In a moment on Fox when he thought his mike was off and the camera wasn’t rolling, Jackson said “See Barack has been talking down to black people on his faith based programs. I want to cut his nuts off”.

I may not be black, but I am a fucking pro at noticing condescension and finger wagging. Jackson is dead on (though I wouldn’t go as far as nut removal). Obama simply buys into all the racist trope about the black community and frames his decisions in that way. Black fathers are uninvolved and lazy. yadda yadda yadda.

So if Obama simply doesn’t get the black community, and can’t be bothered as a Constitutional Law Professor to understand the foundations for women to own conrol of their own bodies, what other lovely bits of misunderstanding are we to get from him? The Fisa/ telecom immunity problem. Constitutional law professor seems to have forgotten about free speech and right to privacy (AGAIN).

And every time someone with some clout and political experience points these problems out publicly, they have to apologize for it.

The emperor wears no clothes, and no one can say a damn thing about it.

Via Pocochina comes this handy dandy Attachment Style Test.

No surprise with my results-

Your result for The Attachment Style Test…

The Player

20% Anxiety Over Abandonment and 46% Avoidance Of Intimacy

Take The Attachment Style Test at HelloQuizzy

It was Wednesday night dinner and we came up with a few tips on how to survive severe poverty while keeping a sense of humor. But first- the menu

Basil Crusted London Broil- bloody and rare ($4 at the ghetto mart)

Spinach and mandarin salad with raspberry vinegarette and goat cheese

Dumpster dive Olive bread with mozzarella and prosciutto

Box of cheap red wine. You need the wine to dull the pain of poverty. Really.

So in our wine addled state we came up with these helpful hints. Please feel free to add your own.

1) When bill collectors call, answer in cat speak. To every question, reply with “meow”. You can even sing the meow mix song. Eventually they will mark you as crazy and stop calling.

2) Dumpster dive at bakeries. Really, the olive bread came from a bakery dumpster in the sodo district somewhere. If I had a car I would totally be rocking the freegan.

3) Kill taste buds with cheap wine.

4) Hijack free wifi if you can. Since my neighborhood is not known for it’s super geeks, I still have to pay for the internet. But someday soon…………….

5) Ms. J says that Trader Joe’s frozen veggies are actually good. I’ll leave you to decide for yourself.I have yet to find frozen veggies that aren’t crap I wouldn’t have paid for if they were fresh. I never buy veggies or fruits in packages. It’s how they sneak the uglies in.

6) Learn the edible weeds that grow nearby. We have lots of fennel, blackberries, strawberries and cherries in the city. Go on walking scavenger hunts.

7) If, like me, you have a yard and a horrible black thumb, find a green thumb with an apartment and offer to trade growable land space for veggies.

8) I am half tempted to get a chicken or two. Free eggs and all that. But I wonder if that counts as having a pet or if I could chalk it up to food storage?

What are you all doing to survive the economic downturn?

Long story short: For most of my life I had struggled with my weight. I had managed to overcome eating disorders, maintain a stable fairly healthy weight and come at peace with my body. I even managed to get over breast cancer, and some serious heart issues as aresult of chemo.

If you are an insomniac, watching movies right before bed about political prisoners, torture and desparadicios will not help you get to sleep.

Quite the opposite, actually.

I’ve been thinking about street harassment and why it is that some boys just can’t wrap their head around the fact that is is harassment and not a compliment. So here’s a little thought experiment for the bepenised among us.

Imagine you have the coolest t-shirt in the entire world. Maybe it’s a concert tee from a favorite band or it has the most pithy statement ever written across the chest. Maybe it was hand crafted by exiled Tibetan monks. Whatever. Every time you wear it, people stop you and comment on it. You think to yourself “Hell yeah, I am awesome and my t-shirt rocks.”

Now imagine you can never ever take the shirt off. Ever. After awhile, you just want to be able to do your grocery shopping without getting asked about the shirt 15 times. You just want to be able to go to the post office or grab a beer with friends without strangers thinking that you are at the mercy of their praise and questions about your shirt. So you start wearing a big, ugly, baggy sweatshirt to cover up the t-shirt. But not even that works. People still bug you. “Hey, aren’t you the awesome guy with the rockin’ t shirt” they ask, and they refuse to leave you alone till you pull up your sweatshirt and show it to them.

At some point, you realize that no one sees you as a person anymore. They see you as “t-shirt dude”. You are reduced to being just a body that wears the shirt. Nobody really cares what you think about the t-shirt or anything else for that matter. You could be a scientist who discovers a cure for cancer. But all these people see you as is a shirt. They don’t care that you may be too busy to answer questions about where you got the t-shirt, how old the t-shirt is, does the t-shirt have a phone number. They don’t care that you are just trying to go about your day without being bothered by strangers. You’ve tried everything by now. You ignore the questions or you walk fast with the scariest look you can come up with on your face. This just makes strangers say things like “dude, with a t-shirt like you should be smiling” or “if you didn’t want the attention you shouldn’t be wearing that shirt” as if you could just take the damn thing off and be done with it.

Sometimes, the t-shirt fans are just too much, and you snap. You yell back or flip them off. But this makes them mad. You’ve been followed, chased, threatened with violence all because you didn’t give some stranger the attention they wanted. Sometimes fighting back feels good, but then you are reminded that you will always have to fight back. When you complain to friends without such a t-shirt, they tell you to lighten up. It’s a compliment after all. Some friends even deny that it happens at all. They think you are just being melodramatic and are always looking for something to get pissed about.

Now substitute vagina or tits for t-shirt, and that is what it is like for girls. All the time. We can’t take off our femaleness. We can’t hide it under baggy clothes. Regardless of how we feel about our bodies, we become public property when we step outside. Whoever we are no longer matters. We are just there for the amusement of others. It’s not a compliment. It’s harassment. And it is meant to remind us that no matter what we do, we are never more than the sum of our sex organs. We are just bodies, not people.

Me: I am the destroyer of men. Well not men so much as republicans.

Kid: And Obamabots

Me: And Obamabots

Kid: but not all Obambots. Ms. Z (kid’s fav teacher) is an Obamabot.

Me: There is a difference between Obamabots and Obama supporters.

Kid: I think ms. Z is an Obama supporter. And so are most of the kids in my class.

Me: Remind me to explain to you about liberal white guilt someday dude. But feeling guilty never actually solved a problem.

(At this point the conversation was interrupted by yet another fuckwad who thinks it’s completely appropriate to make catcalls at me while I am walking with my son.)