Shakesville

Rep. Eric Cantor is a mendacious, obfuscating jerk.

Not news. Still, it's amazing to watch the linguistic contortions here as he tries to evade acknowledging that extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy continues to worsen the deficit. Quite genuinely, at this point Republicans are having to defend their policies by denying basic math.

Savannah Guthrie: Well, well, look, I mean, Democrats may not want to do spending cuts, and Republicans don't want to touch taxes; would you acknowledge, though, it may be a policy judgment you have made—but will you just simply acknowledge that passing these tax cuts worsens the budget deficit problem? I mean, you can't deny that, right?

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA): Savannah, Savannah, let's look at it through the prism of the working families who are seeking jobs and the small businesspeople who are creating them. It's not—it's not a tax cut they're looking for, they don't want a tax hike.

Guthrie: But that wasn't my question.

Cantor: And that's the situation—the prism, the prism through which these people are looking at it. I mean, come on now, you can't hike their taxes and expect them to create jobs.

Guthrie: Right. Yeah, we get that. I just—I just was wondering if you had a—if you had any dispute with the notion that it does exacerbate the deficit picture.

Cantor: What I—what I said in the beginning is, um, if you have less revenues coming into the federal government, and more expenditures, what does that add up to? Certainly you're gonna dig the hole deeper. But you also have to understand, if the priority is to get people back to work, is to start growing this economy again, uh, then you don't want to make it more expensive for job creators. You don't wanna hike their taxes so that they won't hire people. I mean, that's the fundamental, uh, decision here. Do you wanna make it more expensive for small businesspeople right now, and no, I don't think you do.

Update to Emergency Care While Trans

A brief update to eastsidekate's post from last Friday about an Indiana teaching hospital refusing care to a trans person with clearly emergent symptoms: Change.org has started a letter-writing campaign to sort the hospital out sharpish. I encourage any Shakers who are in a position to do so to let the hospital know we're watching.

The second shift ain't harmful, ladies

Ah, ~~economics~~ Economix :laser graphics!: we meet again.

It turns out there was this big study about how working moms don't break their babies. That's good news, I guess.

I see a couple of issues, though:

The article is written as if the status quo is unchangeable. There are places in this world where mothers get a full year of maternity leave. When our daughter was born, we had to take out a loan just to cover the cost of my partner's 6 weeks of partial pay maternity leave, plus a few more weeks of unpaid leave. It doesn't have to be this way.

The article (I don't know about the research paper) does speculate that black mothers may be more likely than white mothers to have extended kin networks to help look after newborns (they don't present any data to back this up). So, it looks like researchers have caught on to the idea that there may be alternatives to the mother providing all the care. But they don't really run with it.

Perhaps there's a second (or third) mother? Maybe the mother is single? Perhaps there isn't a mother? Anyhoo, let's run with the current conservative paradigm for USian nuclear families. The mother might have a job, the mother should care for the kid, presumably clean the house, cook the meals.... Mother, mother, mother...

A commenter named Kate (turns out there's more than one of us) hits on the obvious point that couple consist of two people. It's 2010 and the men are still watching ballsports on the couch? Really?!?!

Ageism, Classism, and Minimum Wage

by Shaker PlusSizedWomanist

Hello, Shakers. PlusSizedWomanist here to share a little bit of how classism and ageism affect me and other young people like me. A little background: I'm a 21-year-old, plus-sized woman of color who works for minimum wage as a cashier at my local grocery store. I'm a full-time college student studying nursing, and I most definitely plan on incorporating HAES into every single care plan I make. Intros aside, let's begin…

I was casually reading the Chicago Sun Times when I came across this lovely number here: Richard Roeper wrote an article about the Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady's notion that the state minimum wage should be lowered to $7.25 an hour, and asked for readers to submit their thoughts.

Let's just brace ourselves for the amount of clusterfuckery that's about to be read, shall we? *pause* Ready? Ok. Here we go.

First, we have the LOVELY comment from R.J.:

R.J.: I thought minimum wage was a starting place, a foot in the door, 'Let me show you what I can do.'

I thought minimum wage was a way to hire new people who desire to move up from that level. Minimum wage is not structured to sustain a family, rent, car note, food and a cell phone.

Hear that, people surviving off minimum wage long-term? Apparently, you don't have the desire to move up from the level that you are now, despite working your ass off for 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week. Not. A. Single. Ounce. Of. Desire to move up.

Next up is Richard Crane:

Richard Crane: The reason to cut the minimum wage is so that people who don't have jobs can have jobs. Some income is better than none.

