What do you do with yourself when you're incandescently angry about and/or frustrated by something over which you have no immediate control?
The Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by broccoli.
Recommended Reading:
Amarie: [Content Note: Misogynoir; tone policing; gaslighting] My Fraught Relationship with the Adjective "Sweet"
Anne: You Are Here
Chelsea: [CN: Transphobia; carcerality] Prison Keeps Us Isolated, But Sometimes, Sisterhood Can Bring Us Together
Keith: [CN: Racism; classism; gentrification] The Rent in the New Cabrini Green Complex Is Ridiculous
Veronica: Beyond Balance: Work, Family, Life in 2016 in Chicago
Susie: Flint Mayor, Residents Thank Hillary for Efforts on Water Crisis
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
Welp
[Content Note: Bigotry.]
It's pretty terrific (ahem) how members of the media are suddenly interested in talking about how dangerous Donald Trump is now that he's won something.
Now he's not the hilarious entertainment with which they've been delighting themselves for months, but a potential president whose wretched policies might personally affect them.
You know, some of us have been pointing out that Trump is dangerous for months.
Because his rhetoric of bigotry is harmful, whether he wins an election or just stands in front of a microphone.
Of course, that didn't much matter to the privileged gatekeepers of the media who aren't the targets of his identity-based obscenity.
It should have.
And maybe if it had, he wouldn't have just won a primary with 35% of the vote.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
After failing to impress voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is reportedly considering suspending his presidential campaign. Seeya.
[Content Note: Disablism; mental illness stigma; violation of workers' and students' rights] I don't even know where to begin with the clusterfuck going on at Mount St. Mary's: Basically, the new president decided he wanted to address the school's retention problem by targeting students who were at risk for dropping out, and instructed professors to flag students using questions from a mental health diagnostic survey. And then, when professors pushed back, they were shitcanned. What the everloving hell.
[CN: Police brutality; racism] Good grief: The Ferguson, Missouri, City Council voted Tuesday night "to rebuff a proposed agreement to reform its police department and court. The city proclaimed that the decision amounted to approving a consent decree that it had spent months negotiating with the department, arguing that seven suggested changes were among hundreds of requirements to which the city had agreed. But one of the proposed amendments would wipe out much of the decree in the event Ferguson disbanded its police force." Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is not happy: "The Ferguson City Council has attempted to unilaterally amend the negotiated agreement. Their vote to do so creates an unnecessary delay in the essential work to bring constitutional policing to the city, and marks an unfortunate outcome for concerned community members and Ferguson police officers. ...The Department of Justice will take the necessary legal actions to ensure that Ferguson's policing and court practices comply with the Constitution and relevant federal laws."
[CN: War on agency] At the Guttmacher Institute, Heather D. Boonstra details how anti-choicers alarmism about fetal tissue research "now threatens fetal tissue research itself," which is very concerning given that "medical research using human fetal tissue obtained from abortions has benefited millions of people worldwide and holds great promise for the continued advancement of basic science, as well as for the development of lifesaving vaccines and therapies."
This is amazing: "The Trust Black Women Partnership (TBW), a collective of Black women-led organizations and advocates, released a solidarity statement with Black Lives Matter (BLM) on Tuesday, reaffirming the shared roots of struggles for Black self-determination and bodily autonomy. The statement comes as movements to end state violence and secure reproductive justice continue to converge around the country. 'The Reproductive Justice movement, created in 1994, the Trust Black Women Partnership, created in 2010, and the Black Lives Matter movement, created in 2012, were created because the lives of Black people were in peril,' the statement reads. 'All were born out of a demand for the…liberation of Black people in this country. And all were born because of the leadership of Black women.' ...'Reproductive justice is very much situated within the Black Lives Matter movement,' [BLM co-founder Alicia Garza] said. 'This isn't just about the rights of women to be able to determine when and how and where to start families, but also our right to raise families, to raise children to become adults.'"
