The Limbaugh Effect
Rush Limbaugh thinks he had a hand in the Indiana primary.
As he had before several recent primaries, Limbaugh encouraged listeners to vote for Clinton to "bloody up Obama politically" and prolong the Democratic fight.Back before the Michigan primary -- remember that? -- some leftie bloggers encouraged their readers in Michigan to try the same thing: get Democrats to vote for Romney so he would become the GOP nominee. It had minimum effect, obviously, probably because very few Democrats are willing to throw away their vote for the sake of mischief.
Limbaugh crowed about the success of his ploy all day Tuesday, featuring on-air testimonials from voters in Indiana and North Carolina who recounted their illicit pleasure in casting a vote for Clinton. "Some of the people show up and they ask for a Democrat ballot, and the poll worker says, 'Why, what are you going to do?' He says, 'Operation Chaos,' and they just laugh," Limbaugh said Tuesday.
But Limbaugh called off the operation yesterday, saying he wants Obama to be the party's pick, because "I now believe he would be the weakest of the Democrat nominees."
He added: "He can get effete snobs, he can get wealthy academics, he can get the young, and he can get the black vote, but Democrats do not win with that."
Rush can gloat all he wants, but all this kind of frat-boy prank does is prove that the only way he thinks that the Republicans can win is by cheating.
(Cross-posted.)
Top Chef Open Thread
Chef Tom Colicchio will drink. your. milkshake!!!
He will also, if you will accompany him into his suspiciously sexy kitchen, show you the proper way to toss a salad.
Question of the Day
What's the best non-fiction book you've ever read?
I'll have to think about this one for awhile, before I can answer it. At current brain capacity, I'll have an answer by next Tuesday.
Flyover Dis
My fellow Hoosier Lauren has a great piece in The American Prospect called "Dispatches from Flyover Country," in which she bemoans the coverage of Indiana—and its residents—in the national media.
Hoosiers have been in the national spotlight over the past few weeks, and I’ve noted that many disparaging stereotypes make it into the national media coverage of my fair state -- stereotypes that reinforce the myth of a beer-drinking, pickup-driving Republican stronghold that is hopelessly out of touch with coastal progressivism. As a life-long Indiana resident, I personally vouch for blue veins running through this state and throughout the Midwest, a fact frequently ignored in favor of maintaining the awestruck-hillbilly myth. If reporters and pundits took a look past the stereotypes, they’d see that Indiana is a lot more complex and important than they think it is.The whole thing is worth a read, just because it's so right on, not that it will change the opinion of anyone who can't be arsed to paint Hoosiers as anything but a sea of Woody Boyd clones in the first place.
The funny thing is that I wrote a post that echoes many of the same complaints—right down to Hoosiers being a practical lot and our decidedly purply hue—on my fourth day of blogging (although my piece was directed specifically at lefty writers, rather than the MSM). The ideas underlying my Notes from a Red State were a big part of the reason I started blogging in the first place.
They're the same ideas underlying Lauren's piece, and a big part of the reason I'm still at it.
Wednesday Blogaround
What's the frequency, Shakers?
Recommended Reading:
Matttbastard: Experiences with Gender Discrimination in Politics
Echidne: Look in the Mirror!
Elle: "On the surface it certainly does not look good..."
John: Will Jon Stewart Ask John McCain Some Tough Questions on Wed?
Andy: Lawrence Webb Is Virginia's First Openly Gay Black Elected Official
Shayera: Another One
Lurleen: NPR: Lesbianism is "a Lifestyle"
Adorable Girlfriend: The Further Decline
SAP: Lesson Learned
Leave your links in comments!
Mullet, Jugs, and Speed
I don't know if you've seen the movie Crank starring Jason Statham, but if you ever have the opportunity, don't. It sucks. I recently described it to some cohorts as "a vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile movie."
