I tried to ignore the “keeping tabs” segment of your show, wherein you and the odious Michael Musto indulge some creepy middle-aged guy compulsion to pick on Britney, Paris, and Lindsay for the imagined offense of being young, female, and visible.

I grimaced when you bent over backwards to kiss David Schuster’s ass while supposedly apologizing to Chelsea Clinton and her entire family for his obnoxious remarks.

Because I thought you were a journalist. One of the rare few in the mainstream media that would say outright “George W Bush is a criminal.”

So imagine my dismay that you can’t even pause your personal segment of the MSNBC kingmaking spin machine to observe that over the weekend Pres. Bush vetoed legislation that would have barred the CIA from using waterboarding and other means of torture ?

Not that Bush’s actions suprise me, but your silence certainly does.

the love affair with your own reflection is getting old Mr O’Reil– oops, Obam– oops. Olbermann.

I have a hard time with sex work and porn. The social libertarian in me says people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies, even sell it. But it isn’t that simple.

Sex work and modeling are the only two professions where women consistently make more money than men. And that is where it gets complicated.

I’ve been offered substantial amounts of money to do porn. I have only ever considered doing it when I was broke as hell and wasn’t sure if we were going to lose our home, etc. That is how it works for a lot of women (not all, yes some choose to do it happily and others don’t choose to do it all but are forced into it). In the end, I’ve always turned it down because while I might not leave my day job for a million dollars, porn is one of those things that I wouldn’t do if I had an extra $500, hell even $200. It is a job of desperation. It is physically much riskier than almost any other job. There is disease and violence. There are the mental health issues (most drug addicted prostitutes become that way after- not before they start working). Without the combination of a big payoff AND serious desperation, there is no incentive to do it.

But does that mean prostitution should be illegal?

No.

Right now the majority of people who get arrested for prostitution are prostitutes. Not Johns, not pimps. We have to stop punishing the victims of sex work and it starts by decriminalizing what they do to survive. When prostitution is legal (and not in the Nevada brothel rape houses kind of way, but simply not something you can be arrested for) then the price tends to go down, making it less rewarding for the girls and giving them more incentive to get out. Then we can concentrate on doing things like busting human traffickers.

So all this is on my mind because of the Elliot Spitzer case, of course. He’s not my governor, but had it merely been a case of him getting some action on the side, I don’t think it’s a big deal. But he wanted the woman to do something risky. General consensus is that he wanted to have sex without a condom. For a guy with a wife visiting a prostitute, that’s pretty low down. You’re not just risking yourself, but two other people. One who needs the money from you and may have to put herself in danger to pay rent, the other who is a probably unsuspecting wife. NOT COOL.

But none of this fixes the most basic problem, the reason why the only 2 jobs where women make more money than men are jobs where they sell their bodies. Women are not fuckholes, they are human beings. Until we are treated as human by all of society, then we will continue to be looked at first and foremost as fuckable or not fuckable before anything else about is acknowledged.

He is pretty much the European version of Guliani, but……

I have a massive girl crush on his new wife, Carla Bruni. She’s got the same problems with monotony, I mean monogamy that I do.

After Sarkozy’s very public break up with his ex-wife, who had been cheating on him for years, and with his new wife who would rather be poly, I am starting to think the little man has a wee bit of a cuckold fetish. I can fault him for a lot of things, but that is not one of them.

It is “Hear hear”, not “Here, here”.

The more you know peeps. The more you know.

And I’ll be damned, I’ve heard the Stephin Merritt gum commercial 3 times in the last hour.

I was mortified awhile back to hear a bastardized version of an Of Montreal song as the new Outback Steakhouse jingle. I don’t have a problem with artists letting their music be used in commercials per se because well, I like downloading free music and musicians need to pay the bill somehow. Better to make scary corporations pay than make both artists and music buyers subject to the evils of the price fixing RIAA.

But…………….

Changing a song, or writing a straight up cheesy jingle makes my ears hurt. Even though it shouldn’t. I know it shouldn’t. But it hurts me (and not just because I’ve been trying to wear earrings in my tender little earlobes for the last 24 hours)

So I keep seeing this ad for gum.

And the voice, the musical phrasing, the piano- it can’t be Stephin Merrit of the Magnetic Fields? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Not my favorite go to angry gay for break up songs (I don’t believe you being one of my favorites).

So kids, how do you feel about hearing your favorite bands music in commercials? Does it make you sad? Does it make you dislike the band for being sell-outs? Does it make you maybe a wee bit smug cause you recognize a song or singer that no one else would? (I have to admit to having that feeling on a few occasions, like when the awesomely beautiful Adrien Brody did a Diet Coke commercial to the Lyrics Born song Callin’ Out)

It’s obvious to us girls, and has been for a long time, that society hates us. We are told we are to dumb to be in charge of anything important, so we might as well stay home and have babies. We are told we are too shallow for caring about our appearance, but then we risk losing jobs, money and social status if we don’t play the beauty game. We are kill joys if we are smart and bimbos if we are not. We are empty vessels, but we are in charge of making sure none but the right kind of man fill us up.

But society hates you boys too. I know, you get a lot of privileges from this society, but you have to be willing to be stereotyped as an asshole. If we went by what society tells us a man is, then you are all sex crazed mad men who can’t think of anything but pussy when a woman is around. You are stupid, lazy buffoons when it comes to children or houses or even dressing yourself, yet you’re supposed to shoulder all of the economic burden on a family despite this. You are an emotionless machine except for anger and lust. You can’t put a sentence together to save your life because of your paltry verbal skills. If left to your own devices, you and all the other men would spend your days in brutal fighting competitions over fertile females. You don’t really care about children, but you do get to own them. You can’t be trusted with food processors or ovens, but you can be trusted with firearms and barbques. Your taste buds only register red meat and beer. You can engineer a vacuum but you can’t use one. You don’t parent your own children, you babysit them. You cannot be trusted not to cheat on your partner.

