Elections – Page 5

On wresting good from stupid: Herman Cain, sexual harassment and sexual assault

This is a guest post by Emily L. Hauser.
With the revelation of what is turning into quite a slew of accusations of sexual harassment and/or assault (“Hey, baby, you’re lookin’ gooood tonight!” [or some such] being the former; grabbing a woman’s inner thigh and pulling her head toward his crotch [the actual accusation that Sharon Bialek has leveled] being the latter) we have an opportunity to wrest some objective good out of this mountain of stupid.

Netroots Nation 2011

This is a guest post by April Lukes-Streich.
It was difficult to choose, as so many [sessions] looked interesting and were sure to be helpful, but I was extremely happy with each of the session I attended. Highlights of some of the panels I attended:

Voter Intimidation

I had a rather unpleasant experience when I went to vote in my first state election.

As we know, I voted in my first federal election last year, and it was a wonderful experience. All the party volunteers out the front got along beautifully, and they were all excited about my first vote, no matter for whom I was planning to vote.

Well, not so this time. I live in a heavily Liberal area (the Liberal Party is actually Australia’s main conservative party) (just… go with it). The New South Wales Labor Party, who were in power up until the 26 March election, are so despised by the good people of NSW that their election campaigning had by the end degenerated to “we don’t know what the Liberals’ plans are, so don’t give them too much power”. Essentially, I’ve been living in Liberal central while the state’s been falling apart the last little while.

I was trotting along to my polling place with my mother, minding my own business and contemplating the gravity of what I was about to do, when we were hailed by a volunteer. Well, my mother was; I was ignored, because young people tend to become invisible when there’s a Responsible Older Adult in Charge present. She asked my mother which her electorate was, and then whipped out a shiny how-to-vote flyer. ‘You put a 1 next to [the Liberal candidate],’ she said.

‘If we want to vote Liberal,’ I put in, knowing that it’s against the rules for any polling place volunteer to tell you how to vote. Volunteers can quite honestly tell a voter ‘here’s what you do if you want to vote for the Liberals,’ just not ‘here’s how you vote’ without any specification as to party or whom they are representing. Now, that stirred the pot.

Meet Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s New President

Three cheers for Brazil for electing their first woman President. Dilma Rousseff of the Worker’s Party won yesterday’s runoff election against Jose Serra and will be inaugurated this coming January. Learn a bit more about Rousseff here. Feminist agendas in Latin America still need work but hopefully as more women come into positions of power, those issues can get the attention and reform they need.

Let this also serve as a reminder to USians that tomorrow is Election Day. Get the 411 on essential voting info, get out there and vote, and then feel free to get your sexy on, courtesy of Babeland.

Talking about one’s views on sex does not equal “sexualizing”

So apparently I’m a bad feminist for pointing out that Christine O’Donnell is opposed to masturbation, and that she thinks it’s akin to adultery. As bad a feminist as Rachel Maddow, even!

Listen guys (or Legal Insurrection Guy, as the case may be): No one is talking about Christine O’Donnell’s personal masturbatory habits (or lack thereof). That is totally none of our business, and also kind of gross to speculate about! What we are talking about are Christine O’Donnell’s views on masturbation, which are relevant in a country where federal funds go towards sex education, churches, schools, health care organizations, etc etc, and where Christine O’Donnell is trying to get herself into a position where she will have some amount of power over those funds. Christine O’Donnell’s comments were not that she doesn’t masturbate, they were that masturbation is wrong and that we should teach young people that it is wrong. She has also said that fighting AIDS gets too much government money and that using condoms won’t work. And see, when she says that using condoms won’t work to fight the spread of AIDS and we (or I) say “That is a ridiculous comment!,” we are not talking about Christine O’Donnell’s personal use of condoms, of which we know nothing. We are talking about her very wrong viewpoint that condoms are useless and should not be promoted.

So in that other post? We were talking about her very out-of-the-mainstream (and in my opinion, wrong) viewpoint that masturbation is not only bad, but is akin to cheating on your spouse. That’s not “sexualizing” her; it’s pointing to a comment that she made on a TV show called “Sex in the 90s” and taking issue with the position she stakes out.

…why is this hard?

But good job on the pointing-out-sexism thing. Now maybe that can be applied to the comments on Legal Insurrection, which discuss how Rachel Maddow just needs to get laid and how she’s letting her lesbian lust get in the way of professionalism.

Big wins for the Tea Party; losses for hairy palms

Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell won the Republican primary in Delaware last night, which is a big victory for the far right. While O’Donnell isn’t hugely opposed to sins like lying and stealing, she is very much against the horrors of masturbation, which is about as bad as cheating on your spouse. But she also has shrubs full of enemies, so maybe she’s just afraid of getting caught in the act?

Good work, America.

Do you live in New York? Remember to vote tomorrow.

