After reading this article in Slate musing on why more Congressmen don’t use Twitter, I have to say that there are few things I would be less interested in reading half a dozen times a day than 140 characters worth of the fleeting thoughts of the members of the House of Representatives  or the arguably slightly saner people in the Senate.  Perhaps I’m unduly cynical, but I generally feel that a certain amount of filtering on political news is necessary to keep the battier stuff from driving you crazy.  Important points, please, not the latest on the Senator who sneezed while the leader of the opposition was making a key speech on the floor.  (The scandal!)

Twitter itself is designed to be the perfect medium for conveying the trivial.  There are people who can be poetic, meaningful in 140 characters, but not many.  I’d like to imagine that our legislators are better than the average person at this kind of thing, but frankly, we didn’t pick them for their concise force of expression, and it’s questionable whether we even picked them for their intelligence.  Do I care that Pete Hoekstra is having dinner in Grand Rapids today?  Uh, no.

Count me as another supporter for the continued existence of traditional media.  If someone is going to have to sort through that crap, by all means let it not be me.

‘Nuff said.  No money of mine is supporting her continued notoriety.  I know, it’s like watching an accident happening, but seriously.  Say no to funding her next attempt at the presidency.

Notice: This pig has not been vaccinated!

Everyone’s talking about the swine flu these days, it seems.  Whether it’s a discussion of the late vaccines, New York’s speculated defense because of the spring outbreak, or arguments over vaccination side effects, everyone seems to have an opinion.  On the Today show the other day, I heard the decision whether to get vaccinated for the swine flu referred to as “such a personal decision.”  Well, yes and no.  It’s personal in the sense that any medical care is personal, but in several meaningful ways, vaccines are less personal than any other medical decision you might make.  Vaccines aren’t just about you not getting sick — they’re about you not passing it on to other people who might also get sick.  Vaccines are about public health.

I know that lots of people aren’t planning to get the swine flu vaccine when it finally becomes available, and I think that dialog is frequently missing a key point.  Here it is: even if you’re not likely to die from the swine flu, you might come into contact with someone who is.  And sure, those people should be vaccinated, but let’s be real.  The vaccines are coming much later than anyone had hoped, and lots of people even in high risk categories haven’t had it yet.  Even when the vaccines are widely available (probably several months from now), there will be a few people who for one reason or another get missed.  And vaccines aren’t perfect.

read more »

Page Six is reporting:

THAT Sarah Palin‘s agents are seeking a beauty endorsement deal, pitching cosmetic companies to capitalize on her “lipstick on a pit bull” catchphrase.

For the love of all that is beauty, please let no one take her up on it.  But if someone has to, I’m willing to bet it’ll be Mary Kay Cosmetics – that brand makes a mint pandering to middle America, and this would be right up their ally.

Anyone who lives in New York or follows the national press on public health issues is probably aware that Mayor Bloomberg has been pushing a nutritional agenda whose primary method of implementation is to force New Yorkers to eat better whether they like it or not.  Recent measures have included banning the use of trans fats in restaurants and requiring chains to prominently post calorie counts for all of their foods.  His latest hobby horse has been pushing restaurants and manufacturers to reduce sodium levels in their foods.  Well, the New York Times today ran an article discussing Mayor Bloomberg’s own eating habits, which apparently include copiously salting pizza.  I can’t quite decide if this is hypocrisy, or if it just means that Bloomberg’s sense that New Yorkers needs the food police to watch them is based in his own need to have the food police watch him.

read more »

Carolina Herrera. Le sigh.

Like so many of my objects of lust, this dress is not something I would have regular use for in my actual life, but I’m still in love. There’s something so quintessentially ladylike about it — it makes me want to put on the perfect pump (I have just the ones) and put my hair in a French twist and be off to tea at the soon to be reopened Plaza. I may not follow “Mad Men” enough to know what happened at the end of last season, but even I am susceptible to a little faintly retro charm.  Would someone like to leave me a substantial fortune so that I can lead that life?

