Author Archives: The Red Queen

Wecome to Bizzaro Land

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It’s official peeps- I get a stalker and lose a dear friend cause I won’t vote for Obama and admit that Unity Ponies are real, and I lose a different dear friend cause I won’t vote John McCain, Maverick at large. Apparently not voting for McCain makes me a coward, yet not voting for Obama makes me a dumb slut.

WTF peeps? I think I am officially in Bizzarro Land.

And after checking the sitemeter stats for today- I know it’s true. Since I am too tired (spent the day cleaning house for a friend. It’s not a lot of money but I was down to bus fare when I got to his house) and am too angry to blog about anything coherent at the moment, you get a list of the weird google searches that get you to this blog:

Cookie Porn

free chimpanzee fucking woman

Center of a twinkie – I’m number 1 on this at Google. I’m so proud!

catch more flies with honey type analogies

Cute Indian Boys

And the still popular- why do men hate their women

Killing 2 birds

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A few nights ago a saw a thing on PBS about Socrates and his tendency to ask profound questions of random strangers on the street.

Then tonight the Kid handed me his geography homework. Which is really homework for me. I have to explain what I think Geography is (as a person in their 20s or 30s). I also have to find someone under 10 and 50 or older to answer the same question. Sorry 40somethings, you’ve been left out.

So darling peeps- what is geography? Do you have a wee child you can harass until they answer that question? Will you help me to help the Kid do his homework?

I’ll post my response in comments later.

But what is geography?

What’s The Big Idea(s)

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Lambert’s got a post up about how we would change things if we had the power to do so. And do I have some ideas for you…………

(Quin- this is what i meant by a wiki think tank- jump in!)

1. Corporate Taxes: One of the most profound things I ever read was in a biography of the first socialist Swedish Prime Minister, Tage Erlander. Horribly paraphrased, his idea was that a company that could not afford to pay it’s employees a high enough wage that the employees could then pay income taxes, was a failure as a company. Business’s 1st and most important function for the state is the taxes it brings in, either through straight corporate taxes or the payroll taxes its employees pay.

We’ve fucked up that idea somehow and forgotten that both business and government work FOR the people, not the other way around.

So I would eliminate all corporate tax deductions except: living wage rate wages paid to employees (not including CEOs) and deductions for materials, etc that are made in the US. We shouldn’t be giving tax breaks on money spent or kept outside the country.

I don’t have any illusions that all employers would pay their employees enough to live on, but this would give employers who treat their employees fairly a competitive edge and an incentive to give raises.

2. Fair Trade: Once we’ve cleaned up our own abysmal pay problem, we allow free trade only with other countries that have living wage rules in place. For poor countries that are trying to enact progressive labor policies, we give liberal trade assistance to get them up to speed faster.

There is little likelihood that we can keep jobs in our country as long as there is cheap labor to be had around the world, but we don’t have to be complicit in the downward pay spiral. Countries that do not and will not set fair wage laws will be charged import tariffs on any goods and services brought into this country.

3. The Social Safety Net: I would eliminate Welfare and Unemployment and roll them into Social Security. The I would put in place a mandatory minimum income (indexed to inflation) that gives anyone whose income falls below the poverty line enough money to make up the difference. I would use the IRS and a person’s tax returns and eliminate the nanny state investigations of the poor. I would also include the ability use this safety net for parental leave or FMLA reasons.

4. Universal, quality childcare. Maybe using the French model so that families have a range of options from straight up preschool to subsidies for inhome care.

5. Universal higher education with subsidies to poor students for living expenses and extra classes, tutoring as needed. With the loss of manufacturing jobs there is no way to earn a living in this country without a college education and we are desperately in need of doctors, nurses, and other high skill professionals. The people to fill in these positions could come from the uneducated ranks with a little extra help.

That’s all I’ve got on a day with no coffee. What’s your big idea?

ETA- Oh Oh Oh DAMN me and my non caffeinated brain. I forgot bodily autonomy.
New constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to control your own body. This includes access to abortion but also an end to pointless drug laws. Free up the prison and put the money into treatment for those that choose it. I’d also structure it so that giving someone false information that results in bodily harm (say abstinence education or falsified drug research) is a criminal act and a violation of civil rights.

And for Lost Clown- Of course there would be universal healthcare.

