Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker RedSonja: "What's your favorite pet name (not necessarily your own pet)?"
A friend of Todd's and mine in college was a guy who grew up on a farm, and, when he was a wee lad, had been given a pet cow, who he named Mrs. Steak. That is, by far, the greatest pet name I have ever heard.
He was a vegetarian, btw.
Most Hilarious Lead Evah?
What happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas - especially if you're the wife of a presidential candidate. Just ask Janet Huckabee, who attended a middleweight prize fight this past weekend in Las Vegas - where she stayed at the Hooters Casino Hotel.How much would I hate to be a Republican candidate? She, former First Lady of Arkansas, was at the fight because Jermain "Pride of Arkansas" Taylor was one of the competitors, and she stayed at the Hooters Hotel because she canceled her room at the MGM Grand when she thought she wasn't going to make her flight to Vegas. When she did, she stayed in one of two rooms a friend had at the Hooters joint, because "it was the only thing, quite frankly, that was available because the fights were in town."
That eye-opening combination - a title bout in Sin City, which celebrates gambling, drinking and all things wild, along with a hospitality chain favoring buxom waitresses in low-cut garb - could potentially shock the armies of evangelical conservative Christians who have made her husband, the former governor of Arkansas, the only remaining GOP opponent to party front-runner John McCain.
Personally, I'd rather sleep on the street than stay at the Hooters Hotel, but wev. The point is that Janet Huckabee now has to answer to a bunch of conservative hypocrites, who don't give a damn about treating women like equal citizens with autonomous control of their own bodies, why she was staying at the Hooters Hotel while visiting "Sin City" to see a boxing match. Doesn't she know she's the wife of a Baptist preacher and should never do anything but read the Bible and make Christian babies?!
Hilarious.
We're Not Popular in Belgrade Either
The US embassy was attacked and set ablaze earlier today:
Several hundred protesters have attacked the US and other embassies in Serbia's capital in anger at Western support for Kosovo's independence.Granted, it's nothing directly to do with Iraq, but it still saddens me to read of more anger directed towards us in the international arena. How long will it take the next administration to repair the damage?
Protesters broke into the US compound and briefly set part of the embassy alight. The UK, Belgian, Croatian and Turkish missions were also attacked.
The violence followed a peaceful rally earlier by at least 150,000 people outside the main parliament building.
The US, UK, Germany and Italy are among those to have recognised Kosovo.
Thanks, Shakers
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who took a moment to let me know in comments and/or by email that the blog means something to them, and to everyone who made a donation to keep Shakesville (and me) going. I don't really like to hold out my hat, but it's true that management of the community has become a full-time job; I usually work on the blog about 10 hours a day, and, if we've got an ad running, I make about 50 cents a day, after monthly expenses. So Mr. Shakes, who supports us to make Shakesville possible, and I are quite genuinely dependent on donations from people who enjoy the site, and I'm not very comfortable asking for them. So enormous thanks to everyone who chipped in yesterday.
It's exceedingly rare that I succumb to genuine feelings of futility, but this week I've just been really despairing about whether this all makes any difference. It's a weird thing—being harassed by a bunch of upright monkeys shitting on feminism, calling me the most unoriginal (and poorly spelled) insults on the planet, and telling me they hope I get raped and killed I can handle. I expect that. (Awful, but true.) But when I saw belligerent sexism emanating from people from whom I expect more, and a stubborn refusal to examine their privilege, it got to me. It made me feel hopeless and overwhelmed. I could see nothing but the ocean and not a sliver of shore.
All of you who remembered and referenced my teaspoon completely made me blub, and I feel embarrassed now that I even needed encouragement to just bloody carry on. But I did—and you provided, and I am immensely grateful to you all.
So here's a Shakesville Silver Teaspoon for Random Acts of Feminism for all the Shakers, for lifting up a crabby old feminist with more love and support than she rightly deserves.
Thanks, Shakers.
The Seven Percent Solution
Like a man who's wolfed down too much Ex-Lax, Ron Paul intones "I couldn't stop this movement if I tried." And with that assures us he's not, in fact, dropping out of the race. According to this electronic rimjob blog post from the L.A. Times, Paul's apparent strategy is to keep pulling in single digits (7% in Washington this week) in the primaries until both Huckabee and McCain fall ill and/or get caught snorting coke off an altar boy's ass. Paul has more money than his competitors, having built a loony pyramid scheme of wild-eyed contributors funneling cash and doubloons into his campaign (that's Libertarianism in action, I guess), and seems pretty confident he can jump right in as the Republican's default candidate should the current default candidate drop out. That's quite a plan. Almost brilliant in its stupidity, really. Except that it is, as I just noted, stupid. Good luck, Ron Paul, and here's to hoping Huckabee gets caught with his pants down.
