on the Clinton Campaign memos

The Front-Runner’s Fall

If you haven't read the piece in The Atlantic about the internal workings of the Clinton campaign, you really should.

Oh, not because it gives you a little thrill to have all your bad feelings against the Clinton campaign reaffirmed (if that was your wont) but because of what you can learn about basic lessons of organizational management.

For me, especially if I remembered part of my past at a strategic communications firm, the story of the campaign's implosion was a textbook lesson of what happens when an organization A) fails to ensure proper values and strategy alignment among its teams, B) doesn't address bad information flow and C) lacks trust. None of these issues are siloed from one another. In fact, they depend on one another and soon you just have a ball of entrenched dysfunction, as the Clinton campaign discovered.

Not to sound all Fast Company, but values and strategic alignment is the glue that holds an organization together. In corporate speak, it's what folks talk about when they say they're 'on the same page.' Folks in leadership talk a lot about 'being on the same page' but there is usually a big gap between where the Leader says they are and what folks on the frontline see.

Say what you will about the GOP, in every single one of the candidates they run, values and strategy go hand in hand. The DNC? Not so much. I don't know if this is because the left likes to 'process' shit so much and no one likes to be the bad guy or deliver bad messages but when I think of the messy politicking of the left, aligned is the last thing they are.

(See the continued wrangling over what's going to happen at the convention, which I won't be able to attend, and how we seem to run into the same thing every election cycle when each warring progressive faction wants some other interest to fall on their sword so that others will survive.)

In the case of the Clinton campaign, HRC and her staff seemed to come from totally different places: in one instance, Penn wanting to go immediately negative (which I'll note later), other key staff resisting, the Leader being conspicuously absent from the final decision. Did HRC really believe that BO was 'un-American'? I seriously doubt that. Yet, what made Penn think she'd be open to that? What values gap existed between them?

(And sharing the same goal does not mean people share the same values.)

My biggest takeaway from the piece is how information flow is crucial to any successful campaign (not just political campaigns, either.) The Clinton campaign memos reveal how information was plugged, or viewed with distrust, at various points, to the detriment of the campaign. Information on budgets, tactics, shifting electoral landscape - all, at some point, went ignored by key people after being floated 'up' or 'across' the organization from people on the frontline. As a result, the leader was left without the necessary tools to do her job; she was at sea.

Does this kind of isolation make a leader trust her team or does this make her assume more random responsibility because she can't trust her team to do what it needs to deliver? And, in return, does a team look at their leader's angry withdrawal and respond positively or do they panic, withholding bad news or difficult conversations - which leads to more distrust?

High performing teams don't have these issues; they see and act (quickly) while wearing the same goggles, acting with flexibility to good and bad environmental factors; ideas are evaluated on their value-addedness (is this idea going to enhance our mission and vision, stretch it or take us outside of it?); high performing teams act with autonomy but there's always an honest touchstone with leadership, marked by free flowing communication.

If only someone on Clinton's staff had read a few issues of the Harvard Business Review.
...
Reading the Atlantic piece, I was riveted.

Penn's memos where he suggested highlighting Obama's Otherness and 'un-American-ness,' made me think, 'Wow, he actually said it!' If we take his suggestion and pair it with his note that the campaign was trying to 'neutralize' race as a major demographic factor, then we get a picture of a man with his head very far up his ass.

You want to take 'race' out of the picture but you don't mind telling a whole bunch of black and brown people (in addition to the rest of the country) that a man of color is un-American. Nice message.

Talk about problematic - and talk about an opportunity for the Dems to ask themselves if that kind of strategic thinking reflects the core values of their party.

This piece also makes me hope the Obama camp will be careful of future values/strategy misalignment, mission and vision creep, or perceptions thereof. (In other words, no more FISA or offshore drilling shit!)

But I'm almost positive Obama reads the HBR. Right?

[crossposted at Screed]

the Olympics, the Other and Orientalism

I love the Olympics. Not for sports - I could care less, frankly, though I enjoy watching the more obscure things, like fencing. I like the Olympics because the nationalism is just so immensely wrong and amusing.

Friday, my friends and I made up a drinking game during the Beijing opening ceremonies. For kicks, and because we are students of the problematic ways our media covers other countries during the Olympics, we made a list of things that might be said or shown during NBC coverage of the games that might be a little problematic or just drive us nuts.

For instance:
If they say the words, 'ancient,' 'mysterious,' sleeping dragon,' 'paper tiger';
if they imply Chinese 'inscrutability';
if color commentary registers surprise at any aspect of Chinese culture;
if color commentary confuses any aspect of Chinese culture with any other Asian culture;
if color commentary points out every Chinese American athlete and wonders aloud how great it must feel to be 'home';
if coverage shows common/stereotypical western images of China - the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, dragons, or anonymous teeming crowds;
and extra drinks for all if any misunderstanding of Chinese culture gets called out on air.

Our real list was actually longer (and also included how many times Mao is mentioned, problematic social policies and continuous stats on the population) and, within a half hour of the opening ceremonies, we were intoxicated. By the end of the opening ceremony there were so many drinks taken, we were all laid out on the floor.

Welcome to the Orientalizing Gaze. Though his book didn't include China in its analysis, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) describes Orientalism as a discourse that makes certain generalizations about the 'East' which serve to paint the Other as inferior (or unknown) and, as a result, the Western subject as superior since the West 'knows' or recognizes the Other. (That's a huge reduction of his main thesis, but that basically covers it.) Said says that, mostly, what the Western gaze sees and reproduces is myth.

And you see the power of that myth in the NBC framing of the story around these opening ceremonies. What's really interesting to me is that there was a huge gap in the representation of China, depending on who was doing the talking. First there's the NBC color commentators - who provided us with all of the problematic dialogue; then there's the 'talking' done by the ceremony itself - but which had to be interpreted by an NBC 'expert' on China. So basically, we didn't see China represent itself at all but saw it through a scrim covered by another scrim covered by another. Will the real China please stand up?

For me, one of the telling moments was midway through the ceremony (which was probably the most gorgeous and amazing one I've seen, truthfully). The NBC expert pointed out the Chinese character for 'harmony' and went on to explain how this theme of 'harmony' will appear throughout the games and the rest of the ceremony; then he went on to bring attention to the irony that this Confucian idea of 'harmony' is at odds with every day reality, how things are quite 'dis-harmonious' within China - i.e., their social, political and environmental policies.

He clarified for Bob Costas and Jim Lampley, "So, actually, this concept of harmony is, you know, an ideal.' As in, completely fake.

I tipsily snarked back to the screen, 'Yeah, sorta like our ideal of democracy.'

The beam in your own eye and all that.

It's easy to 'see' or to 'know' the inconsistent self-fictions of another country (or to think that we do) but it's quite another to see ourselves do the same thing. The NBC expert sneers at Xiang Yimou wanting to include harmony in his country's self-presentation and his tone implies that the Chinese identity is hopelessly broken and false (handily tapping into the stereotype of the false Oriental); but in the same way, isn't our national identity split, too? Our actions are one thing, our ideals another and never the twain shall meet.

Take, for instance, our President at the opening ceremonies. He's there to present an ideal face of America to the world - to embody gravitas, democracy, freedom, liberty, prudence, or whatever else we expect from our President. But what do we actually get? A man in a wrinkled gray suit, looking at his watch, waiting for the whole thing to end. There's your ideal, right there, folks.

[Want more on Said? Go here for a really great intro to his work.]

asshat, international edition: Russia!

I was totally going to just keep on working but a pal sent me this: Sexual harrassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules - Telegraph

What. The. Hell.
There are no words to describe the frakked-up-ness of this news item.

Choice bits:

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled. Who knew the word 'Please?' could mitigate patriarchy? And where the hell did that judge get his law degree? A cereal box?

I could make a joke about mail order brides here, but I won't because it's just too messed up.

Sorry, poppets. Ding has a job and is workin' it this week. Hard.

who killed LaVena Johnson?

These are the dots I want people to connect:

Tailhook
Aberdeen Proving Grounds
The Air Force Academy scandal (the resulting report can be found here)
The case of Pvt. Steven D. Green
This NYTimes series on violent death among Iraq War vets
This Feminist Law Professors post
Jamie Leigh Jones and the 'rape problem' with military contractors

To that string of dots, add one more: LaVena Johnson

I think a primary value of feminist work is its ability to uncover women's hidden history, the stories of our existence that tend not to fit neatly in our national or cultural, patriarchal narratives. The stories of women in our military, as well as the women connected to associated industries that support or benefit from the military's work, are taking shape before our eyes and a repeating thread in this narrative is one of sexual assault and brutal violence against women.

