Before I had children, I had no concept of the power of a mother’s love. Truly, it can overcome almost anything. The example I am about to give is mundane, and many of you will laugh at me, but I’ll risk your ridicule and relate it anyway.
I am not afraid of snakes, or […]
Senators McCain and Obama took turns doing stand-up at the Al Smith dinner earlier this evening, and while Senator Obama turned in a perfectly adequate performance, I have to say that McCain positively shone. I thought he did pretty well in the debate last night, but nowhere near as well as he did at […]
Some of you may be tired of hearing about Sarah Palin by now. I meant to take a break from writing about her, but when I read something as provocative as Cintra Wilson’s latest piece of character assassination at Salon.com, I just have to respond.
Wilson opens her diatribe “Pissed about Palin” with […]
Julia Goldberg at Swing State of Mind reported yesterday that Ira Gordon, operations manager of the broadcasting group that includes “Radio Free Santa Fe” (KBAC 98.1 FM) is running editorials immediately after every McCain ad the station airs, editorials that basically tell listeners not to believe what they just heard:
His editorial begins by noting that […]
I still haven’t ascertained who coined the nickname Caribou Barbie for Sarah Palin, but it’s spreading through the cyberworld like wildfire. Already on Sept. 3 Wonkette was using the term as though it was nothing new, though I haven’t found any earlier occurrences. The name is actually quite clever. Sexist and demeaning, but clever. […]
I’m used to having my intelligence insulted when reading the morning paper, but this morning’s assault was not of the garden variety. In the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s stunning convention speech, the opposition has gone nuclear.
Rosa Brooks, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles […]
A friend e-mailed me with the following comment on one of my recent posts about Sarah Palin:
I don’t want to post a comment because I don’t want to appear that I’m against the McCain/Palin ticket, which I’m not. I think Sarah Palin is great, and I don’t think she’s a bad mother because her […]
This comment was posted to my most recent blog entry:
Reading the exchange you and Slackonomics author Lisa Chamberlain had about the challenges of parenting (and noting that you haven’t had much time to blog because of the needs of your own children), I’m curious what you think about Gov. Palin campaigning for - and possibly […]
Is it just me, or does it seem like Bill Clinton is the only one having a really good time at the Democratic National Convention? He was cheerful as all get-out before Hillary’s speech, leaning in close to the good-looking redhead sitting next to him, chatting her up and giving her both barrels […]
I was absolutely blown away by the number of hits this blog got after I posted my “Lazy shrew and breeder pig” post. I had no idea how many people Google the Duggars and the Gosselins. Especially the Gosselins. Especially Kate Gosselin, whom people (mainly women, from what I can see) apparently […]
Last year there was a discussion on an e-mail list I’m on about the Duggars, the notoriously large family of 17 (soon to be 18) children. There were comments about how that was too many children to give individual attention to each, a snide comment or two about Mrs. Duggar’s hairstyle, and the general […]
When I set up this blog, I wanted to make it easy for people to post comments, but alas, the spam-pornographers are making this increasingly difficult. Since yesterday, I have had hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks added to almost every post on this blog. I just set up a new spam-blocking program […]
In her new TimesOnline piece, “Why you shouldn’t let your kids rule your life,” Katie Roiphe trots out the familiar feminist canard about how she found her brain atrophying when she took a year-long maternity leave. She writes:
A lot of my friends who don’t work — and it was the same for me when […]
One of my husband’s friends gave him a hard time because I “slammed” him in my blog the other day. I was dumbfounded, since the post in question didn’t mention my husband, and my comment was a general one about how mothers tend to feel guilty for frittering away time on the internet instead […]
Bitch PhD is a blog I’ve just discovered. I’d seen the name on blogrolls before, but hadn’t gotten around to checking it out until recently. As in-your-face as the blog name itself is the photo on the home page, which shows a cute little girl making an angry face and giving the finger […]
Lou Dobbs of CNN calls for President Bush to be impeached because several hundred people (out of several hundred million in the U.S.) have gotten salmonella from eating tomatoes. I’m not the least bit outraged by this demand. It’s really too ludicrous to produce outrage. It’s hilarious, really. My only reaction […]
Age has been on my mind more than usual lately, probably because I’m 43 and about to have a baby. Because I had children relatively late in life, I’m in the position of being in a playgroup where I’m old enough to be the mother of some of the other moms – if I’d […]
With the Russian birthrate far below the level needed to sustain the country’s population, the central Russian province of Ulyanovsk celebrated Russian Independence Day on June 12 by giving TVs, refrigerators, jeeps and even new houses as prizes for women giving birth on that day. Nine months earlier, Sept. 12, had been declared the […]
Contemplating the maternal urge to nest the other day, I started thinking about what feminist theorists derisively term essentialism, the idea that there are essential differences between men and women. I heard this term for the first time my first semester in grad school, when the USC History Department’s mandatory seminar for first year […]
A fellow New Mexican blogger at The Donegal Express asks rhetorically, “Did you ever notice how the Left always goes on about how “the Right” wants to install Big Brother and bring about the totalitarian dystopia of 1984, yet it took Keith Olbermann and the unhinged Left to bring us the Two Minute Hate.” […]
This story appeared yesterday on my friend Patrick O’Hannigan’s blog, The Paragraph Farmer, but my friend Martha Brozyna, medieval historian and author of a recently published book on stock trading, had already sent me the link to the Daily Mail article.
In it, 38-year-old Rebecca Walker blames her famous mother, author Alice Walker, for very nearly […]
On Mother’s Day, a story called “Ageless Motherhood” dominated the front page of my local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican. The cover photo featured Joyce Bond, 53, with two of the triplets she recently bore. Births to women over 40 are “soaring” according to the article, with the birth rate to women […]