Update: NMI published this column today, September 27, 2009. Original post (written September 21) below:
You’re all racists — that was to have been the title of my New Mexico Independent column today. But about an hour after I submitted it, I received an e-mail from my new editor (my previous editor, David Alire Garcia, [...]
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Posted 21 September 2009
† Brigette Russell
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Economy § Feminism § New Mexico Independent columns § Politics
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Tagged: Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, censorship, Frank Rich, Janeane Garofalo, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, New Mexico Independent, Orlando Romero, racism
Remember that Metallica song, “Nothing Else Matters“? It came out in 1991, when I was young (well, younger anyway), newly married, without the marks of time that Estee Lauder and I have done our level best to undo, and above all, without children.
That song has been running through my head because I spent Tuesday [...]
My blog continues to get more hits from people Googling things like “I hate Kate Gosselin SO much” and “Kate Gosselin crazy bitch” than from anything else, and as a result, a post I wrote last year called Hate Kate continues to garner comments. The most recent one sarcastically quotes one of my comments [...]
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Posted 02 March 2009
† Brigette Russell
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Parenthood § Politics
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Tagged: freedom, in vitro fertilization, IVF, Kate Gosselin, litter, multiple births, Nadya Suleman, Nanny state, Octomom, octuplets, reproductive medicine
Portia,who is finally sitting up by herself. Tess, who wears a swimsuit all day and wants to be called Stephanie the Mermaid. Cordelia, who is in kindergarten but doing first grade reading and math, and refuses to do half the math work because it’s so easy it insults her intelligence. Elizabeth, who [...]
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Posted 28 February 2009
† Brigette Russell
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New Mexico § Parenthood § Politics
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Tagged: abortion, Albuquerque public schools, birth control, cheese sandwich, culture wars, gay marriage, IVF regulation, Nadya Suleman, New York Times, Octomom, Octopussy, octuplets, rednecks, school lunch, Val Kilmer, William Saletin
Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the British government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says having more than two children is irresponsible and contributes to global warming and other vicious assaults on our loving, nurturing and much-abused Mother Earth:
I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It [...]
Iowahawk is one funny guy. His latest post, “It Takes a Proverb to Run a Village,” was inspired by the rather fatuous flap over President Obama’s Egg of Power statue. See here, here, here and here for said flap. Personally, I think it’s kind of a neat looking little doodad, and don’t [...]
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Posted 03 February 2009
† Brigette Russell
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Feminism § Humor § Politics
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Tagged: Aston Kutcher, Barack Obama, Caroline Kennedy, Demi Moore, Egg of Power, I Pledge video, Iowahawk, Obama Mama, Sarah Palin, Ted Kennedy, Tina Fey
Killing Mother Earth I am. Or so says Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross as reported in the Times Online. Gosh but they report interesting stuff. Found the story by way of this interesting blog which I found in turn on Foxfire’s blog (though she linked to a different story. So anyway, here’s the scoop:
Performing two Google [...]
As I sat in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi on Christmas eve, listening to my daughters and the rest of the children’s choir singing about the nativity of the Lord, I couldn’t help thinking about an article I’d read in the New Mexican a few days before about secular humanist parents:
They are [...]
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Posted 29 December 2008
† Brigette Russell
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Parenthood § Religion § Santa Fe
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Tagged: agnostics, atheists, Catholic, Charles Darwin, Christmas, G. K. Chesterton, humanist, Karl Marx, Patrick O'Hannigan, ritual, secular, Sigmund Freud, transcendence
The other day (I started this post the day of, but never found time to finish it) my three youngest daughters and I were at the grocery store, and I’m trying as usual to keep them from getting in people’s way. When they temporarily block other shoppers’ paths, most people smile indulgently and say [...]
A friend from high school, one of only two I’ve kept in touch with, recently joined Facebook and sent me a friends request. She’d been Googling other friends from long ago, and it suddenly occurred to me that if anyone who knew me 20 years ago or more was looking for me, they’d have [...]
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 [...]