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Hillary Clinton Escort Services
SAYS the email from Hillary Clinton (remember her?):
“Summer is a time for simple pleasures: family vacations, baseball games, and dinner out under the stars. At least it is if you aren’t running for president!”
“HAVE A MEAL WITH HILLARY – LET’S GO TO DINNER!
Hillary’s not pimpimg [sic] Chelsea. There’s more:
“Contribute now, and you an I could be enjoying a summer dinner together soon.”
Make a donation to Hillary Clinton and you stand a chance of dinner with her. And after dinner…? Well, who knows. How much you got?
Better yet, you don’t have to pay to break bread with the failed and in debt former presidential hopeful. You can win a dinner date with Hillary Clinton for free. Hey, it will just like being Bill.
Play now, and that table at Hooters could be yours!
Posthumous Jon Swift sez: “Satire: ur doin it rong.“
Via campskunk @ Alegre’s Corner:
O RLY?
Dear Barack:
Which ‘late-term abortions’ do you oppose, exactly? Those caused by “all those irresponsible, fickle, ninny-brained straw-women who decide willy-nilly they want abortions” when they’re “feeling blue”? Those mythical ones that do not exist?
Pregnancy is not physically comfortable, Barack, nor does society often look kindly upon the choice we make, whatever it may be. Since women (even the dirty, whorey ones!) don’t often subject their bodies to supporting a fetus for seven months or more unless they really want to, the likelihood that a late-term abortion is done for any other reason than the “health and life of the woman” is slim-to-nil.
A piece of advice? After two presidential terms under which the reproductive rights of half the population have been under steady, unrelenting attack, the year you beat out this woman* to become the presumptive nominee? Is not the year to be fucking around with the pro-choice base of your party. People are likely to get awful… bitter.
In short – get it together, dillweed.
- RKMK
(*In theory, anyway.)
Insight into the Anti-Hillary Mind: Nice GuyTM Edition -
Is it so necessary that women compete in the presidential arena? Don’t they have enough power as it is? Must they invade and occupy every last space previously inhabited by men?
I’m all for gender equality. I believe that a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model should be persuaded by society to ask a nerd or geek out on a date and pay for it, while he sits back and judges how good she is at wooing and winning him. Now THAT would be an important step toward gender equality in our society.
Posted by KSP556 at 06/07/2008 @ 01:25am
Oh, KSP556, how I wish you – and others like you – hadn’t let your sad, pathetic ego and frustrated sex drives poison the electoral process for the rest of us. Wouldn’t therapy have been more personally productive?
Damn Penile Voters.
I has a purse.
The Manface luffs his purse. Luffs.
Richard Gere won’t be pulling up in a limo for this woman, nor the millions of others like her.
I certainly don’t think she’s feeling all that empowerful, either.
The idea that women’s public sexuality can so precisely mirror traditional male fantasy while simultaneously existing in a kind of pro-woman, I-do-it-for-myself alternate universe is the cornerstone of funfeminist “thought.” The flaw in this reasoning is that all women must participate in patriarchy regardless of what they say motivates their participation; patriarchy is the dominant culture, and there is no opting out.
“We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.
We also must recognize that women will never gain full dignity until their human rights are respected and protected.
Our goals for this Conference, to strengthen families and societies by empowering women to take greater control over their own destinies, cannot be fully achieved unless all governments – here and around the world – accept their responsibility to protect and promote internationally recognized human rights.
The international community has long acknowledged – and recently affirmed at Vienna – that both women and men are entitled to a range of protections and personal freedoms, from the right of personal security to the right to determine freely the number and spacing of the children they bear.
No one should be forced to remain silent for fear of religious or political persecution, arrest, abuse or torture.
Tragically, women are most often the ones whose human rights are violated.
Even in the late 20th century, the rape of women continues to be used as an instrument of armed conflict. Women and children make up a large majority of the world’s refugees. When women are excluded from the political process, they become even more vulnerable to abuse.
I believe that, on the eve of a new millennium, it is time to break our silence. It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.
These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.
The voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loud and clear: It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.
It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.
It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women’s rights – and women’s rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely – and the right to be heard.”
- Hillary Rodham Clinton, September 5, 1995
… And that could have been the person to take over for this guy. Sigh.
There are so many things wrong with this story, the first of which is “WTF COPS?!?”, the last of which is calling a 30-year old executive “rape girl.”
Really, after the FISA flop, is this really in good taste? At best, IMO, it’s tacky; at worst, it’s politically shtupid.
That concern aside, what’s really been troubling me is the outright corporatization of the democratic process this primary season. No, I’m not talking about the behind-the-scenes by lobbyists and favour-trading and back-scratching and “free speech donations” between corporations and politicians to gain influence in Washington (though I hate that, too), but the growing trend to speak of politics in business-speak terms.
The first time I noticed this was back in March, when Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) was quoted as saying, “You have a very unhappy electorate, which is no surprise, with oil at $108 a barrel, stocks down a few thousand points, a war in Iraq with no end in sight and a president who is still very, very unpopular. He’s just killed the Republican brand.“
“Oh, Rep. Davis,” I giggled. “Only Republicans would see civics and politics in such a manner, and talk in such blatant marketing-speak!”
I was so young, then, and naive.
Not long after, I came across a friend’s blog (a personal one, which is why I’m not linking), who – while simultaneously admitting he wasn’t qualified to comment on the quality of either candidate, and was leaving it up to his political-junkie friends to duke it out – complimented Barack Obama, and his branding:
Barack Obama’s branding is really really good. Specifically, his website branding. It’s clean, very uncluttered, and visually pleasing. Hillary’s is quite good, about what you would expect, but Barack has definitely got some sugary web 2.0 (are we at 3.0 yet? I can’t keep track) goodness going on. Note the logo – the big O. Very simple, but nice. Note the my.barackobama.com, which smacks of .mac account level fandom. I don’t really have the interest to sign up and see what it’s all about, but from the outside, it’s genius: a barack dashboard. He has created his own social network! What’s next – a widget for vista/OSX of an “obameter” or a “barameter”?