[CN: Homophobia] Goddammit: "South Dakota lawmakers have launched a full-blown attack on LGBT rights, passing two pieces of legislation this week that would do irreparable harm to the state's LGBT community. If signed into law, these two bills would legalize discrimination against LGBT citizens and ban transgender students from participating in high school athletics in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity."
[CN: Privacy violations] Um, what? "The US intelligence chief has acknowledged for the first time that agencies might use a new generation of smart household devices to increase their surveillance capabilities. ...James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, was more direct in testimony submitted to the Senate on Tuesday as part of an assessment of threats facing the United States. 'In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things, e.g. remotely operated thermostats] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,' Clapper said. Clapper did not specifically name any intelligence agency as involved in household-device surveillance. But security experts examining the internet of things take as a given that the US and other surveillance services will intercept the signals the newly networked devices emit, much as they do with those from cellphones." Terrific.
[CN: Racism] Another aspect of institutional racism within our justice [sic] system: "The rulings of Black judges are 10 percent more likely to be overturned than those of their white counterparts. ...Reversals are anything but inconsequential. They force judges to revisit old cases, while their everyday caseload keeps on filling the docket. Then, of course, there's the reputation hit—good luck getting promoted with an armful of overturned verdicts. Maybe that explains why there are so few dark-skinned arbiters on the appeals bench."
Donald Trump says he would easily beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. Okay, player.
"Aaron Sorkin Is Bringing To Kill a Mockingbird to Broadway." Nope!
And finally! "This Cat in a Cone Is Having a Fucking Awful Day." LOL awwwwww.
Daily Dose of Cute
Olivia Twist enjoys having her back scratched. A lot.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
The Media's Favorite Game
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
Virtually every day, I document some example of misogyny used against Hillary Clinton. And virtually every day, I encounter numerous people who assert that there is no misogyny used against Hillary Clinton.
That the demonstrable fact Clinton is subject to misogyny is considered "debatable" absolutely enrages me.
There is, of course, all the constant dribbling detritus of a patriarchal culture, to which any woman is subjected by any old person. The obvious misogyny of slurs. Bitch. Cunt. Whore. The more insidious misogyny of language that means something different, something specific, when it's used against a woman. Entitled. Narcissistic. Untrustworthy. Loud. The policing of her appearance, her clothes, her hair, her voice, her tone, her likeability, her emotions, her sexuality, her mothering, her wifeliness, her "murderous cackle," her very womanhood.
There are the Remember Your Place photos, the misogynistic photoshops, the memes, the Hillary Clinton nutcracker.
This demeaning garbage can be found all over the place, all the time. The more hateful and belittling it is, the more quickly it proliferates, shared across platforms for people to laugh at; to satisfy their deep detestation of a woman, of women—to use it to try to "prove" something about Hillary Clinton.
No one loves this game more than the US media. They love to endlessly discuss her "likability," while running segments about how unlikable "some people" find her to be. They love that "some people" construction, which gives them a (laughable) measure of distance from calling her a cold bitch themselves. They depict her with devil horns and portray her as a towering man-crushing monster. They say that she "must be stopped," like she is a plague or, perhaps, Godzilla. They pit her against other women, and imply it says something profound and nefarious about her, if women fail to support her. They dismiss and demean defenders who call out misogyny, accuse them—and Clinton—of twisting words, of being oversensitive, of playing the gender card.
There is no more damning evidence of the unfathomable scope of misogyny to which Hillary Clinton is subjected than the fact that the US media's favorite game is trying to destroy her.
Lest you imagine that is hyperbole, here's a little stroll down memory lane: In 2008, Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy following an enormous number of pieces in the media about how she must run and end our long national nightmare of Republican governance. And, while she was at it, make history as the first female president. Right after she announced, then came the articles about how she felt entitled to the presidency, that she expected to be "coronated," that she was part of a dynasty and needed to GTFO.