So if you're barely making it as it is with your meager income, you should be frickin GRATEFUL that you get anything at all, you whiny so-and-sos!!!

Then, we have a Mr. John Hochbaum:

John Hochbaum: The minimum wage is damaging to business and jobs. You cannot dictate pay. We're better served allowing the market to set pay.

People on the low end of the pay scale are usually teenagers; the $8.50 rate will box out many teenagers from securing jobs. If a company was allowed to pay someone $6 an hour, many more people will work. Low income jobs are not meant for the breadwinner of a family. In today's market if you can't earn $10-$11 an hour you have to be a complete failure. Rewarding failure doesn't inspire people to make themselves better.

Yep. So let's have a closer look at this, shall we?

1. If you are the breadwinner, you cannot be working a minimum wage job, because that's just not what breadwinners do! They WIN BREAD for goodness sakes!

2. If you cannot get a job that pays over $10, then you are being rewarded for failure by having a living standard set for you. Because only people who WORK deserve to have a living standard. So those people who work 2 jobs just to make ends meet just aren't pulling those bootstraps up fast enough!

Don't you guys just LOVE classism?

And FINALLY, we get to the LOVELY Mister Ed Schubert of Northbrook, who owns his own business:

Ed Schubert, Northbrook: I own a Dairy Queen. You are right; one can't live on minimum wage. But if we have to pay a 14-, 15- or 16-year-old $8.25 in our business, we can't pay older persons more. It should be about $5.50 for the kids that we have to teach -- we have to teach them how to work, how to be on time, and what work is all about. Kids from 18-20 should get $7.75-$9.25, and those 21 and over should get $10.25 and up. The state and feds need to look at that idea. People that are older need to make more, NOT THE KIDS DOING DRUGS. Until then you will see more and more businesses going out of business!!!

I've been here for 36 years and it's getting harder ever day. [Recently] a person that worked for me 25 years ago came in and asked me for a job. I told him yes but I can pay only $8.25 an hour until I know if he is going to work out.

Look alive folks! We've got a full-fledged privileged ASSHOLE in our midst!!! Now let's examine how much bullshittery is in this little paragraph here:

1. Young people are inherently irresponsible, lazy and incompetent little hoodlums, and thus they do not know the value of work, therefore they should be paid less, despite doing the same work, simply because they are young and have to be taught… WHAT? Thank you VERY much Mr. Schubert of Northbrook for completely paint brushing all young people as such. We really appreciate that you view us in such a derogatory manner.

I am not some lazy incompetent little 'kid,' Mr. Schubert. This summer, when I went job-hunting for the summer, I got my young plus-sized ass up, got my resume together, printed off 150 copies, borrowed a suit from my grandmother and went to nearly every major shopping facility within in the Chicagoland area. I filled out job applications left and right, with over 70 major stores having my application and resume on file. Know how many called me back? 2. TWO. And I'm lucky as hell that I got the job I got. Majority of the stores I went to required at LEAST 2-3 years of experience, and these were ENTRY LEVEL positions. Now what I want to know is, if these positions are those that are supposed to be entry level, why is there an experience requirement? That right there eliminates a hell of a lot of possibilities for young people, seeing as 9 times out of 10, we've not had the chance to work a register/stock room/etc. because of said requirements!

2. Young people are apparently tireless, and should be grateful when someone gives us grueling work, because it's "teaching us what work is all about." Because young people aren't REAL people, anyways, since we are all so lazy, shiftless, and incompetent. This oxymoronic mentality of us being lazy/tireless is the root of a lot of intergenerational angst.

My peers and I frequently hear comments like, "You can't be tired/in pain/in distress! You're YOUNG!" Bullshit. I work on my feet for 8 hours a day bagging heavy groceries into carts with little time to sit down, while also dealing with people commanding me to smile every 10 minutes. I'm young. And I'm TIRED. You don't get to tell me I'm not.

When someone dismisses my reality with, "You're young," they are really saying "Your distress can't be real because of your age," which is not merely wrong, but ageist.

3. Young people are apparently all devoid of any responsibilities whatsoever. It's not like young people pay rent/buy groceries/pay bills at all. The only thing we do is BUY DRUGS!!!eleventy!1 LOTS OF THEM! So it's not like I'm paying my phone bill or buying groceries with my meager paycheck. Nope, you've totally figured me out, Schubert. I'm wasting my entire check on DRUGS. Every time. LOLSOB.

Overall, those comments made me absolutely furious at the lack of compassion and the amount of privilege people have when it comes to the working poor, and especially the young working poor. And the sad thing is, these compassionless and privileged mindsets are what become law. With that said, I'm asking the Shakers to help out. Teaspoon time, folks. Contact Bill Brady and let him know that minimum wage should NOT be lowered.