If you’re wondering who to support, the Working Families Party has great endorsements — check ’em out. I’ll put in an extra plug for my representative, Yvette Clark, who has done great work in Congress. And even though he’s not my rep, I’ll also plug Jerry Nadler, who has been at the forefront of many progressive causes and has done incredible outreach to bloggers, writers and online lefty communities. Clark and Nadler are both gems.

And if you’re voting in New York tomorrow, vote Row E for the Working Families Party. WFP explains:

Voting Working Families means voting your values. It means taking a progressive stand, and sending a message about the world you want to see.

One where the economy works for everyone, where politicians put working people before CEOs, and where basic rights like access to healthcare or time off to take care of a sick family member are upheld.

Working Families is a third party with a twist. In New York, “fusion” voting lets one party (like the WFP) “cross endorse” the same candidate as another party. The votes from each party are tallied separately, but then combined for that candidate’s total. It gives voters a way to “vote their values” by voting for the party of their choice without spoiling an election.

Before every election, Working Families members across the state interview the candidates, ask the tough questions, and then endorse the candidate who promises to fight for working people once in office. Sometimes we don’t endorse either candidate. Sometimes we run our own.

Voting Working Families also helps build progressive power in New York, because unlike other political parties, our work doesn’t end on election day. We’re always fighting – in Albany and in towns and cities across New York – for a working families-friendly agenda. Working Families votes help empower our work and push politicians to support progressive legislation.

NARAL also has a voter guide, so you can make sure you’re casting your ballot in favor of a pro-choice candidate.

Feel free to leave other endorsements or election information in the comments, for New York or elsewhere.

The Coming Race War

Well, Andrew Breitbart, smearing Shirley Sherrod in order to refute the NAACP’s resolution against “racist elements” in the Tea Party turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Yes, you cost her her job, but she’s making black people look good. It’s too bad you’re not like, a journalist, or something, and did some digging to find the full video before you declared it to be an example of reverse racism. Ms. Sherrod is actually a really worthwhile person, unlike yourself, and now the world knows it. So kudos to you for bringing our attention to a woman who was and is working to bring black people and white people together in solidarity during a time when so many are feverishly working towards the opposite.

Anyway.

I try to avoid watching Fox News. I hear about it on the real news and I see its headlines on my iGoogle page, but I can’t bring myself to waste the electricity changing the channel on my TV to “FNC”. Apparently Glenn Beck has been heralding the coming race war. I’ve always understood “the coming race war” to mean the time that racist white militias finally band together and kill off all the browns. I also thought it was a joke, and kind of funny. Beck, however, wants us to believe otherwise. He’s saying that the “New Black Panthers” are going to start a government-backed race war to kill off Big Whitey. Of course this is silly. Fox News has been complaining about the tiny group of New Black Panthers for like a decade. I don’t know who they think Obama is, but if anything is true about him, it’s that he’s not demonstrably a militant black man. I’m more militant than he is, and I’m a bougie tragic mulatto living in the suburbs. I don’t see any medallions, dreadlocks or black fists adorning the Oval Office. But we’re supposed to believe that in between getting blamed for the oil spill and fomenting socialism, he’s been training this small elite squad of brothers to take out the white menace with the U.S. Army at their disposal? I’m really just speechless.

There was a time when I wasn’t always hearing about reverse racism, race wars, etc. in the mainstream media. It kind of seemed like most reasonable people had come to the conclusion that racism was bad, we needed to work against it, and that if you were a violent, loud mouthed racist you should just stay in your cabin and keep it to yourself. We didn’t worry about them because they stayed in the woods, for the most part, and everyone thought they were “crazy” anyway. I was focused on rooting out insidious racism, the kind that you can’t easily identify, the kind that exists in progressive communities, the institutional kind that deeply affects every person of color and which still exists today but has been obscured by all this blatant racism and the fact that we now have a black man in the White House. I could be romanticizing pre-2008, but it just seems like we wouldn’t be seeing articles like “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” during the Bush years. They knew to keep their racism under wraps back then. I’m almost laughing to myself remembering when the GOP was respectful of black people because they felt like if they tried hard enough, they could lure a few over the fence. Case in point: Michael Steele, head of the RNC. He became head of the RNC during the 2008 campaign as, I think, a way to say “hey black people, we’ve got ourselves a Negro too!”, and also as a way to criticize Obama without seeming racist. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way they planned, and the black guy still won. So what’s the point of respecting black people or other nonwhite people now? They’re all just going to vote for the Colored, right? Because all people of color are a monolith, especially those predictable darkies.

I think the “racist elements” of the Tea Party/GOP are playing their end game. Calling him any name they can think of, blaming him for everything from AIDS to increased activity on the sun, doing anything they can think of to bring him down before the end game plays out. What happens then is yet to be seen. Will it be the repudiation of the Tea Party by the majority of U.S. citizens in this coming midterm election? Will it be the end (again) of acceptable blatant, virulent racism? Will something ominous happen to Obama? I couldn’t tell you. But you can’t be a right wing ideologue with unstable, easily manipulated followers and go on and on about a “coming race war” without something happening at the end. I know what some of Beck’s followers would really like it to be, and that’s scary.

