If you believe former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, Barack Obama is a “hen-pecked” husband who is subservient to his wife, Michelle.  Of course, Blago is currently on trial for federal fraud and bribery charges, so it might be best to take his assertions with a grain of salt.

From The Chicago Tribune:

Rod Blagojevich is not exactly emerging as a shining example of enlightened feminist-friendly rhetoric in the undercover recordings being played at his trial this afternoon.
An example is a conversation he held with chief of staff John Harris on Nov. 7, 2008, in which the two were still discussing Blagojevich’s plans to swap a Senate appointment for a post in the Obama administration or some high-paying job in the private sector.

The two were reviewing talks with union officials they perceived to be emissaries of Obama. Blagojevich said the emissaries didn’t seem to know exactly what to make of his swap request.

“Barack really wants to get away from Illinois politics,” said Blagojevich, laughing.

Eventually the talk got around to a suggestion that they try a different route to convey the swap idea to the president: through soon-to-be first lady Michelle Obama.

“He’s a lot more hen-pecked than me,” Blagojevich said. “He listens to Michelle.”

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The Washington Times recently published a letter from Jon Voight to Barry O. Check this shit out:

June 22, 2010

President Obama:

You will be the first American president that lied to the Jewish people, and the American people as well, when you said that you would defend Israel, the only Democratic state in the Middle East, against all their enemies. You have done just the opposite. You have propagandized Israel, until they look like they are everyone’s enemy — and it has resonated throughout the world. You are putting Israel in harm’s way, and you have promoted anti-Semitism throughout the world.

You have brought this to a people who have given the world the Ten Commandments and most laws we live by today. The Jewish people have given the world our greatest scientists and philosophers, and the cures for many diseases, and now you play a very dangerous game so you can look like a true martyr to what you see and say are the underdogs. But the underdogs you defend are murderers and criminals who want Israel eradicated.

You have brought to Arizona a civil war, once again defending the criminals and illegals, creating a meltdown for good, loyal, law-abiding citizens. Your destruction of this country may never be remedied, and we may never recover. I pray to God you stop, and I hope the people in this great country realize your agenda is not for the betterment of mankind, but for the betterment of your politics.

With heartfelt and deep concern for America and Israel,

Jon Voight

Fuck you, Jon Voight! I definitely have my significant criticisms of Obama, but what is up with this totally warped and deranged view of history for both Americans and Jewish people? If anything, after the bloody flotilla raid earlier this year, President Obama was rather lukewarm in his public assessment of Israel.

As well, FUCK YOU J.V. FOR BEING A BIGOT.

Sheesh.

What are your thoughts on Jon Voight interjecting his opinions on how relations with Israel should be dictated?

Nikki Haley won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in South Carolina on Tuesday in a runoff election with Congressman Gresham Barrett.  South Carolinians will choose between Haley and Democrat Vincent Sheehan on election day, and Haley is the hands down favorite to win.  Haley overcame challenges including cheating allegations, an increasingly common charge in this day and age, and ethnic slurs.

From the New York Times:

Ms. Haley, 38, rose in the polls by promising to break an entrenched network that has dominated state politics for decades. She portrayed the unsubstantiated charges of sexual affairs as retaliation for taking on special interests.

In the general election, Ms. Haley faces the Democratic nominee, Vincent Sheheen, who won his primary on June 8. Republican candidates in South Carolina hold a considerable advantage in the general election, and even Democratic leaders in the state concede that something unforeseen would have to unfold for Ms. Haley not to win in November.

The two are competing to succeed Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican, who confessed to having an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman last year and is barred by term limits from seeking re-election.

Haley, “a first generation American of Indian descent,” has been increasingly popular in the national news.  Her meteoric rise can be attributed to many factors, not the least of which is an endorsement from Sarah Palin.
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Sunday afternoons were pretty predictable when I was a kid — if my siblings and I behaved in church, we got McDonald’s for lunch (which was total crap, by the way … we never behaved in church but always got McDonald’s anyway. I think my dad just needed his weekly Big Mac fix.), then off to my grandparents’ house.  One of the highlights of going over there (for me, anyway … my sister liked to sneak sugar cubes and my brother preferred listening to music with my uncle), where it smelled of pipe smoke I will never forget, was the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe.  You know, the one where the comics were in full color!  I loved all of them—from Beetle Bailey to For Better or For Worse to Peanuts—but there will always be a special place in my heart for Little Orphan Annie.  And now, after 85 years of the little red-headed, blank-eyed girl, she’s finally … uh, retired.

From the Washington Times:

While Annie inspired a popular Broadway musical, Hollywood movie and radio and TV programs, the once-legendary strip is carried by fewer than 20 newspapers today. For fans and occasional readers, it’s a sad ending to an important piece of Americana.

Yeah.  I’m feeling nostalgic and will probably spend the drive home from work (my last day of school for the year, by the way … yay!) listening to show tunes.  I’m also feeling kind of betrayed.

According to Times columnist Michael Taube:

Those of us on the right of the political spectrum also should pay homage to the strip’s historical role in promoting capitalism, a free-market economy and political conservatism to a wider audience.

Annie’s creator, Harold Gray, was once described by comics historian Coulton Waugh as “Republican and conservative to his toenails.” During the Great Depression, the cartoonist was a fierce opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. He detested labor unions and communism. He railed against corruption in all aspects of society, especially Big Business.

Gray eventually morphed his political and economic philosophies into his creation. As noted by Richard Marshall in the book “America’s Great Comic Strip Artists,” “Annie’s homilies and examples of self-reliance and realistic optimism struck a chord with millions of readers who formed a fanatical and loyal corps of followers.” But it went much deeper than that. Marshall also wrote that Annie became a “personalized creation in which [Gray's] own voice obviously predominated, yet one that featured a succession of characters and situations so vivid as to move adherents to tears and detractors to impotent fury over events in the ‘lives’ of mere paper actors.”

