Great Cartoon - Hillary's Useless Flag-Burning Amendment

Paper for Obama - "Bros Before Hos"

Total morons right here. Disgusting.

Notice they used that, but then put a grafittied note on top that said, "This is offensive."

Yeeeah - so why publish it??

Rapist Shows up Wearing Canival Mask

A woman put an ad on Craig's List to sell a baby stroller and ended up corresponding with a man online. He got her phone number (somehow), called to say that he was in crisis and asked if he could stay with her (he lived on St. Claude in New Orleans; she lived about 70 miles away in Covington).

He showed up in his Mardi Gras costume (so she couldn't see his face?) and forced her to use nitrous oxide and smoke marijuana with him. She escaped and got outside to use her cell phone to call police.

Here are the items the man had with him when police arrived:

When officers arrived, they found Goldstein in the residence wearing only trousers and bodypaint and with a bag full of whips, chains, a sex toy and handcuffs, West said. The officers also discovered a canister the victim said contained nitrous
oxide. She told police that they had smoked all of Goldstein's marijuana, West said.
West said the officer on the scene told him, "I opened the door and this Oompa-Loompa is standing there," referring to the brightly-colored characters from "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." While searching the mans car, they discovered its trunk was packed with hay and contained two hula hoops and another whip, West said. more

(Yes, the original article from "Da Paper" really did say "searching the mans car." I've given up writing to them demanding that they find a decent editor. Last time I got a snippy reply.)

Mardi Gras Justice

I shouldn't laugh at a bead injury, but I can't help it.

About halfway through, a rider was trying to toss some kids next to me a stuffed gator and I cruelly snatched it out of the air before they got it. As I looked to Romy for some sort of approval for my action, I was pelted in the face with a set of long pearls. I looked back at the rider who was scowling at me. Then he threw the kids another toy.
here

Next time I want a Muses shoe or a Zulu coconut, I want to be standing right next to Butterfingers Henderson:

I noticed that my catching wass off out there. I kept dropping throws. I felt like a Saints wide receiver.

Olbermann calls O'Reilly Out

1. John Edwards said that on the way to the Ninth Ward to make his withdrawal speech, he spoke to a homeless person.

2. Bill O'Reilly didn't believe there were homeless under a bridge in New Orleans.

3. Keith Olbermann sets the record straight, as only Olbermann can:

For the Love of the Game: Covering Up Rape to Win

"Via SAFER comes this stomach-turning story from the Seattle Times about the violent history of the University of Washington football team and the way that UW has worked to cover up their crimes for the sake of winning games."

read more digg story

Super Bowl - Frist and Carville Share a Coke

Okay, I thought this was funny:

Feminist Read

"Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them" by Dale Spender

I need to add a reading list to this blog at some point. There's just so much!

Female equity ombudsman gets lower pay

Sweden's new Equal Opportunities Ombudsman, who is a woman, is to receive a considerably lower salary than her predecessor, who was a man. One of the ombudsman's main tasks is to actively encourage employers to give equal pay to employees who perform the same tasks, regardless of gender or ethnicity, but she is getting 17 percent less.

read more digg story

Lower 9th has friend from Maine

Another angel:

The first time I saw Rick Prose, he was hammering on Roy Bradley s roof in the Lower 9th Ward. That was 11 months ago, when all he had in mind was helping Roy and his wife, Danielle, rebuild their house.

read more digg story

The Obama SuperBowl Ad

This was good:
video

Backstory of how Fox tried to avoid airing it here - yet another reason to hate Fox.

Political Wives

Sunday political blogging continues...

This article talks about Cindy McCain as a political liability because of her former addiction to painkillers, resulting from physical trauma and following a period of being constantly labelled a D.C. "trophy wife." I remember reading in Julia Thorne Kerry's books (on depression and on divorce) she talked about how life as a political wife was so unbearably phony. Looking back at photos of when she was on stage with John Kerry, Kitty Dukakis, and Michael Dukakis, she said, made her think "what lies our lives were, because there we were smiling and waving and I was so suicidal for so long and now I find out that back then Kitty was struggling with addiction."

I love the article's quote from McCain's first wife Carol about their divorce and John, then 43, falling for Cindy, then 25:

He was also still married to his first wife Carol, although the couple had recently separated. Carol later attributed the breakdown of the marriage to “John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again.”

Bill Kristol - "White Women are a Problem"

Kristol says only the Democratic establishment and white women are supporting Hillary Clinton. Says Kristol:

"White women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that." After fellow panelist Brit Hume responded, "Bill, for the record, I like white women," Kristol said, "I know, I shouldn't have said that." more at Media Matters

Roseanne Barr's Presidential Platform

I love it!

Triple teachers' and policemen's' pay and raise the bar accordingly.

Establish a union of the working poor with the Attorney General as their lawyer.

Replace Organized Religion with strict observance and enforcement of the Golden Rule during my first administration.

Foreign policy statement: "Hey, how's it going? We're your global neighbors. Here's our number if you need something."

Back our currency with yummy baked goods

Abolish the IRS

Birth control in the water supply for the the first two years of my administration.

All sewer and septic tank maintenance performed by convicted corporate criminals.

All medical testing performed on child molesters and animal abusers.

Minimum weight for supermodels: 140 lbs

Roseanne's blog

Sunday Presidential Politics

The L.A. Times reports that someone is doing push-polling for Hillary Clinton in California (I just typed "for the Clintons" and had to fix it; damn you Bill). I don't know that the Clinton campaign is behind it; it could be any sympathetic party trying to help her. Still, this kind of stuff may work in the short term but I think that it ultimately hurts the campaign it was meant to help. I heard a Louisiana pollster on local talk radio the other day talking about how reputable firms don't do push polling and how LA has laws requiring all pollsters to be registered with the state. He says other states need to do the same (geez, on how many subjects are we ever ahead of national trends?).

I just noticed that in the reader comments section on that article, someone suggests the Obama people could be behind the push polling just to make Hillary Clinton look bad. It isn't implausible. Karl Rove would do it. I just hope Democrats wouldn't.

I notice that the photo of Clinton used at that L.A. Times story is also an extremely unflattering one. There is, of course, precedent for news outlets using unflattering photos of candidates they don't favor. I remember some of John Kerry especially that were just the worst they could find, and on SmirkingChimp someone pointed out a few years ago that one could tell press opinion was finally turning against Bush because all the photos of him used in mainstream media were suddenly all bad photos. Still, in a culture in which a woman's looks are assumed to be the measure of her value and appeal, I find the tendency of some outlets to publish the harshest photos of her, with emphasis on her wrinkles (life trails), upsetting. Her looks shouldn't matter, but since they do, I just want to point out that I've met her and she's beautiful. I noticed that, since one of the things her misogynist critics like to do is paint her as a witch, as ugly.


There was an Obama rally in Los Angeles broadcast on C-Span just now. Onstage were Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy, and Michelle Obama. I turned the channel and found the show after Kennedy had already spoken, but I saw Oprah's remarks. I was uncomfortable with her comments about making her voting choice as a "free woman." I think I understand what she was trying to say, but something about the context in which she made the comment suggested to me a "postracial" or "postfeminist"/"postpatriarchal" conception of the culture in which we're voting. We are NOT postracial, nor are we postpatriarchal. The insistence that we are suggests, to me, either privilege or some willful reluctance to see the social and economic forces that conspire to constrain people's lives. We don't actually come to this election as "free women," Oprah. Yesterday on this blog, I wrote at length about "living while female" and what dealing with constant street harassment is like. When you think about that aspect of our lives alone - and there are many OTHER ways besides just street harassment that gender constricts our lives - it is clear that we are NOT free. Although I recognize that Oprah Winfrey certainly was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, that she worked damn hard and overcame racism, poverty, and abuse to get to where she is, hearing someone with the economic privilege she now has talk about being a "free woman" makes me cringe. Many, many women are just as smart as she and have worked just as hard as she and are still not economically privileged enough to rightly be pronounced "free." It just bothered me.

Michelle Obama's speech was much better. I really, really like her. Her speech was, as her others have been, about race and gender and class much more than her husband's are. I think that reflects the reality that if candidates discuss those things, they get accused of playing various "cards" and being divisive, so Barack Obama, like Hillary Clinton, is mostly forced to avoid those subjects. Michelle Obama, however, talks about growing up poor, not getting into Princeton because her test scores were too low, about Harvard saying they weren't sure she could handle their demanding program, about being the child of a disabled blue collar city employee and one of only two out of four siblings to go to college. She talks about racism, sexism, and classism and says, "See, I wasn't even supposed to be here." She says disadvantaged people know they have to be smarter and tougher and quicker. I appreciate that so much because few things annoy me more than the great American meritocracy myth. Michelle also talks a lot about women balancing their many roles. I like her so much. It makes me wonder why I can't vote for her. And it pisses me off that I don't see Hillary being as free to say the very same things. I bet Hillary would if it weren't such a guaranteed vote loser for the actual candidate. And I also worry that, should Obama get the nomination, there will come a time when the media or the Rethugs finally catch on to some of the wonderful radical stuff Michelle's been getting away with, as the lesser-known spouse of a primary candidate.

Maria Shriver decided, literally, at 7 this morning to make her way to the event in Los Angeles and endorse Obama (Barack, that is...damn!). It's interesting to see how this election cycle women have been speaking out as never before. Maya Angelou and Maxine Waters are for Hillary Clinton, but Toni Morrison and Oprah Winfrey are for Barrack Obama. Charlie Rangel may be for HC, but Alma Rangel is for BO. Within the original field of presidential wannabes, all of the female spouses have been incredibly accomplished and brilliant women (with the possible exception of Fred Thompson's wife; I was never able to get much sense of who she was, but maybe that was because of all the male-dominated media's salivating emphasis on her as a Hollywood actor's arm candy). John Edwards may have been "just fundamentally uncomfortable with gay marriage," but Elizabeth and daughter Cate let it be known that they didn't agree. Mitt Romney may be against reproductive choice for women, but Ann makes no secret of the fact that she has given time and money to Planned Parenthood. I love these women. I love it that they are speaking up. If this keeps up, maybe eventually we will get to actually have choices among multiple female candidates.

Marc Cooper on Obama, Hillary, and the clock running on Super Tuesday here.

Gary Hart on the Iraq war resolution vote and on saying you're sorry:

For those in the process of deciding between them for super Tuesday and beyond, they should be urged to consider this question very seriously. Those who decided to grant George W. Bush virtually unilateral authority to invade Iraq now must accept responsibility for its consequences. Votes have consequences. The consequences in Iraq are well over 30,000 American casualties [casualty: killed and wounded], possibly one million Iraqi deaths, and at least a trillion American tax dollars spent on restructuring (much wasteful and corrupted) and not spent on U.S. schools, hospitals, and infrastructure.

On issues such as this, it is not enough to say, We all make mistakes. One of the remaining candidates cannot even bring herself to say that. Why not, at least, say, The president misled me? Given how tragically wrong that vote was, such an admission would be at the very least a signal of humility, responsibility, wisdom, and character.
Consider these two questions when deciding how to vote on Tuesday and beyond: Why did Senator Clinton give George W. Bush the authority to invade Iraq; and why can she not bring herself to admit she was wrong? Regarding the first, she now says that she was only authorizing war as a last resort. Others who voted as she did and now admit error, including Senators Biden, Dodd, and Edwards, do not make that argument. They admit they were wrong. As to the second question, the plausible excuses are few: she still thinks it was right; she thinks the operation was mismanaged; she clings to the hope that this vote and continued support for it will serve her well with conservatives in a general election; she believes it is a symbol of "strength." more

I agree that the war vote remains extremely troubling. Still, Hart is a man, and the other candidates who have said they are sorry are men. What about the argument that it's almost impossible for a woman to stay successful in politics while voting against war and almost impossible for her to admit to a mistake? That's reality as patriarchy has made it. On the other hand, other women in Congress DID stand up against the war from the beginning. And then, back to the old first hand, those women have no chance of becoming president either; they were completely marginalized. In fact, as Susan Faludi's new book "Terror Dreams" shows, anti-war women were targeted for especially viscious criticism after 9/11 (shocker, I know).

