“There she goes again, mentioning us to Matt Lauer!”
Timothy Egan, the Times writer and noted author, wonders what the hell is going on in Alaska, and the resulting blog post is a thing of beauty. Seriously Alaskans: WTF?
Speaking of Alaskans and WTF?, Sarah Palin gave her first press conference today. If you guessed that it was barely longer than a Ramones song, you are correct and deserve some kind of prize. (Truly, Jason Biggs lasted longer with that pie than this woman who wanted to be the vice-president of the United States lasted in front of reporters. It’s insane.)
You can choose from the lovely assortment of paperclips on my desk (there’s a green one, a pink one and a bunch of boring old regular ones) or the Louise Brooks videocassettes I can’t bring myself to throw out despite the fact that Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl are now available on DVD. It seems morally wrong to send anything bearing Louise’s image to the landfill, even though I’m relatively certain the tapes and their cases don’t have feelings.
If you want to get all technical, Sarah Palin didn’t really vow to never stop being stupid. But she came pretty close when she lashed out at bloggers in an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, calling them “kids in pajamas sitting in the basement of their parents’ homes” — ostensibly because they’ve been critical of her. (FOR BEING AN IDIOT!, I might add.)
I guess she’s forgetting the part where she probably owes her selection as John McCain’s running mate to the efforts of a college student and blogger named Adam Brickley. As Jane Mayer wrote last month in The New Yorker:
In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”
Brickley registered a Web site — palinforvp.blogspot.com which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
Palin’s rise from obscurity, her $150,000 wardrobe, her trip to Saturday Night Live, can all be traced back to a kid blogger. Shouldn’t she be thanking the blogosphere instead of telling it to fuck itself?
And by the way, Sarah, when I write hurtful things about you from my parents’ basement, I’m usually dressed in waders, the better to navigate the flood of bullshit that’s unleashed every time you talk to the press.
Are we sure The Terminator wasn’t influenced by Cruising?
Would it kill Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured above at his favorite leather bar) to stick with a position on gay marriage? As this Los Angeles Times article so neatly lays out:
In past statements, he has said he personally believes marriage should be between a man and a woman and has rejected legislation authorizing same-sex marriage. Yet he has also said he would not care if same-sex marriage were legal, saying he believed that such an important societal issue should be determined by the voters or the courts.
Following that position, he publicly opposed Proposition 8, which amends the state Constitution to declare that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. “I learned that you should never ever give up. . . . They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done.”
It’s nice that Governor Schwarzenegger, the star of such cinematic masterpieces as Red Sonja and Junior (oh, the side-splitting hilarity of a pregnant man! It was almost as funny as casting Schwarzenegger as a scientist), has decided that gays and lesbians are deserving of civil rights after all.
It’s also nice that he’s encouraging us to keep fighting for equal treatment under the law.
What isn’t nice is that he didn’t keep his promise to fight Proposition 8. Instead, he chose over and over again to remain mostly quiet on the issue in the crucial weeks leading up to the vote.
Maybe a guy who has blemishes like Raw Deal and Jingle All the Way on his résumé isn’t overly concerned with his legacy, but Schwarzenegger’s failure to stand up to the Yes on 8 crowd will not be forgotten. And he owes us all — not just Californians, but everyone around the country who supported No on Proposition 8 — an apology.
With a Huffington Post blog entry on Saturday, writer and actor Evan Handler has joined the growing list of celebrities registering their disgust with Californians who voted yes on Proposition 8 on Tuesday. I’m not going to quote anything from it, because you should click the link and read it in its entirety, but I especially liked his response to his Sex and the City boss Michael Patrick King’s ludicrous suggestion that a performance art protest is in order.
It shows that Handler understands what we’re up against, and it’s a nice companion piece to this angry Harvey Fierstein essay, also posted at HuffPost, that reads in part: “While we dance in the streets and pat ourselves on the back for being a nation great enough to reach beyond racial divides to elect our first African-American president let us not forget that we remain a nation still proudly practicing prejudice.”
The Associated Press has also put together an article about celebrity reaction to the passage of Prop 8 that includes comments from Sean Penn, Melissa Etheridge, Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Christina Aguilera, and Samantha Ronson. At the time of this posting, more than 500 people who read the piece on MSNBC’s website had inexplicably given it an average rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars. One of the highest-rated stories on the website, earning 4 stars out of 5, was called “Bullies may get kick out of seeing others in pain.”
Normally I dig around British websites every weekend for odd, lesbian-related tidbits to lazily exploit here. You might recall this one about Subarus, or the one about bisexuality being “reserved for 15-year-old goths and Abi Titmuss, you stupid lesbian,” or the field day I recently had with a lesbian sex diary that included strange mentions of sex toys and squirrels.
Tonight I come to you with nothing about lesbians. Honestly, I get lesbian fatigue sometimes. Anytime I’m around more than three lesbians who are under the age of 30 for longer than five minutes and it becomes apparent they all have histories with each other, I start rubbing my right temple in misery and despondently think to myself, “I could be watching Turner Classic Movies right now…”
But most importantly, John McCain is not in the White House. And Sarah Palin is back in Alaska, where she can only harm 683,478 people instead of 305,603,000. Ah, Alaska. As its ever-chipper governor might say, in between “you betchas” and winks, Alaska’s reward is in heaven.
