Hosted by Potatoes. Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!
Question of the Day
What's a common activity in your culture which you've never participated?
I've never had a manicure or a pedicure.
On TSA Security and Survivors
[Trigger warning for TSA enhanced pat-downs discussion.]
Newsweek's Kate Dailey: For Survivors of Sexual Assault, New TSA Screenings Represent a Threat.
That's a beautifully uncompromising headline, and it's an excellent piece, which has the potential to be a conversation-changer.
(Note: Kate interviewed me for this piece yesterday. I'm quoted and our discussion here is also linked.)
In Things That Shouldn't Need to Be Said...
...but evidently do: [TW for sexual violence] Sexually assaulting Transportation Security Administration screeners who are just carrying out orders, and may themselves be triggered by having to execute enhanced pat-downs, is not the way to protest their employer's invasive security guidelines.
Frankly, it's not the way to protest their employer's invasive security guidelines even if the employee is hirself using the opportunity to grope passengers.
It's just not the way to protest anything at all.
P.S. Jeffrey Goldberg: Kilts aren't yours to appropriate as a device to easily sexually assault people, asshole. I've seen a lot of gross appropriation of Scottish culture in my lifetime (I'm looking at you, Mike Myers), but suggesting that USian men wear kilts specifically for the purpose of sexually assaulting people is absolutely breathtaking.
[H/T to Shaker Hornet Queen.]
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.]
What a Great Idea!
Image Description: A screenshot of People's website, featuring a "Daily Dose of Cute" section.
On Last Night's The Fashion Show
Did anyone else happen to catch last night's episode of The Fashion Show: Ultimate Collection? Because it may well have been the most absurd contest in all of reality TVdom. It was more ridiculous than the Lucent Dossier emo clown boners episode of Top Chef: Just Desserts. Nothing could be worse, right?
It hardly seemed a possiblity. Until they revealed what the designers were supposed to use as inspiration for this challenge:
The human body. That sort of sounds nice. Except they meant the inside of the human body. Hence the trip to ogle plastinated corpses at Bodies... The Exhibition.
I've seen some ridiculous shit on TV, but come on. Evening wear influenced by the graceful curves of the spleen? The lower GI tract pant? A gall bladder-kini? Do, shut up, The Fashion Show: Ultimate Collection.
Oh, and the winner? This piece, an apparent homage to the foreskin:
Discuss.
Take that, Antiques Roadshow!
As part of his bizarre neo-conservative five four-year plan for New Jersey, yesterday Governor Christie laid off the state's public broadcasters, all of them, in order to save money for tunnel building not government.
I'm a leftist and also blah, blah, blah, public radio, blah, blah, blah, I <3 government and soft-spoken nutmeg peddlers, blah, blah, blah. Okay, we've gotten that out of the way.
To continue, I definitely see Christie's move as a cynical strike against what conservatives perceive as one of America's greatest examples of state-sponsored liberalism. Here's the thing: there is no such thing as unbiased media. Even if you're broadcasting the feed from an open mic, someone's got to make an editorial decision about where to place it.
And yes, state-run media is no exception. There was no truth in Izvestia and no news in Pravda*, no?
It's possible to exert influence over the media, even the public media. Remember when some dudes convinced PBS to air the The George Shultz Experience? Me neither, but the concept is that were conservatives to put their minds to it, they could (continue to) make public broadcasting more trickle-down-tacular and Cold Wargasmic.
But that's not what these layoffs are about. I suspect they're also not just about distrust of the state, but about distrust of information itself.
Charity isn't going to be enough to broadcast boring speeches from politicians. Press conferences aren't exactly thrilling either. Have you heard one of Obama's pressers lately? I dare you to make money off that (in that I don't).
Broadcasting the nuts and bolts of government isn't necessarily popular**, which is why it's the state's job. Hell, even Izvestia went halfway and printed the government policies and speeches the totalitarian Soviet regime wanted the citizenry to read. Apparently New Jersey residents can no longer even expect that.
--
*A favorite Russian witticism of mine. The names of the largest Soviet newspapers, Izvestia and Pravda roughly translate as news and truth respectively. There's the joke. It's more of an lolsob, really.
**As a young adult, I spent the period after Christmas with a massive tin of cheese, butter, and caramel popcorn watching back-to-back-to-back State of the State addresses, but I suppose YMMV. Also, that reminds me, Gov. Christie? You can't hold a candle to Gov. Whitman, and that's not saying much in my book.