Feminists don’t hate men. We hate that you have been as stupidly stereotyped as we have.

SO after much laundry doing and outfit changing, I have finally come up with the perfect 8 outfits for Paris that will all fit into my backpack. The bad news is, there is no possible way for me to later stuff a couple of bottles of wine in there too. So I am taking a really ugly but checkable tote bag on the plane with me that will hold laundry later so that wine can be imported. Yay wine.

I also figured out which purse to take with me. I have two awesome travel purses. One is a dark red beaded hobo I got as a Hong Kong import special. For years I was the only person around with this bag and got lots of comments, but lately I keep seeing the same bag in green. The other is a pink, brown, red, green, black handmade bag covered in roses that I got in Mexico. It is really gorgeous and has awesome pockets, but it is too much for this trip. The good news is that my red hobo has been to Europe before, so it’s been road tested.

I’m also trying to wear earrings. I made a pair of lever backs out of a set of vintage rhinestone clipons. They are very simple, chic and not able to fall out of my ears. The problem is that my ears don’t like earrings. I have spent the last 24 hours way too conscious of my ear lobes. They hurt and I keep rubbing neosporin with pain reliever on them. But i want to wear earrings, I look cute in earrings. What is the good of having pierced ears if you can’t use them? Besides, I did not suffer through the torment of an at home ear piercing with a safety pin and a potato at 15 just to not be able to wear earrings now.

Any piercing freaks out there? How long must one suffer through aches lobes before the nerve endings give up the ghost?

And totally cribbed from Feministing

I don’t know if you peeps know about my undying love for the Muppet Show. I still get the theme song stuck in my head regularly. And Miss Piggy could easily be the foremother of fat acceptance and fun feminism (the girl can kick ass in pearls, high heels and satin gloves).

But this clip has another awesome feminist icon. Can I just say- I want the t-shirt she’s wearing at the end, but in red and black.

A little while ago a friend and I were comparing our high school eating disorders. I was an exercise addict. I worked out about four hours a day and lived on saltines, water and salads. I was also sick (bronchitis, pneumonia, etc) and injured (broken ankle, torn meniscus in both knees, torn hamstrings) for almost 4 years straight.

She was bulimic. I had wished I could be bulimic because I could have eaten whatever I wanted and not spent so many fucking hours of my life working out. She then told me about throwing up in her sleep. I don’t want her eating disorder anymore.

But I do wonder, if we hadn’t spent so much time starving ourselves, how much thinner would we be now? Every time I lose weight, I gain back double. If I had just been happy weighing 140 in high school instead of trying to starve myself down to 112, or been happy at 160 instead of trying to starve myself down to 130, or (you get the idea- it just goes on from there).

And then I read this article and had one of those moments when your head just fucking explodes with understanding. 1600 calories a day and 3 miles of walking is way more food and less exercise than I get when I diet. It’s more like 1000 calories and 6 miles of walking, plus pilates, plus bellydancing, plus aerobics.

I have another friend who is freaking out because she went over the 300lb point. She’s gorgeous and one of the kindest people on the planet. So she started weight watchers. I was not exactly supportive. Instead of doing the normal “good for you for trying to get healthy”, I said “You know you’re just going to gain back more later”.

Last night, she and I went out for shopping and dinner. She has given up weight watchers for the moment, but I can tell that she is not yet there about being okay with herself. She wants to lose weight cause her knees hurt. I told her it might be a better idea to work on strengthening her calf and thigh muscles so there is less pressure on her knees to hold her up.

What I also need to do is send her this article, with this passage bolded and highlighted and written in shocking neon so there is no way she can miss it.

The extreme physical and mental effects Dr. Keys observed led to his famous quote: “Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren’t feeding them is perfect hogwash.” This was also what led early feminist activists to see dieting and weight concerns as a way to keep women preoccupied with food, filled with guilt and self-hatred, more easily influenced by others, and too mentally and physically exhausted to succeed professionally and politically.

I had another discussion with a friend last weekend about size. She had been very fat when she was younger but is now a skinny little thing. She said she likes being small because she likes not taking up too much space. I say I like being large because I like being here, very here, undissmissably here. Gone is the teenage girl who tried to starve herself into disappearing. I like that I am not a little girl, that my size makes me more of a threat to guys than I was when I was starving and that I am not too mentally or physically exhausted to meet any challenge.

Totally inspired by Little Ms.Randombabble in gmail chat. After listening to the lyrics I am pretty sure Freddy Mercury wrote this for me the year I was born (1975- coincidence? I think not)

She keeps moet et chandon
In her pretty cabinet
let them eat cake she says
Just like marie antoinette
A built-in remedy
For kruschev and kennedy
At anytime an invitation
You cant decline

Caviar and cigarettes
Well versed in etiquette
Extraordinarily nice

Chorus
Shes a killer queen
Gunpowder, gelatine
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytime

Recommended at the price
Insatiable an appetite
Wanna try?

To avoid complications
She never kept the same address
In conversation
She spoke just like a baroness
Met a man from china
Went down to geisha minah
Then again incidentally
If youre that way inclined

Perfume came naturally from paris
For cars she couldnt care less
Fastidious and precise

Chorus

Drop of a hat shes as willing as
Playful as a pussy cat
Then momentarily out of action
Temporarily out of gas
To absolutely drive you wild, wild..
Shes all out to get you

Chorus

Recommended at the price
Insatiable an appetite
Wanna try?
You wanna try…