Video Description: President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama greet a bunch of white people in one of the White House gardens. A baby being held by M. Obama is SCREAMCRYING! unhappily. "Ohhhh, you okay, baby?" B. Obama asks, in a very hilarious way. As if to say no, the baby continues to screamcry miserably, coming to a horrible crescendo. "Oh, no! Oh NO!" B. Obama says, and he and M. Obama laugh, as do the baby's mom et. al. "She's just like OHHHHH!" says B. Obama, throwing his head back. "She's a big supporter; I don't know why she's crying!" jokes the baby's mom. Laughter. "Can I get a quick picture? I'm sorry," she says. M. Obama hands the baby to B. Obama. "Come on, baby," says B. Obama, as her mom coos. "Come on." Immediately, the baby stops crying. M. Obama looks at B. Obama gape-mouthed with mock awe as everyone laughs. B. Obama bounces the baby and gives a duck-faced look of (faux) smug satisfaction, which might fairly be interpreted as, "Mm-hmm. President's got MAGIC, ladies."
If I liked Obama's presidency as much as I liked this video, I would like his presidency A LOT.
$1 million: The reported amount of debt carried by the presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich, whose fundraising advisers resigned today.
"Newt 2012 continues its reorganization and alignment as a grassroots driven, substantive, solutions-oriented campaign," a spokesman, R.C. Hammond, told The Associated Press, adding that the campaign is "as committed as ever."
Whoooooooooooooooops! That is a very bad idea!
[H/T to everyone in the multiverse, and my thanks to each and every one of you!]
Several times now, I've mentioned on the blog (in comments) that Tils has a mobile groomer who comes to the house, which spares Tils the additional stress of a car ride on grooming day, and each time there are Shakers who note they wish they had a mobile groomer. Well, at least for those of you in Rockland, Bergen, and Southern Westchester counties (NY/NJ), I have a recommendation for you:
The Good Life groomer is my cousin-in-law Chris, who, in addition to starting the business, is also co-mom to two of the cutest dogs on the planet, Gunner and Bailey. You'll not only get a great groomer who loves dogs, but you'll be supporting a woman-owned, all-kindsa-Shaker-friendly business!
(Please feel welcome and encouraged to use this thread to recommend mobile groomers in your area, too.)
State leaders have the framework of an agreement on end of session issues -- a property tax cap, rent control, state university tuition -- but the deal does not appear to include an agreement on same-sex marriage. [Emphasis mine]
"There's a framework by which we plan to end session," [Rep. Sheldon] Silver, D-Manhattan, said. "We will be developing with the conference, over the next several hours, the various areas that are important to close down session and hopefully complete session as quickly as possible."
...
The "framework" includes a 2 percent cap on local property taxes, renewal of rent regulations, a plan to gradually increase SUNY tuition, provide a measure of relief for local mandates and set up a program providing low-cost power for economic development purposes.
Whatever. Just fuckin' whatever, dudes.
ETA: Given the Democrats' relative power in New York State, you'd think they would have the courage to return the Republicans' power politics by refusing to sign the Upstate/Long Island Republicans' disastrous property tax cap unless gender-neutral marriage also passed. Of course, that property tax cap is Cuomo's pet, which makes perfect sense when you consider that he hates public employees, government, and education like all the posh Democrats do these days.
Still, I applaud the Democratic party for doing what it takes to make it look like they give two shits about social justice issues. I'm almost tempted to mail them a check in exchange for their first-rate posturing, but...... no.
Update 2. 4:21PM: I've been following the local media in Central New York, and AFAICT, nobody knows what's going to happen on Wednesday. "A framework by which we plan to end session" tends to imply that Speaker Silver is planning to head home, but I've also heard that there are negotiations going on about Jesus. In any case, an actual vote on the marriage bill isn't just going to happen in the absence of a backroom deal, because Robert Moses, no doy.
After my garbage governor, Mitch "The Blade" Daniels signed into law a bill defunding Planned Parenthood in Indiana, the healthcare provider, which serves 85,000 people, including 9,300 Medicaid patients, has stayed open and continued to provide care to Hoosiers with more than $100,000 in donations, but, after state funding ran out Monday, Planned Parenthood Indiana will "will stop treating Medicaid patients and lay off two of its three STD specialists," and will also "close all its clinics on Wednesday and send employees home without pay" to save funds.
