And the title says it all, today. We had to get our pictures taken today for various company purposes, and I thought I might wear a dress that was sort of last season. With stockings (which, I don’t care what anyone says, are Still a Thing). I left in early afternoon, fairly gasping for air. Well over 80 degrees. Wendy is no longer a lapdog, the birdies wake me up in the predawn gloom, and here we are. Summer.
What we’ve all been waiting for.
Complaints about the heat and humidity begin in three, two, one…
But first, some bloggage!
I know most of you have probably already seen this, but it took me back. What my mother sees in Hillary – The author describes what it was like for her mother, widowed young, to make her way in the world without a man, in the 1970s, when the modern women’s movement was just getting rolling. It wasn’t always pretty:
Political decisions and opinions are personal and emotional — maybe more so than they are ever practical. Our identities are tied up in our choice of candidate in any given election cycle. This person represents me. It’s never been a question that Mrs. Clinton would be my chosen candidate. For me, it’s not just that she’s a woman who fights for women. It’s her giant heap of experience in governing — a heap so much higher than any other candidate’s.
And yes, I also love that she is always the last woman standing. She has survived ceaseless attacks. It must get very tiring, and yet she never flags. She has been called a bitch and a witch and characterized as Lady Macbeth. She’s shrill, she shouts, she barks. She’s uninspiring, she’s unlikable and she’s not exciting the base. Sometimes I think that many people in this country are still scared to see a powerful woman. But I am more ready for her than ever.
In the years when my mom was a single mother, people commented on her lifestyle with alarming frequency. Why wasn’t she living with her parents, they wanted to know. Wasn’t she worried that if she didn’t marry again soon, her son would grow up to be gay? Her landlord came over after her husband died, hemming and hawing, saying how sorry she was, but also that she was hoping my mom might move out to be closer to family, which would probably be better for everyone.
Well. My mother persevered. She smiled politely and bit her tongue and did what she had to do to survive those rough years.
I’d forgotten the endless Lifestyle section articles on how a single woman might get her own credit cards (!!!), take out a loan, deal with a handsy boss. It wasn’t that long ago. Ready for Hillary, indeed.
Speaking of the ’70s, you remember when the microwave oven was a miracle, when suddenly there were different types of lettuce in the markets, and then that lettuce started coming pre-torn and already washed, and now it’s so easy to buy organic baby greens? I can’t remember the last time I had to put a bunch of spinach through three washes to get the grit out of it – no, wait, I do, I think it was last summer – and chard and kale in their infant form are as easy to buy as peanut butter.
So now comes the pre-sliced apple. And it’s working:
Three years ago, a group of researchers at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab had a hunch. They knew that many of apples being served to kids as part of the National School Lunch Program were ending up in the trash, virtually untouched. But unlike others, they wondered if the reason was more complicated than simply that the kids didn’t want the fruit.
Specifically, they thought the fact that the apples were being served whole, rather than sliced, was doing the fruits no favor. And they were on to something.
A pilot study conducted at eight schools found that fruit consumption jumped by more than 60 percent when apples were served sliced. And a follow-up study, conducted at six other schools, not only confirmed the finding, but further strengthened it: Both overall apple consumption and the percentage of students who ate more than half of the apple that was served to them were more than 70 percent higher at schools that served sliced apples.
This may be good news, it may be bad. But I guess it’s good enough. The heirloom varieties I favor in the fall don’t take well to pre-slicing; the Northern Spies I buy for pie start turning brown almost immediately. It doesn’t affect their taste, but it would affect a picky child’s appetite. But if they’re eating apples, it’s better than not eating apples.
Finally, I loved this. So proud of my old buddy Mark the Shark:
Things have gotten a bit testy between several members of the Fort Wayne Community Schools board and the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
Last week the foundation sent a new report extolling the virtues of vouchers via email to Mark GiaQuinta, president of the Fort Wayne Community Schools board.
He responded with “more distortions and lies.”
That’s when Jennifer Wagner got involved – a well-known Democrat who has bucked her party’s stand against the state-paid vouchers that largely go to religious-based private schools.
She is now the Vice President of Communications for Friedman, and responded “Hi, Mark. Thanks for the thoughtful and constructive feedback on an issue that’s very important to the roughly 4,700 Fort Wayne families who are using Indiana’s voucher program.”
