This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, publishers of the upcoming Anthology of Fuzz: A Year of Daily Cuteitude, by Matilda McEwan, and the rival publication Matilda's Stupid, by Olivia McEwan.
Recommended Reading:
Trouble: Interview & Transcript with Jody McIntyre [TW for police brutality and disablism]
Melissa: Sexism Watch: The Black List
Amber: Nina Power on the Bechdel Test
Fat Waitress: Oh Really, Kanye West? [TW for violence and misogyny]
Gabe: An Open Letter to the Clay Duke Surveillance Tape [TW for violence and violent imagery]
Andy: Jimmy Carter Says America is Ready for a Gay President
Tami: Rant: Hate Twitter? Fine. Stop being so sanctimonious!
If you enjoy these blogarounds, make sure you stop by Hoyden About Town to check out Tigtog's regular Femmostroppo Reader round-ups, too. She always finds great stuff. The most recent one is here.
Leave your links in comments...
Wednesday Blogaround
Seen
[Trigger warning for sexual violence against children.]
There is a terrible story out of Oklahoma about a compound on a rural property comprised of several mobile homes and RVs in which children in residence were sexually abused. Eleven people have been arrested "on complaints ranging from first-degree rape to enabling child abuse."
There's not a whole lot of information available to the public at this point, but my guess is that the three-family community was started by convicted sex offenders whose inclusion on the sex offender registry rendered them unable to live in an established community.
Anyway, I was trying to find more information about the story and wound up at KOCO.com, which is the website for the Oklahoma City ABC affiliate, and, at the top of their article page, I see this:
It's a banner of "Hot Topics" which includes the linked topics: Who Got Arrested? | Sex Offenders | Free Ride Scholarships | Mall Hours.
My first thought was that it might just be an unfortunate result born of some algorithm that generates "Hot Topics" links from accessed content. But no. Clicking on the "Sex Offenders" link takes you not to an archive of stories that are getting lots of hits because of the aforementioned breaking news, but to this page, featuring a KOCO-created "slideshow of Oklahoma sex offenders who have failed to register, according to the Oklahoma Sex and Violent Crime Offender Registry."
Hot Topic. Like how late the mall is open.
Time's Person of the Year: Another Dude
The history: Time has not selected an individual woman as its "X of the Year" since then-president of the Philippines Corazon Aquino was named Woman of the Year in 1986. In 1999, Time changed the annual year-end honorific, which had almost exclusively been a "Man of the Year" since its inception, to "Person of the Year," but it merely created an illusion of parity. Still no individual women.
This year, no different. Time's Person of the Year is Mark Zuckerberg, aka Professor Facebook.
(Btw: The last time an individual person of color got the award, before president-elect Barack Obama in 2008, was when AIDS researcher Dr. David Ho was "Man of the Year" in 1996.)
To put into perspective exactly how absurd this parade of white men really is, George W. Bush was "Person of the Year" twice in the last 10 years, in 2000 and 2004.
And, of course, there was the infinitely stupid 2006 cover, which featured a reflective screen and the word "You."
"Person of the Year," my ass. If Time doesn't believe there's been a single individual woman deserving of the title in 24 years, then the least they could do is be honest and go back to calling it what it really is: "Man of the Year."
Because the message being sent by having not found a single woman deserving of the cover in longer than a girl child could be born, attend grammar school and junior high, graduate from high school, graduate from college, get her Master's degree, and settle in at her first job, is not that she could be their "Person of the Year" someday.
It's that she shouldn't waste a dime of her 79-cent-on-the-dollar salary on their garbage magazine.
---------------------
Update: Every year, Time also features runners-up to their "Person of the Year." This year's runners-up are: The Tea Party, Hamid Karzai, Julian Assange, and the Chilean Miners. So no individual women made their list of runners-up, either.
You Give the White House Council for Community Solutions a Good Name
President Obama has appointed Jon Bon Jovi to the newly established White House Council for Community Solutions, which is tasked with "provid[ing] advice to the President on the best ways to mobilize citizens, nonprofits, businesses and government to work more effectively together to solve specific community needs."
The bio of Bon Jovi provided by the White House highlights his work as chairman of the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, "a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the lives of those in need.""He is also totally famous, so he'll be useful in getting people talking about the White House Council for Community Solutions."
"To date, Mr. Bon Jovi and the Soul Foundation have provided affordable housing to hundreds of low-income individuals and families."