Within months, there was so much pressure for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the Democratic Primary, even when she still had a decent chance of winning the nomination, that I started cataloging the public admonishments for her to go away in a series called Take Your Boobs and Go Home Watch.
Then, beginning literally immediately after President Obama's reelection in 2012, there began the pressure campaign for Hillary Clinton to run in 2016. By January of 2013, the media's pressure campaign was already so intense that President Obama was prompted to say, during a joint interview with Clinton: "You know, Steve, I gotta tell you, the—you guys in the press are incorrigible. I was literally inaugurated [looks at watch] four days ago. And you're talking about elections four years from now."
By 2013, fully three years before this election, the media was still pressuring Clinton to run, but that pressure had taken on an edge. Clinton was a liar for claiming she hadn't made up her mind about whether to run, and she was a bitch if she chose not to run. Stories were run quoting anonymous Democratic operatives who said stuff like this: "'We would be at sea in a lifeboat with no food, no water, and no land in sight,' said one veteran Democratic operative who has worked on presidential campaigns, and who, like most people interviewed for this story, asked for anonymity to speak candidly about the former first lady. 'There is no Plan B.' It would be, the operative said, a 'gut punch' to the Democratic party."
By the end of the year, the media was simultaneously telling Clinton she had to run and that she should not run. And by January 2014, Time was asking: "Can Anyone Stop Hillary?"
But they didn't really want her stopped. They wanted her run, and to run quickly. So we got pieces saying she had a moral obligation to run, and that she should "stop dithering." There were pieces about how she was hurting the Democrats by not announcing sooner. The pressure mounted.
Because unless and until Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president again, the game to destroy her couldn't begin.
There was never a happier day for the US media than when Clinton finally announced that she was running. On that very day, the game of destruction begun, as fingers started to fly, composing stories about how she views herself as "inevitable," and how that dishonest bitch knew she was going to run all along but delayed her announcement to screw over other potential candidates. To screw over all the menfolk who wanted to run for the nation's highest office and assume arguably the most influential position on the entire planet, but couldn't make their way down the path because of the gargantuan monster-woman blocking it.
And ever since, it's been wall-to-wall misogynist shit. Even when she wins, she can't fucking win, and the media barely bothered to mention that she was the first female presidential candidate ever to win the Iowa Caucus, because they were too busy discussing all the ways in which Clinton winning Iowa was somehow actually a loss.
Now, they are salivating that she's lost New Hampshire, even though they know as well as I do that winning New Hampshire isn't a reliable indicator of who will be the eventual nominee.
Because they don't actually care about the Democratic primary. They care about destroying Hillary Clinton.
They have spent decades, since the time she was First Lady, building her up and pressuring her to take on increasingly prominent public challenges, only to immediately turn on her and unleash breathtaking misogyny against her when she steps up to the plate.
There is a sickness across our culture in which many people love watching people succeed and then love even more watching them fall. But there is a particular game the media plays with Clinton—begging her to run, cajoling her to run, telling her it is her duty to run—only to then do everything they can to defeat her.
They call her to the stage just to throw tomatoes. Over and over and over.
I don't imagine for a moment that Clinton has made her decision to run for president, twice, on the implorations of a media that she knows hates the fuck out of her. But it is cruel all the same.
And it is painful for me to watch. I hate it so desperately.
I hate that they do it, and I hate that they deny that they do it, and I hate that those of us who see it are gaslighted by despicable dirtbags who revel in the opportunity to humiliate a woman on such a grand and visible scale.
Who actively seek to destroy her, and then write narratives about how she feels "entitled."
I daresay no one is more keenly aware that Hillary Clinton is not entitled to the presidency than Hillary Clinton.
She of the reputed galactic ego, who continues to petition for an opportunity to serve a country that is filled with people who hate her.
Hundreds of Galaxies and Billions of Stars
An artist's rendering of the galaxies hiding beyond the veil of the Milky Way. (ICRAR)
This is incredible: "Hundreds of Galaxies Were Found Hiding Behind Our Milky Way."
Using radio telescopes to peer through the dense plane of the Milky Way, researchers have spotted huge galactic gatherings that have long been obscured from view. These galaxies lie a mere 250 million light-years away—and they will only get closer, because they appear to be pulling us towards them at breakneck speed.Sometimes, when god-believers find out I'm atheist, they ask me a question like, "Don't you want or need to feel like there's something bigger than you?" or "Don't you sense that there's something bigger out there?"
Scientists had suspected that galaxies existed in this region, says study co-author Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. But seeing them with traditional telescopes presents a challenge.
"It was not really not that surprising, because the stars and dust in our own Milky Way block a not insignificant part of the sky from our view, in optical light that is," she says. "So yes, we did expect that many galaxies would be lying behind the plane of the Milky Way, or the so-called Zone of Avoidance. However, we did not know anything about their distribution in space."
...The effort identified 883 total galaxies, 240 of which hadn't been seen before, the team reports this week in the Astronomical Journal.
This galactic cornucopia represents a huge amount of mass, which makes the team suspect that the objects play a role in the intergalactic draw of a strange region called the Great Attractor.
...The authors suggest that the previously unseen galaxies may help explain where a lot of that mysterious mass comes from—hundreds of galaxies, each containing perhaps 100 billion stars, can exert a lot of pull.
"It seems that the Great Attractor consists of many galaxies and clusters of galaxies lying in a very large region of space," says Lister Staveley-Smith of the University of Western Australia. "Just why such a large overdensity of galaxies lies in that region is a mystery, although cosmological theory does seem to confirm that, occasionally, such large mass concentrations should occur."
The mystery isn't entirely solved, notes Kraan-Korteweg, but her team thinks they are on to something.
"Further follow-up studies are still required to quantify the mass that these galaxies seem to trace and see if this is in full agreement with what the Great Attractor suggested. But we are a major step closer in this endeavor."
I personally don't need a deity to experience the feeling of something bigger. I look at images and stories like these and I feel impossibly, wondrously tiny.
New Hampshire Primary Wrap-Up
[Content Note: Islamophobia; misogyny.]
Congratulations to Senator Bernie Sanders, who not only decisively won the New Hampshire primary last night, but also made history by becoming the first Jewish (and first non-Christian) candidate to win a presidential primary!
The nomination race is, however, far from over, and suggestions to the contrary are premature. The last two presidents, Barack Obama and George Bush, won Iowa and lost New Hampshire. That doesn't mean it will go that way this time, but it does mean that winning New Hampshire isn't a reliable indicator of who will be the eventual nominee.
The Democratic candidates now head to Nevada for a caucus on February 20, and then to South Carolina for a primary on February 27. South Carolina in particular matters, because it is the first state on the schedule that isn't disproportionately white.
To be clear, I'm not making that point to delegitimize Sanders' win. I genuinely care, no matter who wins, that the Democrats' selection process starts in two very white states. Clinton won one; Sanders won one. And anyone who's been hanging around here for awhile will know I'm continually pissed that we can't have a rotating primary schedule or single-day mega-primary. It's not about who won. It's about who has gotten to vote.
Anyway.
Congrats to Sanders on his historic win!
And while Democrats were busily handing the win to a Jewish candidate, Republicans were busily handing the win to a rank Islamophobic shitlord.
Donald Trump, whose Islamophobia is only the tip of his bigotry iceberg, handily won the Republican contest last night, taking around 35% of the final tally. Ohio Governor John Kasich took second, with 16%. Of course Kasich came in second—because the story of this GOP primary has been: Trump! Oh no! Let's flirt with this dude! Oh crap he's a garbage nightmare! Shit! Let's flirt with this other dude! So it's Kasich's turn in the sunshine until they find out that he, too, is a horror show.
Spoiler Alert, Republican voters: THEY'RE ALL TERRIBLE.
You know your party is terrific when people not knowing shit about your candidates is apparently their biggest asset. I'm finally on to your brilliant long game, Jim Gilmore.
