Brenda Holloway: "You've Made Me So Very Happy"
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie is expected to sign legislation today that will legalize same-sex marriage in the state, with December 2 as the date on which same-sex couples can start getting hitched. Huzzah!
[Content Note: Death; destruction] There is more terrible news out of the Philippines, as conditions continue to worsen for survivors of the super typhoon. Eight people were killed when a wall collapsed at a government-owned rice warehouse after thousands of people pushed their way into the building in pursuit of food.
[CN: Rape apologia] Ranjit Sinha, India's chief of the Central Bureau of Investigation, said this shit at a conference on illegal gambling, while arguing that gambling should be legalized and taxed: "If you cannot enforce the ban on betting, it is like saying, 'If you can't prevent rape, you enjoy it.'" Yikes. That is fucked-up for about a dozen different reasons. Talk about a catastrophic failure to expect more.
An anonymous official says that HealthCare.gov is unlikely to be fully functional by the end of November, despite promises from the administration. Whoops.
Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton said in an interview: "I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honour the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got." This is being widely reported as Clinton shading President Obama, but it sounds pretty much like exactly what the President promised to do when he apologized. Obama said: "We've got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this." The media sure loves pitting Bill Clinton against the current president. Can you imagine how fun THAT will be if Hillary Clinton runs and is elected?!
Speaking of former presidents, George W. Bush is going to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno later this month. I can't imagine something I would want to watch less.
[CN: Misogyny] I find it really interesting how many liberal men say, of a potential Hillary Clinton presidential run, things like George Clooney says here: "I think she'd be very tough to beat now." Is that meant to be a compliment, lol? Because it kind of doesn't sound like one to me. But what do I know. Maybe I'm just irrepressibly cynical after having watched a lot of men delight in their guy having beaten her.
David Beckham has reportedly been nominated for knighthood. I couldn't really give less of a shit about knighthood, but as long as knights are still being knighted, go ahead and give one to Becks!
[CN: Disablist language] Jennifer Lawrence is terrific. The little girl's face in that video is amazing. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH MY FACE IS CRUMPLING! I know that feeling. :)
Whut.
Because the mainstream entertainment industry is entirely bereft of new ideas, since anyone who might have the temerity to propose a project that isn't a remake, reboot, sequel, or another tiresome iteration of some seen-it replication of kyriarchal narratives upholding privilege is summarily booted out of the office of whatever money-grubbing executive has been tasked with finding the next box office smash to appeal to young white straight men, Paramount is turning the movie Ghost into a TV show. Sure.
This marks the first project to come out of Paramount's re-launched television division and signals its plans to mine the studio's movie library and team with experienced film and TV writers for series adaptations."Mine the studio's movie library." LOL! That's a nice way of putting it.
I really thought we'd reached the nadir of filching old shit to make new garbage when Universal decided to turn the board game Battleship into a movie, but apparently new ideas are still out of fashion.
I just hope Paramount has the courageous vision to reimagine Sam and Molly as hot teens. No one wants to see people over 30 in their paranormal romances these days. YUCK!
Good News
After previously declining to take up a major medication abortion case out of Oklahoma, the US Supreme Court has also declined to take up another state restriction out of the state which had been ruled unconstitutional by a lower court:
The top court rejected a request from officials in Oklahoma who wanted to reverse a state court decision to strike down a law requiring any woman seeking an abortion to first see an ultrasound image of the fetus.Tough luck, anti-choicers.
The decision Tuesday leaves intact an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that struck down the law on the basis that it ran counter to the top court's precedent on abortion restrictions and placed an unconstitutional burden on abortion rights.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Doctor_Tinycat: "What words are unique to your family? That is, something you think is only used by your family to mean a specific thing. Can be a made-up word. Or else some local jargon, that others might not know what it means."