I just find this totally amusing. Not in a critical way—I'm familiar with and very supportive of Bon Jovi's philanthropic work and he's always struck me as a very decent and engaged guy. It's just, you know:
White House Appointee Jon Bon Jovi
I don't know there's ever been a White House appointee whose picture once hung on my bedroom wall. Don't get me wrong, Erskine Bowles is foxy as hell, but he's no Jon Bon Jovi.
[Related Reading: FYI.]
Question of the Day
I've seen a lot of crappy movies in my time. Those I've seen in the theatre, those I've shelled out money for, are pretty embarrassing. (Tango & Cash, anyone?) But the absolute worst would have to be this fiasco:
Nuns on the Run.
What's the worst movie you've ever paid money to see?
UW Halting Efforts to Provide Abortion Clinic Due to "Safety Concerns"
by Shaker adrienne_again, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
[Trigger warning for anti-choice terrorism. Please also note that the comment sections of externally linked pieces are not safe spaces.]
On my way to class this morning, a headline on the front page of one of our campus newspapers, The Badger Herald, caught my eye:
UW to stop efforts on abortion services: Madison Surgery Center's clinic halts attempts to offer second-trimester procedures due to safety concernsAt first I thought the "safety concerns" had to do with the procedure itself, but I should have known better. The article goes on:
The main reason UW Health is no longer working to offer these services at MSC is to make sure all patients entering the clinic, regardless of what they are at MSC for, are not harmed by activists, [UW Health spokesperson Lisa Brunette] said.According to another article The Badger Herald published last year, the Madison Surgery Center was hoping to fill the gap in local services left by the retirement, in 2008, of the only doctor in Madison who provided second-trimester abortions.
"We want to make sure anyone going into that building is safe from harm and has their privacy respected," Brunette said.
So basically, anti-choice "activists" have succeeded in using fear and intimidation to eliminate this community's access to a legal medical procedure. As the Herald article reports, "Pro Life Wisconsin spokesperson Virginia Zignego said the announcement […] proves grassroots anti-abortion activism works."
I put "activists" in quotes because there is a point at which activism becomes terrorism. There are many laws in this country that I would like to see changed, and practices that I would like to see abolished, but I would not support the use of violence or physical intimidation to achieve those goals. This success on the part of anti-choice terrorists is part of what Liss has called "a decades-long campaign of intimidation, harassment and violence directed at abortion providers and abortion seekers."
I felt I had to reach out to the Shakesville community on this topic in part because I don't know how to talk to people in my local community about it. Upon finishing the article, I had to share my anger and frustration with someone—I had the urge to wave the newspaper in the air and exclaim to the people all around me, "Can you BELIEVE this?!"—but I was worried that if I brought it up with my classmates or professor, the discussion would be clouded by debate over the legitimacy of the procedure itself.
(Which underscores how even the nature of the abortion debate has turned into a silencing tactic designed to intimidate people who don't want to debate the ethics of abortion.)
The legitimacy and/or legality of the procedure is not the issue here, for me; I understand both sides of that issue. The issue for me is why any compassionate person, no matter what they believe about abortion in general, and second-trimester abortions in particular, would fail to agree that we need a society in which people can make decisions for themselves and for their health without fear of violent repercussions—and that our medical professionals must be able to make decisions about what services to offer without having to worry whether the safety and privacy of their patients will be compromised by terrorists.
Pop Quiz
[Trigger warning for homophobia and predatory gay/rape culture narratives.]
Which is worse?
A. Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos suggesting that repealing DADT will endanger the lives of straight soldiers because gay soldiers will be distracted by their uncontrollable sexual urges;
or:
B. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs refusing to explicitly condemn Amos' homophobic fuckery.
Pencils down!
If you wrote on your paper: "It's a trick question. They're both contemptible garbage voiced by craven assholes. It's a goddamn tie." give yourself 1,000 points.
The Fat Body (In)Visible
[I'm moving this post back to the top for a bit, since Shaker katebears graciously provided a transcript.]
A documentary on being a fat woman, and the moments in which you feel visible and invisible, moments in which you can just be and moments in which you are obliged to be hyper-aware of your fat body. By Margitte Kristjansson. Featuring Jessica and Keena, as well as photos from The Adipositivity Project (some of which may be NSFW).
Via Frances.
Shaker katebears has done a transcript for the whole documentary, which is now below the fold (on most browsers). Thanks so much, katebears!
Song: Breathe by Telepopmusik
Jessica: The way people view fat today is… I want to right away say disgusting. We are told we can’t even love each other in public because it’s so revolting.