More on the "prose versus poetry" theme here.

The "Yes We Can" video and its creator's story.

overt racism finally goes mainstream regarding Obama - it was just a matter of time

This article about the power of grassroots organizing in Obama's campaign points to a wonderful trend. I don't care who gets the support. I love the idea of an emerging power in grassroots organizing, finally! And turnout is up over 30% for Democrats, which is very exciting.

Mandy Grunwald tells a reporter from Britain's "Daily Telegraph" that she has an "I only speak to American journalists" policy. “I just have this, like, you know, it’s my job to talk to people who print papers in states where we have voters - don’t take it personally but I’m going to answer his question first,” she said. Mandy, what are you thinking? more here

Hillary on the Hallmark Channel tonight. I hear she's talking about domestic violence out there on the campaign trail and that her New York office is full of women employees who can, for instance, take an afternoon off to get a sick kid to the doctor without getting criticized for it. What a concept!

And, finally, the U.K.'s "Guardian" does a great job covering our presidential race. I was living in England when Michael Dukakis ran against Bush I, and the news we got there was so much better than the news in the States.

Collaborators

Collaborators are a heartbreaking and sometimes maddening aspect of oppression.

NoPornNorthampton reports the following:

Once the Mexican traffickers abduct or seduce the women and young girls, it's not other men who first indoctrinate them into sexual slavery but other women. The victims and officials I spoke to all emphasized this fact as crucial to the trafficking rings' success. ''Women are the principals,'' Caballero, the Mexican federal preventive police officer, told me. ''The victims are put under the influence of the mothers, who handle them and beat them. Then they give the girls to the men to beat and rape into submission.'' Traffickers understand that because women can more easily gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them. ''Men are the customers and controllers, but within most trafficking organizations themselves, women are the operators,'' Haugen says. ''Women are the ones who exert violent force and psychological torture...'' more

We know that where female genital mutilation is practiced, the procedure is almost always carried out by a woman (of course, we are told this is a sign that women want it done, believe in it - never mind the fact that marriage is the only available path to security for women in these cultures and that mutilated female genitals are the only genitals acceptable to prospective husbands).

Collaborators.

Then there's this woman. The article is from 2006, but I'm writing about it because there is so much material like this out there and it reminded me of the trafficking quote (above). Her name is Naomi Schaefer Riley. She's white, college educated, privileged, and writing for the Wall Street Journal. She says that the case of the New York City woman who went out drinking and was raped and killed by a bouncer shows that feminism has it wrong. We feminists are wrong to insist that women should be able to go where they want to, as men do, even alone. We're wrong to drink alcohol without a designated bodyguard, and if we do so, then our rapes or murders are our own damn fault. Feminists, she says, place emphasis only on trying to get men to quit raping (imagine!), rather than on getting women to "use their common sense" (translation: know your place and stay there - either at home or guarded by a man, and preferably both).

Now, readers may well assume that this advice is obvious and that no Duke coed would ever do what the stripper, by her own account, did: Upon finding 40 men at the party instead of the four for whom she agreed to "dance," she stayed and performed anyway. When the partygoers began shouting what she described as racial epithets and violent threats, she left but returned after an apology from a team member. A stripper with street smarts is apparently a Hollywood myth.

First of all, her insistence that "strippers" don't have street smarts shows how little she knows about the world of sexually exploited women. To paraphrase Riley, a woman hired by the WSJ with enough research smarts to learn about her subject before commenting is apparently a journalistic myth.

