season of the bitch

I warn everyone: this may be offensive. There was champagne, and much shouting at the TV. Click “more” at your own risk. Also, it goes in reverse order, with the most recent first.

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I just realized that I haven’t updated. I’ve been working on this and that, writing school stuff and writing for other places, so I guess I just felt like I’d updated more recently than I have.

It’s a busy, busy week this week. My sister’s birthday is today, so I’m taking her out for dinner tonight, and then getting a good night’s sleep because it’ll be my last until Sunday.

Most importantly, tomorrow night is DEBATE NIGHT. I will be purchasing more cheap champagne and live-twittering. Going to see if I can change my Twitter widget to update in the main blog area instead of in my sidebar, so those of you who don’t stay up to watch the hilarity can read it all the next day.

Apparently, the format of the debate is going to favor Palin–no follow-up questions. I’ve elaborated several times as to why I think that this will also help Biden–he’s got to answer the damn question, and won’t have much time to snark at Palin. She, on the other hand, will be able to make her own self look, well, clueless.

I stood up for the woman in the beginning–certainly not for her policies, but at least for her not being as dumb as people wanted to think. But as time has gone on, while I still don’t think she’s dumb, she certainly has proven herself to be willfully uninformed. I still won’t compare her to the much-maligned Dan Quayle. We’ve got another one much closer: George W. Bush.

Remember Bush sneering at a journalist translating languages for him? Or his many mispronunciations or confusions of foreign officials (I seem to remember a story about Prime Minister Poutine? Oh, ye gods.) Remember Bush defining the word “Sovereignty” as “it’s sovereign”?

This kind of arrogant, oppressive ignorance seems to be fading from popularity, as Obama’s poll numbers seem to indicate. One of the things I do like about Obama is his tendency, from all reports, to sit back and listen when other people are talking, and to be willing to learn. Now, since by all accounts Palin is cramming for her debate like a high schooler for the SATs, one would assume that she’ll have learned something by then. After all, I spent 3 hours Monday morning boning up on my economic policy and all I had was Google and a friendly debate through IM. (I don’t have a solution to the problem, but I like the one Bernie Sanders proposed–surprise, surprise.)

Point being, if she wanted to learn this stuff,  it’s out there. She’s clearly not a stupid woman–she managed to get elected governor of Alaska without a dynasty behind her to shoehorn her into the seat. But she certainly didn’t count on being quizzed on federal-level policy this soon into her career, and it is pretty sad that even as a governor of a state she didn’t find it necessary to learn it.

Anyway, I’m honing my snark for tomorrow night. Until then, if you miss me, you can check out my Paul Newman piece, my first debate piece, my bailout piece, etc. at GlobalComment (plus read Renee’s stuff there, she’s excellent) and a bit of lighter fare: Janes in Love review at BUST and Black Summer review at Newsarama. And a bunch of junk on Tumblr.

Mother Jones has 5 alternative plans, just in time for the bailout to fail in the House.

Read this this morning. Some interesting tidbits in there.

Among them:

For the first time, the federal government will limit the compensation of some top corporate executives to $500,000 annually — directly in the case of big banks that participate heavily in the new program and through limits on tax deductions for everyone else. There will be tough restrictions on golden parachutes and clawback provisions for bonuses based on profits that later disappear.

Of course, commie that I am, I think $500,000 is still way too much.

Also:

Finally, the legislation contains several mechanisms for the government to recoup all of its money, and perhaps even turn a profit, by collecting insurance premiums, demanding stock from participating banks and, should all else fail, slapping a new tax on the financial services industry beginning in 2014.

Somehow, I don’t believe that.

I wish I had studied economics more. I wish I had a better suggestion, but let’s face it: our economy is dependent on too many huge corporations that do nothing in essence but shuffle money around. We don’t make things anymore, we’ve got ridiculous trade deficits, we in essence have nothing to offer but bombs and threats.

For all of McCain’s tough talk on Russia and China, the fact remains that we can’t be threatening large countries that own huge chunks of our national debt with much of anything. We can’t bulldoze them into compliance–we can’t even get Iraq and Afghanistan to do what we want.

I think this is the end of US global dominance no matter how we slice it–and that in itself doesn’t bother me. The question is, can we just gently accept that, start to compromise and deal with other countries on a level, or are we going to freak out like spoiled children, provoke or start more wars, and end up collapsing in a bloody heap?

Somehow, I think the answer hinges on this election.

Scary shit, eh?

*Edit: Krugman’s blog.

I wrote this. The 700 Billion Bailout

I have some fun and some serious for you this morning.

1. Publius on Obama’s economic policy and reasons to be excited.

2. Ren’s posts on Feministe. All of them. Because she lays it all out there: treat sex workers as people, please. It ain’t friggin’ hard. Or shouldn’t be.