Bill Brady's campaign offices:

Chicago: 1201 N. Clark, Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60610 (312) 846-1649

Bloomington: 2203 Eastland Drive, Suite 3, Bloomington, IL 61704 (309) 664-8544

Springfield: 500 W Monroe Street, First Floor NE, Springfield, IL 62704 (217) 241-9830

You can also email him here.

Tony Abbott Makes Rape Joke; MSM frames it as "sexist gaffe".

by Shaker Napalmnacey

[Trigger warning for minimization of sexual assault.]

So, Tony Abbott is totally going after the women's vote! Check this out!

The Australian: Tony trips at paid parental leave launch with 'no' gaffe.*

On a day that the Coalition was devoting to winning the women's vote, Mr Abbott questioned whether when Julia Gillard says no, she really means it.

Mr Abbott has knocked back the Prime Minister's offer for a debate on the economy, saying she initially refused his request for three debates and had changed her mind because she was now in panic mode.

"Are you suggesting to me that when it comes to Julia, no doesn't mean no?" he said.

Mr Abbott repeated the comment a number of times.

It's just a world, a galaxy, an entire universe of "inappropriate". He's equating an entire party's decision on how to proceed during the election campaign with a tired, misogynistic, down-right dangerous rape culture trope about women's ability to make decisions about their sexual behaviour.

How dare he?! How friggin' dare he? Would he ever, ever stoop to making a joke like that about a male PM? He didn't just make this joke once — it's a part of his campaign repertoire; he said it repeatedly, obviously very pleased with this line and hoping it'll hit the front pages and be used against Julia Gillard.

What really pisses me off about this soundbite is that he also refers to her as Julia, rather than Ms. Gillard or 'the Prime Minister'. In this particular instance, it's stripping her of her authority. It comes off to me as a very targeted, cruel and disrespectful. It's not just making fun of her decision-making. It's an underhanded, sneaky way to strip her of her agency, her professionalism and her personhood. In his mind, there is nothing worse than a woman that "gets herself raped", and he framed our Prime Minister in that narrative because it was the most damaging thing he could think of.

If this doesn't expose the cold-hearted, calculating and dangerous man he is, I don't know what will. Keep talking like this Tony Abbott, keep showing us your true colours.

It'll help with the women's vote, totally. /sarcasm.

------------------------------

The Sydney Morning Herald has a slightly more critical article here, accompanied by a poll asking: "Do you think Tony Abbott's comments were inappropriate?" Currently, 55% of respondents have answered "No."

And Prime Minister Julia Gilliard responds here: "Mr Abbott's words are a matter for Mr Abbott."

[Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.]

------------------------------

* [As an aside, the link to that article in The Australian's search returns appears to be broken. Right now, the link returns the user to the front page of The Australian, where the top headline is "Nothing sexual in 'no' comment: Abbott" (yeah, sure) which links to this story, headlined "Tony Abbott accuses Labor of 'vicious smear' over Gillard 'no' comment reaction." Ugh.—Liss]

Open Thread

Hosted by a hippo sink.

Question of the Day

It's hot here. 106° F. Technically and theologically speaking, that is hotter than Lucifer's taint. It's so hot, I've had to get out my ice buttplug just to cool down. And it's not working! I'm feeling very frustrated at the moment.

So. What do you do to beat the heat, Shakers?

VA Healthcare Challenge Can Proceed

A U.S. judge ruled on Monday that the state of Virginia could proceed with its challenge to President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare law, a setback that will force the White House to defend its reforms in the middle of a tough congressional election campaign.

In the opening salvo of the legal fight, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson refused to dismiss the state's lawsuit, which argued the requirement that its residents must have health insurance is unconstitutional and conflicts with state law.

Hudson, who noted that his ruling was only an initial step, decided the issue the state raised -- whether forcing residents to buy something, namely healthcare, is constitutional -- had not been fully tested in court and was ripe for review.

Suffice it to say that I am not a kneejerk defender of the administration's insurance mandate, but this lawsuit is complete crap. As Steve Benen notes, "Folks who never seemed especially troubled by mandatory auto insurance or mandatory flood insurance in some parts of the country have now concluded that a health care mandate is the most offensive idea they've ever heard. It's the basis of GOP litigation, and ballot measures at the state level touted by right-wing activists."

I don't like the healthcare insurance mandate, either—but that's because I support socialized healthcare, not because I'm a hypocritical shit like the government-employed Republicans who happily accept the taxpayer-funded health coverage that comes with their jobs while running their mouths off about bootstraps and rugged individualism.

