[Background.]
[Trigger warning for sexual assault.]
Mike Myers does not get a lot of love at Shakes Manor.
This is mostly due to the existence of the multi-part culture-saturating Shrek franchise, the central character of which is literally just a collection of nasty Scottish stereotypes (which, as Scott points out here, are Myers' stock in trade)—although we're not exactly enamored of his gifts, ahem, to the Japanese, the Dutch, and Indians, either.
And now he will be getting even less love, if it's possible to give less love than none, as he's signed on to voice the lead role in a live-action/CGI hybrid film featuring everybody's favorite purveyor of the rape culture to children, Pepé Le Pew!
Awwwww, how adorable!
[Image Description: Still images from various PLP cartoons, showing Pepé the Skunk grabbing, kissing, chasing, pursuing Penelope the Cat.]
Lest anyone suffer from the misapprehension that it is only humorless radical feminists who are always looking for things to get mad about that see attempted rape in Pepé Le Pew cartoons, it is not. Frankly, it's astonishing that anyone watches these cartoons and doesn't see it the same way, given that the entire premise is that Pepé Le Pew is trying to "romance" Penelope against her will.
She pushes him away, she squirms out of his grip, she runs from him, she jumps off a cliff to get away. In some of the cartoons, Penelope would eventually attack Pepé and finally manage to free herself, leaving him a cloud of dust, scratched and defeated, but still as "amorous" as ever. And, in others, Penelope would eventually submit to Pepé, at long last (inexplicably) returning his affections.
Pursuit in defiance of interest, stalking as romance, sexual aggression, and disregard for consent—all the key narratives of the rape culture are handily conveyed to children via a "harmless" cartoon.
Gee, it'll be fun seeing this brought to the big screen.
I don't give a shit how much they're paying you, Mike Myers. It isn't worth it to participate in introducing yet another generation to this shameful character.
A few days ago, a student teacher in a suburb around here was asked, by the district, to be reassigned because when he was asked--by a fourth grade student--why he is not married, the teacher replied that he could not be, as he would marry a man and that's currently illegal.
Seth Stambaugh told a fourth-grader who asked if he was married, that he was not. When the student asked why, Stambaugh, who is gay, replied it was not legal for him to get married because he would choose to marry another man. The student then asked does that mean you like to hang out with other guys? and Stambaugh responded yes, said Lake Perriguey, Stambaugh's attorney.Now, the parent of the student who actually had the conversation with Mr. Stambaugh is not the one who complained. This was a parent of another child who overheard the conversation--the same parent who had already previously complained about Mr. Stambaugh:
The parent of a student who overheard the conversation complained, Perriguey said, and district administrators asked Stambaugh's advisors at Lewis & Clark College to find him another school.
Perriguey said the parent who complained had already raised an issue about Stambaugh's appearance, which Perriguey described as pressed pants, an oxford shirt, a tie and a cardigan. Stambaugh has a light Van Dyke and pulls his hair back into a pony tail.Pressed pants? A dress shirt? A cardigan? Do you know who that is, Complaining Parent? That's:
Lewis & Clark spokeswoman Jodi Heintz said it’s not uncommon for student teachers to change positions due to conflicts with their mentor teachers or other reasons. However, the decision usually comes at the end of a mutual discussion.Clearly something went wrong, that's for sure--and it's not particularly on Mr. Stambaugh's end that it happened. Shame on Beaverton School District (again--as back in 2005, they shut down Southridge High School's performance of The Laramie Project) for not standing behind their student teacher and caving to a parent--a parent who obviously was looking for something.
“Standard operating procedure includes all parties sitting down at a table and working out solutions,” Heintz said. “Clearly, in Seth’s instance, that collective conversation did not happen.”
Today's New York Times contains a story titled "Democrats in Tight Races Put Focus on Abortion Rights." In other words, exactly what Liss has been saying (in that it's largely the opposite of what she's been saying).
How's the weather on planet Times?
The article discusses two races. In the case of New York, I haven't heard Cuomo say anything about abortion (or much of anything really-- the Cuomo ads I usually see feature Republicans having bipartisangasms over what a nice guy he is). The New York ad the article cites was put out by NARAL, not the Cuomo campaign. In other words, an abortion rights group is trying to put a focus on abortion rights, and some Democrats are having none of it. This is a wee bit different than the headline. Basically, there's this one Democrat in Colorado who ran an ad in favor of abortion rights, but that's not news. Or is it?
Newt Gingrich is a mendacious wad, and the latest in his decades-long involvement in professional mendacious waddery is disputing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's assertion that food stamps have a stimulative effect. Last night, Gingrich made an appearance in his natural habitat, Fox News, to blink naively and profess not to "understand how liberal math turns $1 into $1.79."
Well, you know, I carry around a bumper sticker that says 2 plus 2 equals 4. So I'd be very curious how a dollar given to somebody becomes a $1.79. And I think if we could get that to work with the U.S. Treasuries, so if people gave the Treasury $1,000, it became $1,790, we could pay off the federal debt and never worry about spending or anything. I mean, I — you know, somehow, I don't understand how liberal math turns $1 into $1.79.As Ben points out at Think Progress, "the Wall Street Journal explained this alleged 'liberal math' that Gingrich doesn't understand."
Money from the program — officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — percolates quickly through the economy. The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that for every $5 of food-stamp spending, there is $9.20 of total economic activity, as grocers and farmers pay their employees and suppliers, who in turn shop and pay their bills.Gingrich, of course, understands this principle perfectly. He's just counting on the fact that most of the people watching Fox News won't.
While other stimulus money has been slow to circulate, the food-stamp boost is almost immediate, with 80% of the benefits being redeemed within two weeks of receipt and 97% within a month, the USDA says.
"He's still a draw. People still respond really well to him."—An anonymous Republican strategist, on disgraced Republican Senator George Allen's planned 2012 Senate comeback.
Allen, who is an authentic asshole, lost his senate seat in '06 after referring to one of his opponent's staffers, S.R. Sidarth, a Virginian of Indian descent, as "macaca," which is a kind of monkey.
He's still popular with the rightwingers, though!
Yesterday attorney Danny Lampley found himself in the poky, charged with criminal contempt of court. Why? Because he did not recite the Pledge of Allegiance when standing up with everyone else in the courtroom:
Wednesday, Chancellor Talmadge Littlejohn sent the 49-year-old Oxford attorney [to jail] for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in court.From the judge's order (.pdf--emphasis mine):
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.So all he has to do to expunge his criminal charges is to "stand and recite" in "open court", eh?
[...]
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.
Southern Baptist leader on yoga: Not Christianity.
All righty then.
Now if a real news agency could do an investigative report on why the AP thought this was fit to publish, I'd be ever so appreciative.
[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.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.
...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."
In Overton related news:
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.
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.
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."
"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."
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.
"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."
"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.
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.
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."
"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."
[Trigger warning for misogyny, sexual assault, bullying, suicide, slut-shaming, and victim-blaming.]
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.
[Trigger warning for homophobia and suicide.]
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.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*
..."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."
At least one major Christian group, Focus on the Family, stood by the Day of Truth on Wednesday.I am literally shaking with fury.
"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.
What's your favorite card game?
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?"
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.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.
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."
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.