Second, Riley, like the boys in the mainstream media, refers to the woman as a "stripper." The woman was, in fact, a student, a student who was accepting payment for letting men use her body for entertainment so she could afford to stay in college. I'm sure that's why she stuck around even in a roomful of forty drunk white frat boys - not because she lacked street smarts but because she needed the cash and couldn't risk losing her job. As one might expect from a token woman columnist at the Wall Street Journal, her analysis of the (then alleged) Duke rape follows carefully the capitalist patriarchy's script, putting all burdens on the individual woman (even for her own harm!) and assuming a full and free range of choices without any analysis of how circumstances may restrict choice.

Feminists are always accused of hating men. Riley assumes that some men will always rape and insists that women adjust and limit our lives accordingly. Radical feminists, on the other hand, like men enough to insist that they can do better. We like men enough to demand their accountability because, as Andrea Dworkin said, we continue to have faith in their humanity.

Political Insensitivity

Obama advisor says Obama "doesn't go on t.v. and have crying fits" and that he "didn't just find his voice at age sixty." Only a man would fail to understand the extent to which voicelessness is an ongoing theme in women's lives, even those who have lived for more than sixty years. The Obama campaign has apologized and distanced itself from this guy. Good. The guy is still a jerk.

On the other hand, this representative of the New York chapter of N.O.W. who called a debate between Clinton, Edwards, and Obama a "verbal gang-bang" is also ridiculous. Come on. It's a debate. Hillary Clinton is tough enough to stand up for herself with those guys, and thank god! They did nothing that was in any way out of bounds and Marcia Pappas, you're making us all look foolish - feminists, women, serious followers of politics, debaters, and advocates for women against pornography, prostitution, and abuse of all kinds. Get a grip!

And then, there's this fun collection of weird recent statements by politicians and their advisers. Some are Freudian (when Romney says "my mother" and then realizes he meant his wife), some are scary (Huckabee says that in college they used to fry squirrels in popcorn poppers), some laughably faux-hip (McCain says he's trying to be sure he's, in his daughter Meghan's words, "keeping it real"). And I like the one where the Obama adviser says, "Polls are shit."

The View from Atop the Mardi Gras Floats

I've always wondered what it's like to be one of the people on the floats!

Pearls of Wisdom from a Parade Pro

A good article on the New Orleans phenomenon of Bead-flation

Also, this latest on the St. Rita's nursing home / Katrina story.

I didn't go to Krewe D'Etat last night. It's my favorite parade. I wish it were on a Saturday instead of a Friday, since that would make it easier for me to make it every year. I'm especially sorry I didn't make it since there were three parades in a row last night too (because of other parades having been rained out). Damn. Now I was debating whether to go to Endymion tonight (my daughter is a teenager and I guess she's decided parades aren't "cool"), but I just found out that the Go-Go's are in the parade. Okay, this child of the eighties can't resist!

Living While Female

Read this, please, please!

It's an entry at "The Burning Times" on "Street Harassment, Privilege, and Lies." The analysis is as good as it gets.

I'm going to add some of my own experiences, but I can add nothing to the analysis at "The Burning Times." Put me down for "ditto, what she said."

Women are living in a war zone.

Living while female means constant harassment, men approaching you and frightening you, touching you without permission, following you, strangers making demands of you, angrily bossing you in ways that they wouldn't dare with a man. It means your body is always available for public scrutiny and comment. It means you are walking along, lost in your own thoughts, wrapped in a thick winter coat and covered by a hat and scarf, and some men in a truck drive by and yell at you, scaring you and leaving your heart pounding long after they've driven away laughing. It means a man throwing water on you while you're jogging. It means a man yelling at you, "You'd better watch it, girl," when you're bicycling and forty years old and obviously no longer a girl. It means never, ever having the freedom to walk down the street, unmolested, safe, truly free and alone with your own thoughts. After all, isn't a woman alone merely a walking invitation for male intrusion of some sort?

