AddieStan

The most astonishing thing about last night's Academy Awards was not the public cry for equal rights for queer folk -- though that was certainly welcome, and a breakthrough of major proportions. No, the most stunning thing to happen at the Oscars was the appearance of the very God to Whom your blogstress prays: the God that accepts her with all her blogstress ways, the God who made her has she is and likes her that way. The moment came in the elegant acceptance remarks of Dustin Lance Black, who won Best Original Screenplay for his script for the movie, "Milk," based on the life of the assassinated gay rights activist, Harvey Milk. I've got a preachy little post up on Religion Dispatches, complete with video of Black's acceptance speech. CLICK HERE TO READ "GOD DOES LOVE YOU"

However unfortunate it is for President Obama to be caught flatfooted by the sudden withdrawal of Commerce secretary nominee Judd Gregg , it is a boon to women. As stated here previously, Gregg has an anti-woman, anti-civil rights record , and had no business leading an agency ostensibly dedicated to fairness in commerce. Further, Gregg's withdrawal relieves Obama of any need he felt before to sacrifice our priorities in the name bi-partisanship, as Gregg has claimed ideological differences -- including over the stimulus package -- as his reason for pulling out. And best, it opens the position to be filled by a woman. I nominate Laura Tyson , a trade whiz who chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. So far, Obama's Commerce secretary nominees are like the drummer in Spinal Tap -- they just explode. Maybe the nomination of a woman -- one far more qualified for the post than either of the president's two male nominees -- will alter that dynamic.

CROSS-POSTED FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST "THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE," shouts the tee shirt worn by an illustrated Barack Obama on the cover of the current issue of Ms . magazine. Gosh, I sure hope so. But signals from the White House are coming a bit mixed in these first two weeks of the Obama presidency, and I find myself looking for reassurance. Naming Rosa DeLauro to the cabinet, as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, would provide just the reassurance that I, and other of my sisters, are looking for. Two days before the inauguration, I found myself seated at a table of feminist superstars at the Women's Ball sponsored by the National Council of Women's Organizations . Eleanor Smeal , president of the Feminist Majority Foundation ; Katherine Spillar , executive editor of Ms. magazine (which is published by Feminist Majority); Vicki Saporta , president of the National Abortion Federation and Martha Burk , director of NCWO's Corporate Acco...

It was bad enough that President Barack Obama failed to use the opportunity of Bill Richardson's exit from the nominee stage to appoint a woman to his woefully gender-unbalanced cabinet, but then he appointed a guy who appears to have utter disregard for the financial well-being of women: Judd Gregg. Gregg has a 20% approval rating from the ACLU, making him an anti-civil rights candidate. And he has consistently voted against making affirmative action measures apply to the federal government in contracting, including his vote "to disallow any funds in the [1995]Legislative Appropriations bill from being used to award, require, or encourage any Federal contract, if the contract is being awarded on the basis of the race, color, national origin, or gender of the contractor," according to On the Issues . Reference: Bill HR 1854 ; vote number 1995-317 on Jul 20, 1995 All right, Mr. President. No more Ms. Nice Guy here.

It's Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland. Hope he sends Barack Obama a thank-you note.

This morning, the Romenesko blog, famous among journalists for its coverage of da biz, featured a link to Tom Shales' Washington Post piece about Katie Couric: Another tongue-bath for Couric This time from Shales. When your blogstress returned from her lunchtime stroll, the hed was a bit more demure: More love for Couric This time from Shales. Apparently, when a male writer expresses appreciation for the work of a woman in a man's job, it's almost like he's licking her -- until some editor comes to his senses. Alas, your Webwench did not perform a screen-save of the original hed. You'll just have to take her word for it. UPDATE: The "tongue bath" phrase comes from a blog post by Bill Wyman that appeared earlier this week on Hitsville, a post played big by Romenesko.

The most astounding exchange just took place on MSNBC's "Hardball" between former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Salon editor Joan Walsh . Host Chris Matthews had engaged the two to discuss the recent outrageous comments by Rush Limbaugh about President Barack Obama . Matthews played this clip of Limbaugh, in which the radio host says of Obama: LIMBAUGH: We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president. When Walsh asked why Republicans failed to apologize for Limbaugh's comments, Armey interrupted her: with remarks to the effect of (paraphrase; transcript to come): I'm lucky you're not my wife, so I don't have to listen to this kind of prattle all day long. UPDATE: Sam Stein has the transcript at HuffPo "I'm so damn glad you can never be my wife because I surely wouldn't ha...

"...interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused." --Bono Bono often annoys the crap out of me, but the man can write. Here's his first column for the New York Times op-ed section.

He may not have offered the most profound prayer we ever heard, but Rick Warren, the right-wing preacher from California, offered a prayer at yesterday's presidential inauguration that was designed to bring people together. For this, he will surely take some heat from among the more political preachers of the right. Your blogstress is thankful for favors, small and less so...

