This plugin I have is not letting me upload the video, but here’s a link to an excerpt of Dear Daddy, a documentary which gives girls the opportunity to read letters to the camera containing what they would say to their absent fathers.
It is a tear jerker, but h/t to Womanist Musings for posting!
No bullshit. That’s according to Tim Gunn, who recently appeared on the Lopez Tonight show to complain about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s style of dress.
“Why must she dress that way?” the 57-year-old quipped. “I think she’s confused about her gender [with] all these big, baggy menswear tailored pantsuits.” ”No, I’m really serious,” he added. “[They're] unflattering.”
When Lopez, 50, asked how the former New York senator could “hide her cankles,” Gunn said it was just a matter of adjusting her hemline. “Well, if her pants didn’t stop an inch above her ankle, she could hide the cankle!”
This douche bag tried a haphazard attempt at a mea cupla later, adding he has “great respect for her intellect and her tenacity and for what she does four our country in her governmental role,” but added he wished she was, in a nutshell, a little bit more feminine in her style options.
Photo courtesy Wen Jiabao Pictures
Really, cankles? Are we still hung up on Clinton’s ankles? That’s so 1990s, Tim Gunn…
The Project Runway sexist pig star apparently believes women like Clinton not only should be intelligent, well-educated and aspire to reputable positions in government, law and business, but they also need to be watchful of the New York City runway in order to keep up with all the latest fashions. Gunn’s comments reek of the male chauvinistic, sexist double speak men are guilty of more likely than not. While many men are capable and willing to applaud and support successful, ambition women, they still are unable to let go of the sexist attitudes that keeps women below the glass ceiling by applying gender-based stereotypes.
I have one phrase to Tim Gunn and the men and women like them: Fuck. You.
A lawsuit filed in Arkansas alleges McGehee Secondary School named a white co-valedictorian because the initial valedictorian was black. The plaintiff, Kymberly Wimberly, said she got only one B throughout her high school career and took many Advanced Placement and honors courses. However, she alleges in her lawsuit the school’s “refusal to let her be sole valedictorian was part of a pattern of discrimination against black students.”
Wimberly says that despite earning the highest G.P.A. of the Class of 2011, and being informed of it by a school counselor, “school administrators and personnel treated two other white students as heir[s] apparent to the valedictorian and salutatorian spots.” Wimberly’s mother is the school’s “certified media specialist.” She says in the federal discrimination complaint that after her daughter had been told she would be valedictorian, the mother heard “in the copy room that same day, other school personnel expressed concern that Wimberly’s status as valedictorian might cause a ‘big mess.’”
McGehee Secondary School is predominantly white, and 46 percent African-American, according to the complaint. Bratton says that the day after she heard the “big mess” comment, McGehee Principal Darrell Thompson, a defendant, told her “that he decided to name a white student as co-valedictorian,” although the white student had a lower G.P.A.
Bratton says she tried to protest the decision to the school board, but defendant Superintendent Thomas Gathen would not let her speak, because she allegedly had “filled out the wrong form. Instead of ‘public comments,’ Gather [sic] said Bratton should have asked for ‘public participation.’” The superintendent told her she could not appeal his decision until the June 28 school board meeting; graduation was May 13.
First: I’ve never heard of a superintendent over a school board denying someone the opportunity to speak on an issue just because someone filled out the wrong form. While they technically may have a right to do that, it does not speak well of the superintendent and the board.
This makes me sick to my stomach. This young woman worked her ass off, took the initiative to take demanding AP and honors classes and studied her way to the top in order earn the valedictorian slot. And this principal has the nerve to wield his authority to keep the system of white privilege in place by appointing this student, who, according to the lawsuit, had a lower GPA than Wimberly.
If this school district and this superintendent gave the green light for the principal to do this because of the valedictorian’s race, this principal, this superintendent and this board of education need to all be thrown out of office. If this is indeed true, none of these people deserve to set foot in a classroom or have the privilege to work as an educator for the rest of their natural lives.
