Dear Senator Hillary Clinton

Thank-you.

Thank-you for all of the amazing things you have accomplished in your life.  Thank-you for being a wonderfully strong and confident woman to whom my daughter can look for inspiration.

Thank-you for being a champion for women's rights.

Thank-you for your fight for health care.

Thank-you for smashing through the glass ceilings that you have and most of all, thank-you for running for the Democratic nomination.

Thank-you for staying in the race this long and giving as many people as possible a choice.

I am awaiting your next move, for I know that it will break ground and pave ways for future generations of women.  I know that whatever you choose to pursue next it will make my life better, and it will make the future better for my daughter, and everyone with whom she will share that future.

I know that you will not let me down, for you haven't done so yet.  I know you are not perfect and that you have made mistakes, but being that you are human, I know you have learned from those mistakes and will use them to better prepare to forge ahead. 

I hold you to the highest of standards, and wait anxiously for the great things I expect to see from you in the future.  

Our Future.

Thank-you.

Warmest Regards and Endless Admiration,

Chang'e

A gallon of milk or a gallon of gas

This is what the Obamabots don't get.

Most people are rational creatures- even uneducated single moms

Over at Feminste the classism is alive and in full force.

It's the same load of crap I've heard forever.

I had the Kid a week before my 20th birthday. When I found out I was pregnant, I could have had an abortion. Actually most of my "friends" tried to push me into having an abortion.

But........

My mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness 3 years earlier (she's still alive - I think she runs on anger and spite). I was working crappy minimum wage jobs. I didn't have the money for college.

I wanted my mom to see her first grandchild. (I was still under the impression that at some point I could do enough to make her love me) I also knew that I could get more financial aid for college with a baby and that it wasn't going to get any cheaper to have a child. At that point, waiting till I had established a career seemed ridiculous. I was printing t-shirts. There is no career path there. Having a baby at my age meant that 1) I still had a parent around to help me and 2) having a baby got me MORE access to an education, not less

So I ad the Kid. I started college when he was 6 months old and actually got more in financial aid and student loans than I had working. I made my schedule such that the Kid stayed home with his dad or my mom while I went to school at night so we didn't have to pay for childcare. And until Kid's dad rediscovered his love the crystal meth and tormenting me, I did well. When Kid's dad left, even though I only had a year of college under my belt, I went from making $5.50 an hour to $9.00 and by the time the Kid was 4 I was making 35k per year. (then Bush became president and the world went to shit).

There are a limited number of good jobs in the world. Period. Not everyone can be a white collar professional. But that doesn't mean that people in low paying jobs are failures. They do vital work. We could not live in a world where no one performs the shit jobs. And working a full time job should pay a living wage. Period. And having children while young or poor or uneducated is not a crime. It is, in fact, how the majority of people in the world have children.

So reading the comments at Feminste made me heartsick. Women, ostensibly feminists, who think that punishing someone with poverty for having children is acceptable don't strike me as much different than people who think women should be punished with children for having sex.

As for the minimum wage part of the argument- why should it be okay for ANY job to pay less than what is required to live on for full time work? I'll say here what I said there- a business that cannot afford to pay it's employees a living wage is a failing business. If a business could not afford to pay it's rent, we would not write into law a that businesses can pay less than the required rent. We would let the business fail so it's place could be taken by a business that can compete fairly.

Businesses that don't pay a living wage put more of a strain on society, not less. Sure, they provide jobs, but not jobs that pay enough for their employees to pay income taxes. And they increase the strain on social service agencies who then have to make up the difference with childcare subsidies and food stamps and health care.So they cost society more than they benefit it. Propping them up by keeping the minimum wage low and not holding them accountable for the strain they cause creates an unfair playing field for those businesses that can and do provide living wages (look at the difference between Wal-mart and Costco).

