Having posted that little video last night about Canadian virtues, it's my sad duty to bring to your attention a bit of Canadian shame. Anyone who's been here understands the ubiquity of Tim Horton's franchises in Canada. There are, literally, five of them within 2km of my apartment - actually, six, now I think of it, there's one in the hospital too - serving coffee (not very good) and donuts (not bad), sandwiches, that sort of thing. It is not uncommonly referred to as "Timmy's" (Tim Horton was an NHL defenceman, who played for Toronto and Buffalo in the early 70s, and used his pay as a pro athlete to start the business for his retirement - sadly, he died in a car accident before it became a huge national company).
In the last decade or so, Tim's has been spreading to various parts of the US, mostly the northern states, as part of their ownership by Wendy's.
And this is where it gets unpleasant. Tim Horton's is, as I said, a franchise organization. In Rhode Island, the company has sponsored a rally being held by the anti-gay "National Organization for Marriage".
Change.org, at that link, has a petition and a sample letter. I urge any Shaker who spends money at Tim Horton's, whether in Canada or the US, to write to the company and tell them that we're not impressed, and we expect more.
Canada has had gay marriage nationally for several years now. It's shameful that a company so strongly associated with Canadian values should so badly fail at exemplifying those values.
Tim Horton's will no doubt say "it's just a franchise, they can market how they like", but that's not good enough. Corporate policy shouldn't be allowing a large corporation to be associated with organizations explicitly dedicated to removing people's civil rights - and I encourage you to let Tim's know that you won't be spending money in their stores as long as they're supporting this kind of bigotry.
Tip of the CaitieCap to my friend If for this.
Teaspoons up, let's get bailing. o.oP
Edit to add: Shaker JPlum was kind enough to post in comments the link to Tim Horton's contact page.
And success! Look at the post here!
Teaspoon Time for Timmy's
I'll Have the Rainbow Sherbet, Please
Quite obviously the Best Ice Cream Truck evah:
"If I weren't gay, I wouldn't call it the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. And if I weren't happy, I wouldn't have the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. It would just be the big crabby ice cream truck," [Doug Quint, who owns and operates the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck in New York City] says.I am totally hiring him to cater the Radical Gay Feminazi Cooter Convention at Fuck Mountain next year.
Quint, who is a classically trained bassoonist, has only been in the ice cream business for a few months. The ice cream truck is just a summer gig while most orchestras are on break.
"It kind of came about because the idea of a middle-aged gay guy driving an ice cream truck seemed pretty humorous and a little bit suspect to me. I love the idea of what people might be saying, so I thought, 'Whatever they might be saying, let's grab it and amplify it times a hundred and label the truck that way,' " Quint says. "There's gonna be no doubt. It's the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck."
You can read Doug's blog here. Thanks to my girlfriend Miller for passing that along.
What The Hell?
Shaker summerwing, right
What is with that "dramatic" pose? What the hell is your sister on about?? What the hell is with the microbe jammies??? What the hell????
[See also: Deeky, Liss, evilsciencechick, katecontinued, ClumsyKisses, Mistress Sparkletoes, Liiiz, Reedme, Mama Shakes, Mustang Bobby, RedSonja, MomTFH, Portly Dyke, SteffaB, Icca, Christina, Orangelion03, Car, Siobhan, InfamousQBert, Maud, Rikibeth, MishaRN, CLD, Cheezwiz, MamaCarrie, Temeraire, somebodyoranother, goldengirl, and Liss (again).]
Tell me what you want what you really really want...
It's a big country, and we got lotsa room for lotsa Shakers...:DYeah I know that you wanna be Canadian, please
Even if in winter things tend to freeze
We've got the world monopoly on trees
And our country's bordered by three different seas
Yeah I know that you wanna be Canadian, please
We invented the zipper, we've got expertise
We made insulin to combat disease
Yeah I know that you wanna be Canadian, please
CHORUS
Brits have got the monarchy
The US has the money
But I know that you wanna be Canadian
The French have got the wine and cheese
Koalas chill with the Aussies
But I know that you wanna be Canadian
Et si ce n'était pas assez
On a deux langues officielles:
L'anglais et le français
Ooh la la
Yeah I know that you wanna be Canadian, please
Where else do you find mounted police
Or go to the hospital and not pay fees
Yeah I know that you wanna be Canadian, please
And when freshwater is in high demand
We've got the world's largest supply on hand
So you know that we could make a pretty good friend
But it's even better if you can be...
