50: That's how old Guns N' Roses frontman (and my fellow Hoosier) Axl Rose is today! Which I know because the American Association of Retired Persons tweeted this earlier today:
Happy Birthday, Axl. LOL.Happy b'day to Axl Rose, who turns the big 5-0 today. Welcome to the 50s jungle! Share your 50s b'day advice w/ Axl#turning50
— Official AARP Tweets (@AARP) February 6, 2012
Flula is here to explain:
These are my reasons why sex is great: Sex is amazing, you know?! It is like this movie, Lethal Weapon—have you seen this, with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover? Oh, it's amazing! Right?! Riggs is there, and he's like a tough boy, "I don't care nothing," right? And then Murtaugh, he's like fifty years old and he's like, "I just, I just wanna make a retire right now!" Riggs is like, "No! No! I'm gonna hurt my shoulder and then I'm gonna jump from a building and then I'll put my, put my stuff on the beach, and I'll put my pants down—all the people see my booty!" And my dog is there, and machine guns with helicopters, and shooting everything around! And then like foreign peoples are there, like, "We're gonna get you; we're gonna kill you really good," or something like this from South Africa, and everyone dying—and saxophone! Always saxophone playing! Everywhere, all the scenes. He probably hiding like Kenneth G in the background. [mimes saxophonist] Brrring! "I must retire!" Brrring! Play it right out! And then Riggs is jumping and then they got a giant mobile phone—it's like eight hundred pound! Doo-doo-byew-dee-boo! And the everything happening! And then KWWVEEWWW! [mimes explosion] Credits! Yeah! [mimes credits scrolling down the screen] So, to conclude it: Sex is great!This is not my favorite Flula ever (that would be "Daddy Long Legs, Who Did Name You?" followed closely by his deconstruction of the idiom "Shooting Fish in a Barrel"), but it's up there.
From the Guardian: Obama orders new sanctions on Iran, including 'deceptive' Central Bank.
President Barack Obama has ordered new sanctions on Iran, including its Central Bank, moving to enforce a law he signed in December.I know that I'm just a dirty hate-America hippie and all, but I continue to be amazed by the US' unmitigated temerity to justify its continued belligerence toward Iran by pointing out that Iran is doing the same shit that we are.
In a letter to Congress Monday, Obama said more sanctions are warranted "particularly in light of the deceptive practices of the Central Bank of Iran and other Iranian banks." He said the problems included the hiding transactions of sanctioned parties, the deficiencies of Iran's anti-money laundering regime and the unacceptably high risk posed to the entire international financial system posed by Iran's activities.
So, most of the time when Dudley wants to run around the backyard like a wild greyhound type person, Zelly is right there with him. But, occasionally, Zelly doesn't feel like it, and Dudley will engage in all sorts of ridiculous antics to try to get her to join in. Last week, he discovered that if he starts digging, she'll come over to investigate. At which point he takes off like a shot, hoping she'll give chase.
This is pretty amusing, except for the fact that his massive clodhoppers can dig a GINORMOUS hole in about six seconds.
(And it's not that we care so much about the state of the yard aesthetically, but neither of us wants to break an ankle walking across a yard full of holes, especially when snowfall renders them invisible.)
I managed to catch this on video over the weekend. Note, in addition to the hilarity of Dudley's goofballery and my increasingly serious pleas to knock it off with the digging already, how quickly Zelly susses out that I don't want Dudz digging and starts herding him away from his trenches. I don't know what her breed mix is, but there's some kind of amazing intuitive shepherd in there.
It was another banner week in Indiana under the governance of Mitch Daniels last week, as my state passed its gross right-to-work bill, the state senate passed a measure that would allow public schools to teach creationism, and our Republican Secretary of State was convicted of six felonies: Three counts of voter fraud, two counts of perjury, and one count of theft.
Ha ha don't worry! The judge will probably reduce them to misdemeanors so he can keep his job!
"Halp! Ha ha! Halp us! Halllllllllllp!"—Indiana progressives.
This blogaround brought to you by toes.
Recommended Reading:
Ben: How Much Did Media Companies Spend Lobbying on SOPA and PIPA?
Sharon: Ending "Farmer's Wife" Syndrome
Andy: Roland Martin Makes Excuse for Homophobic Tweets in Statement [Content Note: The post at this link contains quoted expressions of homophobia and associated discussion.]