When pressed for clarification I responded:
Everything about it was awful.So I was kind of surprised when I read they were making a sequel. It's doubly strange considering Statham's character does end up dying at the end and is somehow set to star in the follow-up. (And hey, if I just ruined the ending of the movie for you, too bad, I consider that part of my civic duty.) Maybe he'll play an Evil Twin™ or something. Perhaps he'll only show up in flashbacks.
Foremost was the scene where the hero wants to have sex with his girlfriend, and she says "no" over and over again. That doesn't stop him from pouncing on her. (There's a word for that, you know.) Of course, she suddenly gets into it and turns into a wildcat. All of this happens on the sidewalk in Chinatown, as throngs of onlookers hoot, holler and cheer.
Then there was a foot chase through a hospital where the hero ran over and shoved down countless patients, which I think was supposed to be funny. Or maybe not. I dunno. It went on far too long and was really off-putting.
There was also that tired old sight gag where the hero has a raging hard-on and it's sticking straight out from his waist. Not funny the first time I saw that gag twenty-five years ago, not funny now. (Has anyone in Hollywood ever actually had an erection?)
There was not one likable character in the whole thing. The hero was a contract killer who rapes his girlfriend, beats up elderly hospital patients, makes homophobic wisecracks, etc. and yet we're supposed to somehow give a shit if he lives or dies.
Personally I was hoping the bad guys would kill him.
Not to mention the film making itself was garish, obnoxious, edited in a manner reminiscent of Ritalin-starved music videos by third-rate rock acts.
It was the worst movie I've seen in a long time, and dude, I rented Frankenfish recently.
Or maybe he'll be a spectral mentor to the film's other star, Corey Haim. (It could be like Faraway, So Close!, but with buckets of misogyny, racism and homophobia.) Haim may be too much the human trainwreck to appear in Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, but is apparently just trainwrecky enough to be in Crank 2: High Voltage (see inset).
I just hope that's a picture of him after makeup.
Now, I'm going to get a little personal here and address this last bit directly to Jason Statham: I really liked you in Snatch and The Italian Job. I even enjoyed you in Transporter, despite that film otherwise being a total box of suck. I know you want to be a big action star, but come on, crap like this isn't a good idea. Do you think Schwarzenegger looks back on Commando with anything other than shame? How do you think Stallone feels about having Cobra on his résumé? At least Cobra had that weird little scene with Brigitte Nielsen and the robots.
All I'm saying, Jason, to you and everyone else in Hollywood, please stop making crap like this. Please please please. We don't need it. We don't want it.
Rape Is Not a Crime? Who Knew?
(Hi. This is Kathy from Birmingham Blues. When I tipped Liss on this story, she asked me to write a post. Here it is. Thanks, Liss!)
**Trigger Warning** (and I apologize profusely for not including this originally)
Last year, Echidne wrote about three De Anza college students, members of the women's soccer team, who rescued a girl who was apparently being gang-raped by several members of the school's baseball team:
Lauren Chief Elk and April Grolle are 20-year old De Anza College students and teammates on the school's soccer squad. They were leaving a party at a house when they realized something wrong was going on in a back room where the doors were closed and the lights were off.Right. She got drunk and raped herself. And, as it turns out, the vomit in her mouth was not her own. I guess she got drunk and insisted that someone else vomit in her mouth too.
"We heard and saw a girl tapping on this door in the kitchen saying 'There is a girl in there with eight guys," explains Chief Elk. They say they tried to get into the room, but were confronted by a baseball player. "[He said] 'Mind your own business; she wants to be in here' and slams the door," says Grolle. What they saw through a crack in the door horrified them. "When I looked in, I saw about ten pairs of legs surrounding a girl, lying on the mattress on the floor and a guy on top of her with his pants down and his hips thrusting on top of her," recall Chief Elk. "And when I saw that I knew immediately something wasn't right. It just didn't look right." "I saw that this young girl did not want to be in there, and that's when we just went 'We're getting this girl out of there,'" says Grolle. April and Lauren -- along with a third soccer player named Lauren Breayans -- broke down the door and were shocked with what they found. "This poor girl was not moving. She had vomit dribbling down her face. We had to scoop vomit out of her mouth [and] lift her up. Her pants were completely off her body," says Chief Elk. "She had her one shoe one, her jeans were wrapped around one of her ankles and her underwear was left around her ankles. To the left of the bed there was some condom thrown on the ground." "When they lifted her head up, her eyes moved and she said 'I'm sorry,'" says Grolle. "One of the guys who was in the room said 'This is her fault. She got drunk and she did this to herself.'"
