Cho On This, Palin!

Feminist comedian Margaret Cho had this to say recently about GOP veep pick, Sarah Palin:

"...she is the ultimate misogynist. She is a woman hater in the extreme. To force women to have children against their will, to deny abortion rights EVEN in cases of incest and rape is abominable. She is an insult to feminism, a sickening example what a woman will do to other women in order to please men and further her own career. Women do s**t like that to other women to keep them down – to make their achievement seem more extraordinary – to keep women out of their way, so they can enjoy all the power and the men themselves, and that stuff makes them worse than sexist men. It is worse to be a traitor than a perpetrator."

Ouch.

Hitting McCain on Gender and the Wage Gap

This is a very good new ad and I hope it receives wide airing:

Pass it along...

Michelle Obama Eats White Babies!!!

Over at The Root, Kim McLarin has written a funny and insightful piece - "Whiteygate: What black people call white people…and it ain't 'whitey'" - about the recent claim that there is a secret tape out there somewhere that shows Michelle Obama in full black nationalist rage attacking "whitey" from the Trinity United pulpit...

McLarin begins, "And so continues the conundrum of being a post-racial black candidate in a still-very-racial world. To speak the truth about anything involving race is to be accused instantly of dragging out that famous racial deck we've all been dealt that stands us in such good stead in America."

And continues,

The campaign of Barack Obama has had to rebut, not once but several times, the wild rumors that his wife Michelle used an insulting term for white people while railing from the pulpit of Trinity United Church in Chicago. His campaign has had to set up a website to refute the charge, and Obama himself has had to chastise mainstream reporters for spreading the lie.

What he hasn't done—because he cannot if he wants to win the presidency—is roll out the clearest and most obvious knockdown of Whiteygate. Namely this: "When the hell was the last time you heard a black person call somebody 'whitey?'"

I mean, come on. White man, please.

Speaking as a person who has been black all of my 40-plus years on the planet, I can say with some authority that no self-respecting black, African-American, Negro, colored or even "there's only one race: the human race" person I know would use the word.

Not unless they were quoting Rush Limbaugh. Or maybe George Jefferson.

Ok, now she's found her groove...

The accusation is insulting not only because it so clearly reveals the desperation of right-wing zealots terrified of losing their stranglehold on a gasping America by playing to baseline anxieties and sad, unfortunate fears of those hard-working white Americans we've heard so much about; but because, frankly, it's so ham-fisted in its mendacity.

And then, finally, exasperated:

I mean, 'Whitey?'

The woman has a law degree from Harvard, for crying out loud. If, for some reason, she was trying to rile up a congregation she could do much, much better than that.

So, according to McClarin, what do black people call white people?

[I began] to think about the terms black folks use when talking among themselves about white people.

I could barely move my pencil tip. Probably because black folks spend a lot less time talking or even thinking about white people than most white, right-wing reactionaries and their black counterparts dream in their hot little dreams. I had trouble, and, after hours and hours, the best I could come up with was this:

White folks. Whites. White people. They.

Upon greater reflection:

But really, that was pretty much it. When I was growing up in Memphis in the groovy '70s, some people tried to get the word "ofay" going, but, in my circles at least, it never really took. My mother's generation used Mr. Charlie, my older sister's cool boyfriend use to say The Man. There was redneck, of course, but growing up in Memphis, the only people I ever heard use that word were white people.

There was cracker, but usually that referred to a certain, specific kind of hog-jowled, Southern racist, as in "That cracker had the nerve to make me wash his sheets—and I don't mean the ones he use on his bed!"

I know a genteel older black woman who, out of delicacy or discomfort, will never use the words white or black when referring to people associated with those hues. Instead she says "wonderful people" and "beautiful people," which I think is kinda sweet.

But whitey? Uh uh! I'm sorry. No.

Any of you lurkers out there in blog-o-land have any thoughts or reactions to McLarin's piece, or the whole "controversy" over the term "whitey"?


Here are some further online resources:

• Erin Kotecki Vest skewers the Fox News "Obama Baby Mama" smear.

• Fox News contributor and all-around conservative blow-hard, Cal Thomas, blathering on about "angry black women," as if he has a clue:


• Kim McLarin has written another excellent essay on Michelle Obama: "The Real Prize: Why Obama's Wife Makes Me Love Him More"

• Here is another interesting piece about the attacks on Michelle Obama: Marc Lamont, "The Attacks on Michelle Obama (Call)"

• And Paul Devlin wrote "An Open Letter to Michelle Obama"

National Shame on Memorial Day: "Military Sexual Trauma"

(click cartoon to enlarge)

NOW, the fantastic news magazine that airs on PBS each week, has a shocking story about the surge in rape against female soldiers in the U.S. military.

Here is their set-up (emphasis added):

There are more women serving in the military than ever before, and they're in danger—but not just from combat. Last year, nearly 1,400 women reported being assaulted and raped by their fellow soldiers, in some cases by their commanding officers. The shocking phenomenon is called military sexual trauma, or MST.

Since NOW first aired its investigation into rape and sexual assault in the military last year, the Pentagon has released new reports in which one-third of military women say they've been sexually harassed. And the number of women reporting assault and rape has essentially remained the same—even though the military says it has invested serious resources to combat the problem.

This week NOW on PBS talks to women soldiers who signed up to defend their countries but instead had to defend themselves from assault and rape by their own fellow soldiers. How are these women picking up the pieces of their life after military sexual trauma?

To stream the program from your computer, click here.

To watch the original program on military sexual trauma, click here.

In addition to the streaming video of the show, each of the above links has a variety of other resources and information listed on this disturbing subject.

I'll add my own question to the above: why is this story not front page of every major newspaper in the country? Why are none of the presidential candidates, including the self-described feminist champion, Hillary Clinton, and the war hero, John McCain, as well as the front-runner, Barack Obama, making it a public issue? Is this the result of the Pentagon's control of information and infiltration of the media? Is it because we don't take such statistics seriously in environments that have historically been deemed "male"?

Seriously, what the fu*k!?!?!?!!? It is shameful enough that our nation has been overrun by militarism and hyper-nationalism, but it is mind-blowing that these chicken-hawks in power have such disdain for actual soldiers. We have this piece of horror, we have recent reports that in recent years soldier suicides have far surpassed troop deaths in Iraq, we have the VA hospital scandal, we have the lack of basic body armor for soldiers and their vehicles, we have the President and McCain opposing a new GI Bill of Rights, and on and on and on...

... Given all this and more, why the heck would ANY veteran or current military person vote for the Republican Party? The reality is that the Repubs love to run the nation into bad wars, but they don't like to take care of the troops.

It is Memorial Day. While we salute the service and sacrifice of all soldiers today, shouldn't we also take a good hard look at how our government is running the military and ask how we might do better by these men and women?