Hallelujah!
The Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus have made another important religious appearance in a bag of Rold Gold pretzels!
Three years ago, Michael Fleming found the pretzel and has been saving it ever since.
Finder of Holy Pretzel, Michael Fleming: "I saw a similarity between the pretzel and the photo. … People seem genuinely moved by these images, and they seem to really believe that the Virgin Mary is appearing before them."
Now he and three co-workers have posted it on eBay, to share this remarkable miracle with the rest of the world. Or at least with someone who's got lots of spare cash to burn, since the bidding passed $1,000 in the first hour.
Friend of Holy Pretzel-finder Fleming, Chad "Tanner" Haney: "We're kind of capitalizing on the stupidity of eBay and the fact that people will buy anything. … I mean, this is authentic—straight from the heavens, right on eBay."
Beautiful.
Just to ensure that I go straight to hell without passing Go or collecting $200, I would like to note that I would give my right arm to see Bush choke on the Madonna-Jebus pretzel.
[Holy folks Gone Wild: Weeping and bleeding and appearing in fire and on pancakes, baking sheets, pizza pans, doggy doors, ice, peanuts, x-rays, turtles, ultrasounds, chocolate, dying plants, sheet metal, trees, more trees, more trees, more trees, more trees, more trees, wardrobes, water stains, plates of pasta, drywall, fish, grilled cheese sandwiches, and potato chips.]
What's in a Name?
In last night's QotD thread, Shaker Dariaclone said: "This is so not the right type of question for QOTD, but I so need to help with it that I am begging the Internets this week. How do you pick a kid's last name? (In a non-patriarchal, feminist way...)"
I was never particularly worried about the whole name thing for myself—my maiden name was no more mine, or no less patriarchal, than McEwan, so unless I wanted to make up a whole new name for myself and go through the process of legally changing it, it didn't really matter. I liked the way McEwan sounded, so I changed it. If Iain's last name had been Fartworthy, I wouldn't have.
If I'd ever planned to have kids, though, I'd probably be concerned about it, in the same way Dariaclone is. I like hyphenated family names, which are more common in Britain and Ireland (e.g. Daniel Day-Lewis). If you hyphenate in alphabetical order, that seems pretty egalitarian to me.
I also love what the mayor of Los Angeles and his (soon-to-be-ex-)wife did when they got married: He was Antonio Villar and she was Corina Raigosa, and they became the Villaraigosas. I've met a few gay couples who have done the same thing—smashing two names into one. That's very romantic, and creates a great last name for the kids, too.
Anyway, what are your thoughts, Shakers? Has anyone picked a kid's last name (or your own) with patriarchy-busting in mind? If so, what did you do?
Teenz Korner: Hillary Clinton is Ruining My Life
Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign is ruining my life. I'm not making any endorsements or condemnations, but before that uppity woman came along, at least in my circle of friends, sexism remained safely un-discussed. But Hillary saw all the happy male friends in the world and decided that it was time for her to blast them apart with a fucking stick of vagynomite. That's right—vagynomite!
I never had to worry about what my best teevee watching buddies thought about Gender Rights and Equality...it was irrelevant to us! The only political issues that we discussed back in the day were which people were running for President of Jay Jay's Pizza, and how they could possibly effect the future of the Cheeseburger Pizza. Now I have to hear statements like "Hillary is just a bitch, dude," or "LOL did u see that guy with the sign that said Iron My Shirt? That was a great argument he made against her policies." And in order to preserve these valued friendships, I just have to nod along with these formerly solid bros, and say things like "Toooootally," or "You do have a point in that her genitalia differs greatly from our own."
Hillary, out of respect for the friendship of gnarly dudes, stony bros, and all around high-five buddies across this great nation, please just drop out of the race and let Obama have his day in the sun. At least I can agree with my friends on one thing—Barack Obama would be totally fun to knock back icy brews with. And that's what we need in a president, god damn it. If we tried to knock back icy brews with Hills, who knows HOW much buzz she could potentially kill?
If not for the bros, then please, Hillary, just do it for the buzz. Don't kill the buzz.
[This has been another dispatch from Shakesville Teen Analyst and 18-year-old Man-Boy of Leisure Kenny Blogginz, who has previously reported on Dem Younginz, Young 'Publicans, and whether feminism is even necessary anymore, dude.]
Hoosier Favorite State That's Happy to Break the Rules for Ya...?
