"'Cougar,' for the three people still blissfully unaware, is a slang term applied to women who date younger men. Men who date younger women, on the other hand, are typically described with a slightly less loaded term: 'men'."—Jamison Foser, on MSNBC's important news announcement that Tiger Woods' "14th mistress is a cougar."
[H/T to Shaker Siobhan.]
Quote of the Day
Blog Note
Some Shakers raised objections to imagery associated with religious holidays posted at Shakesville. In response to those concerns, the following policy has been instituted: Contributors will not post secular or religious holiday imagery without comment (e.g. as hosts of open threads) except on the day(s) of the actual holiday(s), if they so choose.
We do, however, have a diverse group of contributors, including atheists, agnostics, Pagans, Christians, and Jews, and guest posters, which have included Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, and part of what makes this site what it is is writers' willingness to share their personal lives and experiences with an equally diverse audience.
So, to honor that tradition, contributors will continue to be welcome to post secular or religious holiday imagery as part of posts about their individual holiday traditions.
And, naturally, posts that analyze/critique subject matter such as the War on Christmas, or holiday-related bigotry, e.g. racist carol parodies, will continue to be part of Shakesville's content.
Problems with this policy should be addressed to me personally, via email.
Oral Roberts Dies at 91
Televangelist Oral Roberts met his reward today from complications from pneumonia. He was 91.
Gross
[Trigger warning.]
As I've said no fewer than approximately fourteen thousand times, homophobia and misogyny are BFFs who are often found skipping merrily along hand-in-hand. So it's no surprise to find some fun misogyny alongside the much-discussed homophobia in Uganda:
Youth who get married when they are still virgins will be rewarded, the Mityana Anglican Diocese Bishop, Dr. Samuel Stephen Kaziimba, has said.Youth. All youth? Of course not.
The bishop on Friday said the scheme is intended to encourage the youth to live a prudent life.
"Like the Virgin Mary, we want you to have good lives. I am, therefore, willing to reward anybody who will get married when she is still a virgin," he said.I'll let you parse every discernible nuance of what's wrong with that hot mess of an idea in comments, while I go hurl up my breakfast.
Kaziimba was closing a one-week youth convention at Mityana Secondary School.
He said the scheme will start with the girls who will be getting a prize of sh100,000, adding that he has set up a committee that will ascertain whether the girl is a virgin.
[H/T to Shaker Doxy.]
One Man, 330 Million Votes
The hands of fate are attached to Joe Lieberman's arms:
[Lsst] night, Democratic senators emerged from a tense 90-minute closed-door session and suggested that they were on the verge of bowing to Mr. Lieberman's main demands: that they scrap a plan to let people buy into Medicare beginning at age 55, and scotch even a fallback version of a new government-run health insurance plan, or public option.My pal Steve notes:
Mr. Lieberman said he believed that the Medicare expansion was off the table, though he did not get any guarantee. "Not an explicit assurance, no," he said. "But put me down tonight as encouraged at the direction in which these discussions are going."
There were concerns early yesterday that the more progressive members of the Democratic caucus might balk at a bill lacking their key priorities. As of last night, it appeared that they, too, had grudgingly agreed to accept the weaker bill.I've completely and utterly lost track of what it is that we're "going to get" out of this reform. I'm sure it'll be awesome, though.
Senate HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said the loss of the provisions was bowing to "reality." He added, "There's good stuff in the bill. It's a giant step forward. We're changing the paradigm of health care in America." Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), another champion of the public option, told reporters, "I want to see health care reform. There's going to be a good bill." Sen. John Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), who helped strike the deal for a Medicare buy-in last week, added, "We're not going to get all that we want. But we're going to get so much more than we have."
Radio Shakesville
Episode 15: Christmas In Space
Here is a link to the podcast blog where you can download the show.
And this is the list of all songs used in this week's ep.
You can also play the show in a pop-up.
(Which is the recommended way to read Shakesville, just FYI.)
The show is available via iTunes, and on Feedburner. The RSS is here, if you need it.
Did I Seriously Just Read This at the Washington Post?
Actual Headline of the piece by WaPo columnist Richard Cohen: Why is there no female Tiger Woods?
But what he really wants to know, which is the first line of the article, is: Why are there no female sex scandals?
He goes through the list: No professional female athletes who we hear about "hitting on every caddy, pool boy or masseuse," no female politicians, no female corporate CEOs, no female entertainers, except Madonna, who "was famous for bedding much of New York's outer boroughs," but it was okay because "she was not married at the time." (Did I seriously just read someone wheeling out a "Madonna's a slut" reference in the Washington Post? Seriously?!) "Nobody knows," says Cohen. And a second time. And a third. "Nobody knows" why there are no female sex scandals.
Oh, but he's got some ideas (emphasis mine):
We can guess. The first guess is that women are simply smarter than men. Say what you will about Woods, it's not his wholesome image that has suffered, it's his standing as a sentient being. A person with the wit of a mosquito knows better than to leave a voicemail message on a mistress' phone or to text women who, from the angelic looks of them, would sell their own dear mothers for a chance to appear on Inside Edition. Few women are that stupid. Few men aren't.Wow.
The other possibility that strikes me is that women seem not to have the evolutionary urge to couple with cheaply dressed strangers. They have a stronger need to mother — to have a child and then raise that child.
The male equivalents of the sort of women who have courageously come foreword to claim their reward money for entertaining Tiger are evolutionary bad material. No woman would want them as husbands and fathers. They are what Darwin called dreck, which is Yiddish for cocktail waitress.
Dreck actually means trash, of course.
