Wednesday, Chancellor Talmadge Littlejohn sent the 49-year-old Oxford attorney [to jail] for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in court.
Littlejohn urged Lampley to reconsider repeating the Pledge, as every other person in the judge's courtroom did as the day's proceedings began.
"This morning, that was the last thing on my mind," Lampley said late in the day after a child-support hearing.
At 10 a.m., Lampley was in jail garb. By 2:30 p.m., Littlejohn ordered his release and return to the Lee County Justice Center to continue their business.
BE IT REMEMBERED, this date, the Court having ordered all present in the courtroom to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegience, and having found that Danny Lampley, Attorney at Law, failed and refused to do so, finds said Danny Lampley to be in criminal contempt of court.
[...]
IT IT FURTHER, ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED, that Danny Lampley shall purge himself of said criminal contempt by complying with the order of this Court by standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in open court.
So all he has to do to expunge his criminal charges is to "stand and recite" in "open court", eh?
[Trigger warning for fat hatred, body policing, and classism.]
New York Mayor and "anti-obesity" crusader Michael Bloomberg is asking the federal government for permission "to bar New York City's 1.7 million recipients of food stamps from using them to buy soda or other sugared drinks."
The request, made to the United States Department of Agriculture, which finances and sets the rules for the food-stamp program, is part of an aggressive anti-obesity push by the mayor that has also included advertisements, stricter rules on food sold in schools and an unsuccessful attempt to have the state impose a tax on the sugared drinks.
...The mayor requested a ban for two years to study whether it would have a positive impact on health and whether a permanent ban would be merited.
"In spite of the great gains we've made over the past eight years in making our communities healthier, there are still two areas where we're losing ground — obesity and diabetes," the mayor said in a statement. "This initiative will give New York families more money to spend on foods and drinks that provide real nourishment."
Okay, so here's the thing: Stigmatizing food stamp recipients by suggesting they're too stupid to make the right decisions about what food they should be purchasing is not a good idea for reasons that ought to be self-evident. But supposing, for a moment, that this proposal wasn't embedded with patronizing classist horseshit and a heap of fat hatred, there still remain reasons to question the potential efficacy of this proposal, and its very design.
Why, for example, is the USDA being petitioned to allow an infringement on the autonomous decision-making of poor USians, instead of petitioned to ban the use of high-fructose corn syrup in all the foods and beverages purchased by those poor USians (and everyone else)? Given that researchers have found that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain, and that the average USian's consumption of HFCS over the same time period associated with the OH NOES Obesity and Diabetes crisis has increased by "an alarming 12,250%," you'd think that the mayor and USDA might want to start there and see if "a ban for two years [has] a positive impact on health."
Of course, that's never going to happen, since corn is subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars in the US every year. What a coinkydink!
All of which is a moot point, anyway, because we live in a country where people are meant to be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies. (Consent. Autonomy. Respect. Dignity.) And access to that freedom of decision-making isn't supposed to be decided on how much money one earns.
I'm not naïve or ignorant enough to believe that shit doesn't happen all the time already; we live in a fucked-up country that preaches equality and practices inequality, where we believe we're all middle class except for those people, for whom we're pretty sure we should be allowed to make decisions.
In a town where Michael Bloomberg's buddy Donald Trump has become a billionaire and gone bankrupt and become a billionaire again, you'd think there'd be more support for the idea that everyone should have the right to make their own decisions, even if they're lousy ones.
And, frankly, I can think of about a metric fuckton of lousier decisions than consuming a can of soda.
Way back at the beginning of this series I noted that Beck dedicated Overton to David Barton, founder of dominionist group WallBuilders. Barton is back in the news today, going on record with the decidedly un-Libertarian position that teh buttsex among queers should be regulated by the federal government. No word on how Barton feels about hetero assplay. Specifics on how regulation might work were not available.
Noah finally strolls out of jail, along with all his patriot buddies. Überslick lawyer Charlie really earns his pay.
According to Charlie, a group of cops had eventually come forward to corroborate Noah's version of the evening's events: they'd apparently wanted to play no part in the railroading of this harmless group of like-minded citizens. Just as a minor rebellion was threatening to break out between the actual uniformed officers and the contract security forces who'd been working the scene, a phone call had come in from some high echelon, and right away everything was abruptly and quietly settled.
