Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - Posts
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
Barack Obama isn't the only person in Washington whose schedule has
been all discombobulated by healthcare reform. Patrick Mahoney,
director of the Christian Defense Coalition, planned on staging a
"pray-in" at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office on Wednesday, but he's
rethinking that now. Apparently the efficacy of a prayer is determined
by its proximity to an event; Mahoney said "it wouldn't make any sense
to be there all day praying if the vote isn't going to be this week."
(He also admitted that there is a "chance that there may be some
arrests" at a speaker's-office pray-in, and he didn't seem to want to
put his group through that more than once.)
But even though the events most likely to get their participants
arrested have been postponed, the delay hasn't stopped activists from
making their presence felt ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Nina, I’m glad you brought up Grady Hendrix’s complaint that vampires aren’t doing enough blood sucking these days, because I have a bone to pick, too ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Or so argues Grady Hendrix in Slate today. Hendrix hates emo-boy vampires, with their all-swoon, no-suck brand of human relations. Latoya Peterson argued here in Double X that Twilight and True Blood are bad for women because they're all about pigeonholing female characters into a virgin/slut binary ... (Read more in Double X.)
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What is television good for? Curbing population growth,
of course! Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s Health and Family Welfare
Minister, wants to bring electricity to the most rural parts of his
country, in hopes that it will slow down the baby making... (Read more in Double X.)
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Emily and Willa, I completely agree with you that it’s time to get serious about cell phone use while driving—and I think there’s an interesting generational angle to consider as a crusade, I hope, gets under way ... (Read more in Double X.)
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In last Sunday’s New York Times Modern Love column, author Joyce Maynard wrote about trespassing
into the e-mail account of her 22-year-old daughter, Audrey. The
daughter had temporarily relocated to the Dominican Republic when her
communications home were abruptly and, to Maynard, ominously silenced.
From reading the correspondence, Maynard learned that her daughter was
embroiled in a personal dilemma—one that she apparently needed to
resolve without involving her mother. After justifying the invasion of
her daughter's privacy ("I dreamed my daughter was running ... her face
a mask of grief"), Maynard goes on to tell Modern Love readers the
details of her daughter's very emotional crisis, including results of
her HIV tests.
Maynard has, apparently, always had difficulty with boundaries. In 1972, when she was 18, the writer published a confessional essay in the Times
about her generational perspective (sample: “Marijuana and the class of
'71 moved through high school together”) that brought her national
attention. She was later criticized about her 1999 memoir that excruciatingly detailed her teenage affair with then 53-year-old novelist J.D. Salinger. Maynard also auctioned off her love letters from the reclusive author.
Even had Maynard not been notoriously ... (Read more in Double X.)
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The Senate Judiciary Committee voted in support of Judge Sonia Sotomayor this morning almost entirely along partisan lines—13 to 7, with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina the only Republican in favor. Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. She made it through her hearings without the “meltdown” that Graham said would be needed to stop her confirmation, and also without giving Republicans any additional ammunition to oppose her. Yet today’s "no" voters included John Cornyn of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and so presumably thinks about the long-term national health of his party, and comes from a state that is 36 percent Hispanic, and Jon Kyl of Arizona, which is almost 30 percent Hispanic. The GOP stance leaves the party without an answer to this headline in Politico: “Democrats have huge day with Hispanics.”
Why don’t the Republicans seem to care? Three reasons ... (Read the rest of this post, or the entire conversation on the Sotomayor hearings in Double X.)
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