So, while New Jersey (and much of the rest of the northeast coast) is buried under eighty billion metric biebers of snow, Governor Chris Christie is on holiday in sunny Florida. And the Lieutenant Governor is on holiday, too!
New Jersey Copes With Blizzard Without the Governor—or His Backup.
Eric Boehlert's been tweeting the fuck out of this, if you're looking for more info.
Apparently Mayor Bloomberg hasn't exactly covered himself in glory, either.
Discuss.
Open Thread: WTF Chris Christie?!
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker shiftydiscogirl in comments: What people/quotes/scenes would you like to see on your country's currency?
You know who'd make a great running mate...
...for Mitch Daniels? This guy.
What a character!
[H/t to my mom.]
Two Facts
1. Jonah Goldberg loves sarcasm quotes ("transgressive," "free love," "subversive") as much as he hates facts and sense.
2. Jonah Goldberg has a ball of old shoelaces where his brains should be.
Nope
Have I mentioned in the last five minutes that my garbage nightmare of a governor shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the presidency...?
No?
Well, he shouldn't.
Seriously.
No.
If you're still not convinced, having heard me kvetch about how he's privatized everything from welfare to highways, have a look at him telling progressives to settle down with their equality business while the grown-ups fix America.
Ma < 3 Koidula
I wanted to take a moment to note the passing of the Estonian kroon into the annals of currency. On January 1, Estonia will become the 17th nation to adopt the Euro.
This is actually an important story in and of itself, but I want to focus on the necessary evil attached to adopting the Euro-- getting rid of the kroon.
Part of the reason for my writing lies in fond memories of my travels in Estonia, but another is that I think currency design can tell you a lot about a nation and the things that those in power value (or at the very least, feel have symbolic value). I think thoughtful currency has worth beyond its monetary value.
The front of the 100 kroon note features the 19th-century poet, dramatist, and nationalist activist Lydia Koidula, while the reverse contains a scene from Estonia's northern coast scene and :gasp: actual poetry. IMO, it's also a beautiful bill:
I suppose it takes an American to be impressed by a bluestocking on a banknote.
For the record, the other Estonian notes feature a painter, a naturalist, a chess grandmaster, a linguist and folklorist, a novelist, a composer, and another nationalist writer (all men). Most of these bills are also in colors not suitable for camouflaging tanks.
I'm not sure any of this is unusual. Many nations deem women of enough symbolic worth to place them on currency. Two of five denominations of Swedish krona banknotes feature women. Intentional or not, the last series of Deutsche Mark banknotes alternated women and men.
With a few exceptions, those bills didn't feature politicians (and there's no rule that paper money has to have people on it). Even Canada, which puts influential Prime Ministers (or Queen Elizabeth II) on the front of dollar notes, puts some sort of prose on the reverse of every note, including an excerpt from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the back of the fifty.
This brings me back to the US. According to our banknotes, my country values dead politicians, has a marble fetish and is so masculine (and insecure) that it won't be caught dead using queer/lady things like color. Yep, that's my empire. Well, I live here, at least. Oh, and the US is also unfriendly to people with disabilities. Different sizes for different denominations? Not here.
I guess there's something to be said for truth in advertising. :shrug:
Nerdz
An actual exchange I just had with my friend Todd, with whom I just saw Tron: Legacy on Saturday night:
Liss: "It's bio-digital jazz, man."
Todd: The dude cyber-abides.
Liss: That grid really tied the digital frontier together.
FYI
[Previous FYI: Rick Astley; Eddie Murphy; The Eurythmics; Eddie Rabbit; Sinéad O'Connor; Was (Not Was); Bon Jovi; Kenny Rogers; Bobby McFerrin; Starship; Dead or Alive; Right Said Fred; Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians; Salt n Pepa; Nelson; The Cure; The Soup Dragons; Europe/BushCo; Elton John; Eddie Money; Human League; Glenn Frey, Van Halen, Alanis Morissette, Depeche Mode. Hint: They're better if you click 'em!]
Daily Dose of Cute
With Lord Alfred taking up a lot of attention these days, Feather has obviously been getting short shrift. So, it's only fitting that after spending the whole day with her working from home yesterday, I pay homage to my little girl who always knows when and how to strike the perfect pose.
Oh, Anti-Choicers, How You Never Change
So, MTV has this show called "16 and Pregnant," which features teenage girls who are pregnant and carrying the pregnancy to term, most of whom also go on to parent the children themselves once they're born. Across several seasons, rarely has abortion even been discussed, and only two girls (that I know of) have chosen adoption, one of whom surrendered the baby to her aunt and uncle. The show has spawned a spin-off series, "Teen Mom," which has had two seasons, and a "Teen Mom 2," featuring new teen mothers originally featured on "16 and Pregnant" is set to begin after the new year.
The shows are all about Having Babies.
A young mother featured on the most recent season of "16 and Pregnant" is now the star of a follow-up stand-alone feature called "No Easy Decisions," in which she terminates a second pregnancy. Naturally, because one show about an abortion exists in association with seasons upon seasons of footage of young women carrying pregnancies to term, giving birth, and raising their babies, anti-choicers are OUTRAGED about how MTV is "promoting abortion."