But we don't look at it that way. We look at raising the minimum wage as a charitable thing instead of as the right thing to do for the sake of the economy as a whole and business competition. The working poor doesn't need more charity, we need to be paid enough to live on as is fitting of working a full time job. There is no shame in being a minimum wage worker. There is shame though in being a business that would fail without being able to exploit your workers.

We are more than just the sum of our vaginas

I heard form a friend who heard from a friend who heard from an Obamabot campaign employee that Obama is in negotiations with Hillary to give her the VP spot.

Apparently someone in the Democratic leadership figured out that you can't win an election if a quarter of your party refuses to support the nominee.

What they fail to realize is that we are not so blinded by our need for a vagina in the White House that we will see past Obama's serious failings just because he's decided to give our candidate the do nothing job of VP.

Hillary being Obama's number 2 mitigates as much of Obama's lack of experience, sexism, and messianic cultishness as Gore's being number 2 mitigated Bill's affairs or Cheeney's being number 2 mitigates Bush's entitled stupidity- in other words, not at all.

So should the Democratic party do something so obviously condescending - I am still voting for either McKinney or writing Hillary in.

On the other hand- if Mr Postage Stamp resume wanted to take the VP spot, spend a couple of years seeing how running a government is different than running a campaign for head cult leader president, I would have no problems. He is younger and less experienced. I would hate to see our highest office turned into the corporate cliche of the woman who has worked for decades becoming the number two to the bosses favorite nephew.

Trolling and Male Privilge

Why are trolls almost always boys? Why, like rapists, can they not take no for an answer? Why don't they leave when you ask, demand, ban, block, and delete them?

Rotten Feminist knows why. And she is dead on right (resident troll take note- she describes you perfectly with these words)

He relies on assumptions and stalker-like tactics. He is indignant that we refuse to “hear his voice” either by ignoring him or out-right deleting his comments. And he operates with the attitude that he is right, and all other ideas are WRONG.

And now I have someone new to add to my google reader.

Speaking of the work mothers do

So the Kid and I have had a lot of time to talk since he was deprived of internet and television for a few days. It turns out he really does love his dear old mom, but not if there is manga to be read.

He's studying American history this year and they are learning all about the constitution and the civil war, etc. He said "the Civil war wasn't really fought over slavery, it was over state's rights".

And then I gave him the condensed for a 13 year old version of this post

You may have some romantic notion that the Civil War was fought for philosophical reasons over the enslavement of fellow humans. The truth is actually based in the functions of a capitalist society. As the north industrialized and started selling more finished goods that were more capital intensive than agricultural raw goods from the south, slavery became an impediment to the wage system.

Keeping a slave is a fixed cost. The only fluctuation is in the original buying price, after that there is no competition to keep costs down. You could keep your slaves near starvation but when they dropped dead you would have to buy another slave. Replacement was not cheap. So the price of raw goods stays relatively high because labor costs can't be dropped. Paid workers, on the other hand, had no initial cost and since you were not responsible for their well being you could pay starvation wages without a replacement cost. As long as there was a surplus of labor, you could keep dropping the wages lower and lower making the cost of producing your goods cheaper and cheaper. Capitalism at it's finest (oh sense the irony there or you people don't know me well).

And so the very next day (oh providence!) the kid had a group exercise on the Civil war, slavery and economics.

And my darling child just went and rocked the brains of a group of 7th graders.

When I asked him if he understood what I explained to him - he did the typical teenage eyeroll "Of course, Moooooooom." And he thinks the other kids understood it too.

So RQ is not only corrupting her own child with radical ideas, but the precious children of the creative class elites as well. Their parents may have drank the koolaid, but not all hope is lost.

The Obligatory Mother's Day Post

You all know by know that I hate Mother's Day. I hate the schlock. I hate that instead of valuing the real work that women do (for free) we give flowers and cards one day of the year.

So I decided to figure out how much we really value mothers' work. We've all seen the calculators that say if moms were paid for all they do they'd make the same salary as doctors. But we don't actually pay moms like that. In fact, there is only one instance in this country where women are paid to stay home with their children. Welfare.