(This isn't to say men aren't assaulted; they are, at much smaller numbers. I'm just not writing about sexual assault against military men right now.)

From the testimony of the women at Tailhook after the first Gulf War to the stories from KBR contractors in this latest Iraq conflict, the lives of women linked to the military - as family members, government employees, soldiers, or contractors - is bracketed by sexual or domestic violence. Perhaps, as the Times series sugggested, we can attribute some of this violence to inadequately treated combat trauma. In the Frontline site for the Tailhook investigation, some male officers and attendees attributed some of the behavior by the aviators and officers to post-Gulf combat relief; in other words, they were 'blowing off steam' - and what better way to blow off combat stress than violating women's bodies?

It's clear the military, despite lip service to the contrary after every sexual assault scandal at their proving grounds, academies and bases, has no capacity to deal with the needs of military/civilian women who've been assaulted or harrassed within, or by, the military. Their reporting structure is broken, their punishment structure is an utter failure and their treatment/prevention capabilities seem to be non-existent, despite their best intentions.

About these intentions: after the worst stories broke (especially the Air Force Academy scandal) there was an attempt to improve the military's metrics on sexual assault. Sexual assault trainings and awareness programs were implemented; oversight committees were formed; victims names would be kept anonymous, cutting down on the threat of reprisals; greater efforts would be made to collect and analyze evidence and counseling supports would be made readily available to victims of assault. These improvements seem to send a strong message that sexual assault in the military is unacceptable. But the chances that such a message will drift down to service members is slim. Frankly, it's not in the military's nature to change.

What is it that makes the military what it is, that allows it to do what it does? The military accepts violence as a suitable human, cultural and national response; it creates an environment that feeds on a sense of overweening Masculine privilege; and what makes all of this aggression and privilege acceptable and not merely psychotic is the body of a woman. Whether it is the feminized 'body' of the nation they invade or the bodies of assaulted female soldiers or civilians left in its wake, our military clearly requires the Othered, violated bodies of women to keep a grip on its GI Joe identity. The subjugation of a woman in order to retain the fiction of masculine 'wholeness' is, to me, a function of patriarchy.

(If this sounds familiar, it's because I said something like it in a post about Joe Francis and the Steven D. Green case here.)

In the stories patriarchy tells of us, a woman's position is primarily prone. We serve patriarchy either on our backs or we prop it up by conveniently and quietly dying. LaVena Johnson's death was not quiet. She was raped, beaten, tortured, murdered and her body burned. Despite physical evidence to the contrary, the army still calls her a suicide, a bootstrapped Dido. Her family is being lied to about the circumstances surrounding her death and the wall of silence around her murder is not just about the military's need to maintain a modicum of public relations discipline (though that's certainly part of it.) The military's silence is also the silence of complicity and it needs to be broken, cracked into pieces for the sake of justice.

(If you want to know what to do about LaVena Johnson's murder, visit ColorofChange.org here.)

I used to think that whatever men could do, women could do, too. But LaVena Johnson's rape and death, along with all the other military women's deaths and rapes, prompts me to ask a potentially un-feminist and problematic question: Why should we? Why should women even serve in the military when it's clear the eminent danger they face isn't from combat but their male cohort?

newsflash: the human race has jumped the shark

i'm utterly dumbfounded:

Sleeping man beheaded on Greyhound bus

TV: Passenger killed by seatmate with 'Rambo knife' in Canada's prairies

MSNBC News Services
updated 10:47 a.m. CT, Thurs., July. 31, 2008

WINNIPEG, Manitoba - A passenger sleeping on a Greyhound bus was killed and decapitated by his seatmate on Wednesday night as the vehicle rolled across the Canadian prairies, witnesses said.

"All of a sudden, we all heard this scream, this bloodcurdling scream," said Garnet Caton, who was sitting just in front of the victim, in an interview with CBC Television.

"The attacker was standing up right over top of the guy with a large hunting knife — a survival, Rambo knife — holding the guy and continually stabbing him, stabbing him, stabbing him in the chest area," Caton said.

The attack continued as other passengers fled the bus and waited for police on a desolated stretch of the TransCanada Highway near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, said Caton, who helped bar the bus door to prevent the attacker from leaving.

'No rage in him'
"He calmly walks up to the front (of the bus) with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," Caton said.

"There was no rage in him ... It was just like he was a robot or something," Caton said.

Caton said the victim was stabbed up to 50 times.

A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer said the attack occurred while the vehicle was en route from Edmonton, Alberta, to Winnipeg, Manitoba.

CBC reported the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took the attacker into custody.

Authorities declined to provide other details of what they described as a "major incident."

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

it's like a scene from a rob zombie movie, you know? but worse.

on the bus

I am an observer. Or voyeur. Whatever. I like watching. Pervy? Sure; I blame my mother. She would sit on the couch and watch our neighbors like she was getting paid to do so.

She'd flip the blinds a little and say, "Hmph. Mrs. Jones is spending a lot of time at home."

"So are you, mom."

"Hmph."

Anyway, my genetically inherited practice of keeping an eye out on the world kicked in yesterday when I was riding the bus down Michigan Avenue. It was morning, one of those gorgeous robin's egg blue mornings, and the bus was not yet full. I stood by the rear exit since I was just riding up to the river and an older man sat to my right, in the seat closest to the aisle.

Halfway up the avenue, a dark haired young woman rang the bell for a stop and de-bused. (Like 'de-planed,' see?) As soon as she hit the sidewalk to transfer to another bus, the older man to my right slid quickly to the window, pulled off his sunglasses and pressed his face to the window where he began to devour that woman with his gaze.

(That's a phrase I used to read in my mother's old romance novels - 'he devoured her with hungry eyes' - and I could never picture what that looked like until now.)

I'm not kidding. He ate her up. Think of the look a person gets on their face when they pass a shop window and see something they want. I see it when I pass the Bentley dealership and a man is bumping his head on the plate glass to get closer. The man on the bus was like that. He kept his face pressed to the window, turning to keep her in view as the bus slowly pulled away. Then, when the woman was no longer visible, he just put his glasses back on and slid back to his original seat.

His face immediately fell back into the stoic, blank expression he was wearing before the woman got off the bus and he stared straight ahead, his eyes now hidden behind his glasses. He didn't even care that I had watched him do it. It was past since his object was gone.

I've seen this before. Just a week or so ago, I was standing at a LaSalle bus stop during lunch hour next to a short man in a gray suit. It was a hot, bright day. The street was crisscrossed with people rushing to and from lunch. I noticed the man had a pattern. He'd step into the street, look for the bus, grumble at his watch then, if a woman was approaching his location, he'd grow still, track her with his eyes, and as the woman passed, he'd turn on his heel and stare at her until she disappeared.

I did this with him a few times. It was creepy. It was like he was in a cuckoo clock and this is how he marked the minutes passing.

When you're a woman, you train yourself to be blind to these things. If you registered every gaze, every stare, or leer our brains would explode. It doesn't matter if we're pretty, old, young, plain, fat or thin. We still feel the eyes on us all the time.

It's maddening.
...
In related news, it was reported that "Nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed women in the most populous Arab country, and a majority say women themselves are to blame for their maltreatment, a survey showed Thursday.

The forms of harassment reported by Egyptian men, whose country attracts millions of foreign tourists each year, include touching or ogling women, shouting sexually explicit remarks, and exposing their genitals to women."

No, it's not about culture. It's about patriarchy.

Hey, I'm over here, too!

I have a new post up at Bitch Ph.D. about fat issues and progressive gaming issues.

Check it out!

a game of 'what if?'

good, sweet lord.

i wonder when games are going to get progressive? (remember the disaster that was Ghettopoly? ugh.)

i mean, when are they going to make some attempt to stop reinforcing the current/past power structure and start doing some subversive work by offering a different narrative? from the Racialicious post:

'It is reprehensible that colonists are so often portrayed as brave heroes earning what land is rightfully theirs–games such as Colonization only perpetuate this myth so common among Americans and Europeans. How about a game about colonization from the natives’ perspective? Battle against an army of white folk claiming the land you’ve lived on for centuries to be theirs–now that’s a game I’d play.'

sure, some folks could say that reversing the script is only a way for 'victimologists' to achieve useless emotional catharsis and that it's a pointless, PC gesture. i partially agree; playing a game of 'beat the colonizer' won't reverse the centuries of cultural hegemony begun when those ships came over with their guns, germs and steel.

but i think playing a game that uses indigenous resistance as its premise would at least be a valid (and fun!) critique of the popular myth that colonization was a win-win. i've often imagined what could have been if those ships had been turned away or if some event had intervened that changed the colonizing trajectory.

