Senator Ensign, someone's here to see your career....
What is it with these guys? Are they holding out a few extra weeks so they can earn their pension or something?
Burris won't get one, you have to serve five years in Congress, minimum.
After watching Rachel Maddow last night*, I blame brainwashing. More on this book, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" here. It really explains the entire right wing Christianist power structure, especially Bush and his feeling of being God's chosen, in the creepiest way possible.
PS if Rachel Maddow ever endorses anything I do the way she did this book, the grim reaper can just come take me away to Jeebus, Hallelujah, The End.
*For those of you following me on Twitter and thus familiar with my favorite euphemism for sexytime, in this instance I was actually watching Rachel Maddow, not hiking the old Appalachian Trail or crossing the ultimate line. Just sayin'...
It's not that I'm nervous about going, not in the least. I'm meeting up with the Evil Slut Clique, after all, and who could wait for that kind of excitement?
The thing is, this is a conference for women bloggers. And while woman and blogger (and mother and knitter and homeowner and Democrat etc. etc.) are all words that describe me...
I have never allowed "woman blogger" to define me. And I don't expect anyone at Blogher wants to do that, least of all the organizers, who seem cool and very well organized and eager to make newbies like myself feel welcome and free to express whatever they feel about the conference and get the most out of it. There are technical forums, at least one truly political forum (on Sarah Palin, which should be a riot) and enough to keep me thinking and writing for the rest of the summer, at least.
What makes me a little nervous is, this:
There are at least fifty-five corporate sponsors at this convention. At the lower level of the Sheraton Chicago, I can test drive a Chevy. Pepsi, McDonalds, Hanes, Microsoft, all have booths. Estee Lauder wants to give me free wrinkle cream. Also, um, Tim Gunn wants to know what I'm wearing to the conference. So he can wash it in Tide (tm)? But Tim! The "My Marxist Feminist Dialectic Brings All The Boys to the Yard" baseball shirt is already clean!
Conferences like this have to be paid for. Should the glee with which this particular conference has turned "blogging plus women" into outreach to a million woman free-stuff stuff! STUFF! marketing venue for us female internet entrepreneurs have me worried? I mean, marketers have always been such supporters of women's independence:
I'm not trying to be a troublemaker, but seriously, if someone at the WalMart booth decides to offer me free wrinkle cream, I might hafta...um...videotape the encounter for my blog.
An angry commenter at the big blog, deeply offended that I would insinuate anything about the sanity of one Christopher Hitchens, accused me of being...
...an "admitted theist."
So true. Now I'm waiting for someone to come after me for being a "thespian," which I'm not, unless you count that one time in senior high.
If you use Blogspot to blog, post images to your blog, and you log in with your Google account, I discovered something cool this past weekend that might help you. Try this:
1. Log in to your blog.
2. Go to the Google main webpage. Make sure you are logged into google as your blogger name (the gmail address will appear at the top right)
3. At the top left, click 'more', 'photos'.
4. You should see, or be able to login/create, a Picasa web album showing every image you've posted to your blog. For those of you who photoshop regularly, this can be a great archival tool. Picasa lumps the images into folders of 500 each.
I hope you find that as helpful as I did. OMG the panties of my past....
Cynthia Tucker with a little George Will on the side, says what needs to be said regarding Sarah Palin and the public stage. But there's an important subtext in this discussion that is being overlooked.
They are talking about Sarah Palin as a politician. Because that is what she is.
Of course she and a lot of other politicians resist that label, no more politics as usual, those politicians in Washington, you betcha, they are the problem. And yet, Sarah Palin's occupation, at least through the next three weeks or so, is politician. It's a dirty word, akin to used car salesman and prostitute, but the nation perishes that thinks themselves above electing politicians to public office.
You see that in the swearing in today of Al Franken, who also swears he's not going to be funny anymore. I'd like to start an ActBlue fund where we the citizens pay Al Franken five bucks for every joke he gets off on the Senate floor, and twenty bucks for every joke during the Sotomayor hearings. C'mon Al.
But no. He's got a new job. His occupation is now US Senator, and Harry Reid doesn't think fart jokes are funny.
I just listened to Franken take the oath of office, and I suspect Sarah Palin held a Bible and said "faithfully execute" just as he did. Ironic that the comedian seems to take it, um, seriously.
There are good politicians and bad and certainly these days the whole lot of them have a verifiable "corporate soft money whore" label attached to them. It's becoming more and more undeniable every day that Congress represents moneyed interests more than it does their constituents, all of Franken's talk about serving Minnesotans aside. It's going to get a whole lot worse before public financing and real reform happen. I doubt I'll see such in my lifetime, frankly.
But you work with the political system you've got, and it's made up of politicians. The job description of politician, Sarah Palin has taught us by her lack of example, includes basic knowledge of law and history and geography and English diction. It's not sexism to require those qualities in a woman politician, or racism to require them of a Black politician, or elitism to require them of a working-class politician. Those are occupational requirements, just as understanding allergies and blood type is required of a doctor, regardless of gender, race, or background.
But she resists. Palin rails against politicians and "business as usual in Washington" and her followers eat it up.