For their pains, the three women who pulled her out of that horror were ignored by the district attorney's office, which decided at the time not to prosecute the case, and threatened for speaking out.
"People I didn't even know were coming up to me and saying, 'Stop your lying. Shut your f -- mouth,' " Chief Elk said in an interview last week. "We'd be walking around, and people would actually come up and get in our face."Outrage over the district attorney's failure to prosecute the alleged rapists led the California Attorney General's office to review the decision, and on Friday -- almost a year later -- it released a statement that there was insufficient evidence to file charges. I guess there wasn't, given that the local grand jury never heard testimony from the three women who witnessed the assault.
It reached the point where they felt threatened. Cmdr. John Hirokawa of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department confirms that deputies were called to the campus on a complaint of harassment.
"I can say that we went out there at least once in regards to a possible complaint," Hirokawa said. "People were warned."
Now comes Debra Saunders, sage of the San Francisco Chronicle, to opine on the AG's decision. To her credit, she doesn't try to pretend this wasn't rape. She doesn't imply that a girl who was unconscious, with someone else's vomit in her mouth, had somehow consented to be violated. She acknowledges the heroism of the three women who intervened. She even soft-soaps the victim-blaming that always seems to surface in cases like this:
Lauren Breayans, Lauren Chief Elk and April Grolle - three soccer players who say they saw the girl being sexually assaulted and brought her to the hospital - issued a statement voicing their disappointment "in the entire criminal justice system. The message seems to be, if you get an underage girl drunk enough, you can get away with rape."But then she truly goes off the deep end. She questions the victim's decision to file a civil suit. She quotes an attorney who represents the son of the owners of the house where the rape took place as saying, "The issue isn't whether it's acceptable conduct, the issue is whether it's a crime," and then follows with this stunner:
...Sadly, in a way the soccer players may not have meant, they are right. Teenagers do need to be very wary about what others can do to them when they drink...
And if it is a crime, is it the same as premeditated rape? It may well be that civil courts are better suited to redress what happened at that March 2007 party.Oh, dear God. If it's a crime? From where I stand, rape is always a crime. What difference does it make whether or not it's premeditated? And yet she thinks the perpetrators should get a pass because they were drunk too.
According to Grolle and another source, the vomit on Jane Doe was not hers. Is it in society's interest to prosecute kids who are months older than Jane Doe for doing things in an alcohol-fueled atmosphere that they never would have done sober or alone? I think there's reasonable doubt.
Here's a question for you, Debra. If a drunk teenager chooses to get into a car with a bunch of other drunk teenagers, takes the wheel, and unpremeditatedly rams the car into your teenager, do you think we should give the driver a pass because s/he would never have done such a thing if s/he had been sober or alone? Give me a break.
As Tom Hilton says over at If I Ran the Zoo,
Now the defense attorney knows very well the issue isn't "whether it's a crime"; he knows it is a crime, no whethers about it, and to spin it otherwise is completely despicable. It's also, in a despicable sort of way, part of his job. Not an excuse, but a mitigating factor.
But there's no such mitigation for Debra Saunders. How fucking stupid do you have to be to buy into that despicable spin?
Debra Saunders stupid, I guess.
News from Shakes Manor
I'm getting better! And I'm keeping clear of cudgels.
Happy Blogiversary...
...to SB Gypsy at The Gypsy's Caravan, celebrating five years of caravanning goodness. (And thanks to SB Gypsy for spending a lot of that time as a Shaker, too!)