CHORUS
So you're thinking to yourself,
"How do I live in this beautiful country?"
Well we've got some steps for you to follow...
STEP 1: Lose the gun
STEP 2: Buy a canoe
STEP 3: Live multiculturally
STEP 4: You're ready, there is no more!
We got beavers, cariboo and moose
We got buffalos, bears, and Canadian goose
And we're sorry about Celine Dion
But she did do that good song for James Cameron...
CHORUS
Brits have got the monarchy
The US has the money
But I know that you wanna be Canadian
The French have got the wine and cheese
Koalas chill with the Aussies
But I know that you wanna be Canadian
The Greek chilled out with Socrates
Can't build a wall like the Chinese
But I know that you wanna be Canadian
In Kenya they have safaris
We've missed lots of other countries
But I know that you wanna be Canadian
Yeah--What Bob Said!
Trigger Warning For Violence
Here is Bob Herbert in Yesterday's New York Times:
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.Please, read the whole thing. In this piece, Herbert refers to the column he wrote after the Amish school shooting in 2006. So, read that one too.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
[...]
A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.
There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.
We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.
So far, Herbert seems to be one of the only voices in the MSM who is not presenting Sodini's massacre as unfortunate but understandable. Here are some quotes from one of my local news outlets:
George Sodini couldn't find love.That was in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review under the headline, "Failures in love bred LA Fitness Center Killer's Hate".
He tanned, worked out at the gym, held a steady job and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman, according to his online blog begun in November. He wrote that he felt totally alone -- isolated -- and estimated that 30 million desirable women rejected him in the last 30 years.
Enraged, he hatched a heinous plan to make some of those pretty young women pay for his misery.
The price would be their lives.
Or this, from an article by Luis Fabregas and Chris Togneri in the same publication:
Sodini's online diary depicts a man desperate to meet women, yet deeply frustrated by more than two decades of rejection.Poor guy.
Most of the voices in the MSM appear to be making excuses for Sodini and explaining to us how his crime was just the "price" women have to pay for not providing Sodini with the sex he deserved.
The shocking thing to me is that Sodini's crime was understandable--just not for the reasons presented in the Tribune-Review. Sodini was simply taking our culture's hatred of femaleness and femininity to its logical extreme.
So thanks, Bob--let's keep making noise about this.
Quote of the Day
"How do you get out from under it? You can't re-establish your credit if you can't get a job, and you can't get a job if you've got bad credit."—Matthew W. Finkin, a law professor at the University of Illinois, on the increasingly popular habit of companies weeding out potential employees by looking at their credit reports.
A human resources director quoted in the article justifies the trend by saying: "If I see too many negative things coming up on a credit check, it's one of those things that raises a flag with me. If you see a history of bad decision-making, you don't want that decision-making overflowing into your organization."
Leaving aside the questionable logic that being bad with your money will make you bad at your job, the rationale would still only be reasonable if bad credit were always a result of bad decision-making. Which, y'know, it isn't. Bad credit can be the result of many things having nothing whatsoever to do with bad decisions, like getting laid off, or a family illness yielding exorbitant medical bills, or identity theft.
And I guess I don't need to point out to this crowd that the practice will disproportionately exclude minority applicants, who are more likely to have bad credit as a result of the predatory lending practices that flourish in minority communities, and/or female applicants, who are typically left with comparatively smaller savings after layoffs, thanks to the wage gap to which they're still subjected.
Random YouTubery: Shatner of the Mount
Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain.
Why is he climbing a mountain?
Quote of the Day
"Hello! Uh, my name is Diana and I'm calling from Oregon. Uh, I just wanted to let the SEIU know that, um, America is watching the thug tactics that you folks are using at healthcare meetings and various other public places, and the absolutely thuggish, violent tactics that your group is using. I suggest you tell your people to calm down, act like American citizens, and stop trying to repress people's First Amendment rights. That, or you all are gonna come up against the Second Amendment. Stop the violence!"—A woman who left this voicemail message for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
I love the implicit threat of gun violence followed by an exhortation to the SEIU to "stop the violence." Without a trace of irony.
Also love the framing that members of the SEIU aren't Americans.
