"But what about us whites dudez?"
One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.Read the whole thing. It's hilarious.
Actual opening paragraph of an actual CNN article:
When Rep. Joe Wilson interrupted President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress by yelling "You lie!" a livid House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looked as if she was about to jump out of her seat and give her colleague a five-minute "time out" for misbehavior.Wow. There are a lot of ways I would describe Nancy Pelosi's reaction—
It can no longer be denied:
Here's a sign the Washington Post is a liberal newspaper: today's Adam Bernstein obituary for Patrick Swayze begins obviously by noting his big hits "Ghost" and "Dirty Dancing," but doesn't get to "Red Dawn" until paragraph 23. Even then, Bernstein wrongly suggests he had a supporting role.And there you have it: Proof of the Liberal Media Bias™. If only Bernstein (where's his birth certificate anyway?) had mentioned that NRA-machine-gun-and-apple-pie-wankfest earlier in his obit, his Liberal Media Bias™ may have gone unnoticed.
[snip]
"Road House", "Next of Kin", and "Point Break" appeared in paragraph 12. The next paragraph even brought up the drag-queen turn.
Williams: This morning in Atlanta, former President Carter spoke up and spoke out against what he has seen emerging in some of the public protests against President Obama. We were in Atlanta to interview President Carter at the Carter Center for air at a later date in connection with his upcoming eighty-fifth birthday. During the interview, we talked about what some see as a heightened climate of racial and other hate speech since the election of President Obama—a certain number of signs and images at last weekend's big Tea Party march on Washington and at other recent events have featured racial and other violent themes, and President Carter today said he is extremely worried by it.
Carter: I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American. I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country, that shared the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans—that racism, in connection, still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of a belief from many white people, not just in the South but from around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and grieves me and concerns me very deeply.
Williams: President Carter in Atlanta today. He went on to say that because of President Obama's personal qualities, he will be able to, quote, "triumph over the racist attitude that is the basis for the negative environment that we see so vividly demonstrated in public affairs in recent days." End of quote.
Who have been your most important personal and/or professional mentors?
This question isn't really about people you don't know who inspire you (e.g. President Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Beth Ditto or Eddie Izzard), but people with whom you personally interact.
Feel the Homomentum!
Pride and joy on display at Peoria's first gay festival:
Diversity and acceptance were key as hundreds of children, adults and families flocked to the Peoria Riverfront on Sunday afternoon for the first Peoria [IL] Pride Festival.When I first saw this story, the first thing that popped into my head was "Pride plays in Peoria!" and it gave me a mad case of the joyblubs.
The festival was a six-hour gay pride event, featuring music, speakers, food and information booths, as well as children's activities.
Kim Roe, 43, of Peoria brought her 3-year-old son, Jackson, to the festival in order to help him learn about acceptance and diversity.
"I'm not gay, but I went to (a similar festival) in Chicago, and I think it is so important to celebrate diversity," she said, adding, "People need to understand, there is more than one way to love somebody."
Peoria Pride was organized by local volunteers who created a not-for-profit organization called Central Illinois Alliance for Diversity and Equality (CIADE), said Dave Barker, festival organizer and alliance president.
"CIADE's goal is to unite the established LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) organizations and community in order to speak with a common voice in central Illinois about LGBT issues and needs. This Pride event today is the first step," Barker wrote in a forward to the event's program.
Barker said he was pleased with the 37 vendors and hundreds of people who showed up to support the festival and enjoy the experience.
"It's about our community being proud of who we are and coming out to support each other and have a great time," he said.
[Trigger warning; image with potentially triggering language below the fold.]
In case you were worried that Tucker Max & Co. couldn't get any more repulsive:
Tucker Max's message board has launched a Photoshop competition for the best reimagined protest signs from the "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell" protests. Creative Max devotees are working off images from the film tour's photostream in order to ridicule students from the NC State women's center, which staged a Raleigh protest of the film.[Image removed by request of the pictured protester. The image pictured the original photograph of a young female protester holding a protest sign, and an altered photograph in which the sign has been Photoshopped to read "I'm mad cuz no one will rape me" followed by a frowny face.]