Um, Okay

On the front page of CNN: "Female condoms -- strange or natural?"

The link goes here.

Daily Dose o' Cute

"Bond. James Bond."

Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"

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.]

10 Questions for Governor Tim Pawlenty

1. You're the governor of Minnesota?

2. You?

3. Really?!?

4. "Kicked it in the dugout?"

5. What the hell does that even mean?

6. Why the insistence on opaque sports analogies?

7. Couldn't you come up with something more universally understood?

8. Do you have anything to say for yourself?

9. Anything at all?

10. Why are you even here?

The New York Times had a different set of ten questions, which were slightly less informative.

:Yawn: Is it 2013 yet?

--
ETA: 11. "Red-hot smoking wife"?

12. Really?!?

The OFFS Awards: Modern Family Edition

Or, your entertainment headline of the day:

Nathan Lane to Play Cam's "Flamboyant Friend" on Modern Family

Swell.

Tony winner Nathan Lane is joining the ABC series next season, at least for one episode. Executive producer Steve Levitan just told us that Lane has been cast as Pepper, the ultraflamboyant friend of Cam and Mitchell on the show.

I officially hate my TV now.

Today in Ugh

That Tom Shales is a contemptible dipshit is not news. But smearing the amazing Christiane Amanpour by implying she's a terrorist sympathizer is a new low even for him. Ugh.

Another Brief Encounter

Saturday afternoon, I was in the kitchen when I heard a commotion upstairs in the loft. I thought the cats and dog were fucking around or something, but when I walked out into the living room, all four of them were there. Clunk clatter clickity-click. I realized the sound was coming from the roof—and as I peered up, the pigeon who visited us last weekend hopped onto one of the skylights and strode around, occasionally stopping to peer down and try to get a glimpse of what was inside.

Hop flap clunk clatter clickety-click. Now zie was in the other skylight.

I watched hir for awhile, took a few snaps, and then went out to the porch and cooed at hir, tossing some cracker crumbs into the yard in case zie was hungry.

We're either a perfectly-positioned resting point on hir messenger route, or else a pigeon is considering adopting us.

Monday Blogaround

This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, publishers of the New York Times' bestseller Facts About Hippos You Should Know by Deeky W. Gashlycrumb.

Recommended Reading:

Marcella: Carnival Against Sexual Violence 97 [TW for sexual violence]

Pizza Diavola: ALERT: HHS Rule Banning Abortion Coverage in High-Risk Pools

Andy: FOX News Given Front Row Seat in WH Press Room

dentedbluemercedes: For the Dignity of Santhi Soundarajan [TW for self-harm]

Angry Asian Man: Race: Yellow [TW for racism]

Steve M.: A Follow-Up to a Phony Story [TW for disablism.]

Jorge: Local, I'm working on it.

Leave your links in comments...

Three years and one day ago today...

I was watering my garden when my sweetie ran out to told me there had been a bridge collapse.

“Where?" I asked.

“In Minneapolis, the bridge over the river.”

There are two major rivers in the Twin Cities (the Mississippi and the Minnesota), and countless bridges crossing them. I assumed that one of the derelict bridges crossing the Minnesota had finally given out, possibly taking a pedestrian or cyclist with it. It took me a while to process that the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi had gone done. Back when I was in college, I had crossed this bridge twice a day. I had countless friends and relatives in the area. This was stunning.

One interesting realization that came out of this was the way that the media and society treat “local” events. The collapse of the World Trade Center's main towers is, in a sense, a defining moment for my generation. There are good reasons for this. But outside of New York City, I daresay the media and politicians (and marketers) have marketed and branded the tragedy. People with no real connection to the collapse have internalized it, and taken it as their own personal tragedy.

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. What's interesting to me is the way in which we, as a whole, have not personalized other tragedies, including those that happen to have touched me. I'm from Minneapolis. I also know people who lived blocks from the Seventeenth Street Canal in New Orleans. I know people who were in the Superdome during Katrina. The I-35W bridge collapse and Hurricane Katrina were intensely personal for millions of Americans, yet I'll claim that many (if not most) Americans have yet to internalize, let alone learn from them.

There is a new, functional (if not fabulous) 35W bridge in Minneapolis. Stimulus money has paid for lots of new bridges and civil engineering projects. However, the US hasn't addressed the political, philosophical, and economic issues behind its crumbling infrastructure. It's built new and improved roads and bridges in certain neighborhoods, while leaving others in decay.

