This came up in comments. How come a “women’s magazine” (“woman’s magazine”?) means Vogue or Cosmo or Good Housekeeping or Glamour or Marie Clair, but does not mean Ms. or Bitch or On Our Backs?
Archive for Politics
An Inconvenient Truth
Last night, Olberman showed an extensive interview between Katie Couric and Al Gore. The focus was An Inconvenient Truth. This was an amazing interview, really blew me away. I learned two things.
First, Al Gore is amazingly personable. Kind of funny, warm, brilliant yet cuddly. When did this happen? I don’t remember this. He’s maybe sexier than Olberman.
Second, is it me, or was Couric flirting? How can she do interviews when she’s giving the coy, girly, I’m-gonna-ask-you-a-good-one-now face? Ew.
Impeachment should not be off the table
I’m inspired by mealy-mouthed, weak-willed Nancy Pelosi as well as by Shakespeare’s Sister’s conversation with Evan Bayh, whose hat is hovering over the Presidential ring in a pre-tossed state.
Shakes asked Bayh about Pelosi and didn’t get a progressive-heart-warming answer:
He went on to say that the American people didn’t like it when the Republican Congress went after Clinton when they should have been paying attention to jobs and the economy and shit, and there was a backlash, and the Dems won seats during midterms—and if the Dems tried to impeach Bush, the same thing would happen, because it would be viewed as motivated by a vendetta.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
Let’s compare. » Read more..
Sex is sacred. Therefore, have some.
Why is sex the only sacred thing that conservatives want you to do less?
Per Amanda, I learn that whacko nutjob freakazoid Dawn Eden wants sex to stay “a great mystery” (read: “about which you are uneducated”). Of course, she also doesn’t want you to have “casual” sex, or sex outside marriage, or sex with contraception, or sex in certain positions, or using certain parts, and certainly not using the same parts for both partners, and definitely not having more than one partner, and no the frick way having less than one partner, and not with devices and not during your period and probably if you’re a woman you also shouldn’t come.
So here’s the thing. We’re told that prayer is sacred, and so Christians pray often, every chance they get, in many different contexts. We’re told going to church is sacred, so Christians go often. Catholics especially just pop on by the big pretty building to light an extra candle. We’re told that giving charity is sacred, and so religious people of all stripes should give more, and more often. We’re told sex is sacred, and so we should…not have sex?
As they say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other. » Read more..
Not acceptable
My sister just wrote the most amazing blog about being a fat woman that maybe I’ve ever read.
Mandisa, American Idol contestant, a big beautiful woman (genuinely big, genuinely beautiful) was told by Paula Abdul that she has a beautiful face. Let’s finish that sentence… ‘despite how fat you are’ or, the perennial favorite, ‘if only you would lose weight’. And Mandisa did not know enough, I assert, to find that comment insulting. Katharine McPhee is told every week how beautiful she looks. Not her face, but her.
Read the whole thing.
Update: Link corrected.
You Are My Everything
I was reading this interesting post by Jill of Feministe. She’s talking about the situation that many feminist women find ourselves in, of being in relationships with men who aren’t feminists, or who think they are feminists, but have some seriously sexist blind spots.
[I]n just about every relationship I’ve been in, there have been at least a few feminist falling-outs. They weren’t usually deal-breakers, but they shaped my view of the person that I was with, and they generally just made me feel bad – like there was another reminder that I wasn’t entirely safe, even within my own relationship, and that this person who I cared about and maybe even loved could never really see me or get it.
The thing this got me thinking about was not feminism per se, but relationships, and the huge demands we place on them. » Read more..
Thank the Goddess
I am very, very glad that the FDA advisory panel has approved the HPV vaccine. But I must say, it is bittersweet to be happy about something that truly should have been a given.
Tar babies and apologies
In looking into the whole “hug the tar baby” thing, I find citations of Tony Snow using the phrase as far back as 1999. It seems it’s a pet phrase of his.
On the way to work this morning, I was listening to Rachael Maddow, and she explained that yesterday, she’d called Snow to task for using “tar baby” because, although it is a phrase meaning “sticky or inextricable situation,” it’s also a racial epithet. Later in the show yesterday, she used the word “bohunk,” which she didn’t realize was also an offensive epithet. So today she apologized for it, laughed and moved on.
It was so easy. It astonishes me that people don’t know that apologizing is easy. It is a natural thing, because sooner or later, we all need to apologize. It can be discomfitting to approach, but is often pleasant in the hearing.
The current administration seems structured around the idea that apologizing is offensive and wrong. “Stay the course” is not just their watchword in Iraq, it’s their watchword in everything they do, because they cannot and must not be wrong.
It’s not the worst thing about Bushco, but it may be the most inhuman.
Monday Movie Review: About Schmidt
About Schmidt (2002) 6/10
Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) has just retired, and his wife has just died. Empty and sad, he journeys to his daughter’s (Hope Davis) wedding.
An entire thesis could be, and perhaps has been, written about the role in this film of Kathy Bates’s naked ass. By the time Schmidt arrives in Denver to meet the parents of his future son-in-law Randall (Dermot Mulroney), we are relieved by their warmth. Roberta (Bates) has a home painted in deep rusts and golds, decorated with art and musical instruments, and she dresses in a flowing purple caftan. After an hour of Schmidt’s sorrowful, repressed, seething grays and tans and blues, arriving in Denver is like finding a warm fire after trudging through the snow. » Read more..
What’s that odor?
I wake up to morning news on WCBS AM. (I find that if I wake up to music, there is considerably less “waking up” involved.) I am often bemused by how conservative a CBS station is—you know, the network of Dan Rather and all that. But today takes the cake.
Yesterday, I woke up to the story of the NSA tracking millions (!) of American phone calls. CBS presented me with two “person in the street” voices (for “balance”), one was mildly concerned, the other was a man saying “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about” (only with a New York accent) (moron) (y’think his name was Winston Smith?).
So today, the headline is that everyone is exploding about these revelations, both ordinary people and politicians. This time, three sound clips:
- The same moron saying he had nothing to hide (presumably they could only find one person that stupid)
- A politician (sounded like Hastert, can’t be sure) saying that breaches of national security (i.e. the story itself) were of grave concern, and
- A woman with a Hispanic accent saying she was concerned about her privacy.
Your lesson, boys and girls? Real Americans think this is okay. Suspicious brown people with accents worry about (sniff, snort, hehehe) “privacy”.
That funny odor you smell is the Constitution burning.
