Miscellaneous News

Text messages between Steve McNair and Sahel Kazemi during the last hours before the July 4 murder-suicide have been made public.
_____

The ad geniuses at Ralph Lauren and their ilk deserve every bit of criticism and more for those notorious photoshopped images of already grotesquely thin women looking even more freakish.

Talk about absolutely twisted:

A spokeswoman for Polo Ralph Lauren has apologized for the photo of the stick figure with the freakishly out-of-proportion head, albeit after the company tried and failed to suppress dissemination of this image on the Web. But the story has a final twist. Last week the company fired the model in the ad, Filippa Hamilton. She says she lost her job because the company thought she had grown too fat. She’s a size 4, 120 pounds on a 5-foot-10 frame. The company says it ditched her because of her “inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us.” Just a crazy coincidence, I’ve no doubt.

How in the hell is a size 4, 120 pounds, on a nearly six-foot tall frame considered fat? That's anorexic. Sorry, but that scrawny a body is no beauty standard.
_____

More Sexist Filth

If Sarah Palin were a Democrat, would articles like this even exist? If this jerk writer is representative of the thinking of mainstream Democrats, I want no part of it.

Media Sexist Commentary

One doesn't have to be a fan or a voter for Sarah Palin to recognize filth when they read it.

Any time there is a halfway strong woman running for president or other public office, the media has to paint the woman as a domineering, controlling, castrating bitch. Hillary Clinton went through the same damned thing.

Because to anyone who isn't a true believer, Palin comes across not as a fantasy pinup, but as a dominatrix. And the S/M demographic isn't going to put the Republicans over the top in the swing states.


For the die-hard Republicans who lusted over Palin at the convention, her whip-wielding persona was a turn-on. You could practically feel the crowd getting a collective woody as Palin bent Obama and the Democrats over, shoved a leather gag in their mouths and flogged them as un-American wimps, appeasers and losers. "Drill, baby, drill!" the chant ecstatically repeated by the GOP faithful during Rudy Giuliani's speech, acquired a distinctly Freudian subtext after Palin spoke. The more Palin drilled the Democrats, the more hotly the base yearned to drill her. (We will leave it to shrinks to determine whether the GOP hardcore has the hots for Palin because she's reaming the Democrats, or because authority-worshippers tend to have secret fantasies of being reamed themselves.)

The problem for the GOP, however, is that for independents, Palin comes across as someone who's going to drill them. Strict biblical literalism, trying to ban books, denying human responsibility for global warming and launching nasty vendettas against foes may put lead in the pencil of unreconstructed Bush supporters, but for those who haven't already signed up for the extreme GOP agenda, they're about as seductive as a great white shark in Victoria's Secret lingerie.

This Kamiya is one sick asshole to write semi-pornography like this. It sounds more like his own sick fantasy about Palin than it does Republican supporters'. How does this help Obama, by the way, whose balloon is rapidly losing air?

I got news for him: It isn't whether McCain/Palin win the election, it's by how much.

More Political Commentary

In this columnist's eyes, it's long past time for the media to stop with the trashing of Sarah Palin and her family, including the sexist subtext that she can't have both a high-profile job and have a family.

This has nothing to do with the political stance of Palin; this has to do with how we treat women politicians with one set of standards, and men with another. It also has to do with the whole notion of the so-called "mommy wars."

This much-ado-about-nothing over Palin reminds me of the classic Ms. essay written by Jane Brody in 1971, "Why I Want a Wife." Despite her having a somewhat nontraditional husband, Palin still doesn't have a wife.

No wife, no life is Palin's problem.


The more I think of the media harping on Palin, the more I see something else at work. Given the fact the media are in the tank for John McCain and have been for years, this constant slamming of Palin actually BENEFITS McCain and doesn't hurt him at all. McCain, in turn, can complain about media unfairness and get away with it because the media DOES appear to be unfair to him. What this does is strengthen the resolve of his supporters and pisses off other people on the fence. At the same time it hurts Obama, whether or not Obama and his campaign are up to their eyeballs in promoting the smears. I am coming to the conclusion there is a lot more than meets the eye here.

We will see if my growing suspicion is right or is just simply borderline tinfoil.

Sexist Double Standards

The media tells us women like Sarah Palin shouldn't be running for president because of her DS baby, no matter how well cared for this baby has been and will be, but it's perfectly okay for Obama to run all over the country and ignore his two daughters.

The article reeks of sexism. The message is clear: If you're a woman and you've just had kids, don't bother running for high political office.

Media Follies.

The New York Times was as guilty as other media outfits in its trashing of Hillary Clinton:

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

The problem is Dowd has treated the Clintons like filth over the past decade or so. In fact, one would argue she made it to the pinnacle of paper punditry on their backs.

I have always found her overrated as a writer.