Posts by Melissa McEwan

Melissa McEwan writes and edits the blog Shakespeare's Sister.

Death Toll After Myanmar Cyclone Could Reach 10,000
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on May 5, 2008 at 12:47 PM.

This is just unbelievably sad:

Almost 4,000 people were killed and nearly 3,000 others are unaccounted for after a devastating cyclone in Myanmar, a state radio station said Monday.

Foreign Minister Nyan Win told foreign diplomats at a briefing that the death toll could reach 10,000, according to diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was held behind closed doors.

… "It's clear that we're dealing with a very serious situation. The full extent of the impact and needs will require an extensive on-the-ground assessment," said Richard Horsey, a spokesman in Bangkok, Thailand for United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

"What is clear at this point is that there are several hundred thousands of people in dire need of shelter and clean drinking water," Horsey said.

U.N. agencies were working with the Red Cross and other organizations to see how it can help those affected by the cyclone. UNICEF spokeswoman Veronique Taveau said the U.N. children's agency alone has five teams assessing the situation in the country.

…The cyclone blew roofs off hospitals and schools and cut electricity in Myanmar's largest city, Yangon. Older citizens said they had never seen the city of some 6.5 million so devastated in their lifetimes.

Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless. Candles and bottled water have, of course, doubled in price.

I don't know that any charitable aid has been set up specifically for Myanmar yet, but, in the meantime, if you'd like to help, donating to UNICEF would be a good start. (You can donate specifically to Myanmar here until they get an emergency fund set up.) They've been working inside Myanmar since 1950 and are likely to have the organization already in place to make sure money gets to where it needs to go.

Please drop any other suggestions—or links to charitable aid and/or emergency funds for Myanmar—into comments.

UPDATE: There's more information on the scope of the devastation and which aid agencies are providing immediate help here.

Americans Selling Possessions to Stay Afloat
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on April 30, 2008 at 2:06 PM.

I want you to think of President Mondo Fucko's total shock at hearing gas would hit $4/gallon and how blissfully isolated his precious ass is from actual Americans as you read this item:

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms.

…At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period. Craigslist CEO Jeff Buckmaster acknowledged the increasing popularity of selling all sort of items on the Web, but said the rate of growth is "moving above the usual trend line." He said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.

Like a Georgia teenager whose mother lost her job and whose ad pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out." Or like Alabama mobile home resident Ellona Bateman-Lee, whose husband was disabled in 2006 by an electric shock on the job as a dump truck driver: "Among her most painful sales: her grandmother's teakettle. She sold it for $6 on eBay."

Now, according to conservative philosophy, private charity is supposed to step in and help these struggling Americans in their time of need. That's the whole plan: Let people keep their tax money, starve the government, subcontract welfare to via faith-based initiatives to private charity, who will be phat with donations from the Americans who have been allowed to keep more of their income care of tax breaks.

But guess what?

The trend may be hurting secondhand stores too. Donations to the Salvation Army were down 20 percent in the January-to-March period. George Hood, the charity's national community relations and development secretary, said that was probably partly because people were selling their belongings instead.

There's your trickle-down economics at work, right there.

Noose Found At Secret Service Training Center
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on April 29, 2008 at 7:04 AM.

Noose Allegedly Found at Secret Service Training Center:

The U.S. Secret Service has placed a white agent on leave after an African American employee reported finding a noose hanging at the service's main training facility outside the nation's capital.

The service has acknowledged "an allegation of misconduct" at its J.J. Rowley Training Center in Beltsville, Md., and that an employee last week was placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation. The employee is a veteran agent with the service, according to fellow agents.

The noose was found by an African American officer in the uniform division of the service during the week of April 14, according to those familiar with the alleged incident. That division protects the White House and surrounding grounds.

Gee, couldn't this be kind of a huge fucking problem given that we may be only eight months away from our first black president?!

Cheesus. What the fuck is wrong with people?

(Rhetorical. There ain't enough bandwidth in the multiverse to completely answer that question.)

SCOTUS Strikes Again!
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on April 28, 2008 at 10:43 AM.

Upholds bullshit voter ID law from Indiana (sorry, everyone):

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud.

It was the most important voting rights case since the Bush v. Gore dispute that sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush. But the voter ID ruling lacked the conservative-liberal split that marked the 2000 case.

