Category Archives: The Rest

Errrrything else.

One More Win in the Fight Against the War on Women™, in Arizona

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | 11 Comments

UPDATE:  BREAKING NEWS!!

Via @LbrlOkie77 on Twitter, an Oklahoma county judge struck down as unconstitutional the Oklahoma State-Sanctioned Rape aka Transvaginal Probe Law. It had been blocked temporarily, and now it’s permanently gone. Another win for #TeamUterati!

END OF UPDATE

We’re winning the fight against the War on Women™

Remember when I wrote about the two small victories in the fight against the War on Women™, one of them concerning the Right to Shame Employees as Sluts and Refuse to Pay for Their Contraception Bill in Arizona?  I said that even though Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko’s (R-Traitortoallwomenville) new version of the bill was still invasive and odious, the fact that she was rewriting it at all because of the national outcry over it was a small win for us.

I wrote that post assuming that the bill would pass, because, you know, it’s Arizona where it seemed as if no law is too punishing of women, LGBTQ, and undocumented workers.  This bill should have sailed right through the legislature, only to be signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer (R-Crazybittertown).

It didn’t.

Let me say that again.  The slut-shaming, protect-our-religious-freedoms, give-all-the-power-to-the-employers bill didn’t pass in Arizona.
(Click for more of that good news)

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Posted in asiangrrlMN, Body/Health Shenanigans, War on Women

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Huge correction re: Ehud Olmert & the Arab Peace Initiative.

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

For years now, I’ve written some version of the following words:

“All 22 members of the Arab League, including the Palestinian Authority, offered a comprehensive peace in exchange for a two state solution not once, but twice: in 2002 and 2007. Both times, Israel entirely ignored the offer.”

I wrote these words in good faith, but it turns out I was wrong. Wrong matters.

Late Monday night, while he was speaking to the annual J Street conference, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said this: “Those who say that Israel did not address itself to the Arab Peace Initiative do not speak the truth. Israel was prepared to negotiate within the framework of the Arab Peace Initiative.”

I took note but was busy transcribing the speech for a client, so couldn’t do anything at the moment. By the time Olmert was done, JTA’s Washington bureau chief Ron Kampeas had tweeted:

I tweeted back a question asking for clarification, and he very kindly obliged — and lo, it turns out that at the Annapolis Peace Conference in November 2007, then-Prime Minister Olmert said in his address:

I am familiar with the Arab peace initiative, which was born in Riyadh, affirmed in Beirut [in 2002] and recently reaffirmed by you in Riyadh. I value this initiative, acknowledge its importance and highly appreciate its contribution. I have no doubt that it will be referred to in the course of the negotiations between us and the Palestinian leadership.

So first of all: I was wrong.

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Posted in Emily L. Hauser, International Shenanigans

On The Hunger Games and general female badassery.

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | 9 Comments

We saw The Hunger Games on Sunday — and oh my God.

That’s kind of the sum total of my review, because, dudes: Oh my God! So good!

Sosososososo good!

Note: More images of badass women, after the jump. Jump, dudes! 

Ok, there could have been a few fewer hand-held close-ups — but mostly they worked. And ok, Gale should have somehow been given a few more minutes to establish just how close that relationship is. And I’m not sure Lenny Kravitz was really meant to act.

But other than that? OH MY GOD. (And come on come on, the 12 of you who are silly enough to have any Josh Hutcherson [Peeta] hate. He.was.perfect. Haterz to the left! Done).

Plus, bonus: We didn’t go on our own. We brought the boy (who got me into the books in the first place) and one of his closest friends — two seventh grade boys absolutely determined to see a girl with a bow kick some serious ass on opening weekend. They loved it. LOVED it. The boy’s one critique? “Jennifer Lawrence was great and everything – I just wish Katniss could have been even fiercer, somehow.”

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Posted in Emily L. Hauser, Kick Ass, Watch it!

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Lying to support Trayvon? No thanks, Larry

Posted on March 27, 2012 by | 79 Comments

I’ve gotten out of the habit of tuning in to evening cable news shows, but I flipped on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell last night in time to catch him dressing down Rene Stutzman, a reporter for The Orlando Sentinel who covered the leak of George Zimmerman’s statement to police.

For more coverage of the Trayvon Martin case, here’s a link to all Angry Black Lady posts with that tag.

I was astonished as O’Donnell began to ream Stutzman, apparently quoting her story in the Sentinel.

O’DONNELL: Rene, I want to ask you about some lines in your story today that are presented as fact, and I don’t understand why they’re presented as fact. You say, “Zimmerman was on his way to the grocery store when he spotted Trayvon walking through his gated community.” Now, others have said that he was on a community watch thing. You don’t say that Zimmerman says that. You don’t say that police told you that. You just report it as fact as if you know exactly what Zimmerman was doing. You don’t know that.

