Chris Boese's Weblog

Rachel Maddow goes prime time cable on MSNBC

Link: Maddow Gets Her Own MSNBC Show | The Trail | washingtonpost.com.

Maddow, who leavens her barbs with humor, is something of a heroine on the left. New York magazine recently ran an item headlined "Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow," and a Nation article said:

"Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a Ph.D. Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist."

Congratulations Rachel!

It couldn't happen to a smarter woman, and the cable news bloviation airwaves are just a tad more intelligent when your voice cuts through the shit!

I haven't been able to get Air America in a while now, but I stuck with Keith Olbermann even as he piled on Hillary, just to catch Rachel and Pat Buchanon juicing things up with something other than the standard, tired old spin-meisters.

So Rachel, do something original! They'll probably make you salt your show with all the standard paid-for-hire talking heads (like you used to be, in your election drag, which was hot in its own way, but not like your non-drag shots--found this one at right on Facebook--hey, it works for me!).

Don't let network management types push you around too much! Standard cable programming wisdom is utter bullshit!

Here's some of my fav bits from an article in The Nation and around the web:

Link: The Nation: Rachel Maddow's Life and Career.

Mad for Rachel Maddow

By Rebecca Traister

This article appeared in the August 18, 2008 edition of The Nation.

July 30, 2008

VIRGINIA SHERWOOD/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA AP IMAGES Rachel Maddow reports from the MSNBC newsroom in New York City, January 3.

In a year bursting with memorable moments in televised political punditry, the first may have come on January 8, when MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow explained one of the quick-spreading theories behind Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire, a surprise win that had knocked many of Maddow's on-air colleagues on their asses.

"You want to know who they're blaming for women voters breaking for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama?" a delighted Maddow asked co-panelist Pat Buchanan and host Chris Matthews, her eyes flashing. "They're blaming Chris Matthews! People are citing specifically Chris...not only for his own views but also as a symbol of what the mainstream media has done to Hillary Clinton."

Matthews sputtered dismissively, but Maddow wasn't done yet. "People feel the media is piling on Hillary Clinton," she said, "and they're coming to her defense with their votes."

[Happily, I was watching this particular show live, and relived this moment reading it here! But at the time I was clapping and cheering, doing my usual "Go Rachel, Go Rachel!" Guess I wasn't the only one!]

For Matthews, who'd been enjoying near rapturous pleasure over the presumptive early-season thumping of his personal hobgoblin, there could not have been worse news than that his own commentary might have paved the way for Clinton's triumph. Yet here was just this headline, delivered by Maddow, looking like Sylvester the Cat, practically licking yellow feathers from the corners of her mouth.

"I didn't mean it in a mean way at all," says Maddow over breakfast on a summer day many months and many MSNBC promotions away from that indelible January night. "But I knew that it was just going to blow his mind."

Matthews is far from the first talking head to get this treatment. Long before this primary season, clips of Maddow, an Air America host often invited on cable news shows as a ballsy gremlin of the left, zipped around the Internet. Her specialty was making Tucker Carlson's head explode, or getting under Buchanan's skin until all he could do was gibber at her about socialism. But presidential election cycles provide the hot klieg lights under which character actors mature into media leading ladies, and at 35, with fewer than five years of national broadcast experience under her belt, Rachel Maddow is the explosive star of the season.

[YES! I been saying it and saying it.]

She's gone from being a popular guest analyst on MSNBC to an exclusive commentator to a regular guest host for the network's prize pig, Countdown With Keith Olbermann. Now there is increasing clang and clamor over the possibility that she will get her own show on MSNBC.

[As of Sept 9, which Rachel notes is her 93-year-old grandmother's birthday. I'll be visiting my 95-year-old grandmother at the time. Maybe we can watch the first show together.]

What's remarkable about Maddow's ascension is not its velocity--Hurricane Katrina made Anderson Cooper in less than a week...

[For the record, I called that out here on this blog as well, and got tons of hits that week.]

--but the shifts in media it may demarcate. Maddow is one of the few left-liberal women to bust open the world of TV punditry, which has made icons of right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.

[Yeah, and by being a hell of a lot smarter on her feet than the average bloviating bear. I wonder what her astrological sign is? I'm guessing Sagittarius, with those truth-arrows she likes to shoot with deadly accuracy.]

All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow's unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliché and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules--without actually breaking a mold?

[That's the $64,000 question! On Air America, she called herself "Amy Goodman with animal sounds"]

When we meet, Maddow is halfway through an eight-night stand filling in for a vacationing Olbermann on Countdown, and she is vibrating with energy from the previous evening. She believes she has three distinct responsibilities when subbing: not messing anything up for the show's permanent stewards, keeping Olbermann's ratings high and just being Rachel Maddow. "Trying to do it as if I'm Keith isn't the best way to go," she explains.

Maddow fulfilled all three responsibilities in her July stint, showcasing her obvious facility with the medium while putting her own stamp on the program.

[Without trying, that week I managed to catch every program. Go figure. Not since Xena: Warrior Princess have I watched any program so faithfully. I try with Battlestar Galactica, but life too often intervenes.]

Nonetheless, she still dwells on her anxieties about the mechanics of hosting--when to look at the camera, when to turn to the script--which she says Olbermann has tutored her on. "It's like rocket science, honestly," she says. "And I feel like I've got a learning curve that's like the Matterhorn! Holy mackerel!"