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According to a recent article in American Thinker, there is a left-wing message that Americans in general—and conservatives in particular—are … well, dumb. And that Sarah Palin isn’t. And that Woody Allen is a political commentator to be taken seriously.

Stupidity is the face of American exceptionalism for Barack Obama and his media and university supporters. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a graduate of the elite University of Chicago, says the nation’s a “joke,” that Sarah Palin and ordinary Americans should shut up and let the “educated class” lead. Bill Maher, who practices his contempt at HBO and honed his arrogance at Yale, labels us a “stupid people.”

Meanwhile, Woody Allen says we are so clueless that Barack Obama needs to take his Harvard law degree in hand and become a “dictator for a few years.” Allen, who does not have an Ivy League degree, nevertheless burnished his elite cultural credentials with first an affair, and then a marriage to his stepdaughter a few years back. More recently, he dismissed the rape of a fourteen-year-old by fugitive director Roman Polanski with the observation “he’s an artist.”

Uh … it speaks volumes about your argument that you’re giving credence to Woody Allen’s word on politics. Is that the best example you can come up with, Stuart Schwartz of American Thinker?

They are angry that 81% of us put the nation “on the wrong track” and that two-thirds are “outraged” with what the “educated class” is doing to us. Their response, however, is pushback. The Atlantic magazine, a favorite of our political and media elites, just this month explained the growing anger on Main Street: “It’s that you’re stupid.”

Yeah, those numbers seemed a little funky to me, so I went to the link referenced by Schwartz’s article. It’s from an April 2008 CBS poll report essentially focusing on whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate to go up against John McCain. Um, yeah …
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With a $500,000 grant from the M.A.C. AIDS fund, Washington health officials decided to flood their region with a less ubiquitous type of condom — the female kind. CNN reported that a “newly released [female condom], called FC2, is cheaper and designed to be more user-friendly, but the female condom is still relatively unknown.” Now available for free at select D.C. salons, college campuses, and community centers, doctors and activists are hoping to see that change.

As we’ve discussed on Zelda Lily before, the HIV infection rate in Washington D.C. is sky-high — and 30% of those infected in the nation’s capitol are women. According to CNN, “HIV is particularly prevalent among African-Americans, and more black women between 25 and 34 will die from HIV/AIDS nationwide than from any other cause.”

Shannon Hader, senior deputy director of the district’s Department of Health, doesn’t think women have an adequate understanding of the menace of HIV infection:

Women haven’t really gotten the message that they’re at risk … So we are very, very concerned with making sure that women in the district realize that HIV, in fact, is a woman’s disease too.

Along with the purchase and distribution of female condoms, the city has also seen that trained outreach workers go out with the prophylactics. One outreach worker, Charlene Cotton, felt compelled to join the cause after she discovered she was HIV-positive:

It will give a woman a choice, freedom to use protection when a man feels as though that he doesn’t have to use a condom … it gives her the opportunity to say, ‘Well you don’t have to use one, so I’ll use one.’

As of this morning, same-sex couples were able to register for marriage as new law took effect in the city and also in five states. Affianced gay and lesbian couples were lined up at the marriage bureau of the D.C. Superior Court, according to the Washington Post. By mid-afternoon, “124 couples had filed to be married, far surpassing the dozen applications the bureau typically collects on a single day.” The majority of these individuals, WaPo noted, were women, and the environment was supportive and familial:

“It’s a great source of pride for her and deep down, a source of relief and stability,” said Silver Spring resident Deborah Weiner of her 15-year-old daughter as she stood with her partner of 24 years, Janne Harrelson.

Extra security officers were on-duty in case of protesting, but only a small group of religious protesters from Kansas showed, at the time of the WaPo report. (It should be noted there were also religious leaders who came out to support the legislation.)

Now that same sex couples have finally won the right to marry in D.C., when can they actually, formally, finally tie the knot? Next Tuesday — three business days are necessary to process the application.

Late last month, a group of women gathered at the Islamic Center of Washington to pray. In the main prayer room — which is, according to Salon.com’s Broadsheet, “reserved strictly for men.” Women and their prayers are usually relegated to an area behind a visual barrier, to “[protect] the men from female distraction.”

Broadsheet points to The Daily Beast’s coverage by Asra Q. Nomani, who compares the demonstration to “Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat.” She says:

The 21st-century suffragettes are part of an emerging movement that challenges traditional interpretations of Islam — and questions the disturbing fact that women’s rights take a back seat to civil rights in America when freedom of religion is invoked. So, today, a mosque can’t tell a woman of color she has to sit separately because of her race, but it can banish her to a corner, as most do, because of her gender. Some even ban women altogether.

The courageous gang of devout women were asked to leave, but said no. Only after the police were called upon did they choose exit over possible arrest.  According to Broadsheet, both CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America “have called for women’s right to pray in U.S. mosques without being forced to hide behind a partition.”

Once and for all, the DC City Council will vote on the same-sex marriage bill.  Today.

Most All are under the impression that the bill will pass; it’s already preliminarily passed a trial vote and a vote that actually counted. Previous votes have passed the bill in a sheer 11-2 victory and the mayor also promises to sign off on it.  Naturally, there are dissenters who claim that they will do whatever is in their power to overturn the passing of the bill in Congress but they have so far been unsuccessful.

Although it’s expected, the passing of this bill in the nation’s capital would set an exemplary standard for other states to hopefully follow.

Let’s just hope another Prop 8 doesn’t emerge from the woodwork.  More to come!