Hard News: Unreasonable people vote
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Dude, i'm a man
For you, Jeremy. These guys are bloody great. :)
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ladies politics
Ookay...
Put it this way, without feminism the only women who get into politics and public life are the ones who manage to contort themselves into the tiny window of acceptable public femaleness under patriarchy.
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Thanks Petra, that was neat.
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Oh, I dunno, B Jones - Helen Clark was in office for a pretty long time. Admittedly, she got flak for how she looked, or dressed, or spoke - far more than a man ever would - but she was there, at the top, for ages.
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My pleasure, nzlemming. :)
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Put it this way, without feminism the only women who get into politics and public life are the ones who manage to contort themselves into the tiny window of acceptable public femaleness under patriarchy.
Let's have more feminism, most of the writings of the group i've described are markedly anti-feminism and it's absurd to see women dump on their own gender for no other reason than a spot on Bill oreilly and the like.
50% female representation, no taxation without representation.
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Helen Clark was a lesbian, manhater according to many men I've met, and she was ugly to boot.We never really got on to policy.
actually personally she's quite unique looking and takes a great photo straight on but my vote isn't on the photo.
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Helen Clark owes a lot of her success to the success of the lefty feminist movement in the past forty years*. When I said without feminism, I'm saying without the efforts of the suffragettes, the second wavers, all that. Before that the only women who could cut through the power structures were exceptional, and exceptionally lucky. Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria.
It's not so much absurd to dump on your own gender, as inevitable in a world where feminist successes are incomplete. Uncle Tom is the equivalent term in a racist society.
*which is exactly why she's vilified by the conservative right on such gendered terms. She personifies everything they hate about the last forty years, even though in fact she's much more a pragmatist than a radical.
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Petra - Stop please with your Spooky Men's Chorale and stuff! Soon I'll have no mascara left at all!
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B Jones, well put.
She also was voted back in on a 41% vote at best. She maintained that level for Labour whose core vote seems to be around 35% by being one of the best leaders i've ever seen in this country, although the competition is not remarkable.
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My Broadband has been cut. I can't see it. New Broadband , where are you?
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lol. Sorry, Jan! ;-p
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There are a pile of other intelligent female columnists that don't deserve to be lumped in with the likes of McLeod and Coddington. I don't read Garth George, Karl du Fresne and Chris Trotter and wonder where the rational male commentators are.
Of the five you've named, I greatly prefer the two women. Both of them do have their moments.
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That's true. Nine times out of ten I violently disagree with Rosemary McLeod, but on the tenth, she nails an issue really well in a way that nobody else has thought of. I couldn't say that about Garth George.
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Unless the issue is "what do fatuous codgers think about modern life?"
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Was Rosemary McLeod "Felicity Ferret" at one time?
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Unless the issue is "what do fatuous codgers think about modern life?"
lol. Zing!
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Ah, but not as zingy as some of those 100 Best Signs At The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear (thanks, Russell).
Personally tickled by #17, 25, 35, 43, 57, 58, 59, 84, 89 -
The worst thing is: these are not bad people. They're not stupid. They're not spending hours each day burning crosses on their neighbours' lawns. They're not uneducated or ignorant of history.
I'm right there with you, up to that last clause. A lot of Americans ARE very ignorant of history and the ignorance matters, it matters a lot.
If the public doesn't know the answer to questions like "how did Iran come to be an 'islamic republic'?" or "where did the Taliban get all those weapons anyway?", we're all going to ride to "doomed to repeat it" in the same handbasket. -
It is surprising to read that so many in the US and overseas don't seem to understand why the Dems are looking like taking a bit of a flogging tomorrow. This article gets the economic side of things quite well.
Is it really extreme to be worried about trillion dollar deficits and the consequent rapidly accumulating debt as far as the eye can see? Hardly. Add to that Obama's policies have created so much uncertainty that it has really cramped job creation, keeping unemployment high. How can companies invest when you don't know what their tax rates, healthcare costs or energy costs are going to be?