"Our 9,300 Medicaid patients, including those who had appointments Tuesday, are going to see their care disrupted," said Betty Cockrum, president of Planned Parenthood of Indiana.
The provider typically receives about $1.3 million a year in Medicaid funds, about 10 percent of its total budget. The new law also strips Planned Parenthood of roughly $150,000 in funding for prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, money that paid for three intervention specialists -- health workers who track down the partners of someone who tests positive for an STD and ensure they are tested and treated. Two of those specialists, who were based in Muncie, have been laid off, and a third, in Lafayette, is now employed in a different capacity.
That leaves Planned Parenthood with a single specialist, in Lafayette.
...Sue Swayze, legislative director for Indiana Right to Life, said that with Monday's reduction in services, Planned Parenthood has "made it clear what their priority is."
"They wouldn't stop providing abortions even in the interim to keep the women's health services," she said.
ABORTION IS A HEALTH SERVICE, YOU MENDACIOUS GARBAGEBRAIN!
State Sen. Scott Schneider, R-Indianapolis, who authored the defunding language, echoed that criticism in legislative debate in April.
"If (Planned Parenthood) wants to receive taxpayer money," he said, "they can simply stop practicing abortion."
As if "taxpayers" and "people who need/want abortions" are mutually exclusive groups.
Honestly, I have never been so furious at the collection of dipfucks and miscreants running this state as I am right now.
"I don't, in any way, doubt that there are those who don't feel like progress has been made fast enough. I have no doubt that there are people with particular issues of concern who feel that way. But, at the end of the day, I believe that people are going to be fully engaged when this next election comes, because they'll understand exactly what the stakes are."—David Axelrod, former White House senior adviser, who served as chief strategist for Obama's 2008 campaign and will presumably serve in a similar role in the 2012 campaign.
Looks like the Extortion Fairy is getting busy early this election!
[Trigger warning for discussion of rape jokes; ableist language.]
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a follow-up to his post in which he defended a Louis CK rape joke by asserting: "Very few people would (publicly) claim that there are 'good reasons' for rape." (My post in response to his original post is here.)
I'm not sure I understand the point of the follow-up, in which he reprints a letter from one of his readers (who sounds like zie reads Shakesville, too), who identifies hirself as a survivor, only to reassert in response to the letter that he hasn't changed his mind and still considers the joke defensible. He additionally posts video of the joke, and opens it up for discussion with the admonishment to "walk away, have a drink and come back later" if you "find yourself typing out of anger."
Rape apologists are not singled out. Anger of any sort is deemed unwelcome.
"This is a really sensitive issue that should not be handled with kid gloves, but should be handled with a modicum of respect," he explains. "Don't be an idiot."
I am reasonably certain that Coates did not intend that to be read by survivors as, "Let's not get all emotional about how some of us like to laugh at jokes about someone disregarding your agency, bodily autonomy, dignity, and essential humanity in order to brutally assault you," but only because I imagine he didn't consider how (or that) it would be read by survivors at all.
It's incredibly hostile to survivors, especially survivors who are triggered by rape jokes, to tell them that their emotions, even if those emotions include anger, are unwelcome in a discussion of jokes about the thing that they have survived.
We want to dispassionately discuss jokes about this incredibly personal and intense thing that happens to people, but we don't want it cluttered with all your icky emotions about it.
Again, we witness the apologist's construct that people who have survived sexual assault cannot be objective (or rational, or calm, or some variation thereof) in discussions about "rape humor" (unless, of course, they're the ones saying they laugh at rape jokes).
The implicit suggestion, of course, is that only people who are perceived to have no personal reason to be angry about rape jokes are unbiased—which conveniently ignores that lack of experience can make one's opinions incredibly subjective, too.
No one, on either side of the survivor divide, is more intrinsically disposed to be more objective. We're all biased—either because we are unwilling experts on the act of being raped, or because we are not.
To exclude unqualified anger, in favor of some anodyne discourse whitewashed of all evidence of the ugly consequences of rape, is to exclude survivors.
And, frankly, it seems to me that any discussion of rape jokes needs more anger, not less. After all, rape jokes work to empower rapists, and thus tacitly abet the act of rape.
Which, ostensibly, we are all reflexively against, right...?
