Think they’ll blog about it? And take pictures of the Kum & Go? And pick up other execs along the way?
Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., was the one who asked the executives if they flew commercial to Washington, D.C. None had.
I suppose Sherman had a decent question. So when will he get his D.C. colleagues to start road-trippin’ in and out of the city? Or maybe he’ll convince them to hitchhike when they go on their PR junkets to Iraq.
Well, not exactly buttah. I cheated and didn’t use a strainer or food grinder, so my apple butter is lumpy. But, hey, it’s apple butter. I got fancy yesterday and used the food grinder on the applesauce. It’s more like buttah than the apple butter. Oh well.
I heard someone on election night say that everyone will remember exactly where they were when Barack Obama was elected president. Yep. I was at home. Making apple butter.
Congratulations, President-elect Obama, on your victory.
You said you need my help.
Yes, you do.
You said you will be my president too.
Yes, you will.
You said you hear my voice.
I’d love to agree with that, but you have shown me that you hear only what you want to hear. So, while I have a wholelotofotherthings I could say, I’ll leave it at this for now:
Coldplay was on Saturday Night Live last weekend. They performed four times. I can’t claim to have seen every SNL episode, so this is just a guess, but most musical acts usually perform twice, right? I figure someone at SNL really loves Coldplay.
Chris Martin said at the end of one of the songs, “Barack Obama.”
Wait. Isn’t he British? Yeah, OK, he’s married to an American. But … isn’t he British?
In case you missed it, Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska, appeared on last weekend’s Saturday Night Live.
My only criticism for Alec Baldwin is, hey, we know she’s not Tina. Quit calling her Tina. As if we didn’t hear you the first three times. Oh, and, “Everything WE stand for,” you said to Lorne Michaels? Even though you’ve given twice as much money to political candidates, Michaels has supported John McCain for years. Just sayin’.
Other than that, I don’t know what kind of heat Baldwin is getting about the whole thing or to whom he’s responding, but he had this to say yesterday.
Saturday Night Live is a comedy show. It’s not Meet the Press. It doesn’t “ask the tough questions” or “set the agenda.” It attempts, with varying degrees of success, to make people laugh. That’s it.
I was going through my feeder this morning before it explodes. Yes, I’ve been neglecting it along with every other thing in my life (one being that I’m apparently not writing about politics often enough). I ran across this post by CityMama at MOMocrats … the one with Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin. After watching it, all I could think of was, “She’s Dan Quayle. With glasses and a gun.”
Then I thought, wait. I’ve got a photo I took of Quayle when he was veep wearing safety goggles … it’s gotta be around here somewhere. Don’t ask. Long story.
Alas, I was unable to find it. But I will … one of these days. It will make the comparison even better. He wore the original rimless glasses. If he only wore his hair in an updo …
The good news is that I found a story I wrote about my grandmother … one that’s been MIA for about 10 years. Score. Maybe y’all’ll wanna hear about that sometime.
As I was getting ready to write something about the book, I ran across Maloney’s July 29, 2008, appearance on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. At first, I thought I would just include it with other links, but the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.
Is it really funny that women get fired for lactating?
Here’s a quote from Maloney’s book.
I also heard numerous stories about difficulties in the workplace, including one woman whose male colleagues mooed outside the door as she expressed milk to take home and another woman being banished to do so in her car across the street from her office.
I didn’t laugh once while reading her book, but maybe I missed something. Exactly which issue that she wrote about was funny? Rape? Domestic violence? Burkas? Breast cancer? Or maybe prostitution? That link goes to a 2007 feature in Prism magazine, which Maloney reprinted on page 246 of her book and said it made the strongest case against sex trafficking she had ever seen.
Depictions of prostitution in the media and popular culture (including the movie Pretty Woman) can be grossly misleading, even glamorous. In fact, street prostitutes are typically trafficked, exploited, battered, and often force-fed drugs by slavemaster pimps. This series of mugshots of street prostitutes, which documents their first arrest to their eighth, illustrates the reality of life on the street, which more closely resembles a descent into hell than a Hollywood movie.
Is that funny? If not, I’m confused about why one of the first places she went to discuss her book was Comedy Central.
I’ve written about the blurred lines between celebrity and politics. It’s as if something has shifted. Instead of looking back as former government officials (elected or not), they now have to prove they don’t take themselves too seriously while they’re in office, no matter how “serious” the positions they hold. They have to prove that they get the joke. Hey, they’re even in on the joke because so many things that happen in Washington are, well, a joke. Is that it?