Of course, Olbermann recently told the Kansas City Star that his protégée mastered the technical stuff in about ten minutes, and that on the first night she stepped in for him, she didn't make a single teleprompter mistake, while he averages four or five a night. But Maddow's signature mixture of self-deprecation and gusto, her holy mackerel-ness, is as good a place as any to start thinking about her singular success. Everything about her radiates competence and a deft, bright careerism. She wants to succeed, makes no bones about campaigning for her own television show and yet evinces a regular-person charm and self-doubt that ensures you'll never mistake her ambition for bloodthirst or bullying.

Unlike her Air America founding classmates Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken, Maddow is not a professional comedian. Still, it's clear that she finds many of the characters lumbering across the tableau of American politics a total hoot. She finds her own story pretty hilarious, too. Asked if her television career is the culmination of a plotted path, Maddow laughs. "You mean when I started working on AIDS in prisons, was this where I thought it would end up? Yeah. This is pretty much it. Phase forty-seven of my master plan."

Maddow grew up in the Bay Area; she came out just before college in 1990 and became an AIDS activist at the epicenter of the epidemic. She earned a degree in public policy from Stanford before beginning work with ACT UP and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. But Maddow had trouble breaking into treatment activism, which was then the rock-star world of AIDS policy. "It was boys' land," she says. "I knew like two women total who were doing treatment activism. And I didn't totally get it. I'm not like Barbie--'Math is hard!'--but it was a techie world, and I didn't feel like I could be all that helpful."

What she discovered instead was the nexus of the radical prison reform movement of the '70s and modern AIDS activism. It was an area where Maddow felt progress--like allowing secure hospices to take dying prisoners--was possible. "Dying behind bars?" she says fourteen years later. "Wicked expensive. And wicked stupid. And also mean. So let's make the hospices get what they want and also do the right thing!"

In 1995 Maddow traveled as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, where she began a doctorate in political science, focusing on the intersection of the AIDS and prison movements. She moved back to the United States to finish her dissertation, crashing with friends in Western Massachusetts. "I wanted to live somewhere where I'd be unhappy," she explains. "And I have no interest in New England, hate winter, don't like the country, not fond of animals." More than a decade later, Maddow still divides her time between her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, and an apartment in Greenwich Village, both of which she shares with her girlfriend, artist Susan Mikula. The couple have been together for almost ten years, and Maddow calls their relationship "my proudest accomplishment."

[No way I could complain that much about Northampton, for most of the obvious reasons. I'd take a teaching job at Smith in a heartbeat, but the real lure? Living a stone's throw from Emily Dickinson's grave! I happened to be working on my doctorate during this same times, and making pilgrimages to that area fairly regularly, but mostly before 1996. Sorry if I missed you, Rachel. As in, damn, I am sorry.]

After defending her dissertation, Maddow picked up work on AIDS in prison again, as well as a series of odd jobs, from cleaning buckets at a coffee bean factory to being a handyman who didn't know how to fix anything. As part of her patchwork career, she attended an open audition to replace the "news girl" at the local radio station. She got the job and took a shine to the airwaves. When Air America launched in 2004, Maddow lobbied the network to bring her aboard. It did, hiring her to co-host Unfiltered with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. When the show was canceled a year later, Maddow got her own two-hour weekday slot. "They had no business hiring me," Maddow says of the flier Air America took on her. "As it turned out, it worked out for them. I mean, I hope it did. I hope they're happy!"

[2005 in Missoula, Montana was, oddly, when I got totally hooked on my daily Air America Rachel Maddow fix. And then, mysteriously, I couldn't find it anywhere I was living again, until she turned up on Olbermann.]

Maddow is one of the only original Air Americans to be left standing after the company's rocky four-and-a-half-year history, and her mainstream success is an unqualified victory for the network. If she got plucked away by grabby television hands, it would be a tough loss. "We view her as a homegrown talent," says Air America chairman Charles Kireker, who has run the network since February. "We hope and expect to have her continue hosting a radio show on Air America for a long time."

In an e-mail, Maddow confirms her desire to host both a TV and a radio program: "If O'Reilly, Hannity and Beck can do that, so can I." Still, Kireker has reason to be nervous. Calling from the Netroots convention in Austin, he'd just come from a panel during which mention of a still-imaginary Maddow TV show prompted an eruption of applause. "We've seen the potential for greatness in Rachel for years," says Kireker. "What's so remarkable is that now it's coming so quickly. This election cycle has propelled it forward in a meteoric fashion."

No kidding. Love is too weak a word to describe how some people feel about Rachel Maddow. They lurve her, loave her, luff her.

[Heh. Hey, I resemble that remark!]

New York magazine's online Intelligencer column recently ran an item headlined Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow, and the blogosphere is dotted with posts like "I'm totally gay for Rachel Maddow." The "gay for Rachel" meme appears to transcend gender and sexuality. Women, men, straight and not straight: they're all gay for her. In a year in which we have decided to become postracial and postgender, Maddow may embody a media in which adoring fandom is postgay.

That's appropriate, since part of the hypnotic hold Maddow has on her audience is that while she is one of the first fully forged stars of the "liberal media," her commentary is, in a funny way, also postpartisan. During an incendiary primary season, Maddow maintained an almost maddening equilibrium, expressing dismay and appreciation for just about every candidate. She was very hard on Clinton; her face still hardens when she talks about the 3 am red phone ad, which she calls "an abomination," and Clinton's war vote, which she says is "unforgivable." But Maddow also finds herself "frequently underwhelmed" by Obama. "He got it right in opposing the war," she says, "but his war policy stuff now is bullshit. It's total bullshit, and I've never been impressed by it. One or two brigades a month? You want your son to be in the last brigade?"

