Tag Archives: Obama

I don’t know who you are, but I just might hate you

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I got called out for not writing anything political in politically charged year, a politically charged month. Fair enough, I am mad as hell, and I know full well that I live in a bubble that shelters me from morons.

The obvious target of my hatred right now are the so-called undecided voters. But, like some of what is implied here in this article from The Week, I’m not sure that they exist. All of the focus groups and idiots getting their 15 seconds of fame on the news channels are probably just happy to wave at the cameras. Maybe a chunk of them won’t even bother to get off their fat asses and get to a polling place on Election Day, when they aren’t guaranteed any camera time.

Nope, I think my anger is mostly at the real, live, breathing, pearl-clutching, hyperventilating ladies of the GOP. I say “ladies,” because I hate that word and everything my women’s studies reading ever taught me about the coded meaning of it. Sit like a lady, act like a lady, be quiet like a lady, allow yourself to get stomped on like a lady. For a few women, the language sadly still fits.

Here’s the thing, my sisters, you folks out there rocking a cootch not a dick between your legs, this shit is real and Romney and Ryan do NOT have your back.

Abortion is a loaded term with all sorts of shit laid on it that has nothing to do with what it is. Normal women get abortions. In every layer of society, every historic period (and most certainly in prehistory), always and forever in mankind, just like there has always been sex and hookups, there have been unwanted pregnancies. Here’s some factual information from actual research: http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/women_who.html.

By all means, be against it in your own life. Help yourself, help your family, help your friends, help anyone you can work out what is best for them. Always remember, always, that the only way to really be able to do the right thing and make the right choices for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for whoever matters to you, is in a society where you are goddamned allowed to make a choice. And, in a society that recognizes your rights and supports your choices.

When weasels like Paul Ryan are about your business, when they want to put their noses in your uterus, and they really do want that, you have lost that choice. Keep weasels out of your vaginas, my sisters. It’s the right thing to do.

Oh, and while I’m ranting about weasels like Ryan, if you are a woman or a human being who doesn’t despise women (or children for that matter), you really should look up the bill he supported, the Sanctity of Human Life Act.

If life starts the moment of fertilization, that warm little instance when the sheets are still damp or the petri dish is still in the scientists hands, and we have laws weighing in on that instance, a lot of crazy shit happens in our modern world. Tagg Romney gets locked up for the criminal he is for participating in in vitro fertilization. Yup, we got contraband grandkids for Mitt and Ann.

And, any of us who have messed in the voodoo that is birth control pills, even if you did it to control migraines, acne, anemia or all sorts of hormonal things, you be committing a crime. A lot of pills work by giving the fertilized egg no place to call home and settle.

A real life thing that happened to me, which made me realize there are folks out there who truly don’t see eye-to-eye on this one. In my world of earning a living, I have to answer a phone from our company website. Where I work is involved in some huge human issues, and one of them involves women and health. That phone number on our webpage is a honeypot for attracting people with time to talk about the one issue that blows their skirts up; my job is pretty much only to answer the phone with respect.

So, an older, female, not unkind voice greets me on the line. Dare I say, a voice past the childbearing years. I am informed that the owner of the voice has read our website with great interest and in depth. It’s wonderful that we are doing good works around the world and helping poor people. I hear it in her voice, the wind up, the setting a snare, baiting the trap, she’s made calls before. She is kindly setting me up for what her real agenda is. Did I know that where I work is helping to kill babies?

The upshot was, as I good-naturedly took the hits knowing that there could be no victory in arguing against someone so strong in her convictions, she truly and absolutely believed distributing contraception is baby killing. She explained to me in detail how some contraception is a form of abortion, and it needs to be stopped.

At the end of the day this woman, who know doubt has a life and smiles gently and laughs with family and friends over sweetened iced tea and a good Sunday dinner, probably is not a monster. She wants to help babies and the world. I’m sure she wants to do right and good.

However, the rhetoric has gotten out of hand. The heat, the lies from cynical bastards who don’t really care about people, who themselves quell their best “Christian” impulses with back room deals guaranteeing good money for their investments, have taken hold.

They don’t want to protect Catholic women working at a Catholic university, as they claim because her religion is being attacked. They want to fight universal health care, because it cuts into the profit margin of pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

They don’t hate the birth control pill, because they so love the potential souls that never become babies. They hate it, because free women, able to make their own decisions on family planning, are an economic force with a voice, who will shake their status quo.

If they really cared about babies, if they really cared about women, if they really wanted equality, if they really wanted to help women in any way, they would support universal health care. Instead of vitriolic protests with photos of fetuses, hyped rhetoric and downright lies, they would support daycare centers, good, practical sexual education, preventive health care, women’s shelters, stronger laws and prosecution against human trafficking, domestic violence and child abuse.

