New Conservative Fashion Trends Courtesy of Mikhaela– click on pick for more fun!

Most of you have heard me rant about buying crap from irresponsible companies. Now I have found a tool to make it much easier to know who you are buying from and what they do.

check out buyblue.org

Some things I have discovered:

I am never buying from Amazon again, I’ll go to Powell’s instead.

Overstock.com is not only a great place to find bargains, but supports Dems too.

Ebay is blue-ish.

As always- Costco kicks all the other big-box stores in the nuts when it comes to corporate responsibility and donations to the Dems.

Shop wisely kids- only you have the power to prevent donations to the republicans being made with your hard earned money.

Wonder and I were talking about the sneakiness of military recruiters this morning. See, I live in a poor neighborhood near a highschool. In the only shopping center for the neighborhood (this is the ghetto- big grocery stores don’t want to compete for food stamp dollars) are all the military recruiters. Army, Navy and either Air Force or Marines (I can never remember which) all have men with crew-cuts and well-pressed uniforms wandering around all the time. Now, 3 miles up the road, where all the docs and proffs for the university live- there isn’t a military recruiter to be found. I’m sure if they even tried- eyebrows would be raised considerably over there. But even here in the ghetto, they aren’t getting much business lately. This is despite the reduction in student loans and financial aid to colleges. Guess the real possibility of dying in war isn’t a great marketing strategy.

So I am perusing craigslist today- checking out jobs, cause like I said- they cut financial aid and the Queen’s coffers are seriously diminished at the moment. I may have to take a break from school for a bit and go work a real job.

Then I ran across this:
Which leads to this little bit of crap:

Funny- I didn’t know that dying in a fucked-up war constituted customer service work. And $250 a month seems like a paltry sum to me. No wonder they can’t get anyone to join up.

But how sneaky is it to post on craigslist as a customer service job? Pretty damn sneaky in my opinion.

Oh man- this just chaps my hide. Enough that I went and emailed my congressman- Jim McDermott.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) took on a rare role yesterday as a defender of President Bush. Hoyer came to the defense of the commander in chief after Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where the president took a drubbing from comedian Stephen Colbert. “I thought some of it was funny, but I think it got a little rough,” Hoyer said. “He is the president of the United States, and he deserves some respect.”

We are the minority party because of pissants like this who couldn’t grow a set of balls if they tried.

So here is the note I sent:

Dear Congressman McDermott:
Would you please tell Rep. Hoyer to stick a sock in it about Stephen Colbert’s fabulously brave Correspondent’s Dinner speech? Hoyer’s sucking up is the reason Democrats are perceived as milquetoast weenies.

While our party has spent most of the last 6 years running around trying not to offend, Colbert was one of the few people to call Bush on his inane policy behavior to his face. If more dems acted like that instead of trying to pander- we wouldn’t be the minority in every branch of the federal government. Standing up to corruption and idiocy is not disrespect- it is patriotism and a civic duty. Hoyer’s comments are asinine at best, but harmful in that they perpetuate the idea that Bush’s grab for absolute power is ok- he’s the president after all and according to Hoyer he deserves absolute respect simply for occupying that position.

Thank You, I know you have been much more vocal than most of your fellow Reps, but the other members of the party who (to use a blue phrase from my yellow dog democratic southern roots) wouldn’t say shit if they had their mouth full, are causing us to look like the party of cowards and suck-ups.

Thank You

If you are also tired of Democratic politicians who act like pimples on the ass of wignuts- go tell your rep to shut Hoyer up.

Some fun things I have discovered while checking out our Sitemeter info

1) If you search msn for hot girls wallpapers we show up as the 7th site. You’d be amazed at how many people get directed to our little site because of that. Little do they know they are actually getting Lovejoy’s piece about Macho Vs. Girly. Guess it’s one way of fighting the patriarchy- haha

2) If you search Yahoo for thankyoustevencolbert- we are #3 of 3 sites that shows up

3) My little post on ladyquakes also seems to draw them in – especially since Sister Nancy Beth Eczema linked back to our site) (scroll down to everyone gets a holiday but Jesus- we are the to speculate part of the link

4) Despite Mephistopheles tendency to be long winded- his posts on immigration vs environment and intelligence being linked to income have drawn in their own little following. Good for him!

