A scary teaching story: “I am just as liberal as liberal gets in the Heartland, but I can’t be “out” about that — not completely — in front of a bunch of tuition-paying conservatives.” I feel that way only too often, too.
If Todd Akin du jour said that there are “legitimate and illegitimate ways of giving birth”, we’d eviscerate him. Yet when women say that, it’s perfectly OK. I feel disgusted right now.
Baby formula is just like AIDS! Or, at least, it is in the mind of some vile “lactactivists”: “Formula is a little bit like AIDS… Nobody actually dies from AIDS; what happens is AIDS destroys your immune system and then you just die of anything and that’s what happens with formula. It provides no antibodies.” On jerkwad compares being raped with having a child out of wedlock. Another says that formula is like AIDS. What is it with the freakazoids?
An autistic’s tips on surviving the first day of school.
Baby turtles are back!!! Impossible cuteness awaits you when you follow this link.
Mitt Romney’s funny biography in pictures. Brilliant!
“While the women of Christian patriarchy will joke amongst themselves about the helplessness of their husbands and how they are really the ones who keep it all together, it’s a joke that casts a shiny veneer over the uglier truth: that they are staff in their own households, and that if they stopped keeping it all together they would be replaceable.” It’s not just the Christian fundamentalists. Whenever you hear a group of women joke about their useless husbands, you need to know that there is some major compensation going on there. These women have given up something of value and now feel like idiots. The post starts out well but ends up dissolving in idiocy: “In patriarchy – Christian or otherwise – women are expected to be daily martyrs, to give up little pieces of their lives and their freedom over their lifetimes. Men, on the other hand, are allowed to keep their liberties in exchange for the vague risk that someday they might need to die (with great honor) to save someone else.” Yeah, because being the only person in the family who is responsible for paying the bills and feeding everybody is not a daily effort. Come on, men in patriarchal arrangements are as miserable as women.
Clint Eastwood’s discussion with an empty chair was not only ugly and embarrassing, it was also full of lies. I always really disliked Clint Eastwood and considered him to be grievously devoid of talent. It’s a mystery why so many people like his boring movies. All he films is infantile macho mythology.
A brilliant deconstruction of Ann Romney’s RNC speech.
And here is another deconstruction of the same speech: “The big thing seems to be to point out that women are necessary in their traditional roles for this particular economic and social system to work, and that to praise them for their traditional work suffices to keep them faithful to the GOP.” I think that in the light of the recent activities of the GOP, no speech of theirs addressed to women could have avoided being obnoxious. But this one was really really obnoxious, no matter who it came from. If Hillary Clinton gave that speech, I would have hated it, too. This idea of women constantly serving the needs of others and needing to be celebrated in that capacity bugs me.
“Pickert never minded that his son liked dressing in little girl’s clothes, but when his family moved from West Berlin to a small southern town in Germany, he learned that other people did. In fact, it became a “town wide issue,” according to Pickert.” Read how the father joined forces with his small son to combat the close-mindedness of the people in their village.
This article on how a bunch of rapists gets celebrated and protected by the criminal justice system and their pathetic excuses for parents will make your hair stand on end. I warn you, everybody, this is really horrifying.
Clarissa's Blog 
Thanks for the link love! I feel like a celebrity. 🙂
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You are welcome! I really identified with the story.
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Re formula: I was adopted, so had to be raised on formula. My immune system has always been fine and I never had more than the usual childhood colds, occasional flu, one bout of chicken pox in high school (before there was a vaccine). And I was born in 1963 so I was fed on primitive, before-the-internet formula. So there.
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I was formula-fed and my sister was breast-fed. Today, nobody would be able to find any difference in our health. This is why I find it so hard to comprehend all this brouhaha about breastfeeding.
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“If Todd Akin du jour said that there are “legitimate and illegitimate ways of giving birth”, we’d eviscerate him. Yet when women say that, it’s perfectly OK. I feel disgusted right now.”
At least the women quoted are talking about their own experiences of “not giving birth.”
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You know I read that thing of Ann Romney’s where she was trying to show she sympathized with poor people by telling us how she and Mitt in their early days had to eat dinner off an unfolded ironing board in their kitchen, and I thought “they had a kitchen large enough for two grown, not especially short people to sit down and eat dinner in.”
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This is precisely what I mean when I say that you can’t know what poverty is like unless you have actually experienced it.
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At the Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona blog, I wrote about the HOPE program, an option that allows some people to obtain hormonal contraception without first getting a pelvic exam (which may be a significant barrier to people who’ve been victims of sexual assault or abuse, for example).
And on my own blog, I wrote Vote for Me about my own waffling to nominate myself for a leadership position at school. I was concerned that I should “be humble” or whatever and nominate someone else — when really, if I think I’m the best person to do something, dammit, I should say I’m the best person to do something. 😀
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