Gifts for Feminists

sisterhood is powerful.

This has been a year when women's voices have begun to be heard, from the millions of women who marched in January to the many women of color who voted their values and led the way in last night's historic Alabama vote. 

The future is female.

This is a year to celebrate the achievements of women and look forward to 2018.  Show your solidarity with your Christmas gifts.

Level up your solitaire game with this pack of 54  cards celebrating women. Just $20 and the perfect size for a stocking suffer. 

You can never have too many t-shirts, right? Buy this "I Stand With Planned Parenthood" t (one of those "graphic t-shirts the fashion blogs are always tweeting abuot) and $2 of every $25 sale will be donated to Planned Parenthood, so that's a win/win. 

Show your appreciation for California's junior senator with a Kamala Harris portrait t from kamalaharris.org's online store. While you're there, get to know where the Senator stands on the issues that are important to you. Even if you're not one of her constituents, she's working hard for you.

The Most Important Article You'll Read Today if you didn't read it yesterday

"What can be causing Trumpism? We ask, and seek for an earthquake, or at least a historical oddity or a series of highly specific causal events. The more tragic truth is that the Trumpian view of the world is the default view of mankind. Bigotry, fanaticism, xenophobia are the norms of human life—the question is not what causes them but what uncauses them, what happens in the rare extended moments that allow them to be put aside, when secular values of toleration and pluralism replace them."--Adam Gropnik, "Why Trump is Different--and Must be Repelled" (New Yorker, November 3, 2016)

Gropnik's article is sobering. It's full of facts that counter what's become perceived wisdom. But he

also does something that I think cheapens his article. He uses this phrase, "...so infantile a figure as the orange menace." It's become a standard thing for news stories and blog posts and magazine articles to trot out the metaphors to mock Trump's perennial orange tan. It's often funny. As are the bazillion memes that mockery has generated. (Like the one on the right.)
But as Gropnik says in another part of his article, "there's nothing funny about it." Anything that trivializes Trump makes him seem less dangerous. People were not paying attention when he started his campaign. They enjoyed the spectacle. They laughed and pointed and couldn't get enough of him. And now...he's a heartbeat away from becoming President of the United States. We sowed the wind and we're reaping the whirlwind.

Read the article if you're thinking about voting for Trump. And then go Google "Bill Weld and Trump" to see what the Libertarian candidate has to say about him. (Here's a story from USA Today that includes a link to his appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show.)

A meme is worth a thousand words

I've worked in a sexist business since I was in my 30s. If I blushed every time a man used the C word or the P word around me, I'd  be permanently beet red. I've heard producers candidly dismiss actresses because they weren't sexy enough (or because they didn't want to sleep with them and as Rachel Maddow would say, "That's not the word they used.")

I saw one of Donald Trump's female surrogates on CNN yesterday defending what he said on the leaked Access Hollywood tape as just being the way people in Hollywood talk. And you know--she wasn't wrong. There are people in Hollywood who do talk like that. But they're not running for president.

Rachel and the Pink-haired Pundit

My parents didn't watch a lot of television but they were news junkies, so every night it was Chet Huntley & David Brinkley delivering the news to the Tomlinson household. I switched to Walter Cronkite in college because he was the majority pick of the dorm and everybody watched in the commons room. After college, CNN came along and it was Wolf Blitzer. And Bobbi Batista!!! I can't tell you how awesome it was to see a woman anchoring the news. Yes,there'd been women reporters out there--the glamorous doomed Jessica Savich, UN reporter Pauline Fredericks, disgraced White House correspondent Helen Thomas, and the awesome Andrea Mitchell, but on the networks, the women didn't fly solo but were paired off with men. Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer made their marks and paved the way. And then came Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow is a force of nature and a breath of fresh air. And last night, she had two guests on her show who just seemed to epitomize what 2015 is all about. One was the new mayor of my hometown, Washington DC. Muriel Bowser is African-American. Rachel's other buest was journalist Xeni Jardin, co-editor of the BoingBoing.com site. Xeni Jardin has pink hair. (She mostly writes out tech culture but she also writes openly and movingly and with humor about living with breast cancer.) I (heart) Xeni Jardin.

