So. Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel has been brought up on ethics charges, and the House ethics committee, in the Democratically-controlled house, appear as though they are going to opt for a trial instead of accepting a settlement deal.
The opening paragraph in the New York Times' story reads:
In laying out 13 charges of ethical violations committed by Representative Charles B. Rangel, the House ethics committee set the stage for a rare public trial of the Democratic Congressman this fall, a potential embarrassment for the Democratic leadership during the election season.
Only in the Bizarro World that US politics has become could holding a trial to determine accountability for multiple alleged ethics violations by a member of one's own party be considered "a potential embarrassment."
Three years ago, after a long Republican Congressional majority, former majority leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) was headed to prison, former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) was in prison, former Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) was in prison, former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff was in prison, and so many sitting representatives and senators were under investigation that Republican strategist Scott Reed lamented: "The real question for Republicans in Washington is how low can you go, because we are approaching a level of ridiculousness. ... Republicans think the governing class in Washington are a bunch of buffoons who have total disregard for the principles of the party, the law of the land and the future of the country."
Republicans were voted out and Democrats voted in to clean up the unprecedented level of ethics violations. And now that Democrats are doing precisely that, the media deems it "a potential embarrassment."
Inspired by Shaker BrianWS' evangelizing, and because I've been listening all day to "Closer to You" (which I note has the sort of lyrics that one might find meaningful if one is/has been in a long-distance relationship but could also be fairly catalogued under "creepy stalker anthems") by The Wallflowers, who I've always thought to be an underrated band, today's QotD is: What's your favorite band that deserves more attention?
Although I just mentioned The Wallflowers, my top nomination would be Shudder to Think, who are now disbanded but have long been a favorite of mine (thanks to my ex-husband, who was already a huge fan when we met). I have many fond memories of standing in small, smoky clubs swooning mightily as Craig Wedren's undulating vibrato rattled through my chest.
I especially love the title given to the interview with this convicted rapist: "Tyson reflects on sex, drugs, spirituality."
Love the subhead, too: "The former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world looks back on a long, strange trip."
Very cool. Very way to minimize the fact that he is a person who served time for raping someone. Very way to recast him as some kind of sagacious icon whose wisdom was accrued through a lifetime of living hard and fast and wild.
Very lifetime-of-fuckery-turns-men-into-prophets. Very cool.
[Trigger warning for violent religious imagery, misogyny, and other objectionable stupidity.]
Hey! Remember our old friend William Tapley, aka the Third Eagle of the Apocalypse…? Sure you do! He was the kindly gentleman who informed all of us slutty naughtybitsies who use contraceptives that we won't be raptured—and thank Maude for his warning, because heaven knows I want nothing more than to spend ETERNITY with the likes of William Tapley.
Anyhoo, the Third Eagle is back! And this time with a song called "It's Prophesied (End Times Anthem)," which combines my two favorite musical features: Content about religion and parenthetical titles. What I like, ahem, most about this song is the glee with which Pappy Tapley sings its hideous lyrics. Enjoy!
Tapley, an older white man with a white beard stands at a keyboard next to a river, playing terrible music on what sounds like the organ setting, accompanied by a bosanova beat or some shit. Titles scroll by: "REVELATION UNRAVELED. William Tapley: Third Eagle of the Apocalypse. "It's Prophesied."
Tapley then begins to sing; the lyrics are subtitled across the bottom of the screen:
Your future's coming fast, my friend / You know we're nearly at the end / Your freedom's gone / Your friends are gone / But when I'm raptured / I'll be gone / It's prophesied, it's prophesied / You can run but you can't hide / Some will live, some will die / A few will go to meet His bride.
Tribulation will arrive / By Armageddon, few survive / You must get oil and trim your lamps / 'Cause you won't get a second chance/ It's prophesied, it's prophesied / When those four horsemen start their ride / There's pain and death on every side / When those four horsemen start their ride.
When Enoch and Elijah preach / Seven thunders fill their speech / They will call fire down from the sky / Until the people watch them die / It's prophesied, it's prophesied / Jerusalem is where they'll die / They'll do their best to save us all / But very few will hear their call.
America is Babylon / And her story's almost done / She rides a beast / The beast is sore / And now that beast / Will burn that whore / It's prophesied, it's prophesied / When Babylon the Whore gets fried / The merchants weep / The merchants cry / When Babylon the Whore gets fried.
Obama is beast number three / A leopard which comes from the sea / He's got four heads / He's got four wings / The Bible calls him the "leopard-king" / It's prophesied, it's prophesied / Obama's on the losing side / He'll start a war that he can't win / Obama is the "leopard-king."
The Antichrist is not your friend / The mark you take will mean your end / Yes, you can buy / And you will sell / But then your soul / Will burn in hell / It's prophesied, it's prophesied / You can run, but you can't hide / Some will live / Much more will die / A few will go to Paradise.