Phew! I just knew all the cop-hating would not stand. The good, hardworking, honest (white) cops were under the thumb of those Blackwater goons, or whoever the "contract security forces" are. That the cops went along with this scheme, up to and after the fact, until a nosey lawyer got involved, doesn't exactly paint them in the kindest of light. But, just so you know, the cops are not the bad guys. Cops are never the bad guys.
Noah watches his new teabagging friends leave and notes how "the sky was clearing with the soft lights of the predawn metropolis outshining all but the brightest stars." Barf.
Hollis thanks Noah and says he's in his debt. They can call it even if Hollis can just tell him the time.
The big man looked up and seemed to take a bearing on a number of celestial bodies before ciphering a moment. "I'd say she's nigh onto half-past four in the morning, give or take some."
Barf. Again. I'll leave it to you to unpack Beck's boner for the Everyman™.
A silver Mercedes S600 Pullman, waits for Noah, and fortuitously, as he's about to be whisked away, Molly and Beverly appear. Noah, gentleman that he is, offers them a ride home.
The author goes on about how nice the limo is, wanking over the "hand-worked leather and rare polished wood." It's a nice car. "The entire vehicle was a rolling monument to the comforts of First World business royalty."
"I don't always get to travel like this," Noah apologized as the car got under way. "But just for perspective, my dad wouldn't be caught dead in a Mercedes. He rides in an armored Maybach 62, or he walks."
Yeah, for perspective. What? I don't even know what this means. Nevermind. Noah has a fancy limo. Darthur has a fancier limo. It gets more ridiculous:
Noah opened a center compartment by his side. Behind the sliding door was a neat pyramid of Turkish hand towels, kept constantly warm and moist like fresh dinner rolls. With a set of tongs he passed one to each of them, and then unrolled his own and pressed the steaming cloth to his face, rubbed in the heat, leaned back, and breathed in the faint scents of citrus and therapeutic herbs. His riding companions did the same, and soon there were long sighs from across the compartment, the sounds of unrepentant indulgence, comfort, and relief.
Nice limo, nicer towels.
Beverly asks Noah about his work as a lying PR stooge. Noah gleefully details how he "wrote some talking points for a man, a U.S. senator from out west who's about to become the subject of an ethics investigation."
"You've heard it before—there's been no wrongdoing, the charges are baseless, a pledge of full cooperation, faith in the process, a little slam at the motivations of his accusers—short and sweet, because he's so eager to get back to serving the needs of his constituents. Believe me, this sort of thing is routine. It'll be in the papers tomorrow night; that's why I can tell you about it."
Just one question: Why would anyone pay for that service? Because if you're a veteran politician who has managed to make it through the gauntlet of campaigns and debates and elections and closed-door backroom negotiations and committee meetings and filibusters and blah blah blah and then get caught, figuratively or literally, with your pants down, and you haven't the wherewithal to come up with "the charges are baseless" on your own, then it doesn't seem at all likely that you'd end up in office to begin with.
Just saying.
Anyway, Beverly asks him if it bothers him doing that for a living. (Lying, I think; not ripping off dildobrains by charging them for talking points they could have thought up themselves.) Yes, it bothers Noah if he thinks about it, so he doesn't think about it.
The limo drops Beverly off at the Chelsea, which seems a little boho for such a conservative woman, if you ask me. I may have mentioned this before, but I am pretty sure the writer has never been to New York. It's like his only reference for the city was a Rough Guide. It reads with such inauthenticity, as if someone whose never been to a big city is imagining what New York might be like.
It reminds me of an anecdote I once read about Truman Capote. He was living in New York at the time and he had a friend in from back home in Monroeville. One morning he asked his guest where they'd like to go for breakfast. "Tiffany's!" they blurted out. That was the only business the guest new by name in New York. Nevermind that they don't actually serve food at Tiffany.
I just imagine the ghostwriter thinking to himself, "The Chelsea is a hotel in New York, right? I can have Beverly can stay there. Yes, authenticity!"
Noah and Molly sit in the limo as it drives aimlessly through the city. Molly first confesses she misjudged Noah then confesses she's hungry.