Melanie: If It Looks Like a Compliment, and Sounds Like a Compliment…Is It Really a Compliment? [Content Note: The post at this link is an exploration of 'benign sexism'.]
Monica: Blake, Stop Using The T-Slur [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of the use of a transphobic slur.]
Arturo: The Racist Super Bowl Commercial You Might Have Missed [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of racism, Othering, and xenophobia.]
New Black Woman: Things White Activists Say to Activists of Color [video]
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Last Monday, I mentioned that I'd been interviewed for a piece about Hillary Clinton and promised to link it once it was published. The piece, "Farewell to Our Feminist-in-Chief," which was authored by TigerBeatdown's Sady Doyle, is here. You should read it! And pretty much everything else in In These Times!
Although Clinton did indeed announce on Jan. 26 that she will "step down from her position as the Secretary of State when the president's terms ends," I don't know that we're really saying farewell to her. In fact, I suspect we are not. Clinton has hinted that she will continue her work on behalf of the world's women and girls in a different capacity, and she may well become even more influential in the private sector than she's been in the public sector. Having the length of your reach unimpinged by bureaucracy is an idea about which her husband has spoken many times since launching the Clinton Global Initiative, and it's conceivable that Hillary Clinton still has ahead of her a path along which she will open all sorts of new avenues of influence and opportunity for women and feminists, all over the world.
But she will, as Sady notes, be leaving a huge void. With no disrespect to women like Senator Patty Murray or Representative Nancy Pelosi, who are awesome, neither has quite the same profile as Hillary Clinton—and the void of a passionately feminist woman with that sort of recognizability is going to be profound.
To me, it's terribly concerning and disheartening that she is leaving an obvious vacancy—that there is still only room, or so it seems, for one woman among the men, that US politics is still doing the Star Wars thing: If you're a boy, you can see if maybe you're more like Luke or Han or Chewie or Yoda or Obi-Wan or Lando Calrissian, or maybe a little like each of them, but, if you're a girl, you're sort of measuring yourself against Leia. Like her or not like her—check one box.
A continued dearth of multiple types of women inhabiting that rarefied air means any woman who comes after her will still suffer the same fate of being passionately loved and passionately loathed, like her or not like her, because there aren't alternative models of what being a woman in the upper echelons looks like.
And additionally, anyone who comes after will be compared to her.
As if it's not hard enough being a woman who has to fight the pressures of tokenism. Now you've got to live up to the bar set by Hillary Clinton. Yikes.
We've let her down by allowing that to happen, you know? She has borne the burden of standing in for "women" for her entire career, with the tacit promise that it would all be worthwhile because she'd be blazing a trail on which many women could follow. But after decades of carrying that imposed status of standard-bearer for the monolith, after it was used to try to discredit her over and over and over, still she walks away from a landscape fundamentally unchanged to the sound of dismissive shrugs: She hasn't proven that women are competent; she was just exceptional.
Check out this fucking irony: The credit for being exceptional which eluded her for much of her career is now being used to wave away the obvious call for gender inclusion that her legacy should rightly inspire.
How truly disappointing.
At the end of the Beltway celebrations lauding her accomplishments at the end of her term, once the crowds have dispersed and the music has faded, we will hear in the silence a collective sigh of relief from the Powers That Be: "Well, we weathered that extraordinary career without being forced into institutional change! Phew!"
We've still got so much work to do.
Which reminds me of a dream I had about Hillary Clinton once upon a time: I asked her, "What can I do?" And she told me, "Everything you can."
[Content Note: Rape culture; encroachments on reproductive rights; violence.]
I didn't want to bury this in today's Primary Speaking post, because it's too important: Ron Paul's antipathy toward women plumbed new depths during a recent interview with CNN's Piers Morgan, during this extraordinary exchange about his views on abortion and sexual assault:
MORGAN: Here's the dilemma, and it's one I put to Rick Santorum very recently. I was surprised by his answer, although I sort of understood from his belief point of view that he would come up with this.Emphases mine.
But it's a dilemma that I am going to put to you. You have two daughters. You have many granddaughters. If one of them was raped -- and I accept it's a very unlikely thing to happen. But if they were, would you honestly look at them in the eye and say they had to have that child if they were impregnated?