Contrary to widely held opinion, Maddow did not endorse a candidate in the primary. "I have never and still don't think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually," says Maddow, adding that she feels "liberated by having a professional role in which it's probably better for me not to take sides."

"She is a civics geek," says Vanessa Silverton-Peel, executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show. "She wants to talk about AIDS in prison and the Constitution and the war in Iraq. Policy is her main focus. Not winning elections."

[OK, so I want to marry Bill Moyers, but have Rachel Maddow's love child. Or marry Rachel Maddow and have Bill Moyer's love child. Think their spouses would mind?]

On radio, Maddow starts every day with war news. She focuses hard on policy and on the politics of the absurd. "I'm fascinated by the evil child actor twins that run Poland," she says, as well as inflation in Zimbabwe ("How many bails of hundred-dollar bills does it take to buy bread today in Zimbabwe?"). She's obsessed with the Iraqi national soccer team, librarians and cocktail mixology; she once said that she'd like to "professionally bully people about what they drink." Then there are her specialties: foreign policy, the GI Bill, veterans groups. "That's the most satisfying thing about being able to do my own story selection," she says. "You get to pick that stuff. And whoever is President or in control in Congress is not going to affect that."

It's ironic that Maddow, perhaps Air America's most successful product, has traveled through the looking glass of partisan journalism and come out the other side an electoral agnostic, a liberal in the purest, almost mineral sense of the word. She loves the country, loves the Constitution and loves what is moving about politics. A worldview shaped by these concerns, one that maintains a well-manicured distance from electoral Sturm und Drang, could be a powerful asset for Maddow and the rest of the left-leaning media, an inoculation against future tune-out should they get their wish--an Obama administration that could rob them of their fury-fueled audiences.

Maddow, who has not owned a TV since 1990, tries to limit her exposure to online and print criticism of herself.

[Whew! That means there's no chance she'll stumble on my silly gushing!]

If and when she lands her own berth, and with it a nightly viewership unused to seeing a brainy lesbian with rock-solid expertise on military policy or the IAVA, that will become more difficult. She already bristles slightly when talking about how she gets all the girl questions. "I love the idea that I am the voice of woman," she says, gesturing at her T-shirt, baggy jeans and Red Sox cap. "Look at me. It's like: really? The one woman in the room is really mannish." In real life, as advertised on her website, Maddow dresses "like a first-grader" and hypothesizes that her mild androgyny might have greased her infiltration of boyworld punditry. "I look like a dude," she says.

[No, that isn't what that "D" on your forehead stands for. I'm talking from one to another here.]

Of course, for her television gigs, Maddow gets coiffed and painted and dressed up in what she calls "lady clothes" to fit a more traditional bill, a process she says she used to "resist and get angsty about," but to which she has now surrendered.

[I'll never forget the first day I caught Rachel in her "Primary Coverage" drag. She looked great, but that's when I knew she was in the running to move into the big leagues, or rather, the bigger leagues of fringe rant cable. Heh. Hey, I did my dissertation on Xena, while lived on the cable fringes as well. I'm not putting it down. I worked for 5 years at CNN. Fringe cable and the nutball Internet. That's my life! At least no one will ever go to see Rachel years later at Sci-Fi Cons. The Spinsterhaven Old Age Home that will take the place of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, maybe.]

When I ask whether some of her signature habits--the fascination with the evil twin Polish dictators, the obsession with the nuts and bolts of foreign policy--will go the way of her chunky glasses and naked lips, she balks. "The only reason I get these opportunities is because of my sensibility," she says. "I'm not being invited to do these things because of my looks or my facility with language. What they're after is the thing you're saying I have to trade off."

She continues, "My instinct sometimes is to trade it off. Like, 'Oh, I'm in the big leagues now so I better dial it back. But they don't want it dialed back. They are booking me or asking me to host because they like what they see."

Hillary Rodham Clinton: On suspending her 2008 campaign for the U.S. presidency

[...]

I ran as a daughter who benefited from opportunities my mother never dreamed of. I ran as a mother who worries about my daughter's future and a mother who wants to leave all children brighter tomorrows.

To build that future I see, we must make sure that women and men alike understand the struggles of their grandmothers and their mothers, and that women enjoy equal opportunities, equal pay, and equal respect.

Let us resolve and work toward achieving very simple propositions: There are no acceptable limits, and there are no acceptable prejudices in the 21st century in our country.

You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States. And that is truly remarkable, my friends.

To those who are disappointed that we couldn't go all of the way, especially the young people who put so much into this campaign, it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours.

Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. And, when you stumble, keep faith. And, when you're knocked down, get right back up and never listen to anyone who says you can't or shouldn't go on.

[...]

Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.

That has always been the history of progress in America. Think of the suffragists who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 and those who kept fighting until women could cast their votes.

Think of the abolitionists who struggled and died to see the end of slavery. Think of the civil rights heroes and foot soldiers who marched, protested, and risked their lives to bring about the end of segregation and Jim Crow.

Because of them, I grew up taking for granted that women could vote and, because of them, my daughter grew up taking for granted that children of all colors could go to school together.