In their quest to win the Dems continue to prove they are losers

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With all the talk of presidential spawn, doncha think it’s a wee bit funny that all we hear about are the girls. Obama’s girls. Palin’s Bristol. McCain’s bloggette. Sure we hear a bit about the down syndrome baby, but only in relation to Palin’s uterus.

So I am here to break with feminist tradition and cry “but what about the mennzzzzzz”.

Specifically, McCain’s son Andrew who has recently resigned from the board of Silver State Bank, a bank that federal regulators shut down Friday because of its failings.

Now while the Dems all have their panties in a bunch over the possibility that estrogen might actually come near the White House (and not just to design the new Oval Office rug) they seem to have missed Andrew’s little career failure.

If Andrew shares daddy’s views on economic policy, and a bank that Andrew worked for fails, does that perhaps mean that the McCain family idea of winning economic policy is failure? Shouldn’t the Dems be spending their time pointing out the Republican economic policies are failing our country, using Andrew as a prime example of “What would daddy do?”

But Andrew, alas has no uterus to control or shame. Poor Andrew. If he had only been born a girl, he could be taking the center of the political stage right now while the Dems point out that “girls suck at math” or economics or something. Though truthfully, Obama and McCain both share a hands off the money of the rich approach to economics, the Dems would more likely take the tack of saying that Andrew had to leave banking cause his uterus couldn’t be in two places at once, caring for his family and working a job.

But boys will be boys and banks will fail when run with little oversight and regulation. And the NeoDems don’t get off their ass to fix the country unless there is some slut shaming to do.

(HT to Lambert, who is quickly becoming my latest blog crush)

ETA: Oh my gawd- bank failures really are the McCain family business. I was just a wee 14 year old girl when the Savings and Loan failures happened and so I didn’t know that McCain was part of the Keating 5. Holy shit, Batman, you would almost think the republicans believe that robbing from the poor to give to the rich is sound fiscal policy. .

Inner 3rd World: Reproduction

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If you listen to WOC talk about reproductive rights, you get a profoundly different view from the dominant white feminist talk that centers on abortion. For poor women and brown/black women, choosing to parent is seen as an affront to decent society.

There is a long and sad history of eugenics and forced sterilization of “undesirables” in this country. While white babies are considered a treasure, brown babies are considered a burden on society. You could even posit the idea that the insanely high prison rates for black and brown men is an underhanded attempt at keeping them locked up so that they cannot reproduce.

But there are more obvious racist and classist eugenics programs that are already in place. And several of them spring from Welfare reform. Ronald Regan started the idea of the Welfare Queen, a woman so diabolical that all she did all day was spread her legs so she could pop out more babies to suck on the government teat. Welfare reform decided to deal with this mythological beast by putting in blocks to additional aid when a woman already receiving assistance gets pregnant while on assistance. If you are a poor single mom on TANF and you get pregnant, you will not receive any additional money. And as I’ve written before, it’s not like TANF gives you all that much to begin with. In WA state the amount for a mother and child is $440 per month and it’s been the same for decades. And we’re one of the higher states. $440 doesn’t cover rent anywhere, it barely covers the cost of diapers and laundry soap. Add a 3rd person into this budget, and kids are spending a long time in a wet diaper simply because there is no more money for clean ones.

But it doesn’t stop with TANF. The same rules apply to housing grants.

Now part of Welfare reform did include provisions to provide post-pregnant women with birth control. But it’s only birth control. If during the course of a routine pelvic/papa smear to get you the pill they discover cancer- you’re SOL. They don’t actually care about keeping you healthy. They just care that you don’t bring anymore snot nosed brats into the world. And don’t you forget it.

Besides- we all know that birth control is infallible. Right?

Very few states have figured out that it is cheaper to pay for abortions for poor women than it is to not pay for them. Washington is one of them. If you walk into a Planned Parenthood in WA state to take a pregnancy test, and you are poor, they help you apply for Medicaid. If, during the application process you tell them that you want to have an abortion, the application is speeded up. But you still get Medicaid, temporarily, whether you decided to parent or not. As soon as you are not pregnant either via birthing or abortion, you lose all medical coverage except for birth control.

