My new idol

The White House held its annual congressional picnic yesterday, and the star of the show was Sasha Obama for sinking chief of staff Rahm Emanuel in the dunking booth.

Yessss!

Hillary Clinton's 1995 speech on women's rights

text [and mp3]

NY Times article

I'll take door #3

Now, if door #1 had been a weekend in New York with Hillary...

Femi Nazis in Phoenix

So, if you're a grrrl, you can belong to the Phoenix Country Club, but you can't eat in the Mens grill room.

And if you complain about this, men will come to your house and pee on your landscaping.

Grandmother, may I?

go to war?

get up off the floor?

The trouble with a kitten is that

eventually it becomes a cat.

One of the good [not really good, I know] things to come out of Hillary Clinton's campaign for President is that an awful lot of people are having to wake up to the fact that misogyny is not dead, and we are not living in a post-feminist world.

Even better, some of the younger women, many of whom have been reluctant to listen to us old fogies from the second wave, have noticed that they don't have quite as much power as they thought they did and they're starting to make plans on what to do about that [h/t Molly Ivors].

Good for them.

Ticking time bomb

Dude thinks there's too many women doctors, recklessly dragging quality standards up, not to mention that at some point they might actually start outnumbering the men. I'm having some difficulty feeling sorry for him.

Also, I voted NO in the poll last night, and was gratified to find that I was voter number 666.



update, 4/9/2008--darn it, they changed the poll. they're no longer asking if there are too many women graduates in medicine.

The family that mushes together

wins Iditarods.

There are a lot of activities that purport to be fun for the whole family, but apparently running the Iditarod, arguably the Interspecies Ironman Of The Cold Frozen North, really is a family affair. Of the 96 mushers who started off this year [that's a record turnout] and in no particular order:

brothers
Lance Mackey, 1st place [as of this posting] Update: WINNER
Jason Mackey, 39th place
another brother and their dad have run the race too, though not this year

more brothers
Ramey Smyth, 3rd place
Cim Smyth, 15th place

more brothers and their dad
Louis Nelson Sr [dad], 31st
Robert Nelson, 44th
Darin Nelson, scratched

a kid, his dad, and his teacher
Martin Buser [dad], 5th
Rohn Buser [son], 33rd
Sue Allen [teacher], 69th

grandsons of the race's founder
Ray Redington Jr, 19th
Ryan Redington, scratched

married to each other
Jennifer Freking, 56th
Blake Freking, 55th
condolences on the loss of their dog Lorne

married, but not running together
Jim Lanier, 20th
Anna Bondarenko, not running this year

Update: As has ben pointed out in comments, I missed a couple.
another husband and wife, and she's waaaay ahead too
Aliy Zirkle, 21st place as of this writing
Allen Moore, 57th place

Speaking of blowing stuff up

graphic from Dark Wraith

I have to admit that it was a jolt to realize that I'm not especially worried about the lives of any of my favorite candidates. Worse yet is that even as Martin Luther King Day draws near, it hadn't occurred to me to actually remember King, or Medgar Evers, or Malcolm X.

Clinton and Obama both are at the bottom of my list of Democrats that I want for President, Hillary because she's Republican-lite on going to war and Obama because he's Republican-lite on economic policy.

Still, I'd be willing give up my hopes for single-payer health insurance or a populist champion for the little guy [me!] in exchange for the intangible but important social benefits to be gained from having our next President be a person of either the wrong sex or the wrong color.

One of the things I'd been wondering was which issue is more pressing, racism or sexism?

Where have all the women gone?

So, I discovered this while I was surfing late last night:

September 30, 2007, 9:54 am

To Readers: Online Politics Question

By Katharine Q. Seelye

Hi, readers.

I’m writing a small column item for Monday’s Caucus blog about why more men seemed to be involved in politics online than women. I wondered if you 1) agreed with that and 2) why or why not.

Short answers are best, by 6 p.m. today, if possible.

Just post your comments right here on the blog.

Many thanks,
Kit Seelye
Web Correspondent
The New York Times

She posts this at 10am and wants responses by 6pm. Well, the blogosphere is notable for immediacy, among other things, but honestly now, couldn't she have waited a few more hours? There really are people in this world who don't blog from work. Or am I the only dinosaur?

Several commenters posted late anyway [no, I'm not any of them] and more power to them I say.

In spite of my irritation with the short deadline and with the rampant sexism in the comments [even from some of the women!] I was looking forward to reading her article, expecting some insight or analysis, seeing as how she's a woman writing for the Politics section of the NYT.

Bah. Basically she just regurgitates the comments. If you've ever wondered if the MSM is stealing from you, fellow bloggers, the answer is Yes. At least Ms Seelye is openly letting the bloggers and commenters do the heavy lifting, and she provides some attribution.

Anyhoo, somewhere along the line, in the same vein, I ran across The Updated Pew News IQ Quiz in which I prove that I am smarter than both the men and the women. Or not. I thought the questions were ridiculously easy and the answers were ridiculously apparent. It could be that instead of being smarter than you, I just need to get a life.



Take the quiz yourself.

One thing I found interesting, the old folks got more right answers than the under-30 crowd [or even the under-50 crowd, for that matter] except for one question. You'll recognize it when you get there.