GiaQuinta didn’t hold back in his response to Wagner – saying ” it is very important to those desiring a religious education at taxpayer expense. You know it and I know it. Fewer than 10 percent of the recipients ever attended a public school. Congratulations for taking funds to educate the poor. You people are despicable.”
Despicable! He never holds back. And he’s so, so right about this.
Reading that today prompted me to surf over to the alma mater and see if they’re still putting out the laziest, most boring, recycled-crap editorial page in the Hoosier state and probably several others, and yes, yes they are. This sinecure-holder farts out another trombone solo, and as for Leo, well, it’s the usual regurgitated-from-blogworld stuff, the “apology tour,” Michelle Obama’s “obsession” with our eating habits, etc. Sad. But not really surprising.
Bedtime for me, and I need my beauty sleep today.
Dexter said on May 25, 2016 at 3:54 am
The availability of all the leafy and baby greens is nice but sort of overwhelms me as I try to decide, but recently we have sworn off one commodity, and that bagged salads. Every year e coli is found in these bags somewhere and uyeah, it’s mostly a psychological thing, but those bagged salads never enter my cart, after years of buying them.
We have many farmers’ markets here in the summer and fall, but nothing like the Kerrytown market in Ann Arbor. I used to go about six times a year, mostly for the apple selection, as I have been an apple connoisseur ever since I grew teeth.
Vendors came down from the northern counties with apples for sale , apples hardly anybody grew anymore, throwbacks to hundreds of years ago, kept going only by special apple lovers. Now I accept pre-sliced apples for school kids, but why wouldn’t adults pack a small paring knife and knock the peel off and slice a whole apple as they eat them? Jonathan (or Jonathon, as they used to be called) are still my fave, and the horrid bitter Macintosh are still the worst. I believe most folks consider processed apple juice is for babies and small toddlers, but I still sometimes buy a bottle. Maybe Jerry can help me with this one: I read that in GB bottled (hard) cider easily outsells bottled lagers and porter ales, but the draught beers and ales were not in this comparison. The mighty apple rules.
Tonight on NBC Nightly News, a startling figure…60% of registered USA voters do not like or favor either HRC or Trump. I was watching the NBA Western Semis but my wife told me there was a nasty demonstration against Trump in Albuquerque last night.
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adrianne said on May 25, 2016 at 5:58 am
Huzzah for Mark GiaQuinta and his pushback against the grifters who steal public education money for their religious schools! This is the biggest scam going in education circles these days, but, you know, you’re not supposed to criticize God-bothering conservatives. Their feelings get hurt.
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Nancy P said on May 25, 2016 at 6:34 am
I didn’t know that stockings are Still a Thing. Would you say it’s mandatory, or left up to personal taste?
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 25, 2016 at 7:30 am
It’s just damning to see the actual stats on what happens with vouchers, as the story notes even if too far down in the piece for my taste. That’s the anchor of what Mark’s talking about: they are sold politically as a way to give poor struggling families options, but they’re used primarily to subsidize enhanced success and segregation. We have a fairly significant Catholic school in this county, and two larg-ish (for their type) Christian schools, and I have no beef with any of them, except that outside of a poster child or two, they are cream-skimming from already successful school districts and buildings to deliver a boutique experience.
My office used to service those schools like we do the others, but my first three “truancy mediations” were for tardies, and I told the head of school “those aren’t my job,” and he asked me “well, who do you work with?” I explained, and he looked baffled and said “but those kids we just dis-enroll, so I’d never call you about them.”
“Right, sir,” I replied, “and they are who I now will go look for on behalf of the school district you sent them back to. You can set up an in-school sequence of consequences for tardiness up through dismissal if you want, and that’s legal.”
“Oh, we’d never want to do that,” the administrator answered. “There’s a certain number we have to keep to pay the bills, you know.”
I tipped my metaphorical hat to him and left. They’ve not called me in six years.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 25, 2016 at 7:31 am
(I am not wearing stockings today. Shorts and sandals.)