And finally! It wouldn't be 2016 presidential campaign coverage without some instance of misogyny being levied at Hillary Clinton. I'm sure there were many last night, as every night, but this one just about did my head in.
So, during her concession speech, Hillary Clinton said this:
When people anywhere in America are held back by injustice, that demands action. That is why I believe so strongly that we have to keep up with every fiber of being the argument for, the campaign for, human rights. Human rights as women's rights, human rights as gay rights, human rights as worker rights, human rights as voting rights, human rights across the board for every single American! [huge cheers and applause]Cut back to CNN, where I was watching her address, and the talking heads immediately start castigating Clinton for using the word "I" too much in her speeches, while Bernie Sanders uses "we." Because he cares about other people, and isn't a voracious narcissist monster like she is.
I may be paraphrasing. But not by much.
You've really got to be operating from an agenda of straight-up hatred to listen to a candidate say the words quoted above and then immediately accuse her of insufficient concern for other people. Especially when that "human rights as X rights" has been an iconic hallmark of her speechmaking for two decades.
Further, as Ana Mardoll has repeatedly pointed out, women tend to be socialized to use "I" statements, as well as use qualifiers like "I think" and "I believe."
And then there is this: Clinton is obliged to prove her credentials and competency over and over, in a way that Sanders is not. It's taken as read that he is capable of being president, which allows him to skip the "I can" and "I have" and go right to "We will."
This shit is exhausting.
In summation: Donald Trump is horrendous, and he must never be allowed anywhere near the US presidency. I have a preference between Clinton and Sanders, but either one of them is preferable to Donald Trump by a margin incomprehensible to mortal comprehension.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Lady Blanchester: "What was your most memorable personal growth moment and why was it important to you?"
[Content Note: Fat hatred.] The first one that comes to mind is: About 15 years ago, I was sitting on the beach at Lake Michigan with a thin woman I didn't know very well. I was feeling particularly self-conscious, and I was indescribably hot, being a fat woman at the beach on a blazing summer day wearing too many clothes so as not to offend with my fat body.
I made a shitty, judgmental comment about a couple of fat women in the distance who were wearing bikinis. I didn't even believe what I was saying: I was envious of them. But I had learned that the only way to make myself acceptable to most thin women was to express hatred at fat women even more explicitly than they did. It was a survival mechanism, but a goddamn nasty one.
Instead of the congratulatory laughter I'd usually (always) have gotten, my companion just shrugged and said, "I think anyone should wear whatever they want to wear." She didn't even say it in a way that judged me for being a jerk. She just said it so matter-of-factly.
I was deeply embarrassed, but I was also profoundly moved by her decency. And I realized that I agreed. I, too, thought that anyone should wear whatever they want to wear. But I'd never had the luxury of expressing it, without implicitly defending myself.
I still don't, really. But in that moment, I decided I never again wanted to be a person who chose judgment, and participation in my own oppression out of fear, over acceptance and courage.
For the Record
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
Since this is apparently not evident to a number of Bernie Sanders supporters, let me go ahead and just say it plainly: When your misogynist garbage attacks on Hillary Clinton are removed from comments here, that is not an invitation to email them to me.
If you can't talk about Hillary Clinton without engaging in misogyny, I don't give a fuck what you have to say.
Here, there, anywhere.
Please see also: One and Two.
Whoooooooooops!
"Fox News accidentally reports Donald Trump as the winner in New Hampshire."
Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary Tuesday — according to a premature Fox News report.I don't know what the big deal is. It's as accurate as anything else they report.
Citing every precinct reporting, Fox News' website accidentally published election results declaring Trump the winner with 28 percent support and 14 delegates.
"During routine testing in preparation for the New Hampshire primary a malfunction occurred which briefly showed errant data on our website," Fox News Chief Digital Officer Jeff Misenti said in a statement. "This error has been rectified. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused."
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Flint water crisis.]