Because of them, Barack Obama and I could wage a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination. Because of them and because of you, children today will grow up taking for granted that an African-American or a woman can, yes, become the president of the United States. And so when that day arrives, and a woman takes the oath of office as our president, we will all stand taller, proud of the values of our nation, proud that every little girl can dream big and that her dreams can come true in America.

And all of you will know that, because of your passion and hard work, you helped pave the way for that day. So I want to say to my supporters: When you hear people saying or think to yourself, "If only, or, "What if," I say, please, don't go there. Every moment wasted looking back keeps us from moving forward.

Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been. We have to work together for what still can be. And that is why I will work my heart out to make sure that Senator Obama is our next president.

And I hope and pray that all of you will join me in that effort.

[...]

Link: Transcript - Hillary Clinton Endorses Barack Obama - Text - NYTimes.com.

PRIDE! Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stand poised on the edge of a historic opportunity

Link: Ending Her Bid, Clinton Backs Obama - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Bob Herbert - Savor the Moment for a Historic Campaign - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Gail Collins - What Hillary Clinton Won - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

As the TV blowhards blather on about general mindless crap they scat with after political speeches, I just have to pause for a moment and savor Senator Hillary Clinton's concession speech today, as she suspends her campaign (wording there is very important) and unequivocally throws her support to Senator Barack Obama.

It was a historic speech, and one that had me clapping in my living room more times than those fake manufactured applause moments in the usual State of the Union presidential speeches.

So am I one of those "wounded feminists burning up the Internet," as Gail Collins called us above? The passions of the feminist movement are as much with me as they ever were, and they are the reason I watched every word of Hillary's concession speech today with my heart in my throat, and the memory of every glass ceiling I've ever banged into as fresh in my mind as ever.

I LOVE that the feminists emerged from out of the 30 years of history they'd been relegated to by the media and culture, as if they were as dead as the suffragists. And more important, I LOVE that many of those original women who won their right to vote in the early 20th century returned to the front lines again.

Oh, I've been in love with those wonderful League of Women Voters ladies for years, and I sit and talk with them at the polls whenever I find one of their often elderly poll-watchers.

Those crappy pundits say her "celebratory tone" in this terrific speech was an audition to be Obama's Vice President, which is about all they can see. Not surprising, most of them are men, and that is all they can see because that is all their sexist blinders let them see.

This speech was a celebration for women, and for all the other traditional and populist constituencies that haven't seen the light of day for so long, from people without health care, to the vanishing middle class and the threat of deep poverty that a looming recession brings for all of us, just one twist of fate away.

Yeah, I know as well as anyone that the Clintons always brought a mixed bag, doing whatever they could within the frame of politics as the art of the possible. I remember the awful disappointment, after that empowering and massive March on Washington in 1993, when the Clinton administration turned on the gays and lesbians who supported them so strongly, because GA DEMOCRAT Sen. Sam Nunn decided to single-handedly strong-arm  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" into place in the military. It was a slap in the face, but unlike others at the time, I knew the politics of the situation well enough to know that if I were on the receiving end of Nunn's threats, I may have had to capitulate to them as well. Ironically, the Clinton Administration did better standing up to Newt Gingrich's Congressional strong-arming than it did to more Machiavellian Democrats in Congress (damn, I miss Paul Wellstone too! I miss him all the time).

I don't care about that mixed bag. Hillary Clinton will have my support whenever she wants it. She became, in the course of this campaign, one of the most courageous and strong human beings I've ever seen. I love that she stayed in the campaign as long as she did in the face of unfair media coverage and unprecedented chauvinistic media activism, and I'd have loved a brokered convention even more.

I love that she was smart like a fox "suspending" her campaign, so her delegates remain hers, for the history books, as a bargaining chip. All those MALE pundits seemed to demand she just capitulate without a word, with a sense of male entitlement that made me gag. I feel that such a demand that would have never been made of a man, and was never demanded of other male presidential candidates who went all the way to the convention with a much smaller and less historic percentages of the popular vote.

But what I really want right now is to find a transcript of this speech, so I can pull my favorite parts out of it.  I titled this post PRIDE because there is NO OTHER WORD for what I feel about this historic campaign by this historic woman.

That I met her 30 years ago in Arkansas gives it more poignancy for me personally, just as Bill Clinton's election in 1992 moved me strongly as well. (Arkansans never expect to win in the end... long conditioning of a small and often-overlooked state, because as much as we love the Razorbacks, they do have a tendency to often fall short in the big game. So when we win one, the celebration is bigger,  because the fight is as underdogs, with no real expectation of winning. Hillary's relentless focus on the White House without considering the possibility of defeat is a part of Arkansas she carries with her, because defeat is such a more likely norm, you always operate with that subtext, and fight like a wild boar--Go Hogs!-- anyway, no matter what anyone says about you.)

So PRIDE! Hillary won! This was not defeat, because Hillary won what needed to be won for us, as Obama wins what also needs to be won for us. This presidential race (and the GOP hasn't gotten the word yet, but they will, because there have been GOP populists before, real ones, not Rovian manipulators of Joe Sixpack demographic categories) for the first time in my memory is about candidates as true symbols for a movement of real people, not candidates as candidates, They are candidates WE, not candidates Me, I. This was brought out on Bill Moyers last night. Other presidential candidates in the past have had to go in search of a movement, but these candidates have found their movement, and for the first time in my memory, the movement is more important than the point person who gets designated to give the movement a voice.