McCain gets some assistance from the corrupt wankstains that call themselves the Republican Party of Indiana:
Now, I'm originally from the 4th District, so curiosity led me to check out who had made it [onto the primary ballot] (and by how much) in my old stomping ground. To my surprise, I noticed that John McCain -- the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination -- was just a little short in a few districts, including my precious 4th, despite the fact that Attorney General Steve Carter had already turned in their petitions. I made a few phone calls, and one by one I found out that the McCain camp had got the job done across the state.Normally I expect more from Indiana's elected officials. But under "The Blade's" regime, I expect nothing but honking piles of shite. That's what happens when your state is full of senseless morons who decide to elect one of Bush's minions as governor. Nothing but shite and McCain love.
Except in the 4th District.
In the 4th District, they are short.
By my latest count, they turned in 496 signatures for the 4th, and the latest IED report for this morning shows them with only 491.
So this afternoon, I filed a challenge with the Secretary of State's office to keep John McCain off of the ballot.
…The DNC responded to my challenge in a release a short while ago, but the key part of it is this:Despite the fact that the McCain campaign clearly failed to qualify for the ballot, Republican Attorney General Steve Carter and Republican Secretary of State Todd Rokita (who recently endorsed McCain) rubberstamped it anyway, trying to sneak McCain onto the ballot. Clearly, the Republican Culture of Corruption is alive and well within the McCain campaign.A culture of corruption or a culture of incompetence, the fact remains that Hoosiers expect more from their officials, and I have no doubt McCain expected more from Mitch and the gang.
Which I realize is fairly redundant.
Ink Blots
The reaction to the McCain/Iseman story has been a lot more telling than the story itself, and you can see that the pundits and bloggers are putting their own spin or agenda behind the interpretation. It’s this week’s Rorschach test of the campaign.
They've come down roughly in three camps. First there's the kill-the-messenger group, mostly on the right, who claim this is just another smear job by the New York Times; that it is old news from the 2000 campaign, and there's not much to the story in the first place. Then there's the group that immediately jumped to the conclusion that Sen. McCain was having a sexual relationship with Ms. Iseman; after all, what else could the term "inappropriate relationship" mean, and they're jumping to the conclusion that we're on the verge of a Bill-and-Monica story again. And then there are those who are watching those first two groups and waiting to see if the story itself has legs or whether the story about the story is what will give it more than a one-day news cycle lifespan.
As for the story itself, it is long on Mr. McCain's history as a congressman and senator and his dealings with lobbyists and short on accusations of actual wrong-doing. It is more about the perception of Mr. McCain's relationships within his own campaign and how they could be used against him in the campaign. As Josh Marshall notes at TPM, it seems that the story has been lawyered down to the point that whatever raw meat there was that could have created an implication of a romantic relationship between the senator and the lobbyist has been taken out. (This is where the defenders of the senator jump in and say the story is too thin to warrant any attention and slam the New York Times for launching a smear job. A bit of a vicious cycle there.)
According to several reporters, including Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, this story has been floating around for several months and that Sen. McCain hired Robert Bennett, the lawyer who defended President Clinton, to intervene with the Times to kill the story in December, before the Iowa caucuses. According to other reports, the reason the Times came out with it now was because another outlet, The New Republic, was planning to put out its own story... about the Times not writing the story.
It will be interesting to see how the anti-McCain wingnuts in the conservative camp take to this story. On the one hand, they will see it as an affirmation that Sen. McCain is a sanctimonious hypocrite about campaign finance and lobbying reform with the titillation of a possible sex scandal thrown in, and that gives them even more reasons to hate him. But there's also the natural instinct to come to the defense of a Republican being attacked by the New York Times, that bastion of elitist left-wing liberalism. This may provide a bipolar moment for folks like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. My guess is that they will torture it enough that they can come down on both sides and still claim they were right about John McCain and the liberal media all along.
The McCain campaign issued a blustery non-denial denial, accusing the Times of launching a "hit-and-run smear campaign" and claiming that "Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics." The next couple of days will prove whether or not that's true.
(Cross-posted.)
Question of the Day
I'm so out of questions after doing like 900 of them, it's not even funny. So, today's QotD is: What question would you like to see asked as a future Question of the Day?
John McCain and the Lobbyist
From the New York Times:
Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.Stay tuned.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.
Cross-posted.
The New Sanjaya
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that American Idol hopeful Danny Noriega (left) will be this year's Sanjaya. Oh, he won't be quite the cultural phenomenon that Sanjaya was, no little girls will cry and bleat over him, but he'll be just as annoying. His little performance last night was rightly dubbed "grotesque" by Simon, and it'll only be downhill from here. He will long outstay his welcome, beating better singers into the finals, where he'll grate on our ears like nails on a chalkboard. Think I'm wrong? Just wait and see.