"As I've said for some time, to try to capture in words the tragedy of what occurred in Flint, it's almost beyond description."—Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, as investigators said today that the "state of Michigan's inquiry into the Flint water crisis will consider any potential criminal conduct, including involuntary manslaughter."
I honestly don't know what meaningful justice would look like in this situation, short of building a time machine and going back in time and preventing this unfathomable fuckery from being committed against the people of Flint in the first place.
Discussion Thread: Life Hacks
We haven't had a Life Hacks thread in a long time, so here's a thread to share all the little tips and tricks you've got for making life easier.
I'll share an old favorite of mine: If you ever get a food stain on a shirt that's oil-based and won't come out, treat it with some dish soap before running it through the wash. Even if it's already been washed and dried, using dish soap, which is formulated to break up oil and grease, will almost always do the trick!
Being a lady with a prominent boob rack and a penchant for clutziness, I cannot tell you how many times this has saved my shirts, lol.
Daily Dose of Cute
"What? I fit perfectly here!"
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: Misogyny] Here are some cool headlines about Hillary Clinton today, from the BBC and the LA Times:
"Female trouble." Like, you know, having your period. It's also pretty cool how Clinton's "armored persona" is her "weak spot," unlike Bernie Sanders who hasn't been subjected to four decades of Can't Fucking Win misogyny and thus gets to be Mr. Cool Cat.
[CN: Misogynist slur] Meanwhile, we've got the Republican frontrunner using a misogynist slur against one of his male competitors: "Donald Trump faux-admonished and then repeated a woman who called Ted Cruz a 'pussy' at a rally [in New Hampshire] on Monday night. Trump was criticizing Cruz for, in his view, failing to offer unequivocal support for waterboarding in the debate on Saturday night. Trump then interrupted what he was saying to point out what a woman in the crowd had shouted. 'She just said a terrible thing,' Trump said. 'You know what she said? Shout it out because I don't want to—OK, you're not allowed to say, and I never expect to hear that from you again. She said—I never expect to hear that from you again!—she said he's a pussy. That's terrible. Terrible,' Trump said, throwing up his hands. ...A few people near BuzzFeed News at the event started chanting, 'Pussy! Pussy!' after Trump said this."
Oh, President Obama, how I will miss you: "In a wide-ranging conversation on Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama opened up to 'CBS This Morning' co-host Gayle King in the Oval Office to discuss his final months on the job. He reflected on memorable visitors, shared charms that he rotates in his pockets, discussed how the presidency changed him, and what stresses him out when it comes to the future. ...But the president is also known to love babies. 'I love getting on the ground with babies in the Oval Office. And they're unrestrained so they will run around. They will take out all the apples out of the bowl and set them in various places and then put them back and, they're out of control,' Mr. Obama said."
[CN: Anti-choice terrorism] The bravest people: "The Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs where a shooter killed three people in November will reopen February 15. The accused shooter, Robert Lewis Dear Jr., said he 'picked Planned Parenthood because it's murdering little babies,' an apparent reference to a series of attack videos released last year by an anti-choice front group known as the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). Dear awaits trial on 179 charges, including first-degree murder. 'We are in awe of our healing and resilient colleagues in Colorado Springs,' Vicki Cowart, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said in a statement. 'They are eager to get back to the mission they so deeply care about and the people they so compassionately care for. We welcome our team and our community back into the space with open arms and full hearts.'"
[CN: Prosecutorial misconduct; racism] Good: "A Texas legal disciplinary board upheld a decision to disbar a prosecutor who oversaw a case that sent an innocent man to death row. The board on Monday affirmed an earlier decision that found Charles Sebesta extracted false confessions and withheld testimony to convict Anthony Graves, who spent 18 years in prison before he was exonerated. The Texas supreme court-appointed board of disciplinary appeals said Sebesta's behavior in the case was 'egregious.' ...There was no physical evidence linking Graves to the murders. The prosecutor's case instead relied on a string of prosecutorial misdeeds. Sebesta presented false testimony in the case and withheld information from the defense."