The Line is Drawn Here
by Shaker Sarah in Chicago
[I asked Liss if she wouldn't mind posting this for me, and she has been wonderful enough to agree, as per her usual awesome self.]
On Tuesday April 29th last week, the College Republicans at Smith College held an event where Ryan Sorba, author of the Born Gay Hoax was to speak. The group was not expecting a huge turnout.
They were wrong.
A huge crowd turned up, and they weren't there for the refreshments. They drowned out Sorba, to the point of 10 minutes into his talk, Sorba gave up, being unable to be heard over the noise the protesters were making. The protesters even opened up the windows apparently to let more in to the session.
Of course, the conservatives are crying foul, claiming Sorba's freedom of speech was restricted, proving once again they do not know constitutional law. The usual shit that we get from their ilk when they can't take the heat of the kitchen.
However, even the Smith College president criticised the protesters, saying that the ideal of the college's free expression of ideas was compromised, and saying they were looking into whether or not college regulations were broken.
And you know what? Bullshit.
Maybe it's because I don't believe in 'freedom of speech', or more specifically the fundamentalism of infinitely free speech (and yes, I realise that many of you here disagree with me on this, but that's not really the point of this piece), but while I often agree with the free debate of issues (hell, in the Enlightenment French cafe debate ideal of the 19th century), I don't think it really applies here.
This ISN'T merely the exchange of opinions and ideas. This isn't about people on differing sides of issues finding together common ground and the best solution. THIS IS OUR LIVES.
We're in a battle for our very lives, for our human and civil rights, to live in our neighbourhoods and communities and be free from intimidation and violence. To love and date and treasure our families, friends and partners. To fight against oppression and heterosexism.
These aren't merely abstractions we're debating here. These are our LIVES. A bunch of conservatives thought they had the right to have a say in something that, honestly, doesn't fucking concern them in the slightest. How DARE they think they get to have a say on my life, my love, and those of my friends and loved ones? How fucking DARE THEY?
So yes, we will take this fight to you. We will shut you down. We will drown out those that would spread hate and intolerance under the 'protection' of freedom of ideas. Because you aren't spreading ideas and debate; even if you dress it up in the trappings of such a Trojan Horse, we recognise it for what it is—hate.
And we know what to do with hate.
This field of ideas is not level; we do not come to here on some fictional equal footing. To get where we even are now we have had to scrape, fight, struggle, bleed, and, yes, die, for every millimetre of ground. To somehow grant those with the privilege of hegemony to have an 'equal' say in our lives is to ignore the oppressions that have silenced us throughout history, that STILL privilege their voices, their arguments, over our own today.
And so I say enough. We will fight back in civil disobedience like this because the very civil world gives their vileness protections that should not be granted to hate. I say again, how DARE they think they get to have a say in this? I am not curtailing their rights. I am not arguing to have their love, their basic humanity, taken away from them. I am not trying to have them killed, alone, in the dark, as the life drains slowly out of them in some cornfield, tied to a fence. This isn't merely two sides of the same coin.
This is our LIVES. This is not merely some debate where you think I should just respect your 'opinion' to dehumanise me and deny me citizenship and my civil rights. How insane can you be to think we're merely going to listen to hate like that, and just go "We'll, you're entitled to that, I'll respect you" as though you weren't arguing for the denial of our equality. Our humanity. Our love.
This is not a debate. This is our lives.
This is our lives.
(Crossposted.)
[This post is dedicated to SZ, who knows who she is. Who last evening did something amazing and totally unrelated to this post, just to make me feel good and special; to let me sleep well.]
How it Works
So, the other day I was talking to a reporter who asked--in the role of devil's advocate--whether it's appropriate for me to be a fat acceptance activist, when I'm only a size or two bigger than the average American woman. Can I really speak for someone 100 or 200 lbs. heavier than me, or more?
