Syndicate and Hague

Apparently, that girl reverts to all her obsessive behaviors. Worked all night, save the time I was on the phone with Megan. Installed the new WP and plotted future improvements to the site. Read and plotted grant applications for my real job. Tried to break away from the computer. Failed. Wondered if I wanted to incorporate Twitter in my blog.

I was also reading a bunch about salary negotiation/feminist finance type stuff and feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of saving for a down payment on a house. I know everyone says “do it now! it’s so cheap!” but those were the same lines I was being fed two years ago - “do it now! interest rates are so low!” And then everyone on the planet got foreclosed on. Hyperbolic, I know, but there are dozens and dozens of foreclosed/foreclosing homes in my neighborhood and you can feel the stress of it when you walk down the street.

Something I don’t really advise at night, now.

To those of you who read here, I know you’re not much of a commenting crowd. You often respond on Twitter or in person, depending, but what improvements do you want on the site? I could thread the comments, but won’t if people still don’t care to comment. I could pull in a twitter feed to keep some kind of content fresh.

I can anticipate topic areas this fall. Let’s have a preview, shall we? (Oh humor me, Megan will be back tomorrow and I won’t need you to put me to sleep at night again for a while. Let’s just talk a little longer.)

Things that will likely come up beginning in September:

• ruminations on technology in education
• bitching about how much I dislike the statistics class I just spent a billion dollars on books for
• thinking about the role of race in researchers and, by extension, the role of researchers in developing race
• election ‘08
• the old standbys of feminism, racism, and cool technology things and promoting my friends’ activities because they are awesome
• and of course - how googley-eyed I am over Megan

Yup. I think getting off teh interwebs is a good idea…

I’m getting bogged down in trying to improve my tag cloud.  Unfortunately, that “work” thing that I have to do takes precedence.  Dammit.

A moment, though, on my funny day yesterday.  Nothing pulls in the viewers like a little maniacal raging…but when there aren’t really any consequences, speaking your mind isn’t really a brave/innovative thing.  I doubt I’d have written a similarly vituperative post about the academic hand that feeds me–I can be critical, sure, but boy I was just furious yesterday!

That said, I think I was validly angry/annoyed/mortified…so nothing has really changed.

In completely unrelated news, Twin Cities citizens better get ready to hide because not only are the RNC and Ron Paulites coming to town, so is Ralph Nader. Sigh. My plan is to hide in my non-destination neighborhood and hope things don’t get explosive.

So I was at this thing today on the “mobile web” and, mostly, how to market to whom and blah blah blah. I often like going to more corporate-ish things because they tend to be light years ahead of Universities about conceptualizing and implementing ways of using technology. I’m pretty good at parsing the data and coming up with ideas based on the concepts, but less evil and more relevant to the work we do at the University.

Sometimes, however, I want to strangle presenters.

Look, I know advertising as a field is demonic. I do. This is a field in which you spend all your time thinking about how to sell people things that they:

• don’t need
• don’t want

“Oh, but Sara!” you might say if you’re in advertising and pretending what you do isn’t mostly evil, “we’re just giving people options/trying to tell them how to make their lives easier/no one is forcing anyone to buy anything.” Pshaw.

Here’s what set me off.

First, the keynote spoke–I have no inherent problem with what he was saying. He was really telling it like it is. People want to make money on mobile tech. Ad people are trying to figure out how to do that. It’s not really my scene and creeps me out a bit, but whatever.

But then this…this…ignorant, trifling woman gets up as part of a duo and repeatedly says horrific, offensive things that wound up causing me to blow the joint after she finished. (I couldn’t believe how much more I would want to strangle her by the end of the presentation).

It started with slides. Her point was to prove the pervasiveness of mobile. Fine. She called it (I paraphrase) the first truly democratized medium. I stifled a laugh. I mean, I think cell phones have done a lot of great things, but anything you have to pay a chunk of money for every month isn’t really “democratized,” and it’s not like the library has a bunch of cell phones lined up for free usage. Plus…we’re at an event that is centered around targeting and tailoring content to individuals and trying to find out as much as we can about people so that we can inundate them with messages to get them to buy things. C’mon.