Keena: I just feel like it is a love/hate. I think people are scared to show their appreciation of some big women and some people don’t care after a while. I feel like it is an indifference.
Jessica: While I have all the confidence in the world, I am being told every day that my body is revolting.
Keena: I look at it like this. You know, there are so many beautiful natural wonders in this world. And all these natural wonders they’re huge right? You know? The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, all these things are big and people come from all around the world to see it. So it just lets me know with me being a larger women, I’m like an attraction. You know? You can’t miss me and I’m a good thing to look at too.
J: And they see a fat body it is very challenging to their politics. It is very challenging to what they view as their moral code, is challenged by a fat body, especially a confident fat body. I think I have always felt moderately at peace with my body, my issues have always been with everyone else. I first realized I was fat when my mom stopped introducing me as her daughter and starting introducing me as her fat daughter, her fluffy daughter, my chubby Jessica. I stopped being a human and started being a body.
K: For me, I am at my heaviest, and ironically, or maybe not ironically but at my heaviest I’m the happiest. I first realized I was fat at a young age. I was an 11 pound baby, so I never had a skinny phase and my family, they accepted me.
J: Dieting for me started really young, it started off as restricting. And by 10, I was in Jenny Craig and then weight watchers and pills and special physicians.
K: When I look at the word diet, I see the word die. Die-it. I have never dieted. The only time I can think of dieting, I was young, probably like 7. When a doctor said you should cut back on x,y,z. And I did it, but afterwards, I was like this ain’t for me. You know what I mean?
J: In high school, I had a personal trainer, I got my calories down to what almost killed me and still couldn’t lose any weight. When I moved out of my mother’s house, I gave up dieting for good.
Song: Dimestore Diamond by The Gossip. Jessica is fixing her hair, applying make-up, appears to be getting ready.
J: Fat acceptance is just the radical idea that every body is a good body and that regardless of your shape or your size that you deserve just as much respect as the next person.
K: Fat acceptance is just accepting your body where it is at. Whether you’re bigger or you’re smaller. Just accepting what it is, your arms, your double chin, your thighs and just not worrying about how other people may view you.
Song plays while Keena is getting ready, putting on jewelry, getting dressed.
Footage of Keena and Jessica shopping together, talking about clothing.
K: Growing up I compared myself to images I saw on T.V. As a young black girl, it wasn’t so much the size, it was the skin color. You know, watching T.V., you don’t see really a lot of young black girls on T.V. And it wasn’t until probably in my later teens, that I felt more conscious about my body because that is when I saw the music videos. My ah-ha moment was through the fat community through the fat acceptance group. That really started when I was in high school when I saw it was a celebration of plus size women. And that has been going on for about ten years now, since the early 2000s. From there, the light bulb went off. I love myself more. I didn’t want to wear the baggy clothes to hide myself. My mother told me to cover my arms, I didn’t want to cover it. You know? I felt more comfortable in my body cause I saw other women who looked like me doing the same thing, so I was like why can’t I?
J: I think high school is a struggle to feel visible for anybody. As a fat person, I think I took on the role as the class clown, because I wasn’t allowed to be an object of desire by my classmates. I think once I started finding that people were attracted to me and that men and women found me desirable as I was, I felt it was an invitation and permission to start loving myself as well and as much as they did.
Footage of friends at a bar, Keena and Jessica present.
J: I get negative feedback quite a bit on the street. Recently, I was walking home and I live in my own world and I know that a lot of negativity happens around me so I just try to phase it out. But I was walking home and a woman called me a fat piggy bitch for no reason, she just yelled it And in my head, I heard Ms. Piggy Bitch and so I looked at her and said thank you. And I kept walking and I was feeling great about myself. And a man said did you hear what she said to you? She called you a fat piggy bitch. Which just seemed like ludicrous to me because I didn’t even irritate her in anyway but just by existing she felt it was necessary to take me down.
K: I hate to say it, as ironic as this may sound, I still feel invisible today. Like I would probably say most of my life. As big and as colorful as I am I still feel invisible in a sense.
J: The way I make myself present and visible is I really allowed myself to give in to everything I have ever wanted to wear and a lot of times that means I look like a cartoon character. In allowing myself to dress in the ways I have always wanted to. In allowing myself to dress the way I have always wanted to I make myself very present for other people. Recently I met a woman online maybe two years ago that was involved with an online community called Fatshionista which is a fat fashionista on livejournal which just brought me into this myriad of blogs and books and people that were involved in this movement that gave a me sort of a more substantial argument when people would initially say, “Fat is Bad” I could only say “No it’s not”. I was then introduced to this community that gave me substantial reasons why fat was okay and why my body was beautiful and why I deserved more than society was ready to give me.
