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Caturday Reads: A cure to PAD*

Posted: October 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Food, GLBT Rights, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, Human Rights, Mental Health, morning reads, Political Affective Disorder, Politics as Usual, unemployment, Women's Rights |61 Comments

Friday Night Ohana: my kittos, Lily and Rue, last night having “facetime” that defies the space-time continuum… the dog on my Macbook Air is my angeldog on the other side, Callie. The kittos are resting on my foot (under the covers).

Morning, news junkies… it’s been awhile, so welcome back to Caturday!

Please Note: *PAD=Political Affective Disorder.

So, I’d like to start by getting some election season political ranting out of the way as a housekeeping matter. I hope y’all don’t hate me after this, but here goes:

  1. Can we just take it as a given that Republican pols are generally very skeery people with skeery politics and lying faces (Exhibits A-Z: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan)? Obviously. Especially to a more liberal (and correctly so, in my liberal opinion) crowd such as Sky Dancing. But, I am kind of tired of this being used as a reason itself to vote for Oprecious, as if he is not guilty of being kinda “skeery moderate Repub” himself on more than a few issues, frankly. Just me personally, ok? I understand this is a stinky lesser of evils game and everybody just tries to make the best decision they can where their voting and advocacy is concerned in an election year. So I’m not judging or pointing any fingers here, but I am asking if maybe we could try to elevate the conversation that is going on *elsewhere* in the blogosphere and offline. I think there are plenty valid reasons to vote *for* Obama (as opposed to *only* against Rom/Ry)–I’m voting FOR O too (and against R/R for that matter), albeit, begrudgingly, and I’ll be glad to devoting a post or three to making that case in the days ahead. But, I’m not going to chalk it up to Dems being saviors, while the GOP is satanic. I mean, they are kinda satanic 😉 but, it’s not a compelling argument (to little ol’ me anyway)! Because while upwards of 99% of Republican pols scare the bejeebers out of me, upwards of 90% of pols that claim to be Democrats scare me as well. They’re almost all owned by the Oligarchy/Wall Street/War Party. Even Bill and Hillary, much as I love ’em, are working within that system, not outside of it. To improve the system, of course, but nonetheless they are part of it.
  2. I think it is really remarkable that the first time I’ve ever heard so-called Mr. Economy Romney say anything remotely (note: I am not saying fully, just remotely…) intelligible on the economy was yesterday when he pointed out that the job numbers don’t include people who have stopped looking for work. Well, gee, golly, were you just born yesterday, Mr. Romney? Of course, Mittens only said this because all his usual trickle down lies wouldn’t have served his case and telling the semi-truth (see The Note’s Zunaira Zaki and her Fact-Checking Mitt Romney Job Claims) here was actually beneficial to him. And, worse it was compounded by his general inability to make sense on the economy and his wingnut surrogates and their bizarro world conspiracies. The truth is, both the ostensible “left” and “right” made me tune out yesterday with their reaction to the unemployment stats. Neither side cares about unemployed people, period. It’s all tribal and it’s all my guy rulez, your guy droolz.
  3. It reminds me of Hillary saying, “And, some people think elections are a game, they think it’s like who’s up or who’s down…it’s about our country, it’s about our kids futures…and it’s really about all of us together.”
  4. Here’s your Lazy Persons, Sununu: Almost 2,400 Millionaires Pocketed Unemployment Benefits (h/t Delphyne)

Alrighty, now that I’ve gotten those doozies out of the way. Are you still with me? I hope so… ’cause I’ve got a few links and discussion for you that I hope bring some relief for you during this political season of suck.

First up… Paticheri: Ethno,Graphic.Food. Go read it. It’s AWESOME. I’ve linked you to the post I’m currently savoring (“A Taste of Salt: Marakkanam, Bar Nuts, and Roasted Tomatoes”) and that I left comments on. It is an incredible trip that will take you around the world on a grain of NaCl!

This next one is a gem of a youtube that I am very very narcissistically proud of myself for digging up this week (go me and my googling abilities!)…

“This Little Light of Mine” was my absolute favorite song in choir as a kid (back when I used to sing…shhhhh! 😉

I love this song even more as an adult and being able to appreciate all the history of human resilience behind it. And, of course it’s a youtube of the wonderful Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Lizz Wright, and Toshi Reagon singing from Harlem… what is not to love?