Obama still isn't fully my cup of tea. Too young, too cultivated, too close to the machine (Hillary is cultivated and close to the machine as well, but we have seen examples of how she acts in a position of power in those circumstances, and we have no similar examples with Obama). But that's not enough to offend me. I do love what he's doing, and the symbol he is painting himself to be.

I just wish he'd drop the fake Southern accent word-endings in speeches, the eh- sound of the genteel plantation South (not rough hill country Ozark South), mixed with self-consciously-used preacher cadences. I understand why he is doing it, and what he wants to evoke, and I don't deny it does what he wants it to do. I also know Martin Luther King Jr. was criticized for some for having an "academic" voice and a "preacher" voice, and for being an adept code-switcher. I don't even have anything against that. MLK actually WAS from Atlanta, tho, and his preacher voice didn't sound so much like an affectation, since he actually WAS a preacher, and that's the part that bugs me about Obama's use of it. Blah.

But I will back Obama as fiercely as I back Hillary, not because of either one of them, but because I sense potential in the populist movement they given a reason to arise. That's the magic part, isn't it?

I mean, think about it. The feminists didn't go away by the mid-80s. They were still kicking around, even as attention went elsewhere with the failure of the E.R.A. Many built empires in academia, where they embraced post-modernism and acted as if all the activists had fought so hard for was automatically achieved, so all they had left to do was gaze endlessly into relativistic cultural navels, because everything had "always already" happened (the freaky post-conservatism conservatism of postmodernism), instead of fighting for deeply oppressed women globally, those multi-cultural women the pomos had theories for, yet whom they rarely actually encountered, except on Fulbright exchange programs (Fulbright--see? everything comes back to Arkansas!).

Hillary Clinton was still out there duking it out tho, going to the World Conference on Women in China in 1995 (to be fair, some academic feminists I know were involved with this conference as well).

But what is bringing U.S. feminists back out of the woodwork, out of the closet, out of the lowered expectations the revenge of the glass ceiling has brought them? The Chauvinist Piggies came out in force, and by god, that was OFFENSIVE. We'd already been putting up with a lot, but when the Piggies got up on TeeVee and went all oink oink, that was just too much. Suddenly Hillary wasn't just Hillary any more. She became all of US who had ever been oinked at by a Piggie. Just WHO did they think they WERE?!

That was probably what killed E.R.A., you know? A different time, but there had been enough of a reduction in general piggie-ness that nobody really had a bee in their bonnet about it. Nobody had their panties in a twist. It just lost steam.

Think too about the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the U.S.  It has a history of ups and downs since the time of Lincoln, but most tellingly, the civil rights MOVEMENT needed something to get outraged over, something to make them turn out in numbers. Jim Crow provided that public dose of bigotry in several different forms, from segregated schools, bathrooms, drinking fountains, lunch counters, buses and trains. The courts also "helped," as did George Wallace and Orval Faubus.

It is crass movement politics to seek out, create, or exploit such moments or incidents.  Yet Rosa Parks was chosen for her role to be a symbol, as did others in test cases created to push the courts to overcome or show their bigotry.

In this case, tho, this LONG primary campaign was the exigence, the bully pulpit that brought the Piggies and the Bigots out of the woodwork and trotted out by the unconsciously right-wing media, with all the irony that entails (yes, I was embarrassed by the racists in Southern states Hillary unfortunately had to embrace, because they are working class Democrats and do deserve a voice about real working class issues, but oh, I just had to hold my nose).

Do we want to abandon those folks to the GOP who will vote to chop the tops off their mountains and fill in valleys with slag? Do we want to blow off the real health issues the terrible pollution in these coal-mining areas are bringing to these people's children, just because they happen to have a cultural tradition of racism? Or do we want to keep them in the Dem tent, and plan programs that might lead to greater cross-cultural and class and race-based understanding and solidarity?

And no, I do not think the Clintons "chose" to play any race card whatsoever, or to adopt a Nixon-esque "Southern strategy." That is utter horseshit, and was manufactured by Obama campaign handlers or Rovian dirty-tricksters or god knows what, I but I know the Clintons and how they feel about African Americans, and there is not a racist bone in either of them, as I saw in things they did in Arkansas, with no national spotlight on them. There was a truly odd tone among some Obama supporters, who tried to use a rhetorical frame that anyone who would oppose Obama's historic campaign must be racist, by the very act of opposing it, and Hillary as his primary opponent must therefore be racist because of it. Besides being an absurd false dilemma fallacy, it is also a bizarre attempt to manipulate the dominant stupidity of tape recorder journalism, which has no problem repeating false dilemma fallacies unchecked and ad nauseum.

Difficulties will arise with trying to unify and deal with the cultural differences between African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S., and that may be a bigger challenge for the Dems than racist bigots. Dems will have a challenge healing that divide by bringing all into one tent, united for civil rights for all, especially the poorest of us. But is the alternative leaving the more conservative Catholic Hispanics to join with the GOP and be exploited and blown off, imprisoned and deported, abused and kept as a permanent invisible underclass living in semi-legal slave-like conditions?

That is an exciting opportunity for Senator Clinton and Senator Obama to approach head on, if they can unite their constituencies as a single MOVEMENT and a united ticket. I believe a united ticket is an IMPERATIVE to ride this movement to its natural next populist step.

Yes, Obama MAY be able to be elected to president without Hillary on the ticket, but what price must he pay to do so? He will not have the votes to lay claim to a full-on movement. But Hillary and Obama together can be the less important figureheads to something more important, the actual populist movement behind them, to which they both have made noises to the desire to give it voice.