K: I discovered Fatshionista. I was just always inspired by the outfit posts. Since I got inspired, I posted my own and from there, it was just a wealth of information.
J: With the fatosphere, there is a lot of fat fashion blogging. There is always what fat girls wear, what fat girls wear. There is not a lot about what fat girls think in relation to what they wear. Fat touches everything I do.
Jessica and Keena shopping. Footage of them talking about clothing.
K: I really don’t see a lot of art out there that reflects me. You know, I am a plus size woman. I love afro-centric things. You know, why I don’t I try to play around with it? I don’t feel like I am the best artist, but it is my work. I have always wanted to see the few black artists out there to show images of bigger women. When it comes to crocheting, the challenge is sometimes that there are not that many patterns with plus sizes. The beauty is just winging it, just adding more stitches. The same thing is with constructing clothes. You know, clothes are nothing but shapes. I made a skirt in 45 minutes. I was just draping the fabric on me, two squares put together. Bam, you’ve got a skirt.
J: Fat style is one of the biggest ways that I believe you can be political as a fat body. It is very subversive because we as fat people are given limited choices. When you are thin, you have the entire mall at your beck and call. When you are fat, you have one store that has matronly, shaming clothes.
Video of Jessica and Keena shopping together. Jessica is trying on a shirt and it not fitting. Keena is laughing in the background.
K: When you look good, you feel good. And people feel good around you as well. People don’t expect for larger women to wear bright colors, or god forbid a mini skirt or god forbid, stripes. So it feels good to step outside the box and wear things that are not the norm as a larger woman. And you get compliments because you rock it a certain way.
Fashion show footage; murmuring, talking in the background, music playing.
J: Recently, I went to an indie fashion event at a plus size thrift store called Re/Dress and it was just really inspiring to see all these fat bodies, all these loving fat bodies in one space. Most, if not all the people present, were part of my online community, my fat acceptance activists, my Fatshionists. It was just really inspiring to see people doing what they love, promoting a positive self-accepting environment. We’ve noticed that it is really powerful to see more than one fat body enjoying each other’s company in public. And I think that initially people are too intimidated to say anything. Occasionally you will have people who make comments. I just think it is really intimidating for people to see fat bodies together. It is really powerful.
Footage of Keena, Jessica, and some friends in a bar. It seems that they are flirting with someone off camera.
J: I think because I make such a point of making myself visible on my own terms there is very little places where I feel invisible. I feel hyper visible when I am in restaurants eating. I feel like the spotlight is always on me. When I am at the doctor’s, it’s a weird mix of hyper visible and invisibility. I feel so detached from my body and not a human. But I also feel under the microscope and sort of like a mutant as well. So going to the doctor’s is challenging.
K: A couple of months ago, back in June, I bought an airplane ticket through Southwest Airlines to Las Vegas for my aunt’s weeding. I got to the airport early and thought, maybe I should get my return boarding pass printed. That day I wore a miniskirt and a sleeveless top. Didn’t think nothing of it, didn’t think people were watching me or scrutinizing me. Went to the counter, asked the lady about it, and she was like I think you could use another seat. I was like so what are you implying? Well, me and a few people have been observing you and we feel that you could use another seat and so that will be $179. I was like, excuse me? How are you just going to assume that I will need another seat? Well, you know, the seat you are sitting in over there is smaller than an airline seat. So long story short, it just took me by surprise that people were watching me that they were visualizing me fitting in a seat. Maybe that was a time that I felt kinda hyper visible. Like unbeknownst to me someone watching me, judging my body frame that I need to pay another $200 for another seat on an already crowded aircraft. And so we worked it out, I talked to the supervisor. Another thing: I really wanted to lash out, but I couldn’t. It’s one of those things where you don’t want to be the angry black women, let alone at the airport. I was looking around seeing if anyone was observing me, but it didn’t look like it. I talked to the supervisor uh, went on the airplane while they were boarding the handicapped I sat in the seat, put down the armrest and the supervisor said “Well, you are borderline on safety, we’ll let you pass this time”. It is just like, I never thought that I would be picked out like that. And it’s just before I got on the plane, I was thinking I should change my body to please others. Maybe if I weren’t so big, maybe I wouldn’t be a hazard to someone. But it went well, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth because I want to travel more. And with the whole airlines charging more for luggage, it’s just southwest is the only place that has an inexpensive airline ticket. I just feel like when I travel or when I got out, I have to be conscious of the space I take. No, I can’t fit in every chair but I still like being a plus size woman. I don’t want to change myself to make others feel comfortable.
