As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I’m not big on the pink marketeering that passes for breast cancer ‘awareness’, but we’ll make an exception for this terrific graphic via Florence, who is the mother of a good friend of mine:
Find A Cure Before I Grow Boobs
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Nov 182008
I was talking to my mother the other day about the Marie Antoinette theory of leadership wherein world leaders sit around drinking $500 wine while the economy goes to hell in a handbasket and wise woman that she is, she suggested that maybe what we need to do is to hold a bake sale.
After all, it is usually women who run those sugar-laden fundraisers for desperately needed programs that are routinely left out of our national budgeting priorities and whose voices are routinely left out of the economic decision-making process. If ever there was a time to bring them to the table, baked goods in hand, this is it.
Another woman whom we should all be listening to is Naomi Klein who is the rare voice of courage and clarity when it comes to understanding the current economic crisis. Listen to what she has to say about the culpability of the Democrats in enabling the continued treasonous plunder of the economy:
“Despite all of this potential lawlessness, the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. “There is only one president at a time,” we hear from Barack Obama. That’s true. But every sweetheart deal the lame-duck Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama’s ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140 billion in missing tax revenue is almost the same sum as Obama’s renewable energy program. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.
Yes, there is only one president at a time, but that president needed the support of powerful Democrats, including Obama, to get the bailout passed. Now that it is clear that the Bush administration is violating the terms to which both parties agreed, the Democrats have not just the right but a grave responsibility to intervene forcefully.
I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. “None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression,” explained one unnamed Congressional aide.”
While we all have high hopes for the Obama presidency, we cannot be complacent. We need to insist that our budget priorities be completely revamped to be supportive of sustainable economics for those of us who don’t drink $500 wine.
And who says you can’t have have your pie and eat it too? Just in time for the holiday season, Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND) has launched the Great American Pie Campaign, call it the nutritional antidote for the economic pyramid that is eating up our well-being!
The Great American Pie Campaign is about raising awareness of how our federal budget affects our everyday lives. And the lives of people around the globe.
It’s also about know-how and action.
And it’s about women — because women are big stakeholders, and women have what it takes to turn things around.
The Great American Pie Campaign is about you – your vision for a better world, your contribution.
We are baking a new American Pie:
Now that is something we can all digest.
Nov 172008
I’m generally not a fan of CNN, but check out the contenders for their hero of the year–7 out of 10 are women!! Better yet, you can go to their website and vote on your choice, so go check it out and vote, let’s make sure that woman power prevails!
Nov 142008
Mega thanks to our good friends at Our Bodies Our Blog for the heads up on this hilarious look at the pharmaceutical exploitation of women’s health from Stephen Colbert:
Memo to Tina Fey
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Nov 142008
Memo: To Tina Fey–Immediate Action Required
Topic: The retirement of your Sarah Palin persona may have been a tad premature…
So here’s the deal–
I started having withdrawal symptoms the day after the election, what was I going to do with out my daily dose of Sarah?? Journalists everywhere were suddenly faced with thinking of other topics to fill the space she left behind. But there is good news for Sarah junkies! Finally freed of her McCain campaign minders, Sarah Palin is talking to the press, and what a mouthful is tumbling out! For openers, in an interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News’ “On The Record” she showcased her Alaskan sensibility with what is best described as a snowplow metaphor where she talks about plowing through open doors.And then there is Sarah’s dad, Chuck Heath who, after welcoming her home with Moose chili, told the media that his daughter is “frantically” trying to sort out which clothes in her closet belong to her and which are the property of the RNC,
“She was just frantically … trying to sort stuff out,” Heath said. “That’s the problem, you know, the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for.”
As a seasoned parent and veteran of the lost clothes wars I’ll just offer this–look behind the clothes dryer. No doubt her finest hour upon hour upon hour in the limelight of post election afterglow was her interview with Fox’s Greta Van Susteren whose opening line was a definite harbinger of what was to come:
GVS: Governor, it must be fun to be back in your office here in Anchorage.