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alex said on May 25, 2016 at 7:36 am
I see a lot of ladies who don’t know stockings are Still a Thing and it’s too bad they don’t. There’s something I find vaguely unappetizing about bare legs in stiletto dress shoes and high hemlines. If you’re going to succumb to old-school society’s oppressive dictates and dress like a coquette you might as well go all in and wear something that firms the flab and hides the varicosities and stubble.
I had no idea just how difficult life was for single women with children in the old days until a friend told me about his childhood. His father had run off with another woman in the early ’70s and left his mother with a brood of children. His mother faced a lot of blatant discrimination in housing and employment, so their existence was fairly precarious. Landlords didn’t consider single mothers a good risk because they didn’t have “real” jobs, and didn’t want unsupervised kids destroying their properties and disturbing other tenants while the mother worked.
As a landlord myself these days, such considerations didn’t even occur to me when I rented to a single mother. So we’ve come a long way in terms of acceptance of differing family constellations. As far as forcing women to regard themselves as sex objects first and people second, not so much.
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Julie Robinson said on May 25, 2016 at 7:55 am
If stockings are Still a Thing I’ll have to retrieve mine from staking tomato plants.
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basset said on May 25, 2016 at 8:09 am
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mB-XIgcxdYg
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Jolene said on May 25, 2016 at 8:10 am
I haven’t worn a skirt in ages, but I have wondered about bare legs and dressy clothes, especially in winter. Seems unfinished.
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Snarkworth said on May 25, 2016 at 8:18 am
Being unappetizing can be empowering, if applied strategically.
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Heather said on May 25, 2016 at 8:22 am
Count me among those who think stockings (or what we called nylons in these parts) a tool of the patriarchy. A good pair costs $10-20 and you’re lucky if you get more than two wearings out of them without snagging them. That’s money we need to spend on waxing and other procedures to meet the standards placed on our physical appearance!
If you want to wear them, by all means, go ahead. But if I have to look at men’s pasty, hairy legs and gross feet in shorts and sandals, I’m not going to feel like I have to wear stockings.
Note that I’m not talking about tights. For the guys, tights are the heavier, more opague things that come in all types of colors. Necessary for keeping one warm while wearing skirts in winter.
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Heather said on May 25, 2016 at 8:26 am
Also I never understood why certain stuffy law offices and such required women to wear skirts and nylons. The idea seems to be “you have to show your legs, and they have to be perfect.”
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nancy said on May 25, 2016 at 8:30 am
Here’s my stockings manifesto: What Alex said about winter-white, imperfect legs. I still have chubby thighs, so any hemline above the knee would look gross without a little visual smoothing-over. L’eggs are my usual jam — unless I’m at Nordstrom Rack, where I stock up on better brands, cheap — and I can usually keep them unsnagged for a while. A loose, flow-y summer skirt? Sure, bare legs there. But for the office, like Jolene said, it just feels unfinished.
And finally, some of this may depend on how your body deals with heat, but as long as they fit, I’ve never found them particularly uncomfortable. Except when it’s in the 80s. Which is when I almost always wear pants.
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basset said on May 25, 2016 at 8:40 am
And another:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YSqBqueFtf0
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Connie said on May 25, 2016 at 8:50 am
I recently cleaned out the stocking drawer and threw it all out. I had a still new in box pair of pantyhose that I purchased in 2010. As for long flowy skirts? Knee highs!
I don’t appreciate the no stocking look, just doesn’t look right. I just figure I have become an old fuddy duddy.
My shins are so covered with scars from having had pyoderma gangrenosum that I worry about scaring children at the beach.
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Deborah said on May 25, 2016 at 9:33 am
I haven’t seen a woman in nude colored hose in years. I’ve seen black and patterned ones but not the plain nude colored types. I like to wear tights, very opaque black ones in winter, I had a navy blue skirt that I wore navy blue tights with. Now that I’m retired I rarely wear skirts, or even regular pants, just jeans mostly. I did go through a phase last year where I wore skirts with leggings, but I’m back to jeans. If I want to dress up a bit I wear black jeans with a black jacket. Also, sometimes it’s hard to find opaque black tights, so when that happens I wear 2 pair of tights, they actually hold your flab in better than one pair.
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ROGirl said on May 25, 2016 at 9:56 am
I’m not a fan of bare legs and tattoos.