Personally- I think having the option of abortion is a good thing. And it’s one of the things the WA state does right. But for a majority of states, abortion is not covered by Medicaid. As a poor woman you have the choice of finding a way to pay for it yourself (upwards of $400 for an early procedure, substantially higher the later you go- and remember that most women on Welfare receive less than $400 a month to begin with.) or having a baby. But if you choose to have a baby, you won’t get any additional money from the state. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position. And that’s before we even get into personal choice.

I can guarantee you that no one would applaud a poor black woman’s choice to knowingly have a downs syndrome baby like Sarah Palin did. The first thing they would say is that she was trying to milk the government for extra money for the disabled kid. And the kind of hoopla surrounding Bristol Palin’s pregnancy would be changed to something about how young brown women are too lazy to get an education and opt out with pregnancy instead.

But if we really do believe in choice, then the poor have just as much right to choose parenthood as everyone else does. If we put a mandate that people can only have the number of children that they can afford right now, then the entire world would depopulate within a generation. In an ideal world, we would all get to parent only when we wanted to and with enough resources to raise healthy, well educated, future paragons of society. But this isn’t an ideal world. And pretending it can be isn’t much different from fundies thinking that they can brow beat everyone into heterosexual marriage where everyone stays virginal till the wedding night.

What we can do is provide the resources so that only women who want children have them, and that they have enough resources to raise their children without the violent punishment of increased poverty.

Friends, Co-Bloggers, Feminists

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I come to bury McCain, not to Praise him

Okay- seriously. Two people who I love to bits are having a screaming comment battle over voting for a goddamned Republican.

On my very progressive, very feminist blog.

The Queen is not so happy about this.

It’s like this. Imagine that McCain and Obama are credit cards. McCain starts with a really high interest rate, but a low available balance. A balance that you could say pay off in 4 years time. The interest is going to kick you in the ass. But not forever.

Obama starts out with a shiny 0% interest rate, at first. But then the rates skyrocket and it will probably take you 8 years to climb out of the hole that using that card is going to create.

Both choices suck hard.

Both choices suck hard not just for us Americans but for everyone else in the world.

Everyone who writes here and comments here (trolls excepted) gets this.

But I cannot, in good conscious, let this become a pro-McCain blog. I can’t. I’ve let it go on for far too long already. So no more pro-McCain stuff. No bullying people because of their perceived race. No bashing thoughtful progressive people who actually get how American neo-colonialism works for not being large enough in numbers to stop it. Not all of us are coddled rich brats who are ignorant to how our government works.

We all get it here and this level of discourse is NOT GOING TO CHANGE A DAMN THING. But it is hurting people I care about. And that is not okay.

So I am no longer approving comments from the cranky making posts.

Sorry kids. But you are fighting allies instead of the enemy. It’s become a circular firing squad of crap and it ends now.

Oh Lambert, how perfectly put

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From Corrente:

Seems like the “progressive” blogosphere isn’t all that progressive; four days making running “mate” jokes and going after 17-year-old girls and babies with Down syndrome and at the end of the day it didn’t fucking work, as Biden rules the family “off limits.”. Four days out of the what, sixty-some, that are left. If that’s what they thought would be effective, that’s bad. If they were acting as Tier Two of the Obama campaign (my view), that’s even worse.

Now there’s a winger populist barracuda loose in the water, and nobody seems to know what to do. And it’s really too bad. If only… If only Obama had a surrogate, somebody who could speak to real issues in people’s live with real details about policy, and out populist the populist. Maybe even a woman. A Mama Barracuda to take out the cute little Baby Barracuda. Wouldn’t that be great?

Too bad the fauxgressives hate women sooooo much that they can’t even act in their own best interests.

The Inner 3rd World- Educating The Poor

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I am sure that I have written about some aspects of this previously, but I am way to lazy to go dig through 1000 plus posts to find it.

Education is supposed to be the great leveler in this country. Supposed to be. But we throw so many roadblocks in for poor students that even if they start a college education, finishing is a problem.

First, there is the atrocious way that poor kids are not prepared for college. When I went back to college I had to start with pre college level math. I’d taken the hard math in high school, all the college prep classes. But it had been so long that I had forgotten almost everything. To get myself up to college level required 2 quarters of remedial algebra. Each of those classes cost a little over $300, plus books (another $150) and a graphing calculator ($75). So I spent nearly $1000 of my paltry financial aid money on classes that won’t count towards my degree but must be taken.