(to read jared diamond's book, though, such an intervening step would have meant finding a way to prevent east-west migration, stop the development of western literacy and killing horses. that's a lot for just one indigenous population to handle all at once. and, yes, that's a gross reduction of his book's premise.)

neither do i buy the argument that basing a game on the POV of the colonized is problematic, or just a game of 'kill whitey'; wanting to be the one who fights being colonized is just as valid as wanting to assume the role of the colonizer (which, to me, is plain old disturbing.)

i mean, wouldn't we call that person who resists enslavement a Freedom Fighter?

or would we, because it runs counter to our approved national and racial narratives, call that person a terrorist?

churchgal asks: what would you like me to write about?

Writing is hard - especially when you write a lot for work, too. (As well as for two other blogs.) If I'm not careful, posts here will end up being about what I've eaten for breakfast.

So, I'm throwing out a sincere plea to all 5 of my readers:
Give me a topic you'd maybe like to see ChurchGal write about soon.

That should at least give me material for a couple of weeks.

dear president bush: you really suck

Abortion Proposal Sets Condition on Aid - NYTimes.com

This is the proposed intent:

The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control.

Under the draft of a proposed rule, hospitals, clinics, researchers and medical schools would have to sign “written certifications” as a prerequisite to getting money under any program run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

How this report proposes to define abortion:

“any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

[bold emphasis mine]

What's the significance of the 'conception' and 'before implantation' lingo? It pretty much makes hormonal contraception into an abortifacient, which it is NOT.

This is the potential impact (from Womens eNews):

Organizations that don't comply with the proposed rule could be forced to scale back services due to lack of funding, leaving women who rely on government-funded family-planning clinics with fewer options for affordable services and supplies, Richards said. That would compound their financial difficulties at a time of rising rates of unemployment and higher costs for food and fuel.
...
The regulation could also undermine state laws that require hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims and that require health care insurance plans to cover contraceptives if they cover other prescription medications, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights lobby in Washington, D.C.

What else is impacted?
My fricking right to control my fertility without having a bunch of patriarchal asshats forcing me to tie my tubes (or stop having sex.)

Why am I kvetching about tying my tubes?
Because if hospitals are suddenly to be staffed by squeamish religious types who believe the Pill (and other devices) kills homunculi babies, then the only way to prevent pregnancy, clearly, would be to sterilize myself.

But would that really be cost effective for me (or any woman, for that matter)?
Tying ones tubes is not like having a vasectomy; it is not a simple snip-snip that can be done with a local anasthetic, in a soothing doctor's office while a little blue napkin lays across your lap. You don't go home and stay in bed for a few days with an ice pack between your legs. It's major surgery. It's invasive, expensive and hellishly inconvenient.

It looks like this.

Contraception, on the other hand, looks like this .

I've already done this, thank you very much. I would be more than a little resentful if I had to to it again.

As for the petty, ignorant, anti-woman Bush administration, I wonder if they convene meetings with agendas titled "How to Do the Most Damage in What Little Time We Have Left."

the trib talks 'race' and the result is...varied

This is the column in today's Trib from Dawn Turner Rice who's doing a series on race. I suppose we can credit the Year of Obama for being the catalyst for all this racial navel gazing.

Whenever a paper or media outlet decides it's going to tackle race, I gird my loins for a discussion that will, inevitably, derail in seconds. My standards for having these conversations is high and I can't stomach the kinds of comments that make me wonder if we're living in 2008 or 1958. This time, I really couldn't allow the conversation to veer off into troll land so I got really into it (if you read the comments, you'll find Ding peppered here and there.) Surprise, surprise, I manage to keep my temper and have a few exchanges that are civilized.

The question of color blindness comes up. Blah di blah, we all know that saying 'I don't see color!' doesn't really work as a racial justice strategy. Racialicious and Too Sense have good posts on color blindness worth looking at.

But the thread made me wonder, if ideological color blindness could actually be achieved, how sure am I that I could be racially color blind (like, skin color carried no semiotic weight for me)?

I gave myself a random 90% - I am 90% sure I could act/behave in a color blind way, considering my ethnic background, how I grew up, who my friends were/are, and my current/past behavior. At first I was going to say 100% but that's not true; I'd have some issues. (Originally, I gave myself an 80%.)

No, this doesn't have metrics built into it in any way, but as a wholly unscientific assessment, it's at least as worthwhile and revealing as Which Sex and City Character Are You?

Over at Bitch Ph.D. they had a really good discussion on Obama's recent statement removing mental health from consideration when a woman decides to have a late abortion. In other words, if I said to a doctor that I cannot be remain pregnant because the idea of being pregnant is so repugnant to me my mind will split, then my reason isn't 'enough' to justify having one, presumably because my 'health' isn't in danger.

The discussion is cogent, varied and smart. I especially liked one of the comments of ProfessorDarkHeart because it made me step back from my usual position and really think about some nuances:

"Of course this is true; legislating against abortion in any way imposes a burden upon the mother. But I guess I don't see why in this one area of the law the standard should be that NO burden should be imposed upon the individual rather than no UNREASONABLE burden. The latter standard already limits our power over our bodies in a lot of ways. We can't legally sell our organs, for instance, or commit suicide; those are limitations on our personal autonomy, but it's widely agreed upon that they are reasonable ones that serve legitimate state interests. Of course, in a patriarchal state, the law is likely to take the least liberal view possible of women's autonomy; but I think it's a legitimate feminist goal to work to broaden society's ideas about the scope of that autonomy, as opposed to insisting that it lies outside the law altogether. The latter argument is a far more libertarian one than Roe itself makes, and isn't very likely to find a place in American jurisprudence anytime soon. Since Roe asks states to balance women's rights to privacy and due process against a state interest in protecting potential fetal life, I think it's important for feminists to try to help define where that state interest might begin (and to define it as conservatively as possible); otherwise, the only propositions about how to define fetal rights will be coming, as they are now, from the right. Whether we like it or not, the state's interest in protecting fetal life is enshrined in Roe, and unless we can articulate a pro-choice position that allows for that interest, we'll be talking outside the framework of existing law as the religious right chips away at choice from within it, as they've been doing so successfully in recent decades."

summer resolutions

so last week was exhausting, simply exhausting. raging PMS while fighting the governor is not restful. therefore, i have resolved to avoid straining my capacities too far.

resolved, Ding will start playing tennis. Really.
resolved, Ding will stop eating so much pasta; the Italy vacation is over!
resolved, Ding will see all the comic book movies she can this month.
resolved, Ding will take a break from reading political blogs because it's making her lose focus.
resolved, instead, Ding will read big, smart books that have won prizes.
resolved, maybe Ding should go to church at least once this summer.

sigh.

summer wrangling

the illinois governor is nuts (along with mike madigan and the state assembly) so i'm stuck in the middle of budget crisis hell over here.

but in a bit of good news, i may have just successfully lobbied for some federal 'pork'.

(one man's pork is another woman's operating budget, is what i say.)

and i'm trying to decide if i'm going to the Democratic convention in August. (denver, sleeping on the floor of someone's house, blogging the convention, drinking with strangers...hm.)

asshat: karl rove

So.
Yesterday, Karl Rove called Obama 'cooly arrogant:'

"Even if you never met him," Rove said, "You know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Clearly, if making snide comments was all that counted I guess that makes all of Gen X 'cooly arrogant.'
But I digress.

1. how many black people actually belong to a country club?
2. of those black people, how many would actually make snide comments about their fellow privileged country clubbers?
3. how many country clubs actually allow smoking?
4. since when does 'cooly arrogant' mean something bad when pop culture/literary/cinema tells us 'cooly arrogant' men are frakking hot?

A Few Cooly Arrogant Men We (ok, I) Have Loved:
Mr. Darcy

Captain Wentworth

Toby Stephens

Cary Grant

James Bond

Daniel Craig, James Bond

Pierce Brosnan, Thomas Crown

Steve McQueen

Rupert Everett

Omar Sharif

Peter O'Toole (when he was less cadaverous)

Jean Reno, Swept Away

Morpheus

George Clooney

Clive Owen

almost every Regency romance hero ever written

Batman

Magneto

Bruce Willis

Prospero

Severus Snape

Nick Charles

Mr. Tibbs

Han Solo

Spencer Tracy

Paul Henreid

Humphrey Bogart

Spock

Feel free to add your own.