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Bitter Scribe said on May 25, 2016 at 10:27 am
I may have said this here before, so apologies if I’m repeating myself, but…vouchers really got off the ground as a way to direct tax dollars to the Southern all-white “academies” that sprang up in the wake of Board v. Brown. It’s an unsavory heritage, and I think it informs a lot of the current activity around vouchers. Good for this GiaQuinta guy.
This Leo Morris apparently thinks we didn’t fight long and hard enough in Vietnam. Judging by his picture, he probably was of military age during the war. I wonder what his service record is?
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nancy said on May 25, 2016 at 10:35 am
Leo’s a Vietnam vet. He also thought the Swift Boaters were totally on the beam.
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Bitter Scribe said on May 25, 2016 at 10:40 am
I’ll bet he did.
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Heather said on May 25, 2016 at 10:46 am
I’m really not as annoyed as I sound. I read a NYer piece about “angry” comedian Billy Eichner before going to bed and I think it affected me subconsciously, heh. Anyway I’m fine with people wearing whatever. And I certainly understand if someone feels more comfy in pantyhose. Not me though.
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MarkH said on May 25, 2016 at 10:56 am
Nice finds there, basset.
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Icarus said on May 25, 2016 at 10:59 am
Ed nails it again:
We’ve been told that in order to compete in the Global Economy we have to work cheap and hard; to work anything less than 50 hours per week for the good of our employer is a moral failing, a shirking of economic and patriotic responsibility, yet they owe us nothing whatsoever in return. There is no trade-off in terms of stability. If they can find someone to do our jobs for less tomorrow, even halfway around the world, Third Wave capitalism demands that they fire us in the name of Efficiency and Shareholder Value. And that new reality – the knowledge that no matter how hard or well one works, the financial rug could be yanked out from under us at any minute – is one that actively discourages young adults from doing the very things (investing, saving, home-buying, and consuming) that this new economy needs us to do in order to grow. This system doesn’t work unless we spend; we don’t spend when we’re insecure about the future; we have to be kept in fear so we’re too afraid to demand better compensation and treatment; we spend less to compensate for stagnant compensation.
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/05/25/the-new-normal/
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Dorothy said on May 25, 2016 at 11:23 am
My husband’s cousin lost her first husband to leukemia in 1987. Not long after Rich died (maybe a year) Nora had to buy a car. The salesman was acting kind of weird anyway, and finally he blurted out “Isn’t there someone else I should be talking to?” Nora got up and walked out, she was so pissed. That was 1988!! I hope that kind of crap doesn’t happen anymore.
A co-worker brings in a sliced apple every day and eats it around 10 AM. She puts the slices in a zip loc bag and then in the fridge here to keep them chilled. She slices them so thin they’re almost see-through. I keep a paring knife in my desk drawer and slice an apple fresh when I bring one in my lunch.
I wear tights when I wear a skirt, dress or jumper in the cooloer months. I think the last time I wore pantyhose was at my son’s wedding in December 2012. If I’m getting dressed up for a fancy occasion I’ll wear hose, but not usually in the summertime. Hardly anyone does anymore! I always wonder if movie stars who are hose-less on the red carpet and their legs are visible are wearing makeup on their legs. No one EVER seems to have a little scratch or a bruise from bumping into the car door, etc. That’s just nuts – EVERYONE’s legs are dinged up I promise you!
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basset said on May 25, 2016 at 11:32 am
Thanks, MarkH. Tony Joe White is an inspiration to aging lechers everywhere.
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Deborah said on May 25, 2016 at 11:47 am
I’m going to my brother-in-law’s wedding in a few weeks and I’m wearing a very form fitting outfit that I’ve only worn twice in the fifteen years I’ve had it. It’s an Issey Miyake Pleats Please top and longish straight skirt in a campaign color, I’m not wearing hose because only my lower legs above my ankles will show. My legs and feet are pasty white. I got sandals with a low heel to wear with it, and I’ll be getting a pedicure for sure. I also got a big bright scarf to wrap around myself since I haven’t worn the outfit in so long and I’ve gained a few pounds since then that I can’t seem to get rid of, I will also be wearing Spanx underneath. What we women do is ridiculous, isn’t it? Here’s a link to Pleats Please, the outfits in the link are mostly flow-y, mine isn’t that, at least not on me. http://www.isseymiyake.com/en/brands/pleats_please.html
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alex said on May 25, 2016 at 11:50 am
Fuck being gay. I want to be transgender and wear Issey Myake.