"Say no more." Noah touched the intercom. "Eddie, could you take us up to Amy Ruth's, on One-hundred-and-sixteenth? And call ahead, would you? I don't think they're open yet. Tell Robert we need some orange juice and two Al Sharptons at the curb." Through the glass divider, he saw the driver nod his head and engage the Bluetooth phone system.
Yay for soul food! Boo for dragging Robert out of bed to cook for Noah!
Backstory alert!:
On the way to the restaurant he learned a little more about her life. Her family had moved around a great deal when she was young, following her father's job as a journeyman engineer for Pratt & Whitney. They'd ended up living near Arnold Air Force Base outside Manchester, Tennessee. When her dad was killed in an accident at the testing facility there, that's where they stayed. Her mother then reclaimed her maiden name and started the patriot group they were both still a part of, the Founders' Keepers, a few years later.
Clenis alert! Changing the subject, Molly asks "Who's the most fascinating person you've ever met?"
He didn't hesitate. "President Clinton. Hands down."
"Really?"
"All politics aside, you've never seen so much charisma stuffed into one human being. And you brought up the subject of lying earlier—this man could keep twenty elaborate, interlocking whoppers in his head at a time, improvising on the fly, and have you believing every word while you're holding a stack of hard evidence to the contrary. His wife might be even smarter than he is, but she doesn't have any of that skill at prevarication, and Gore was pretty helpless if he ever dropped his script. But Clinton? He's like one of those plate spinners at the circus: he makes everything look completely effortless. And obviously, in a related skill, he's a total Svengali with the chicks."
"I never found him all that attractive."
"Oh, but it's a whole different thing when someone like that is right next to you, as opposed to on your TV. If he was sitting here now, where I'm sitting? I promise, you'd be helpless. He wouldn't even have to try. You'd listen to him recite from the phone book for an hour and swear it was written by Oscar Wilde. Clinton could read you a fairy tale and you'd be down to your panties by the time Rapunzel let down her golden hair."
"I'll have to take your word for it."
"That being said, he's also one of the most ruthless sons of bitches who ever walked the earth, and we won't see another one like him for generations."
Back in the author's note, Beck said "the words Republican or Democrat rarely appear in this book, and when they do, it’s in an equally unflattering light." Okay. Sure. When this book gets around to calling W. and Cheney the d-bags that they are, I'll believe Beck is a non-partisan man of the people, and not the right wing hack that he appears to be.
Backstory alert! Darthur edition:
"Rhodes Scholar, that's a little-known fact. He was studying anthropology at Oxford when he met a man named Edward Bernays—Bernays was an admiring nephew of Sigmund Freud, if that explains any part of this messed-up business—and Mr. Bernays needed some new blood, someone with my father's skill set, to give a shot in the arm to the industry he'd invented a few decades before."
"Public relations."
"Right. Bernays got his start in the big leagues helping Woodrow Wilson beat the drums to push the U.S. into World War I. And my father's first project with him was a massive propaganda campaign for Howard Hunt and the CIA, along with the United Fruit Company, when they all got together to overthrow the president of Guatemala in 1954."
Did you get all that? Darthur helped overthrow Guatemala's democratically elected government. So he knows what he's doing when it comes to coups.
Speech alert!
Just kidding.
No, really, Noah gives a speech. But I am not going to tell you anything about it. It's a short one. And he references Joseph Goebbels. So, no. I'm not going into it. I've already said more about it than I wanted.
There's chicken and waffles, Noah's backstory (it's a bore), a ride through Central Park. Then things get weird: Molly sits on Noah's lap and asks him to take her home. To his home.
"I'm not talking about anything sexual," she assures him. "I just don't feel safe yet, after last night."
Well, at least that means there will be no sex scene in chapter fifteen. I'm glad something about this chapter went right.
[Trigger warning for misogyny, sexual assault, bullying, suicide, slut-shaming, and victim-blaming.]
[Transcript below.]
Above is video of a CNN piece that aired about Hope Witsell, a 13-year-old girl who hung herself after being viciously bullied following the dissemination of a picture of her breasts she texted to her boyfriend.
This story is similar to the more widely-discussed TylerClementi case in a very important way: Sexual images of Witsell were distributed without her consent, so it was not merely bullying, or "cyberbullying," that Witsell experienced, but sexual assault. And, also like the Clementi case, any discussion of sexual assault aspect is being eclipsed by the current media meme about bullying.