It means that road rage escalates to a level that it does not with men (although - to the credit of New Orleans men - this doesn't happen in New Orleans, it happened to all the women I knew when I lived in Spokane). Living while female means that a man who is angered by a woman driver will follow her to a parking lot, will exit the vehicle to scream at her and will immediately stop and quietly slink away only when the woman's male lunch companion emerges from his vehicle (with another man present, she now belongs to that man, so the public aggression stops).

It means even when you're obviously underage, you will be followed and frightened and harassed and badgered for sex (meaning, "allowing something inside your body" kind of sex). It means grown men following you home from school, as you carry an armload full of schoolbooks, insisting that you accept a ride from them or even, sometimes, just outright demanding specific sexual acts ("come on, baby, you know you want to; I know you're not a virgin; come on baby..." - of course, if you're not a virgin, that means you're available to him now). It means one of them following you right to your driveway until your mother takes off down the road after him in her car, yelling, "Get back here, I'll kill you, you son of a bitch" and zipping around the city in a dangerous car chase while you stand in the driveway crying over her safety, feeling guilty that you caused the commotion and thinking that if your mother dies in a car wreck this day, it will be your fault. It means your mom saying she no longer believes in God, because if there were a God, it wouldn't be this difficult to keep three beloved daughters safe. It means three teenaged sisters having a peeping tom for two solid years, one who waits for their boyfriends to leave before immediately ringing the doorbell then running to the window and demanding "show me everything." It means the police can't do anything, for two years, and it only - finally - stops when a very large boyfriend in full military uniform chases the peeping tom down the alley with a piece of pipe.

It means being twelve years old and eating an ice cream cone in McDonald's with your elderly grandmother and having grown men at a nearby table saying to each other, "Mnmmm, God, I wish I was that ice cream cone." And when you don't respond, since, after all, you're blushing in front of your grandmother, the men just keep saying it louder and louder to make sure that you heard.

For a mother, it means walking down the street with a teenaged daughter and having mother and daughter treated like pieces of meat, men howling and hollering at both. It means a teenage daughter asking, "Mommy, what do they want?" What indeed!

It means you and your mother sitting in a coffee shop, teenage daughter and niece at their own table nearby. A man takes a table next to theirs, but on the other side of the glass storefront. He begins gesturing to the thirteen year old, flashing her a Post-It note on which he has written, "I (heart) you." He starts flashing his credit cards around, gesturing for her to come outside. She is frightened. The police interview her, but she feels guilty and thinks she did something wrong and is afraid of getting the guy in trouble.

Living while female means being in a state of constant alertness that burns up lots of emotional, spiritual, and physical energy before you even begin to gather your strength to compete with men at school and at work. It also means that the men around you are oddly oblivious to the fact that you live and function inside a war zone, while they function in the mythological great American meritocracy. Either men don't know or else they just refuse to see. Maybe they truly don't know, since that kind of blindness is a hallmark of privilege. Or maybe they refuse to see. After all, if more men had to get real about what the women they care about are dealing with, then they would also have to get real about the times when they have been the perpetrators - and who wants to have to examine their own privilege, without fear and with total commitment to justice?

Check out the link!

Tucker Carlson Can Only Imagine One Side of the Abortion Debate

(I'm paraphrasing here, but...)

On "Meet the Press" just now, E.J. Dionne said that each major political party kind of forces its candidates to become liars on the abortion issue. Neither side, Dionne said, puts its politicians in a position of being able to say, "You know, I do have ethical concerns about this possibly being the taking of a human life, but I am also unwilling to see abortion made illegal, with all that that would mean for women - especially in the first trimester."

Carlson's response was, "No, I think the pro-choice side can't allow for an argument that's that nuanced, because the pro-choice side can't allow that there might be a valid point to the argument that a human life is at stake."

