Toga Party Open Thread

Animal House?

Please tell the Wanktards that yes, we saw it

when we were in F**KING HIGH SCHOOL!

(Back when they were just a gleam in their uncle’s eye)

It’s Crunch Time. Have you voted today?

Hi guys, did you remember to vote today?  There’s only two days left.  Someone else isn’t going to do it for you.  We need every vote if we are going to win.  And Remember our friends too!  Here are our recommendations for this year’s 2008 Weblog Awards:

For Best Liberal Blog, vote for The Confluence here

For Best New Blog, vote for Uppity Woman here

For Best Small Blog, vote for Nice Deb here

For Best Hidden Gem, vote for Deadenders here

For Best Food Blog, vote for Cake Wrecks here

For Best Pet Blog, vote for F**k You, Penguin here

For Best Podcast, vote for This American Life or NPR’s Planet Money– here.

Thanks for your support!

They’re Everywhere!…And They Don’t Even Know They’re Feminists!

It used to be that everyone was a comedian.  Today…everyone’s a feminist.  Go figure.  I suspect that next we’ll see these gems on the cover of Ms. Mag:

Homer Simpson

Larry Flynt

Beavis and Butthead

or even

The Dice Man.

Saturday: In case you have forgotten…

THIS is what a feminist looks like:

and this:

Hillary Clinton has been a feminist for decades.  She has championed issues important to women and never backed down from a fight.  One of the most recent issues she tackled was the Bush Conscience Rule, and Executive Order that would have exempted health providers from providing reproductive services to women out of conscientious objection.  The order takes effect just as Bush leaves office but instead of vowing to rescind this order while passionately defending the rights of women to obtain the best medical care available according to “their” consciences, Barack Obama said he will study the order and make changes.

But it is the Lilly Ledbetter Act and Paycheck Fairness Act that is important here.  It’s payback time, Conflucians.  That’s what the Ms. Magazine cover is all about.  Remember the horribly racist thing that Hillary Clinton said about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964?  She said that we need dreams and vision but they aren’t enough.  If you want to see your dream fulfilled, you need a president.  See where I’m going with this now?

Here it is: The House just passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act and the Paycheck Fairness bill yesterday.  Hillary Clinton, who sponsored the bills, along with Tom Harkin, reintroduced those bills in the Senate yesterday.  She originally introduced them over a year ago but they failed to be passed by the Republicans who didn’t want the Democrats to win a single triumph during the Bush years.  Fine, so they will now be passed by the Senate as Hillary’s swan song before she leaves the Senate for greener pastures at Foggy Bottom.  And then what?

You got it.  President Barack Obama will sign these two bills as his first acts as president, probably a mere seconds after he takes the oath.  Thus, he will go down in legend as a great feminist leader after being not only the most corrupt, cheating fraud the DNC ever selected but also as the man who actively participated in the denigration of women in last year’s presidential contests, while doing absolutely *nothing* for women while he was in the Senate.  Pretty fricking sweet, ain’t it?

No doubt it will all be followed by the smarmiest, most insincere inaugural speech that Jon Favreau has ever penned.  If it weren’t so true that Obama needs Hillary at State, I would have to say that his and the Obamacrats’ hatred of Hillary Clinton is beyond pathological, irrational and stupid.  We are about to inaugurate this man.  He’s going to be our president, this most opportunist of politicians.  And women like Hillary will be completely forgotten as the true workhorses and champions of women’s rights.

Ms. Magazine, intoxicated with Obama worship is completely clueless that Obama has just slipped Rohypnol into its kool-ade and is about to screw them silly.

Update: Commenter gxm17 says this is not the first time Obama has gotten unearned credit for the hard work of others:

[Emil] Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

SourceLink bottom of page 2

Once your blood pressure has returned to normal, don’t forget that there are only a couple of days left to vote for your favorite Weblog at the 2008 Weblog Awards.  Here are our recommendations:

For Best Liberal Blog, vote for The Confluence here

For Best New Blog, vote for Uppity Woman here

For Best Small Blog, vote for Nice Deb here

For Best Hidden Gem, vote for Deadenders here

For Best Food Blog, vote for Cake Wrecks here

For Best Pet Blog, vote for F**k You, Penguin here

For Best Podcast, vote for This American Life or NPR’s Planet Money– here.

For the last two, This American Life and NPR’s Planet Money, please visit their sites and make donations if you have the extra bucks.  I’ve got paint, furniture and flooring to buy for my basement so I am super strapped but I plan to throw a fiver to TAL to cover the cost of their streaming podcasts.  At $5, that’s a steal for one of the best podcasts ever.  For Planet Money, they are trailing a Harry Potter blog in their category.  They deserve much better than that and the crew at Planet Money is just barely holding onto their jobs due to layoffs at NPR.  Go vote them up, guys.  They need to stay employed so we can learn the difference between Keynesians and Austrian School followers.  It’s that important.

Joe Francis buys Ms. Magazine

Joe Francis announced today that he is purchasing Ms. magazine and he will make himself the new managing editor.   He said the unexpected purchase of the magazine was inspired by the cover of its Special Inaugural Issue.  He said “I saw that cover and I realized that if Barack Obama can be a feminist then so can I.” 

The 35 year-old Francis is  a self-made multi-millionaire who has launched the movie careers of 100’s of young women, some of them while they were still minors.  One of the aspiring young performers, Ashley Alexandra Dupré, later became involved in politics and played a intimate role in helping David Paterson become Governor of New York.

In 1997, at the age of 24, Francis founded Mantra Films, Inc. which combined independent filmmaking with infomercial marketing to become a media empire.  Francis and his film crews traveled the country looking for young women willing to show what they had to offer.