But the way in which Witsell's situation is being framed here is meaningfully different from the way Clementi's case was framed by mainstream commentators, who clearly laid the responsibility at the feet of his roommate. Here, we hear instead of Witsell's "mistake," and how she'd been warned by her mother about "the dark side of cell phones and computers," but "sexted" a private sexual photo to her boyfriend nonetheless. Curiously, it is never explained how the image privately sent to the boy ended up being in the hands of a female classmate, who then widely disseminated the photo, nor are either of them held accountable for the grave breach of Witsell's trust. Welcome to the rape culture, where it's just taken as read that people will violate you, so it's your responsibility not to do anything to make yourself vulnerable. And if you do, that's your "mistake."
No one with any decency suggests Clementi shouldn't have trusted his roommate not to secretly film him. But suggesting that Witsell shouldn't have trusted her boyfriend not to pass along a private image is not only considered acceptable, but the obvious conclusion for how the whole thing could have been avoided.
If we lived in a different (better) culture, we would use the sad and entirely avoidable death of Hope Witsell to have a national referendum on how slut-shaming and victim-blaming, specifically in association with young women's sexuality, is as damaging to (and frequently deadly for) young straight women as homo/bi/transphobic bullying is to LGBTQI youth. There is so much crossover between misogyny, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, particularly at the intersection of demonized sexuality, of which expressions of young straight women's sexual agency remains firmly a part, that these are not separate issues, nor competing issues—they are inextricably linked. Consent. Autonomy. Respect. Dignity.
Of course, if we lived in a different (better) culture, I wouldn't be writing this post at all.
Randi Kaye, CNN Correspondent (in voiceover, over photographs of Hope Witsell): Hope Witsell was a good student, but about a year ago Hope did something so unexpected, so out of character, it changed everything. (onscreen): Friends and family say this all started in the spring of 2009 at the end of the school year when Hope sexted a picture of her breasts to her boyfriend. Another girl at school they say got her hands on that photo and sent it to students at six different schools in the area. Before Hope could do anything about it, that photo had gone viral.
Donna Witsell, Hope's Mother: —and to just love everybody.
Kaye (in voiceover): Hope's mother, Donna, says she warned her many times about the dark side of cell phones and computers. (onscreen, sitting with Donna Witsell): So after all those conversations, you never imagined that she would sext a photo of herself to someone.
Witsell: No. No. No. Absolutely not.
Kaye (in voiceover): The photo made Hope a target. She was in middle school—11, 12 and 13-year-olds, and suddenly bullies everywhere.
Kayla Stitch, Hope's Friend (sitting at a table with other friends of Hope's, being interviewed by Kaye): They would walk up to her and call her like a big slut and whore, and, like, they would—sometimes they would, like, call her skank and, like, just be really, like, cruel to her.
Kaye: Hope hid her pain from her family and school officials. They knew about the photo, but she never told them about the ridicule. And she couldn't escape it. Online, friends say bullies wrote horrible things about Hope. On a MySpace page called "The Shields Middle School Burn Book," anonymous bullies created a "Hope Hater" page to taunt her.
Abby Hudson, Hope's Friend: Every time I see it I think back to Hope and what people were saying about her.
Kaye (in voiceover): And it got worse. In school friends formed a human shield for her.
Lexi Leber, Hope's Friend: People would try to come by and like hit her or push her into a locker or something.
Kaye: So you walked as a—like a crowd?
Stitch: Yes.
Kaye: Protecting her.
Leber: She was, like, afraid to walk alone because she was afraid that somebody was going to do something to her, or like verbally attack her, so we always—so she'd always have somebody come with her.
Kaye (in voiceover): Her parents did not know what was going on. (onscreen): Did you see a change in her behavior? Could you tell something wasn't quite right?
Witsell: I could tell that she was struggling to overcome this mistake that she made.
Kaye (in voiceover): On a Saturday, as school was starting last year, Hope helped her dad mow the lawn, ate dinner with her parents, and then went upstairs to her room. Her parents turned on a TV show.
Witsell: When we had finished watching the program, and I went upstairs to go in her room and kiss her goodnight, like I always do, is when I found her.
Kaye: What happened when you walked in her bedroom?
Witsell: I—I screamed for my husband as I was putting her on the bed. And doing CPR.