Well, Tucker, what you left out is that neither can the right take a nuanced position that allows that there is a genuine ethical problem with utterly discounting women's right to autonomy. Once you, Tucker, admit that there are problems with your argument, you face questions about what it really means to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy (what am I, an autonomous human being or an incubator?); how much prison time are you willing to impose for a woman who illegally seeks an abortion; how many women dead from coat hanger abortions (WARNING: GRAPHIC) is an acceptable price to pay to ensure that all unwilling incubators carry their "unborn" to term?

That, Mr. Carlson, is a conversation in which your side can not afford to engage either.

Happy Mardi Gras

My favorite parade, Le Krewe D'Etat - because I love satire!
The 2007 program cover, program, and float list.
Deep Float on this year's satirical secrets

Slate: The Gardens That Care Forgot - How New Orleans Residents are Replanting Their Roots

The "Stop Porn Culture Conference"

It's hard to believe it's been a week since the conference, but it has, and I haven't blogged about it yet.

Thursday night, I didn't get any sleep and ended up driving all the way to Austin on no sleep - 460 miles. I left at four in the morning. The drive wasn't too bad. For some reason I was thinking I had never before driven that far in one day, but once I was on the way, I realized that Austin is very near Crawford, where I'd been for Camp Casey with Cindy Sheehan in 2005, so I must have driven that far on my own before.

Just outside Baton Rouge, my radio was picking up Catholic mass in French. Then over the Atchafalaya Basin and all the way to the Texas border, it was Cajun music. Finally, almost as if on que, I hit the Texas border and lost Cajun music but instead found some really cool Mexican music. What a country! Early lunch was at Waffle House.

I started getting really stressed driving through Houston and it took me a while to figure out that it wasn't just the traffic. I had, until last Friday, forgotten that my Katrina-week meanderings had led me through Houston. Some part of my brain, apparently, remembered quite clearly - that prehistoric part of the brain that hides yet stores trauma. So, driving through Houston was very distressing since, apparently, that part of my brain thinks that "driving through Houston" equals "holy shit, New Orleans is underwater." Saw an IKEA store, which we don't have in Louisiana, and decided to stop in on the way home.

I got to Austin about two hours early for the conference and managed to find my hotel in city traffic (hadn't thought about having to find my hotel AND read a map at the same time; I'm obviously used to having someone with me). I got to La Quinta (brand new, very nice hotel, nice breakfast included) and checked in. When I got to the room I realized it was the first time I'd ever had a hotel room to myself. I've shared rooms with the husband, the kidlet, and my mom before but this, finally, was MY OWN ROOM!

I managed to find the University of Texas, which is in the middle of downtown Austin. Obviously, the way to make sure a town's Main Street doesn't die out is to have a university in the heart of downtown - wow! Parking was a nightmare on Friday though. I ran into the drugstore and got a notebook (of course, I'd forgotten to bring anything to write on for a three day conference). I managed to find the conference room, which began with a "5" but was on the third floor (okay, New Orleanians don't generally think that the bottom floor will be level "3" because we don't have basements).

There were introductions all around. I had brought two king cakes from New Orleans and had to explain what they were. Apparently, many people were rather frightened by purple and green sugar - who knew? In fact, they seemed to find that even weirder than my warning about watching out for the plastic baby. I introduced myself and explained that I'd always been a feminist, had been raised to be a liberal feminist, but that years as a military wife had turned me into a radical feminist. Everybody laughed and nodded and someone said, "That'll do it."

Next was the slideshow about pornography, presented by Rebecca Whisnant. I'm going to stop here and write about the slideshow next time (have to get some sleep for Mardi Gras weekend).

John Kerry invitation

Well, I got this invitation to go hear a John Kerry speech - in Seattle! Apparently, team Kerry thinks I'm still in Washington State. I tried reregistering, but it recognized my email and said I already had an account. Damn

Dear Bill and Hillary

This - "Dear Bill and Hillary" - was written by Andrea Dworkin during the Clinton impeachment era. At the time, I was a defender of Bill Clinton. I was wrong. I'm sick of that guy.

This - "Are you Listening Hillary? President Rape is Who He Is" - came later.