3. Prof BW has a call to arms: Blog Action Day on Poverty. I’ll be trying to do this. You should too.

4. And some fun, as promised: BFP has Lita Ford, Joan Jett, and Joan and Bruce Springsteen duetting. Yay!

So today is house-cleaning day. I’m doing a gazillion loads of laundry, have swept, cleaned my room, cleaned my bathroom, and am about to go to Target and buy a new vacuum and a bookshelf so I can unpack the last few boxes on my bedroom floor. I don’t have a ton of money to spare, but a bookshelf will cost $30 and help me be organized, so it’s well worth it.

I bloody well hate cleaning. I never do it until I can barely deal with the mess and dog hair and then I binge and clean for three hours straight (like I did this morning). If I had money, I’d have a cleaning person. And I’d have some bourgeois guilt, but I’d make sure to pay hir a living wage.

My mother was a cleaning lady for a while. When I was little, we had lots of money. My dad owned restaurants. Then in the late 80s, well, the restaurants weren’t doing so well. They were closing one by one. One of the earliest things my mother gave up was her cleaning guys (yes, they were men, there were two of them, and they made fun of my guinea pigs. That’s all I remember. I was little!).

My mother went to a two-year program post high school that I think trained her to be a secretary, but she wasn’t the secretary type. Instead, she managed a Mr. Donut shop and did it well. Her bosses continually told her that she couldn’t be a manager because she couldn’t lift heavy boxes, but she’d lift them and laugh at her bosses–and they’d promote her. Eventually she traveled across the country opening Mr. Donuts. By herself. A single woman.

When she gave that up, she got a job as a restaurant manager. (Her father ran a brickyard in New Hampshire. I come from blue-collar stock for sure on that side. It’s my dad’s side that’s the bourgeois Ivy League Jews.) And again, they tried to tell her at first that she couldn’t be the manager because she’d have to be alone at night. Eff that, she said, and she was the manager. Then one day they sold the restaurant, and she gave her notice to the new owner. “That’s OK,” he said, “I’d rather date you anyway.”

My dad was suave, back in the day, eh?

Anyway, he went from that restaurant to a new chain that he founded and ran, until they started to lose money. And my mother had a gap in her resume a while long now, since she hadn’t worked while she had her kids, and she needed a job that would be flexible and let her be home for us when we needed her.

So she and my old nanny (yep, had one of those too) started a cleaning business. Don’t know how much they charged, but they worked on their own schedule, made grocery money, and kept me fed. I went from private school to public, they left the country club, traded in the fancy car for a Taurus, and sold the big house in Massachusetts, the last two restaurants (at a huge loss) and moved to South Carolina on credit cards.

Eventually, my dad bought a little bike shop and built the business up to where I lost a good chunk of my student aid when we went up a tax bracket (that’s another story). And so when I was broke and couldn’t pay my bills with my two waitressing jobs, I had an option to go back to. Oh, and I cleaned my landlady’s house a few times in Denver to pay my rent, since she was a wonderful person and understood that I was poor.

This isn’t a sympathy story. I don’t care if you think I’m a whining twit for writing about it. But Natalia hipped me to this story and it made me think of the type of people who will talk shit about other people’s financial status or downward mobility. The type of people like this one woman I know who thought she knew enough about me to make fun of me for working for my parents.

It isn’t anyone’s business, really. And this is where that safety net I was talking about a few posts back would really come in handy. Because as I’ve pointed out, I came from privilege and my mother came from privilege.

My mother has two shoulders that don’t really work now. She has had multiple surgeries, and my father has a heart condition and a lung condition. Health insurance for the two of them is somewhere around $45,000 a year (I’ve said this before). My father shouldn’t be working six 9-hour days a week in the heat at the bike shop, but he doesn’t have an option until he’s old enough for Medicare to kick in. My mother is basically unable to do any work that she’s qualified to do.

She has a cleaning lady again. A college student from Lithuania who also likes the work because of its flexible hours. She pays her $60 for two hours’ worth of housecleaning.

It’s a hell of a lot better than working at a restaurant.

But I wonder sometimes if all of this plays into my hatred of cleaning, cooking, and anything domestic.

That I’ll finish later today, I promise.

For now, I recommend this, Hilzoy on the government’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and this, wherein Latoya asks what we’re fighting for when it comes to feminism. Interestingly, both those writers are feminist bloggers who do not primarily center feminism in their blogging, yet I think it comes through in everything they say and do.

And for you to check out the new category in my blogroll: comics & art. Since they didn’t really fit in my regular blogroll and all.

from LGM. This is truly ridiculous, you know.

from Obsidian Wings. Just…wow. Worse than a Presidential yacht. what the hell is wrong with these people?

Mother Jones: it’s the deregulation, stupid.