STUTZMAN: I think you’re misreading the story –

O’DONNELL: No, I’m reading –

STUTZMAN: — High in the story, it says –

O’DONNELL: — I’m going to quote you again. “Zimmerman was on his way to the grocery store when he spotted Trayvon walking through his gated community.” You don’t attribute that to anyone, except your own knowledge.

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Posted in Criminally Stupid, Do The Right Thing, Ian Boudreau

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Romney: Voters wouldn’t elect me if they knew my plan

Posted on March 27, 2012 by | 11 Comments

Mitt Romney won’t explain to the American people what he would do if he were elected president.

Odd though that may sound—especially considering that presidential campaigns are designed specifically to inform voters of such plans—the strategy actually aligns quite well with Romney’s “emotion-free crisis management” style.

Romney isn’t the most likeable candidate to run for the presidency, and his campaign’s intention to swap out the conservative talking points for the more moderate middle ground rhetoric once the general election begins, as his chief campaign advisor forewarned, isn’t likely to boost his popularity among the GOP base. So in order to alleviate the nation’s continued ambivalence toward Mr. Etch-a-Sketch, Romney has announced a plan to…not announce his plans. The thinking behind this, I believe, is that if nobody knows what he’d do as president, he might have a chance of becoming one!

Jonathan Chait of New York magazine has the story:

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Posted in Magic Underpants, Nicholas Wilbur, Obama 2012: Yes We Will!

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On the West Bank, Israel does whatever it wants.

Posted on March 27, 2012 by | Leave a comment

In Monday’s HaAretz, leading Israeli political columnist (and national treasure) Akiva Eldar wrote about a dicey Palestinian decision to call on the UN to investigate Israel’s West Bank settlements (about which I wrote here, if you’re looking for a brief primer) — his point boiled down to: Such a gambit is simply not likely to pay off for the Palestinians, and then what?

However, on his way to making that point, he also happened to sum up, almost incidentally, the last decade or more of Israeli behavior on the West Bank, which in turn boils down to: They do whatever the hell they want, no matter what.

To wit:

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Posted in Emily L. Hauser, International Shenanigans

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Obama tries to end Big Oil subsidies. Will the GOP let him?

Posted on March 27, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Subsidizing hugely profitable companies is a good idea why again?

President Obama is leading the charge on ending taxpayer subsidies to the massively profitable oil companies. This week, the Senate voted in a procedural vote on Senate bill 2204, the Repeal Big Oil Subsidies Act, to do just that. The vote was a lopsided 92-4 but that’s not because Senate Republicans actually want to end these subsidies. It’s because, for some reason, they think this is a winning issue for them and that it will go down in flames in the end while making the Obama administration look bad in light of rising gas prices.

The Obama administration smartly disagrees. They want to have this national conversation. Why? Because rising gas prices are tracking corporate profits quite nicely as it turns out. In other words, the only ones taking a hit on the rising cost of oil are consumers, not the oil companies.
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Posted in Do The Right Thing, Eclectablog, Read Me!

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Splitting The Coalition: The Game Plan

Posted on March 27, 2012 by | 9 Comments

It’s a NOM bombshell: splitting the “blacks and gays” was the plan all along.

I got some push back last week when I laid out the case that African-Americans were unfairly being singled out for being anti-gay bigots and for being responsible for passing Prop 8.  Turns out that the notion of trying to split African-Americans and black pastors and chuch-goers especially from the LBGT community is literally in playbook for the actual bigots at NOM.

Late yesterday, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights group, obtained “internal NOM documents” that were part of an ongoing investigation by the State of Maine into financial activities by the organization. NOM apparently fought hard to keep those documents sealed, and in reading portions of one of the documents (a 34-page document entitled “The National Strategy for Winning the Marriage Battle”) we understand why. Not only has this organization used ham-fisted approaches to attack the LGBT community, but there’s textual evidence that they aren’t afraid to use a ham-fisted approach to court black and Latino communities.

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Posted in Do The Right Thing, LGBTQ Shenanigans, Read Me!, Teabilly and GOP Mendacity, Zandar

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Oil Discovered in Kenya.

Posted on March 26, 2012 by | 7 Comments

They’ve found the oil reserves in Kenya.  I repeat, they found the oil reserves in Kenya.  Commencing emergency shutdown in

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – The president of Kenya says that oil has been discovered for the first time in his East Africa nation.

The wingnuts just creamed their collective twinkie.

[via New Fuelist]

[cross-posted at ABLC]

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Posted in Balloon Juice Cross-Posts, What the Crap!?

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