The law "is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting 'the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,'" Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy. Stevens was a dissenter in Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

McCain's Temper Should Be A Liability
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on April 23, 2008 at 4:19 AM.

The WaPo is the latest media outlet to notice (or drag themselves reluctantly to finally cover) what McCain watchers have been saying about him forever: He's a full-tilt asshole got a temperament problem. It's the usual litany of ugly behavior, going back to when he was a kid, although it's worth a read just to get a feel for how reprehensibly vindictive McCain is, in addition to having a hair-trigger temper.

Just one quick comment: I thought it was pretty amusing that not once but twice, recounted incidents of McCain's altercations with fellow Republicans ended with the pathetically low benchmark at least he didn't punch anyone.

It is unclear precisely what issue set off McCain that day. But at some point, he mocked Grassley to his face and used a profanity to describe him. Grassley stood and, according to two participants at the meeting, told McCain, "I don't have to take this. I think you should apologize."

McCain refused and stood to face Grassley. "There was some shouting and shoving between them, but no punches," recalls a spectator, who said that Nebraska Democrat Bob Kerrey helped break up the altercation.

...Reports recently surfaced of Rep. Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican, taking offense when McCain called him "boy" once too often during a 2006 meeting, a story that McCain aides confirm while playing down its importance. "Renzi flared and he was prickly," McCain strategist Mark Salter said. "But there were no punches thrown or anything."

As I've said before, are a lot of scary things about the possibility of a President McCain, but the fact that he could make Bush look like a model statesman has to be right at the tippy-top of the list. I cannot even begin to convey what a terrible idea a McCain presidency would be for this reason alone, not to mention all the others. If you think Bush was an embarrassment as a paradigm of diplomacy, McCain could conceivably be even worse.

Shudder.

[McNasty Parts One, Two, Three, Four.]

Can Women Be Taken Seriously?
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on April 22, 2008 at 4:31 AM.

Occasionally, I get emails from men who tell me (rather dubiously) that they really want to get on board with the whole feminism thing, but they really wish I'd stop blogging about shoes, or my marriage, or too many clasps on my trousers. I have to be serious, they tell me, if I want to be taken seriously.

A similar complaint has come up in the semi-annual "Where are all the women bloggers?" navel-gaze, though the idea is more that women bloggers tend to be too personal for serious, detached, objective political bloggers to consider them a serious part of the serious political blogosphere.

The general drift you're probably starting to catch by now is that women's lives are unserious things.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

I Still Hate Chris Matthews! MSNBC Moron Says "No One's Surprised" Obama's Good at Basketball
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on April 1, 2008 at 12:06 PM.

Chris "Paleface" Matthews, on yesterday's Hardball, discussing with Howard Fineman and Michelle Bernard the very, very newsworthy and important fact that presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama isn't a fantabulous bowler (about which Spudsy posted yesterday):

FINEMAN: … He definitely needs some bowling lessons. He should do what we used to do in Pittsburgh, which is all-night bowling for a dollar, you know, really work on your game. I think he did get [former Pittsburgh Steelers football players] Franco Harris and he did get Jerome Bettis, the Bus, to endorse him. And he's traveling around on the bus with the Bus. But if you can't do something like that, you shouldn't do it. He should have stuck to shooting hoops—

MATTHEWS: Yeah, I know.

FINEMAN: —which he's very, very good at, by the way, and which translates racially, too, especially during the NCAA basketball tournament. Don't do something you've never tried before in front of a national television audience, OK?

MATTHEWS: You know, Michelle—and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody, but the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder—

FINEMAN: That doesn't surprise anybody either.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Mike Gravel Quits the Democratic Party, Becomes a Libertarian
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on March 27, 2008 at 7:03 AM.

Gravel: Out. Not of the presidential race that hardly anyone knows he's in, but the Democratic Party.

Long-shot presidential candidate Mike Gravel told supporters Wednesday he is leaving the Democratic Party to join the Libertarian Party.

Gravel, a former Democratic senator from Alaska, said in an e-mail that the Democratic Party "no longer represents my vision for our great country."

"It is a party that continues to sustain war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism - all of which I find anathema to my views," he said in the e-mail in which he also asked supporters for campaign donations.