In the meantime, the GOP needs to resolve their collective cognitive-Obama-dissonance if the best they can come up with is calling Obama a milk chocolate WASP.

A Belated Father's Day Tribute to Pastor John

Some of the photos I like most during this election season have been the ones showing Obama in the role of father. Images of him embracing his girls, evidently loving and caring for them - during the race of his life - make my little adamantine heart sort of clench, you know?

I've written a lot about my dad here on ChurchGal. He reads this site and has been incredibly gracious about standing in as my occasional straw man against which I throw my screeds and opinions.

If you looked at him today, with his distinguished gray hair, glasses and the goatee (that makes all the old ladies love him), you'd see an educated, charismatic older black man. A man who looks like he could be a jazzer or a popular philosophy professor at a city college. A man who looks comfortable wearing the collar of a reverend as well as the crazy red cashmere sweater-gym shorts-dress socks-sandals combo he wears to his daughters' chagrin during Saturday brunch. He looks settled, comfortable, successful. But his life story is, to me, the typical African American bildungsroman.

My father grew up in the ghetto. Literally. THE GHETTO. The projects of Compton and Watts might as well have been a sharecroppers plot. But from the ghetto, he went into the Army, married my mother, went to school to earn two degrees (including one from Talbot Seminary), became the young associate pastor of our church, then senior pastor.

I think growing up in the ghetto gave my dad some resilience. He built several ministries from scratch, launched a radio show and a web ministry; he survived a number of professional rivalries, controversies and church schisms. He survived the sudden death of his wife, the new world of dating in the 21st century and has somehow managed to avoid getting leg-shackled again. I remember a story he told me about dating a woman who became so frustrated at his unwillingness to 'take it to the next level' she sicced her little yappy dog on him and dumped water over his head on a beach date. Clearly, my relationship issues are a family trait.

My pops has lost several friends, made quite a few enemies, and earned grudging respect because of his unwavering integrity and willingness to call bullshit on the black church's excesses and hypocrisies. He's often an exasperating object of frustration to his daughters.

(A common refrain: "Dad, why don't you do things the way they're meant to be done?!"
A common response: "Oh, girl. You worry too much.")

In his middle age, my dad has become a different dad. The previous authoritarian has been replaced by a more mellow, cigar smoking, wine-sipping, Christian libertarian whose motto is 'That is between you and God. But you know you're wrong.'

This later incarnation of my dad is a very cool, though befuddling, one.

So this is what my father taught me:

He taught me how to argue. Dinnertime was usually 90 minutes of my dad and I exhausting my mother and sister while I argued why it wasn't a sin to go to the Homecoming Dance or the weekend ski trip and he'd block me every time - until I figured out how to flip his rhetoric around on him. Good times.
He taught me how to fight. Watching my dad constantly turn the other cheek in the name of the Lord, I formed different opinions about the value of strategic conflict. I mean, David was a warrior, right?
He taught me how to think critically. Listening to my dad tear apart the faulty logic of his opponents was cool; having that same logic tearing applied to me, not so much.
He taught me how to tell a story to make a point. These were always the best parts of his sermons.
He taught me how to lose. Like that Elizabeth Bishop poem, 'One Art.'
He taught me how to start over. Watching a pastor incubate and launch new ministries will do that.
He taught me that education counts.
He taught me that integrity and character count more.
He taught me that it is possible to change.
He also taught me there are some things you can't change - who you are is WHO you are. It's just that some folks lie about who they are.
He taught me how to charm. The moms in the PTA liked my dad for a reason.
He taught me about jazz.
He turned me into a feminist (when he told me I needed to learn how to make a man a sandwich.)
He is a walking lesson in vulnerability, sacrifice, faith and dedication to one's Call. (Yes, he might have *said* he wants to give his congregation the finger but he's still there.) This is a lesson I'm still trying to get.
He taught me that you make your own path. One thing I've always loved about my dad (both of my parents, actually) is that he has never, despite the unfortunate sandwich incident, tried to dictate my identity.

My memories of dad are those of unwavering support, whatever my decision has been. He was the one who drove across the country with my stuff when I started at UofM; he was the one who helped move me to Chicago when I decided to leave UofM; he was the one who didn't blink an eye when I told him I was going to jump into the unknown world of the non profit. He was the one who shut down his congregation when they had the nerve to whisper about my gay friends attending and helping out with my mother's funeral. He was the one who showed me that when other people start telling you how they need you to be someone you know you're not, you need to walk away and say, 'You crazy.' Consequences be damned. Most likely, there won't be any.

So, thanks, Dad. You've made me the feminist, bitchy, snarky, authority-hating loudmouth bougie snob I am today.

Love you! Happy Belated Father's Day!

rhetorical devices, 101: hyperbole

"This is the happiest day of my life." Really? Are you sure? I mean, out of all your days on earth you're sure that this day, this particular day, is the one that gives you the best feeling of happiness (well-being, satisfaction, contentment and joy) you have ever experienced? Can you measure that happiness and back that up with some sort of empirical evidence - and can you be sure that this zenith of happiness will hold firm in the future?

"Oh my god, that was the worst sex ever." Really? Ever? In your lifetime of sexual activity, this one instance was measurably worse than (and exceeded the badness of) the sex you've had before? So bad that it may put you off sex forever? If you run an analysis of all your lovers, taking into consideration their various techniques and the quality of the sexage, will this one lover top the list as the worst, or just one of the worst?

"For the first time in my life, I am really proud of my country." Oh, please. You mean you have lived in a state of perpetual and uninterrupted dissatisfaction with this country since the day you were born? I mean, you haven't felt even a little swelling of pride during the Olympics?? And what makes this particular moment so great for you that it erases all other, potential pride-inducing moments a country could have, huh?

"Mission: Accomplished." Sigh.

So. Out of all these dramatic, hyperbolic declarations, which one is the most damaging to our civic psyche? Which one makes the person saying it a liar and a person not to be trusted?

hands off my ovaries, part one million: contraception does not kill babies!

ChurchGal: the other shoe drops: anti-choicers don't want you to have contraception!

i'm bumping this thread up to the top because i think it's a conversation we should start having in public now that groups are starting to target our legal right to contraception.

yes, our LEGAL right to use medically safe contraception and devices.

i want people to start thinking about the frakking consequences of their arguments, the frakking legal and social impact of their arguments. it's one thing to advocate and wish for the government to lay its hands on all aspects of one's intimate life but it's another to actually think about what this would look like in real life.

so, what would life really look like if fertilized eggs were declared 'people' (with separate, legal status) and how would this impact a woman's already legalized ability to use any kind of contraception?
...

this is an article, too, that one should read, written by pro-life Christian OB/GYNs about the Pill. in particular, for those who say that the Pill is an abortifacient, pay attention to what they say about how the Pill actually works:

"Most hormone contraceptives are noted to work by 3 methods of action:
1)Primarily, they inhibit ovulation by suppression of the pituitary/ovarian axis, mediated through suppression of gonadotrophin releasing hormone from the hypothalamus.
2)Secondarily, they inhibit transport of sperm through the cervix by thickening the cervical mucous.
3)They cause changes in the uterine lining (endometrium) which have historically been assumed to decrease the possibility of implantation, should fertilization occur. This presumption is commonly known as the "hostile endometrium" theory.

A thorough review of the medical literature uncovers ample data to support the first two methods of action, which are contraceptive actions. (Appropriate references will be found in the sections discussing each type of hormone contraceptive.) However, there is no direct evidence in the literature to support the third proposed method of action. This conclusion is shared by the respected Gynecologic Endocrinology textbook authors Yen and Jaffe." [emphasis mine]

further, the article goes on to say "An extensive review of pertinent scientific writings indicates that there is no credible evidence to validate a mechanism of pre-implantation abortion as a part of the action of hormone contraceptives. On the contrary, the existing evidence indicates that "on pill" conceptions are handled by the reproductive system with the same results seen with "off pill" conceptions, with the exception of increased ectopic rates seen with POPs and Norplant."

in other words, what happens when you conceive off the Pill happens when you conceive on the Pill. nothing's aborted - you're pregnant. so yeah...there goes that argument.