Greg Sargent notes: "The call seems to refer to reports today to scuffles in St. Louis between SEIU members and town hall rowdies. … Brian Beutler reports that an anti-health care reform organizer is explicitly calling on the troops to 'carry' and if SEIU members get disruptive, to 'hurt them'."
And Rush Limbaugh gave out the address of SEIU's St. Louis headquarters today on his show.
Meanwhile, a Republican Congressman who had the good sense to tell people to stop listening to Glenn Beck got booed.
Totally, totally trucknutz.
Willy DeVille RIP
Willy DeVille, founder of pioneering NYC punk act Mink DeVille, has passed away. DeVille died at New York's Cabrini Hospital yesterday of pancreatic cancer. He was 58.
DeVille was one of those artists that my husband turned me onto (along with Leonard Cohen and the Velvet Underground; his taste was always better than mine) and whenever I hear one of his songs shuffle across my iPod I smile fondly. Interestingly, in one of those weird moments of synchronicity, a few minutes before I heard about DeVille's passing I was listening to one of his songs.
Not nearly as famous as some of his contemporaries, but profoundly influential, his songs varied greatly, covering nearly every genre imaginable, from mariachi to soul to punk. And if you haven't heard of him, you may be familiar with his Oscar-nominated recording of "Storybook Love" from the film The Princess Bride.
RIP, Mr. DeVille
USA: Beacon of Fascism - We're Almost There
As Liss pointed out earlier, angry mobs of mindless people are assaulting various town halls while holding signs warning against the type of outcome that they themselves are actively contributing towards. To that end, Sara Robinson has written an extremely important post on where we currently stand, as a country, in our journey to the point of no return: a full blown fascist regime.
Certainly, some might consider that to be a rather alarmist stretch. But the fact of the matter is that this isn't something that happens overnight.
In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together.As Robinson points out, the current townhall frenzy, which has already started showing signs of violence, advances us to Paxton's third stage of the process.
The key identifier is the now cozy relationship between the political elite and their fringe base in an attempt to regain power by force.
This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.Fortunately, Sara's follow-up post will discuss what we can do to reign in the lunacy. My guess is that we're going to need a might big teaspoon.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.
[H/T to Mike]
Photo of the Day
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks to the media on the Sotomayor confirmation in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House August 6, 2009 in Washington, DC. [Via.]
Awesome. Totally Awesome.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks with CNN's Fareed Zakaria about former president Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea to secure the rescue of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee:
Below, I included a full transcript of this video, plus some preceding conversation (which I transcribed from this clip), to help contextualize the conversation. The stuff not included on the above video is in italics.
Zakaria: But the Bill Clinton mission was unorthodox—here you have a former president going on what appeared to be a state visit from the way in which he was greeted, um, being received by North Korea's top nuclear negotiator—
Clinton: This, as you know, came from the families; I mean, this was a message that, um, Laura and Euna were given by the North Koreans, which they passed onto their families, and former vice president Gore—
Zakaria: Naming him specifically?
Clinton: Naming him specifically. And then they passed it on, obviously as they should, to the rest of us, um, and, you know, it was not anything, you know, Bill was interested in, seeking, or even contemplating, but, of course, when, you know, vice president Gore called and when, uh, our administration evaluated it and began to, uh, brief him, he said, 'You know, look, if you think it's the right thing to do, and if you think I should, should do it, of course I will do it.' Um, but it is a private humanitarian mission. It was not in any way an official government mission.
Zakaria: But John Bolton, the former UN ambassador said—
Clinton: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Zakaria: [grinning] Should I—
Clinton: I'm sorry!
Zakaria: —even go on?
Clinton: No, you shouldn't. [still laughing] You really shouldn't.
Zakaria: But he said this is, this is rewarding hostage-taking.
Clinton: [still laughing] Ohhh, well. You know.
Zakaria: Why, why is he wrong? 'Cuz you— They effectively took hostages—
Clinton: We have done this so many times before. I mean, we've had former presidents do it, we've had sitting members of Congress do it—it is something that, you know, it is absolutely not rewarding them; it is not in any way, uh, responding to specific demands. It is a recognition that certain, um, countries, uh, that I think are kind of beyond the pale of the rule of law, uh, hold people and subject them to long prison terms that are absolutely unfair and unwarranted, and, maybe it's, you know, the fact I have a daughter, but I believed that if we could bring these young women home, we should bring them home. And it had nothing to do with our policy, and, of course, you know, you mentioned somebody who, you know, heavens—you know, if President Obama, you know, walked on water, [John Bolton] would say he couldn't swim. So, I mean, it's just not, you know, it's not something that, uh, I think is, uh, relevant to what we're trying to do.