J: I just sort of go day to day and talk to people when they approach me. I am confronted a lot about my body on the street by strangers. It gives me a chance to open up a dialogue about fat acceptance and get other people involved in this community.
K: The Adipositivity project is a project that a woman made to photograph plus size women in the nude. So I contacted her earlier this year when I had a trip to New York and I just had to be a part of it. It was a very, very liberating experience and I would love to do it again and I encourage other women to do it. Especially women of color to do it.
J: I make myself present on line. I am just fully exploiting every outlet for myself. I have a tumblr which has really helped promote my blog. I’m on twitter. I try to read other blogs, comment, and create a community with other FA bloggers and just really inundate everyone with my image, my thoughts.
K: I’m on tumblr. I mostly post pictures and words of things that inspire me. What made me create an account is I wanted to show a person who is fat and Black, Afro-Centric and is unashamed of who she is post there. Right now, I have over 500 followers. I would have never thunk it.
J: I hope that my activism and my blogging and the work I do online helps to give people of all shapes a safe place to feel good about their bodies to talk honestly about what they are feeling and why they are feeling it and just in hopes that someday we will just feel very neutral about our bodies and fat people won’t feel so isolated.
K: My message to young girls who are plus size in this day and age is to just live life and enjoy yourself. Don’t let nothing stop you. If you want to take a plus size or pole dancing. Take it. I’ve done it. If you want to be a dancer, do it. If you want to go to the beach in a bikini, do it. I‘ve done it. Don’t let nothing stop you. Don’t let the naysayers get to your head. Just live life. Because at the end of the day, you want to die knowing that you’ve done everything that you wanted to do. Even my experience with Southwest Airlines at the end of the day won’t stop me from traveling. I just have to do it other ways. I want to die knowing that I did everything I loved and wanted to do. So I hope that other women, young or old, big or small, Black or White, in between, they do that as well.
J: If I could say one thing to young, fat people dealing with bullying and their body image. I don’t really think there is anything you can say to young teens because we all struggle with how we feel about ourselves. But it’s not about you. It’s about the bully and their own issues. It is about what people are telling them they should feel and you just don’t let anyone police your body.
Song: Breathe by Telepopmusik
Glenn Beck Tacitly Endorses Violent Revolution
Again.
I'd just like to take a moment to note that progressives who had the unmitigated temerity to question the veracity of the Bush administration's case for the Iraq War (which actually turned out to be garbage) were deemed traitors by the mainstream media, while Glenn Beck exhorts the military to choose sides in the revolution against progressives and is considered, at worst, a harmless "nut."
(No, that is not an invitation to comment on Beck's psychological status. It's just an observation about how he is regarded by the media. The usual rules apply.}
Daily Dose o' Cute
Hibernation.
Video Description: The camera pans from falling snow outside the window to Dudley snoring away on the couch.
As always, snaps of all the behbehs below the fold (on most browsers)...
OMG MUST SNORGLE CUTE FLUFFY FINGLE!
im in ur box, sleepin.
Large and in charge.
When I roll right off, I will have MEANT to do that.
On the Media and Marginalization of Liberals
Rachel Maddow lays it out (as always with Maddow, unfortunately, warning for ableist language):
The transcript
Related (and Recommended) Reading: Eric Boehlert's Memo to the Media.
Photo of the Day
A photo of part of New Zealand, taken from the Space Station. Click to embiggen. [Via Barbara.]
Yikes
[Trigger warning for sexual assault.]
So Michael Moore bailed out WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, and in his explanation about why he posted bail, with most of which I am in total agreement, he inserted this note:
For those of you who think it's wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he's being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please -- never, ever believe the "official story." And regardless of Assange's guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself. I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money -- and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.Oof. Would that he had left it at the right to bail and defense and skipped the rape apologia.
It's eminently possible to not "be naive about how the government works," to acknowledge that the US and other governments use shady methods in pursuit of whistle-blowers, and even to observe that these allegations would almost certainly have been ignored had they been made against someone whom it was not politically expedient to give them attention, and not engage in apologia like "never believe the official story," which second-guesses victims' statements, and dismissing the allegations as strange, as if there is some "right" way for assault allegations to look.
An ally to survivors recognizes that the problem is not investigating Assange in this case; it's the failure to investigate people alleged to have done the same in virtually every other case.