"When I think of him, I think of being in his arms when we were kids, dancing, practicing the lift in the freezing lake, having a blast doing this tiny little movie we thought no one would ever see."—Jennifer Grey, on her Dirty Dancing co-star Patrick Swayze, who died yesterday.
Shaker Llencelyn sent me the link to this Onion video earlier today, with the note: "The Onion has had some awesome articles in the past, but in recent months there's been a lot of fail. This one, for me, takes the cake."
Contact the Onion.Anchor: Pakistani officials are expressing outrage following what many in the international community are calling the brutal and unjustified use of Hillary Clinton against their nation. [video of Clinton deplaning, smiling and waving] Secretary of State Clinton hit Islamabad [map graphic of a flight made to look like a missile deployment] at approximately 9:00am yesterday as most civilians were starting their workday [video of women in headscarves crying and throwing their hands in the air] or attending morning prayers [video of men crying and hugging each other].
Woman sobbing and speaking in what I assume to be Arabic [sub-titled]: I was just five or six feet away from her, close enough to see her dead eyes.
Man slumped on ground, clearly upset, also speaking in a language other than English [sub-titled]: Don't the Americans care how much suffering their Hillary Clinton is causing?
Anchor: Just hours after Clinton arrived, the UN released a statement condemning the United States, saying, quote, "Under no circumstances is there ever a justification for the preemptive deployment of Hillary Clinton anywhere by any country." Joining us now is Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Hassan Amdiri. Thank you for being here, Mr. Ambassador. [ambassador, shown in split-screen with anchor, nods] Preliminary figures we have here showing over five hundred civilians suffered the full force of Mrs. Clinton, and over a thousand more may have suffered some exposure to her inflexible hair and pseudo-folksy hand gestures.
[graphic is shown reading: "Projected Impact on Citizens" with radiating impact effects]
Ambassador: It's horrible. Innocent women and even children have to endure her stiffly rehearsed stories about farmers she met who inspired her. [video of Clinton on an official state visit] She was even sent into a hospital.
Anchor: That's awful.
Ambassador: Mr. Obama clearly regards our people [video of Arabic men wailing and running through streets] as beneath human dignity to have unleashed such a woman upon us.
Anchor: The Red Cross has set up camps just across the Afghan border [video of refugee camp] for the tens of thousands of refugees who fled their homes to avoid Mrs. Clinton, is that right?
Ambassador: These are the lucky ones. Many more were trapped inside the Clintonized area and could not escape her clumsy attempts to relate to them.
Anchor: So people were caught completely unaware then?
Ambassador: I'm afraid so. The Hillary Clinton warning sirens—
—sounded just a few minutes before she hit. It was too late for most people. [video of refugees being given water] They had to endure her cacophonous fake laughter, and—
Anchor: Sir, we're just getting word that the White House has released the following statement: "We reserve the right to use Hillary Clinton in situations where all other options have failed." Mr. Ambassador, this sounds like a threatening tone.
Ambassador: It is horrible! The world must unite against this act of naked aggression. Let a thousand Hillary Clintons reign down upon those responsible for this.
Anchor: All right, Mr. Amdiri. Thank you very much for joining us.
Ambassador: Thank you.
Anchor: Intelligence reports have indicated that Pakistan is developing its own Hillary Clinton, in that a Nida Alvi—
—a stiff, humorless, provincial representative could be ready to use against a major US city as soon as 2011. Moving on: Medical researchers are close to finding another cure for erectile dysfunction.
This is, for those who have requested it, your monthly reminder to donate to Shakesville. I know there are people who resent these reminders, but there are also people who appreciate them, so I've now taken to doing them every other month, in the hopes that will make a good compromise.
As I've said before, asking for donations is difficult for me, partly because I've got an innate aversion to asking for anything, and partly because these threads are frequently critical and stressful. But it's also one of the most feminist acts I do here.
So. Here's the reminder.
You can donate once by clicking the button in the righthand sidebar, or set up a monthly subscription here.
Please don't feel obliged to donate, especially if money is tight. The last thing I want is for anyone to feel stretched because of a donation.