But welfare is temporary. Women with newborns have to start 40 hours a week of job searching when their child is just 12 weeks old. And Welfare doesn't exactly pay minimum wage.

In WA state the monthly TANF (new term for welfare since welfare to work program started) grant is $440 in cash for two people. And from personal experience that amount has been the same for at least 13 years. If you include food stamps, it's $607.

Let's just assume a mom on welfare works just 40 hours a week caring for her child. 607/ 4.3 (weeks in a month)/40 (hours in a week) and she gets about $3.53 per hour.

(And if you happen to be one of the 30% of custodial parents who receives child support in a timely fashion and you also happen to be on TANF- your child support will go to the state first to pay back your grant money. You *may* receive an extra $50 on top of TANF from your child support but you will not get the whole amount of both child support and TANF)

And WA is in the high middle as far as grant amounts go. Tennessee, at the bottom of the heap gives a family of two $142 in cash and a total of $398 if you include food stamps or about $2.31 per hour.

That is what motherhood is worth in this country, less than minimum wage.

Let's contrast that with the average monthly cost for infant daycare. In WA it's about $754. That's 20% more than the monthly TANF and food stamp grants combined. In TN it's about $412 per month, close but still more than TANF and food stamps.

Why, if mothering is such an important job, do we pay poor mothers so very little to do it?

Because the ideal has been set of the two parent family with a mom who stays home and sacrifices herself for the good of the kids. And sacrifice isn't really looked at as work. Sacrifice is religious term meaning to give up yourself for the good of others. But not just give up, but totally subvert any of your own desires.

And because the sacrificial mom is our ideal, we do not give poor mothers with no other resources as much money as someone who does their same job for fewer hours a day and fewer days per week. We don't expect strangers to sacrifice themselves. Actually, the only people we expect to sacrifice themselves completely are mothers.

But children are work. And the work that a mother puts into her children is not for her benefit. It is partially for her child's benefit, but it is mostly for societies benefit. We need children to grow up and be productive members of society. We need them to grow up to pay the taxes that will pay for social security. And now we need children to grow up and pay the taxes for our massive war debt. If we remove all the sentimentalism that has been attached to motherhood to make the sacrifice more palatable, then mothers are performing a vital function for society to continue. And they aren't paid for it. They are financially punished for it with lower wages ($11,000 less on average than non-mothers), higher expenses and less job security.

Because we don't value women, but we really don't value mothers.

My Uterus Will Not Be Held Hostage

So the cry from the Blogger Boyz and their cronies to those of us who refuse to drink the koolaid and bow to the Precious is "What about Roe! What about the Supreme Court!"

Fuck you. Seriously. I don't like it when Rethuglikan boyz try to control my behavior with threats to my bodily autonomy, why on earth would you think it's okay coming from you.

Really it is two halves of the same coin. Don't be a slutty whore or you'll get punished with an unwanted pregnancy on one side and don't be a slutty Hillary voter or you'll get punished with an unwanted Supreme Court on the other.

How's this? It's my mother fucking uterus and I am a grown up woman. I think I know how to best protect it, and you boyz do not. I am sick of and tired of having to vote for shit ass people because of a threat to limit my control of my own body. And quite honestly- so far my voting for the candidate least likely to pack the court with Forced Pregnancy wignutz hasn't done shit. Did the Dems shut down Roberts- no. Did they stop the partial birth abortion ban- no.

So my letting the immediate safety of my uterus dictate my votes hasn't really worked out. And you boyz seem to think that is the ONLY thing feminists care about. Yes- reproductive rights are incredibly important. But they wouldn't even be an issue if we women were considered to be full human beings with all the rights that entails.

So I choose to focus my time and attention on a candidate who understands that women are more than the sum of their genitalia.

In the mean time I'm stocking up on birth control and emergency contraception.

My uterus, not a hostage, not for sale to the lowest bidder.