Photo of the Day
Yesterday, I promised to try to find a picture of President Obama meeting with 107-year-old Richard Overton, believed to be the oldest living WWII US veteran. And here it is, care of The Obama Diary:
President Barack Obama greets Richard Overton, with Earlene Love-Karo, in the Blue Room of the White House, Nov. 11, 2013. Mr. Overton, 107 years old and the oldest living World War II veteran, attended the Veterans Day Breakfast at the White House. [Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson]Amazing.
Richard Cohen Is a Nightmare
[Content Note: Racism; bi/homophobia.]
The Washington Post's Richard Cohen is the worst. As you may recall, back in July, he wrote a gross column called "Racism vs. Reality" that was just comprehensively appalling. His columns in the interim haven't exactly been hot shit, either, but if I spent all my time writing about how terrible Richard Cohen and his garbage columns are, I'd never get around to publicly shaming David Brooks.
Anyway. Yesterday, Cohen wrote another winner that included this gem:
Today's GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn't look like their country at all.And today he is defending himself:
Richard Cohen says that his latest piece was not intended to be and shouldn't be read as racist.I've got dipshit bingo!
"The word racist is truly hurtful," he told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "It's not who I am. It's not who I ever was. It's just not fair. It's just not right."
..."I didn't write one line, I wrote a column," Cohen said. "The column is about Tea Party extremism and I was not expressing my views, I was expressing the views of what I think some people in the Tea Party held."
And those views are not held by the entire Tea Party. "I don't think everybody in the Tea Party is like that, because I know there are blacks in the Tea Party," he said.
...Cohen has been criticized for his comments on race in the past. When asked why he thought it was that he keeps getting caught up in racially charged arguments, he said that it's because people view him as a liberal and find some of his positions unconventional. "Every once in a while I take an unconventional stance as a liberal -- as someone who has always been called a liberal," he said. "If someone on the right wrote this, no one would care. No one would make a big deal about it but because I veer every once in awhile from orthodoxy, or maybe more than once in awhile, I get plastered this way."
I don't even know what anyone is hoping to accomplish, even someone trying to observe that there are social conservatives who object to interracial marriage, by talking about how there are people who "must repress a gag reflex" at the sight of a happy marriage between two people of different races and/or at the sight of their lovely children.
And though it's the insensitive (to put it politely) comments about race that are being most widely discussed, I have a real problem with this shit: "(Should I mention that Bill de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?)" Nice parenthetical rhetorical mentioning it under the tiresome pretense of not mentioning it. Christ. This guy writes for the Washington Post.
I have no idea how Ms. McCray personally identifies. Maybe she really does identify as a "former" lesbian. But maybe she identifies as a bisexual person, an identity the wholesale erasure of which Cohen commits with a casual snide remark about how she "used to be" a lesbian.
This is terrible, retrograde stuff. I would say the Washington Post should be ashamed, but keeping this guy around after the other swill he's disgorged into their pages indicates they are intractably shameless.
True Fact
A true friend is someone who will happily complain about a totally aggravating article with you until you get it out of your system.
With Thanks to Al Gore for Inventing the Internetz
This afternoon, I will be speaking via Skype to a class at Syracuse University taught by my old friend Lance Mannion. The class is called "Public Intellectuals and the Digital Commons," so, from here on out, I would like all of you to refer to me as Public Intellectual Melissa McEwan. I think that's only reasonable.
Anyway. I'll be away for a bit. See you later!
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: War; misogyny; religious oppression.]
"Islamist parties started to control Iraq and that was the worst nightmare Iraqi women have ever faced. Religious parties and militia have stolen free life from Iraqi women."—Sana Majeed, a resident of Baghdad who once "was free to dress as she pleased" and "now wears a black abaya and head scarf," as a result of the increasing social control of women. "The reality of the new Iraq struck her in 2005, when she got out of a taxi and was accosted by a group of men in black who chastised her for wearing inappropriate clothing and told her to go home and cover her hair."
(Please note: I am not implying and do not believe that Islamic female garb is inherently misogynist. There are Muslim women, many of them feminists, who wear head scarves et. al. and embrace them. My issue is only with the lack of choice. I am pro-choice in all things.)