Another DIVINE youtube (which I snagged from the delectable Owl Report on facebook last week) of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, France 1960. BEHOLD the wonder:

Next up, a reminder to check out PBS Independent Lens’ “Half the Sky” while its up (till October 9th) if you haven’t already… Part 1… Part 2:

A couple more links…

Happy News about an Unhappy (Degaying…) Practice…via Joyce Arnold’s Queer Talk over at Taylor Marsh’s: New California Law Bans ‘Conversion’ Therapy. Please check it out! Hopefully this is the start of a trend, and eventually kids will be talking about these conversion ‘therapies’ in school the way they now talk about Jim Crow.

I’d like to end with a really wonderful blog by my friend, Marie–a young woman who is so gorgeously candid in her recovery! This is a personal request to check it out and help spread the word to any young (or really, any-aged!) people you know suffering from eating disorders and/or addiction.

Alright, the comments are yours to soapbox all over, Sky Dancers. Make it worth it — and, have a lovely autumn weekend!

61 Comments on “Caturday Reads: A cure to PAD*”

  1. Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
    October 6, 2012 at 4:03 am

    Reblogged this on Let Them Listen.

  2. Sweet Sue says:
    October 6, 2012 at 6:03 am

    Great to see you, Mona, and your girls are getting so big.
    I agree with all that you say but I cannot bring myself to vote for Obama, again.
    It’s hard to believe that in 2012, our choices boil down to shit sandwich A with mayo or shit sandwich B with mustard.
    This year, I’m voting green.

    • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
      October 6, 2012 at 10:47 am

      I’m tempted to vote Jill Stein… but I just can’t stand the thought of exPOTUS Obama on the golf trail while we’re stuck with Romney-Ryan and the accelerated dismantling of FDR/LBJ social policy legacy. 😉

      • dakinikat says:
        October 6, 2012 at 1:39 pm

        The only thing i am voting for is the end to the republican reign of terror. I want their entire fascist agenda in the crapper! We are too close to the atwood scenario now.

        • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
          October 6, 2012 at 2:28 pm

          I hear ya Kat, but is Grand Bargain Obama really going to bring an end to anything? I feel like its just a slower suicide for us with O,..and with Rom/Ry it’s like a much more fast acting/catalyzed homicide.

          • dakinikat says:
            October 6, 2012 at 2:32 pm

            I am trying to focus on what got done the last few months before Boehner’s boyz got in. Too bad dems don’t act like that all the time. They scurried to make progress for all kinds of folks at that time.

    • janey says:
      October 6, 2012 at 4:35 pm

      Sometimes elections are just that- the choice between two lesser evils. We have to put more dems in the House and Senate, then we get a real result when we have a dem president. Obama could not get much done because of the tea partiers etc in the Congress. I, too, am disappointed with his failure to leave Afghanistan/ Iraq the moment he got into office but when you have a huge majority of congress that voted to go into the war, your hands are kind of tied. We were also disappointed when LBJ let Vietnam develop, and you remember what happened there. War will always be a driving force until a lot of people stand up and scream before it happens.

  3. bostonboomer says:
    October 6, 2012 at 7:49 am

    Funny piece on the Mitt Romney who showed up for the debate after the “severely conservative” Mitt Romney cancelled: The Multitudinous Mitt.

    Barack Obama had a tough time in the debate because he was told he would be debating Mitt Romney, a self-described “severely conservative” Republican who rails against regulation, promises huge tax cuts and has no use for Washington’s meddling in private businesses like health insurance. But Mitt Romney had to cancel.

    Instead the president found himself facing a last-minute replacement named Mitt Romney, a bipartisan-minded compromiser who says, “You can’t have a free market without regulation,” vows not to accept any tax cut that would increase the deficit and wants to tell insurance companies whom to insure.

    Obama wrote a book called “The Audacity of Hope.” But until Wednesday, he never knew the meaning of audacity. Romney left Obama looking like a nearsighted farmer chasing a greased pig in a dark barn.

    Reciting his five-point economic plan, the GOP nominee said, “No. 4, get us to a balanced budget.” He grieved over chronic deficits: “I think it’s, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in.”