Kaye (in voiceover): It was too late. Hope was already dead. The 13-year-old hanged herself from her canopy bed. She used her favorite scarves. (onscreen): The day before she died Hope met with a social worker at school. A spokesperson for the school said the social worker was concerned that Hope may have been trying to harm herself, so she had her sign what's called a "no harm" contract in which Hope promised to speak to an adult if she was considering hurting herself. Her mother told me she was never told about that contract. She found it crumpled in the garbage in Hope's bedroom after she had died. (in voiceover): The school told us that the social worker had tried calling Hope's parents, but the parents say the school dropped the ball. And still, incredibly, the bullying was not over. After Hope's suicide, her sister Samantha found more cruel comments posted on Hope's MySpace page.
Samantha Beattie, Hope's Sister: There was people putting comments on there like, oh, my god, did Hope really kill herself, I can't believe that whore did that, you know, just obscene things that I would never expect from a 12-year-old or 13-year-olds.
Kaye: Obscene things written by children. So terrible, Hope Witsell thought there was only one way to escape. Randi Kaye, CNN, Tampa, Florida.
Every spring, in schools across the world, students mark a Day of Silence during which the discrimination and harassment—in effect, the silencing—of LGBTQI students and their allies is protested with silence.
And every year, the pray-the-gay-away Christian conversion program participates in a "Day of Truth" on the same day, admonishing conservative Christian kids to "counter the promotion of homosexual behavior" by wearing anti-gay t-shirts and handing out anti-gay literature, i.e. engaging in precisely the homophobic bullying that the Day of Silence was created to protest.
Well. It only took a well-publicized cluster of teen suicides directly attributable to homophobic bullying for Exodus to decide that maybe they shouldn't sponsor the "Day of Truth" anymore.
"All the recent attention to bullying helped us realize that we need to equip kids to live out biblical tolerance and grace while treating their neighbors as they'd like to be treated, whether they agree with them or not," said Alan Chambers, President of Exodus International, the group that sponsored the event this year.
..."I don't think it's necessary anymore," Chambers said of the event on Wednesday. "We want to help the church to be respectful of all its neighbors, to help those who want help and to be compassionate toward people who may hold a different worldview from us."
The absolute rage I feel at these assholes is indescribable. Just because the news inexplicably decided to finally bring attention to the well-documented issue of LGBTQI teen suicide doesn't excuse having ignored those easily accessible statistics, not to mention the stats on homophobic and transphobic hate crimes, for years. *rage*seethe*boil*
And yet at least Exodus International has the decency to do the right thing, which is more than I can say for James Dobson's despicable outfit, Focus on the Family:
At least one major Christian group, Focus on the Family, stood by the Day of Truth on Wednesday.
"Without question, Day of Truth is a loving and redemptive way students of faith can express their views positively in response to GLSEN's Day of Silence which only presents one point of view," Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family, said in a statement.
"In contrast to the whole idea of 'silence,' Day of Truth has encouraged students to exercise their free speech rights and have an open dialogue while respectfully listening to others," Cushman said.
I am literally shaking with fury.
It's not that I'm surprised that a group of horrible, heinous bullies would talk about an anti-bullying protest as "presenting one point of view," and mendaciously suggesting that advocating decency toward LGBTQI peers is equivalent to promulgating a Radical Gay Agenda, but I will never be able to wrap my head around that kind of hatred, nor understand the profundity of antipathy that allows someone to dress it up in some Orwellian message of tolerance and dialogue.
I despise those hatemongering fuckers to their rotten goddamn cores. And if my sneering contempt makes me a terrible person, so be it. But at least I'm honest about it.
[Image from last night's episode: The chefjudicator and grief counselor Johnny Elvisface delivers some distressing news.]
Last night's episode will be whipped and folded, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, pack your ice cream scoop and go...
Also: What the fuck does this have to do with food?
I love just about every card game I've ever played, and I've played tons of 'em: My dad is one of seven kids, and my childhood memories from every family get-together of our large extended family are centered around my grandma's big dining room table, playing cards.
One-on-one, my grandma and I would play games of War that would last for hours. But my favorite game that we played, and still my favorite, is probably Shanghai Rummy, which is essentially the more complicated Chinese version of Gin.
I also love me a game of Texas Hold-'Em.
If you're not a fan of traditional card games, please feel free to answer with your favorite card-based role-playing game instead. Like "Magic and the Gathering?"