To that you can add that Obama hasn't been the president that he said he was going to be. Nothing worse than being sold a bill of goods. He was going to be a post partisan president, and yet he told the Repubs "I won" when they wanted to talk about the stimulus package. Much like Cullen's "we won, you lost eat it' comment. Obama said he was going to bring a new kind of politics to Washington, but the Dems' healthcare bill was rammed through against the expressed wishes of the Americans in the worst of corrupt old political ways. He was going to "review every line of expenditure" and he rammed through a pork stuffed stimulus package that was more a payoff to his union buddies than a genuine stimulus package, and it hasn't worked as promised.
After all that it would be amazing if the Dems weren't going to get a stuffing tomorrow, and if the American people were okay with all of the above, then American would be truly fucked. That they are rejecting it is cause for optimism.
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To that you can add that Obama hasn't been the president that he said he was going to be. Nothing worse than being sold a bill of goods. He was going to be a post partisan president, and yet he told the Repubs "I won" when they wanted to talk about the stimulus package.
It's such fun when you stop by and bring the talking points, James.
Here's a report of the meeting where Obama said "I won". It was a cross-party meeting with senior Democrat and Republican reps, in which Obama is reported to have favourably received a one-page list of Republican stimulus proposals.
The line you quote came in this context:
Mr. Obama did voice opinion on some differences on the issue of whether the lowest individual tax rates should be cut from 15 percent to 10 percent and from 10 percent to 5 percent.
As the president, he had told Kyl after the Arizonan raised objections to the notion of a tax credit for people who don't pay income taxes, Obama told Cantor this morning that "on some of these issues we're just going to have ideological differences."
The president added, "I won. So I think on that one, I trump you."
So, they talked at length and he acknowledged their differences.
How on earth is that your evidence of Obama refusing to talk about the stimulus?
It's this sort of fantasy world logic that is blighting American political debate.
Ironically, the big objection raised afterwards by John Boehner was to a Medicaid family planning initiative. The economy's going down a hole and the Republicans are fretting about condoms.
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It is surprising to read that so many in the US and overseas don't seem to understand why the Dems are looking like taking a bit of a flogging tomorrow. This article gets the economic side of things quite well.
No it doesn't. It's a thin, partisan effort that holds that Tea Party folk wisdom trumped the work of national economic advisors, without actually offering any evidence that that is the case.
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Put it this way, without feminism the only women who get into politics and public life are the ones who manage to contort themselves into the tiny window of acceptable public femaleness under patriarchy.
Oh come on... even if you think Margaret Thatcher is the anti-Christette, you've got to grant she was in no way "acceptable" to the Tory grandees -- she was a "pushy" little daughter of trade who'd was a (barely) acceptable place holder until someone better came along.
It's not so much absurd to dump on your own gender, as inevitable in a world where feminist successes are incomplete. Uncle Tom is the equivalent term in a racist society.
I think I'm going to back away from this thread before Emma, Megan and Danielle smell the "bad feminist" troll-bait...
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He was going to "review every line of expenditure" and he rammed through a pork stuffed stimulus package that was more a payoff to his union buddies than a genuine stimulus package, and it hasn't worked as promised.
Oh please, James... First, you're being rather disingenuous (or flat out ignorant) about how the Congress works. The President doesn't get to "ram though" as much as a take out order from Starbucks; the GOP did a pretty damn good job at larding up the stimulus bill with pork all along the line. But I guess I keep forgetting that the GOP is now the Party of Palin: Lie about your record (the biggest expansion of the federal government since LBJ), re-write you history and show an infantile disdain for taking any responsibility for your own actions.
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Emma, Megan and Danielle smell the "bad feminist" troll-bait...
Smell it, you just wrote it, although it is a very bad summation of the point being made. Maggie Thatcher worked in a male-dominated party in the seventies, they would still freak out today but she hardly can be seen as a role model for female equality and she was a horrible politicain who played on the worst aspects of Englands many egos.
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