[CN: Transgender healthcare; carcerality] "Nearly one year after the Department of Justice confirmed that denying hormone therapy for transgender people in prison is cruel and unusual punishment, Texas just loosened its strict guidelines for who could receive the treatment. Texas' Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) policy now allows prisoners to receive hormone therapy behind bars, even though they weren't undergoing therapy prior to their incarceration. Until last week, TDCJ only provided the treatment plan for inmates who went through hormone therapy before they were locked up. Now, any prisoner who is diagnosed with gender dysphoria—'clinically significant distress or impairment that is associated with the marked incongruence between one's experienced or expressed gender and one's assigned gender'—can qualify for the treatment." Getting a diagnosis, however, could still be a significant barrier to accessing care.
[CN: Illness] Shit: "Scientists confirm second, more intense form of Lyme disease: 'At this time there is no evidence that B. mayonii is present outside of the Upper Midwest,' Dr. Jeannine Petersen, a researcher at the CDC, told CBS News. 'However, people who live in areas where black-legged ticks are common should continue to take precautions.'"
[CN: Misogynoir] On The Daily Show, Jessica Williams shut down all the Beyoncé haters. "Race was brought in because Beyoncé was brought in and, brace yourself, you might want to sit down for this, but Beyoncé is…black! And as a black person, you walk around every day constantly reminded that you are black. [Beyoncé is black] and this song is her message." BOOM.
[CN: Video autoplays at link] And finally! An Italian Greyhound tries peanut butter for the first time. LOL!
Sure, But What About the Important People Who Matter?
[Content Note: Misogyny; war; drones; rape in war zones.]
In the Washington Post, Greg Sargent takes on the question of [CN: video autoplays] that video of Senator Elizabeth Warren asserting that Hillary Clinton's voting history on bankruptcy bills proves that she is a corporate shill who has been influenced by donations.
It somewhat mirrors what I wrote in comments the other day about that very video:
I have an enormous amount of respect for Senator Elizabeth Warren and the work she does. Truly. Just last weekend, I recommended Iain watch "Maxed Out," and my primary argument for watching it is because Warren is awesome in it.The difference between Sargent's piece and my commentary is that he doesn't seem particularly interested in highlighting that categorizing Clinton as a "shill" is dependent on ignoring her own words about why she voted the way she did, nor particularly interested in underlining that this line of attack is only effective when it conceals Clinton's perspective and relies on decades of shadowy rumor and misogynist double-standards.
But, for reasons I don't totally understand, Warren is substituting her own explanation for Clinton's turnaround on the bankruptcy bill, despite the fact that Clinton has publicly explained it.
The two bankruptcy bills Warren references were not the same. And do you know why they weren't the same? Because of Hillary Clinton -- who negotiated protections for women and children who depend on alimony and child support payments.
Here is Hillary Clinton, in her own words:
Mrs. Clinton said that the bill was pending when she arrived in the Senate in 2001 and wanted some changes to protect alimony and child support payments.That bill, by the way, did not pass. And when another bankruptcy bill came up in 2005, and was eventually passed, Clinton was not present in the Senate on the day of the vote, because Bill Clinton was in the hospital with heart problems, but she opposed it and said she would have voted against it.
"So I negotiated those changes and then the people who had been handling the bill said, 'Well if we take your changes you have to support it.' That's the way the Senate works," Mrs. Clinton said. "And so I said 'It's really important to me that we don't hurt women and children, so I will support it even though there are other things I don't like in it.'"
Clinton being passionate enough about the bankruptcy bill that she convinced her husband's entire administration, as Warren credits her with doing, to oppose it, and then completely doing a 180 just because of campaign donations doesn't pass the smell test. Because if campaign donations were a major consideration, they would have been a consideration back when the bill came up during Bill Clinton's administration, too.