Noises, but are the noises the real thing, or political opportunism, a motive that simply disappears once the goal has been reached? Hillary's speech today (and her actions of the past 40 years) lead me to believe her noises are the real thing. Obama's community organizing and superior campaign organization do give me hope that for him too the movement is more important than personal glory. He possibly could gain office without it (as most presidential candidates have done in modern history, running for the office as a man, not a voice for a movement. Not since RFK, I don't think, has a candidate run as a voice for a movement. Even his own brother did not. Jesse Jackson may have tried, but his own personality overshadowed the aborted attempt at a movement, the Rainbow Coalition).

But if they chose to lead the movement (and the movement must necessarily direct them, not the other way around, that is the mark of real movement leadership, that the leader is a wise servant of a populist moment), they could do something far more historic than just the amazing list of "firsts" that they've already compiled and will continue to compile. That would be the hope Obama would like to invoke in his "Yes We Can" chant for "change."

I had more hope from Hillary's track record than Obama's speech-making wind that she could deliver, but together, maybe they could keep the focus in the right place.

It is most historic, I think, more so than the first woman or first African American, as an emblem, to run for an office, to see a movement rise up around the exigence of that agon, the campaign struggle, a populist movement that needed the outrages of the Bush years to get their dander and gumption up, to be their "Jim Crow," to be their "Iron My Shirt!" moment, to make their voices heard.

That's the real reason my overwhelming emotion at this moment is Pride.   

Teach your children well...

Link: Our Boob Jobs, Ourselves: My Beautiful Mommy Teaches Kids Why Mommy's Face Is Suddenly "Prettier".

File this one under "How we raise kids today..."

Or under the "Child-bearing as disease" model of pregnancy.

Or just under "Neo-Gilded Age people still can't find enough to do with their excess wealth."

I love the headline the Jezebel site put on it, tho, and so I must quote it. I love how they invoke the feminist women's health classic, Our Bodies, Our Selves (I wish I still had that early edition of it. I wonder if it will ever be reprinted, for posterity? If the Boston Women's Health Collective is listening, please take note!)

Our Boob Jobs, Ourselves

, plastic surgery, top, tummy tucks, boob jobs, mommy makeover, nose jobs

My Beautiful Mommy Teaches Kids Why Mommy's Face Is Suddenly "Prettier"

Here's the perfect Mother's Day gift for your favorite surgically-enhanced breeder: My Beautiful Mommy, a picture book explaining plastic surgery to the under-8 set. Mommy is by Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a Florida plastic surgeon who tells Newsweek he was inspired to write the book when he saw parents coming into his office with their kids, who would become confused and upset when they saw their mothers in bandages. "Parents generally tend to go into this denial thing. They just try to ignore the kids' questions completely...With the tummy tucks, [the mothers] can't lift anything. They're in bed. The kids have questions." The hero of the book is named "Dr. Michael" and he looks like the dad in the Incredibles, all solid muscle and square jaw.

[...]

Newsweek ... gives stats about plastic surgery, including the fact that, last year, 348,000 women had boob jobs and 148,000 had tummy tucks, but what I'm wondering is who are these people?

There are so many articles about plastic surgery — women dying from Botox,  women getting boob jobs for their weddings — but I barely know anyone who's had surgery at all. Sure, a smattering of post-grad nose jobs have occurred, but it doesn't seem to be this all-out country-wide body reconstruction/ self-loathing that the sheer amount of press makes it seem like. Is it because celebrities get so much surgery that it makes it seem like the norm? Or do I live in a fantasy land where women spend their money on new books, not new breasts?

Mommy 2.0 [Newsweek]
My Beautiful Mommy

Hear the Feminists Roar!

Hell yeah! Watch out, y'all. There's some uppity wimmin about! Can I have a witness?

Robin Morgan does some hell raising like the old days, and how wonderful to hear somebody tell it like it is. Can't let a rant like this go by without pulling out some of the more eloquent and rowdy juicy bits.

Trust me, you don't want to miss this. Sing it, Sister!

Link: In Support of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Good-bye to All That, Part II, by Robin Morgan | Women’s Space.

Link: WMC Commentary: Goodbye To All That (#2) by Robin Morgan - February 2, 2008.

In Support of Hillary Rodham Clinton:  Good-bye to All That, Part II, by Robin Morgan

by Robin Morgan (and thanks to the Women’s Media Center)

“Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (online version is here.) During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .”. But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities — the joint conscience-keepers of this country– been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.

Goodbye to the double standard . . .

• Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
• She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains? )
• When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint  analyzing our national dishonor.
• Young political Kennedys –Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr. — all endorsed Hillary. Sen. Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness  . . .

• Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.”
• Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters).
• John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs.

If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged — and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

[...]

Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .

The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments. But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN’s Tony Harris  chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.

Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .

Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities, abilities, sexual preferences, and ages — not only African American and European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arab American and — hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t be alive if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist –  but sexism is everywhere.  No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other oppressions, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”

So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially wealthy ones–adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were black or he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance—even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.

[...]

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .

• blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys–though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant.
• Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
• an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
• the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job,
• goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.

Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.

Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.

Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure”  to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming  the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell  up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement.  She is running to be President of the United States.

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power—granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen. Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.

[...]

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her.

Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands — if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”

I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men—of all ethnicities and any age–who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)

[...]