US House News
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has retained her leadership position. Because the Democrats will now be the minority party in the House, she will be the House Minority Leader.
Meanwhile, Rep. John Boehner has, as expected and unanimously, won his party's leadership position, which will make him Speaker Boehner come January.
Number of the Day
Zero. The number of Senate Republicans who voted in favor of considering the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have helped end discriminatory pay practices against women.
The legislation, which had already passed the House, is now dead in the Senate, because it garnered only 58 votes instead of the 60 it needed to move forward.
Echidne finds this hilarious line in a Wall Street Journal piece: "Let's not embark upon a journey that leads us to gender warfare."
Got that? Wage discrimination isn't gender warfare, but fixing it is.
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, proud distributors of Sophie Brand Monitor Warmers.
Recommended Reading:
Renee: Tangled: A Celebration of White Femininity
ashoncrawley: In Praise of Non-Famous Black Women
Fannie: Better Than [TW for sexualization of children, sexual violence, homophobia]
Cuppycake: Zynga CEO on FrontierVille Gay Marriages
Mannion: The Ruffalo Is All Right
Living ~400lbs: I Love This Dress
Leave your links in comments...
The Overton Window: Chapter Twenty-Seven
Faction time, kids!
Fortunately, that "long story" about Kearns' career has been summarized in four short paragraphs. Whew. But, like I said, faction. So, not so whew.
Kearns "worked in the top levels of counterterrorism with a man named John O'Neill, the agent who'd been one of the most persistent voices of concern over the grave danger posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s."
John O'Neill is a real person. A one-time special agent and Assistant Director at the FBI. He investigated the USS Cole bombing in Yemen, among other things. According to Wikipedia:
In 1996 and 1997, O'Neill continued to warn of growing threats of terrorism, saying that modern groups are not supported by governments and that there are terrorist cells operating within the United States. He stated that veterans of the insurgency by Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union's invasion had become a major threat. Also in 1997, he moved to the FBI's New York office, where he was one of the agents in charge of counterterrorism and national security.
And as Beck puts it:
John O'Neill had seen a woeful lack of preparation for the twenty-first-century threat of stateside terrorism, and he hadn't been shy about expressing his opinions. The people upstairs, meanwhile, didn't appreciate all the vocal criticisms of the Bureau specifically and the government in general, especially coming from one of their own.
In August 2001, O'Neill left the FBI (after losing some sensitive documents and equipment) and took a job as the World Trade Center's head of security. He died on September 11.
All of which isn't really Kearns' backstory so much as it is O'Neill's. But "Stuart Kearns's FBI career had likewise been derailed by his outspokenness and his association with O'Neill, but he'd stubbornly chosen to try to ride out the storm rather than quitting." I guess that's how Kearns ended up selling a fake nuke to a bunch of would-be terrorists in Nevada.
Kearns' career never much recovered from being O'Neill's protégé:
A bureaucracy never forgets and they'd kept pushing him further and further out toward the pasture until finally, for the last several years, he'd been banished so far undercover that he sometimes wondered if anyone even remembered he was still an agent at all.
I think, though, that the reason Kearns is being pushed out is because he's not a very good agent. For example: Bailey convinces him to pull over at the Pussycat Ranch so they can have a beer.
"You've got to be kidding me," Kearns said.
"We've had a rough night, Stuart, and I'd like to have a beer."
"I've got beer at home."
"A beer in a can in a house trailer with another dude and a beer in a Nevada brothel are two totally different things, and right now I need the second one."
I guess the Pussycat Ranch reference is more faction. It's not quite as tasteless as including John O'Neill as a character, but it is still pretty bad. Of course, Kearns opts to stay outside. "Fake or not, I'm not going to leave an atomic bomb unattended in the parking lot of a roadhouse."
Okay, now, you see where this is going, right? This is what I meant about Kearns not being the best agent the FBI has in that institution's employ.
Inside, he'd barely taken a seat at the bar and placed his order when one of the more fetching young ladies of the evening caught his eye and invited herself over.
"What can I do for you?" she asked.
"That's a loaded question in a place like this, isn't it?"
She frowned a bit and looked at him a little closer. "Do I know you, mister?"