The answer--as I've said here before--is yes and no. Can I speak to the experience of living in a much larger body? No. Am I fat enough to have faced discrimination and hatred, and to be motivated to fight against those things on behalf of all fat people? Hell, yes.
Exhibit A. I'm walking home from Pilates this afternoon, and I stop for a red light. Light turns green, I start walking across the intersection, and some asshole barrels around the corner, clearly not seeing me. I stop walking and he hits his brakes--with a resounding skreeee--at approximately the same time. We exchange dirty looks, and I take another step--just as asshole hits the gas again, intending to blow past me.
Me: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? IT'S A CROSSWALK!
Asshole: WELL THEN WHY DON'T YOU FUCKING WALK, YOU FUCKING WHALE?
Woman sitting at outdoor cafe across the street: WHAT THE--?
No kidding, lady.
Let's review. This asshole didn't look where he was going and nearly hit a pedestrian. Therefore, I deserve to be shamed for the size of my body.
Of course. That's how it works.
Assholes like that do not look at me and think, "Hmm, she looks only slightly bigger than the average woman." They do not yell, "YOU FUCKING MILD TO MODERATE CHUB!" They think, "fat chick." And they yell, "YOU FUCKING WHALE!"
And if I have this particular asshole pegged right--which I'm pretty sure I do, however brief our encounter--he is the kind of guy who would also look at someone smaller than the average American woman and think the same thing. It doesn't matter how often you trot out that statistic, or how many idiot columnists claim that since a majority of the population is categorized as overweight, fat has clearly become "socially acceptable." In many people's minds, a woman who is not thin is fat, period, and that is not okay.
Furthermore, the average American woman, for all her averageness, is well into "fat" territory. She teeters on the brink of plus sizes, probably has some flesh that isn't rock solid, will find herself standing next to much thinner women almost everywhere she goes, and will almost never see a woman her size on television or in a magazine who isn't A) depicted as lonely, clueless, and a compulsive overeater for "comedic" value, or B) there to talk about the beginning of her weight loss journey. It really doesn't take any more than that to make a woman think her body is abnormally large--and we all know that the larger your body is, the more shameful it is. So, while the average American woman (or the woman a little smaller or a little bigger) doesn't face anywhere near the volume of discrimination and hatred that much bigger people do, she probably thinks she's fat and hates herself for it--and plenty of strangers definitely think she's fat and hate her for it.
Meanwhile, people both fatter and thinner than she is will repeatedly tell her she's not fat, in an effort to be "polite," and/or get her to quit whining. But they're not there when her boyfriend pinches her belly and says she should do some sit-ups. They're not there when she orders a whole milk latte, and the barista looks at her like she asked for two shots of dead baby in it. They're not there when her mother berates her thirty-year-old ass for ordering dessert, and goes on to insinuate that that's why she's single. They're not there when her thinner co-workers make self-deprecating remarks about the size of their thighs, assuming she'll relate, 'cause... well, obviously. They're not there when a brand spankin' newbie at the gym she's been going to for two years comes up to her and says, "Good job! Keep it up!" They're not there when her doctor tries to put her on Weight Watchers when she's come in barfing up blood. They're not there when she watches TV and sees only much thinner women presented as attractive. They're not there when she looks at a "plus-size" model and realizes that woman, too, is smaller than her--and has long, relatively thin legs and a practically "perfect" hourglass figure, to boot. And they're not there when some asshole yells, "You fucking whale!"--or "Fat bitch!" "Fat cunt!" "Lardass!" "Fatass!" "Cow!"--at her from a passing car.
'Cause guess what--that happened when I was the size of the average American woman, too.