Note to the Cambridge Police: if you’re looking to avoid embarrassing publicity on the subject of racial profiling, do not arrest prominent African American Harvard racial-relations professors for attempting to get into their own houses.  This Thursday, Cambridge, Massachusetts, police arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, apparently for forcing the front door of his own home in broad daylight with the help of his chauffeur after the front door stuck.  (Gates apparently had already opened the back door with his key.)  According to the Washington Post, police said they received a report of two black men in backpacks breaking into the house from a neighbor. (Gates was wearing a blazer and leather shoes, and the “break-in” occurred shortly before 1 pm.)  Despite the fact that Gates apparently showed them both his driver’s license and his Harvard ID, they arrested Gates as soon as he stepped out onto the porch and hauled him away, causing a descent of other Harvard professors on the police station.  (Quite a mental image, isn’t it?)

Short of arresting Cornel West on his doorstep or trying to tackle the president, it’s hard to imagine a poorer choice of a black man to arrest from an embarrassment standpoint.  While I obviously don’t know how upset Gates became while trying to explain himself and get the first police officer’s name and badge number, it’s difficult to imagine how they could have felt very threatened by Gates in his own home, as he’s not a physically imposing man.  Gates is now saying that his experience has inspired him to make his next project a study of racial profiling in America.  The Cambridge police had better hope they don’t have any more embarrassing incidents before then!

As the week draws to a close and we come to grips with the horrific shooting at the Holocaust Museum, a letter in today’s Washington Post reminded me of the amazing capacity we as humans have to find meaning, inspiration and hope in the face of tragedy:

James W. von Brunn — racist, domestic terrorist and anti-Semite — never knew that when he and his then-wife sold their Lebanon, N.H., home in 1982, they sold it to a Jewish family.

The von Brunns had moved to Maryland before we looked at the house, and he was incarcerated when we bought it, imprisoned for attempting to hold hostage members of the Federal Reserve Board. When we moved in, we realized we’d bought it from an anti-Semite survivalist because he’d left behind several boxes of anti-Jewish books. We immediately added them to the trash.

Anyway, James W. von Brunn, we want you to know we took great pleasure in living there despite the hate-filled man who occupied it before we did. We celebrated Passover Seders, exchanged Hanukkah gifts and raised two wonderful Jewish children there.

GAIL CHADWICK

Wonderful, non? Irony is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

“Women are under the most stress at two times in their lives: when they are pregnant and don’t want to be, and when they want to be and can’t” – Dr. George Tiller

The Internet is already filled with saccharine, moving and poignant accounts of the doctor’s life (and, frankly, the exact opposite, as I unfortunately discovered as I was searching for a picture), so I’m not sure that adding one more blog post will accomplish anything.

Instead, I’ll just float out there the questions his murder has raised:

• Why is he referred to as an “abortion doctor,” rather than an OB/GYN?  He cared for women throughout their pregnancy, sometimes right up through termination.  This sort of rhetoric is precisely what appeals to/fuels the hatred of the lone wolf assholes who commit these crimes.
• Speaking of those lone wolf gunmen, I truly hope that Republican politicians who defended extreme right wing groups when they were rightly designated as “potential terrorist threats” (such as Operation Rescue, which has Dr. Tiller’s blood on its hands) by the DHS are – at the very least – moved to revisit their opinion.
• How in the hell is the pro-life stance even a Republican issue?  It doesn’t gel AT ALL with the party’s small government platform.  And even taking into consideration that many Christians feel that a fetus is a fully formed human being deserving of birth, why do Red States keep cutting post-birth medical care, insurance for kids, etc.?  It’s a completely irrational, incomprehensible party line.  And that’s before we factor birth control, insurance and abstinence education into it.

Finally, this site is absolutely the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read.

I unfortunately haven’t had opportunity to post much lately (damn work!) but I wanted to take a quick minute to bring this article to Femmeiniste’s attention.  This opinion piece in yesterday’s NY Times, entitled “Liberated and Unhappy”, comments that the many advances women have enjoyed over the last few decades – educational, social, financial – have not, it seems, brought them any greater happiness.

To quote:

“American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago … on some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.”

And yet:

“But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness … male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women. ”

read more »