I already recommended this in Friday's blogaround, but I'm going to recommend again reading Jaclyn's piece on this subject here.
Seen
In the UCC church hallway of the church that houses our youngest kiddo's (non-church affiliated) preschool. The sign has been there for months but I just got around to taking a picture yesterday. It makes me smile every time I see it.
Discussion Thread: Fat Stereotypes
What has someone wrongly assumed about you because you are fat? (Or because you are an in-betweenie, or on an occasion when you were deemed to be "too big" or "insufficiently thin" or some variation thereof.)
All those old chestnuts re: assumptions about how much/what you eat, your health, your intelligence, your physical abilities, your sex life, etc. are welcome contributions to this thread, but I'd also like to get at the less obvious or less discussed wrongful assumptions that are frequently made about fat people, the things that really stunned you.
I will never forget, for example, an episode of Oprah that I saw when I was in high school which featured a thin woman who hated fat people because she presumed them to have terrible hygiene, and one of the manifestations of her bigotry was refusing to use a public toilet stall after a fat person, because it was her fervent assumption, from which she could not be persuaded, that fat women are not able to wipe themselves.
(And though there are people whose size and/or disability does create that difficulty, she was making the assumption about any woman over about a US size 18, and further speaking of women with that difficulty as if they were diabolical harridans who remorselessly schemed to ruin the world with their dirty fat.)
I've also had someone assume I couldn't drive (!) because I'm fat.
[This thread is for both fat people and not-fat people; the latter are invited to participate by listening with the open-mindedness and open-heartedness that is key to dismantling unearned privilege.]
Senate Advances Tax Package
President Obama's $858 billion tax package won a huge bipartisan majority in the Senate on Monday evening, setting it up for a contentious debate in the House.Oh, Bernie Sanders. I love ya.
On an 83-15 vote, the Senate quashed a filibuster by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Fifteen lawmakers voted against it, including five Republicans: Sens. Tom Coburn (Okla.), Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), John Ensign (Nev.) and George Voinovich (Ohio).
Nine Democrats and one Independent voted against the bill: Sens. Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Russ Feingold (Wis.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Carl Levin (Mich.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Sanders.
"It makes no sense to me to provide huge tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires while we drive up the national debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay," Sanders said in a statement after the vote.
The Senate will now move forward with debate on the legislation before a final up or down vote. The legislation seems likely to pass the Senate, but House Dems are still barfing about it. (Good.) Now they've got to figure out a way to tank it, because "House Dem leaders have sent very clear signs that despite their own unhappiness with the deal, they believe it would be irresponsible to sink the compromise and have no intention of thwarting the President's will" and will be pushing for passage of the craptacular bill.
Quote of the Day
"You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."—US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and well-respected diplomat Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, uttering his last words before he was taken into emergency surgery for a torn aorta, during which he died.
Holbrooke spent his entire adult life serving this country, starting with a tour in Vietnam, a war he later helped end. In a long career of public service, his tenure was marked with precious few controversies, and I always found him an interesting character, given his work in high finance and his humanitarian endeavors, a combination that always strikes me as somehow incompatible.
The thing I always thought about Richard Holbrooke was that he seemed wickedly smart, the kind of smart you want on your side.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says of her "friend, colleague, and confidant":
America has lost one of its fiercest champions and most dedicated public servants. Richard Holbrooke served the country he loved for nearly half a century, representing the United States in far-flung war-zones and high-level peace talks, always with distinctive brilliance and unmatched determination. He was one of a kind -- a true statesman -- and that makes his passing all the more painful.My sincerest condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.
From his early days in Vietnam to his historic role bringing peace to the Balkans to his last mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard helped shape our history, manage our perilous present, and secure our future. He was the consummate diplomat, able to stare down dictators and stand up for America's interests and values even under the most difficult circumstances. He served at every level of the Foreign Service and beyond, helping mentor generations of talented officers and future ambassadors. Few people have ever left a larger mark on the State Department or our country. From Southeast Asia to post-Cold War Europe and around the globe, people have a better chance of a peaceful future because of Richard’s lifetime of service.
I had the privilege to know Richard for many years and to call him a friend, colleague and confidante. As Secretary of State, I have counted on his advice and relied on his leadership. This is a sad day for me, for the State Department and for the United States of America.
[Note: If there are less flattering things to be said about Holbrooke, they have been excluded because I am unaware of them, not as the result of any deliberate intent to whitewash his life. Please feel welcome to comment on the entirety of his work and life in this thread.]