Now, some of you are probably striking up the world's smallest violin right now, so let me make it clear that I am not whining that in-betweenies have it just as bad as fatter fatties here. Don't get me wrong: it's not even close. But this "the average American woman wears a size 14!" shit is utterly meaningless in terms of defining what's "fat" and what's "normal" in this culture. Might I remind you that according to doctors, this woman is normal, this woman is overweight, and this woman is obese. Yes, the whole point of the BMI project is to illustrate how fucked those categories are, but it's one of the metrics for determining fatness that haunts the average American woman--along with images in the media, clothing sizes, and the judgments of both family and strangers. So the next time some barely chubby friend or partner or sister or daughter of yours complains about feeling fat, and your kneejerk response is to tell her she's not, as if she's being utterly ridiculous? Take a moment to consider that maybe she's not. Maybe, just maybe, she's heard from about 1,000 other sources that she is, in fact, fatty fat fat fat, no matter what you happen to think. Maybe just this afternoon some dickhead called her a fucking whale because she had the temerity to cross the street in front of his car, and she felt too ashamed to tell you about it.
You're right, of course, to want to get the message across to this woman that there is nothing wrong with her body. She could probably stand to hear that. But telling her she's not fat is not the same thing. It denies her the anguish she feels about having a body that deviates from the ideal, however slightly--and believe me, deviating even slightly is plenty to cause legitimate anguish--and worse yet, it reinforces the message that her being fat by some other standard would mean there was something wrong with her body.
That's the underlying problem here--not whether the woman is officially "fat," but that so many of us automatically equate fat with a host of other negative characteristics, with there indeed being something wrong with your body. The hilarious thing is that just before this wankstain yelled at me, my Pilates instructor--a student teacher who's not used to me yet, let alone to how all sorts of different bodies work--had been falling all over herself telling me how amazingly strong and flexible I am. (Thank you, yoga.) In the space of ten minutes, I went from being praised up and down for what my body can do to being cruelly insulted because it's not a socially acceptable size. And if that doesn't drive home the point that the real problem is not anybody's fucking fat but a culture that insists fat bodies are intrinsically worthless, I don't know what will.
Another question that reporter asked me was, "Does it still hurt when people say mean things about your body?" I told her honestly that it mostly doesn't anymore--but that I only got here because it hurt like hell for almost twenty years, until I finally got fucking sick to death of internalizing all the nasty things people said, directly or indirectly, about my body. Trolls, especially, just crack me up these days; they're so bloody ridiculous and predictable, it doesn't even occur to me to do anything but laugh. But sometimes? Yeah, it still stings. Today was one of those times. There I was, walking home on a beautiful afternoon, high from a good workout and the praise of my instructor, and out of nowhere, there it was: YOU FUCKING WHALE.
For a moment, I'd almost forgotten that no matter how much I like my own body, other people will always be happy to hate it for me. For a moment, I'd almost forgotten that's how it works.
Question of the Day
Following up on the Quote of the Day, care of the lovely Lily Tomlin: Who's your favorite funny lady?
In case you, like Christopher Hitchens, have problems thinking of women who are funny, here are the first 100 off the top of my head: Kirstie Alley, Bea Arthur, Lucille Ball, Maria Bamford, Elizabeth Banks, Samantha Bee, Sandra Bernhard, Elayne Boosler, Jo Brand, Carol Burnett, Amanda Bynes, Nell Carter, Margaret Cho, Mo Collins, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Curtain, Joan Cusack, Yvonne De Carlo, Ellen Degeneres, Phyllis Diller, Rachel Dratch, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Nora Dunn, Susie Essman, Conchata Ferrell, America Ferrera, Tina Fey, Jenna Fischer, Carrie Fisher, Dawn French, Mo Gaffney, Janeane Garofalo, Estelle Getty, Marla Gibbs, Peri Gilpin, Judy Gold, Whoopi Goldberg, Kathy Griffin, Jasmine Guy, Melora Hardin, Goldie Hawn, Cheryl Hines, Jan Hooks, Jane Horrocks, Bonnie Hunt, Jackée, Victoria Jackson, Mindy Kaling, Jann Karam, Julie Kavner, Diane Keaton, Catherine Keener, Regina King, Angela Kinsey, Lisa Kudrow, Jane Leeves, Wendy Liebman, Joanna Lumley, Jane Lynch, Shirley MacLaine, Kathleen Madigan, Leslie Mann, Penny Marshall, Andrea Martin, Etta May, Rue McClanahan, Bette Midler, Mo'Nique, Mary Tyler Moore, Kathy Najimy, Laraine Newman, Catherine O'Hara, Park Overall, Amanda Peet, Rhea Perlman, Amy Poehler, Paula Poundstone, Parker Posey, Gilda Radner, Caroline Rhea, Joan Rivers, Esther Rolle, Roseanne, Rita Rudner, Maya Rudolph, Mercedes Ruehl, Jennifer Saunders, Julia Sawalha, Amy Sedaris, Sarah Silverman, Loretta Swit, Wanda Sykes, Judy Tenuta, Lily Tomlin, Aisha Tyler, Tracy Ullman, Nia Vardalos, Nancy Walls, Betty White, Dianne Wiest.