And she is great on TV--comfortable with the camera and able to communicate complex issues in a relatable way. And I just thought--pundits with pink hair. A mayor who is a woman of color. A lesbian anchorwoman who is the smartest person in the room. This is a feminist's dream come true. This is 2015. Good night Chet. Good night David. I love this century

COMING IN MARCH!! The return of Kattomic Energy

Yes, the blog has been off-line since last fall but now, in the creative Year of the Ram, it has been re-energized. And reincarnated with a slightly different focus--as a mystery site, with reviews and other mystery musings. Now that I'm in Bellingham, WA--home of one of the country's great bookstores, Village Books, I will be part of a new Mystery Readers Group and hope to involve my fellow readers and writers in that enterprise as well. And this will also give me an opportunity to indulge my love for Etsy. Because there are people out there like Pattie Tierney who designs really cool mystery-themed jewelry. Check her out here. I am particularly fond of this Trixie Belden bracelet.

As Rachel Maddow would say, "Watch this space."

Feminist (Non) Fiction Friday--the News Edition

Pauline Frederick c. 1955

When I was growing up, writing for school newspapers and thinking about going for a journalism degree, the three most visible women journalists were Barbara Walters, Pauline Frederick and Helen Thomas. (On the print side there was also Gloria Emerson and Frances FitzGerald, who both wrote fantastic books about the Viet Nam War.)
Later, there was Diane Sawyer, former beauty queen and Republican political strategist  (she helped write Nixon's memoirs), and Jessica Savitch, the weekend anchor at NBC who died tragically in 1983. I never watched the Today Show, so never had an opinion about Katie Couric one way or another. I never watched a single broadcast of her prime time news show. I just never really put her in the same category as other women journalists. But they came later.
The three women who shaped me were Barbar and Pauline and Helen.
I cannot tell you how completely betrayed I felt when beteran White House reporter Helen Thomas suddenly revealed herself to be an anti-Semite. I took it personally.
I remember Pauline Frederick as a UN reporter. I thought that sounded very glamorous. I could see myself doing that--using my French and maybe other languages I'd pick up on the side as I covered stories in far-off places.  The story is that when Pauline was first starting out, few men would agree to be interviewed by a woman so she approached their wives first.  She was the first female reporter to broadcast from China and she had an early interest in "electronic communication." She died more than two decades ago at the age of 82, but she would have felt right at home in the world of Twitter and FB and YouTube.
And then there's Barbara Walters. Every female journalist working today owes a big thank you to Barbara. She's always been an easy target for jokes about her questions ("If you were a tree what would you be?") but I've done my share of celebrity interviews and you know...sometimes questions like that are the only way to break through the wall and get something like a real answer,
Barbara. She worked her way up to that slot on Today and she paid her dues in a time when NO ONE would take a woman reporting hard news seriously.
Seriously.
That idea seems so quaint now.
Connie Chung was another journalist who was very visible in the late 20th century but she's kind of disappeared now. That's a shame.  Andrea Mitchell, another veteran reorter, is very visible right now, appearing at the RNC and DNC conventions, doing interviews from the floor while being virtually engulfed in balloons. She is a breast cancer survivor (this is Breast Cancer Awareness month) and a tough cookie who is in her mid-60s and shows no signs of slowing down.
When CNN came along it was thrilling because there was Bobbie Batista anchoring the news and just being awesome by her very presence. And then there was Christiane Amanpour, who was tough and beautiful and whip smart and reporting from war-torn countries. (I still had fantasies of being a war reporter myself.)

Workers of the World Unite

There's a class war brewing in America. It's been steeping for awhile and now it's a dark and potent and bitter brew. What has finally caused the pot to boil over is the furor over unions and the virulent, illogical and seemingly personal attacks on working people by the people elected by those working people to represent them.

Cue the chorus of the Black Keys' song, "I got mine."

In Los Angeles, it's easy to see the human carnage that has been left in the wake of the disastrous financial storms of the past decade. People who used to be comfortable are now scraping by. People who used to be scraping by are now in bad shape. I know two people who have been unemployed for more than two years--with college degrees and excellent resumes. I know one woman who lived in an apartment without electricity for a month because an ex- roommate left her with a huge bill she couldn't pay on her income. I know one person who lives in her van. These are not lazy people.

These are not crazy people. These are people who have worked all their lives and worked hard and now find themselves all alone and naked as howling winds scour their flesh. They are terrified. But it should be the politicians quaking in fear.

"If they have no bread, let them eat cake." Those words led to a revolution. It's time for a political reality check before the chant of the crowds in American cities becomes, "Eat the rich." The contempt of elected officials for the people they are supposed to serve is unacceptable. It's time to let them know that.

Rachel Maddow nailed it in her phrase "the people who write the paychecks" not caring about the "people who cash the paychecks."

If you haven't seen the segment where Rachel talks about the GOP war on workers, click here.

Here's a thoughtful piece on the matter from David Simkins' McKinley-Whitehall blog.

I am an American. I work for a living. And I vote.