Which means that a columnist for the Washington Post, and at least one editor, thought it was perfectly acceptable to "joke" that every female member of an entire profession is "trash." Where, exactly, the humor is in using dehumanizing language against women I'm not sure, but then again I'm the Most Humorless Feminist in all of Nofunnington, not a comedy genius like Richard Cohen.
Ostensibly, Cohen's argument is that there are no female sex scandals because men are stupid, knuckle-dragging slaves to their evolutionary impulses:
Men, like the poor polar bear, have seen their ecology change. Their youthful aggression, so useful for wars of choice (not to mention necessity) or merely hunting saber-toothed tigers, is now just a social menace. Their urge to have sex with just about any woman with a pulse makes them crude laughing stocks. Tiger Woods has become a punch line -- and so have men in general. (Thanks, Tiger.) We are a sorry lot. Almost no one, save maybe lachrymose country western singers, will defend the cheatin' man.—but, after "insulting" men by calling them totes awesome war-mongering sex machines, it's women (again) at whom Cohen has the last laugh:
But it could be that the urge to get closer to cocktail waitresses and denizens of dimly lit hotel lounges is in some way linked to the drive to conquer, to prevail — to succeed. It could explain why all this time into the Age of Feminism, years after women were liberated, women make up less than 20 percent of Congress and only 3 percent of those top CEOs.The unmitigated temerity of claiming women have been "liberated" from their oppression in the same column as he concludes that women have no drive to succeed because they want to be mothers is absolutely breathtaking. He literally repeats the same diminishing, marginalizing stereotypes about women against which feminists were fighting decades ago, only to conclude it must be biological destiny that women aren't more successful.
The reason the Glass Ceiling has not broken is that women have other priorities — maintaining relationships and being a mother. This is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been. As any of Tiger Woods's cocktail waitresses could tell him, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
N'est ce pas?
One would think a self-interested reluctance to be regarded as a manifest wanker would stop one from promulgating narratives of the patriarchy while simultaneously denying its existence and influence, but apparently Cohen is so invested in his privilege he's willing to look like a total dipshit to protect it.
The Washington Post doesn't have to allow him to use their pages to do it, however.
Contact the Washington Post's ombudsman.[H/T to Shaker Falconer.]
Question of the Day
What's your favorite YouTube video?
If you can't see and/or hear video, and/or just generally don't like it for any reason, please feel free to substitute your favorite lolcat, web comic, or equivalent Thing of the Internetz.
(Please include trigger warnings for material that needs them.)
Monthly Kiefer
My favorite video on all of YouTube, once again, just because.
Transcript:
Voice Off-Camera: Hey, Kiefer. You're a pirate, man.
Kiefer: That would explain everything. [jumps into Christmas tree]
All I Want For Xmas Is 22 Million White House Emails
And who says Santa Claus isn't real?
Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the White House had said were missing, two watchdog groups that sued over the documents announced Monday.Suddenly, my stocking is feeling mighty stuffed.
The e-mails date from 2003 to 2005, and had been "mislabeled and effectively lost," according to the National Security Archive, a research group based at George Washington University. The archive and the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued over the issue in 2007, said Monday they will settle their lawsuit under an agreement with the Obama administration.
The controversy dates back to the Bush administration's 2006 firing of the top federal prosecutors in nine cities. After congressional committees demanded the administration produce documents related to the firings, the White House said millions of e-mails might have been lost from its servers.
Silly Me
Huh.
And here I thought Joe and Hadassah Lieberman were two separate people.
[H/T to Shaker Chari.]
Mm-Hmm
President Obama pressed Wall Street bankers at the White House on Monday, urging them to make more loans and modify mortgages to help taxpayers who propped their banks up with federal bailouts.I'm sure they'll get right on that.
"My main message in today's meeting was very simple: America's banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry," Obama said. "Now that they're back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy."
I've obliquely touched on this before, but one of the things I dislike about President Obama is the naiveté and arrogance of his insistent assumption that if only he just expects people to behave better, they will.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for expecting more, but I'm also for consequences. If telling people this is a safe space, exhorting them to behave decently, and expecting it were enough, I wouldn't need a commenting system that allows banning and a handful of moderators. Being a leader who expects more also entails giving people the tools to succeed, the path and means to meet those expectations. Obama has done naught but give the people from whom he expects more every reason to fail to live up to those expectations. No consequences.
And, worse yet, he's shrugging off responsibility to the people who got us into this mess in the first place. When they inevitably fail to meet his expectation to transform overnight from avaristic scoundrels to fair-minded altruists, shrugging his shoulders and saying he's disappointed in them isn't going to be good enough.
This is not leadership. This is foolish indulgence. It's misplaced trust. It's a rejection of accountability. It's willful ignorance of reality. It's capitulation. It's not leadership. Not even close.
Btw, I love this note stuck in the middle of the story: "Policymakers have little power over bankers who have their own priorities, namely, making money."
Indeed. Especially when they refuse to make policies that would actually forcibly realign those priorities for the good of the nation.
You've Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me
Human Events, a website for and by conservadouches, posted an offensive "parody" of the song "Feliz Navidad" entitled "Illegals In My Yard." Check out these charming lyrics:
Illegals in my yard.Listen to the whole thing. Or don't. It's vile.
Illegals in my yard.
They’re going to spread bubonic plague this Christmas.
They’re going to bring me lots of bed bugs this Christmas.
They’re going to pass tuberculosis this Christmas.
Those illegals in my yard.
Quote of the Day
"When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs."—Paul Krugman.
lolsob.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
Strips One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85. In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.