As proof of her concept (yay mobile happy fun democratized equality!), she showed slides of people of varying races/nationalities using cell phones. Whoopee. It’s common knowledge to me, and probably to many of you, that cell phones really have revolutionized communication in a lot of areas that don’t have landline infrastructures. Poorer areas/countries and developing areas/countries have used mobile phones for some time now because throwing up cell towers is way cheaper than landline wiring a whole country.

Saying that isn’t offensive, because it’s true. Saying “and mobile phones have allowed people in places like Africa who didn’t have jobs to start businesses” (picture of a cell phone kiosk) is. Which was all kinds of ridiculous, but got worse. There was a photograph of a girl outside a small, circular house with a thatched roof in a pretty treeless, desert-looking area and she was holding up her phone. This girl lived in the country of Africa. You know, that country…the really big one…anyway, but the comment about that picture was something like “You see the funny house and clothes, but she looks just like a normal 13 year old with her phone.”

Because, you know, she was a normal kid with a phone.

Of course, the woman at the front probably doesn’t spend much time thinking of people in ways other than what demographics they happen to fall into and how she can sell things to them, but her assuredness and confidence in what she was saying made me ill. The utter elitism and exoticism and ugh. I was so angry that, when her next part of the presentation started, I just about lost it.

She started talking about the sectioned off demographics of cell phone usage. The first were “mobile moms.” Because, and I paraphrase, moms are really busy! they have to manage the family and their friends and they used to manage from the kitchen and hear about everyone’s goings on at the bfast/dinner table, but now everyone is busier and cell phones help mom feel like she’s there because she’s the ultimate multitasker blah blah blah blah. No mention of career. Lots of qualifications about “of course, not all moms are like this, but…”

And this (way way late, Sara) gets to what drove me away. Or, rather, what drove me to my bike and made me decide that reading through documents for tomorrow’s meeting was more important/interesting than being there.

Today’s multitasking mom? Is a creation of the ad industry. We can make choices. We can change how we live–buying less means you don’t have to make as much means you don’t have to work as much. Your kids don’t need $800 strollers or ten activities a week. They don’t need all their time scheduled. You don’t need to do it. You don’t need to look 30 when you’re 55. You just don’t.

And I had a revelation. It takes me a really long time to make decisions on purchases. But not on life. For instance, I decided it was what I wanted to do to move in with Megan, so I did it. I decided I should apply to grad school, so I did it. All of these major life decisions were quick and easy.

But trying to figure out what new cell phone I should buy? I’ve labored over the decision for eight months. It took me 2 years to figure out what kind of car I wanted to replace my crappy car with. And the reason is that I hate being marketed to. I’m filled with WANT from advertising, but there is a larger part of me that says waiiiit a minute, Sara. What do you need, what do you want, and where is the happy medium? Or, is there a happy medium? I’m not immune to impulse purchases, but I really try to fight the excess consumerism. As much as I can in this society.

Anyway, in honor of all that is evil and here to make women feel like crap, here are some great episodes of Sarah Haskins’ “Target Women” segments of Current TV.

“Feeding your fucking family”

Botox

Hey! Did you hear? Russia and Georgia are pretty much at war. There had been a build up of Russian troops in South Ossetia and then all hell broke loose. This is what the Georgian prez had to say about it:

Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, said Russia’s ambitions were even more extensive. He declared that Georgia was in a state of war, and said in an interview that Russia was planning to seize ports and an oil pipeline and to overthrow his government.
(NY Times)

Gosh, you might say, I don’t even know where Georgia is in relation to Russia! Well, I’m here to help with that.

Sadly, the U.S. has no moral authority to say anything the Russians need to take seriously. How can this not make you laugh?

The Bush administration said it would seek a resolution from the United Nations Security Council condemning Russian military actions in Georgia.
(NY Times)

UN Security Council, eh? Well. We’ve always cared so much about what they think.

As one top adviser described the argument, Mr. Bush must decide ”whether to go it alone or go to the U.N.” with one final if largely symbolic effort to force Mr. Hussein to re-admit arms inspectors, who left Iraq three and a half years ago.