The bartender had returned with his beer, taken his twenty, and left a ten-dollar bill in its place. Danny picked up his glass and his change and took the woman's hand.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"My name's Tiffany." Her eyes lit up suddenly. "You're that guy," she whispered, "on the Internet, in that video."
"I am indeed," Danny said. He leaned in a little closer. "And Tiffany, I need for you to do me a little favor."
Kearns stays with a fake, inert, prop outside, instead of keeping an eye on his wily, doesn't-play-by-the-rules stool pigeon. Whoops, no more promotions for you, Kearns! Seriously, that's pretty damn stupid.
Also stupid: "You're that guy, on the Internet, in that video."
And more stupid:
Outside at the bar the television had been showing the news, and in the crawl along the bottom he'd seen that over the weekend the national terrorism threat level had been raised to orange, the last step before the highest. Maybe that was related to this thing with Kearns, maybe not.
Just FYI, the threat level has been at orange (high) for air travel for more than four years. It's been at yellow (elevated) for everything else for more than five. There is a whole conversation to be had about the implications of a warning system that never moves, and the implication of constant and unending fear. Or maybe the lack of fear, the lack of vigilance when everyday normal is an elevated level of threat. Whatever. That is not the conversation Beck is interested in having.
As he composed the text message to Molly Ross he began to realize how little intelligence he actually had to pass along. He knew the code name of this operation he'd become involved in; he'd seen it on the paperwork they'd made him sign upon his release from jail. He knew when it was going down, and where. And he knew something was going wrong, and that the downward slide might be just beginning.
He checked the message one last time, and hit send.
molly -
spread the word --- stay away from las vegas monday
FBI sting op --> * exigent *
be safe
xoxo
db
Whew! Thank you Hooker With A Heart Of Gold for letting your favourite celebrity use your phone, and thank you Kearns for being such a shitty federal agent! Without your help Bailey wouldn't have got word to the patriots about Operation Exigent!
Now, what will Molly and Noah do? Oh, wait, Noah ain't doing shit, he's been kicked to the curb, proverbially speaking. You remember that old proverb about curbs and kicking and whatnot, right? Nevermind. Anyway, thing are really starting to thrill up around here. Are you excited?
I Write Letters
Dear Tea Partiers:
Seriously, I couldn't give less of a shit about your campaign to make Bristol Palin the winner of Dancing with the Stars. And I don't know a single person who gives the tiniest, infinitesimal, microscopic, vanishingly minuscule shit about it, either.
"Liberals' heads" are not "exploding" because Bristol Palin might take first prize in a nightmare dance competition on a garbage reality show.
WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK.
As per usual, you are projecting. But if it makes you feel powerful, if spending your evenings typing fake email addresses into ABC's website fills your lungs with rarefied air and makes your head woozy with the drunkenness of your own magnitude in shaping important world events like the outcome of season 11 of Dancing with the Stars, then, by all means, have your fun.
We should all be so lucky to find something that makes our bodies tingle like we're composed of irradiated pixie dust and have the finest Boone's Farm vintage coursing through our veins, and if your magical moment is watching Bristol Palin get handed a glittering disco ball garbage trophy, then let no one take it from you, friends.
But, for the record, liberals don't find that infuriating.
Hilarious, maybe.
Love,
Liss
TSA: Don't Like Our Rules? You're Grounded!
[Trigger warning for sexual assault.]
Testifying before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs yesterday, Transportation Security Administration Chief John S. Pistole insisted that the TSA is "not going to back down in the face of complaints that techniques are invasive" and "appealed to the flying public to become 'partners' in the effort to combat terrorism."
Am I the only person who recognizes how patently fucking stupid that is? Asking people who aren't terrorists to submit themselves to invasive (and unproven) security procedures to prove they aren't terrorists doesn't make them "partners" in combating terrorism. It just makes them victims of an unfettered police state where the appearance of "doing something" is more important than the actual efficacy of what you're doing.
[Pistole] said they try to strike a balance between privacy and security needs. "We want to be sensitive to people's feelings about privacy," he said. "We have to ensure that each person getting on every flight is secure."Now, I know he means "safe from terrorists," but that's a pretty hilarious thing to say considering that they're busily compromising people's sense of security with public scanner images, triggering pat-downs, and retributive legal investigations. Which is to say nothing of the potential health hazard of the full-body scans.