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[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 (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
"Seventy percent of unmarried women voted for Obama. And this is because when you kick your husband out, you gotta have Big Brother government to be your provider."—Conservative firebrand, crusader against women's equality, and lady who is not me Phyllis Schlafly, during a speech last weekend at a fundraiser for Oakland County congressional candidate Andrew "Rocky" Raczkowski, who later said he was "taken aback by the comments, because they do not reflect my personal beliefs," but defended Schlafly's "right as an American to express her views."
In which Liss re-imagines masterpieces of modern cinema, making them a tween bit better by adding me (Deeky: The Zac Efron of the Eighties) to their classic posters. Today, a film based on a book about a guy in love with the ghost of a girl in a coma.
CNN is reporting that Shirley Sherrod is planning on suing Andrew Breitbart for knowingly misrepresenting a speech she made to a chapter of the NAACP.
The fun thing that you'll immediately notice upon reading the actual story (at least the version that's up at 1:45 U.S. Central Time) is that most of the article is taken up by a discussion of what "the other side" thinks about Sherrod, in this case, the bleatings of a retrofuck conservative who's on the board of the Catholic League.
Maybe existing evidence illustrates that Sherrod was quoted out of context by a bigot who wanted to take down the NAACP and defend his own political movement, maybe Sherrod's a racist who hates America and eats white children. I suppose we'll never know the real truth.
"As youth who have 'grown up' during the '80s and '90s, we are the product of a unique historic moment in which queer youth are increasingly visible and coming out at younger and younger ages. These days many of us have greater access to community and support. From gay-straight alliances to LGBT centers, from media visibility to the Internet, queer youth are finding and creating community all over the globe. Increased visibility, however, also means an increase in the attacks against us. And with youth coming out in larger numbers and from more disparate communities, it is all the more urgent that we talk about how our identities as young queers intersect with our cultural, racial, and economic backgrounds."
I ran across this book last winter, when I was browsing at a local bookstore. I snapped up the last copy, which was being remaindered. I strongly suspect that the main reason the bookstore was carrying it was that the book grew out of a project at Syracuse University, which is just up the street. This is really a shame, because I wish more, not less, people had access to this collection.
The book quickly became my winter companion. It's a small paperback comprised of around 70 poems, short stories, and works of art. As such, it's great for reading while riding a train with a fussy toddler on your lap, while waiting at the doctor's office, or really any other time you might have two or three minutes to get a quick fix of inspiring thought from young queer people.
But of course, this is precisely the problem.
As has been discussed in this place previously, some folks have *ahem* issues with queer people. Folks like Glenn Beck and Lisa Harvey, founder of [TW: homo/queerphobia] Mission:America.
Mission:America is opposed to "dangerous" groups like PFLAG, because they recommended books like Revolutionary Voices, which in turn encourage "bisexuality, fluid sexuality and sexual experimentation," "coming out" (which Harvey puts in quotes) and other self-evidentially bad things.
Here's one of the passages that [TW: homo/trans/queerphobia] Harvey singles out from Revolutionary Voices as problematic:
"I first began to come out when I was 11. In terms of my family, I was fortunate because my parents have always been accepting of my sexual identity....So at the age of 12 I came out to my entire elementary school, which included grades K-8...I was in sixth grade and attending a Catholic school in San Francisco when I came out to a small group of people...During this time I started attending LYRIC, the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, a wonderful program and hang-out space for LGBT youth in San Francisco....The next year I was in seventh grade..."
Apparently this is dangerous writing, because it might lead one to turn out like Gina de Vries, author of that passage, or like Alix Olson, whose work is also included in the anthology.
Interestingly enough, Harvey quoted about a quarter of de Vries' essay. The parts Harvey omitted primarily deal with two subjects: being bullied, and de Vries' feeling happy with being honest with the world about who she is. This is not a coincidence.
When I came out in my mid-20s (and around a decade after de Vries' coming out in the 90s), I was terrified. I was filled with fear, self-hatred, and emptiness. This goes a long way towards explaining the times I tried to take my own life. You know what helped me finally come out and feel better about myself? Books like Revolutionary Voices (actually, it was this one). That book, along with things like Lynn Conway and Andrea James' websites and GenderTalk saved my life. In that they stopped me from killing myself.
It's also not a coincidence that a lot of the contributors to Revolutionary Voices discuss racism, sexism, religious bigotry and problematic aspects of capitalism. These are precisely the sort of things that Glenn Beck, Mission:America, and their followers want suppressed.
This brings me back to porn, which coincidentally, I was e-mailing folks about yesterday (believe it or not, that's not an every day occurrence for me). So, there's no porn in Revolutionary Voices. There's no smut, either, or whatever word you choose to describe erotic literature.
In conjunction with yesterday's thread on The View, it never ceases to amaze me how some folks talk about queer people (or at least lesbians) by completely erasing sexuality, while other folks talk about queer people by erasing everything but sexuality, even when the sexuality isn't explicitly present. In either case, the message is that something's wrong with us, because we're not like normal (straight) people, who, you know, manage to be people and in many cases also have sex.