It does, however, pass the smell test that a freshman senator whose entire career has centered women and children would make a compromise in order to protect them, because she fears the bill will pass anyway without those protections.
Of course, if one is primed already to believe that Hillary Clinton is a liar and an opportunist who will stop at nothing to get what she wants and is beholden to corporations, then I don't guess these facts will convince them.
Which goes back to the point I made earlier in the thread: A lot of these smears only work because they exist in the context of decades of garbage designed to cast Clinton as a monster.
It's a lot less exciting for people who hate her to hear that the special interests to whom she's actually beholden are women and children.
Instead, he pivots to suggesting "Both Clinton and Sanders make good arguments." And, in the sense that Sanders argues that half-measures aren't enough, and Clinton argues that incrementalism is the only way to get shit done in a dysfunctional Congress, they both make compelling arguments on behalf of their distinct approaches.
But in the sense that Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, or anyone else, would ignore context that suggests the opposite in order to claim this "proves" that Clinton is a corporate shill who's compromised by corporate donations, no, they are not making good arguments. They are making mendacious arguments that trade on narratives created about Hillary Clinton by the rightwing.
And what bothers me the most about this is something that consistently bothers me about much of the policy-related criticism of Hillary Clinton: It fundamentally ignores that Clinton makes decisions on behalf of women and children.
(For the record: No, I am not arguing that Clinton has always made choices that have been universally good for women and/or children.)
When Clinton was Secretary of State, there were a number of pieces accusing her of lacking a unifying vision, and following her tenure, there were a number of pieces suggesting she didn't have a "big idea" that justified a run for the presidency, despite the fact that anyone who bothered to connect the dots would see a pretty clear picture of a person who advocacates for women and children.
Similarly, reducing her foreign policy decisions to her single, regrettable vote on Iraq necessitates ignoring that spent her tenure as Secretary of State doggedly advocating on behalf of women and children who are victimized by rape as a weapon of war; speaking about violence against women as a security issue; and repeatedly talking about how women are key to peacekeeping.
The thing is, there are legitimate criticisms to be made about Clinton's support for President Obama's drone program, for example, which harms women and children. And reducing her foreign policy to one vote, for which she's apologized, actually serves to distract from criticisms of contemporary policy.
But is also conceals the things she's done right on behalf of women and children in war zones and destabilized nations, and her highlighting of how oppression of women foments the instability from which armed conflicts emerge, in order to prevent them—an observation unique among the current field of presidential candidates.
It's incredibly important specialized foreign policy work. Of course, she's done it on behalf of women and children, so it's pretty easy for lots of Very Important People Who Care About Serious Issues to ignore, because who gives a fuck about women and kids.
When one really deep-dives into the policy criticisms of Clinton, a pattern emerges of what work and what motivations are concealed in order to make those criticisms. (Despite the fact it is eminently possible to criticize Clinton for policies that harm women and children on one hand, while also recognizing her work on behalf of women and children on the other, as I have done here.) It doesn't take anything away from valid criticisms to acknowledge her successes. But concealing them functions quite niftily to underwrite the narrative of the HILLARYMONSTER.
And in the process, it once again suggests that women and children aren't people who matter.
I believe that they are.
New Hampshire Primary Day!
Today is the New Hampshire Primary, which is the first primary in the 2016 presidential primary season that started with a caucus!
On the Democratic side, I would be surprised if Bernie Sanders didn't win, since he's from the neighboring state of Vermont. But even if Hillary Clinton does win, somehow she'll still lose! Don't worry about that!
On the Republican side, Trump has a strong lead in the polls, and it's a tight race for second between Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich (!). I suspect Trump will underperform the polls again, but he'd have to underperform them by a lot in order to lose.
I don't anticipate New Hampshire will significantly shake things up for either party, but the results should thin the herd a little more on the Republican side. If Jeb Bush comes in a distant fifth, expect him to finally admit it's never gonna happen and suspend his campaign.
Anyway! Let's see what ya got, New Hampshire voters!
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