Again, the political-junkie and civics nerd in me sneered – great marketing and graphic design does not a great leader make. The thing about Barack Obama’s website that jumped out at me the most was that, (at that time) he had no section on women and women’s issues, and the kind of blind spot that overlooked the needs of about 52% of the population. That, to me, indicated far more about Barack’s candidacy that the “clean, uncluttered” nature of the site. “What about his policies,” I cried (internally). “What is he going to do?”
To my great dismay, this sort of talk didn’t abate as the primaries went on; in fact, it got worse. After Barack “won” the primary, a post by zuzu at Shakesville asked Obama’s supporters why Clinton’s supporters should vote for him in the general, and a well-meaning commenter responded:
To all of the substantive points I raised, I will finally add Obama’s brilliance in marketing.
He has managed to associate his brand so indelibly with “hope”, “change” and “inspiration” that his opponents and naysayers are forced to criticize those words and concepts, which rarely works out well. Regardless of whether he actually does represent hope change and inspiration (I personally believe he does), don’t we want our Democratic presidential candidate to be a hella good marketer?
I had a visceral reaction to reading this – I hadn’t been lurking at The Great Orange Cheeto or any other pro-Obama site, and hadn’t actually seen people arguing that this sort of thing was a positive; before I could respond, however, Shaker kidlacan was on it:
“perverse as it probably sounds, for me, the quality of obama that last of your posts highlights is the thing putting me off him the most. i’d give anything to have a break from the marketing. it sets my teeth on edge. i’ve been wishing since january that his website would tell me the sorts of things you’ve told me, in your posts, and shut up with the Hope and Change and Hope and ooh web 2.0 lookit! already. it’s a relief to me to hear reasons for supporting him which haven’t got anything to do with ‘the zeitgeist.’ “
Jerseyboy quickly followed up with:
“I agree…Zoe has enunicated succinctly what we never get on TV from him, from his supporters in general or from his website…the marketing stuff is a monstrous turnoff for me…we dealt with that garbage from Bush and Co. for nearly eight years…I hated it from the right, I don’t want to see it from the left…it’s nauseating from any part of the political spectrum.”
There’s been a lot of pop-psychology running around the media and the ‘net about the tensions between whom supports whom, via age (Boomers vs. Echo-Boomers/”Generation Y“), the “waves” of feminism (second vs. third), and classes (Creative vs. Working), and geography (urban vs. Appalachia). I’m personally starting to see another thread of preference (which surely intertwines with each and every one of these divisions), that is, which kind of “consumer” each voter is: those who enjoy “buying into” concepts, and those who don’t like being “marketed” every. last. thing., especially not democracy.
For example, I’ve often commented that while I’m part of the “demographic” that is supposed to be overwhelmingly pro-Obama (young, educated, urban latte-sipping liberal), I’ve pretty much rejected the entire kit’n'caboodle. This is perhaps in part because I identify more with second-wave feminism, which in turn may partly be because I both get along fabulously with my boomer-generation mother and because I don’t particularly share my generation’s resentment of the boomers.
But I’m also someone who’s reknowned as a “hard-sell.” I hate telemarketers. I hate going into stores and having salespeople flutter at me, because I know what I want, and I resent someone trying to sell me otherwise. I rarely buy something just because the commercial appealed to me, aesthetically or otherwise; I enjoyed the Joe Canada commercial back in 2000, but I never bought Canadian - because I don’t enjoy the taste of beer. I really liked the Pepsi/Britney campaigns of the same era, and could appreciate their zip and style, but … I prefer the taste of Coke, and that’s what I buy. Right now, I’ll fully admit to being addicted to my Starbucks, but it’s not a status/brand thing to me – it’s that their hazelnut/cinnamon dolce/chai lattes are fooking delicious. The only time a commercial speaks to me, like, enough to part with any money, is when it happens to speak to me on a functional level, that the product that’s being sold to me will actually solve a problem I have or I truly enjoy it.
That Generation-Y link says the following about my generation:
They represent more than 70 million consumers in the United States. They earn a total annual income of about $211 billion, spend approximately $172 billion per year, and considerably influence many adult consumer buying choices. They also face a greater degree of direct corporate marketing than any other generation in history….
A 2008 survey by UK recruitment consultancy FreshMinds Talent in partnership with Management Today suggested that Generation Y are generally more ambitious, brand conscious and tend to move jobs more often than ever before.
I think my generation is definitely more brand-conscious than ever before, but I think there’s a bit of a dove-tailing effect: there’s a split between those who are marketing-skeptical (like myself) - those who can recognize marketing tricks for what they are, and have fused it with the previous generation’s anti-capitalist sentiment – and those who have embraced corporate branding and marketing as an art, and make their judgements based on the brand, the marketing itself, who buy into the “logic” that the person who can manipulate the message the best is, ipso facto, the person who would lead best.
Which, to me is a logical non-sequitur, but it seems to follow to the latter kind of person, and (terrifyingly) that the latter seems to be far more prevalent. But what kind of “consumer” one is seems to both correlate with and explain the cross-section of voters that Clinton and Obama appeal to, respectively, across those urban/rural, generational, and class divides: those who are likely to appreciate and buy into gloss and glitter, and those who are wary about throwing their money and support behind something without there being a little substance to back it up.