…

Secretary General Kofi Annan seemed to confirm those fears at a news conference today in Botswana, when he said, ”The U.N. is not agitating for military action” against Iraq.

China and Russia, which both have veto power in the Security Council, oppose military action. France, which also holds a veto, has demanded a Security Council vote and has made it clear it would oppose military action without evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq.
(NY Times, 2002)

And now,

The Russians issued an ultimatum to Georgian forces to disarm or face attack, and proceeded to occupy government buildings there, the Georgians said.

And the South Ossetia conflict also appeared to have widened, with Georgia accusing Russia of capturing the town of Gori in central Georgia.
(BBC)

Sooooo…wait…I did promise to tell you why everyone should STFU about John Edwards, didn’t I? Yeah, that was kind of a bait and switch. But not really, because the lack of reporting (outside more “global” news outlets) on this conflict is partially because the news fucking sucks. They spend a ridiculous amount of time going over the details of Edwards’s affair, and nothing on a war breaking out.

But here are my thoughts about Edwards:

It was dumb. But is an affair really our business? My philosophy on sexual ‘improprieties’ is that if it’s personal, it’s your own business, but if you spend your days as a moral crusader trying to invade other peoples’ bedrooms, then it’s public business. I think it’s a bit melodramatic to say, as Andrea Mitchell did on Countdown on Friday, that Edwards’s public service career is over. And, by extension, Elizabeth Edwards’s.

Do you hear that? That is the sound of my eyes rolling so far into the back of my head that they snapped whatever attaches them to my body.

Did affairs affect the careers of John McCain (HuffPo, LA Times)? Newt Gingrich (See below? Did toe-tapping in a Minneapolis airport destroy Larry Craig? What about David Vitter going to a prostitute?

Nope. They hung onto office.

A taste of Gingrich’s affair:

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, “Let Our Family Represent Your Family.” (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair’s Gail Sheehy: “We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.’” Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.
(Washington Monthly)

How about the criminal behavior of other Republicans (Well, Vitter is in this group as well) Here’s a list from Kos. I’ll give you some highlights (links to sources are found on the page I just linked to).

• John Bolton: George W. Bush’s latest Ambassador to United Nations. Corroborated allegations that Mr. Bolton’s first wife, Christina Bolton, was forced to engage in group sex have not been refuted by the State Department.
• Robert Bauman, Republican congressman and anti-gay activist from Maryland, was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.
• Bob Barr, Republican Congressman from Georgia. Sponsored the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, saying “The flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society, the family unit.” Was married three times. Paid for his second wife’s abortion. Failed to pay child support to the children of his first two wives and while married to his third and present wife was photographed licking whipped cream off of strippers at his inaugural party.
• Jon Grunseth, Republican businessman and candidate for Minnesota governor, withdrew his candidacy after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter, and tried to grope one. “I’ve made some mistakes” he said.
• Newt Gingrich, Republican from Georgia, married three times. Gingrich campaign worker Anne Manning admitted that she gave Newt oral sex while he was still married to his first wife. Informed one wife he was filing for divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer treatments.
• Henry Hyde, Republican Congressman from Illinois, Judge who oversaw Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, prominent opponent of reproductive rights, who had an extramarital affair with a woman who was married and had three children, during the course of which she and her husband were divorced.
• Bob Livingston, former Congressman (R-La.), Speaker of the House; resigned from the House in the wake of revelations about his past adultery — at the same time he was leading calls for impeachment of President Clinton.
• Jeff Miller, (R-Cleveland), Senate Republican Caucus Chairman in Tennessee and the sponsor of Tennessee’s Marriage Protection act, getting divorced (as of April 2005) because of an affair he was having with an office aide. Miller described the Tennessee Marriage Protection Act as a means of preserving the sanctity of marriage. He opposed an amendment, however, which stated that “Adultery is deemed to be a threat to the institution of marriage and contrary to public policy in Tennessee.”
• John Peterson, Congressman (R-Pa), accused of sexual harassment and creation of a hostile work environment by six women. Peterson has refused to admit a crime, saying only “I may have been an excessive hugger.”
• Jim West, Spokane Mayor. Supported a bill, which failed, would have barred gays and lesbians from working in schools, day-care centers and some state agencies. Voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS. Proposed that “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person” among teens be criminalized. Had a sexual affair with an 18 year old boy.