If they supported women, the GOP would shut up their own kind, people like Rush Limbaugh. They would make sure their daughters grow up more like Libby Dole, giving them education, support and strength. They’d help get the word out that there are so many more choices beyond 16 and Pregnant, Teen Momor Honey-fucking-Boo Boo.

If you are a woman, vote. Vote for the people who have your back. Vote for the people who think you can make decisions for yourselves, and don’t try to construct a world where forced counseling and vaginal ultrasounds are for your own good.

Vote for the people who just might make a difference with equal pay. Or don’t need binders to know that there are qualified women.

Obama/Biden, ladies. Obama/Biden.

Asian prequel and burning out on Tuesday

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M.’s aunt, uncle and cousin from KL were back in the Bay Area. Whilst here, they stay with a high school friend of the uncle’s, in a typical suburban family house that is much like my big bro’s own playhouse. A drive from the big city, well-stocked, comfy and with all manner of entertainment.

They brought along another couple with whom they are partnering in a business, who hadn’t seen any of the sights.  So, we spent the weekend eating Asian food, talking about the business venture, sight-seeing and eating Asian food.

Here’s me, I believe looking like some kind of famous bridge docent:bridgetourists

M.’s taking the picture.  What this picture really needs is a bit of a visual intro, but I missed the shot while thinking about it rather than taking it.  You see, the Golden Gate bristles with tourists on any given weekend, and a large percentage of them are from areas east of Europe and west of the California cost.  However many countries there are in Asia, they be representing bridge-side.

And, there I was.

bikesunsetgoldengate

While driving up and down, up and down, up and down and over and across the San Francisco Bay quite a few times this weekend, I finally finished my ballot. 

We are heading out and away from the primaries on Friday to the other side of the globe, so we will be absentee voters in this race.  While the polls are reporting and the counting goes on, remember us as they talk about the millions of “absentee ballots,” now re-branded as vote-by-mail, not yet counted in Cali next Tuesday.

(Here, where people make programs and computers for a living, voting by mail is pretty dang popular.  Somewhere, somehow, tucking a piece of cardboard colored in with black or blue pen, licking it shut, stamping and tossing it into a blue box on the corner seems safer than using a newfangled machine that hackers have proved oh-so-compromise-able.)

M. has already been researching how we can tune into the crazy wacky fun of Super Tuesday.  (By the way, note to all TV talkers every-fucking-where, calling it “Super Duper Tuesday” just sounds so fucking indescribably lame. Please stop.)

We should be in Kuala Lumpur, but I’m not sure.  When the last polls close at 8 p.m. PST Tuesday, it should be 12 noon on Wednesday in Malaysia.  I’m confused, as I think we may already be hopping into his aunt and uncle’s minivan and driving from KL to Penang, because Super Tuesday will be Wednesday, the eve of the lunar new year, when the Chinese New Year-ing festivities shall commence.

Starting the new year and trying to monitor the primaries is likely to drive M. to distraction.  To say he’s wrapped up in the race would be an immense understatement.  He’s obsessed.

Somewhere in Malaysia, there will be at least one “Barack Obama ’08” t-shirt, and my man will be sporting it on his back.

Cumulatively, we’ve watched days of hours of minutes of eternities of coverage, swapped news links, youtube videos, blog postings, read most major news stories and finally did our ballots yesterday and mailed them off to the county.  I was undecided until minutes before envelope sealing.

In the end, I listened to the fire in the belly of our former president, William Jefferson Clinton.  His passion, his anger, his parsing of words, like “rolling the dice” and “fairy tale.”  And, I voted against his wife.

As much as I want to see a woman get ahead, I am fucking worn out and tired by all of the bullshit and lies and grandstanding.  We’ve been doing that for eight fucking destructive years.  It’s easy to believe that old Bill and Karl Rove are spiritual twins.

Oh, and, ah, feminist-wise, someone relying on both her husband’s old job and his current-day bullying, is, ah, not the kind of chick that does it for me. I mean, Phyllis Schlafly has a following and a career and ovaries, and I wouldn’t give her the time of day.

Like a whole lot of people I want to believe that maybe there is something else.  I want to think change could happen as Barry Crimmins, who hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid yet like me, wrote here. Caroline K. helped push me over the edge.  And today her uncle closed it.

I mean holy shit.  Ted Kennedy is speechifying all positive-like and forward thinking and inspirational.  There is something in the air.  Could be political shit, of course, but at the moment it’s smelling sweeter. Check this endorsement from the SF paper.

(Sorry to Dennis Kucinich.  I know you and I are kindred spirits, united on such things as policy and progressive ideals.  We were meant to be together, you and I.  Like a poor girl in a Dickensian drama, I went not with love but with strategy.  Barack has a chance of making history, Dennis, and selfishly I want to be a part.  Maybe we could each send him a pocket Constitution.)