Markai Durham, who was first seen last month on "16 and Pregnant," discovers she is expecting again and must decide whether to have the baby.So not only is this a single incident of a pregnant teenager choosing abortion among seasons of teenagers not choosing to terminate, but MTV is airing the show as a separate episode, broadcasting it at a later time, and generally treating abortion like a fucking scandal, yet still this is somehow "promoting abortion."
Her decision to terminate the pregnancy is the centerpiece of "No Easy Decision" and has pro-lifers up in arms.
The show is so unusual, MTV scheduled it to air at 11:30 p.m. -- well past the bedtimes of the network's youngest fans.
MTV did not make the show available to the media before it airs and has forbidden Markai to give interviews about the subject.
In recent months, MTV has promised to tackle "all sides" of the hot-button teen pregnancy issue.Just LOL. Yeah, birthing babies has really been buried beneath the weight of MTV's unwavering support of abortion. Yeesh.
But pro-life blogger Jill Stanek says she expects a one-sided portrayal.
"This apparently means the pro-life perspective will simply get tackled," she writes.
Whoa
[Trigger warning for sexual violence and rape apologia.]
Actual Headline in the New York Times: Is It Rape? It Depends on Who Is Asking.
No. No it doesn't.
[H/T to @GABblog.]
"An erosion of standards of living for an enormous portion of the population"
Bob Herbert hits another one outta the park:
I keep hearing from the data zealots that holiday sales were impressive and the outlook for the economy in 2011 is not bad.Read the whole thing here.
Maybe they've stumbled onto something in their windowless rooms. Maybe the economy really is gathering steam. But in the rough and tumble of the real world, where families have to feed themselves and pay their bills, there are an awful lot of Americans being left behind.
...There is a fundamental disconnect between economic indicators pointing in a positive direction and the experience of millions of American families fighting desperately to fend off destitution.
Herbert gets to a fundamental truth of the divide to which John Edwards referred as the Two Americas: It's not just that the Haves and the Have-Nots have different standards of living and qualities of life; it's that the difference is so vast it's like living in separate countries, complete with separate economies and separate cultural attitudes about the US' ability to provide sufficient opportunities to its people.
This chasm, of course, has always existed. There has always been an underclass of endemically impoverished people—blacks and ethnic/immigrant whites in urban areas, Latin@ migrant communities, many Native American reservations/pueblos, rural communities of whites and/or people of color across the country, etc. Young single mothers are more likely to live in poverty. People with disabilities are more likely to live in poverty. People who are trans are more likely to live in poverty. This is not a comprehensive list.
The middle class provided a buffer so that privileged people didn't have to think about the US' permanent underclass, and breathed life into the fantasy that all it takes is bootstaps to succeed in this nation. Now that it's eroding, that story's getting harder to tell with conviction.
And, the reality is, the middle class did provide a path out of poverty for marginalized people who had the right combination of opportunity, luck, talent, and the personal ability to exploit all of the above.
But there's increasingly no more Third America anymore. No safety net for people falling down; no higher rungs for people climbing up. It's just the Haves and the Have-Nots, and a bunch of people who are tourists in the middle, awaiting their fates in one destination or the other.
Chipping Away at Roe
It's really too bad that the Washington Post decided to run this important article about the erosion of Roe on the state level, with SCOTUS' help, during a week that's essentially one long newshole. But I guess all the good days were already taken up with whitewashing profiles of anti-choice terrorists. Ahem.
[Related Reading: The discussion following Point 3 here.]
Question of the Day
Do you speak more than one language? What languages do you speak? Are there any languages you'd like to learn?
English is my first language. I had five years of German, from eighth to twelfth grade, and I remember enough that I can have a totally awkward conversation with a native German-speaker who knows as much English as I know German, lol.
I also learned the alphabet and a few key signs in ASL when I was a kid; fingerspelling has come in very handy (pun unintended) on several occasions.
I had some Spanish in elementary school, and I can't speak a lick of it (aside from a handful of random words and phrases), but I can usually suss out what's being said if I'm listening/reading Spanish. I'd like to become fluent in Spanish, at some point.
Assvertising
I must have also seen this Tide commercial ten thousand times in the last week:
Video Description: A white middle-aged man oiling his gate spots a short white skirt hanging on the laundry line. He frowns, looks at his grimy hands, then grabs the skirt and uses it like a rag, then goes inside and throws it in the hamper. Cut to a white teenage girl digging through the hamper and finding the oil- and rust-stained skirt. She shows it to Mom, who throws a side-eye at Dad, now obliviously reading the paper. Mom throws the skirt in the washer, where Tide's "Acti-Lift Technology" removes the stains. Cut to daughter wearing clean white skirt; Dad looks horrified and Mom nods happily at evidence of her mad cleanin' skillz. Dad looked perplexed by the MAGIC OF LAUNDRY. Daughter ruffles his hair as she walks by and sails out the door in her short skirt. A female voiceover says, "Dad may try to ruin your style, bur dry stains won't."
The entire thing is set to Studio B's rape culture anthem "I See Girls," the lyrics for which can be found here.
I don't even know where to begin. Suffice it to say, if Tide thinks that 1950's gender roles, patriarchal body policing, and rape culture narratives are hilarious fodder for their advertising, then Tide must not want my business. Done and done.
Email Tide.