It's the shoes, isn't it?

Silly girl, what was she thinking?!

Manolo's Shoe blog [h/t]

Better not venture out into the deserts of the Southwestern US without boots.

"This isn't about fixing the women."

It's true. Men are assertive go-getters, women are pushy bitches.

Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".

We've been telling y'all this for years now. Get it through your thick skulls.

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

Echidne, bless her heart, tackles the Evil Psychos.

[oh, wait. that didn't come out quite right. or maybe it did.]

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4


Also, Echidne asks, in part 3, whether suicide bombers really are all single. I did a quick googling, but all I could come up with was this:

The early years of suicide terrorism were a simpler time, the officers explained. Suicide bombers were—at least in theory—easier to spot then. They tended to carry their bombs in nylon backpacks or duffel bags rather than in belts or vests concealed beneath their clothing, as they do now. They were also typically male, aged seventeen to twenty-three, and unmarried. Armed with these data, the authorities could simply deny work permits to Palestinians most likely to be suicide bombers, thus restricting their ability to cross the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 border) into Israel proper from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

Today, though, suicide bombers are middle-aged and young, married and unmarried, and some of them have children. Some of them, too, are women, and word has it that even children are being trained for martyrdom. "There is no clear profile anymore—not for terrorists and especially not for suicide bombers," an exasperated senior officer in the Israel Defense Forces told [the author] last year.

from:
The Atlantic Monthly | June 2003
The Logic of Suicide Terrorism
by Bruce Hoffman

I was going to post it as a comment over there, but haloscan is being unfriendly. I'll try again later.

infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality and orgiastic sex

And here you were all thinking it's money that's the root of all evil.

Things are really bad when the only adult in the room

is a 16-year-old child.

She's sixteen years old. She's made it through tenth grade. She has no job, has never had one. She lives with her mom and brother. No dad, he died. This brother has already fathered a child and his mom is raising it, her grandchild, for him.

If she were to stand up before you right now and say I want to have children someday, but not just yet, you would praise her for her wisdom, her intelligence, her maturity, her sense of responsibility.

Here's the kicker: she's already pregnant.

She wants to get an abortion. She lives in a state that requires minors to notify their parents before getting an abortion. For whatever reason, she feels like she cannot do this and has petitioned the court for "judicial bypass," the process where a minor can go before a judge and get special permission to get an abortion without notifying her parents.

The lower court has ruled that she's too immature to make this decision on her own. She appealed that ruling, and the next higher court has also ruled that she's too immature to make this decision on her own.

Right.


There's a lot not to like about this whole case, and I had planned to tell you in detail what I think of the court's decision, but I'm just too angry right now. Maybe later.

Holy simoleons, Batman!

In addition to the original complains Conney had against the school, it was discovered during court proceedings that her UCLA department had a secret reserve of money that they used to supplement the salaries of male faculty members only.

--------------

“Because women are taking advantage of educational opportunities in record numbers, there is a myth out there that higher education is a place where women have achieved equity,” [AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund Interim Director Lisa] Maatz said. “Janet’s case, and many others, shows that simply having large numbers of women on campus does not protect them from discrimination in academia or the workplace.”

I found the above while browsing in Twisty's new forum. I'd link it, but if you don't already know which forum I'm talking about, you're not a CrunchyRadFemAdvancedPatriarchyBlamer, and maybe you shouldn't go there.

AutoAdmit update.

here

Life lesson for some of you: hate speech is not free speech and not all of your victims are going to meekly disappear into the woodwork.

Another Modest Proposal

You might as well start here with Mark Purdy's opinion piece on jock culture. I did, having been a bit of a jock myself [and nerd and geek and dork] all through school, and for some years after. One of my [many] soapboxes is Organization Is Evil, so I'll step down off of that one for the moment and just agree that jock culture needs an overhaul. Call this Plank One in my proposal.


If you've already clicked on the link, you noticed there's a list on the right hand side of the page of Related Stories, and that they're all about the De Anza rape case. I've read several of those, including this one, where the prosecuter explains one of the reasons for not going forward with the case:

Is it sexual assault when a victim is too intoxicated to consent to sex? Yes, but we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim was so impaired that she could not understand what she was doing. We must also prove that the defendant should have known that she was incapable of consenting.

Well, heck, if you've got to prove all that, no wonder we can't get anywhere. So, for Plank Two, I propose we use Twisty's definition of consent [it's a good one]:

Well, what if lack of consent were the default? What if all prospective objects of dudely predation — by whom I mean all women — are a priori considered to have said “no”? What if women, in other words, were seen by the courts to abide in a persistent legal condition of keep-the-fuck-off-me?

Last one, Plank Three: What if we remove sex from the equation, dispose of the word rape altogether [and the phrase "sexual assault"], lump everything under one label? From Wikipedia:

Assault is often defined to include not only violence, but any physical contact with another person without their consent.

Don't use your penis, your fist, your baseball bat, your stun gun, your hairbrush, your [insert favorite object here] to make physical contact with someone without their consent. Don't reach out lovingly towards that pregnant belly, and don't admiringly stroke those manly biceps. Not unless their owner says so. Explicitly and enthusiastically.

Carnival!

The First Carnival of Radical Feminists

via Dr Violet Socks