There's a gas leak in front of my apartment; the utility company has known about it for years. A couple times a year the smell gets really bad and they send someone out to look at it. Nothing gets done, though. The cost of fixing the pipe outweighs the cost of venting gas into my neighborhood.

Every fews weeks a water main breaks. Sometimes this floods buildings and shutters local businesses. Especially in the US' eastern urban centers, underground pipes are often well over a hundred years old. Replacing them all would cost billions, if not trillions of dollars. Yet, many US cities are broke. However, money goes to war, not to cities. Tax structures and politics shuttle what does get spent on infrastructure to suburban and rural areas.

The United States cannot afford to forget that infrastructure matters. It also can't forget the many lessons of Katrina; among others, the dangers of ignoring the needs of the US' poorest (and in many cases, least white) neighborhoods. We all need affordable and safe transportation, water and schools.

Alas, I fear this neglect is at worst intentional, at best a product of political and economic expediency. I wonder if my nation's leaders want some of us to stay in poverty, for the benefit of others. It is, I feel, particularly cruel that many of my leaders are, from my perspective, using a third tragedy, that of 9/11, to distract us from the lessons of horrors taking place in hometowns across the country.

---
I'm well aware that the tragedies I'm discussing are incredibly different (among other things, they differ by orders of magnitude in the numbers of causalities. I'm not interested in discussing which tragedy was worse, as much as the differences in how politicians and leaders have responded to each, and how those responses intersect.

This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

[Trigger warning for stalking/predatory behavior.]

Persistance Hunting in the Park—an article about how you can make jogging fun by pretending you're a hunter and another jogger is your prey.

I particularly love the update in which the author expresses his mystification that everyone was getting all bent out of shape about his ~~awesome workout idea~~ ridiculously clueless article written from the deeply privileged perspective of someone who is vanishingly unlikely to actually be stalked and victimized while running, and notes:

I thought it went without saying, but don't invade anyone's personal space and don't do anything else that common sense tells you not to do. I took out the line "Hide behind a tree for a second or two." just so no one gets the wrong idea. Happy hunting!

Wow. As Shaker MelissaRel, who sent the link, observed, one might imagine common sense to dictate not endorsing "a predator/prey workout in the first place."

Meanwhile, over at Traxee, a website for female runners, contributor bmoore sighs: "As the member of a gender that frequently IS hunted down while running in the park (sometimes with heartbreaking consequences) I just really have to wonder what goes on in Mark's head."

I have a few ideas about what's going on in there, but what's definitely not going on in there is empathy with the runners who are turned into "prey" in his workout scenario, particularly the female runners (although I believe any man who became aware of being stalked by another runner while jogging would be uncomfortable at best—and quite possibly terrified—too).

I'll just quickly add that the author begins his piece with a note about how more people are outdoors during the summer, making it the perfect season for stalk-jogging. So far today, by coincidence, I've now written three pieces, including this one, that use summertime as a pretense for talking about ogling/stalking people—primarily women—just because they happen to be outdoors, wearing or doing something related to the nice weather.

Quote of the Day

[Trigger warning for dehumanization.]

"To be a gazer, some say, is to place oneself superior to the gazed, which works fine as a tenet of film theory and feels notably more dubious as a premise of girl-watching analysis. The girl may be an objectified being, but it is practically a subclause of the social contract that we all objectify ourselves in the mirror every morning. Meanwhile, the girl-watcher is subject to the absolute rule of his powers of vision and carries a distinct whiff of comic pathos. Figure, carriage, finish, charm, flesh, cool—these are omnipotent. It is the nature of beauty that the girl-watcher is helpless before the wonders of nature."—The concluding paragraph of Troy Patterson's " A Dandy's Guide to Girl-Watching," a treatise on objectifying women published in Slate and subtitled "Checking out girls in shorts…tastefully."

I remember when Slate used to be worth reading. Now it's just another smelly internet receptacle into which garbage-brained writers can dump embarrassingly florid exposition waxing romantic about the dehumanization of women, justifying it with some yawn-inducing codswallop about how ~~women~~ "girls" are really the ones holding the power because men are just goofballs who can't resist looking, and a well-rounded ass reduces them to comic helplessness, or similar nonsense that boils the blood of every woman who's ever been sexually assaulted, harassed, cat-called, or ogled by a man who considers that shit some kind of goddamn compliment and blames his victim for being so irresistible.

[H/T to Shaker Julie. Related Reading: The Magical, Mysterious, Mighty Power of Uncovered Meatdom, Rape Is Not a Compliment, Today in Rape Culture.]

Two Minute Nostalgia Sublime

The Band with the Staples Singers: "The Weight"