When a significant portion of the population is more afraid of what the TSA will do to them if they fly than what some hypothetical terrorist might do to them if they fly, we are losing the battle for making sure people are secure.
Meet Judge Victoria Kolakowski
Victoria Kolakowski (pictured at left), a 49-year-old patent lawyer from California, has been elected as the nation's first openly trans trial judge:
Alameda County elections officials say Victoria Kolakowski beat prosecutor John Creighton 51 to 48 percent — a margin of nearly 10,000 votes — in the Nov. 2 election to fill the vacancy in California's Superior Court.Congratulations, Judge Kolakowski!
Kolakowski had been leading since election night, but outstanding absentee and provisional ballots made the race too close to call until Monday.
The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund has said she is the first openly transgender trial court judge in the country.
Kolakowski spent the past three years as an administrative law judge settling energy contract and environmental compliance disputes for the California Public Utilities Commission.
[H/T to Shaker roro80.]
What a Charming Family the Palins Are
[Trigger warning for homophobia and homophobic slurs.]
Raw Story: Palin's daughter uses homophobic slurs to attack critic on Facebook.
In an apparent effort to defend her mother, Sarah Palin's daughter Willow labeled one critic a "faggot" and said he was "so gay" on her Facebook page after he said that her mother was "failing" on her new TV show.Bristol also joined in, commenting: "You're running your mouth just to talk shit," and Willow later added: "Sorry that you guys are all jealous of my families [sic] success and you guys aren't goin to go anywhere with your lives."
The comments were posted by Palin's 16-year-old daughter Willow Palin on Facebook. They came in response to a Facebook user who updated his status to read, "Sarah Palin's Alaska is failing so hard right now."
The user, Tre, is believed to be a student who went to school with Willow. He was writing in response to Palin's new Discovery Channel TV show, "Sarah Palin's Alaska." The comments were first highlighted by TMZ.
"Haha your [sic] so gay," Willow typed in response. "I have no idea who you are, But what I've seen pictures of, your [sic] disgusting … My sister had a kid and is still hot."
She added later: "Tre stfu. Your such a faggot."
One doesn't have to be the kid of a famous person to understand how difficult it is. The notoriety of being a member of the Palin family would be tough to handle at any age, no less at 16, and, for most of us, it sucks to hear people say negative things about one's parents. Navigating all of that isn't easy.
THAT SAID, even a teenager is capable of getting angry and being defensive and even flying totally off the handle without peppering their speech with homophobic epithets. Especially teenagers who aren't raised in a home where hating gays, or "hating the sin," or whatthefuckever, is acceptable. I would suggest that the anti-homophobic bullying discussion the entire country has been having still hasn't made it to Alaska yet, except that I know that it has. It just hasn't made it to the Palin household, apparently.
We all know there are different rules in "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Mavericky blah blah.
Countdown to Willow didn't mean it THAT WAY in 5...4...3...2...
Question of the Day
For Shaker rachael1978 (because): Got any good stories of a celebrity encounter?
Most of the occasions I've met famous people are not remotely interesting stories about meeting my favorite musicians/singers (Morrissey, the boys from Suede, Craig Wedren from Shudder to Think, Harriet Wheeler from The Sundays, Tim Booth from James, Martin Rossiter, etc.) because I was a goofy fangrrl who hung around outside venues the day of a show I was going to see, or stood in line back in the days when Tower Records used to have in-stores.
Once upon a time on a cutting room floor somewhere was footage of me interrupting a shoot on the set of the Bruce Willis film Mercury Rising, which was being shot right outside the building in which I worked. After being trapped in the lobby and prohibited from leaving for well over a half hour, repeatedly told that it was going to be "just five minutes!" as a crowd of people needing to leave for meetings, doctor's appointments, life gathered, I finally refused to stand like a corralled sheep any longer and walked past security and out the door, to the immediate sound of "CUT!" Bruce Willis yelled at me: "We're trying to shoot a film here!" I shot back, "I'm trying to live my life here!" then turned on my heel and made a dramatic (and swift) exit before I was detained by the movie police.
I also once spent an evening backstage at a Chicago comedy club managed by my then-boyfriend's brother sharing a spliff with a local comic named Brian McCann, who would go on to be a writer and performer on Conan O'Brien's various shows, and a then-unknown comic named Dave Chappelle. (!)
[Previously: Spudsy and Mustang Bobby.]