Francis said he plans to expand the Ms. readership by adding a monthly centerfold pictorial that will be called “Fem-babe of the Month”  He also said he wants to replace the current “dried up staff of writers with some perkier new talent.”   He added “The staff is bloated and their performance is sagging.  We need to cut the fat.”

To help him with managing the magazine, Francis said he is creating an Editorial Board that will include Phyllis Schafly (Women’s Rights)  Rick Warren (Reproductive Rights) Mark Foley (Children and Family) and Donnie McClurkin (LGBT Rights)

He announced that to increase sales Ms. has reached a joint agreement with the Church and Dwight company and they will be offering a free Trojan “Vibrating Touch” with every new subscription in a marketing campaign he called “Get the latest buzz from Ms.”

Francis said his next project will be acquiring and expanding the the “Hooters” restaurant chain (another ‘female-friendly’ employer) because “We need to see more Hooters.”

————————————————————————————

UPDATE:  An anonymous source at Ms. reports that Francis is in negotiations with Jim Newell and Ken Layne of Wonkette to take over as co-editors.  “They’re from Wonkette so they must be feminists” the source said.

————————————————————————————

UPDATE II:  Francis denied rumors he plans the change the magazine’s name to “Ms-ogyny”

I can’t help it

When I see this:

I think of this:

Watch it here:

Around and about (Open Thread)

This has been a good week for blog posts.  It seems like everyone I know (and some I don’t) has been hit with a serious attack of hypergraphia. And that means loads of fun (and news) for us!

Our dear friend, GaryChapelhill is following the money in the post, Money, Money, Money… at Electric Blues:

So this is why Obama was trying to get away from Richardson so fast.

President-elect Barack Obama took big money from a man at the center of a federal probe that has forced one of Obama’s top Cabinet picks to withdraw.

Financial records show the Obama campaign got more than $30,000 from California financier David Rubin, the target of an investigation into donations and possible “pay-to-play” deals involving New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Obama’s pick for commerce secretary.

Now I know I’m speculating here, but if a man like Rubin is in the habit of throwing money at politicians in exchange for favors, why is it such a stretch to imagine the same thing going on with Obama?  I hope he at least got a picture with His Holiness for$ 28,500.

In late September, Rubin attended an exclusive Los Angeles fundraiser for Obama, held at the Beverly Hills’ Greystone Mansion.

Rubin’s money went to a joint Obama-DNC fund ($28,500), the DNC itself ($26,200), and to the Obama campaign ($2,300), according to the database of campaign donations at OpenSecrets.Org.

Hmm…. Well maybe Obama didn’t know what kind of man Rubin is, and certainly couldn’t know that people might find taking donations from such a person inappropriate, to say the least.  Uh…wait a sec… (the whole story)

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Oh Really? . . . . From Memorandum this link:

Smarter Men Have More Sperm — Women tend to like smart men because they’re usually more successful and better providers. But here’s another reason: Their sperm is better, a new study says. — Researchers at King’s College London, the University of Delaware and the University …

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Lambert’s got the links and a way with words. (Sigh- it was so fun to have a secret love)

From When you lose your job, COBRA is no help getting you health care. Quelle surprise:

Miami Herald:

Most laid-off workers can’t afford to keep health insurance, according to a study from a Washington consumer group released Friday morning.

The report, by Families USA, shows that monthly payments of COBRA, the coverage available to those who lose their jobs, eats up far too much of unemployment benefits to be practical.

In Florida, the average monthly family COBRA premium is $1,037, which is more than the average monthly unemployment benefit of $1,013. For an individual policy in Florida, COBRA is $371 monthly — more than a third of the unemployment check.

So, your house, and food — or medical care. Which’d you rather? What is this, the fucking third world? I mean, what next? Foraging in the fields?

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And now for the shocker: I watch television. I happen to have cable (not the so-called movie or premium channels) but we’ve got several TVs scattered around the house that aren’t hooked up to it. And those TVs (simple, small and black & white) have been critically important on several occasions.

On one memorable occasion we hooked a tiny TV to a motorcycle battery to see what was going on after our electricity went out.  And found that virtually the entire city was out of power — there was only one station broadcasting that night and they were doing it from a generator set up in their parking lot!

But, I guess this sort of thing isn’t going to happen after the Analog-to-Digital-Conversion is complete.  Right?

Read this (and the comments) and weep (these guys aren’t friends by the way):

President-elect Barack Obama requested Congress extend the analog television cut-off date because inadequate funding and flaws in the converter box program. You know, because a bunch of people are stupid. And dumb. Mad dumb.

John Podesta, co-chair of the Obama-Biden transition team, requested that “the cut-off date (February 17th) for analog signals should be reconsidered and extended”. The letter was sent this Thursday to the chairs and ranking Republicans on the House Energy & Commerce Committee and Senate Commerce Committee.

Apparently there is some concern that the inbreds will freak out and blame the new president when their picture-boxes stop working shortly after his inauguration. So better to postpone the shutdown and educate the yokels before things get out of hand. Uh-oh, and speaking of getting out of hand — where’d my penis go?

(shaking my head)

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Finally, from our own Heidi Li we discover the new face of feminism.  Shocking doesn’t begin to describe it.

But then, lo and behold, here, in Washington, DC,  the epicenter of inaugural schlock (T-shirts, onesies, coffee mugs), I received yet another email from another organization trying to make money off the onset of the Obama administration. (I’ve already been tapped by email solicitations to give money to money to fund the inauguration itself!). The latest organization looking for dough: Ms. Magazine. The product they are hawking: a subscription that kicks of with their special inauguration issue. The cover photo they sent, designed, one must assume to make me want to subscribe:

You’ve got to follow the link (or slide down the page a couple of posts) and see this one for yourself!

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