Gravel, 77, has been excluded from recent Democratic debates because he failed to meet fundraising or polling thresholds.

I feel his pain. And I'd add a grumblefuck about gobbling from the corporate trough, too.

But even if I belonged to the Democratic Party, I don't think I'd find the Libertarians the answer to my problems.

Are You a "Typical White Person"? Truth Is You Probably Are
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on March 21, 2008 at 1:40 PM.

I guess it's too much to ask...that white people who take offense to Barack Obama's "typical white person" comment stop to question whether they have themselves been intimidated by black men who pass them in the street and if they've ever personally used any racial or ethnic stereotypes that would make a person of color cringe--and that, if they haven't, they take a "if the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it" approach.

Like I've said a nonillion times or so, without rigorous self-examination, we're all racists (and sexists and homophobes...) by default, by virtue of our socialization in a culture steeped with negative stereotypes. One of my closest college mates is a black man who used as an example of internalized racism his own stiffening spine when he saw another black man coming toward him on an otherwise deserted street--even as he knew how deeply irrational and unfair it was. I've never been a nervous street-meeter--I tend walk with my head up and smile and say hi to everyone--but it's not like I didn't and don't have other internalized shit. The question is not whether we have biases; we all do. The question is whether we leave them unexamined.

So, yeah. To suggest that a typical white person has some sort of racist biases doesn't strike me as particularly controversial.

That said, such sweeping generalizations are dangerous because most people don't like to think that they have unexamined biases or--Maude forbid!--unexamined privilege. I have to be really careful when I'm talking about institutionalized sexism not to say "men" (or even "the typical man") but "lots of men" or "men who haven't thought about this issue" or something that makes abundantly clear my acknowledgement that I am not tarring an entire group with the same brush.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Woman Left in Cell for 4 Days Without Water, Food, Toilet or a Bed
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on March 13, 2008 at 4:41 AM.

I would say it's unbelievable, but, of course, it's totally, depressingly believable. For four days, Adriana Torres-Flores, a 38-year-old undocumented immigrant who has been in the US for 19 years, was locked in a 9x10 holding cell in Arkansas, where she had no sustenance but her own urine and slept on the floor using her shoe as a pillow.

A bailiff had apparently forgotten that he placed Ms. Torres-Flores, a mother of three, in the cell last Thursday, and simply left her in the empty courthouse, in Fayetteville, over the weekend, said the chief deputy of the Washington County Sheriff's Department, Jay Cantrell. A snowstorm meant that there were far fewer people than usual working at the courthouse on Friday.

"He just flat forgot about her," Mr. Cantrell said, adding that the bailiff, Jarrod Hankins, had been placed on administrative leave, having been on the job a few months. "It was just a horrible mistake," Mr. Cantrell said.

Gee, ya think? I don't know if Mr. Hankins will have enough time to ponder his "mistake" while he's on administrative leave. I'm pretty sure firing him would give him enough time to reflect on the precise scope of his "mistake," though. But I guess that's just crazytalk when he didn't leave a real person in that cell for four days--just an undocumented brown woman.

Torres-Flores was taken to the hospital after she was found lying on the floor of the cell and is now at home recovering. Cantrell says that there will be an investigation, but assures "there was no malicious intent. The whole thing is terrible." Why, yes. It really, really is. But not so terrible that anyone should be jumping to crazy conclusions like his gross negligence makes Hankins unfit for his job, I guess. That needs to be determined by an investigation.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Hey Maureen Dowd, Please Shut Up!
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on March 5, 2008 at 12:14 PM.

Part wev in an Ongoing Series by Tart and me, named elegantly and succinctly by Tart, about the World's Most Obnoxious Feminist Concern TrollTM.

Today, Maureen Dowd takes on the pressing issue of concern trolling the Democratic primary by waxing lastweekity about identity politics and the Duel of Historical Guilts. What's really at stake, don'tcha know, is not a little thing like deciding who would make the better president, but answering the question: "Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?" Someone introduce MoDo to the theory of interlocking systems of oppression, please.

But first...once again, she has to begin the collection of half-baked idiocies she calls a column by drawing a nearly unrecognizable caricature of feminism:

Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don't like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism.

They feel that women have moved past that men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary's campaign has lately revived with a vengeance.