SP: It’s great. It’s great. A lot of work to do, so it’s good to be back.
Oh sure, we totally believe that you’d rather be in Alaska than headed for Washington. Then Van Susteren and the still Gov got down to the real dirt about the clothes:
GVS: All right. Let me clarify some loose ends here. The clothes — what is the story on the clothes?
SP: The clothes. When I arrived at the convention, there were clothes waiting for me and clothes being ordered for me and for the family, for eight of us. And ever since then, those clothes, knowing that they didn’t belong to me, many of them had been returned, many of them were put in the belly of the airplane, and some of them were returned home with me. We boxed them all up, sent them back to the rightful owners, the Republican National Committee. And that’s the story on the clothes.
Put in the belly of the plane? Oh never mind. It must be because I’m a feminist and Palin’s a faux feminist that has me all riled up…
GVS: Well, it’s interesting. You lured some feminists to the Republican ticket, which you might not expect. I mean, feminists have typically been Democrats. By feminists, I mean some of the farther left. But you lured some of them. But if you think about it, a woman on the ticket is very exciting for women. Why do you think that you didn’t get more women? I mean, you’re a working woman. You’ve been successful as a governor. Why do you think some women probably weren’t lured to your ticket?
SP: I don’t know, but I’m going to work harder on that, if anything ever happens in the future in terms of me running for office, to kind of put more women at ease, I guess, with the idea of me or any other woman serving in higher office. I think that it’s really important because I truly believe that we have more in common than we have differences, when we want to make sure that our communities are healthy and safe and that we have health care for our children and that our daughters have equal opportunities in the workforce. All those things that we have in common, again, certainly outweigh the differences than perhaps we have.
So I would like to see, perhaps, some of these feminist women — and sometimes, you know, I consider myself, too, as a feminist, whatever that means. In fact, I subscribe to Feminists for Life. I’m a pro-life woman who wants to make sure that, you know, we cherish the sanctity of life. And this group, Feminists for Life, sort of encapsulates all that I believe in with that — with the pro-life movement.
You know, or more to the point, you so don’t know what a feminist is but you consider yourself to be one? You know. Whatever. And then there is the fact that I’m one of those awful pajama wearing bloggers, can’t say it much better than Sue Katz,
“I’ll say it loud and I’ll say it proud: I’m a blogger in my pajamas. In one of the more insidious of the cornucopia of interviews that Palin has been conducting this week, she told the fawning, hyperventilating Greta Van Susteren (Fox News) that her bad press was the result of “some blogger, probably sitting there in their parents’ basement, wearing pajamas, blogging some kind of gossip, or a lie”.
“Way to go, Sarah! In your ubiquitous campaign of political rehabilitation and self-redemption, be sure to slag off bloggers. That’ll improve their attitude towards you. Dis people who work from home. After all, since you play Governor from your home in Wasilla instead of Alaska’s capital city Juneau, you know all about it. Criticize other people’s clothes – you know, those schmucks who don’t shop for their nighties at Neiman Marcus.
Go ahead and infantilize bloggers while showing off your total misunderstanding of what blogging is. No, it isn’t like some meth lab that requires a hidden basement room.”
Katz then goes on to point out that Palin’s use of the pajama metaphor isn’t even original, imagine that. And check out Rachel Maddow’ s take on the fashion diss that Katz has posted!
But when it comes down to it, you gotta hand it to Dennis Miller, recipient of this week’s Dick in Brain Disease Award for nailing it on the head of his, oh never mind:
“She’s a great dame. People are fascinated by her because the Left hate her. I think the Left hate her — mostly women on the Left hate her — because to me from outside in it appears that she has a great sex life, all right? I think she has non-neurotic sex with that Todd Palin guy. … I think that snow mobile looks like mechanized foreplay to me and that’s why people are fascinated.”
I know–we all thought she’d just snowmobile out of here after the election, but since we’ve been blessed with an encore Palin performance, surely you can see where your patriotic duty lies…
Signed,
Your devoted fan and proud to be a feminist sex-starved pajama-clad blogger. You betcha.
