Tag Archives: politics

do stuff for your new president

{17 January 2009}

those of us in the theatre industry rarely get those three-day weekend monday holiday things. if we’re lucky enough to get a day off at all, it’s usually on a monday, in which case the fact that banks and post offices are closed is just plain inconvenient.

which is why i’m stoked that my tech schedule is giving me sunday and possibly much of monday off this week. whoo! and then on tuesday i will be celebrating the day that everyone has been anxiously awaiting by attending a friend’s inauguration brunch, aptly titled, “Ditch Work For Your New President”. tuesday morning = pancakes + barak obama? yes, please.

in the mean time, obama has urged everyone to consider MLK Day to be a day of national service. so if you’re lucky enough to have the day off, please consider volunteering for a community event. there are services events like helping out in shelters and food pantries, and also a lot of drop-off events, so if you don’t have a lot of free time you can still help out by donating an old coat to a shelter or coat drive, give blood to a blood drive, food to a food drive (i’m starting to get a drive theme here…), etc.

so go on, thank your lucky stars for a three day weekend, and go find a service event in your hood.

hometown pride

{05 November 2008}

photo is circa 2006
with the exception of my boss, everyone else in this photo no longer works here. oh, and Obama doesn’t need to practice for his senate-race debates on our stage any more.

free association gabfest

{26 September 2008}

political angst in numbers is good; sympathetic company is best. i will be watching the debate tonight in the company of other like-minded leftys. how disappointing that next week i have to call a show during the vice-presidential debate.

which brings me to the clips of Katie Couric handing Sarah Palin just enough rope to hang herself with that are flying all over the interweb today. Emily Bazelon (of Slate.com’s excellent Political Gabfest) bemoaned Sarah Palin’s embarrassing ineptitude as being bad PR for female leaders everywhere, but i disagree. i’m plenty concerned about the damage that Palin could inflict on our country if she gets into office. but as for her ineptitude as a candidate? competent women leaders and their reputations will be fine. Sarah Palin doesn’t speak for me.

speaking of disasters of our own making, how about that economy, eh? last night i actually saw my first ever honest-to-god bank run. i was driving past a Washington Mutual around 5pm and noticed a line of people that stretched past the storefront bank and around the corner. because some news blip about Washington Mutual being on shaky financial ground had entered my brain in the past week or two, i actually thought to myself, i wonder if all those people are trying to get their money out of the bank? images of the bank run scene in It’s a Wonderful Life popped into my head. then i decided that the generally high level of anxiety in the news lately was seeping in and i must be paranoid. they’re probably queuing up for something at the shop next door, i thought. what i didn’t realize until much later that night, was that the collapse, seizure and sale of Washington Mutual had just been announced around the same time i saw the hoards of people.

moving on from the truly scary to the truly bizarre, i’m really really excited about the Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland adaptation that was announced yesterday. as you readers of slithy tove can guess, i’m deeply partial to Lewis Carroll for many reasons, artistic and nostalgic, and i’ve seen the Alice story retold and retreated about a half dozen times, some to very good effect, some not so. but i think the Tim Burton aesthetic isn’t a bad place to start at all.

however, since that won’t be released until sometime 2010, i’ll have to set my sights first on Repo! The Genetic Opera, which looks to be some sort of instant campy cult hyrid of Rocky Horror, Buz Luhrmann, Joss Whedon, and Meatloaf*. i’m particularly excited about Anthony Stewart Head playing the conflicted villain, tho i am deeply troubled by the fact that last night one of the characters on Gossip Girl was headed out the door to go watch Repo. what? fake TV characters get to see movies before they are released for real? what gives?**

we’ll wrap up this, my own gabfest, with two facebook-related topics: a link to my new favorite piece on McSweeny’s: HAMLET (FACEBOOK NEWS FEED EDITION), and a moment to mention how pleased i am that Facebook now offers English (Pirate) as a language selection. if you’re Facebook, every day can be Talk Like A Pirate Day!

* to my knowledge, none of those artists are actually involved in the project.

**in my defense, i had just run 12 miles at race pace in preparation for next week’s marathon, and i was really really tired, so tired, in fact, that i couldn’t get off the couch to find the TiVo remote and change the channel. i swear.

***this footnote is in homage to David Foster Wallace. i can’t seem offer anything at all eloquent on the topic of his untimely death, but will say that his work certainly influenced my own writing and my analytical approach to the world — footnotes being only the stylistic tip of the iceberg.

Are you registered to vote? are you sure?

{25 September 2008}

So I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes administrative stuff like getting a library card, paying my electric bill, and registering to vote, can seem way more complicated than it should be.

I can’t help you with the utility bills or the library fines. However, here’s all the info you need to make SURE you are registered to vote. Don’t risk getting to the polls (or NOT going to the polls) on election day and being unable to vote!

This site, which is run by the Obama campaign, seemed to be the easiest one to use that I found. Even if you think you’re probably registered (did you move in the past couple of years?), you can use it just to double check that you are registered just by entering your name and current address. Check it out at: www.voteforchange.com

If you’d prefer a non-partisan place to register, you can go to: www.registertovote.org

Google also has a really handy tool for making sure you know where your polling place is (The G says polling locations will be posted mid-october. In the mean time the tool is great for getting your states deadlines and general info)

Don’t wait! In Illinois, you have 13 more days to register! Other states have other deadlines. That Google tool I listed above will tell you what the deadline for registering in your state is.