And the number one thing I noticed while writing this post- we have to stop using vs. some much in our titles- macho vs. girly, income vs. intelligence, immigration vs environment

from the NY Times:

Cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service are talking
about creating a two-tiered Internet, in which Web sites that pay them large
fees would get priority over everything else

So us poor bloggers would have to take a back seat to corporate bigwigs with fat wallets once again? I don’t think so. The best argument I’ve heard against this is that telephone companies don’t get to decide which phone call you make goes through faster- they shouldn’t get to decide which pages you click load faster.

Shakespeares Sister has a good list of actions to take to save the internet– go do something good.

The other day Mephistopheles brought me a print out of rules for husbands and wives from the late 1800’s. I’ve seen similar things before and I love collecting old books on how women should behave. I currently have a sex manual from the 1930’s and I used to have a revolutionary book called “What every young woman should know” from 1905 (my whack-ass mother has a tendency towards cleptomania and it’s been gone for a while).

There is one main theme through these books- it assumes that the reader is of a class where the wife can stay home. It’s a pretty steadfast delusion that until the the 1970’s women didn’t work. But it was only certain women that didn’t work. Poor women have always worked- it was never a choice to stay home or to to earn a living- it was work or starve. Even today, the argument over women working outside the home only applies to a small minority of women who have the financial resources to actually have a choice. But the arguments and condescension from women who have the ability to choose not to work really piss me off. If they think more women should be barefoot in the kitchen- then maybe they should pay women to be barefoot in the kitchen so we all get a choice.

In my family, where women have always been what was previously called high-spirited (or independent) everyone works. I was fortunate that I could take a year or so off when The Kid was born, but that is because childcare would have cost more than a 20 year old can generally make.

Mephistopheles comes from a family that has been securely lodged in the upper-middle class for a long time. The women didn’t have to work. He sometimes forgets that this may have been the social ideal of the time- but it is not really the whole truth.

So, I thought I would give you all Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” to remind you all that women work and always have. We haven’t always been paid for it, but it’s never been bonbons and soap operas for most of us.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain’t I A Woman?Delivered 1851Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

Next time someone says something about when women didn’t work- ask them when in the history of the world have women not worked?

Willie Nelson has an article up at alternet about saving family farms, and it’s the perfect excuse for me to launch into one of my favorite topics- eliminating farm subsidies.

In America, we tend to think of the people who grow our crops and raise our meat as the struggling family farmer who is doggedly perusing a noble cause and spartan existence. When the topic of removing farm subsidies comes up, images of Willie Nelson on stage at Farm Aid in the 1980’s are trotted out to pull our heartstrings. But most farm subsidies in America go to large agri-business firms. From Welfare Farming at Fortune Small Bussiness:

“America’s farmers are among the most cosseted constituencies in the
country. In the past five years alone, they have soaked up a record $99
billion in subsidy payments…But it is the biggest farms that get the most,
turning subsidies into a particularly gross kind of corporate welfare. The
largest 10% of farms get about 70% of the loot.”

Huhm- sounds familiar. Once again the wealthiest 10% are taking off with most of the government cash. Just to give you an example- the subsidies on cotton are equal to the actual market output and America has 40% of the worlds cotton exports- yet struggling West African produce cotton much more efficiently until you factor in US subsidies. Another example- it cost a farmer in 2001 $5.31 to produce a bushel of wheat which was then sold on the international market for $3.50 after US subsides were applied. That’s a subsidy of about 34%.

On a positive note, the small organic farms the Willie is talking about are experiencing the fastest growth and innovation as well as being able to set above commodity market prices for their goods. So I can absolutely get behind Wilie’s call to help the small farmers with legislation to keep land, food and water healthy.