I live in California, Los Angeles to be exact. I saw this on a bumper sticker the other day:

“Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald When You Really Need Him?”

Keeping Up With Those Little Rascals in Congress: A User’s Guide

Speaking of American exceptionalism, are you interested in tracking what the US legislature is up to? Good, because I got a request for this post, so here we go!

While it’s great to rely on action items from sites and organisations you follow and trust to alert you to key upcoming legislation, there’s a lot of stuff that happens in Congress that isn’t widely discussed, even though it may be of great importance. There are also many things that die in committee for lack of support that might stand a fighting chance if members of the public knew about them and were taking action; why rely on MoveOn or NARAL to write your action items when you can do it yourself? (Incidentally, if you are muzzy on the process of how a bill becomes a law in the first place, here is a quickie overview you may find helpful.)

I follow a fair number of political sites, to keep up on what’s happening both on a Federal and state level in terms of policy here in the United States; for the purposes of this post, I’m focusing on Federal stuff because I think it’s more widely applicable to the readership. In addition to following sites, I also like to go straight to the source. While it’s always great to read interpretation of activity in Congress, reviewing the original source material provides information and context that wouldn’t otherwise be available. There are a lot of resources you can use to find out what’s going on in Congress, and I thought I would list some of them here for those who are interested in tracking pending Federal legislation, but not really sure how to go about it.

I’ll make you a deal like any other candidate…

Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Katrina vanden Heuvel were on GRITtv yesterday to talk about the “Year of the Woman” framing that’s hit hard after the round of primary elections we saw in the States last week, and something that Harris-Lacewell said really struck me.

Transcript: This is part of what identity politics always does, it assumes that anyone whose voting record is contrary to the identity group from which they emerged, it assumes that they are therefore independent thinkers. We saw the same thing with Colin Powell as a potential Republican nominee for the U.S. presidency, the idea that as a military man and a Republican he wasn’t bound by race. It’s part of what made the election of Barack Obama so extraordinary. It wasn’t even so much the election of a black man but a black man in the Democratic party which was so surprising! I’d expected us, in fact, to elect a person of color, to elect a white woman as president, but I certainly thought that it would have come from the Republican party because there’s always this assumption that if you are against the interests of the majority of the individuals of the group from which you emerge, that you are therefore an independent thinker.

Sarah Palin’s whole “Maverick” shtick. Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, who my boss noted are just the acceptable version of any other multimillionaire, being able to play some sort of “outsider” game. These women get credit for being independent!!!! because they’re seen as having decided on their own to come to right-wing politics, having stepped outside of their identity group to join a politics that, let’s face it, favors well-off white people, especially men. They favor cuts to government services that disproportionately help women, they pretend that gender is no obstacle–well, sure, when you’re the former CEO of eBay or HP, your money buys you out of many of the obstacles that gender creates for women candidates in fundraising.

Me, I’m pretty far left in my politics, but in general I do support policies that would be assumed to be “identity politics.” Yet for me, it was completely contrary to how I was raised. My parents were conservatives. For me to come round to being not only a liberal but someone who identifies as a socialist, I had to do a lot of “independent thinking.” Solidarity wasn’t exactly a word that was used in my household growing up.

But suddenly the media has a narrative it likes; that this is the year of the (Republican) women. I spent a chunk of last month writing a piece that should be out soon on women in the Tea Party and Patriot movements, and their connection to feminism. I mentioned yesterday when writing about Labour in the UK the idea of requiring 50% women in the Shadow Cabinet, and Harris-Lacewell, elsewhere in the show (you can watch the full episode here), noted that having women and people of color represented is in fact a good in itself because it shows people who is considered a citizen, who counts. But that is a separate good from having candidates and elected officials who are in fact progressive and supportive of people who are oppressed, regardless of their identity group.

In other words, to simply be a member of a group does not mean you are actually advocating for or helping the members of that group. You see this even more with the kind of identity politics that are created rather than innate: the argument over who gets to call themselves a feminist, for example. Feminists are rightly angry that antichoice, anti-social-spending Sarah Palin wants to claim the title, and saddened when young women reject it. But just the fact that Sarah Palin and others put it on does not mean they are actually doing anything for us.

It’s what makes me like bell hooks’s statement that instead of saying “I am a feminist,” one should say “I advocate feminism.” It changes it from an identity to an action. Otherwise anyone can declare themselves a feminist and then have to do nothing to help women. One can say “I’m not racist” and then get angry when called out on a racist action. It becomes not all that much different from claiming to help women simply by being a woman in the race. Maybe on some level it helps to have more women calling themselves feminist, more women in office, but we need more than just words and presences. We need action.