PAUL: No. If it's an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen or give them --
MORGAN: You would allow them to abort the baby?
PAUL: It is absolutely in limbo, because an hour after intercourse or a day afterwards, there is no legal or medical problem. If you talk about somebody coming in and they say, well, I was raped and I'm seven months pregnant and I don't want to have anything to do with it, it's a little bit different story.
But somebody arriving in an emergency room saying, I have just been raped and there is no chemical -- there's no medical and there's no legal evidence of a pregnancy --
MORGAN: Life doesn't begin at conception?
PAUL: Life does begin at conception.
MORGAN: Then you would be taking a life.
PAUL: Well, you don't know if you're taking a life either, because this is an area that is -- but to decide everything about abortion and respect for life on this one very, very theoretical condition, where there may have been a life or not a life.
MORGAN: But here's the thing: although it is a hypothetical, it does happen. People do get raped and they do get impregnated. And sometimes they are so ashamed by what's happened that weeks go by before they may even discover they are pregnant.
They have to face this dilemma. And they are going to have a president who has a very, very strong view about this.
PAUL: This is like the proposal that the people who like abortion, endorse abortion because it's the woman's right to her body. You say, well, does that mean one minute before birth, you can kill the baby? I did this on one of the TV programs where some women were opposed to what I was saying.
I said, this nine-pound baby is in the woman. She has the right. She argues her case. I said you would abort this baby because the woman has had unfortunate some circumstances, so the doctor gets paid a handsome fee to kill this nine-pound baby?
Oh, that's not what we're talking about. But that is what they are talking about. They are talking about a human life. So a person immediately after rape, yes. It's a tough one. I won't satisfy everybody there.
But to tell you the truth, what I saw happening in the 1960s and the change in the law and -- no, the change in attitude, people were doing illegal abortions. To me it is a moral problem. It was to change the morality of the '60s, the lack of respect for life, leads to the lack of respect for liberty and all the things that I believe in.
I did not watch the Superbowl, because no one in our house cares about it, and, if you don't care about it and have a partner who also doesn't care about it, it's one of the best date nights of the year. ("We've got the world to ourselves!") How much do we not care about the Superbowl? Yesterday afternoon, I walked into the living room and Iain had the pre-program on. I asked him if he wanted to watch the Superbowl. "Oh hell no. I just put it on while I was talking to my dad, because he was asking about it and I was curious to see what time it was on." Pause. "And what teams are playing." LOL!
(I love that guy. I really do.)
So we didn't watch, although I was curious to see the halftime show, because Madge, Nicki Minaj, and M.I.A. (Did Nicki Minaj win the Superbowl? I hope she did! I love her!) When we got home from dinner, I flipped to the Superbowl to see if it was halftime yet, but it was not. It was, however, time time for a gross Skechers advert that features greyhound racing. Yuck, Skechers. FYI: Greyhounds are fast at the dogpark, too, where they're not abused. Boo.
Also: I noticed Budweiser thinks Arizona = Indiana. Whoooooooooooops there is no desert in Indiana. And we don't wear cowboy hats.
Eventually, I did see the Halftime Show (whut.) that culminated in a rousing rendition of Madonna's 1989 (!) hit, "Like a Prayer," the chorus of which—"When you call my name it's like a little prayer / I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there / In the midnight hour I can feel your power / Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there"—is a double entendre for a blowjob, which apparently everyone has forgotten in the interceding 23 years from when that was A SCANDAL!
This gave Iain and me a huge laugh, especially when, at the end of the performance, the lights went out in the stadium except for giant glittering letters on the field reading "WORLD PEACE." Sure. Totes. Definitely. Also: LOL FOREVER. So, evidently the message of the Superbowl Halftime Show was World Peace through better blowjobs. Well, someone give me and all my hobag friends the Nobel Peace Prize!
Before tuning out again, I heard Clint Eastwood gravelly intone, "How do we come from behind?" Damn, that was one sexxxy Superbowl!
Please feel free to use this thread to discuss the game, the advertisements, how awesome or not awesome quarter-end Brady Tebow Manning is, and/or any other related American Football business.
(Once again, I feel I have knocked a review of the Superbowl out of the park! Huzzah!)