Alas, Mink Stole was not a volunteer at my polling place.*
Four years ago, when I voted in my first presidential election, the line outside my polling place — a small, shabby church with a kitchen whose ancient refrigerator was covered with alphabet magnets and children’s fingerpaintings — was long and grim. And that was at six in the morning, when the polls first opened.
Everywhere I looked there were tense, glum men in business attire, yawning and impatiently checking their watches and cell phones. It was cold and dark outside, and every now and then the wind would pick up and sting my face. The wait ended up being a little more than 90 minutes long, and by the time I stepped into the church my hair was tangled and my fingertips were numb. As it turned out, the day didn’t get any better from there.
Mid-morning yesterday I went back to the same polling place, thinking of the bleary-eyed zombies who’d surrounded me in 2004, when my candidate lost. Again the line was very long, but the volunteers were better organized this time and everything moved faster. It was nice outside, warm and breezy, and the leaves rustling overhead seemed more colorful than I remember anything looking the day George W. Bush was re-elected. The atmosphere was oddly idyllic.
Yes, I really rented Top Gun just to get this image.
I’d planned on simply posting the headline, the picture, and the word “discuss,” but there’s nowhere for you to discuss anything here so that would be kind of stupid. All things considered, the only difference I see between John McCain and Goose is that Meg Ryan, a Barack Obama supporter, cried when Goose went down.
Teens who watch television shows that have a lot of sexual content are more likely to become pregnant — or to get someone pregnant — by the time they turn 20, according to a study in the journal Pediatrics.
Blah, blah, blah, then:
The research was based on a 2001 survey of 2,000 12- to 17-year-olds who were asked how often they watched any of 23 popular TV shows, ranging from cartoons and comedies to adult-themed shows such as Sex and the City.
Follow-up interviews were done years later to see how many of them got pregnant in their teen years or were responsible for a pregnancy.
Teens who watched shows where sex was regularly shown or discussed had two to three times the risk of pregnancy than young people exposed to lower levels of sexual content, the study said.
Hmm. I watched TV shows “where sex was regularly shown or discussed” when I was a teenager, including Sex and the City. Never got pregnant. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That’s ’cause you’re a giant lesbian. I mean, duh, your last name is Lesbian.”
But you never saw some of the women who came onto me when I was a teenager. I’m pretty sure one or two of them might have gotten me pregnant if given the chance. Had I, as a 16-year-old, gone on even one date with that very persistent 24-year-old retail manager who wanted me to see the inside of her truck (I was always afraid that was some kind of euphemism) and liked to point out that she was old enough to buy alcohol, I bet you anything a third-grader would be calling me ‘Mom’ right now.
You’ll note that no one in the Sun-Times article mentions the fact that these pregnant teenagers, and the guys who knocked them up, came of age in the George W. Bush era of abstinence-only sexual education. It was a golden era to be sure, with the teenage birth rate increasing by 3 percent in 2006 after 15 years of not rising. Which makes me think that it might be George W. Bush and his fellow evangelical nutcases who are responsible for creating this spike in our GDJP (Gross Domestic Juno Product), and not the Sex and the City gang.
Still, just to be sure, when I have kids there’s a very good chance they won’t be allowed to watch anything but I Love Lucy and The Cosby Show. They’ll be the only five-year-olds on the playground who could pick Harpo Marx out of a lineup and think loud patterned sweaters are stylish, but when they make it all the way through high school without baby spew on their graduation gowns they’ll thank me.
… And the asshole of the day award goes to Dwight Scharnhorst, the creepy Republican State Representative from Missouri’s 93rd district. Scharnie is up for re-election this year, running against Democrat Phil Bognar, and like his fellow Missourian and brother-in-hate Kit Bond, he’s trying to rile up bigoted voters by reminding them of the gay menace. You know, the same menace that already scared them into banning gay marriage in Missouri back in 2004…
This delightful gay-baiting mailer was sent to my parents on Mr. Scharnhorst’s behalf by “HRCC – Marc Ellinger, Treasurer” (I assume this is the Marc Ellinger in question), apparently to warn them that their almost 30-year marriage is being threatened by hot gay guys in chains. Oh, the humanity!
Mr. Scharnhorst, Mr. Ellinger, I have two questions:
1) If heterosexual marriage is somehow under attack in Missouri (again, despite the state’s gay marriage ban), as your mailer indicates, could you give me an idea of how quickly these traditional man-woman unions might be destroyed by these guys in their white tank tops, with their come-hither stares and their sexy chains, should Mr. Bognar win on Tuesday? Because my parents have an anniversary coming up and I haven’t bought their gift yet. The last eight years of failed Republican economic policies (™ Barack Obama) has taken its toll on my checkbook, and I don’t want to spend money on anything that might be rendered useless by Mr. Bognar’s support of — cue the sinister music — same-sex unions.
2) Where did you find the “guy in chains” photo? Was it already on one of your hard drives, or were you forced to arrange for your own special photo shoot?
Finally, Dwight Scharnhorst, thanks for reminding my parents who to vote for on Tuesday. One of them has a gay sister, the other has more gay cousins than any of us can keep track of, and together they have two gay children. When they drive through their subdivision they pass an awful lot of Scharnhorst signs, but I know that after seeing your mailer today they won’t forget to vote for Phil Bognar.