And goodbye to the ageism . . .

How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse US youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation–the majority of which is female?

Older woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy, who inspired men to become more nurturing parents, who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put child care on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of US voters.

[...]

So listen to her voice:

“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.

“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely–and the right to be heard.”

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the US State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (the full, stunning speech is here).

[...]

So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?  “Our President, Ourselves!”

Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy–as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to  volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.

[...]

I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, and because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.

As for the “woman thing”?

Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman–but because I am.

—Link to Robin Morgan’s website.   Link to Women’s Media Center.

Gloria Steinem NAILS IT!

The Obama wave was sweeping around me, and I just couldn't figure out why it was giving me the heebie jeebies (besides the fact that the guy is younger than I am).

I already laid out why at this point in my life, I think the most important thing I could do is take a stand as the proud feminist I have been all my life, to say Hillary Clinton will do a better job in the White House and will provide a strong enough dose of "politics as the art of the possible" than anyone else out there, in a previous blog post here.

But thank you so much to my feminist godmother, Gloria Steinem, for weighing in and saying the most important things that need saying, things that women in the 1970s and 1980s knew, but things that postmodern feminists have forgotten when they allowed postmodernism to sap their rage at the injustices in this world, ALL injustices, but NOT overlooking the injustices against women, which are in a major backlash of piggy chauvinism.

I'm loving how the media punditcracy is looking so incredibly stupid tonight, given the time between Iowa and New Hampshire. Good lord, they were ready to coronate Obama. Regardless as it comes out tonight, it ain't over until it's over.

Go Gloria! This is one for the anthologies. And of course, Go Hillary!

Link: Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times.

Op-Ed Contributor

Women Are Never Front-Runners

By GLORIA STEINEM

Published: January 8, 2008

THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.

Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?

If you answered no to either question, you’re not alone. Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.

That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).

If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago. Indeed, neither she nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama’s public style — or Bill Clinton’s either — without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

[...]

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule. I’m not opposing Mr. Obama; if he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer. Indeed, if you look at votes during their two-year overlap in the Senate, they were the same more than 90 percent of the time. Besides, to clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.

But what worries me is that he  is seen as unifying by his race while she  is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

[...]

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

I may not look my age these days, and I should do better at keeping it a secret, I suppose. But screw that. I was radical young and now I'm older and feel it all the more (I've seen more ugliness directed at women, perhaps), I can't wait until I can hang out with the elderly League of Women Voters ladies as a poll watcher!

 

So is Hillary Clinton an "agent of change"?

I'm listening to the ABC Debate tonight (WHERE'S DENNIS KUCINICH??!!), and feeling a bit exasperated at the media's bleating repetition about these younger guys being better agents of change than Hillary Clinton.

Hmm, let me think for a second. Hillary Clinton was a tough feminist in the 1970s women's movement who put her money where her mouth was, GOING BACK AT LEAST 30 YEARS that I know about, and that's not just experience, that's called A TRACK RECORD.

Right, plenty of candidates trot out stuff they've done while in the national campaign spotlight. Hillary did it when there was NO campaign watching her, did it when there was no direct benefit for her politically WHATSOEVER.

She just did it because things were bad, and they needed a change. Case in point: I took this photo below in 1989. It was not the first time I met Hillary Clinton, nor was it the last, but it is by far my favorite picture of her.

What is she doing here? Oh, she's opening an on-site daycare center at Fayetteville High School in Arkansas, for pregnant teenagers who choose to keep their babies. And she didn't just stand out stiffly at the ribbon cutting and then bug out. She was in there, meeting and talking with the girls. I think she's wearing a corsage because this event happened on Mother's Day.

How many people in Arkansas gave a damn about what she did that day, besides those teenagers and their parents (or any of the other things this initiative she worked on did, besides the high school day care centers)? Or rather, how UNPOPULAR would you think such a thing was among those freaked-out conservatives that dominate the parents of any given high school class? I taught Arkansas high school students for 7 years and MET those those parents at conferences.

This thing didn't win her any brownie points in the state. It didn't win her political points because she wasn't anyone more at the time than a small state governor's wife who happened to be a feminist, has always been a feminist, and took stands as a feminist WHEN IT COST POLITICAL POINTS TO DO SO.

Where are the change agents now? I'd like to talk to them. No, actually, I'd like to get a roomful of women I think are utter goddesses, 70s feminist movement women, people who participated in REAL political movements, who would not sit still until the world changed, changes that have been forgotten, wholesale, in the 35 years since. I'd sit them down with these blathering, posturing MALE political candidates, and have them GIVE A LESSON IN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A CHANGE AGENT.

Say what you like about how the Clintons are "too centrist." That's right, they are, and I don't like that much.

But Hillary Rodham Clinton is an old school feminist, and I can't NOT back the woman with the kind of guts she has, who is going to become our first woman president! Whoo-yah!

I wasn't a feminist in the 1970s and 1980s not to be here for her when the chips are down, no way no how!

Spacey Gracey hits Huffington Post!

Link: Grayson Daughters: Government In Exile - Off The Bus on The Huffington Post.

Whoo hooo! My buddy, Grayson Daughters, is taking up a gig for NewAssignment.net and filing political reports for Huffington Post! Go gettum Grayson!

And even better, she goes wandering around my favorite Atlanta watering hole, Manuel's Tavern. So watching the video clip is a bit like being back at the old haunt. Made me want to order a draft beer and find my old Sunday night trivia team.