Maybe I just don’t get the whole Inside the Beltway atmosphere. Is it really just a non-stop college kegger where everyone has to hit the beer bong and slam shots until they puke their guts out to prove they can keep up?
Sigh.
Maloney’s book is a fairly comprehensive list of women’s issues — what’s been done, what’s been undone and what still needs to be done. For those who regularly keep up on these issues, not much of the information is new, but it’s interesting to read about the issues from Maloney’s perspective as a policymaker.
She put a “take-action guide” at the end of each chapter, providing contact information for some of the groups and organizations working on specific issues. Her goal is to convince readers to do something, anything: “I hope to persuade you that any action in support of your beliefs matters, whether it is large or small, brief or time-consuming, successful or unsuccessful.”
She included women’s personal stories as well as her own story and a wealth of information from other sources.
She also included some of her own research and highlighted inconsistencies between cultural myth and everyday reality.
Maloney mentioned Morgan Stanley, which settled a class-action sex-discrimination case for $54 million and then another one for $46 million, yet it consistently appears on Working Mother magazine’s 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list, a topic I have written about many times.
You might think that Morgan Stanley would work especially hard to eradicate sex discrimination after so costly [$54 million] an episode. But the firm settled another class action sex discrimination suit in 2007 for $46 million — bringing its overall sex discrimination price tag to an even $100 million. That sounds like a lot, but it only amounts to a few good days of trading.
Despite these incidents, Morgan Stanley has been cited numerous times by Working Mother magazine as one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers. That makes me wonder how bad things are at other companies.
While she pointed out the inconsistency of the companies that appear in Working Mother with their employment track record, she listed in the take-action guide the National Association for Female Executives, which might be a perfectly fine organization. But it falls under the umbrella of Working Mother Media, which publishes Working Mother magazine, whose 100 Best list is — well, let’s just say I’m highlyskeptical of the wholething.
She also gave this example.
If you drive your Mitsubishi to the airport after filling its tank at Sunoco, board a Boeing-built plane for a United Airlines flight, use your Verizon cell phone service to call your spouse before you take off, and then bite into a Krispy Kreme doughnut, you’ve just enriched six household-name companies that have settled or lost sex discrimination cases and lawsuits in recent years.
Right. At least one of those companies — Verizon — makes Working Mother magazine’s 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list year after year.
In the take-action guide at the end of the “Health Care That’s Always There” chapter, she recommended (among others) Dove’s Campain for Real Beauty as a way to “start health education early by teaching our young and teenaged girls about issues that affect them.” If you scratch the surface of Dove, you’ll find a wee bit of image manipulation of its own.
Unilever is the maker of Dove products (and major “research” funder), which are the basis for the Campaign for Real Beauty and its self-esteem education for young girls. Unilever also makes and markets Axe products, which exist in a parallel universe where the V.I.X.E.N.S. (Very Interactive Xtremely Entertaining Naughty Supermodels) and Bom Chicka Wah Wahs don’t have “real beauty” or self-esteem issues.
In “The Pretty Woman Myth” chapter, Maloney wrote about misleading portrayals of prostitution in popular culture and mentioned that the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2006 went to ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,'” whose lyrics include:
Wait I got a snow bunny, and a black girl too
You pay the right price and they’ll both do you
That’s the way the game goes, gotta keep it strictly pimpin
Gotta have my hustle tight, makin change off these women, yeah
I remember when that happened, thinking, what?!? There was George Clooney, smugly patting himself on the back for Hollywood being “out of touch” for “giving Hattie McDaniel an Oscar when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters.” That was in 1939. Just how long was it, dear George, until the next black person was so honored? That would be 1948, then 1964, then 1982, then 2002. And just how far has Hollywood come, George, by glorifying “the black man” … as a pimp, not to mention portraying women of all colors as simply a venue for making money? Hollywood’s out of touch, George. Ya think?
Which brings me back around to the Comedy Central appearance.
If it’s a matter of reaching a younger audience? C’mon, they deserve more credit than that. It’s not only “the kids” watching Comedy Central, and “the younger audience” is watching much more than just Comedy Central. And there are tons of young, vibrant, intelligent voices on the Internet. Dust off the mouse and start clicking.