Also, for all you Chicago folks: don’t forget that you can vote early! This isn’t absentee voting, you can actually walk into a polling place, ANY of the early voting polling places, any day between October 13 and election day, and cast your vote. No lines, no waiting, no risking that your polling place might run out of ballots on election day. I do it every time I vote, and it is soooo much easier. Here’s a link to all the info about voting early in Chicago:

http://chicago.about.com/od/governmentandmedia/a/earlyvotingcook.htm

Now you have no excuse! A few quick clicks and you’ll be all set. Don’t let this opportunity slip by!

please hillary, don’t hurt ’em

{11 March 2008}

i was wondering how long it would take for the question of a joint democratic ticket to emerge. what amuses me about Obama’s rebuttal:

“With all due respect, I won twice as many states as Senator Clinton. I won more of the popular vote than Senator Clinton. I have more delegates than Senator Clinton…I don’t know how somebody who is in second place is offering the vice presidency to somebody who is in first place.”

is that it evokes a memory of the first concert i ever went to. i was in the 7th grade and Vanilla Ice* was opening for MC Hammer. i’d saved up the $45 or whatever from an entire summer of lawn mowing earnings. i’d picked out the coolest outfit i had.** a friend’s older brother was going to drive us so we could arrive at the arena in style, no parents in sight. then, the week before the tour was scheduled to come to my hometown, Vanilla Ice passed MC Hammer up on the charts. and, seeing as how he was now a bigger star, the frosty-haired popstar refused to go on as the opening act. of course, i was crushed, seeing as how we’d all bought tickets to the concert just to see Vanilla Ice (Hammer Pants already taking on a twinge of dweeb at that point).

i’m not sure how to wrap up this analogy. will Senator Clinton wear Hammer Pants? i is Obama coasting on cool he sampled without permission from David Bowie?

*did you know that Vanilla Ice’s real name is Robert Matthew Van Winkle?? i couldn’t have made that up if i’d tried. maybe all you watchers of reality TV already knew that.

**which, for the record, was a pair of denim overall shorts with one strap fastened and the other flapping down my back layered over a pink/purple hypercolor t-shirt color-coded to match my socks and hair scrunchie.

super fat tuesday

{06 February 2008}

CNN’s Jon Klein on NPR this morning: “It’s like the Super Bowl actually matters to people’s lives, is what this election is.”*

ah, profound. wait, pro sports DON’T matter as much as the political future of our country and our world? jeeze.

PS – i voted. did you do your civic duty today?

*as a disclaimer, i couldn’t find this quote in print anywhere, so i might not have it verbatim.

today’s reasons why the bush family makes me angry

{23 June 2007}

two quotes:

first, president bush on why he vetoed legislation for embryonic stem cell research:

BUSH: Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical.

excuse me, what? it’s all well and good to moralize about that when we’re talking about frozen embryos, but isn’t that exactly what we’re doing in iraq? our foreign policy, all foreign policy, perhaps, is centered around the notion that american lives somehow have a higher intrinsic value than the lives of other people. that’s why when the white house or the military reports deaths in iraq, it’s always framed as, “12 US soldiers were killed….” and then tacked on to the end of the story, like a footnote, is “oh yeah, and also 243 iraqi civilians died too,” or whatever. the news has made a big deal as we passed each milestone stone of the number of US soldiers who have died in Iraq, 2000, 2500, and so forth. i sure haven’t seen any news blurbs about milestones of total civilian casualties.

so in war, it’s okay to take an iraqi life to save an american life, but it’s not okay to take an embryo that was never going to become a human anyway and use it to find a cure for diseases that people already living are suffering from? how much more arrogant that we create hundreds of human embryos in the pursuit of invitro, and then throw them away when we don’t need them any more. (why doesn’t anyone ever talk about that part?!?) better to use those embryos for essential, life-saving research. bush, you huge, walk-the-party-line hypocrite. under pressure from your conservative base you pull support for embryonic stem cell research (calling it unethical), but you don’t have the political balls to stick with your moral position and oppose all forms of invitro, and for that matter, contraception, because that would alienate the moderates.

the second sound bite that made cartoon steam come out my ears this week was the first lady speaking with michele norris about

LAURA BUSH: In countries where there are “gender issues” and where girls feel like they have to comply with the wishes of men, I think abstinence [and abstinence education] become even more important. We need to get the message to girls everywhere, not just in Africa, that they have a choice, that they can be abstinent and make choices for themselves that keep themselves safe. (quotes mine)

what? did she get lost mid-sentence and miss her point entirely? i’m going to assume that what she delicately referred to as counties with “gender issues” in fact refers to countries with a predominant patriarchy. and in a culture where women are so devalued, they often DON’T have a choice about when they have sex or with whom. there are cultures where women are still sold by their parents as child brides. they are denied access to education and employment. they are raped until they become pregnant and then have no choice but to stay with the husband who literally purchased them. don’t talk to me about how these women need to know they have a choice. in their lives, they have very few choices. what they need is education about the ways that HIV is transmitted, access to testing and condoms and antiretroviral drugs to help prevent the transmission of the disease to their unborn children. i can’t think of anything more condescending than laura bush sitting in her ivory tower talking about how abstinence eduction can empower women to protect themselves from HIV.