Chef Tom Colicchio will drink. your. milkshake!!!
And he'd better be handing a $10,000 check to Carla for being Fan Favorite tonight, or there's gonna be trouble! Hooty-hoo!
Top Chef Open Thread
Chef Tom Colicchio will drink. your. milkshake!!!
And he'd better be handing a $10,000 check to Carla for being Fan Favorite tonight, or there's gonna be trouble! Hooty-hoo!
Question of the Day
What's the best compliment you've ever received?
(I totally can't answer this one, because no matter what I say, it reads like I posted the question just to crawl up my own ass, lol.)
Quote of the Day
"The comments made during a recent recording session amongst friends were taken out of context and blown out of proportion. I apologize on behalf of myself and my friends if anyone was offended. The intentions were not to pass judgment and we meant no harm. I respect and wish the best for all parties involved."—R&B singer Usher, apologizing for suggesting that Chris Brown should "have a little bit of remorse, man," after viewing pictures of Brown relaxing on a jet ski weeks after violently attacking his girlfriend Rihanna.
This is what we're dealing with in this country when it comes to violence against women. Usher suggests that maybe, just maybe, it's a little bit callous to be taking a little public R&R before the bruises you left on a woman's face have even healed, and, within days, he's the one apologizing because, hey, he didn't mean to pass judgment or anything.
Fucked. Up.
10 Best Conservative Movies
National Review, which did such a wonderful job identifying hidden conservative messages in rock songs a few years ago, has now come up with a list of the Best Conservative Movies. Although their list for the most part sticks to derrièrist principles by not including too many difficult movies, for some reason they named The Lives of Others, a boring foreign film I've never heard of, as their number one movie and even included a tedious talky independent film like Metropolitan. They did include The Dark Knight, however, which should head off angry emails from fans and derrièrist critics who think it was the greatest movie ever made. Of course, I would have included The Dark Knight on my list, too, as well as such conservative classics as Brazil and Red Dawn, but there are so many great conservative movies, I decided not to duplicate anything that appeared on their list. And while their list only included films of the last 25 years (probably because the editors of National Review haven't seen any movies older than that), I also included a few older movies; but don't worry, none of them are in black and white (except for one, but give it a chance; it gets better).
Neither of our lists is definitive. I'm sure you can think of a lot of other great conservative movies. Feel free to mention them in the comments. Some of the other great conservative movies I might have included that didn't quite make the cut include The Grapes of Wrath, Birth of a Nation, Norma Rae, Easy Rider, Slumdog Millionaire, and Showgirls, just to name a few. But these lists are not meant to identify every great conservative movie. The real purpose of these lists is to show that conservatives are actually normal people, who love movies and rock music and video games, who talk a lot about hot women and what we would like to do to them if we were able to get any of them in bed and who use a lot of baseball and basketball metaphors just like regular guys. Hopefully, lists like this, and sites like Big Hollywood, will help change the unfair image of conservatives in the media so that one day we'll be able to say, "You like me! You like me!"
1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Dan Quayle's favorite movie, featuring the film debut of former Nixon aide Ben Stein (who discusses the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the Laffer Curve in one of the film's most moving scenes), Ferris Bueller's Day Off is perhaps the greatest conservative film ever to come out of Hollywood. Matthew Broderick plays Ferris Bueller, who decides he has had enough of liberal indoctrination and skips school on the day of a test about European socialism in protest. "I'm not European," he says. "I don't plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism." Although liberal Hollywood often tries to caricature conservatives as dorks or villains, someone like Ferris Bueller is who conservatives actually see when we look in the mirror. Someone who is handsome and adored by all the "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads." Someone who is really, really cool. And, sure, we might total your father's Ferrrari or invade your country without enough troops or trigger a temporary economic meltdown, but we're actually really lovable, the kind of guy you want to have a beer with. And really, really cool.
2. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Why aren't there more films for children that celebrate free-market capitalism? Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a Horatio Alger story about Charlie Bucket, a poor kid who learns that in the free-enterprise system everybody has a randomly equal chance to find a golden ticket (though some special people, like Veruca Salt, have more randomly equal chances than others because a level playing field would be socialism). After finding a golden ticket in his chocolate bar, Charlie meets Willy Wonka, an entrepreneur who has built his candy empire through constant innovation, corporate espionage and cheap labor. Wonka takes Charlie and some other lucky kids on a tour of his factory and gives them a quick lesson in basic economics. His factory is a consumerist paradise, where everything is consumable, although as one unfortunate child learns, consuming beyond your means can get you sucked up into a giant tube. In a free market economy, the kids learn, some will succeed and others will end up as giant blueberries. "Don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted," Wonka instructs Charlie, imparting the film's most important moral lesson. "He lived happily ever after."
3. Home Alone (1990)
Like some of the other films on this list, Home Alone works on several levels. On the one hand it's a family-friendly comedy about an adorable little boy, played by Macaulay Culkin (before he grew up and got weird), fighting off home invaders. But on a deeper level it is a parable about what would happen if we didn't have a Second Amendment. Luckily, Culkin is able to fend off the incompetent criminals who try to break into his home by using ingenious homemade weaponry, but not every little boy in America is as clever as Culkin's screenwriter, John Hughes. If you went on vacation and accidentally left your child at home, wouldn't you feel a lot better if you knew there was a loaded gun in the house that your child could easily access? I know I would. Unfortunately, gun control extremists want to take away our Second Amendment rights by passing all kinds of laws mandating child safety locks and banning assault weapons, rendering our nation's pre-adolescents defenseless. I think the NRA should remake this movie but this time give the little boy a gun. It would be a very short film.
4. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Although a number of liberal critics with their minds in the gutter slandered it as a "gay cowboy movie," Brokeback Mountain is actually a wonderful paen to the virtues of American masculinity. Ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are no metrosexuals. They are men's men who love nothing better than engaging in such manly pursuits as camping and fishing and rounding up sheep in the great outdoors. Although both are married and have kids, is it so surprising that they feel more comfortable in the company of other men, resisting the feminizing influences that have polluted our culture since the women's movement? Unfortunately, liberals aren't able to accept that two men can be really good friends without adolescently snickering and insinuating behind their backs that they are gay. They certainly don't act gay. If going fishing with your buddy makes you gay, then a lot of men in America must be gay.
5. Weekend at Bernie's (1989)
Although some might dismiss Weekend at Bernie's as a wacky comedy about young insurance executives who drag the corpse of their wealthy boss around and pretend he is alive, it is actually a penetrating allegory about the evils of the death tax (which liberals euphemistically refer to as the "estate tax"). Is there really that much difference between defiling the dead by taxing their wealth after they die and propping up someone's dead body, putting sunglasses on him and dragging him around the beach pretending he's drunk? Can't liberal vultures just let deceased millionaires pass their estates on to their pampered progeny without government tax collectors extracting their pound of putrefying flesh? Although Weekend at Bernie's is certainly a delightful comedy on one level, it just makes me so mad sometimes when I think of the policy implications that I want to yell at the screen, "Leave Bernie's heirs' trust funds and tax shelters alone!"
6. Wizard of Oz (1939)
Long before homosexuals waved rainbow flags and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition fomented racial hatred, Dorothy (played by Judy Garland, who later devolved into a pill-popping gay icon) took a nightmarish, drug-fueled trip over the rainbow to a hellish, multicultural dystopia called Oz. Throughout the Wizard of Oz Dorothy is desperate to flee the perversions of Munchkinland, Afghanistan-like poppy fields and urban ghettos of the Emerald City and return home to safe Republican Kansas, where morality is clearly delineated in black and white. At the end of the film when a big government wizard fails to get her back home, she discovers that all she has to do is pull herself up by her own ruby slipper straps. At a time when the great imperial Obama tells us that we need government to help us solve our problems, we should remember what Glinda the Good Witch of the North, tells Dorothy -- that she doesn't need government handouts to help her when she can just get what she needs by clicking her very own pair of ruby slippers and wishing really hard.
