AddieStan

One of your blogstress's favorite Americans, Michael Tomasky , offers up his year-end list of 2008's worst Americans . Tomasky is the writer/editor at the helm of Guardian America, the online U.S. incarnation of the British newspaper. CLICK HERE TO READ 'WELCOME TO AMERICA'S HALL OF SHAME

Today, that would be Spencer Ackerman (a.k.a., Attackerman) who, in his vigilence , is defending the honor of the female sex against the designs of right-wing commentator Dennis Prager, who has been writing how married women are obligated to put out for hubby whenever the latter expresses his "needs". Kyle of Right-Wing Watch suggests that Prager subscribes the " Phyllis Schlafly School of Marriage Counseling ", the doyenne of the right having uttered this last year at an appearance at Bates College: "By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape," she said. Hat-tip to the fabulous Frankie G. of The Beltway Sewer.

Your blogstress is still wrestling with the decision of Barack Obama (whom her feminist self supported all the way back in the primaries) to anoint the right-wing, anti-gay, anti-woman Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the presidential inaugural ceremonies. Mon Dieu, mes amis ! How to make sense of it? One hopes that Mr. Obama has a trick or two up his sleeve in bestowing this honor on one who has compared pro-choice people to Holocaust deniers, equated gay marriage with polygamy and marriage between an adult and a child (and later denied having done so), and preaches that wives should submit to their husbands. To many liberals, Warren's words are hard not to take personally, especially if you're a woman and/or a member of the LGBT community. This is no mere game of "dozens"; reports come in daily of LGBT people assaulted or killed for no other reason than being queer; meanwhile the terrorism of anti-choice forces has reduced abortion, in many are...

The pushback by the LGBT movement against the anointment of Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration of Barack Obama has been such that Warren felt compelled to go before his own congregants to clarify his views on gay marriage, taking great pains to say that he never equated gay relationships with incest or polygamy. (He just said he disagreed with allowing gays to marry, just as he disagreed with allowing adults to marry children, brothers to marry sisters, and men to have more than one wife. Not that he was equating them or anything.) Here's Pastor Rick: CLICK THESE WORDS TO VIEW VIDEO Meanwhile, on "Hardball" last night, Mike Rogers of blogActive and PageOneQ masterfully reframed the conflict over Obama's invocational choice as one that sees the LGBT movement at its most powerful, ever. Check out Digby's recounting at Hullabaloo : ...Rogers took a very unusual tack and said that [the well-known Reverend Eugene]...

While your blogstress's heart is in Jersey City, she does have familial ties to Chicago's South Side, so the pronouncement of one G-man on the comparative status of the Land of Lincoln was less painful, perhaps, than it was for her fellow dwellers of the Meadowlands: Robert Grant, FBI special agent in charge of the Chicago office, said even the most cynical FBI agents were "disgusted and revolted" by what they heard on the recordings [of Gov. Rod Blogojevich trying to sell a Senate seat]. "If it isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States," Grant said of Illinois, "it’s certainly one hell of a competitor." C'mon Jersey! You're slippin'!