You know you really want to watch it now, right?

I love Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg

The pity is that she had to resort to these measures, with the absurdity that the U.S. Supreme Court has morphed into.

I'll join with Justice Ginsberg, in the hope that a Democratic Congress will rectify this LEGISLATING FROM THE BENCH by the justices on the far right. (Oh, Sandra Day O'Connor, we miss you!)

And WHY was the Bush administration filing this case on Goodyear's behalf? More corporate welfare subsidies, because Goodyear can't afford to pay their own lawyers? Does this one rank right up there with a corrupt Department of Justice reducing the damages on that big tobacco judgment that was already in the bag, taking the damages down from $100 millions to the $10 millions?

Way to add to the credibility of the (in)Justice Department! Woo woo!

Here's just a few bits about today's decision.

Link: Supreme Court Limits Discrimination Suits - New York Times.

Supreme Court Limits Discrimination Suits

By DAVID STOUT

Published: May 29, 2007

WASHINGTON, May 29 — The Supreme Court ruled today, in a case of considerable interest to business and industry, that employers should be protected from lawsuits over pay discrimination linked to gender or race and based on decisions made or acts committed years ago.

Voting 5 to 4 after apparently heated deliberations, the justices found in favor of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and against Lilly M. Ledbetter, who worked for 19 years at the company’s plant in Gadsden, Ala., and was paid substantially less than men doing work at the same level.

The majority found against Ms. Ledbetter, saying she could not show that there had been intentional discrimination in the 180-day period before she complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in March 1998, shortly after she retired following an unwanted transfer. Goodyear’s argument that federal law protected the company from claims concerning discrimination that occurred before Sept. 26, 1997 — or 180 days before Ms. Ledbetter filed her E.E.O.C. action — was upheld.

[...]

The Bush administration had entered the case on Goodyear’s behalf. The case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, No. 05-1074, was argued on Nov. 27. Neal D. Mollen, an employment-law attorney in Washington who filed a brief backing Goodyear on behalf of the United States Chamber of Commerce, told Bloomberg News that today’s ruling has “great importance for employers.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read part of her dissent aloud (itself an unmistakable sign of anger), and the tone of her opinion showed how bitterly she differed with the majority. She asserted that the effects of pay discrimination can be relatively small at first, then become far more serious as subsequent raises are based on the original low pay, and that instances of pay inequities ought to be treated differently from other acts of discrimination. For one thing, she said, pay discrimination is often not uncovered until long after the fact.

The majority’s holding, she said, “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure.” She said the majority “does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

“This is not the first time the Court has ordered a cramped interpretation of Title VII, incompatible with the statute’s broad remedial purpose,” she wrote. Her dissent was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.

“Once again, the ball is in Congress’s court,” Justice Ginsburg wrote, expressing the hope that the lawmakers “may act to correct this parsimonious reading of Title VII.”

The term "partial birth abortion" is a right-wing political invention, a "scam"

Why believe me? It's right there below in the words of the founder of Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion group.

It's about a political movement (and it's well-paid PR and marketing professionals) forcing its rhetorical framing devices on an uncritical and under-funded media class.

Link: AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: How Media Mistakes Fueled the High Court Abortion Ruling.

How Media Mistakes Fueled the High Court Abortion Ruling

By Gloria Feldt, Women's Media Center
Posted on April 21, 2007, Printed on April 23, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50788/

[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but [also] a public relations goldmine. ... The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it. -- Randall Terry

So said the founder of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-choice group that blockaded abortion providers, in 2003.

Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision (Gonzales v. Carhart) upholding the federal abortion ban is the fruition of that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right.

Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court's majority, in addition to using the inaccurate term "partial birth abortion," also referred to the "abortion doctor" repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as "doctors," or "ob/gyns"? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to "tonsillectomy doctor" or "hysterectomy doctor"? Of course not. But those who want to take away entirely a woman's human right to make her own childbearing decisions have used the term "abortion doctor" for so long as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to adopt their language.

Such bias is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle over what losing plaintiff Dr. Leroy Carhart has called "partial truth abortion." There is no such thing as partial birth abortion. The term will be found in no medical book. It was coined in 1995 by Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right-to-Life Committee, and former Congressional representative and current Florida appeals court judge Charles Canady explicitly to confuse, horrify, and deceive -- to manipulate language with the intent of sensationalizing the abortion debate.

[...]

An almost identical abortion ban was found unconstitutional by a different Supreme Court in 2000.

[...]

Now we have a landmark Supreme Court decision, built upon the counterfeit foundation of a made-up term that the media accepted and used uncritically, and that has propelled the highest court to issue a ruling permitting a law that at a minimum:

1. Does not provide adequate exceptions for a woman's health, which means that a fundamental legal principle of the primary importance of women's health has been overturned.

2. For the first time upholds a federal law that steps directly into the physician's exam room and tells him or her what medical technique cannot be used even if the physician's judgment is that it is the safest to protect a patient's health and future fertility.

3. Will not reduce the number of abortions but will over time, according to the doctors who know women's health best, cause an increase in medical complications, and possibly even deaths.

The public relations goldmine of those who aim for nothing less than to eliminate reproductive justice at all times from all women has paid off for them. Language, after all, has consequences too.

Gloria Feldt is the author of "The War on Choice"  and "Behind Every Choice Is a Story."  She is currently at work on a book with the actress Kathleen Turner, entitled "Take the Lead, Lady!"