Archives for “politics”
This black McDonald’s flag flies a few blocks from my home. How ironic, right? As a child I loved McDonald’s. We spent a year in the U.S., in 1978-79, and during road trips my sister and I spent much time arguing with my mother that we WILL NOT eat lunch anywhere except in McDonald’s. My [...]
One of the comments on DoubleX’s reader stories of health insurance nightmares: To the woman with blood clots… Call your insurance company and ask for their Appeals department. You want to file an expedited appeal. (Expedited appeals are different legally than regular appeals. The company is required to get you a decision generally in less [...]
There’s the pointless embarrassment of a state governor calling a press conference to reveal he’s had something as commonplace as an affair. And the emails he’d exchanged with his Argentinian paramour (via 11D) made public, which almost made me feel sorry for them. Almost, but not quite. I don’t know why Mark Sanford is at [...]
I can’t take a feminist seriously if she takes a condescending tone towards traditionally female activities like crafting in order to make some otherwise valid points about the marketing practices of e-business sites (in this case: Etsy) (responses at Jezebel, Magickal Realism, 11D, etc.). In that article, Sara Mosle implies that an educated stay-at-home-mom’s non-work [...]
If medical bills underly 60% of bankruptcies, then how much of all debt, including outstanding debt that hasn’t yet crippled anyone, is due to medical expenses? The figure comes from a Harvard Law School/Harvard Medical School/Ohio University report (via HuffPo), which also found that Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee [...]
If those of us who grew up speaking another language can learn to pronounce others’ – to us – foreign names correctly, then isn’t it only common courtesy for them to do the same for us? I possess no special talent in this and refuse to assume that everyone else can’t do something I’m able [...]
I know that’s not a word. Or anything close to it. I just keep thinking of that school strip search story, and just what component of it scares me the most. And it’s this: that there is no semblance in it of respect for a student’s integrity. You really can’t just go searching people’s lockers [...]
Stories like this, about schools and their right to strip search, without due process, any student if they suspect s/he has any drugs on her/him, they are symptoms of serious damage to American society. It does not matter if the students actually have drugs because no lesson is learned this way, and no one is [...]
All day I kept thinking: in their shoes, I’d fear for my life too. Except there’s a difference: I hope I would not have accepted money I didn’t need for work I’d done that resulted in wrecking the entire world. Oh, there’s an even bigger difference: I doubt I’d ever have been hired by a [...]
Baby Z can do it now: Big change from the less successful lip-crawling phase.* And non-groaning phase. Also note: how I torture my child by moving her most coveted toy (=Bumbo seat part) further and further away from her, forget to move the laptop computer out of the easy-to-reach vicinity, and let our little dog [...]
Sweet Juniper writes beautifully about Detroit and why we should bail out the big three, and the changed landscape of where and how the stuff we use every day is made. To wit: Some of the people saying let them fail about Detroit’s automakers are very the same people who had no problem with the [...]
Paul Krugman’s right: one of the most important areas of legislation, if not THE most important area of legislation that the next administration should enact is universal healthcare. Here’s what’s wrong with not having any kind of universal healthcare: it places people’s bodily integrity completely within the for-profit realm. Whether or not people are able [...]
We voted. In the little elementary school’s gym near our house, one of our neighbors was the poll worker, and my name was, unsurprisingly, hard to find on the list because: foreign and kind of hard to spell, and difficult to recognize in signature form. We came back from Detroit last night, Faustina lasted through [...]
Faustina laughed out loud for the first time today. I was giving her a bath tonight, trying to imitate what her father does (he’s away on business for a few days – so I’ve taken over bath duty), squirting water on her belly with the crocodile bath toy. And she laughed. And laughed again. It [...]
Judith Warner says about Palin (among other thoughtful things): Just look at how quickly the reaction to Palin devolved into what The Times this week called the “Mommy Wars: Special Campaign Edition.” Much of the talk about Palin (like the emoting about Hillary Clinton before her) ultimately came down to this: is she like me [...]
These people terrify me (link found at dooce, who says pretty close to what I think of it all). About Palin: so many have said what the problem with her is better than me. I just keep thinking that her choice as running mate has frighteningly little to do with reality, she might as well [...]
Because in Internet-time this is really old news – but I’m on vacation – but mostly: Biden? Really? This, once again, makes me ponder that she might have been the better candidate.
France denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears a niqab because She has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes The government commissioner reporting on her interviews with social services prior to the decision said “She lives in [...]
I love Obama. What’s not to love? But I’m torn about Hillary Clinton, I feel for her now as she’s being abandoned. And not because it would have been nice to have a woman president. It would have, of course. It’s just that her healthcare plan was much more solid than Obama’s, and what’s more, [...]
I got my economic stimulus check, which was – naturally – for an amount far less than the so-called $600 minimum. Because, you know, I was adjuncting and finishing my Ph.D. and so my income in 2007 was less than the amount they figured as the baseline for the stimulus. Because if you make less [...]
“In fact, Mrs. Clinton was accurately repeating the story as it was told to her — and it turns out that while some of the details were slightly off, the essentials of her story were correct. After all the fuss, The Washington Post eventually conceded that “Bachtel’s medical tragedy began with circumstances very close to [...]
Seriously? Is Amy Winehouse somehow a security risk to the U.S.?
I want to record something here that so far, I’ve kept rather private. Not my vote, which I’ve cast, and which is now a part of this election cycle. As changes in my life go, the biggest one is the baby, of course. But there are other things too. I’ve been worrying about my professional [...]
I vote for the first time in the U.S., on Super Tuesday. I studied: I read through policy proposals, looked at endorsements, criticisms, what-have-you. And I think the best thing would be for Clinton and Obama to end up running together. I can’t help it, and it seems I’m not alone in such dogged hopefulness [...]
Recent Comments