And then there’s the stuff that crops up on a daily basis.

• Missouri state Rep. Scott Muschany, R-Frontenac, was indicted today in connection with a reported sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on May 17, the day after this year’s Legislative session ended.
• Yesterday afternoon, Allen was sentenced on a misdemeanor count of solicitation for prostitution (in lay terms: they done punished him for trying to blow that guy in the potty room).
• The complaint, filed by Clearfield police Chief Jeffrey Rhone and signed by [District Attorney] Shaw, accuses Walker of using his cell phone to videotape a former girlfriend in an intimate moment with another man on Aug. 25, 2007. The complaint also alleges that he had contact with her on two other occasions, despite being told by a police officer on Aug. 25 that he should avoid further contact and that charges were pending.

As I’m sure you could tell, I could go on and on and on and on and on.

All I’m saying is: I don’t care who the hell you sleep with unless you go around making homophobic statements/legislating things like Defense of Marriage Acts/trying to outlaw abortion/promoting abstinence-only education/acting like a puritan freak about sex.

By the way–have you heard there’s a war a-brewin?

Something the Bush administration has taught us is that you can lie through your teeth, doing the complete opposite of what you say, but if no one cares enough or bothers to check out what you’re saying, your lie is seen as truth.

It is the most supremely cynical of tactics and, sadly, it has worked an awful lot over the last eight years.

Jack and Jill Politics wrote today about a perfect, blatant example of this. Those of us who pay attention to politics know that John McCain not only didn’t support, but straight up opposed recognizing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a holiday. Their blog gives the highlights:

* FACT: McCain Supported Republican AZ Governor’s Decision To Rescind MLK Holiday.
* FACT: McCain Supported Gov. Evan Mecham’s Decision In 1987 To Rescind Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
* FACT: McCain Voted Against Creating Martin Luther King Holiday.
* FACT: In 1994, McCain Sided With Senator Jesse Helms and Voted To Eliminate Funding For Martin Luther King Commission.
* FACT: McCain Voted Against The Civil Rights Act Of 1990 FOUR Times.

The reason they bring this up is that McCain is lying about his record. Saying, in the video they post, that “I am proud of that record, from fighting for the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday in my state to sponsoring specific legislation that would prevent discrimination in any shape or form in America today.”

Liar. Liar, liar, liar, liar, liar. Heinous, egregious, horrible liar. This is only an example, though, of his lying. Last week, in fact, he said in a campaign event that he wouldn’t raise taxes, then on Stephanopolous said that, when negotiating Social Security, nothing is off the table, including increasing payroll taxes. It’s not even a flip flop, it’s a lie. Because - and be sure of this - next time he’s asked at a campaign event, he will go back to saying no taxes.

If you want citations on the MLK votes, you can Google them. I’m sick of him getting a free pass on his errors. I’m sick of his lies becoming truth. Not knowing the difference between Shia and Sunni, not knowing that the border between Pakistan and Iraq is another country (Iran), having the media continue pretending that he’s a moderate on things like abortion. He isn’t. I am sick. Of. It.

In light of my “rah rah gay marriage” posts over the last few months, I thought I’d point you to the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which takes up the social justice issues that marriage does not/should not solve and that we have a responsibility to address in our society.

Unlike those who decry advances in gay marriage because it means monogamy (it doesn’t if you don’t want it to) or because we should focus on other things first (nothing would ever happen if we looked at issues that way), the Alternatives to Marriage Project appears to have their collective heads screwed on straight. (Ha. So to speak.)

I’ll disclaim that a friend of mine just joined the board, so there you have that, but my friends are smart people…so…yeah.

From their website:

The Alternatives to Marriage Project is not against marriage. But we believe that unmarried relationships also deserve validation and support. People may be pressured to marry by their families, friends, and communities. They may also face marital status discrimination. We oppose this unfair treatment and advocate for the equal rights of unmarried people.