Why So Many Feminists Are Deciding to Vote for Barack Obama

War Opponents Dispute Clinton Account of Levin Amendment

L.A. Times: Obama is a Poem

MoveOn Endorses Obama

Union That Endorsed Edwards Switches to Obama

Experts in Awe Over Obama Cash Flow

The one-month total for Mr. Obama, of Illinois, also shows the growing power of the Internet as a fund-raising tool. Veteran fund-raisers said it would have been impossible for the campaign to raise that sum by relying solely on well-heeled donors and “bundlers,” donors who tap networks of acquaintances for support.

“When you get $32 million in one month, it is not because you have bundlers working,” said Orin Kramer, a New York financier and Obama fund-raiser. “It is because you have an avalanche of small donors operating online. It’s a revolution. People like me don’t achieve those kinds of numbers.”

Why This Edwards Voter is Backing Obama

Type in your zip code and see who has donated to which candidate. Apparently I live in Romney country! Ewww!

Hot 8 Brass Band and other things NOLA

Great video:

Hattip to The Periphery.

Same blog has a wonderful piece about trying to figure out whatever the hell is the problem that the rest of the country has with us - they don't like our values, they imagine the place is a den of vice, they're racist, they don't like poor people - and what we might do about it:
here

Ashley Morris on when those crazy Vermonters threaten to seceed from the Union and why the same thing wouldn't work for us.

Honore has his say:

The gruff, cigar-chomping general who led federal troops in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is convinced that the United States hasn't learned its lesson from the storm.

As Lt. Gen. Russel Honore prepares to retire from the Army and hand over his command Friday, he says he wants to spend the rest of his life creating a "culture of preparedness" to prevent another post-disaster disaster.

"There's an attitude everywhere else that people are smarter than they are in New Orleans and in Mississippi. They're not," Honore, 60, said at his office at Fort Gillem outside Atlanta. "What happened in New Orleans could have happened anywhere on the eastern seaboard."

Also a blog that includes some interesting and kind commentary about relief work in New Orleans (hattip to Ashley Morris).

Officer Killed by Rapist was Eight Weeks Pregnant

Cotton, 24, was shot several times Monday morning with her own gun. Police said she approached Bernel Johnson, 44, of Kenner as he was sitting in a miniature strip mall parking lot in the 2100 block of Earhart Boulevard. At some point, Johnson allegedly attacked her, wrestled away her gun, and beat and shot her. She was pronounced dead a short while later.

The shooting shook the NOPD to its core. Cotton graduated from the first recruit class after Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Warren Easton High School and lived in eastern New Orleans.

more

Katrina and the Guiding Principles in Internal Displacement

The Institute for Southern Studies reports on "Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles in Internal Displacement."

A Global Human Rights Perspective on a National Disaster
January 2008

Hurricane Katrina was not only a domestic tragedy: The U.S. government's insufficient efforts to prevent families from being uprooted, its inadequate emergency response, and the still-lagging recovery are at odds with internationally recognized human rights principles that the Bush administration has promoted in other countries.

That's the finding of "Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement" (pdf), a new reportby the Institute for Southern Studies.

The report is the first in-depth look at how closely U.S. officials abided by the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement in the wake of Katrina. The United Nations adopted the Principles in 1998 to protect the rights of people uprooted by war, storms and other calamities.

"Leaders in Washington have embraced the U.N. Guiding Principles for helping disaster victims abroad," said Chris Kromm, co-author of the study and Institute director. "But there's serious concern that the Principles continue to be ignored at home in the Gulf Coast."

My Favorite New Orleans video

This shows - finally - what home means.

Norco plant billows smoke

Pay no attention to the black smoke coming from the refinery. It's perfectly safe!

Flaring at the Shell Chemical plant in Norco, caused by an instrument failure in the processing unit, sent heavy smoke Wednesday across St. Charles Parish for most of the day and was expected to continue this morning.

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Does a rapist deserve a military burial? - Los Angeles Times

Honoring a convicted sex predator who killed himself behind bars sends a chilling message to victims.

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