    But there’s that other Romney. His website page on spending omits any promise or plan to eliminate the deficit. Elsewhere, he has said he would balance the budget in eight to 10 years — by which time it will be someone else’s problem.

  4. JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
    October 6, 2012 at 8:45 am

    Great to wake up and see you again on a Sat. morning post. Off to read the cures for PAD…I thought you might find this interesting: Gender Stereotypes: Both Sexes Are Biased Against Women | TIME Ideas | TIME.com

    • ecocatwoman says:
      October 6, 2012 at 10:31 am

      Interesting article. I think it’s true for the most part, but the conclusion seemed opposite to the premise. Why favor men over women if our “tribal roots” precluded choices based on the relative danger the person presented? Anyway, has anyone clicked on the test link? I did & received a moderate implicit preference for white people. I wasn’t terribly surprised because of my age (no black history taught in school) & I am white living in a racist world. I would love to see a breakdown of the results by age, gender, education, location, religious affiliation, political affiliation & race.

      Am I weird for liking online tests?

  5. Pilgrim says:
    October 6, 2012 at 8:52 am

    Thanks for your post, Wonk. Your point about seeking to elevate the tone of the conversation is one I appreciate. I do feel that it is one you reinforce by your example. It is always good to light one candle, the shining of which blesses rather than curses.

  6. ecocatwoman says:
    October 6, 2012 at 8:59 am

    Oh my goodness but you’ve been gone a LONG time. The girlz are grown! Still precious, but no longer baby kitties.

    I’m with you Mona on O vs R, although depending on the day/circumstances I either voting for O or against R. R/R & the slobbering christofascist neocons behind him scare the living $hit out of me. The Constitution is an amazing document but what corporations/plutocrats & greed have done to & with it is dispiriting. We the People are f’ed. When Scalia & Thomas can call themselves strict constructionists, I know there is no god. If there were then both would have been reduced to ashes by a hail of lightning bolts long ago.

    I’ve been saying for years that Obama is a moderate Republican. Once upon a time there were some good, decent moderate Republicans but I still didn’t vote them. All too often I feel I’ve been backed into a corner, forced to vote for Obama because the alternative is too horrendous to consider. What most amazes me is that so many Americans see Romney as either a savior or a knight in shining armor. How is that even possible? Romney embodies the boogeyman of our childhood nightmares or for the Buffy fans out there, he’s Wolfram & Hart who enables the monsters among us to take over & control the world. How can so many people be so blind? Divide & conquer – it works just as well today as it has for thousands and thousands of years. The tribal mentality must be seriously hardwired into much of the human race & the Repugs are masters at activating those tribal feelings.

  7. Beata says:
    October 6, 2012 at 9:01 am

    Hey, does this mean I shouldn’t post any more YouTube parodies? 😆 The only way I can get through this election ( and life in general ) is through humor.

  8. ecocatwoman says:
    October 6, 2012 at 9:02 am

    For kat – hope you watched Joseph Stiglitz on Up with Chris Hayes this AM. If not, the videos should be up later today.

  9. peregrine says:
    October 6, 2012 at 9:36 am

    Mona, as to your political rant, not having Hillary to re-elect, I’ll not waste my vote on a third party candidate, but will vote for Obama. He’s come to represent for me a fire wall between sanity and insanity. I’d like much much more from Obama, but I’ll settle for now, since I don’t have a more viable choice. The fire wall protects from elected conservative madmen who want to torch every right and privilege that isn’t an inalienable, God-given, one: such as life (no abortion), liberty (up military spending), and pursuit of happiness (jobs, unrestrained wealth-building). What conservative radicals want to set a match to is everything else: women’s, gay’s, and black/minority rights; unions; Dodd-Frank and all business regulations; environmental regulations and that department; Obamacare; public education and/or the Department of Education; possibly the Justice Department, or diminished in scope since civil rights have been scrapped. And that’s a partial list. This election is the most important one in my life-time because it has the potential of electing a president and his cohorts who will begin dismantling all the progress we’ve made in the last 75 years, including repealing Constitutional Amendments. I wish Obama’s firewall was as strong and thick as Hillary’s would have been.