The lede of the article whence comes this quote is perfect and terrible:
One year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, then-President George W. Bush told a gathering at the White House: "Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed."This is something about which I've been writing for many years: Former President George W. Bush and his coterie of neocon reprobates (as well as then-First Lady Laura Bush) routinely justified the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the ostensible "liberation" of the women who lived there.
A decade on, that statement rings hollow for many Iraqi women.
It was a condescending lie, which I won't even dignify by classifying as a colonialist savior complex, because that would imply that the architects of this destruction ever actually gave a shit about whether women in their war zones lived or died.
See also: Afghanistan.
It's Not Just You
Disqus comments are either not loading or taking a long time to load. According to Disqus' status page, there is currently a partial system outage. My apologies for the inconvenience. Hopefully Disqus will resolve the issue soon.
UPDATE: Looks like comments are back. Yay!
Daily Dose of Cute
Sophs. A titchy little comma.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
Who's the Boss?
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
In a recent Gallup poll, respondents were asked whether, if they "were taking a new job and had their choice of a boss," would they would prefer a male boss, a female boss, or no preference. 41% had no preference, which was the highest percentage. Of those who did have a preference, male bosses were preferred over female bosses 35% to 23%. Boo.
I am constantly perplexed and annoyed by the persistent bias against female bosses. Even many feminist women will unleash a torrent of misogynist tropes at the mere mention of female colleagues: Women are terrible bosses; female colleagues are the worst; women are back-stabbing, catty, two-faced, incompetent, etc.
This has not been my experience. I have had multiple female bosses, and I have loved working for all of them.
My first job out of college started as a temporary position at a reception desk. When I started, the president (a man) and vice-president (a woman) of the firm were traveling out of the office for a few days. I was told they'd be calling in for messages, and I was warned—repeatedly—that the vice-president, Helene, was a dragon lady, a bitch, a holy terror. The nicest way it was put to me is that she was "difficult." I was admonished to be very careful about how I gave her messages to her, because she would destroy me if I made a mistake.
I made sure to provide her messages in precisely the way I'd been instructed, and she was perfectly polite to me over the phone. But, by the time she was due back in the office, I'd been warned about her so many times, in so many blunt and nasty ways, that I was, frankly, terrified of her.
Helene returned to the office one morning, an hour late as I would discover was her habit. She was a beautiful, fashionable, confident woman. She introduced herself brusquely, but welcomed me to the team. I was intimidated by the sheer force of her presence, but she seemed nice enough. I waited for the other shoe to drop, for the dragon lady to reveal herself.
That day never came.
Within a couple of months, my position had been made permanent, and I was quickly promoted to an assistant position in Helene's department. Helene was tough. She had high expectations of me. But she was also an incredibly generous mentor. I was eager to learn, and she was keen to teach me. She wanted things done a certain way, but she was open to suggestions and encouraged me to challenge her. And if I ever came up with a better way to do something, she was grateful for the idea and let me know she was proud of me. She never took credit for my ideas; to the contrary, she championed me.
By the time I left, I was the director of her department, and I had my own office overlooking Lake Michigan. From reception to an executive office in five years. And it was in no small part because of Helene's eminent willingness to teach, support, and empower me.
The thing is, Helene could indeed be "difficult." But not with me. She was "difficult" with the male executives who treated her like shit, with the male staff who undermined her authority. She was "difficult" with people who treated her, the only female executive at the firm, fundamentally differently than they treated the men.
Funny that I developed a reputation for being "difficult," too.
This has been my experience working for and with "difficult" women. I'm sure there are shitty female bosses in the world; of course there are. But lots of what supposedly constitutes a "difficult" female boss, or colleague, is frequently a reflection of dynamics to which she's reacting.
Dynamics like the one in which people reject female bosses, instead of rejecting workplace misogyny.
BrianWS and I have a long-running and ongoing conversation about how the more we hear that a female colleague is a bitch before meeting her, the more we are likely to love the fuck out of her. It's funny, and it's sad—but it's also true.