[feministing has another post from another OB/GYN that says pretty much the same thing here. it also mentions this thing called to 'right to privacy' that i think is at the heart of this push to make legal contraception suddenly illegal and harmful. i'll be writing on that later, i think. and, of course, my favorite OB/BYN blog, The Well Timed Period, has lots of useful and medically accurate information here.]

so if nothing's being killed, then why do these groups get their panties in a bunch about women using a Pill, an IUD or Norplant?

i will leave you to speculate.

oh, italy.

i LOVED italy.

the views, of course, were stunning and gorgeous. (even the rainy days were glorious. i mean they were the kind of days that made you want to throw open your windows, lean out and belt an aria. you don't get days like that in Chicago.)
the wine, natch, was unbelievably good (even the cheap farmers' wine we guzzled at the villa. all 50 bottles of it.)
the roads were treacherous and the italian style of 'driving' terrifying. (yet energizing in a 'you're going to meet your Maker very soon' kind of way.)

but you know what i really liked about italy?

their pace was my pace - slow.
i don't think i saw anyone actually 'hurry.' you really could sit and drink and eat all day and no one looked at you like you were a wastrel.

sure, i could have stuffed my days with shopping and touring and running from this museum to that old church. instead, in siena, i sat on my butt in the main piazza and read my book; in volterra, i eye-flirted with a hot syrian alabaster sculptor and then ate a load of gelato that gave me gas. (hello, lactaid.) in florence, i sat with friends off the Duomo and ate lunch and ordered liter after liter of wine, smoked at least two packs of cigarettes, wandered to another cafe for several glasses of prosecco, had a round of drinks bought by the kind old israeli vendor who liked Obama (and our friend K-), then stumbled across the street to the restaurant and stuffed myself full of rabbit, beans and more wine.

i LOVE italy!

photos will be posted when they're all downloaded so patience, all 5 of my readers.

i'll be buzzing off this italian high for a while.

ciao!

PS: Incidentally, the best bathroom in Florence is inside the Ferragamo Show Museum. it's worth the 5 euro to pee in it.

Oh, and where can you find the most unnecessarily snooty perfume spritz girls? the overrated profumo-farmaceutica di santa maria novella. yeah, i said it: it's OVERRATED. sure, it's beautiful but it's still just a place to buy old soap and old perfume. the older woman in the soap room is much nicer so go throw your euro at her.

ciao!

Emily Gould - Exposed - Blog-Post Confidential - Gawker - NYTimes.com

i wish i had time to write about this today. often, i've thought about the random way i stumbled onto blogging. (yes, a boy was involved.) often, i wonder why i continue - some of my friends wonder why i say things here i've never said in conversation. the only thing i can do is shrug and say, 'It's different. I don't know.'

remind me to come back to this when i get back from ITALY!

enjoy the beginning of summer and i'll see you in about 10 days.

who gets to be american? a jeremiad.

Well, according to Kathleen Parker, it's all about the blood.

From her column:

It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Fry’s political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically — and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century — there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.
We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants. But there’s a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

The blood that somehow conveys heritage, values, national identity and civic belonging. If you don't have the right kind of 'blood' then you're not a 'real' American. You're a wannabe, a poser, a fake. You have no claim on this American birthright because you aren't 'pure-blooded' American.

You're a mutt, impure, Other.

Is any of this ringing anyone's bells? Even without graduate degrees in history?

Because we should know about bloodlines and blood spilt for sacrifice. Sweet holy jesus, this Parker woman dares to tell anyone in this country (who isn't white) that the sacrifices their families were forced to make because they were Other in this great country of 'opportunity' and 'plenty' don't count.

Who hasn't sacrificed to be an American? Who?
Have black people not sacrificed?
Have the Chinese not sacrificed?
Have the Japanese not sacrificed?
Have the Native Americans, for god's sake, not sacrificed?
Have the Mexicans and the South Asians not sacrificed?
Who is not sacrificing so that they can participate in and assume this American identity?

All our histories in the past two hundred years have all been litanies of the sacrifice and 'blood' of Others. Why does our 'blood' not count and other 'blood' does?

This column so infuriated me, the only thing that could make me feel good about my anger was this Lincoln quote:

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy."

I knew this election season would bring out people's subterranean ugliness, the thoughts that whisper around their heads they would never dare bring out into the light, but I thought folks would treat this historical moment with a little bit more class. How naive of me. Once again, the white supremacist underpinnings of this country have jumped the leash.

You are killing me, America!

I keep giving you chances; I keep thinking, this isn't everyone. It's the media; it's some snaggle-toothed nutter living in the woods; it's just some run of the mill white person who doesn't know any people of color so they're just sort of stupid; or it's Fox News (see nutter). But this came out in a nationally syndicated column. This piece of xenophobic, nativist trash (which reads no different from the xenophobic, nativist trash from the 19th and early 20th centuries) was approved by someone. Someone's lizard brain read this and thought, 'Eh, what's the big deal? It's just an op-ed.'

Gah! If America was a person standing in front of me I'd slap them!

Pat Buchanan wants me to 'be grateful.' He wants me to shut up and be grateful I live in a place that suffers from the worst case of degenerate racism, a place that makes no significant movement toward recognition of or reconciliation for its white supremacist past. But here's our chance! Here's a moment - a gorgeous, breathtaking moment! And what do we do with this moment? We say he is not (and by extension, we are not - I am not) a 'full-blooded American'!

Oh, America, you make we wanna holler!

I can't be grateful when I keep waiting for this country to grow. the fuck. up. I keep waiting for it to do some frakking introspection. Look back at OUR history and make some little effort to change. But this country, rather than look backward with a critical and repentant eye, looks behind like Lot's wife and can't feel its limbs turning to salt.

[h/t: Too Sense: Oh, Hell No.
And here's that excellent post on the Buchanan 'black gratitude' mess at Obsidian Wings.]

Ask A Working Woman Survey 2008: do it!

when i was in college i turned up my nose at Woolf's A Room of Their Own. i thought it was classist, elitist and bourgeois.

ah, youth. now i reread it and, yes, it's still so very British Public School, but the main point of Woolf's essay is still important: women require economic autonomy and fiscal stability to have the lives they want (and need) in order to support themselves, as well as those who depend on them.

when poverty strikes (and, these days, it's striking more and more often) women are particularly vulnerable. as the traditional caretakers within communities, we juggle children, jobs, healthcare, and education needs; poverty makes it more difficult to shoulder those responsibilities. poor women, in essence, need to be superhuman just to make a few frayed ends meet. but this isn't a situation that just affects poor women, or women making below $15k/year. this is now a reality for middle class women. wages are flat, industries are shrinking and working mothers and women still aren't being paid what men in our same positions are making. basically, if you're a woman, economic instability is a very real possibility.

in this primary season, the conversation around economic issues has been presented as a white, male, middle class issue - or a white, male, blue collar issue.

where are women in this issue? what are our economic concerns? what are our needs? what are our burdens?

well, now you have a chance to share what those concerns are.

the AFL-CIO and Working America has launched the 2008 Ask a Working Woman Survey; they are looking for women to take this survey. you can check it out on the ALF-CIO news blog here or take the survey directly here.

i think survey results will be available next month so go do it!

whew! crazy pastor not my dad.

Too Sense: Black Pastor Says Obama, Oprah, and Wright are 'Trinity of Hell'

so imagine the shudder of dread i experienced when i came across this post:

Let's see, according to this guy: Oprah betrayed white women (who put her
where she is today) by supporting Obama; Wright and Obama are closet gays, and
Obama stayed at Trinity United Methodist because he was having a gay
relationship with Wright; George Soros gave $200 million to Obama's campaign,
and Obama spent all of the money on white hotels and white media; in the
"Trinity of Hell" Wright is the Father, Obama is the Son, and Oprah is the Whore
Girl, looking to be President, Vice-President, and Secretary of State.

my first thought was, 'Please, lord, don't let it be dad, caught on tape saying something totally crazy on his website...'

and it wasn't! it was some other black pastor who doesn't like oprah winfrey!

sorry, dad. (you know i love you!)

are pigs flying?: the religous right leaning to obama?

via Jack & Jill, this article seems to posit that the Religious Right is cracking up and the flotsam are breaking for Obama.

my first reaction was to go, Hmm. Really??

a few months ago, we saw the Religious Right (R2) go slightly nuts with their rejection of Romney, their pragmatic shunning of true-blue, 'not electable' fundamentalist Huckabee and their reluctant embrace of McCain.

but does that mean the R2 is going for Obama?

i'd say no. rather, what this article demonstrates is that the term 'evangelical' is just as diverse as the term 'progressive.' (as this primary season has demonstrated, there are schisms and fractures all over the liberal/progressive community. class, racial, sexual orientation and religious differences have uncovered a shifting and discomfitted coalition that hasn't had to face the fact in a very long while that not everything is about holding hands and singing Kum Ba Ya, you know?)