This is also one of those occasions where accusations of porn! really do serve as a way of silencing folks with identities, politics, and habits that the kyriarchy finds objectionable. This instance of book banning isn't about porn at all; it's about keeping queer youth from being happy and fulfilled, it's about withholding knowledge that could improve, and yes, save, lives. Of course, very few people are going to ban a book on those grounds. Thus, queer becomes porn. How horribly convenient.
So, can we talk about last night's episode of Work of Art? [Spoiler warning.]
It was truly the most abysmal episode since the [TW] "create something shocking" challenge, for plethoric reasons, not least of which was the scarred body of a fat man of color being insistently called a suitable palette upon which to build a representation of hell by a thin white woman.
The title of this episode is "Opposites Attract," and the challenge was "Opposing Themes." With six assholes contestants left, they were paired into three teams, who were tasked with creating individual works of "opposites."
The opposites were: Heaven and hell, chaos and control, and male and female.
Male and female are NOT FUCKING OPPOSITES—and defining them in contradistinction to one another is essentially the very thing that underlies the subjugation of anyone who isn't a straight cis alpha male. For a show that continually pats itself on the back for being "progressive" and "boundary-pushing," they would have been hard-pressed to find a more retrofuck, small-minded, oppressive set of "opposites" than the TOTES NOT-OPPOSITE male and female bookends of the regressive and repressive gender binary.
Don't even get me started on what those two dipshits actually produced for "male and female."
6,600. The number of graves at Arlington National Cemetery that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) believes may be unmarked or mislabeled on cemetery maps.
Army investigators estimate the number is a mere 211.
Among the alleged problems at Arlington: "cremated remains being buried in the wrong gravesites, missing burial records, unmarked graves and burial urns put in a spillage pile."
There just aren't enough barf bags in the world for this mess, upon which I hereby confer the Andrew Corsello Award for Public Displays of Cringe-Inducing Privilege While Waxing Narcissistic About a Woman I Could Not Be More Heavingly Relieved Not to Be.
Back in January, the US Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to democracy by ruling that corporations have the same free-speech rights as individuals, thus allowing corporate interests to make almost totally unregulated donations to influence elections.
Taking advantage of this delightful expansion of corporate personhood, Target Corp., which is headquartered in Minneapolis, donated $150,000 to MN Forward, a group that purports to be about job creation, but is a Republican front group run by former staff of outgoing Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty and actively supporting Republican State Representative Tom Emmer as the GOP nominee to replace Pawlenty.
This has caused some problems for Target, which claims to be gay-friendly, since Emmer is, ahem, not gay-friendly.
Target Corp. on Tuesday defended the use of its new freedom to spend money on political campaigns as employees and gay organizations criticized a $150,000 donation that will help a Minnesota GOP gubernatorial candidate who opposes gay marriage.
Chief Executive Officer Gregg Steinhafel assured employees at the company's Minneapolis headquarters in an e-mail that the discount retailer's support of the gay community is "unwavering." He said employees, some gay, raised concerns that the money is helping state Rep. Tom Emmer, a fiery conservative who is his party's likely nominee for governor.
…He said the company doesn't have a social agenda or necessarily agree with all the positions of candidates it supports. "Let me be very clear," he said, "Target's support of the GLBT community is unwavering, and inclusiveness remains a core value of our company."
If that were true, the company wouldn't be donating egregious sums of money to a bigot. It's really that simple.
Monica Meyer, the interim head of the gay rights group OutFront Minnesota, said the gay community has long viewed Target as a supportive employer, and many are surprised by the large donation to the pro-Emmer group.
"A lot of people feel betrayed by this place where everybody goes to shop and you get to see them at Pride and you feel good that you're supporting a corporation that's giving back to the community," she said.
And it's not just LGBTQI groups who are pissed about the donation.
Several shoppers at the SuperTarget in the St. Paul suburb of Roseville — all of them self-identified as Democrats — weren't happy to hear about the chain's political involvement. Viki Karr, 50, said she would like to keep politics out of her shopping and would "definitely" not shop somewhere that supports the GOP.
Pat Mackey, 67, also of Richfield, said she was disappointed in Target.
"I think it is going to drown out the $25, $5 contributions of the average American, and we can't let that happen," she said.
Because the Supreme Court was all too eager to "let that happen," it now comes down to average people tracking corporate giving and making their voices heard in opposition to prevent that from happening.
Along with Target, Best Buy (who's really on my shit list this week), also made a significant donation to MN Forward of $100,000.
[Image from last night's show: Homobigot Aaron Schock (R-IL) explains to Padma why he's pro-torture as Cheftestant Andrea ladles up something far less objectionable.]
Last night's episode will be discussed in finely diced detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, pack your knives and go...
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Challenge Target and Best Buy Antidemocratic Donations