In typical fashion, she draws an outline that vaguely resembles one strand of feminism, then scribbles in a bunch of nonsense and calls it a portrait, hoping the casual observer will not notice the differences--the things that just don't seem right when you stop to think about them, like if feminists think men are pigs, why are so many happily married to men...?

And once she is done reducing feminism to a cartoon masquerading as a portrait, she continues on, blaming Hillary's supposed lack of whimsy for the reason women vote for Obama.

As a woman I know put it: "Hillary doesn't make it look like fun to be a woman. And her 'I-have-been-victimized' campaign is depressing."

A woman she knows named Doreen Mowd, no doubt--who, like Maureen Dowd, would certainly find a newfound appreciation for Hillary if only she'd make it "look like fun to be a woman," and wouldn't at all then accuse her instead of making women look silly, frivolous, and unserious. Yes, if only Hillary would ignore the constant sexism thrown at her by people who say things about her like she is "openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line," if only she could see the fun in that, then Maureen and Doreen would, like, totally start loving her.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Women's Lives Are Worse Than Ever, Thanks George W.
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on March 3, 2008 at 11:02 AM.

Women's lives worse than ever. That's the actual headline to an article in The Independent about the state of women's (and girls') lives in Afghanistan, six years after our war to "liberate" them.

At a White House Celebration of International Women's Day, March 12, 2004, President Bush said: "In the last two-and-a-half years, we have seen remarkable and hopeful development in world history. Just think about it: More than 50 million men, women and children have been liberated from two of the most brutal tyrannies on earth—50 million people are free. All these people are now learning the blessings of freedom."

The "blessings of freedom" are these:

Grinding poverty and the escalating war is driving an increasing number of Afghan families to sell their daughters into forced marriages.

Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation – burning themselves to death – or severe self-harm.

…The statistics in the report from Womankind, Afghan Women and Girls Seven Years On, make shocking reading. Violent attacks against females, usually domestic, are at epidemic proportions with 87 per cent of females complaining of such abuse – half of it sexual. More than 60 per cent of marriages are forced.

Despite a new law banning the practice, 57 per cent of brides are under the age of 16. The illiteracy rate among women is 88 per cent with just 5 per cent of girls attending secondary school.

Maternal mortality rates – one in nine women dies in childbirth – are the highest in the world alongside Sierra Leone. And 30 years of conflict have left more than one million widows with no enforceable rights, left to beg on the streets alongside an increasing number of orphans.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Huckabee's Wife, Heavyweight Fighters and "Hooters"
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on February 22, 2008 at 7:28 AM.

Most Hilarious Lead Evah? Maybe:

What happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas - especially if you're the wife of a presidential candidate. Just ask Janet Huckabee, who attended a middleweight prize fight this past weekend in Las Vegas - where she stayed at the Hooters Casino Hotel.

That eye-opening combination - a title bout in Sin City, which celebrates gambling, drinking and all things wild, along with a hospitality chain favoring buxom waitresses in low-cut garb - could potentially shock the armies of evangelical conservative Christians who have made her husband, the former governor of Arkansas, the only remaining GOP opponent to party front-runner John McCain.

How much would I hate to be a Republican candidate? She, former First Lady of Arkansas, was at the fight because Jermain "Pride of Arkansas" Taylor was one of the competitors, and she stayed at the Hooters Hotel because she canceled her room at the MGM Grand when she thought she wasn't going to make her flight to Vegas. When she did, she stayed in one of two rooms a friend had at the Hooters joint, because "it was the only thing, quite frankly, that was available because the fights were in town."

Personally, I'd rather sleep on the street than stay at the Hooters Hotel, but wev. The point is that Janet Huckabee now has to answer to a bunch of conservative hypocrites, who don't give a damn about treating women like equal citizens with autonomous control of their own bodies, why she was staying at the Hooters Hotel while visiting "Sin City" to see a boxing match. Doesn't she know she's the wife of a Baptist preacher and should never do anything but read the Bible and make Christian babies?!

Hilarious.

Religious School Bans Female Referee from Officiating Boys' Game
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on February 19, 2008 at 6:03 AM.

This would be unbelievable if it weren't just so gosh darn believable:

Kansas activities officials are investigating a religious school's refusal to let a female referee call a boys' high school basketball game.

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary's Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell cou