I also want say thank you, so very much, to each of you who donates or has donated, whether monthly or as a one-off. I am profoundly grateful—and I don't take a single cent for granted. I've not the words to express the depth of my appreciation, besides these: This community couldn't exist without that support, truly. Thank you.
Why, my stars and garters! I never would have imagined President Mondo Fucko, he of the knuckling under and belligerent immaturity and accusations of treason and unsolicited groping and various other international fuckery, was an enormous, undiluted, unrepentant asshole. I am shocked—SHOCKED, I tell you!—to hear of this scandalous news:
Last month, we noted that former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer's new book, Speech Less: Tales of a White House Survivor, was making Republicans nervous. The book is out next week and, from brief excerpts obtained by the New York Daily News, it appears President Bush "dissed pretty much everyone in Washington."Oh, dear! Oh, dearie dearie me! *fans self* I do believe I have a case of the vapors, Martha! Get me to the fainting couch!
On Barack Obama: "This is a dangerous world and this cat isn't remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you."
On Joe Biden: "If bull was currency, Joe Biden would be a billionaire."
On Sarah Palin: "I'm trying to remember if I've met her before. What is she, the governor of Guam?"
On Hillary Clinton: "Wait 'til her fat keister is sitting at this desk."
[Trigger warning.]
So a dude who spent possibly as much as $100,000 trying to buy a woman's affections, despite the fact that she routinely told him she didn't return his feelings, finally gets fed up, and, instead of walking away from the clearly dysfunctional relationship, decides to hire his roommate (who thankfully reported the scheme to police) to:
kidnap [Elissa Rodriguez], slash her face repeatedly with a utility knife and torch her Toyota.The headline on this story? "Man accused of plotting mayhem to win woman's love."
That way, [Jimmy Santiago Dominguez] reasoned, he could "be there for her," helping his disfigured angel recover from her wounds by giving her tender care and a brand new car.
…"This is a dirty gig," Dominguez told the undercover officer about the plot to hurt the woman he wanted. Rodriguez thinks she is "better than she is," he said, and disfiguring her would change that.
Crystal Lee Sutton, the woman whose fight to unionize the factory floor of the North Carolina textile plant at which she worked was made into the amazing film Norma Rae, has died at age 68.
Sutton ended her life fighting another iconic battle of working Americans: Trying to get her health insurance company to pay for her life-saving cancer treatments.
She has been married to Lewis Preston Sutton Jr. for 30 years and he works two jobs to take care of her while she battles Meniginoma - a cancer that is usually slow growing with benign tumors. Unfortunately, that is not the case for Sutton.Sutton eventually got her meds, but the fight to have basic medical treatments covered went on as did her disease, as is the case for so many Americans, who discover only when they most need their insurance that it sucks, who suddenly find out in the cruelest way what it means in practical terms to have a for-profit healthcare system model.
"I said I've always been different and I wouldn't have this cancer thing be any other way. I accept it," she said. "It has to follow my personality."
She went two months without possible life-saving medications because her insurance wouldn't cover it, another example of abusing the working poor, she said.
"How in the world can it take so long to find out (whether they would cover the medicine or not) when it could be a matter of life or death," she said. "It is almost like, in a way, committing murder."
Sutton's small brick home chronicles the battles she fought and the people who have acknowledged her sacrifices. Her walls and refrigerator are plastered with photos of her three children, two stepchildren, 11 grandchildren and four great grandchildren. She hopes they will follow in footprints.We'll remember you, Ms. Sutton. We'll remember you as a teaspoon-wielding badass, who left the world a little bit better than she found it. Thank you.
"Stand up for what you believe in, not matter how hard it makes life for you," she said. "Do not give up and always say what you believe."
..."It is not necessary I be remembered as anything, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for the working poor and the poor people of the U.S. and the world," she said. "That my family and children and children like mine will have a fair share and equality."
Recommended Reading:
AP: Health Care Issues: US Costs vs. Other Countries
NPR: Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option
CNN: Americans Divided on President's Health Care Plans
Steve Chapman: The GOP's Health Care Reform Failure
NYT: Baucus Bill Would Bar Illegal Immigrants From Insurance Exchanges
Newsweek: Wait a Second. Why Shouldn't We Insure Illegals?
DDay: Owning It
Discuss.