Tell me about a Worst Nightmare Broad, and I can almost guarantee that she and I are going to get along just fine.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
Reports estimate that about 50,000 have enrolled in Obamacare. (Although that might be a low estimate.) This is apparently indicative of a terrible failure, but all I can think is: Fifty thousand people who didn't have access to health coverage now do!
[Content Note: Racism; guns; violence] The killing of Renisha McBride, the 19-year-old black woman who was shot and killed in Detroit by a white man after seeking help at his front door following a car accident, has been ruled a homicide.
Gallup finds that most USians support raising the minimum wage. But ha ha don't worry—they're still totally stingy about it!
Yesterday, fifty-four workers and activists were arrested outside of Walmart's new store in Los Angeles during what organizers called "the largest act of civil disobedience in Walmart's history [to protest] the company's harsh labor practices that include 'poverty wages' and unpredictable part-time hours."
[CN: Animal harm] A University of Colorado study published in the journal BioScience found that more than 600,000 bats are killed annually by wind turbines. Sadface. I ♥ bats. Of course, I also ♥ wind energy. I hope the Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative can find a way to bat-proof them soon!
[CN: Pranks] In case you'd forgotten for two seconds, Sacha Baron Cohen is the worst.
Do you love The Princess Bride SO MUCH and wish it would be adapted into a stage production? As you wish.
Bruce Springsteen is going to be the subject of a theology class at Rutgers. Sure!
Ten motherless chicks wandered into a yard, and so Bailey, the dog-in-residence, adopted them. Obviously.
Hillary 2016 MAYBE
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
So, first, during the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton was told to GTFO so that then-candidate Barack Obama could secure the nomination, make history, and become president.
Then, in the last year, ahead of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton has been publicly pressured to run again, make history again, and become president. And warned, if she doesn't, she will destroy the Democratic Party and AMERICA.
Now, as it looks increasingly like she might run, it's: Not so fast, lady.
Liberal leaders want Hillary Clinton to face a primary challenge in 2016 if she decides to run for president.HA HA PERFECT. Look, Ms. Clinton: We definitely want you to run, because, let's face it, you're the only Democrat with the mojo to win this thing, but YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO WORK FOR IT.
The goal of such a challenge wouldn't necessarily be to defeat Clinton. It would be to prevent her from moving to the middle during the Democratic primary.
"I do think the country would be well served if we had somebody who would force a real debate about the policies of the Democratic Party and force the party to debate positions and avoid a coronation," said Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America's Future, an influential progressive group.
..."If Hillary has no opposition, if she has a coronation instead, that debate doesn't happen," Hickey said.
The profound irony of this shit is that, when "liberal leaders" were telling Clinton to take her boobs and go home in '08, they were all crowing about how an extended primary was terrible for the party and would weaken the eventual nominee's chances and blah blah fart. Now they're suddenly taking the exact opposite position, in that a primary challenge will strengthen Clinton as a candidate.
Gee, it's almost like the rules are totally different for women or something!
Ahem.
Personally, I supported a long primary in '08, and I would support one now. I couldn't be happier if Senator Elizabeth Warren or Representative Gwen Moore (as two not-remotely-random examples) challenged the fuck out of Clinton, kept the platform as progressive as possible, and we ended up with a Clinton/Warren or Clinton/Moore ticket. Or even a Moore/Warren or Warren/Moore ticket. I WOULD LOVE THAT.
But the thing is, I wasn't one of the assholes shouting at Clinton once upon a time to get out of the race because primaries hurt the party.
Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda Update
[Content Note: Death; destruction.]
Things are very grim in the Philippines following the super typhoon that ravaged the central part of the country. International aid is being mobilized as quickly as possible. Mackenzie Kruvant at BuzzFeed has compiled five ways to help, if you can. And, as always, please feel welcome and encouraged to leave news (sans images) and suggestions on how to help in comments.
Question of the Day
What is your favorite thing about this time of year, wherever you live? Could be the weather, could be the holidays that are unique to your nation or culture or religion, could be your birthday coming up, could be the best time of year at your job, whatever.