Besides, there’s not a damn thing that’s funny about this book. Just like the issues Maloney discusses in the book — the media and popular-culture myths that harm the efforts to improve the lives of real people — Maloney’s Comedy Central appearance did nothing but belittle and mock some very serious societal issues. The people behind the stories about sex discrimination, prostitution and unacceptably high infant-mortality rates (to name just a few) deserve much more than to become the butt of a comedian’s joke.
Leslie Bennetts should activate the Photon Accelerator Annihilation Beam on the Continuum Transfunctioner, save the universe and deliver Breast Enhancement Necklaces to the world.
When she writes about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Katie Couric, for whom things — according to Bennetts — have gone wrong, they’re victims. Well-paid, well-heeled victims of the patriarchy that calls for Couric to display her “denuded gams” for her $15 million annual paycheck.
Bennetts says male pundits gleefully deconstruct the “twin debacles” of Clinton and Couric’s “front-page flame-outs,” and she knows exactly who’s at fault.
But there’s plenty of blame to go around, much of which belongs to the male advisors whose catastrophic advice helped steer both women to defeat.
Dude. Because prominent women are, like, totally incapable of making their own decisions.
Bennetts says Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid is a failure.
She will kick your ass. Or, as the Post would have you believe, she will shoot off your face, a la Susan Sarandon‘s Louise Sawyer. Yeah, the Post bobble-headed (yeah, that’s a verb … shut up) Clinton and Katie Couric on a Thelma & Louise publicity photo.
But who knows? Maybe Clinton will step down tomorrow, and I’ll eat my words.
Bennetts says Couric is “one of the toughest interviewers in television.”
At CBS, Couric was the $60 million talent, but the suits who run the network were the geniuses who decided that one of the toughest interviewers in television should be reduced to a nauseating female caricature whose main contribution to her new role was girlish fatuousness, despite the excruciatingly obvious fact that the primary job requirement was gravitas.
Dude. Did you see this interview with Clinton — the one where she asked, “Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?” Yeah. Whew! Tough as nails.
Bennetts says Couric was girly and leggy at the behest of the CBS guys writing her paycheck.
Dude. Because she was never, ever girly or leggy before joining CBS.
Bennetts talks about Manolo Blahnik shoes, an essential element of the Victim Uniform of American Female Failure.
Dude. Does a celebrity writer get a pair of Manolo Blahniks in the mail every time she mentions them?
When the ousted Dan Rather complained that his former broadcast had been “dumbed down and tarted up,” he wasn’t wrong, but nobody ever instructed him to insert cutesy comments about his kids between devastating news segments on the Iraq War, let alone to flash his shapely legs and a titillating glimpse of thigh for the cameras. America remains blessedly unfamiliar with the sight of Rather’s hairy pins — one shudders to think what they’d look like in Manolo Blahniks — but Couric’s denuded gams were accorded such prominence that the male honchos masterminding her show seemed to believe that sexy legs in stilettoes were all that viewers cared about.
Dude. Victims. Or … maybe they have better male advisers, eh?
And if blaming the patriarchy doesn’t work, Bennetts pulls out the “who’s the worst victim” card.
Lest anyone forget the proper role of women, there were helpful reminders from morons like the heckler shouting “Iron my shirts!” during a Clinton campaign appearance. No white males have yet been recorded yelling “Shine my shoes!” at an Obama event, but of course racism is offensive, whereas we’re supposed to laugh off even the most virulent sexism.
Dude. Because that’s how to eradicate sexism — by saying it’s worse than the racism a black presidential candidate (and an entire population of Americans) deals with every day. Because, you know, sexism can’t stand as an issue on its own. It has to climb on the back of racism to be seen and heard.
With friends like these, famous women scarcely need enemies. But there are more than enough of both to get the job done. And so the glass ceiling cracks a couple more well-coiffed heads, as effortlessly as if they were eggs.
Dude. With “journalists” like Bennetts, putting “prominent” women like Clinton and Couric in the “victim” sandbox, who needs a reason to get out of bed up in the morning? Quick. Someone get me a cosmopolitan and some pills. It’s women’s own fault. Because, as Bennetts said in her book, American women today have the most choices of women at any time in the history of the world. According to this article? Here are those choices.
1) Be stupid.
2) Be a victim.
So, Dude. Click your ruby-red high heels together and make a choice. If you pick the wrong one? Blame your male adviser.
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