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adrianne said on May 25, 2016 at 12:04 pm
Put Michelle Obama in the nylon-free camp. She hasn’t worn them in years, she says. Of course, many of her elegant dresses are floor length, so it doesn’t matter.
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brian stouder said on May 25, 2016 at 12:08 pm
I must be getting hungry for lunch, because this – plus Alex’s rejoinder – got me laughing
Issey Miyake Pleats Please top
say THAT 3 times fast!
(ending with ‘please, please stop!’)
Well – it looks like Sec Clinton just got hit with their best shot (the stupid email thing) – and it looks just as unimpressive as ever.
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Charlotte said on May 25, 2016 at 12:23 pm
My mother was one of those women who couldn’t get a checking account in 1972 when my dad left. Her male cousin (quite distant one actually) had to go to the bank with her and vouch for her. So she took me in to get my first account when I was 12 and making babysitting money.
No on pantyhose, but on the West Coast, unless you’re in finance or law, I don’t think anyone wears them. I wear a lot of skirts in the summer, but I work at home …
And vouchers for religious schools make me livid.
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Sherri said on May 25, 2016 at 12:23 pm
We could break up the banks, we could overturn Citizens United, but neither of them would solve the fundamental problem, which is that too few people have too much money. The only way I see to mitigate that is through the tax code. If I could wave a magic wand, I’d eliminate the distinction between capital gains income and wage income, because the evidence we have suggests that giving tax preference to investment income does not increase useful investment. The second thing I’d do is change the marginal tax rates, basing them off the income curve. Out there in the 95%, where the income earned goes off the charts, the marginal tax rates would go up off the charts as well. Those two things might discourage the practice of rewarding CEOs so handsomely, and might move them away from such a shareholder-focused approach to running companies.
So, income is income, and marginal tax rates that are flattish for 90% of tax payers before rising steeply for the last 10%. Oh, and remove the cap on SS tax, too. That solves the SS trust fund problem.
Now, for companies, I need to come up some way to make it painful for them to park all their money off shore.
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nancy said on May 25, 2016 at 12:27 pm
Shelley O also has great gams — her husband says so — and dark skin, which shows fewer flaws. And as Adrianne points out, she rarely wears anything above the knee.
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Julie Robinson said on May 25, 2016 at 12:29 pm
For all the crap that women have to put up with, I would hate being limited in my clothing/hair/makeup/jewelry choices.
As for crap, the last vehicle we bought was for me. I was making all the choices, and answering all the questions, but the salesman kept addressing my hubby. Man that irritated me.
Dorothy, a couple of days ago TLo featured a picture of Rihanna on some red carpet or the other, and there was clearly a fair amount of fuzz on her legs.
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nancy said on May 25, 2016 at 12:35 pm
Since I’m writing a story today, and hence procrastinating (although I’m picking up steam), I thought I’d check out Tom & Lorenzo’s Michelle Obama posts of late, and found this. They so funny.
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Sherri said on May 25, 2016 at 2:23 pm
I remember once shopping for a TV back in the 80s. My husband and I weren’t married then, but were together. He didn’t really get the whole dynamic about salesmen ignoring women until he saw me try to buy a TV. I could have camped out in the store, and nobody would have paid me any attention, but as soon as he walked over to join me, a salesman zoomed right over, and addressed all discussion to him, even though he wasn’t buying the TV.
On our last car purchase, I just went by myself to buy it. That way, the salesman had to talk to me.
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Jolene said on May 25, 2016 at 2:29 pm
Brian, there is at least one analyst who thinks today’s report makes things worse for Hillary. I haven’t looked around for other reactions yet, but, as Cillizza points out, this won’t dampen the “Crooked Hillary” charges.
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Jason T. said on May 25, 2016 at 2:31 pm
The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel says …
Craig Ladwig is editor of the quarterly Indiana Policy Review.
And Google says …
The Indiana Policy Review Foundation (IPR) is a right-wing pressure group that is an affiliate of the State Policy Network web of such groups in all 50 states
(The) State Policy Network … is partially funded by The Claude R. Lambe Foundation.[23] Charles Koch, one of the billionaire brothers who co-own Koch Industries, sits on the board of this foundation.[24]
Gee, you don’t say!