For RedSonja and KarateMonkey.
[Video Paraphrase: It's a clip from the documentary "Hell House," in which a man and woman working on the script for a conservative Christian hell house are having a who's-on-first type miscommunication about the name of the role-playing game Magic: The Gathering.]
Senator Jim DeMint (R-Idiculous), last seen gumming up the funding for a women's history museum, revisited his controversial 2004 assertion that gay teachers and straight female teachers who are partnered but unmarried should not be allowed to teach in public schools (for which he later apologized) by saying at a rally last week that "no one came to my defense, but everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion."
Women's groups and LGBTQI groups immediately responded to this retrofuck assholery, by suggesting DeMint should get back in his spaceship and return to his home planet Dipshit-9 or whatever, and now DeMint's office has finally responded:
DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, has issued a response and basically says school boards can decide on their own and people should stop attacking him for being discriminatory.
The statement, via DeMint's communication's director, [says]: "Sen. DeMint believes that hiring decisions at local schools are a local school board issue, not a federal issue. He was making a point about how the media attacks people for holding a moral opinion."
Shakers, I don't even know what to say anymore. In the year of our Maude two thousand and ten, there is a sitting senator in the Unites States Congress who believes that LGBs and unmarried, sexually active straight women shouldn't be allowed to teach in public schools.
(I note that unmarried, sexually active straight men are A-OK, though! Natch.)
Disqus is behaving oddly again. Lots of users are seeing languages other than English used in comment timestamps, and the threads are showing the wrong number of comments on the front page.
As per usual, I've no idea what's going on or when it will be resolved, but I wanted to let you know we're aware of the problem/s and apologize for the inconvenience.
Hopefully, Disqus will have the issue/s resolved soon.
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.]
I like how this turned out looking like a charcoal drawing, via some strange combination of the very early morning light, my not using the flash, and the way Dudz moved just as I took the picture.
Last week, I wrote about a rape case in which two Michigan State University basketball players were accused of taking turns "assaulting an unidentified woman for nearly an hour in their Wonders Hall dormitory room late on Aug. 29 and into Aug. 30," and, despite one of the players' voluntarily corroborating the victim's statement, including the fact that she did not consent, prosecutors had nonetheless declined to pursue the case. (On Friday, I linked to a follow-up on the story here.)
Julie from The American Independent, which has been vigorously following this case, just emailed me with an update, which I'm quoting with her permission:
Hi Melissa,
Just wanted to pass along an update on the MSU sexual assault case. The prosecutor has now released the transcript of the interviews with one of the men as well as the victim (with very little redaction, thus making her identity obvious). Michigan Messenger talked to a number of experts to evaluate what the prosecutor is claiming is an absence of crime vs. what the police report suggests, and that story went up live this morning. Ed Brayton has also been looking at overall prosecution rates for sexual assault in Ingham county as well as nationwide, and will continue following up on the story.
What I find particularly interesting in this case is the prosecutor's contention (pdf) that the player who made a voluntary statement did not actually corroborate the victim's allegation that she was raped, even though the transcript clearly has the player reporting she said, "Stop," at one point, that she then got talked into continuing, that she argued with the other player about his unwillingness to wear a condom, and that she told him she felt as though she couldn't leave because they were physically intimidating.
"It's great that President Obama is showing a fighting spirit in the weeks before an election, but what his former voters need to see is that same fighting spirit when he's governing."—Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, an org launched to advocate for progressive legislation and candidates who will champion it.
On the one hand, I'm like: Yeah!
On the other hand, I'm like: The problem isn't that he's not showing a fighting spirit; the problem is that he's just not using it to fight for the things I want and/or in the way I want. For someone who got elected on the soaring rhetoric of hope and change, he is frightfully indifferent to the value of being visionary. Even if his team is certain they are going to have to end up with compromised, bipartisanized, uninspiringly pragmatic legislation if they want to get anything passed, instant capitulation isn't ideologically helpful, even if it's politically expedient.
It does matter whether we win or lose, but it also matters how we play the game.
Welcome to Shakesville, a progressive feminist blog about politics, culture, social justice, cute things, and all that is in between. Please note that the commenting policy and the Feminism 101 section, conveniently linked at the top of the page, are required reading before commenting.
