Politics: Why I Blog

When my young friends from New York were visiting in January of '08, just after I got my Imac so I could finish writing my first novel, they insisted I needed a blog.  They had to explain to me what a "Blog" was.  Web log?  WTF?  Why would I ever want to do that?  What a pointless endeavor, no one would ever read it.  And aside from working on a difficult manuscript, I didn't really have much to say.  Or so I thought.  1,365 posts later, I have discovered my voice.

It was a political season and I am a political animal.  There could not have been a better time for me to start a blog.  In the beginning of that political season, I was a Hillary supporter, but as the season progressed, I became an Obama supporter. I had begun to have readers and some of them were outraged that I, a feminist, would abandon Hillary.  It was our turn, as women, to put a woman in the White House and not as just First Lady, a term any feminist worth her salt should hate.  We are not "Ladies" we are women.  But it became clear to me that Hillary was not well served by the advise she was getting and that advise was coming from people she had chosen to run her campaign.  She was making rookie mistakes, acting like she was entitled to the nomination, as if it were a coronation and she was the heir apparent.  She was leaving States she'd lost without thanking her volunteers and supporters for their generous help and forgetting to congratulate the victor, her current boss.  She began to seem boorish and rude to me.  And I worried that if she won, she'd do the same thing as President; she'd put the same lousy advisers in positions of power, and she'd still be getting bad advise.

I'm not always sure Obama is all that well served by some of his adivser, but one person I'm positive he's getting and honest advise from is Hillary.  It was a brilliant move to offer her Secretary of State.  So we, the voters got a three-fer:  We got Barack, we got Hillary, and as a tripple player, we got Bill Clinton, the man we quietly call on when we need some charming arm twisting done in the troublesome South.

National Equality March

This is a lovely fall day and I have spent it inside listening to the speakers at the National Equality March and tweeting my support for granting full equality to all our citizens. It is astonishing to me that in 2009 there are still people who are afraid that their rights will be trammeled if we respect the rights of others (already guaranteed by our Constitution). And so we go about deliberately taking civil rights from our GLBT family, friends and neighbors, state by state. We write legislation taking rights away. There is nothing less democratic and more hateful than this. Why is it that the right wing always wants to deny full citizenship to Native Americans, women, African Americans, and GLBT people? It is exactly like the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, which gave full civil rights to all citizens, excluding no one. But these civil rights have been amended by various states to exclude GLBT people explicitly--most notably by California in it's recent passage of Proposition 8 in November 2008. Utah is another state that has recently attempted to legalize discrimination against GLBT from every aspect of full participation in society--housing, employment, marriage, service in the military and national guard.

Bill Clinton had the opportunity to oppose Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense Of Marriage Act, but failed to do so. In my opinion this was his greatest failure, this abandoning of the rights of all our citizens to full participation in our society.

President Obama gave a wonderful speech last night in support of granting full civil rights to GLBT citizens by ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense Of Marriage Act. He did not set a time limit, but I believe he will follow through on his promise. If he does this, he will have earned his Nobel Prize.

The Shock Doctrine

The Stationagent has posted this piece on John Amato's interview of Naomi Klein. It is the best and most in depth interview I've seen with her on her book, The Shock Doctrine. It's almost an hour long interview. But it is so compelling you will not be able to turn away. Please listen carefully, and pass it on. You will never be able to say you didn't know the dangers of unfettered, unregulated capitalism again. I'm a big a fan of the two Naomis--Klein and Wolf.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine