season of the bitch

I’m not an economist, nor a student of economics, or anything remotely like it.

Still, I’m going to say that Hillary Clinton’s latest plan to gang up with McCain on Barack Obama by supporting McCain’s proposal to suspend the gasoline tax for the summer is terrible policy.

Aside from the fact that yet again she’s running closer to McCain than to Obama, and thus actually making herself a weaker general election candidate (how many swing voters are you going to convince away from McCain by sounding just like him? That’s right, NONE.) this is actually just a plain bad idea.

Taxes are the great boogeyman in American politics these days, aren’t they. Everyone bitches about them, and whenever a politician says “lower taxes” it’s a magic tool to win votes.

But taxes pay for things we need and want. They pay for infrastructure that we desperately need. They pay for teachers and Medicare and police and firemen.

Republicans are great at whining about taxes while allowing huge businesses to run roughshod over us.

Suspending the gas tax, sure, will make gas a few cents cheaper a gallon for the rest of the summer. And hell, I could use that few cents a gallon–it’ll add up.

But it will do NOTHING to alleviate the real problem, which is our dependence on a finite oil supply that largely comes from the Middle East, and it’ll also do nothing to stop the record profits of the oil companies. It’ll just take more money out of the government’s hands to do things that we desperately need it to do. (And, it must be noted, to spend on stupid things like portraits of the people at HUD.)

So why does Hillary Clinton support it? Because it’s another way to criticize Obama while stealing a line out of the Republican playbook? Nah, she’s surely not that cynical…

Anyway,  I’m proud of Barack for standing up to this crappy reasoning. Let’s hope more people see it as such.

(And don’t even get me started on our tax rebate.)

Just read it.

Since I’ve been out pounding the streets and all, I haven’t been blogging and in my absence, a bunch of people said things I wanted to say, but said ‘em better anyway:

1. Bill Clinton can kiss my ass.
For real.

2. Barack is, well, badass.

3. I also missed Equal Pay Day.

4. About the Penn Primary: what he said. Except it was a 9-point win.

5. White priest defends Jeremiah Wright, makes FOX News look like assholes. Not that it’s hard. (htp BitchPhD)

6. This says it all, about feminisms, blinders, and unwillingness to listen.

7. Susie Bright gives some love to New Orleans.

Oh, and to the New York Times (I’m not linking ’cause I’m over it): Most of us have already realized that there are two reasons the Democratic race ain’t over yet: Obama’s black, and Hillary’s last name is Clinton.

And we fight on…

(Remind me to talk about Angela Davis’s talk about “Communities of Struggle” and the campaign trail when my brain doesn’t hurt.)

But why the hell is George Stephanopoulos, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, monitoring a debate between Hillary Clinton and…well, anyone?

Objective journalism may be dead, but can’t we at least get someone without a glaring bias?

Even better comments from Bill about those same voters that Obama is supposedly condescending to. But I suppose if he just goes and does a shot of whiskey, it’ll be all better.

P.S. Does anyone think Hillary practiced shooting whiskey before that photo-op? I used to drink a lot of whiskey back in college, but have since fallen out of practice, and I’d probably have gagged or, at the very least, made a really nasty face. I just picture her with some 20-something staffer coaching her on how to drink.

read more | digg story

Bill Clinton wrote in his memoir almost the same thing that Obama said the other day. Minus the B-word.

Read, laugh.

read more | digg story

“There is a language that I speak or that speaks (to) me in all tongues. A language at once unique and universal that resounds in each national tongue when a poet speaks it. In each tongue, there flows milk and honey. And this language I know, I don’t need to enter it, it surges from me, it flows, it is the milk of love, the honey of my unconscious. The language that women speak when no one is there to correct them.”  -Cixous (again)

The right to words, the right to write, is something we all claim for ourselves. likewise the right to political speech, the kind of speech that doesn’t disappear. It’s something we fight for and something that erupts from us without our asking.

I understand what Hillary Clinton meant–or maybe I do–when she said she was just finding her own voice. Getting melded to a biglivewhitemale representation of Power like Billy C. is silencing. Your good advice is absorbed by him, and your mistakes are wholly your own.

I allowed my self to be quieted by a man who didn’t cast nearly as large a shadow and I still lost myself or didn’t speak up with that voice that was me. and now I don’t want to let myself care about anyone for fear of losing that voice that still doesn’t surge like it used to. and yet my fear itself is weakening me.

Leave it to a man to point this out: the costs of primping and appearance.

Remember the John Edwards “I feel pretty” video? (It’s on YouTube if you missed it.) Women are expected to spend a certain amount of time on their appearance, and even Hillary Clinton’s monochrome pantsuits and short, swept-back hair require more work than Obama’s basic lack of hair and monochrome suits.

Honestly, with all the talk of sexism around this election, this was one  thing I hadn’t thought of.

NPR was just interviewing voters in Pittsburgh about Hillary Clinton and almost every one of them that spoke talked about how she acted when her husband cheated on her as some sort of a barometer of whether they liked her.

Granted, it was mostly favorable–”She was held up to the public as a woman scorned and she didn’t break down,” etc. but are we really basing our evaluation on whether or not she stuck by Bill? God.

And of course it was mostly men who said that. Because that’s what women are supposed to do, stand by their man? Who knows. But it makes me a little sick.

Just now, NPR announced that while Hillary Clinton was speaking to a labor groupl, she continued to swear up and down that she fought against NAFTA even after the release of her papers proved that she fought FOR NAFTA.

Is the media in this country truly that bad that they forget that their job is not just to report that someone said something, but to find out if that something is true? Perhaps provide a little context for those remarks?

Context like this.

At this point the only reason I can see for voting for Hillary Clinton would be that she’s a woman. And that’s just not good enough a reason for me.

It is kind of amusing that the quote that’s all over the current Yahoo and BBC headlines on my screen is “Clinton says she will fight ‘like Rocky.’”

After all, Rocky’s a fictional character, too. Just like the one Clinton’s playing on the campaign trail.