there are an emerging group of evangelicals (like Jim Wallis) who, rather than focus on hot button issues like abortion and homosexuality or whether or not dinosaurs existed, tend to look at other 'values' issues like the care of the earth, the treatment of the poor, war, or human rights issues (like trafficking, immigration, rape in the Congo and Darfur, genital mutilation, etc.) through a lens that we would say is more 'progressive' than their counterparts in the R2.

but i'd be very comfortable in saying they don't represent the R2. who's the Religious Right? look at james dobson, hagee, and the current leader of the southern baptist convention. that's the religious right. and there is no way in frakking hell their constituents are going to break for the Dems.

i'd say this group the article, and the other links in the Jack & Jill post, describe moderate evangelicals. these are evangelicals who believe in actively spreading the gospel (as well as the power and necessity for conversion) by focusing on issues that can make the most impact on a person's life now, rather than later. with issues like poverty and the environment, they're not necessarily already preaching to the choir about issues that are 'easy' rallying cries for those already hanging out inside the fundamentalist clubhouse . these are folks who just built a different clubhouse - same tree, different branch.

can the Dems depend on this emerging moderate evangelical bloc?

no. well, maybe the Dems can depend on these folks for those issues that speak to a moderate evangelical sensibility - like AIDS, global poverty, war/peace, the environment, or human rights (outside of abortion and/or gay rights, unless the Dems can find a way to message reproductive justice and gay rights as part of human rights, or social justice, issues. which they haven't successfully been able to do for the moderate evangelical crowd because the Dems just haven't taken the time), etc.

(i keep drawing a line between moderate issues and hot button issues because i think those moderate evangelical issues are 'missionary' issues; you can build a nice youth trip or awareness raising campaign around these things. you can't necessarily do that around reproductive justice or gay rights without looking like, well, the Religious Right.)

this isn't to say that i think moderate evangelicals don't belong under our progressive big tent. quite the contrary. but if the tradeoff is to give on some fundamental progressive issues, like abortion or gay rights, just to curry favor with some moderate evangelicals as part of a measly electoral strategy, then i'm more than wary.

(and why is our first inclination to tradeoff, anyway? let other people tradeoff if they wanna vote for us!)

and if the Dems really think it's going to be a good idea to climb up on that slippery slope and begin to couch our values in even stronger language of religion, then i wonder what kind of weed someone's smoking up there in Democratic headquarters.

Jack and Jill Politics: Religious Right -leaning towards Democrats?

The New Republic has an excerpt of Jeff Sharlet's The Family that will give anyone pause about the benefits of mixing politics with religion. [via The Revealer]

he has a point: The Huckabee Option

As the interminable death march to the convention continues, we have to ask ourselves a question:

Why is this happening to us? Where did we go wrong? Why has the spectre of political unity forsaken us?

It's because Hillary Clinton didn't go to church enough.

Everyone who goes to church knows you're supposed to turn the other cheek. Some of us are better at this than others. (Not me. Oh, I turn the other cheek but then I seethe inside just waiting for some righteous justice to fall on someone's head. You hear that, anonymous men of UConn?) Mike Huckabee, though he scared me as a presidential candidate, apparently internalized this golden church lesson, as this post from Shakesville makes apparent:

Shakesville: The Huckabee Option

But what are the chances that Clinton will suddenly have a 'come to jesus' moment and back off her wacked out scorched earth campaign strategy?

About as many chances that those asshats at UConn who assaulted Melissa Bruen will be identified and prosecuted.

asshat: the entire state of Missouri

The Initiative for the Prevention of Coerced and Unsafe Abortions (via Bitch Ph.D.)

This is how I imagine a conversation to go if such a law was established in Illinois:

Ding: I need an abortion
Nurse: Hm. Really. Why?
Ding: Because I'm pregnant and don't want to be. (Ass)
Nurse: Hm. I'm afraid that's not good enough. Are you being forced to get this abortion?

Ding: Yes. I'm being forced by the very fact that I am pregnant. If I wasn't pregnant, I wouldn't ask for the abortion.
Nurse: You're rather hostile.
Ding: I'm hostile to you because you are standing in the way of me not remaining pregnant.

Nurse: Would you like an ultra-sound?
Ding: No.
Nurse: Have you received counseling?
Ding: Have you?
Nurse: I think we might need to order a psych evaluation. For your safety. Just in case you're being forced to get this abortion against your will.
Ding: I'm not. Have at it. Abort away.

Nurse: I'm sorry. I can't. I'll need to refer you to our social worker who can evaluate your state of mind and then recommend -
Ding: How long will that take?
Nurse: Her earliest opening would be...next month.
Ding: So I'd have to wait another four weeks for my abortion.

Nurse: Yes. Then, perhaps another couple of weeks for an appointment.
Ding: So maybe another 6 weeks until I can get an abortion, pushing me further out of the window to get an abortion before it's considered a 'late term' abortion and not able to get one at all. You're basically going to stall this thing as long as you can until I'm forced to either give birth or rip this fetus from my own belly.
Nurse: Definitely a psych exam is in order.

(Ding lunges across desk.)

Nice fantasy, huh? Unfortunately, Missouri is taking steps to make sure you don't just have to imagine having asshat conversations like this; they actually want to legislate it.

People, it's time for a revolution.

[Note: Dad, I'm not really pregnant. That was totally made up. Do NOT get excited. There are no grandchildren on the way over here.]

another asshat: the men of UConn

What kind of world do we live in when a woman, who's in the middle of her own sexual assault, fights off her attacker (in a rather bad-ass way, too), then when she's calling out for help, a group of male bystanders then SEXUALLY ASSAULT her for defending herself??

This is what we mean by rape culture. Rape culture says that women's bodies ought to be available. Rape culture says women's default answer to sex is 'yes.' Rape culture says it is unnatural and punishable for a woman to defend her body. Rape culture says it is appropriate for a man to violate a woman's physical space. Rape culture says it is men who can have physical autonomy but women none. Rape culture says that these anonymous men have more legal rights to protection than the woman who fought off her own fucking attacker.

Rape culture says it's ok to raise your sons like this.

This is rape culture and I'm frakking sick of it. Someone needs to track these guys down and take a hammer to their testicles. Really.


[h/t Feministing; read the post and read Melissa Bruen's original post. Her bravery is astounding and exemplary. If UConn doesn't take suitable action, they need to be sued. Here's a thought: has anyone ever thought of bringing a class action suit on behalf of campus rape victims against a university for not suitably protecting its female population?]

'crossing the line'

From The Revealer, I came across a little item pointing me to an interview between the Family Research Council and religious right activist Janet Folger about some electioneering activities the FRC has planned.

The usual (non-tax status threatening) stuff: pre-packaged sermons on hot button conservative issues, candidate comparisons (hmm) and then comes this:

"We're going," he said, "to prompt pastors and say to them that, you know, we really believe that they need to challenge some of the things, some of the thinking that we have going on in our society, which is that separation of church and state doctrine, that we really need to preach the Bible on these issues and apply them to the things that are going on in the culture today." [emphasis mine]

Uh-huh. Pastors really need to challenge that separation of church and state thing. Yeah.

You heard it, people. Right from the right's mouth.

Talk To Action Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith

the other shoe drops: anti-choicers don't want you to have contraception!

Feministing has a story here about the campaign from the American Life League to stop folks (uh, women) from using the Pill. It's called The Pill Kills!

Yeah, well. It DOESN'T. Basic science, people. Basic. But who cares about basic science when you can write frakked up stuff like this:

The birth control pill does not reduce the number of abortions. The only difference is that you are killing the baby earlier.
[T]he pill and other contraceptives can stop a tiny child’s implantation in his/her mother’s womb because the pill irritates the lining of the uterus so that the tiny baby boy or baby girl cannot attach to the lining of the uterus and the newly formed human person is aborted and dies. This is called a chemical abortion.

Never mind the fact the Pill prevents ovulation so there's no egg to be fertilized. Never mind the fact the Pill cripples the sperm to prevent it getting to the egg. Never mind the fact ... oh, hell. These people are ass and facts mean nothing to them.

Personally, I cannot extoll the wonderfulness of the Pill enough. It regulated my periods, it cleared up acne and, taken in a super concentrated dose, it also backed me up after a condom malfunction. (Yay, Plan B!)

So frak off, sex-hating old Bible thumping ign'ant prudes. Leave our contraception alone.

(And did I not call this 4 years ago?? I totally called it! Not satisfied with messing about with abortion, the 'I hate women' crowd goes for contraception. Arrgh.)

But what am I thinking? They don't even think married people should use contraception.