Good Advice
Jamison Foser has some advice for news organizations about how to cover health care reform: Cover health care reform.
Stop wasting time on meaningless polls. Stop focusing on angry townhall outbursts. Stop making it a political issue. Stop giving time to the peddlers of misinformation. And start covering health care reform.
All those polls showing that people hold contradictory views and false -- or at least highly questionable -- beliefs about health care and efforts to reform it are a pretty good indication of what reporters should be doing: Reporting the truth, and doing it often. Giving people the facts about health care and about proposals to reform it.Go read the whole thing. It's great.
When you see people yelling, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare," that's a pretty good indication that the public could use some solid facts. How many people do you think know that health care reform with a strong public option would cost taxpayers less than a plan without such an option? I would bet that a distressingly large number of members of Congress don't know that -- and that very, very few voters do.
...If news organizations want to produce health care reporting that actually has some value, some utility to their readers and viewers, they'll forget about the polls and the protests and the politics and focus on making the actual facts about health care, and efforts to change the system, as clear as they can.
I know what many journalists will say: This is how things are. Political intrigue, controversy, polling, strategy, demonstrations -- these are the things the media cover. That's how it works.
No. That's how it doesn't work. That's how we have a public that is so badly confused about health care reform that polling on the topic is basically a useless bundle of contradictory results. That's how we have a situation in which more than half of the Republican Party doesn't know Barack Obama was born in the United States.
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Dr. Deeks' Orthopedic Handbaskets, for the most comfortable trip to Hell you'll ever make.
Recommended Reading:
Andy: TABC Agents Face 19 Violations, Disciplinary Action for June Raid of Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth
Resistance: More Citizen Deportations
Tami: What We Mean When We Talk About Confronting Privilege
Alison: Sincerely, John Hughes
SarahMC: An Ode to Roseanne
The Unbeatable Kid: Robots Do the Robot
Leave your links in comments...
Republican Senator Mel Martinez Resigns
His full statement is here, but he gives no reason other than:
My priorities have always been my faith, my family and my country and at this stage in my life, and after nearly twelve years of public service in Florida and Washington, it's time I return to Florida and my family.He doesn't want to return after the August recess. In Florida, the governor chooses the replacement when a senator resigns; interestingly, Florida Governor Charlie Crist is the leading contender for Martinez's seat, for which he'd already signaled he wouldn't be seeking reelection.
So today I am announcing my decision to step down from public office, effective on a successor taking office to fill out the remainder of my term.
Surely, Crist has to recuse himself from the selection process, otherwise it would be seen as a conflict of interest, i.e. choosing someone he thinks he can beat in the next election. But to whom would he hand the decision that itself wouldn't look like a conflict? His lieutenant governor? Really, anyone who he chooses risks the appearance of being an ally who's appointing someone weak. And choosing someone who agrees only to serve out the remainder of Martinez's term always looks shady, even when the governor isn't angling for the seat himself.
All of which brings me to: I can't imagine Crist is happy about Martinez's early departure. I wonder why he's bolting now; maybe he found out he's ill? I haven't heard any rumors of scandals or indiscretions.
Floridian Shakers? Any thoughts?
So You Think You Can Dance Open Thread
I won't say anything about the winner in the post, lest I spoil it for someone who's got the finale awaiting hir on TiVo, but suffice it to say I was very happy with who won.
Other things I was happy about this season: Cat Deeley, who continues to be the best host on television, less Shane Sparks and more Lil C and Nappy-Tabs, TRAVIS!, more Debbie Allen, and, as always, Mary Murphy's infectious joyfulness; I know she drives some people nutzoid (which I can totally understand), but I just love her to bits.
Things I was not happy about this season: Homophobia, Janette's premature exit, too little Wade and Amanda Robson, "Oooh what will your husband think?" repeatedly asked of Randy and Melissa, Mia's continued woman-hating, Nigel's increasingly lecherous behavior. The homophobia and misogyny on a show that wouldn't exist without women and gay men is just utterly ridiculous.
Discuss.
SPOILER COMMENTS THREAD BELOW.