President Obama is reportedly going to announce this week that he will withdraw the 30,000 troops that were sent in for a "surge" in Afghanistan last year. But the surge troops will not be fully withdrawn until the end of 2012. (Whut?) The drawdown will leave approximately 70,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
The time-frame would give U.S. commanders another two "fighting" seasons with the bulk of U.S. forces still available for combat operations. Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pushed for additional time to roll back Taliban gains in the country before starting any significant withdrawal -- a position at odds with a majority of Americans, according to recent public opinion surveys.
...The president is expected, in his remarks Wednesday, to stress the importance of preserving flexibility in force levels on the ground so commanders can adjust as conditions warrant, the official said.
The drawdown will be accomplished by troops returning home and not being replaced as well as canceling some proposed deployments.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that Obama had yet to make a final decision on the size and scope of the troop withdrawal, but would do so "soon."
In good news, Obama can probably just recycle the speeches he gave last time he ran for president, when he was also promising to bring the troops home from Afghanistan.
Republican Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and former ambassador to China, is officially throwing his hat into the blah blah and will call for "broad and bold" changes to tax laws and blah blah and energy independence blah and job creation blahbitty-blah and "hard decisions" fart.
Happy Birthday to youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!
Happy Birthday to youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!
Let's crack open a little beeee-eeeer!!!
And eat a cheeseburger, toooooooooo!!!
Although, perhaps I should reconsider, given that every song they ever released back in the '80s and '90s is utterly forgettable, and yet I still remember their shitty name. Maybe it's secretly the best band name of all time!
Honorable Mention goes to Hoobastank. You do not irritate me with deliberate misspelling and a gratuitous apostrophe, but you are definitely the grossest, Hoobastank!
It's one thing when the dirty hippies (alwayz wrong) are raising the flag about radioactive destruction, but you'd think that the media could tear themselves away from the Kardashians' cleavage for two seconds when a former senior vice president in the nuclear industry says stuff like:
"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."
and:
"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."
and:
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of [human]kind."
Peter Jackson posted some Hobbit casting news on Facebook this weekend, and, basically, he's just trying to make my head explode at this point:
Evangeline Lilly [who played Kate on Lost] will be playing a new character—the Woodland Elf, Tauriel. Her name means 'daughter of Mirkwood' and, beyond that, we must leave you guessing! (No, there is no romantic connection to Legolas.) What is not a secret is how talented and compelling an actress Evangeline is; we are thrilled and excited she will be the one to bring our first true Sylvan Elf to life.
It was also recently announced that Benedict Cumberbatch (he of the new Sherlock Holmes series) will voice Smaug.
I don't even know how to deal with this information, but I'm guessing there's going to be some of this involved.
SPOILER WARNING AND REQUEST: Spoilers for Season One of the The Killing reside herein, so, if you don't want to know, move along. If you've watched the original Danish series on which it's based, Forbrydelsen, please make sure to clearly label spoilers that watchers of the US series may not want to know.
So, I started out liking, with some reservations, AMC's The Killing, and then I kept liking it, even though there were some silly bits and too many reversals and too much rain, and then came the finale of the first season, which apparently everyone else in the world hated—except for the New York Times critic who evidently didn't watch it.
I kind of liked the series finale, and, because I'm an asshole like that, I'm kind of amused at how much so many people hated it, even though I totally understand exactly why they hated it and think they kind of have a point.
"I'm hoping the success of Bad Teacher & Horrible Bosses will convince Hollywood to make my movie, Cunty Dermatologists."—Rob Delaney, via Martha Plimpton on Twitter.
I cannot even tell you how hard I laughed at "Cunty Dermatologists." LOL FOREVER.
That is, by the way, simultaneously the greatest commentary on the heaping fuckloads of misogynist swill currently emanating from Hollywood and the best film pitch I've heard in ages.
Shaker NapalmNacey emails (which I am sharing with her permission): "I know, LiveScience is like shooting fish in barrels. But Jesus H. Compton, they're talking about LGBTQ people like we're wildebeest."
In addition to the Wild Kingdom tone, I like how "keeping one foot in the closet" is described right in the headline as a "savvy decision." How clever, those foxy queers, to find such an effective way of navigating stupendously inappropriate bigotry!
Yes, obviously, being circumspect about one's sexuality, when it has been marginalized as "alternative" by privileged dipfucks, is "savvy." But there are a lot of other ways I would describe that decision: Difficult, oppressive, unfair are at the top of the list.
There are ways to write about things, and ways to write about things.
P.S. LiveScience: Your end-of-article bulletpoints of related reading are not helping your cause.
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.
*rage*seethe*boil*