7. Starship Troopers (1997)
One of the problems with a lot of liberal Hollywood war movies since Vietnam is that they get all caught up with trying to see the enemy as human beings and depicting war as morally questionable. But Starship Troopers brilliantly spares us all the distracting moralism by stripping war down to its essential elements. It accomplishes this by reducing the enemy to nasty alien insects who look really cool when they blow up so that we can see war in its purest form as the glorious adventure it actually is. Although President Bush accomplished some of the same goals by banning photography of flag-draped coffins and limiting the press's coverage in the battlefield, the war in Iraq would probably have been even more popular if he had been able to convince the American people that the Iraqis were actually giant bugs. Maybe with all the CGI technology we have now a future President waging a future war will be able to do just that.
8. Patch Adams (1998)
It's too bad advocates of socialized medicine don't subscribe to Reader's Digest, which for years has taught us that "Laughter is the Best Medicine." Based on a real-life doctor, Patch Adams, starring Robin Williams in one of his most delightful roles (Williams is so much better in films where he has a director who restrains him), is about a doctor who did have a subscription to Reader's Digest, and realized that all the cheap pharmaceuticals illegally imported from Canada in the world are no match for comedy hijinks. Unfortunately, government bureaucrats try to shut down his comedy clinic just because he is practicing medicine without a license. Although Patch Adams eventually wins his case, imagine if we had socialized medicine and a lot of humorless bureaucrats were given the power to require doctors to have medical degrees and ban them from wearing big red noses and funny glasses or replacing bed pans with whoopee cushions. That's not the kind of America I want. So the next time some liberal complains about the 45 million Americans who are uninsured, spray him with water from the flower in your lapel and send him to see this movie.
9. Planet of the Apes (1968)
Planet of the Apes is based on an intriguing premise: What if evolution were true instead of just an unlikely theory? In this film apes have "evolved" to the point where they talk, wear clothes and walk upright. Evolutionists would have you believe that monkeys are our uncles so if you evolved them a little, then it would stand to reason that they would be just like us. And the apes on this planet sure seem human at first but as the film unfolds we see that there is nothing very human about these animals at all. No matter how you dress them up or how many words of English you teach them in the end they're still just "damned dirty apes," as Charlton Heston discovers. I don't think I've ever seen a better refutation of Darwin's theories.
10. Jaws (1975)
The next time your annoying animal rights activist friend cries and moans about bunnies and puppies and kitties being tortured and murdered in medical labs, pop Jaws in the DVD player and show him what animals are really like. Animals are not really cute and loveable little creatures, living together in harmony in the forest, as animal rights activists would have you believe. Many of them are vicious, amoral killing machines like the shark in Jaws, who would like nothing better than to bite PETA members in half given the chance. Jaws dares to tell the truth about animals. That's why we call them animals. By the end of the film your fauna-hugging friend will be cheering as loudly as you are when the nasty shark is finally blown to smithereens. Then you can take them out for nice hot bowl of shark-fin soup.
Crossposted at Jon Swift
Number of the Day
Daily Kitteh
1. Laying on top of me, perfectly content, using my boob as a
pillow if at all possible, and loudly purring like a lawnmower.
2. Looking guilt-inducingly pathetic in the corner.
Mode Three is running around my legs, mewling and chirping and trilling and pawing at me and biting my ankles, until I either want to strangle her or schnoogle her. Usually both.
Blog Note
For years, I've managed Ye Olde Blogroll of Gigantic Proportions and the News & Aggregators list via Blogrolling, but I've been unhappy with the performance for awhile. I haven't been able update either list for ages, and lately it's made the page take forever to load.
So I've removed them both from the sidebar for the time being, and I'll work on building a replacement.
Apologies for the inconvenience to those who used the blogroll and N&A regularly, and to everyone who was on the blogroll.
Still Trying to Find the "Mysteriously Missing Word, Rape"
Yesterday (Tuesday March 3), Chester Arthur Stiles was convicted of sexually assaulting a two-year-old and a six-year-old.
He videotaped his sexual assault of the two-year-old.