Ok, you know what my issue is? It's this: If these people really believe that the Pill kills tiny, cute, little homonculi, then fine. Be stupid. That is their right to be so ignorant, they think a fertilized egg is a person. Fill your quiver, baby. (And then home school the quiver and form a militia and get on the ATF watch list. Whatever.)

But they need to stop telling the rest of us to get on board with their freaking weirdo religious ideas!

Because that's what this is: it's a religious idea about when life begins. Religious freedom means they can do whatever they like; but it's a frikking imposition on MY religious and personal freedom when their actions can negatively impact my ability to control my Supreme Court-supported ability to control my own frakking fertility - according to my own religious ideas.

So. Whose religious ideas win? Mine? Or theirs?

Jeebus. I got so worked up I need a cocktail.

a must read

Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog

I really can't say enough about this blog; it's like a refresher course on feminism that I can go back to again and again. Even now, when my current thoughts on feminism and my place in it is sort of shaky.

(Oh, Feminism. Never fear. I will never completely desert you. But I will be that annoying woman in the corner raising her hand and asking really annoying questions about some folks who stand next to me, under this so-called Big Tent.)

So. On this very busy Monday, wherein I will be swamped until the wee hours of the early evening, refresh yourselves at the well of feminism and reacquaint yourself with why you call yourself one.

Iron Man: my new boyfriend

oh. my. god.

i don't care if you've never heard of Iron Man, never read a comic book (what are you, a philistine?), never even knew comic books existed and don't give a crap who Stan Lee is. i don't care if your boyfriend owns all these weird dolls (oh, action figures) and they're taking over your apartment and all you want to do is pile them in the backyard and set them on fire.

this movie is teh bomb.

it's better than the X-Men movies (not that hard); better than Spiderman and his tired adolescent angst; and gives the recent Batman a serious run for its money, if not totally surpassing it with the quality of the script, acting and action. this movie made a man encased in titanium erotic. hello!

favorite bits:

1. Robert Downey, Jr. - how hot is he? how funny and witty and sad can he be? and when his eyes get all teary and he's regretting all his life decisions in a cave in Afghanistan? sigh.

2. The bromance - at last, masculine friendship that isn't totally about measuring the size of one's dick.

3. The pacing - hail to Jon Favreau for making a movie that actually captures the 'ohmygod what's going to happen now???' spirit of comic books. every beat in the story was struck blam blam blamblamBLAM!

4. The script - wow. dialogue that was actually character-driven and not merely 'cartoony.' it was sly, spry and wry. loved it.

5. Women I could like - ok, there's only one woman who really matters and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) wasn't a screamer, a frail chick who needed to be rescued or a belligerent neurotic with issues. she was capable, supportive, knowing and decidedly not foolish. (the other woman in the movie just needed to be recast. the actress was awful and bland.)

6. Humor - at last! a comic book movie with a sense of humor! i'll chalk this up to Favreau and Downey's snarky sensibilities. yeah, the Christian Bale Batman has a certain hangman's noose humor about it, but it's so...heavy. blah. and the X-Men movies? pullease. dour, overbearing and way too earnest about its own allegory. give me the wink and the sharp quip delivered by a guy you can actually believe can carry it off.

7. Robert Downey, Jr. - sigh. really. he is just so...yummy. sure, he's short; he's in his 40's; he's a little worn on the edges. that's history, baby! and sure, when he takes off as Iron Man there's a little balletic grace to that little hand flip he gives that might not be really very macho. but i don't care! he's hot!

i'm about to start babbling about this movie. i should stop.
oh! but one more thing!

now i'm gonna have to start reading Iron Man - and isn't *that* the measure of success for a comic-based movie?

(thank goodness saturday is Free Comics Day.)

countdown to italy

4 weeks.

then i'm blowing this pop stand and lolling in the hot Tuscan countryside, drinking wine, eating pizza and saying things like 'Non sono Americana. Sono Canadian. Whatever.'

4 weeks and i will leave this horrific primary season behind me (only to come right back to it); i will try to leave behind our nation's unexpiated racist past and present.

(come on, sean bell's killers get off completely?? no punishment at all? people go to jail for accidentally killing someone with their motor vehicle! 50 rounds! unarmed! LORD JESUS!)

4 weeks and i will be on fricking vacation from this frakking mess of a country that i love with all my heart, even though recent events are making me struggle with my affection. it seems like every little privilege i enjoy feels like a bribe. or like a stack of crumpled bills on the side of a bedstand, at the very least.

in 4 weeks, i will sleep deeply, i will explore eagerly and i will float lethargically in the villa's 4 ft pool that Roomie chose so i can't drown.

thank god there's italy because lord knows here is riding me like a pony.
...
there's so much still to do.

i know we're 4 weeks out but i have a running list in my head of the things that need to be taken care of: i have to hold the mail, unlock my phone, alert my bank, transfer funds, wrap up work stuff, make a list of things to pack, actually pack, copy recipes, learn a bit more italian (i'm actually not bad with the accent!), and resign myself to the fact that, yes, i will be on my period while in italy. dammit.

(forget that summer fantasy of white linen and a summery light wardrobe. i will be bleeding like MacDuff's mam.)

an acquaintance last night gave this piece of advice: "Never pass up an opportunity to sit, eat or pee. You never know when you'll get another chance." i will take that advice to heart, slowing down my group of friends as i take every opportunity to sit, eat and pee. perhaps all at the same time.

and did you know urban outfitters has really cute, cheap cameras? unlike the coldly perfect pictures taken with digital cameras, these take really wonderfully lo-fi photos, sort of blurry and saturated with light and all sorts of imperfections. i'm thinking about getting the Diana+Edelweiss or the Holga.

and i need to get my hair done. i think i'm officially over being completely 'natural.' not for anything political, but for danged expedience. the summer is around the corner and i do not want to mess with the frizz. Tia at Shake Your Beauty mentioned something called a 'conditioning relaxer' and i think i need to try that. i just need to loosen the curls here and be less frizzy.

wow. a whole post on totally frivolous crap.
excellent.

[crossposted at my other blog, too. no, i won't link there. my dad reads this space!]

one more time, this time with feeling

if you haven't already dropped dead from Obama/Clinton/Longest Primary Season EVAR Fatigue, then perhaps you have some thoughts on Wright, more distancing, the black church (whatever that is) and racial politics.

here's my thought about the whole thing:

Church. State. Divided.

why are we even discussing this?

[if anyone needs it spelled out: it's like the chocolate and peanut butter thing. if you don't want your politics to suddenly turn into the Nearer My God to Thee hour, then keep politics out of your churches - and keep your churches off the political radar. when the Church steps onto a public platform, all sorts of lines get blurred - and when the political process suddenly starts to require folks to make religious proclamations in order to pass some kind of political fitness test, then that's problematic too. movement in either direction pulls Church and State closer together until the one is indistinguishable from the other.

capisce?]

Jack and Jill Politics: Rev. Michael Pfleger Holds It Down In Fox Interview On Wright, Farrakhan and "Hate"

Jack and Jill Politics: Rev. Michael Pfleger Holds It Down In Fox Interview On Wright, Farrakhan and "Hate"

Remember what I said about Fr. Pfleger when this whole Wright thing happened?
Well, now FOX News got the full on Pfleger experience - right in the face.
The last 3 minutes are awesome. I had to jump up from my desk at work and wanted to yell out, 'Preach!'

[and i'm really enjoying reading the folks over at Jack & Jill. they're on my feed.]

fine. i'll watch the primaries.

a scene from yesterday, a gorgeously sunny day in chicago with relatively mild traffic while Roomie and Ding left their offices early

Roomie: so what's on your schedule this week? dates?
Ding: nah. a work event and a board meeting. maybe a boy later on this week but nothing's confirmed.
Roomie: what do you want to do? dinner?

Ding: (sigh) but where will we go? what will we do? what will we eat? choices...i'm incapable of making them.
Roomie: mmm, jibarito....
Ding: we can't have jibarito for dinner. that would totally mess us up for the rest of the night.

Roomie: (sigh) jibarito. what about tomorrow? let's watch the primaries at Enoteca Roma.
Ding: euww. no. i can't watch the primaries. i'll just get mad.
Roomie: o-kaay. no primaries.