Get another tactic boyz.

Conversations With the Kid about Unity Ponies

Unity is impossible in a democracy. Unity is a tool of dictators and facists.  But for democracy to work there must be vigorous opposition to keep those in power in check.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling glitter and hot air.

We've Got The Power!

Well not exactly. But we will, either tomorrow or Saturday. And in just a very few minutes I will have to shut down my compy at work to install new compys in the whole lab. (New to us anyways, we are th bastard stepchild of the main campus and get their hand me downs).

So I will be computer-less for at least 24 hours. Think of this as an open thread and leave me something nice to read when SCL finally brings me back to the 21st century. I'll take thoughts, musings, haiku, rants, jokes, you name it.

And enjoy this picture. Behind every great woman there isn't necessarily a great man, but this is too cute not to post.

Seattle City Light Forces Me into Gay Marriage

Not so much forces, but you all know my ongoing drama with the power company.

Well after going without power for nearly 2 weeks in January (you all remember hot water bottle babies) Seattle City Light dug up a seven year old bill and attached it to my current bill. It would have been illegal for them to try and collect it in just a few weeks, but since they have attached it to my current bill and told me to pay in 2 days or go (again) without power, they will get their fricken money.

In the meantime, Soopermouse tells me it is illegal to shut off someone's power in England. And that every weekend in May is a 3 day weekend because of bank holidays.

And gay marriage is legal.

So I proposed.

That is the real threat to hetero marriage in this country- Seattle City Light. Now you know.

Cause it's always the woman's fault

Well Michelle Obama, should we blame you for your husband's raging misogyny.

Maybe we should, since you blame Hillary for Bill's infidelity. Or maybe we should blame you for his loss in PA. It must be because you're an uppity woman (huhm, it isn't nice to have someone else's failings laid on, you is it.)

And should we be surprised that you parrot that same old misogyny line for your hubby's benefit. Oh Michelle, it's not cute when Ann Coulter plays sexist exceptionalist. Why would you think you can get away with it?

Or maybe I am tacking the wrong tack here. Maybe, since the press (Hello dimwitted sod from the Nation) likes to blame Hillary for everything that has come out of Bill's mouth ever, we should blame Obama for everything that comes out of your mouth. Which isn't really that much of a stretch. While Hillary and Bill do seem to have entirely different opinions on many things, it is clear that in your addled brain your husband's misogyny is right in line with your own.

You know what they say about people in glass houses. Now that you've basically told every woman who ever had a man cheat on her that it was her fault, how long before your dear hubby does the same to you? You've just given him the perfect excuse. It's all your fault.

Periodically speaking

Sometimes The Nation is full of shit.

You would think that there are only three demographics in this race, white men, old white women, and blacks. Oh wait, there are some younger women too, but they are confused little flowers who can't pick sexism out for themselves but know it feels icky.

This craptastic piece goes through extraordinary lengths to paint the Clinton campaign as directly racist.

Yet there is no mention of the obviously sexist trope that has come out of Obama's own mouth.

I think someone drank the Unity Pony koolaid, but wants to still look "fair and balanced".

It's not fair and balanced until you talk about how Obama thinks women should only have "some control over their own bodies", or about how he's for parental consent laws for abortion, or how he likes to use sexist dog whistles in campaign speeches. You don't have to tie yourself in knots to see the sexism there. It comes straight from the Unity Pony's mouth.

In the ghetto

So right across from my lab, about 10 minutes ago, there was a shooting. According to the 911 logs, it was an assault with a weapon. We all heard the gun shot then heard (and saw, cause my lab door is open) a bunch of girls go running into the bank for cover.

This is the 3rd shooting in 2 years. This neighborhood hasn't always been quite so violent (despite it's reputation). But the worse the economy gets, the more stressed out people get and the more trigger happy they become. And since this is a poor neighborhood, we are always close to the violence tipping point.

It's not endemic to a certain race. Look at our oil wars. When resources get scarce, people fight and kill. It's part of the anthropological idea of collapse (Jarred Diamond readers will be familiar with the term, so will anyone who has taken a class in anthropology or sociology or looked at the carrying capacity lately).Poor people are war fodder because it is easy to push us into reacting violently over scarce resources. In the shopping center where the shooting just happened is a recruitment office for the army, navy and marines. That is no accident.

UPDATE: The guy who got shot just got grazed (he's the son of a friend of the school janitor) and the shooter got caught. But for the 2 hours of fuel for 5 helicopters and the costs of the 7 police cars, 3 fire engines and 2 ambulances that showed up, we could probably pay for an officer to patrol this neighborhood after school (when most of the trouble happens) and during the summer.

How Barak Fails the Working Class

The media would like us all to think that the working class isn't voting for Obama because he's an arugala eating, latte drinking, non-bitter elitist.

Note to the media- we working class people know about Starbucks. We drink lattes too. We don't think Hillary spends her days shopping at Walmart and eating at MacDonalds. We don't care if our next president is someone we can have a beer with.

And note to Obamabots- it's not just the white working class that doesn't trust Obama. It's the Latinos and the Asians. It's pretty much everyone but the African Americans (and we can't fault them for voting for someone who looks like them).

Obama cannot win the working class because Obama has NO FRICKEN IDEA what we need. His ideas all center on making things easier for business. We know that benefits to businesses usually involve less protection for us. Less job protection, less retirement protection, less wage protection, fewer benefits, more hours, etc.

We, the working class, need wages that will pay our housing, gas, and food costs. We need health insurance that doesn't cripple us. We need a country with a future. We need another industry boom that creates living wage jobs. We need education that is affordable for ourselves and our children. We need a real way to save for retirement. We need options for our young people above and beyond becoming fodder for the war machine. We need schools in our neighborhoods that prepare kids, not warehouse them.

Yes, there is part of us that remembers Bill Clinton. But what so many people fail to realize is that the working class has been in a recession since Bush took office in 2001. We have never had an upward swing under Bush. But under Clinton we got raises. When Clinton was president, my income doubled every year that I worked full time. I actually made it to the middle class. I had a house and a car that was paid for and ran. I could pay for childcare and rent and utilities.

Since Bush took office, my income has decreased by 30% every year until it hit half the poverty level. And I've been stuck there since. That is 7.5 years of poverty. That more than half my kid's life.

We trust Hillary not just because we remember Bill, but because we know she actually thinks about our plight. We know that she has the big wonkish brain to find solutions that actually help us.

Hope and change are lovely ideas, but we can't feed our kids hope and change. We can't pay for college with hope and change. We can't by food on hope and change credit. We want solutions. We want to count. We want our kids to have a shot at the American dream, though for the last 8 years it's become obvious that we are the new feudal class. Our Lord and Employer may change, but there is no way for us to improve our lot anymore.

We don't care if the person with the right ideas drinks lattes or coffee regular. We don't care if that person drinks Bud or Burgundy. And we want someone who understands that we aren't just bitter, we are angry. We got promised the American dream only to have our homes foreclosed on. We know we've been fed a load of shit. We want someone to make the promise reachable again. We know Hillary has the not only the chops to do it, but the desire to. Barak is just feeding us another load of hopeful shit, but we know the taste already.

A Request From the Kid

Dear People of Blogland:

My mom has asked for just one thing for Mother's day. She would like Hillary Clinton to be the nominee.

I can't buy that for her. But you can help me get my mom what she wants. Anything you can do to help Hillary win means that I can give my mom the best Mother's day present ever.

And if I butter her up with a present that she really wants, then maybe I can get her to let me play video games in the living room more often.

Thanks,

The Kid

No matter the reason

I don't know if it's still reproductive choice week or not. But shit, it's reproductive choice week every week here.

India, despite having outlawed the practice of aborting girl fetuses for their girlness, still has a dearth of girls.

Feminist me says "duh, making abortions illegal, no matter what the reason is, NEVER reduces the number of abortions".

We use that as an argument here all the time. We say it just pushes women to find underground solutions. Rich women travel, poor women risk death and rusty coat hangars. But making abortions illegal doesn't change the demand for them. This also works as an argument in places where abortions happen for reasons we find repellent.

Now of course I think aborting girl fetuses because they lack a penis is atrocious. But simply making abortion illegal is not going to make more girl babies be magically born. In a place like India, the only way to make daughters more desirable is by making them people and not property. And that takes a lot more laws, a lot more work, a lot more money.

Dis.gus.ting

From How the World Works

The key figure is 2.3 million -- the total number of homes that are empty and for sale. That adds up to a vacancy rate of 2.9 percent, which is the highest, reports Bloomberg, "since the bureau started keeping count in 1956." 2.2 million homes were vacant and for sale one year ago

.According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Second Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, released in March 2008, "the total number of homeless persons reported on a single night in January 2006 was 759,101."

Assuming that number bears some reasonable relation to reality, that would mean there are 24 unoccupied homes for every homeless person in the United States.

The Kid and I, just after Georgie stole the White House in 2000, wound up homeless. For two years we couch surfed with various friends and family and occasionally (but thankfully not often) slept in our car. The only reason we have housing now is that I lucked into a program that fast tracked me into a Section 8 voucher. Those types of programs have been massively cut now. If we were homeless now we would be staying at the tent city (Hooverville) that temporarily set up in a vacant lot down the street. Families live there. Women with children live there. And we have 24 unoccupied homes for every single person in those camps.

I am so ashamed of our country.

You know how I've been bitching

about Obama's use of republican framing and how it isn't a far step from republican framing to republican policies?

Well it didn't take long for Obama to prove me right


Obama on capital gains taxes- don't raise them higher than what Reagan had them at. (But how are we going to pay our massive debt if the rich keep not paying their fair share?)

Obama on corporate responsibility- wants more deregulation. WTF? We already have lead painted lollipop toys for the kiddies, ecoli spinach for salads, and a drug industry that basically runs the FDA.

Obama on tort reform- he likes it. See above about corporate responsibility. Not only does he want us all eating ecoli spinach, but he wants us to not be able to sue when our livers shut down.

Sweet.

h/t Reclusive Leftist

Cause I really like the roof metaphor.

So Lil Ms. Randombabble sent me to this fright fest of misogyny and privilege (thanks! Now I need a bleach bath for my soul)

So this guy doesn't think he should be held responsible for his privilege cause he didn't start it- wah wah wah.

So I give you my comment, in full- typos and all, cause I think the metaphor works really well.

Wow- that entire piece just has white boy privilege bleeding through it.

But there’s a more important point, which is that the idea of privilege seems to me to shift the ‘blame’ for any such favoritism away from the people who propagate it and toward the people who ‘benefit’ from it.

First- who are the mythical people that propagate privilege? Is there a special committee straight, rich, thin, white heterosexual men who get together once a month to decide on the ways further their influence?

No.

Privilege is perpetuated by people who refuse to see that they benefit from it. There is no evil cabal writing secret rules to benefit some people over others. There are just people who have privilege and don’t want to give it up- so they pretend like it doesn’t exist or it isn’t their responsibility cause they didn’t make things the way they are.

You might need to, I don’t know, go learn about how sexism and racism are institutional structures. That means they are the framework society is built on. Much like the framing of your house- you can’t exactly see them cause they are covered with a bunch of stuff. But it’s still there, holding up your roof, whether you believe in it or not.

But see that framework is built to leave a bunch of us (women, gays and lesbians, people of color, the disabled, etc) out in the rain most of the time. Sometimes we get a tiny chance to sneak under the roof for a bit. But usually we are just standing outside, soaking wet, while privileged fucks like you stand under the roof and declare that there isn’t a cloud in the sky.