According to the 2000 Census, there are eleven million unmarried people living with an unmarried partner in the United States today, and this number has grown 72% in the last decade alone. Millions more people are not currently in relationships or do not live with their partner, and have no plans to marry. There are many reasons people choose not to get married. Some people, like same-sex couples and those in relationships of more than two people, are not legally allowed to marry.

The Alternatives to Marriage Project is open to everyone, including singles, couples, married people, people in relationships with more than two people, and people of all genders and sexual orientations. We welcome our married supporters, who are among the many friends, relatives, and allies of unmarried people.

Not to be crass, but seriously, all y’all libertarians and Republicans can go screw yourselves. Live on an island where you don’t care about the society you live in. Tear each other to pieces in some Lord of the Flies fantasyland where the strong survive and blah blah blah.

This is a note I might otherwise post on my Twitter feed. A 140 character WTF, but this is serious.

First, I’ll tell you why I’m beyond outraged. The Star Tribune wrote today that police and fire calls may start to be billed to the recipients of said services in Duluth.

Let me quote from the article:

Duluth city administrators are considering charging fees to property owners and drivers for police and fire responses.

City spokesman Jeff Papas says the amount of the fees haven’t been set yet.

If the Duluth City Council agrees to charge fees, it would then set an amount. The council could vote July 28.

Papas says the city is looking into whether it can charge different fees for residents and nonresidents. If so, fire and vehicle extraction fees would apply to everyone, but only nonresidents would pay to have accidents investigated.

Papas says the fees could bring in an extra $100,000 per year for the city facing a $4.5 million deficit.

Screed ahead.

If our economy/society is in such shambles that we can’t provide basic rescue and protection services to ourselves based on a shared pool of resources, we have a problem.

And here is the problem we face in general. Since the 1980s, certain members of our society have been reaping the tremendous benefits of deregulation, while society itself is cracking under the weight of economic and structural disrepair that has happened with the abandonment of checks and balances on the free market.

Laissez faire economic policy is a dumb idea. The fairy tale that what is good for “the market” is good for the society is preposterous. The current crisis with foreclosures is a fantastic example. “The market” drove up prices and encouraged greedy and corrupt mortgage brokers to get home buyers/refinancers to sign on with loans they had no perceivable way of paying off.

Why would they do this? Huge, huge commission. The bigger the “sale,” the bigger the haul. Lack of oversight and regulation allowed this to continue on a grand scale. There were home buyers/refinancers who made greedy/bad decisions, but if you read the personal stories that have been reported, some were just outright deceived.

Conned. Conned because a lot of people were making a lot of money.

And what happens to the people who really profited on this? They lose a tiny percentage of their ghastly wealth? That’s hardly punishment for hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes and the destruction that wreaks on neighborhoods.

But forget that. We could talk about deregulation of mining, all those cranes that keep crashing down and killing people, the airline industry.

Deregulation=no oversight. No oversight=no one to call you out on fraud.

And now we’re in a situation where a city in this great state, and this is a great state, is considering charging for basic rescue and protection.

Minnesota is not perfect, but we used to value our communities. We knew that in order to have a functional state with a good quality of life, you had to invest in the society. We are responsible for the quality of our communities and neighborhoods.

If there’s no money, raise taxes. Forget this “fee-based” Republican crap. We are a society. We stand together or else we will fall apart. Hardly any of us could afford as a single household to create the kind of life that we have when we combine our resources. It is beyond my personal comprehension that people can ignore this simple fact.

I could scream right now, I’m so frustrated. Our physical infrastructure is disintegrating, and now our rescue/protection infrastructure is something we might have to consider the cost of the charges against the benefits of getting help.

Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Raise the damned income tax. Taxes are your obligation to the society in which you live.

Know what’s worse than taxes? A society where no one is accountable. Make people pay for rescue/protection services and some will opt out. You’d better hope those people don’t live next door to you if it happens.

It’s not the story that grabbed me. The Star Tribune’s reporting has gone down the tubes along with their disappearing staff, but they did the semi-annual “boy, young people don’t have insurance a lot of the time and that sucks!’ piece. It’s here if you want to read it.

The thing that always does it is the damned comments. I don’t even know why I read them.