(silence)

Ding: no, we can watch the primaries. let's do that. i'll just get mad if clinton wins. and the pundits, i want them to die. and i'm too busy this week to be pissed off.
Roomie: it'll be fine. wine, cheeses, nibblies, primaries with other obama folks. perfect.

so, even though my earlier enthusiasm about this election has practically been beaten from me by this too-long primary season (thanks for that, Democratic Party), i will endure one more night of primary returns and hope i don't slip into an election-induced depressive rage.

churchgal, where are you?

you know that wall you hit when there's so much going on in the news that you just want to hibernate and watch Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who all weekend?

well, i've hit it. i've crashed into it and it has given me a headache. i have no idea what's going on in pennsylvania, have almost lost all interest in our political shenanigans and, frankly, if someone told me the moon exploded and killed hillary clinton or barak obama i'd sort of shrug.

instead, i've been spending my time doing things that i really like: hanging out on a friend's back porch, drinking beer, petting her dog and catching up on what's going on; shooting pool in a tiny neighborhood bar with maybe a new friend; enthusiastically writing the crappiest first draft of a romance novel ever, reading comic books like Scalped and Mouseguard; going on a few dates (shrug) and watching the days slowly stretch themselves longer as we leave winter behind and impatiently wait for summer.

(chicago has decided to skip spring entirely, this year.)

so let's hear it.

what are you all up to while the days get warmer?


some things i'm reading this morning:
The Canadian Press: Birth control choices abound for women over 40; the pill, IUDs are safer

'compassion' replaces 'religion'

so, did anyone catch the Compassion Forum last week? (or was it over the weekend? this way too long primary cycle is giving me a hangover.)

how neat that this forum jibed perfectly with my complaint last week that our public political discourse is not being served by the constant introduction of 'faith' - or compassion, whatever. (remember when we all thought Shrub was a 'compassionate conservative'? we all should have learned a lesson from that but, clearly, we didn't.)

anyway, if you caught it and have thoughts about it, i'd love to hear about it.

[and, over here at A Moderate Voice, the writer asks why we even needed this lame forum.]

thank ye, marse!: more on black gratitude and the rev wright nonsense

Obsidian Wings: Where's The Gratitude?

an excellent post (via Bitch Ph.D.) in response to Pat Buchanan's totally frakked up commentary on how grateful black folk should be to white folk. (roll of eyes here)

what's cool about the post is that it doesn't deal with the 'grateful' issue but, rather, gives some rather pointed criticism of Buchanan's poor grasp of public policy and the history of so-called 'generosity' on the part of the government toward blacks.

you must read it. go. do it.
...
this rev. wright thing clearly has some long legs and i think it's been running for so long for several reasons:
1- white folks are still surprised at instances of black anger and black folks are frustrated that no one ever takes their anger seriously
2- it's always nice drama in this country to take down an 'uppity negro' like obama (and his supporters)
3 - this country still wraps itself in knots when it comes to discussing racial/ethnic difference because it still can't acknowledge that the ideological default in this country is still white and male (and straight, for that matter.)
4 - our public discourse has been permamently polluted by the discourse of 'values' and 'faith.'

this last thing is interesting to me (and the Obsidian Wings post touches on this briefly in one of the comments, I think.) i think we can all remember the advent of the Values Voter, that poll-skewing and election-swinging voter who, rather than keep the separation of church and state sort of firmly in place, decided to pretend his polling place was a church pew and made all sorts of decisions based on how closely a candidate seemed to hew to his/her own faith background and their willingness to let their faith inform public policy.

sensing a powerful new voting bloc, politicians scrambled to appease the Values Voter and pronouncements of christianity, faithfulness, prayer, kneeling and all sorts of pharisaical nonsense started to appear all over the place. every election cycle, our candidates went through a dumbshow of evangelism, of piety and visited every major evangelical pulpit in the country. no longer content to be crazy and whacked out behind their pulpits, mini-Dimmesdales were suddenly on every major cable news show to blather on about their faith-based revolution, out to change the culture and return this country to its god-fearing roots. they wanted us to go back, before the feminists, the humanists and the gays started mucking about with things. meanwhile, the rest of us wondered how the hell 'faith' became a litmus test for public service or a new language within public discourse.

(and, quite frankly, if the feminists, gays and humanists were really in charge of things, life would be a lot more fun, if you ask me.)

as a result of all this hollow talk 'faith' is a line item in our federal budget and a pastor's sermon has become a trial of a candidate's patriotism. see how neat that is? a private utterance in a church has far-reaching consequences for someone's public, national identity.

is anyone else totally frightened that the veil separating our private, religious thoughts and expressions from our public selves is beginning to disintegrate?

had a church com'tee last night
have a date tonight
have a tax appt and coaching appt tomorrow night
maybe another date the next night

churchgal has been busy.

but, in the meantime, how about reading an article on how superdelegates' kids are strong arming them to break for obama? (heh)

asshat: wal mart

Learn More about the Shank Family

Who are the Shanks?
They're the unfortunates whose wife and mother was hit by a truck, suffering brain damage and now living handicapped as a result. They're the family who won a modest settlement from the truck company who crashed into her. They're the family whose injured mother just began to earn health benefits from her employer, Wal Mart (can you tell where this is going?), a few days before the disastrous accident.

They're also the family Wal Mart successfully sued last year to recoup healthcare expenses by going after the settlement the family was going to use to provide long term care for their mother.

Is Wal Mart aware that, sometimes, it's important to NOT be perceived as EVIL?

a little busy

sorry posting has been so light.
work has been hectic and with all the cuts being proposed in the President's FY09 budget, organizations like mine have gone into super self-defense mode. So, while I haven't been writing here, I've been writing my arse off at work about the continued need to keep programs serving rape and assault victims in the budget.

but rest assured that i haven't stopped thinking about things over here and that there are connections in my brain being made about the recent Rev. Wright flap and how this crap never would have happened if politicians were actually serious about that little thing called 'the division between church and state.' (oh, and if the so-called Values coalition, two or three elections ago, hadn't exploited religious fervor in the first place as a substitute for political ideology.)

so, what have we learned?

Obama Tries to Shift Focus Away From Race but sees a drop in support, according to a poll mentioned in the Times.

What have we learned from the past few days? Well, that Americans are dumber than ever when it comes to talking about race or racial identity and that no one will ever say the words 'white privilege' on air.

Jesus. As long as Obama stayed imbued with the halo of his media-created 'magical negritude' then he was all right. But - as soon as he became associated with a less moderate point of view about America and America's treatment of communities of color, then he's militant and somehow unworthy of the candidacy.

(And HRC? All she has to do is sit back and watch it all happen.)

I spoke with someone about this today (a white woman that I respect a great deal) and she said that what disturbed her most about how this whole thing is playing out is how this is impacting speech. (And let's be clear about one thing - you might not like what Wright said but it's not hate speech.) Not only is this an instance of 'guilt by association,' something that would never seriously damage a white political figure, she said, 'If churches are where communities can safely vent their frustrations and troubles, then this means that those spaces are no longer safe.'

Here in Chicago, are we suddenly going to pore over the sermons by people like Rev. James Meeks or even Fr. Michael Pfleger at St. Sabina's if they say something critical of white supremacy?

Because that's what Wright was talking about: White supremacy. Not you, oh clueless, individual white person. Get over the interpersonal and intentional way of framing your discussions about race or racial justice. It's not about YOU, it's about the structure of white supremacy in this country. How many times do we have to say this before you frakking get it??

(Angry? Yeah, I'm angry. I'm always angry when I'm confronted with stupid.)

But, more importantly, we've learned that the much-ballyhooed 'post-racial' era in America is about as real as a jackalope.

(The president of the Chicago Urban League wrote a letter to the Editor here in the Chicago Defender about her reaction to the flap.)

my reactions to the obama reaction to the media's reaction to the wright reaction to...

Rather than spend my valuable time creating talking points for an upcoming lobbying campaign at work, I'll jot down some random questions in the wake of the speech Obama gave today (which were in reaction to the public reaction to some old Jeremiah Wright comments.)

Primarily, my questions are about mainstream (i.e., white) reaction to black anger and I'll try to keep my thoughts as succinct as possible. (Thoughts about the theology, or lack of theology, represented by Wright's remarks are outside of my skill set.)

Why is it, whether expressed in the way that Wright had done, in the comedy of Dave Chappell or the comic strips of Aaron MacGruder, that folks can't seem to understand where black socio-political anger comes from?

What and who is served by the public pressure for Obama (or any black person) to distance himself from the problematic comments like the ones Wright made (or even the ones made by Farrakhan)?

What fears are assuaged once this distancing has happened and, conversely, what fears are stoked when a black person refuses?

What allegiances are being sought through this kind of pressure?

Why must people of color perform this kind of white supremacy power dance when individual white people don't? (For instance, we have yet to see any kind of thorough, heavily wrought distancing from Hillary Clinton after Ferarro's avowedly pro-white comments were made.)

And why does the word 'minstrelsy' come to mind?