FYI
I'm about to go on a rampage of enormous proportions. I swear to the fucking gods, if you cross me today, be prepared to have the full fucking gravity of the Queen Cunt's wrath rain down upon you with a ferocity of unprecedented magnitude.
Should you choose to ignore this warning, steel yourself for a throwdown.
My tolerance with the shenanigans going on in some of the threads around here the past few days is goodbye baby gone, so long, nice knowing you. I waved adieu to patience about 24 hours ago. Requests that I politely indulge ignorant sexist horseshit will be ignored for the foreseeable future. There might also be a little of this later:
Consider yourself warned.
Impossibly Beautiful, Part Kate
Seriously, what have they done to this woman's face?
Naw, just kiddin'. It pretty much looks like me, only in really good lighting and with loads of make-up on. (And too damn much hairspray -- wish they could have 'shopped out the crunchiness.) I just wanted an excuse to post about being this week's freakin' cover girl for what my friend Mean Asian Girl describes as "our local Tribune-lame-attempt-at-catering-to-the-18-to-34-demographic tabloid, where the coverage is primarily focused on Lindsay Lohan and what's happening on American Idol."
If that weren't surreal enough by itself, I keep getting e-mails from people saying things like, "I sat on your face on the el this morning!" and "I picked you up off a garbage can!"
Article can be found here.
It's Only a Theory
Following up from this post two weeks ago, the Florida Board of Education will now allow the public schools to teach evolution.
For the first time ever, evolution is to be taught clearly and explicitly in Florida classrooms now that the state Board of Education approved a batch of new science standards Tuesday that mention the ''E'' word.I know the Religious Right thinks they won some sort of victory by qualifying "evolution" by making it the object of a prepositional phrase, but in reality, scientists are not uncomfortable attaching "theory" to it, because that's what it is. The religious advocates think the word "theory" leaves open the door for doubt, but, to quote the immortal Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
But there's a catch: The subject will be taught as ''the scientific theory of evolution.''
As originally proposed, the science standards, updated for the first time since 1996, didn't call evolution a ''theory'' when they were drafted and reviewed by a panel of experts last year. Following numerous public complaints, though, the state Department of Education suggested the wording change to clearly label every scientific law and theory -- not just about evolution -- as such.
The seven-member board adopted the alternate proposal, and therefore the standards, by a 4-3 vote.
Religious advocates wanted more.
They proposed a so-called ''academic freedom'' amendment to counter what they say is the ''dogmatic'' tone of the standards that call evolution ''the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.'' The amendment would have given teachers explicit permission ''to engage students in a critical analysis of that evidence.''
Scientists are very careful to describe what the word theory means.
In science, a theory is a mathematical or logical explanation, or a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theories commonly used to describe and explain this behaviour are Newton's theory of universal gravitation, and general relativity.(The fundies, on the other hand, would have you believe it's intelligent falling.)
In common usage, the word theory is often used to signify a conjecture, an opinion, or a speculation. In this usage, a theory is not necessarily based on facts; in other words, it is not required to be consistent with true descriptions of reality. This usage of theory leads to the common incorrect statement "It's not a fact, it's only a theory." True descriptions of reality are more reflectively understood as statements which would be true independently of what people think about them. In this usage, the word is synonymous with hypothesis.The evangelicals say they only want to open the discussion in classrooms to the possibilities of other explanations for the origins of life on earth, but what they're really trying to do is to sneak their religious mythology into the public schools.
Of course, that's only a theory.
(Cross-posted.)
Periodically Speaking: Part Two
On Monday, some readers challenged my assertion that "periodically feeling down" is a dog whistle by questioning what Obama had to gain with sexist appeals:
what convinces me this is PROBABLY not a sexist dog whislte [sic] that I don't see how this in any way helps Obama, so it makes no sense for him to do itWhite Men Jumped.
He's WINNING so why would he shoot himself in the foot?
You could convince me otherwise if you could tell me what he could possibly gain in the Democratic Primary (or in general) by being sexist. Without that, it seems rather dubious to suggest that this was deliberate sexism on his part.
That's why I think this is more of an unforced error than an intentional line of attack: this doesn't help, it only hurts.
I keep hearing it asserted that it is "beneficial" for men to use and hear this sort of language, but how is it beneficial?
White men can jump—to Obama.
Obama devastated Clinton among men in the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday.
Etc.
That's not to take away from Obama's decisive victory last night—he improved among other demographics, too. It's just to point out that the suggestion Obama had nothing to gain by appealing to (sexist) men was patently wrong. He had room to improve with working class white men in particular—and he did.