  10. bostonboomer says:
    October 6, 2012 at 9:45 am

    Unreal. The Obama campaign raised $181 million in September, 98% from donations under $250.

    http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/obama-camp-announces-record-fundraising-in-september

    • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
      October 6, 2012 at 10:35 am

      I’m not impressed by this any more than I was when his campaign used this kind of messaging in 2008, primarily against Hillary, since O vs H was where the real general election took place.

      There’s a bundling loophole he’s using. I think W. may have started it.

      • RalphB says:
        October 6, 2012 at 10:48 am

        Even if you are a bundler, you have to provide names and contribution amounts inside to the campaigns. Counting them is something that all campaigns should do. If others don’t. then that’s a problem. Romney doesn’t even release the names of his bundlers where Obama does. More info is better.

      • bostonboomer says:
        October 6, 2012 at 1:43 pm

        Anything that keeps Romney out of the White House is cause for celebration as far as I’m concerned. Anything at all.

  11. Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
    October 6, 2012 at 10:30 am

    Did anyone read/click the non-political-ranty links?
    You really oughtta… peer pressure! 😉

    • RalphB says:
      October 6, 2012 at 10:51 am

      Yes. I also used to love to sing This Little Light is Mine. But I won’t tell anyone if you don’t 🙂

      • RalphB says:
        October 6, 2012 at 10:53 am

        is = of

        I also don’t really agree that no one cares about people actually getting jobs. Probably the “serious people” don’t but I think Paul Krugman care a lot or he wouldn’t still be beating his head on the wall promoting policies which would actually help. 😉

      • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
        October 6, 2012 at 10:58 am

        Lol. I think I don’t include The Shrill One in either of the clearly demarcated sides so much anymore, though push come to shove, he’d do his tribal dance for Dems obviously. But, at least he’s called out Obama from the beginning and tried to point out what Obama should be doing, when he’s not doing right. I still think Krug’s “surprise” at Obama not doing so has to be rhetorical 😉 or else Krug is too gullible to be a Nobel prize winning economist!

    • peregrine says:
      October 6, 2012 at 4:39 pm

      No, I thought it was a good day to stick pins in my eyes so I read/scanned the “Office of Management and Budget Report Pursuant to the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012” and it beats any Halloween horror show by $1.2 trillion.

      • Mona (aka Wonk the Vote) says:
        October 6, 2012 at 5:07 pm

        Oh no peregrine! You need some r&r after doing that (but why? whatever possessed you? do we need to call bobby brady jindal to do an exorcism?) at any rate…Try the Sister Rosetta Tharpe YouTube in my post up top if you get a chance 😉 should help you relax

  12. ecocatwoman says:
    October 6, 2012 at 10:43 am

  13. RalphB says:
    October 6, 2012 at 11:14 am

    Dave Weigel has an interesting prediction. The only time we tried something like an Avignon Presidency it didn’t work out well for the instigators.

    Rep. Allen West, Dean of the Jobs Number Truthers

    The way things are going, if the GOP doesn’t win this election, I’d say there’s a 20% chance of a congressional investigation into vote fraud and a 5% chance of an Avignon Presidency set up by those who refuse to believe the election was lost.

  14. pdgrey says:
    October 6, 2012 at 11:51 am

    http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/big-bird-doesnt-stand-chance-against-mitt-r

  15. pdgrey says:
    October 6, 2012 at 11:56 am

    http://www.dependablerenegade.com/.a/6a00d8341bf82953ef017c3256c78c970b-pi

  16. Marie M. says:
    October 6, 2012 at 1:27 pm

    Thanks SO much for giving my blog a shout-out! I really appreciate it, Mona!! 🙂

  17. ecocatwoman says:
    October 6, 2012 at 1:35 pm

    These photos of starfish are too incredible to pass up: http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/nature-blows-my-mind-colorful-bizarre-world-starfish.html Hope you enjoy.

  18. ecocatwoman says:
    October 6, 2012 at 1:39 pm

    Now for more on the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas & Mrs. Fairchild: http://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/texas-farmer-arrested-trespassing-on-her-own-land-protesting-keystone-xl.html They are destroying wetlands & a natural spring on her land. This is the state that has experienced a unbelievable drought & horrible fires.

  19. dakinikat says:
    October 6, 2012 at 2:58 pm

    Something tells me that Bette was really inspired by Sister! Wow! That video is great! Thanks so much for it!

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