But when I opened up my AOL home page, here is how the case was described:
That link takes you to the article linked in the first line, which has the cleaned-up title "Man Convicted in Toddler Video Case," though the URL still contains "man-convicted-in-toddler-sex-video."
Liss has written a lot about the media's refusal to call rape what it is (two examples). I don't have much to add, but I was particularly struck (and angered) by this.
Natural Allies
[Trigger warning.]
For a long time, I've been meaning to write another post on the subject of women and gay men being natural allies, with the intent of drawing a line between the caricatures of the Gay Predator and the Female Rape Victim Who Was Totally Asking For It. We operate on different sides of the consent equation, but we are both demonized via lies told about consent. For gay men, the lie is that they don't seek consent. For women, the lie is that consent is an implicit constant, by virtue of our bodies being public property.
(Keen observers will already have noted that both mendacious narratives are spawned of projection, arising from the ugliest manifestation of straight male sexuality, which itself is predatory in nature and has no respect for consent, having intractably objectified women into beings whose value is wholly contingent upon the provision of sex.)
So, yeah, I've been intending to talk about this, and then comes this story about the zombie corpse of the "Gay Panic" defense stumbling through yet another American courtroom, which perfectly (and depressingly) encapsulates the entire clusterfuck of a relationship between narratives about predatory gays and sexual assault.In opening statements Monday, defense lawyer Michael Aed told the jury of five women and seven men that the case "is not a whodunit."
And not a woman—ergo, since masculinity is inevitably defined in contradistinction to femininity, he is not presumed to have given consent. All the easier to believe because his supposed rapist and actual victim was gay, and thus presumed to have a predatory sexuality.
Aed said [defendant Fernando Limon] will testify that he killed [Jorge Perez] in self-defense. The reason: Perez, a homosexual, molested Limon, who is not gay.
And, in another swell little marriage between projection and the reliance on contradistinctive definitions of manhood, the straight man who invents a sexual assault out of whole cloth benefits from the overwhelming narrative that it is women who routinely make false rape claims in desperate bids of self-preservation (or vengeance). Wonder not why that pervasive accusation against women exists; it exists for the same reason narratives about predatory gays does—because the patriarchal male who is treated since birth as The Norm (from whom all Others deviate) imagines Others to have his motivations.
This (alleged) murderous scum, who prosecutors say killed Perez during the commission of a robbery, is relying on The Patriarchy's demonizing misconceptions about women and gay men in the same way millions of men before him—to scapegoat them and escape the fate he (allegedly) deserves.
We are natural allies, because we are natural targets of the same despicable reprobates.
Kidnapping and Bondage... In the Kid's Department
It may seem that I talk a lot about how products geared for children reinforce and perpetuate ideas instilled by living under the kyriarchy, but, damn, I'm continually astounded.
We were shopping for summer clothes. My son, avowed lover of graphic shirts, thought this was funny:
I told him I didn't like it, then tried to explain why.*
"He's saying his sister is so annoying, he was happy she was kidnapped."
He understood that part, but the back took a little more.
"This is based on a stereotype that girls and women talk a lot, that their talk is annoying, and that what they say isn't important."
A debate ensued, which he began with, "Mama... some girls do talk a lot."
He kept looking at the shirts, then said, "You are really not going to like this one!"
He was, of course, right.**
(crossposted at elle, phd as part of my Things Seen series)
_____________________________________
*Sorry for the (camera phone) picture quality. The shirt says "The Flying Monkeys Stole My Sister... But They Brought Her Back for TALKING TOO MUCH."
**The front of the shirt features a smiling boy holding duct tape. "I have no idea where my sister is," he says. On the sleeve is his unsmiling sister, restrained with the duct tape.
Wednesday Blogaround
hey your big gay sparkly blogaround!
Recommended Reading:
Marcella: Carnival Against Sexual Violence 66
Tara Atluri: Olive Would Have Told Me to Shut Up and Do Something
Resistance: The Cost of Racism (to Whites): Parts One and Two
Meowser: Keep Your Cameras out of My Cleavage
Cara: Because What's the Point of a Woman You Can't Fuck?