The sense of entitlement, which the commenters tend to reproach the young folks for, is actually squarely placed on their own shoulders. Saying “I didn’t have it, so I don’t know what you’re whining about,” or, worse, “they need to learn to budget for medical costs” makes my head spin. First off, just because the older of us had things a little harder (I think, for the record, that we sometimes invent how hard things were, but I digress) doesn’t mean that we should wish difficulty on those who follow us.

But secondly, and more importantly, when we talk about lacking insurance and the problems that causes, we’re talking about not having something that is the difference between financial solvency and disaster. You can’t budget for a crisis. You can’t budget for cancer treatments or a heart attack or a car accident.

But let’s get even more simplistic. The whole idea that has been pushed forward of late–of these Healthcare Savings Accounts (where you don’t have insurance, but “save” money that you use and bank up if you don’t use it) is an entirely wrong-headed way to look at public health.

If you look at healthcare as an individual choice of budgeting and responsibility, you’re missing the point. If Person A and Person B each have strep throat and Person A has healthcare and Person B does not, what exactly do you expect to happen?

Person A is going to go to the doctor, get incredibly low cost medication, and get over it.

Person B may go to the doctor, but they may not. If they don’t, Person B can infect Persons C, D, E, F, and G before they decide it’s time to spend the $100 or so on a doctor’s visit. Not even taking into consideration the possibility that there might be complications or secondary problems from the initial infection, Person B just cost our healthcare system money by infecting 5 people who otherwise wouldn’t have been infected.

When I first moved back to NYC as one of those young college grads with no NY health insurance and no full-time job with benefits, I got an ear infection. Because it didn’t hurt too much–just itched and popped, I mean, I knew I had an ear infection–I decided it would probably just go away. This went on for a few weeks. Then one day at work, I moved my jaw and had the most horrible pain in my ear. It was so bad I started to cry.

I finally decided that it was financially time–I’d been putting it off because I had no money and no full-time work–and went into the doctor’s office. I had to take the afternoon off work because the pain was so bad and thankfully got into see the doctor that afternoon.

He looked in my ear and found a severe and grotesque infection in my ear. Ever since then, whenever my allergies act up or I get a cold, there’s about a 30% chance I’m going to get an ear infection. Which means a trip to my doctor. Which means antibiotics. Because the insurance that I had was one with a high deductible, you had to weigh whether or not going to the doctor was worth the $100+ dollars you would inevitably spend.

Having good insurance now, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. I’d just go in. And you know what? Had I had the insurance I have now back then, I would have gone in and saved myself and my insurance companies the money from repeated trips to the doctor for this stupid, stupid ear that gets infected at the drop of a hat.

Prevention/immediate care is the most important part of healthcare. We still just don’t get it. And we’re wasting money on strep throats that end up in the ER and infections that start out simple, but wind up complicated. Wake up. It’s in our financial and moral best interests to find a way to cover everyone.

To those of you who have pointed out to me lately that my blog is lacking in its previous copiousness…you’re right. I have been a bad blogger, which is partly due to a hectic life, partly due to a newfound sleep schedule (seriously, wow!), and to Twitter.

Twitter has served me well during this mess of a Democratic primary and it has also served to mute the flow of blog postings because quick hits that might have wound up in my blog before now sit in 140 character form on my twitter feed. I will consider pulling the feed into the blog here, but that’s not going to happen right away. If you’d like to keep tabs on my quick and dirty comments about random things, you can find me at http://twitter.com/saralovesyou.

I’ve been feeling a little social-networked/Web 2.0′d out lately, as well as a little politicked out, which has resulted in sluggish blogging on my part.

All that said…

It is time for you to stop now, Geraldine Ferraro.

It’s actually time for all Clinton supporters to take a step back, breathe, and realize that it is over. Game. Over. Obama won, fair and square. He out-campaigned, out-finessed, and just plain old out did the Clinton campaign.

But them’s just the numbers. While I’m irritated by the Clinton campaign’s Rovian fuzzy math, I’m downright angry at Ferraro and other feminists of her generation who are not temporarily being, but showing themselves as flat out racist in the course of this election.

I actually heard a few days ago, and I will not repeat my source because I personally would be embarrassed to have anyone know I’d said such a thing, from an older woman who said that “In my opinion, Obama is just another white man.”

And here is a problem among many…the intention of that remark was that Obama is just as sexist and mistreats Clinton based on her gender as any other man with power (read: white man) has. But the implications of that remark run a much more troubling path.

I will be the first to argue that all men–men of color included–have access to ways of power/privilege in ways that women do not. This does not mean that they have it any “easier” or “better,” but that there are avenues of communication that are shared between them as men.

However, it is tragic that the same women who recognize male privilege don’t see the ways white women have access to ways of power/privilege in ways that men of color do not.

I just can’t bring myself to go over all the intricacies of this argument because I am So. Tired. of all of it. And all over these here Interwebs, there are people making headway into the very basic nature of both of my statements. Try Jack and Jill Politics or Feministing for a sample. In posts and comments you’ll see problems. You’ll also see compelling arguments.

I’m firmly situated behind Obama as a candidate, but I see his flaws. There’s a certain “chivalry” to his dealings with Clinton that have struck feminists as being condescending (pulling out her chair for her at the debate, for instance). More troubling about how he deals with women was when he called a reporter “sweetie” when she kept annoying him as TV reporters tend to do.

The women who came before me in particular had to deal with men casting them aside professionally, dismissing them, muting their interactions with endearments, and downplaying their intelligence and decision-making skills. This isn’t relegated to the past: just as we don’t live in a post-racist society, we don’t live in a post-misogyny society.

However, there is no argument for the racism of the white feminists in response to Obama. There just isn’t. He’s a compelling candidate in his own right. A candidate whose speeches inspire and whose ideas are based in a solid liberal philosophy. He’s a candidate who established a community-based campaign fueled by small donations from a broad base. He showed himself to be the better candidate. If he can organize this well in the general election, we will be handing McCain his ass on a platter. It will be beautiful.

Nonetheless. Clinton lost. Obama won. We need to move on from that, but we’ll be dwelling in the racial/gender divide for some time now. I hope it becomes productive.

*Note: I’m not super happy with this post because I’d like to dissect everything more. As I said, however, I’m so freakin tired of all this.

Just as I am sick of Tony Perkins and the bile of the Family Research Council that he runs, I am sick of the people on my side of the aisle who castigate the GLBT folks who have been working to win the right to get married because they see it as too normative.

Feministing highlighted an article off of Alternet by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore that just succeeded in irritating the hell out of me. I’m just going to paste the quotes in and dissect as we go. Have fun! If you get bored, check out this week’s Savage Love, in which Dan Savage reams some straight people who plan on getting married but are relationship idiots because Tony Perkins tormented him. (That’s all Perkins knows how to do.) Or you could watch Stephen Colbert undercut Perkins on The Colbert Report from last night. So those are your other options. On to me tormenting fellow lefties!

Sycamore begins by saying that she flat out doesn’t support gay marriage and, to illustrate why, says:

Gay marriage does nothing to address fundamental problems of inequality. What is needed is universal access to basic necessities like housing, health care, food, and the benefits now obtained through citizenship (like the right to stay in this country)…

Nope. It sure doesn’t address those things. When you start with sweeping expectations like that in an essay, it’s pretty impossible to argue. And yet…I continue.

Legalized gay marriage means only that certain people in a specific type of long-term, monogamous relationship sanctioned by a state contract might be able to access benefits. While marriage could confer inclusion under a spouse’s health-care policy, it does nothing to provide such a policy. Marriage might ensure hospital visitation rights, but not for anyone without a spouse. Marriage may allow for inheritance rights between spouses, but what if there is nothing to inherit?

Now, I hate to be nitpicky (no I don’t), but you don’t actually have to be monogamous–straight or gay–to get married. You just have to pick someone as primary partner. Other than that, there’s nothing Sycamore says here that is inherently wrong, but the inverse argument doesn’t really help. I mean, what if there is something to inherit? What if there is a health policy that can be provided? An argument that bases itself on absence isn’t very meaningful.