Y’know, for people who think their ideas are so good, and so valuable for the free market, they sure are intent on hiding their names. It’s almost like it’s some sort of vast right-wing conspiracy.
But I’m sure George Soros does the same thing, and also Daily Kos commenters are rude.
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nancy said on May 25, 2016 at 2:52 pm
In the interest of full disclosure, I once did a piece for the Indiana Policy Review,* and worked with Ladwig when he had Leo’s job, a thousand years ago. A strange man in many ways, with an almost allergy-like aversion to what you might call Real People. He ran the editorial department, but his title was Associate Editor, even though he was basically a department head. The masthead had the executive editor, managing editor and associate editor on it, and one late afternoon a woman came in, spitting mad about something, and demanded to talk first with the executive editor (gone home), the managing editor (ditto), and finally the associate editor.
I don’t know what her complaint was, but it wasn’t anything huge. Ladwig acted like he’d been forced to dance cheek-to-cheek with a leper.
* It didn’t pay very well. #freelancewhore
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MichaelG said on May 25, 2016 at 3:02 pm
You got it, Sherri @31. I’ve often wondered why income I earn from the sweat of my labor is taxed and income earned from coupon clipping or interest or whatever isn’t. Capital gains (no) taxes have been a big bugaboo for me for years. And of course eliminate the maximum for SSA contributions. Don’t even get me started on corporate stuff.
Hillary Clinton would be a God Damn fool to go on TV (esp Fox) to debate Sanders. There is absolutely no potential good to come of it. I think Sanders is becoming increasingly unhinged.
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adrianne said on May 25, 2016 at 3:37 pm
Nance, I just did a spit take after reading your description of Ladwig. Classic!
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alex said on May 25, 2016 at 3:40 pm
Jolene, I still think Hillary’s e-mails are much ado about nothing, and the only people who give a rat’s patoot are those who aren’t voting for her anyway. And people like Chris Cillizza who has column space to fill with political twaddle. Likewise Benghazi.
Those are weak tea, anyway, now that Trump is reviving the Vince Foster murder conspiracy and Whitewater and making Hillary complicit in her husband’s alleged “rapes.”
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adrianne said on May 25, 2016 at 3:48 pm
Email server is a big fat nothingburger. See: Benghazi.
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Deborah said on May 25, 2016 at 4:05 pm
Alex, too funny. They make some pretty cool stuff for men too http://www.isseymiyake.com/brand/issey_miyake_men.html
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LAMary said on May 25, 2016 at 4:17 pm
The last time I made use of some pantyhose it was to temporarily replace a belt on my washing machine. It worked really well, btw. I’ve entered a new phase of office dress. I’ve started wearing loafers and they go well with narrow, slightly short pants. I find good loafers on sale at places like Nordstrom rack, but they are frequently not neutral colors, so I have decided I’ve entered my Boca Raton 1978 phase of life. Today I’m wearing coral loafers with the gold horsebit thing. I’m expecting delivery of a pair of very light greyish blue suede loafers tomorrow. If only I could wear my sunglasses all day in the office.
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Julie Robinson said on May 25, 2016 at 4:24 pm
LAMary, I thought of you today when I read there’s to be a Leona Helmsley musical. For reals. http://www.playbill.com/article/tovah-feldshuh-to-play-leona-helmsley-in-new-musical-reading
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Jolene said on May 25, 2016 at 4:26 pm
Yet another incident of guys on a sports team behaving badly. Ugh!
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LAMary said on May 25, 2016 at 4:31 pm
I’m trying to imagine Leona Helmsley singing.
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Brandon said on May 25, 2016 at 4:33 pm
Today I’m wearing coral loafers with the gold horsebit thing.
Gucci?
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LAMary said on May 25, 2016 at 5:09 pm
Not Gucci. Much much cheaper.
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Julie Robinson said on May 25, 2016 at 5:19 pm
Me too, Mary, but no doubt a lot of people said the same thing regarding one of our more obscure founding fathers, and Hamilton seems to be doing okay. 🙂
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LAMary said on May 25, 2016 at 6:16 pm
Coming from the city founded by Alexander Hamilton, I’ve always been a fan. I’m glad he’s staying on the ten dollar bill and Andrew Jackson is getting bumped from the twenty.