The thing is? So do we on the Left.
___________________
Leftists are waking up to the fact that our President is also a politician. Obama seems committed to maintaining his own power in Washington, at the expense of trailblazing the path towards single payer gay military peace-time weddings for all. I'm not denigrating the goals of the Left by putting it that way. Whether we like it or not, Obama sees the path to reaching any policy goal requires that he maintain political power. The power comes first, then the victory. We Lefties hate that, because we always put being on the right side of an issue higher than getting anywhere toward our political goals.
A fellow blogger had a fit last night via email, because that blogger heard a rumor that possibly abortions would not be covered under the Public Option. I. Just. Winced. All. The. Way. To. Bed. We don't HAVE a public option yet. It's not a sure thing. We have to wait for the insurance companies to fail before single payer is maybe possibly back on the table, but let's pour a heaping cup of the most divisive issue of the past fifty years into the pot right now, because it's so very critical.
Hey Lefty Bloggers, let's stroll over to the Rose Garden, interrupt this conversation below, and ask these two people if they think compromise is for sissies:
Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton watch as President Barack Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak (not pictured) speak at a press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House, June 16, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
Hillary Clinton understood far better than some of her supporters just how tough her opposition would be. The Clintonites still fighting the primary battles insult her and her chosen career with every blog post.
Those waking up from Obama worship need transition time to find their sea-legs with this President. He's a politician. It surprises me not at all that Obama is not rolling back Presidential executive power. Why would he? Unless Bush or at least Alberto Gonzales goes to jail, unless some miracle happens and the public begins to realize that The United States of America is governed by this:
rather than a bunch of politicians....
We may hear pretty speeches on national holidays and campaign trails along those lines, but face it, no politician is ever going to vote for that. That's not in their job description.
Wolfrum (genius): GodWink’s Law: As other stories capture the public interest, the probability of Sarah Palin thrusting herself into the news approaches 1.
If she had come forward to say her special needs child had grown into a toddler, and she was going to spend the next four years doing whatever she could including sacrificing her own promising career, to help him develop verbal language and age-appropriate social skills...
...If she had come forward to say that the toll of publicity was damaging her marriage and her relationship with her family, and she was sacrificing her personal ambition for the sake of her family...
...If she had come forward and said that her Presidential ambitions were interfering with her duties (they never do that) and she was sacrificing THIS job for a better one, and moving to, oh, Iowa.
...but I didn't hear anything about sacrificing, did you?
I heard self-congratulation, followed by a total lack of logic, infused with nervous embarrassment. The timing? After lunch on Friday, July 3? Positively Nixonian.
Maybe she just gave up. I've said it before, there's a bright future for her on the mega-church lecture circuit, and FOX will give her her own show tonight if she wants that, also too.
She'll land on her feet red high heels, you betcha.
Here's the deal: anytime anyone brings up an argument against the public option, we should treat that argument as a direct attack on Medicare.
By 2050, 21% of the American public will have a "public option" in the form of this over-65 health care coverage. People who argue against a public option need to defend their position based on the public option so many Americans already have, and are violently opposed to losing.
By the way, at least half of the babies born in West Virginia, for instance, are born while on Medicaid, another "public option." The insurance/pharma concerns are sponsoring plain folks ads arguing for "affordable coverage for every American" without a public option. While I sit here and laugh, please-- I'd like to know what Blue Cross, the other big insurers, and Congress think a West Virginian single pregnant woman can "afford." Blue Cross thought I could afford over $900 a month for me and three kids. And three insurance companies rejected me for pre-existing conditions when I attempted to enter the "competitive" market and reduce my costs.
And shut the fuck up about how we'll pay for it. Costs will be reduced dramatically if we ban pharmaceutical advertising and reform executive compensation. Doctors and insurance company executives, bankers and investment analysts, can make 25 times what entry-level employees do. And CEOS can make 50 times what entry level employees do. NOT 821 TIMES.
In 2005, an average Chief Executive Officer (CEO) was paid 821 times as much as a minimum wage earner, who earns just $5.15 per hour. An average CEO earns more before lunchtime on the very first day of work in the year than a minimum wage worker earns all year.
Socialism? Populism? It's like the unregulated capitalism of the nineteenth century. It's like the unregulated capitalism of the 1920's. Once again, over and over, the ownership class is asking for a backlash from the average working person.
The public option in health care is just the beginning, and the corporate health care lobby knows it. They've milked the public by providing at highest possible cost and lowest possible payout, a product most people feel they MUST have. They have priced themselves out of the market unless they can use political corruption to buy Congress and the White House. My brain hurts.
July 16th is the birthday of both Blue Gal and her sainted mother. And for some possibly astrological reason, (are Cancers especially creative or is it our strong parenting instinct which keeps us feeding these babies?) lots and lots of bloggers celebrate birthdays this month.
TODAY is the seventh birthday of my lovely, lovely middle child. So pretty and so smart and such an artist and such a blessing. I love you, sweetheart. Here she is a couple years ago, showing we Cancerian women are all that. I vote her my child most likely to knit AND blog, which should tell you something:
If you know of any other blogger July birthdays, let us know in comments. And happy birthday.
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