It's been a busy week for your blogstress. Her adopted city hums with the excitement of the impending inauguration of Barack Obama, and given the prime location of her Oppo Factory on Capitol Hill, she has become suddenly popular. That aside, there have been no small measure of serious matters to which she must attend. First up: the promised repeal of the ban on queer folk in the military, which Barack Obama's spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, affirmed again last week, only to say a few days later that what he really meant to say is that they would get to it eventually. At The Guardian's Comment Is Free site, your cybertrix makes the case for proceeding sooner rather than later: CLICK HERE TO READ 'I'M BARACK OBAMA AND I'M HERE TO RECRUIT YOU' The Rick Warren controversy, it seems, continues to roil. Tomorrow your écrivaine will discuss, with Mary Glenney on WMNF in Tampa, her own process for coping with the presence of bigotry on the inaugural platform, eve...

The best thing about the film, Last Chance Harvey , is the acting. What's not to like about a cast such as this: Dustin Hoffman , Emma Thompson , Eileen Aitken , Richard Schiff , Kathy Baker ? Then there's the added bonus of seeing an actress of your blogstress's vintage playing a romantic lead. How often does that happen? Joel Hopkins 's script manages to give off warm and fuzzy feelings despite the fact that it hangs together by only the thinnest of threads. We are asked to suspend disbelief and curiosity throughout the film. Never are we to truly know why the Hoffman character's daughter possesses such contempt for him that she pushes him to the very margins or her wedding. "I wasn't a good father," is about all Harvey Shine, the character played by Hoffman, gives us to chew on, and the script nowhere fills in the blanks. Following the travails of Shine, a washed-up musician on the verge of losing his jingle-writing job, we are asked to believ...

You'll recall, dear reader, yesterday's madness about the meltdown at SoapBlox , a Web host for a number of progressive blogs, which was hacked by no-one-knows-who. There was much drama, as Paul Preston, SoapBlox's founder and keeper, prematurely declared his enterprise dead -- only to have a raft of contributors cry "Say it ain't so!" and contribute, via blog comments and other electronic means of communications, ways to salvage his servers. All that may make this seem like less of a story than we originally thought (panicked visions of site files lost forever seemed to be coming true), but today's more sober assessment by Preston strikes your cybertrix as even more troubling than the original fear: Starting on Tuesday, some of the SoapBlox servers were infiltrated by a currently unknown source for unknown reasons. SSH access was acquired by the hackers, where they were able to install port scanning scripts on to the machines. SoapBlox servers were the...

UPDATE #2: SoapBlox seems to be backing off its announcement of its own demise , though the site's communicator, who posts under the handle "pacified", still doesn't seem to know quite what to do in the face of the Big Hack. He's apparently scrubbed this earlier post from his homepage: SoapBlox is dead.All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it. So I hope the Hackers are happy. If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything. Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post. UPDATE #1: Pam's House Blend is back up; no further word on the fate of SoapBlox. Blue Jersey still down, as is Swing State Project . Just received word that SoapBlox , a Web-hosting service that caters to progressive sites, has been hacked so severely that it is reported to be dead, leaving a number of si...

The great E.J. Graff of the Schuster Center for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis, offers the following suggestions for Secretary of Commerce: …Carol Goldberg, former CEO of Stop&Shop, major grocery chain in New England …Rosabeth Moss Kanter, high-flying Harvard Business School prof …Evelyn Murphy, former Lt. Gov of Massachusetts, Ph.D., economist, author, founder and president of WAGE (Women are Getting Even)

Maureen Dowd makes your blogstress a bit crazy. When she's good, she's very, very good, and when she's bad she's a very mean lady. Today we find her in good witch mode, promoting the candidacy of Caroline Kennedy for U.S. Senate from the Great State of New York: People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God. The press whines that she doesn’t have a pat answer about why she wants the job. I’ve interviewed a score of men running for president; not one had a good answer for why he wanted it. You go, girl!

With Bill Richardson bowing out of the cabinet post to which he was named, an unforeseen opportunity to name another woman to the Obama cabinet. A female Secretary of Commerce would be especially meaningful, given this recent Catalyst study highlighting the paucity of women at the top of corporations (where they comprise 60 percent of the staff). Who should it be? Geraldine Layborne , former head of Oxygen? Suzanne de Passe , former Motown honcho? How about Esther Dyson , the high-tech genius and venture capitalist? Name your suggestions. Nature abhors a vacuum, now, doesn't she? Hat-tip to Jill Zimon of Writes Likes She Talks for word of the Catalyst study via Women's eNews .

In our Viagra culture, it does not surprise your blogstress that women could easily be left out of the economic-stimulus-qua-jobs-building program that President-elect Obama has promised us. With their emphasis on infrastructure and green retrofits for job creation, the ideas being batted about appear to heavily favor jobs whose prerequisite skill sets belong largely to men. In the meantime, our health-care and educational infrastructures are also coming undone; these are sectors where women predominate, and little attention has been given to job creation in these human spheres. Linda Hirshman, with whom your blogstress sparred most vigorously during the primary season, first brought this state of affairs to our attention on the op-ed page of the New York Times not very long ago. Now, a group of women, including feminist economists, have launched an online petition to the president-elect, politely asking that half of the population be dealt into the new New Deal. Here's the t...

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...