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Sherri said on May 25, 2016 at 6:19 pm
The sad thing about the Sanders campaign is that I really would like to see a more progressive agenda being pushed. Had Sanders been smart and more self-aware, he would have realized that he was never in the race after Super Tuesday, and was never going to be in the race, and would have used that money he raised on advancing the cause, not on advancing Bernie. Instead of stingily picking three people he shared the wealth with (after being hammered for not helping anybody else), he could have cast a broader net, looking at races even at the state level that would have brought more progressives into government. He could have trained his excited followers to be organizers, teach them skills that translate into other elections and other progressive causes.
Instead, either because he wasn’t smart or because he had always been an island unto himself, he didn’t have good advisers, his policies weren’t fleshed out because he hadn’t built up relationships with the people he needed to to flesh out those policies, and his campaign couldn’t see the demographic handwriting on the wall that was always going to keep them from closing the gap.
Now, instead of talking about inequality and how best to address it, his campaign is all about pique: the process is rigged against me, I’m endorsing Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s opponent because she was mean to me, I’m going to put Cornel West on the platform committee just to piss everybody off because I’m mad about Barney Frank being on the rules committee. And maybe I’ll make it a messy convention, so there!
What a missed opportunity! I find it so frustrating when someone has such a big opportunity and isn’t smart enough to see it.
I’m always reminding people who have some great idea to solve something: ideas are cheap. It’s easy to come up with ideas. It’s much harder work to deal with the constraints of the real world and build the relationships and coalitions necessary to get some version of the idea to come into being.
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LAMary said on May 25, 2016 at 6:19 pm
patersongreatfalls.org/sum.htm
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Deborah said on May 25, 2016 at 8:28 pm
I’ve been reading about the NM primary and it’s interesting. There was a “riot” in Albuquerque during a Trump rally, which was not surprising. The police in Albuquerque have been criticized about their treatment of citizens so it wasn’t surprising the way things went. Then I read that Bill Clinton spoke in a town about halfway between Santa Fe and Abiquiu, called Espanola, which we always think of as the armpit of the world. It’s really a sad place that has unbelievable corruption in all areas of its governance. It’s mostly Hispanic, not that that is the reason for the corruption but it is unfortunate in any case. It has a huge heroin problem. It is such a complicated situation, it’s just interesting that Clinton would go there. It’s in Rio Arriba County, the poorest county in NM, and also one of the most beautiful in NM.
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Suzanne said on May 25, 2016 at 9:23 pm
I feel funny not wearing hose with a dress, but I usually don’t. I have terrible vericose veins which I don’t want to see and figure no one else does either. I love the idea of long tunics with leggings as the leggings cover all the bad parts.
I used to work with a guy who had taught school in the south for a few years. He told me that absolutely many of the Christian and private schools there were opened up so that the nice white people wouldn’t have to go to school with “those” people.
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Sue said on May 25, 2016 at 10:16 pm
Speaking of Michelle Obama and that husband of hers, I checked out the house they’ll be moving into post-presidency. Now I know you need lots of room for all the secret service folks who are going to be hanging around rummaging through the fridge and generally getting in the way, but you can’t tell me that place wasn’t chosen mainly for its head-exploding qualities.
Seriously. I know they looked at that house, looked at each other, smiled, said “Uppity!” at the same time, and gave each other a terrorist fist bump. They’re probably still laughing.
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Mark P. said on May 26, 2016 at 9:57 pm
Has anyone else noticed that the State Department report on Clinton’s email account is “scathing”? The NBC and ABC reports both used the same word. I didn’t watch CBS to see whether they got the memo.
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Mark P. said on May 26, 2016 at 10:02 pm
Deborah, I overlooked your mention of Espanola. I have a friend who lived there for several years. He had bought a new Acura, which was a very, very nice car at the time. It was stolen out of his garage, driven around for a while and then burned. Great bunch of people there.
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Jeff said on June 8, 2016 at 12:33 pm
I guess I don’t see why it’s so bad that some people, who pay property taxes that mostly go to education, should want their money to go to educate their kids at the school of their choice. And not be called nasty names.
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