Nate: Predicting What You Already Knew
John: GOP Tells Michael Steele: Shut Up About Limbaugh or You're Fired
Leave your links in comments...
The Language of Immigration, Continued
Last night, Iain and I were talking about yesterday's thread on immigration, and how he isn't called (or regarded as) an immigrant, when he made this well-observed point: "Oof coourse I'm noot an immigrant," he said wryly, with one raised brow. "I'm an ex-pat."
Such a spot-on observation. In between the disparate uses and meanings of "immigrant" and "ex-pat" (expatriate) falls everything that underlines the racism, classism, and xenophobia of the immigration debate in America.
White, (relatively) wealthy, and English-speaking immigrants are ex-pats, with intramural rugby leagues and dues-drawing pub clubs and summer festivals set to the distant trill of bagpipes.
Non-white, poor, and non-natively English-speaking immigrants are just immigrants.
Ex-pats are presumed to have come to America after a revelation that their countries, in which any white person would be happy to live, are nonetheless not as good as America.
Immigrants are presumed to have come to America because their countries are shit-holes.
Ex-pats are romantic and adventurous, with wonderful accents and charming slang.
Immigrants are dirty and desperate, with the nefarious intent of getting their stupid language on all our signs.
An American who marries an ex-pat marries up; an American who marries an immigrant marries down. (Which is why noses wrinkle when I say I'm married to an immigrant, as if immigrant is a slur and I'm insulting Iain—and selling myself short.)
And on and on and on the wedge narratives go, creating an artificial distinction where none should be, further demonizing the people who aren't the undeserved heirs to the high-falutin' alternative to the perfectly practical immigrant.
I am married to a man who is regarded as an ex-pat, I have friends who are regarded as ex-pats, and I have worked at an ESL school in Chicago for adult legal immigrants, where the students are about 90% Latin@—and every last one of them are regarded as immigrants.
And you don't need me to tell you that the differences in how they are regarded has nothing to do with anything inherent in any one of them, and everything to do with the operative prejudices in the country they've all chosen as their home. They're all immigrants, but ex-patriotism is a privilege, conferred by pale skin and the dumb luck of having been born in an English-speaking country.
Which means the most progressive thing any ex-pat can do is reject the label altogether, and proudly be an immigrant.
Random YouTubery: Rufus and Martha
I've been enjoying the Sundance channel series Spectacle: Elvis Costello With.... It's an interview show in which Costello traces the careers and musical influences of his guests, which so far have included Sir Elton John, Renee Fleming, Herbie Hancock, The Police, and others. Even better, Costello plays and sings with his guests.
I recently saw Costello with Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. It's a great hour; at one point Rufus is talking about his lifelong dramatic flair and he tells this cute story about himself, his mother Kate McGarrigle, and his sister Martha (hyperlinks mine):
I was always hamming it up—in fact, there’s a funny story about me, that involves a ham. Which is that my sister, when my sister was born, my mother apparently had this incredible kind of vision, of her life, the moment she was born, this kind of glorious, sad, but just, profound, sight of her existence as a human on earth, and saw her crying after that happened. But then when I was born—that was my sister Martha, the great Martha Wainwright (claps) —so when I was born (earlier than she was) her big thing was that the day before I was born she went out and bought a nine-pound ham, and I was exactly nine pounds.
Rufus sings "Vibrate", from his 2003 album Want One, on Spectacle:
Martha has not yet been on Spectacle, though I hope it's only a matter of time. Here she is on Later...with Jools Holland singing "B.M.F.A." (Lyrics NSFW!) and "Far Away":
Wow. These are singer-songwriters who aren't holding anything back. I'm not always in the mood for Rufus' rather piercing, slightly nasal voice, but I'm always in the mood for a Rufus song. This is great song-writing all around. Bravo, Wainwrights!
Super Bonus: Rufus Wainwright with his and Martha's mother Kate McGarrigle, Renee Fleming and Elvis Costello singing "In The Pines" on Spectacle:
Awesome!
And just for fun, here are the lyrics to Martha's "B.M.F.A.":
Poetry is no place for a heart that's a whore
And I'm young & I'm strong
But I feel old & tired
Overfired
And I've been poked & stoked
It's all smoke, there's no more fire
Only desire
For you, whoever you are
For you, whoever you are
You say my time here has been some sort of joke
That I've been messing around
Some sort of incubating period
For when I really come around
I'm cracking up
And you have no idea
No idea how it feels to be on your own
In your own home
with the fucking phone
And the mother of gloom
In your bedroom
Standing over your head
With her hand in your head
With her hand in your head
I will not pretend
I will not put on a smile
I will not say I'm all right for you
When all I wanted was to be good
To do everything in truth
To do everything in truth
Oh I wish I wish I wish I was born a man
So I could learn how to stand up for myself
Like those guys with guitars
I've been watching in bars
Who've been stamping their feet to a different beat
To a different beat
To a different beat
I will not pretend
I will not put on a smile
I will not say I'm all right for you
When all I wanted was to be good
To do everything in truth
To do everything in truth
You bloody mother fucking asshole
Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole
Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole
Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole
Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole
Oh you bloody...
I will not pretend
I will not put on a smile
I will not say I'm all right for you
For you, whoever you are
For you, whoever you are
For you, whoever you are
Interview
In honor of International Women's Day and Women's History Month, Renee of Womanist Musings is featuring eight days of interviews with womanist/feminist bloggers. Sunday was Monica of Transgriot; Monday was Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon; yesterday was Loryn of Black Girl Blogging.
Today is me; you can find my interview with Renee here, in which we talk about intersectionality, fostering inclusivity, the consequences of blogging, trolls, click moments, and other good stuff.
Thanks very much to Renee for asking and allowing me to participate in this project. And stay tuned—because there are four more interviews to come!
Dereliction of Duty
The New York Times published a depressing and frightening graphic today titled "The Geography of a Recession" which represents the unemployment situation across the country, by county:
[Click to go to interactive map in new window.]
Possibly even more scary is the accompanying article, in which the author makes some rather stunningly bad assertions based on alarmingly stupid premises.
For one, he claims: "The Great Recession of 2008 (and beyond) is hurting men more than women." That link leads back to another NYT article, which I wonder if he even bothered to read. Although it does report that women stand to outnumber men in the American workforce for the first time ever, it also notes:
Women may be safer in their jobs, but tend to find it harder to support a family. For one thing, they work fewer overall hours than men. Women are much more likely to be in part-time jobs without health insurance or unemployment insurance. Even in full-time jobs, women earn 80 cents for each dollar of their male counterparts' income, according to the government data.The article goes on to provide examples of two families, in both of which a wife went to work after her husband lost his job. Nasreen Mohammed "works five days a week, 51 weeks a year, without sick days or health benefits" for $30,000; her husband made $150,000 at a corporate job with paid benefits before being laid off. Linda Saxby earns "practically nothing" as an assistant librarian at the local high school, requiring her family to live primarily off their savings; her husband made $225,000 in an executive-level position before being laid off.
"A lot of jobs that men have lost in fields like manufacturing were good union jobs with great health care plans," says Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project. "The jobs women have — and are supporting their families with — are not necessarily as good."
Only in some fantasy world where having a job at all is a better predictor of security and quality of life than what kind of job one actually has does the statement "The Great Recession of 2008 (and beyond) is hurting men more than women" make sense. That women are employed in greater numbers does not mean that men are being "hurt more."
In fact, given that men who are laid off will have made more and ergo had more opportunity to save than their female counterparts before losing their jobs, it is highly unlikely that men are being "hurt more" by layoffs than women. Anytime massive layoffs strike, people who have had less opportunity to stockpile savings are most "hurt."
Which brings us to the next ludicrous claim: "Clearly, [the stock market crash] has hurt wealthy and upper middle-class families, who own the bulk of stock, more than others."
This is technically true, if the only definition of "hurt" is "lose the most raw dollars." But on what planet is a $2 million portfolio that loses half its value really more "hurtful" to its owner than a $100,000 portfolio that loses half its value? That's literally the difference between another entire year's survival (at least) after losing a job, or a life-altering ability to pay for healthcare twice as long after a catastrophic injury or illness.