After denouncing the Norway, attacks that killed over 70 people, Glenn Beck launched into a tirade about the camp in which most of the victims were slaughtered.
Beck, on his radio show, declared the killings “the work of a madman” and called the suspect “as bad as Osama bin Laden.” But before launching into that condemnation, he questioned what the victims were doing at a summer camp run by Norway’s ruling Labour Party.
Beck said the camp “sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth or whatever. Who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing.”
What’s hysterical is Beck is the founder of an organization–9/21 Project–that pretty much does the same thing. There are numerous 9/12 Project organizations across the country. It’s mission, according to its website, “is to inspire individuals and groups to connect with their communities through education, service and dedication to the 9 Principles and 12 Values to which we have committed.” Those 9 principles:
The organization’s 12 values are listed as honesty, reverence, hope, thrift, humility, charity, sincerity, moderation, hard work, courage, personal responsibility and gratitude. It doesn’t end there. The fun doesn’t stop there. More from the article:
The Colorado 9/12 Project hosted a “Patriot Camp” for kids in grades 1-5 earlier this month, featuring programs on “our Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and the values and principles that are the cornerstones of our nation.”
And in August, the Danville, Kentucky, chapter is holding a “Vacation Liberty School” that organizers pledge “will help your children understand where we came from. Understand where we went wrong. Understand where the fork in the road was, and which path we should have taken.”
Let me make sure I understand: it’s “disturbing” for a camp run by the country’s Labour Party to get together to instill left-of-center values, but it’s all fine and dandy for conservative Americans to round up children and instill what appear to be segments of any given Republican Party political platform? It’s a cause for concern when folks left of the political spectrum want to discuss government and politics, but it’s a form of patriotism when idealistic activists want to teach good ol’ fashioned American values to disillusioned children in the post-9/11 era.
Can someone help me on Beck’s line of reasoning? I can’t see through the wall of contradictions and bullshit.
Dr. Keith Ablow, a FOX News medical contributor, thinks so (big surprise, I know). This doctor makes his point by stating men who can make a “credible” claim to paternity, who can wholeheartedly dedicate his life to taking care of the baby and willing to take full custody of the child should have the right to stop the mother from moving forward with an abortion.
Dr. Ablow doesn’t stop there. He also proposes any woman who goes forward with an abortion “should be civilly liable, and possibly criminally liable, for psychological suffering and wrongful death should she proceed to do so.”
Here’s a brief snippet of Dr. Ablow’s opinion:
I have limited the scope of my argument intentionally, in order to focus on what I consider to be a question that puts fairness front and center: If a man has participated in creating a new life and is fully willing to parent his child (independently, if necessary), why should he not have any control over whether that life is ended?
We are ignoring the quiet message that current abortion policy conveys to every American male: You have no voice in, and, therefore, no responsibility for, the pregnancies which you help to create. Your descendants are disposable, at the whim of the women you choose to be intimate with.
Giving would-be fathers a lack of veto power over abortions is connected psychologically to the epidemic of absentee fathers in this country. We can’t, on the one hand, be credible in bemoaning the number of single mothers raising their children, while, on the other hand, giving men the clear message that bringing new lives to the planet is the exclusive domain, and under the exclusive control, of women.
Whether stated or not, the underlying message of withholding from men their proper rights to father the children they create is that they are not proper custodians, nor properly responsible, for their children.
The notion that there is no emotional injury done men by depriving them of decision-making power as to whether the children they father are aborted is naïve.
Just in my own practice of psychiatry, I have listened to dozens of men express lingering, sometimes intense, pain over abortions that proceeded either without their consent, or without them having spoken up about their desires to bring their children to term and parent them.
*Deep breath* 1…,2…3,…
I’m not sure where to begin with this subliminal, anti-abortion propaganda.
A twenty-something black woman fed up with the degradation and subjugation black women are faced with each day. It's time we stand up and demand better. It's time for a revolution!
