candidate in either party portrayed herself, and was portrayed as, too important, too established in the last, biggest bastion of male-ness — our representative government. Savor that for a second, actually. Then join me for some other positive things that Hillary has wrought upon the political climate. More »
crappy hour
Hillary Selfishly, Narcissistically, Delusionally -- Oh Hell, Genocidally -- Refuses To Concede!
Well look who's still here! Anyway, I didn't see much wrong with Hillary's non-concession speech last night. It was brief! It was predictable! But no, the internet's throwing another one of its modifier death matches. Jeffrey Toobin: "deranged narcissism." Or, wait, "outrageous, delusional". Or "frighteningly sad." One Brit went the "damn her with hyperbolic damnation you (unconvincingly) pretend is muted" route, dubbing it "the most abrasive, self-absorbed, selfish, delusional, emasculating and extortionate political speech I've heard in a long time. And I've left out some adjectives, just to be polite." Whatever dudes, why not take a cue from your Casual Encounter-inclined seeking Obamabros and focus your attention on the cute redhead behind her if that's what it takes. Less Talking Points, more Craigslist. Less fulminating, more masturbating. We've got our guy. His Rockwellian family portrait is gracing Drudge as we speak. And it's the 19th anniversary of Tiananmen, as Megan and I will note briefly after the jump. More »
crappy hour
Bitterroot, Or How We Came To Discuss Charlie Black And Mark Penn
Moe's off having a coughing fit and "enjoying" the side effects of DayQuil, so it's up to me to introduce you to one of John McCain's top advisors Charlie Black, aka, The Man Who Can't Be Fired. God, I want to be this guy, and not just because I keep getting fired. He can fuck up, he can have a negative story published about him every week and McCain will keep him around because... well, we're not really sure why, actually. But check in with Utah's liquor laws, my hatred for cover charges, Catholicism, Brutus, the 'burbs, Hillary, Chelsea, Barack and the Old Guy (you know, the regular crowd) and everyone's favorite guy to hate on, Mark Penn. It's all after the jump, people. Click through so Moe can afford her DayQuil tomorrow. More »
majority whipped