Now I’m an older student. It had been a while for me. But what was shocking was the number of just out of high school kids who were in my classes. This is a community college in an urban area. Nearly every student in the school is poor enough to qualify for financial aid. And a enough of them need remedial math that there are dozens of class options for it (there are 34 options for remedial math in the college catalogue right now and only one option for Math 102, the first college level course offered).

And then there is Welfare reform. Before Welfare reform, back in the 80’s, my mom and dad split up and then she got laid off from her job as a cocktail waitress at a casino in Lake Tahoe because of a bomb. Someone blew up parts of Harvey’s. She eventually went on welfare and between her monthly grant and financial aid she was able to go back to school and support two kids. She didn’t get child support. She eventually got her degree in natural science and then turned her work study experience in the college budget department into a career as a comptroller for government funded non-profits.

But she got to stay on welfare the entire time she was earning her academic degree. We weren’t rich by any means. But we were safe and reasonably comfortable for that level of poverty.

Welfare reform changed that. Now the only way that you can get welfare and go to school is if you are in am approved vocational program. I could get welfare money to become a nurse’s aid, but not a nurse, for example, as long as I cannot receive an actual degree from the program. Lemme say that again. You cannot get welfare in a degree program. You can get it for a certificate program. So I could go to school to get certified in a job that would pay me less than half of what I can make as an unschooled secretary. Or I could be a baker. Or a dental hygienist. Or a hair dresser. The one thing all these jobs have in common is a lifetime of low pay and few advancement opportunities.

Now, if you are a poor student who wants to get a real college education, you must rely on financial aid and loans. My school stopped offering loans about 10 years ago because it wasn’t actually doing much for the students besides putting them in debt. So financial aid was all I had to live on, plus the meager earnings from my job (at the school, not work study, whole ‘nother post for a whole other time). Most poor students work full time. Not part time. 40 plus hours a week waiting tables or being security guards at night. Plus another 15 or so hours of classtime and 15 or so hours of homework. And as tuition keeps rising, financial aid does not keep up. My first year I got enough in financial aid to pay for books, tuition, and my rent for the 3 months of the quarter. My last quarter there I could afford tuition only. The financial aid amount hadn’t changed, but tuition had risen so steeply that there was nothing left, not even for books.

So we start poor college students out with a need to take extra classes to catch up, plus the cost of those classes, then hit them with rising tuition, and require them to maintain grueling work/school schedules. When something stresses the system (say a job scheduling conflict) these students who are so close to the poverty edge already have to choose their jobs over their education. It seems ridiculous to worry about sacrificing an education in order to keep a minimum wage job, but that is what they have to do to survive right now. And it always comes with promises to themselves that they will go back when they can. The financial aid counselor told that it takes an average of 4 years for their students to complete a 2 year degree, what with all the remedial classes plus the stopping and starting. Shit, I’ve got one quarter left (and no further financial aid money till I transfer to a university) and I’m at the 4 year mark.

And there are lots of students like me. So close to transferring, but no money to finish. And that’s at community college tuition rates. Cheap as far as education goes, but out of reach for the very students they are supposed to educate.

Things that are important, things that are not.

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All right my darlings, I have reached the end of my tolerance for the discourse level of this election. So here is a cheat sheet so you can tell if the candidates, pundits, news bunnies, blogging heads, and commentors are being of service to democracy or if they are just a bunch of whiny high school brats.

These are things that are actually important to our country: The economy, health care, education, taxes, deficits, the war, national security, privacy, bodily autonomy, separation of church and state, global warming, oil, diplomacy, China, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, subprime mortgages, banking bailouts, corruption, military contractors, global food shortages, inflation, poverty, lax food and drug safety, the supreme court, telecom immunity, the Patriot act, HIV/AIDS, sex education, rising college costs, etc.

These are not important to our country: McCain’s height, Obama’s ears, Palin’s tits (or ass or uterus), the candidate’s children, the wearing or not wearing of flag pins, pantsuits, tie color, hand placement during the national anthem, the child rearing habits of the candidates, the beauty regimes of the candidates, which candidate gives which pundit a hard-on (Pat Buchanan and Chris Matthews included)

These are just quick cheat sheets. Not meant to be comprehensive in any way, but just enough so you can tell if someone is acting in the best interest of our country and furthering democracy or if they are just hanging around spreading tawdry bits of crap like a cliquish teenagers.