For a long time, queers have married straight friends for citizenship or health care, but this has never been enshrined as “progress.” The majority of queers — single or coupled (but not desiring marriage), monogamous or polyamorous, jobless or marginally employed — would remain excluded from the much-touted benefits of legalized gay marriage.

Dude. Marrying straight friends has been what is known as “working the system.” Of course it isn’t progress. It reaffirms the double standard of what relationships are worth. As for the “majority of queers” remaining excluded from marriage benefits…how is she coming up with what constitutes a majority? Who does she consider queer? I’m in no way saying that marriage is a saving grace for the queer community, but let’s stop throwing around vague quantitative terms. Give me numbers, even rounded ones. I’d also argue that jobless and marginally employed folks wouldn’t necessarily not benefit–especially if their spouses were employed…

And let’s not forget the history of marriage as a legal method for keeping property within specific dynasties (property that originally included women and slaves). In fact, marriage still exists as a central venue for spousal and child abuse — there’s a reason divorce is so popular, and suicide attempts among queer teens so prevalent.

Marriage=venue for abuse=queer teen suicide. The leaps in logic here, ignoring the complete lack of data correlating these things…just, wow. Queer teens are harassed, are a part of society where queer relationships are denigrated, and are made to feel alienated by the larger culture. This happens with/without married parents. Show me data that says that queer teen suicide is predominantly taking place in households with married parents and I’ll eat my words. But right now…dumping bad things into a paragraph together doesn’t make an argument.

Also? Bringing up the history of marriage? The Family Research Council does that too. Moving on.

In fact, the push for gay marriage has shifted advocacy away from essential services like HIV education, AIDS health care, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, and homeless care — all crucial needs for far more queers than marriage could ever be.

Agree/disagree. In the absence of the push for gay marriage, would these things be getting addressed better? I’m not entirely sure I buy that argument.

You know, I have a number of friends who have worked hard over the course of years and years to deal with domestic/sexual violence and the only constant I’ve seen in terms of funding is eternal crisis. There is never enough money, they are always overworked, severely underpaid, and stressed to an extraordinary point. Also, a lot of these things rely on grants in addition to private donation. Grants aren’t on the menu for marriage advocates, so that money isn’t even in the picture.

I can’t say for sure that resources aren’t being diverted, but I question whether a=b.

The spectacle around gay marriage draws attention away from critical issues — like ending U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, stopping massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country, and challenging the never-ending assault on anyone living outside of conventional norms.

True that. But I’m afraid that arguing that we’re doing ourselves a disservice by drawing attention to ourselves is defeatist. There will always be more “pressing” issues (homelessness, war, etc.) than exclusively queer rights. And I’m talking about more than marriage here. Someone will always be able to argue that something like war trumps civil rights. But just because you can make the argument doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

While many straight people are reaping the benefits of gay liberation and discovering new ways of loving, lusting for and caring for one another, the gay marriage movement is busy fighting for a 1950s model of white-picket fence “we’re just like you” normalcy. And that’s no reason to celebrate.

Oh, come on! That’s how it ends? The trite “if you want something they have, you’re vanilla and boring and not one of us” line? Ugh.

Look, whether or not marriage is personally something I want or not, I think it’s terribly presumptuous to ask queer/GLBT people to identify as transgressive. There’s nothing wrong with monogamy, there’s nothing wrong with having a primary partner if you sleep with more than one person, and there’s nothing wrong with consenting adults figuring out their relationships however they’d like. My problem is with any of us forcing our values on the others.

Marriage is not the solution, but in a society where the very question of whether or not GLBT people should be allowed into the club sends our entire society into a manic episode, it’s not something to be so easily dismissed.

Back when I had a customer service job and had to interact with random people when I was younger, I found that a fake wedding ring made my life a million times easier. If some idiot hit on me and I said I had a boyfriend, it didn’t even dent his game–if I said I was married, it was usually over. Despite the problems marriage has in our society, it still carries with it a level of respect for the relationship that you just don’t get otherwise. It’s a big deal, culturally, and to pretend that it and all the privilege it gets you are some minor irrelevancy in the face of Big Problems like homelessness, war, etc…well, that’s just naive. Or willfully ignorant.