& he’s got the clips to prove it.
The Requisite Sarah Palin Post
The real kicker of Sarah Palin’s talk tonight was the “scary ideas from Europe” idea. I mean, seriously? Scary Europeans? Where there’s national healthcare and maternity leave and no gun crime? That scary place?
I’m still flummoxed by just about everything she said tonight. Astounded, even. Aside from the Big Fat Liar issue – she was for the Bridge to Nowhere until she was nominated, and she raised taxes on Alaskans – I can’t believe her entire talk was about the elites, and scary European ideas, and tiny government. (You know, like the kind that brought you Katrina.) I mean, aren’t culture wars so 90s?
But it’s more than that. The cynicism and sarcasm and meanness she expressed blew my mind. I like people who are clever and clear-thinking, but that’s not what she is. It makes me so sad to think anyone might admire her, or find like-mindedness in her comments. She’s like Dr. Laura, and those platitudes don’t work as advice, and they definitely don’t work as policy.
Please, Dems, don’t rest easy. We need to kick this woman’s ass. She cut funding on a center for pregnant teenagers even though she has one. Talk about elitism. She tried to ban books and she got pork-barrel funding for aerial hunting (which is about the lamest, most shameful thing I’ve ever heard of).
Go!
Mercury Milan is using a Tones on Tail track for a commercial. I think the world may have just ended.
Queer + Catholic
I’ll be reading with other Queer + Catholic authors on September 4th & 5th in NY. Do come!
- Thursday, September 4 at 6:30PM, CUNY Grad Center, 365 5th Avenue, Skylight Room, (Rm 9100, T. 212-817-7000)
- Friday, September 5th at 7PM, Bluestockings, 172 Allen St (btwn Rivington and Stanton Street).
Choosing Choice
Sarah Palin’s daughter is 17 and pregnant.
I’m not sure if that’s funny or tragically, tragically funny. Or, as our friend The Lazy Cartoonist put it, Bristol Palin is apparently open for drilling.
Feministing did a fine job of making the political hay that’s there to be made.
Obama PIRG
Well this explains everything about why I like the guy: I worked at NYPIRG, and I went to City College, too. I showed up at both about five years after he was there.
After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.
Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling†— a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues†like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.
“You needed somebody — and here was where Barack was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,†said Eileen Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.
Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Obama seemed to remember the experience differently. Gene Karpinski, then executive director of U.S. PIRG, a federation of state watchdog groups, met Mr. Obama in Boston. It was at the time of the 2004 Democratic convention, when Mr. Obama delivered the speech that made him a party luminary. Mr. Karpinski introduced himself. And, he recalled, Mr. Obama told him: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.â€
(From The NY Times)
naked.
DO is upcoming, and so I’ve been wondering: why do I so hate being naked in front of people?
I went to a workshop at a DO summer camp about getting in touch with your body, and you’re meant to sit there naked, and talk about stuff, like what you like about your body, what you hate, problems your body brings you, & pleasures.
& I did it, at long last, only after stripping down piece by piece. A little at a time. Iit was when Ii was at my thinnest (which means it was fall 2006), and now, 20 lbs heavier, I’m thinking I should try that workshop again.
Because there are always people at DO who are fatter, hairier, older; more scarred, more beautiful, thinner, more hairless, with better or worse skin than me. Even if I were judging, which is not my style, I’d still end up somewhere in the middle – not the best, not the worst.
& Then I feel like such a shallow idiot. Because there are people with all sorts of bodies out there – scarred, people who have lost limbs, people with chronic medical conditions, etc. – and really I have a pretty healthy body, all told.
So what is it?
What annoys me most is that plenty of people are not comfortable naked & they’re perfectly okay with being uncomfortable being naked. Others are happy naked and okay with that. Me, I’m not okay with not being okay. *sigh*
Stay Safe, NOLA
Hurricane Gustav is about to bear down on the lovely city of New Orleans, nearly three years to the day Katrina did.
Stay safe.
(& the Republicans, in keeping with their shite response to Katrina, are going ahead with their conference despite it. You’d think they’d show some fucking respect.)
5 Years
It’s the blog’s five year anniverary; amazing that I’ve been doing it this long, after Betty encouraged me to give it a try.
Thanks all, for reading.
McCain Sucks
I can’t find any other words & apologize for the obscenity, but the suggestion that all the Hillary voters, and other women, would vote for him because he found a woman who will run with him just pisses me off.
Take your condescension & shove it, McCain.
The cynicism of this move is even more despicable.
She is anti-choice, pro-creationism, and for drilling in Alaska.