Can You Tell the Difference Between McCain and a Carrot?
Shaker Bekitty passes on this quiz, care of MoveOn.org, which first tests your ability to discern between President Mondo Fucko and John McCain, and then graduates to testing your ability to discern between John McCain and a crappy old carrot.
Have fun!
SHOEZ!
They came today! I love them. I want to be buried with them. I must have them in all three colors now.
Blurgh.
I have the worst stomach flu I have had in years, and now I have to stop shivering and puking long enough to go vote.
Can she do it…? Stay tuned!
Darn you, Democracy! The things I do for you. I hope you appreciate it!
(This really is the most unimaginably horrible flu. Or food poisoning. Or wev. I am positively wrecked. Iain, who is also suffering the same intestinal misfortune, described it as feeling he'd been shoved in a bag, hoisted by a crane, and slammed into the side of a building. Pretty much.)
UPDATE: I did it! And I didn't even hurl on anyone. Wheeeeeeeee!
Fair and Balanced
Chris Matthews spoke last night at the Institute of Politics, and the Harvard Crimson (a Politico campus partner) was on hand.But how does he smell, Chris? We need to know how he smells. Officially.“I am here to make something of a confession,” Matthews said. “Television is limited in the way it can tell the political story of our time.”And later.
The host of MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” went on to “confess” the media’s propensity to focus only on the hot story of the day—the “ring of fire”—as well as his views on the current administration and the upcoming presidential race.When asked by another audience member how he would respond to the claim that MSNBC officially supports Obama, Matthews responded with typical Hardball wit, “Well, it’s not official.”
From the Mailbag…
Shaker Thom forwards this story about the White Sox trying to reverse their losing streak with a truly ridiculous slump buster: "If anyone was offended by the White Sox having a pair of inflatable dolls surrounded by bats and a sign encouraging players to 'push' in their clubhouse before Sunday's game in Toronto, don't expect an apology from manager Ozzie Guillen. 'I'm sure it wasn't done to disrespect anyone,' Guillen said Monday. 'Everyone in the clubhouse, 100 percent of the people in the clubhouse, they are 18 years old and that's a private thing.' … On Sunday, the bats were circled around the two naked female dolls, one of whom had a bat inserted in its backside to prop it up. Each wore a sign over her breasts, one saying 'Let's Go White Sox' and the other reading 'You've Got to Push,' the National Post in Toronto reported." Guillen's an unapologetic homophobe as well as am unapologetic misogynist; the White Sox need to shitcan this guy.
Shaker K recommends this article about Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo y Maura, Spain's "Red Duchess," who "threw down her most defiant challenge in her final hours. As she lay dying in her palace in Sanlucar de Barrameda, aged 71, Luisa Isabel married in articulo mortis her secretary and companion, Liliana Maria Dahlmann, and left her everything. Her discreet sexual preferences were known to her family, but the secret lesbian marriage has shaken Spain's proud and ancient aristocracy."
Page One Q's Nick Langewis writes about an unbelievable case "out of California that could have a chilling effect on the reproductive rights of gay parents—women, in particular, in this case."