Which is to say nothing of the individuals and families who don't own stock at all, but are nonetheless subject to the reverberating effects of the crash. Are the working poor really "less hurt" by the crash than wealthy and upper middle-class families whose portfolios took a hit, but are by no means struggling to put food on their table every night? The suggestion is infuriatingly daft.
It's no wonder this country's economy is in a bloody shambles, when this is the kind of economic reporting that goes on in the paper of record. The average reader, who leaves hir critical thinking skills at the door, is being asked to feel sorry for men and the wealthy—even though the average reader would look around at the men and the wealthy in hir life and say, "Well, they're not doing so bad." It's literally providing the justification to not care.
Hard as it may be to believe, the crash will also help a lot of young families. The stocks that they buy in coming years are likely to appreciate far more than they would have if the Dow were still above 14,000. The same is true of future house purchases for the one in three families still renting a home.Well, la-dee-da! What positively splendid news! Never mind where these rosy-cheeked robber barons will get their first jobs, or from which of the nation's crumbling financial institutions they'll secure the loan to purchase their white picket fences. And never mind that the national infrastructure is so devastated they're practically as likely to die in a bridge collapse as see their IRAs mature. Pish-tosh—details!
We are a representative democracy. It is our duty to provide the accountability that D.C. sorely lacks. And we are derelict in this duty because we have forgotten it even exists, and because we are told by the people whose job it is to call us to duty that we should just take it easy.
Don't worry, America. Everything will be fine.
Except that graph already tells us it isn't.
Question of the Day
We've done this one twice before, but the last time was two years ago now (ZOMG): What's your favorite opening line of a novel?
My favorite is Dickens' opening of A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so." I'll never, ever get over reading that for the first time.
Iain's favorite opening line is from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Love that one, too.
Woot! Fully Inclusive ENDA on the Agenda
Pelosi: "The priorities have been Hate Crimes and ENDA, fully inclusive legislation in those two areas, so we'll have to have our strategy work around on how we can get those passed, as well as move forward on Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Fully inclusive, of course, is shorthand for including protections for gender expression, i.e. the Ts. ENDA passed the House last year without those protections, so this is very good news indeed.
Autumn's got more at The Blend.
GOP = Grovel to One Person
With each passing day, the Republican Party displays a level of weakness and subservience that borders on pathetic. In other words, their desire for autocracy has become more overt. For all of their big talk on military strength and standing firm in opposition to Obama, they seem to have a desperate need for approval from just one person: Rush Limbaugh.
As Liss pointed out, Republicans are tripping over themselves to make sure they remain in Rush's favor after daring to question his comments and motives, thereby deferring to him, in no uncertain terms, as their one true leader. I could certainly point out all of the alarming rhetoric from Limbarf that makes his ascendancy all the more scary and dangerous for rational thinking people. However, what Republicans fail to realize is that they're in just as much danger from this.
Several Republicans have voiced the need for their party to effectively redefine their identity and become more inclusive. After getting their asses handed to them in November, they realized that the party's broad-brush image of greedy, belligerent and racist white men needed to change. With Michael Steele, they could certainly tick off one item on the checklist, but that in of itself will not bring person 1 to their side of the aisle. They need to come up with ideas and policies that are a cold-turkey break from the last couple of decades, as well as a break from the theocratic right. But regardless of which direction they wish to move, they're only marching to wherever Rush wants them to march. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a forfeit of identity. By aligning themselves so closely to Rush, they become the party of Limbarf instead of the party of alternate viewpoints that could possibly bring more voters to their side. And so, my warning to the Republican Party is this: A political party that follows is not a political party that leads.
I'm not sure that a sex-touristing radio personality is the right choice for leading a political party, but hey, it's not my party. If they want to goose-step their way forward to the voice of one leader, and stifle any form of individual thought or dissent within their own ranks, and declare party loyalty above everything else (especially what's best for the country), and... oh wait.
