Something to do this Saturday: repro rights rally in NYC!

The Republicans talk a big game about focusing on getting people more jobs, but as far as actions go, this new Congress seems more intent on limiting people’s freedom, especially women’s. The right wing is going after reproductive rights in general and Planned Parenthood specifically — women’s health care is at greater risk now than it has been years: on February 18, 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to bar Planned Parenthood health centers from all federal funding for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other lifesaving care! Just check out this funny but horrifying Daily Show summary.

2nd annual Unmarriage Until Gay Marriage ceremony

For the second year in a row, the Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping will be celebrating this Valentine’s Day weekend with an un-marriage ceremony for straight married couples who support gay marriage at The Bethesda Fountain in NYC’s Central Park on Sunday from 1 – 2pm. The idea is “no marriage [...]

Best 3-minute argument for gay marriage ever

Passionate, eloquent, convincing, short and to the point — this is a defense of gay marriage made for the Internet. Zach Wahls,  a 19-year-old University of Iowa engineering student, spoke out before the Iowa House of Representatives last week against a resolution which would end civil unions in that state by describing his life with [...]

Naked News: Gagging over Lady Gaga’s new fragrance

• Ted Haggard reveals to GQ that he would identify as bisexual if it weren’t for, you know, God. But wait, didn’t God make him bisexual to begin with? Religion is confusing.
• Ubiquitous James Franco to play porn star Linda Lovelace’s former husband.
• New research suggests are no differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals or between women and men in terms of the brain systems regulating romantic love.

What you remembered about the State of the Union

Immediately after President Obama’s State of the Union address, NPR asked its listeners to describe his speech in just three words, which were all then compiled and put into Wordle, a fun word cloud generator. NPR received responses from over 4,000 people and the result above is a graphic representation of how in tuna people [...]

Valerie Jarrett on gender parity

Rahim Kanani, a Research Associate for the Justice and Human Rights domain of practice at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University, recently conducted an in-depth interview in the West Wing with Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls. They discussed the [...]

How to become a scandal

Laura Kipnis is the kind of writer we’d like to be if we weren’t so fond of making poop jokes and cheesy ’80s references (but, hey, there’s still time to grow up, right?). She writes smart books about topics close to our hearts, like love, sex, pornography, and — most recently — scandal. Her new book is called How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior and it will make you feel okay — even intellectual — about rehashing all the gory details regarding Eliot Spitzer’s mistress or the astronaut in diapers. You get to revel in scandal for two hundred pages and still respect yourself in the morning.

Voter to Miller and Murkowski: Bite Me

So Republican Lisa Murkowski has been announced the winner in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race against Palin-supported Joe Miller as a rare write-in vote. While growing up in Alaska in a decidedly Democrat household, I never ever thought I’d be rooting (okay, half-heartedly, sorta, lesser-of-two-evils, casually rooting) for a Murkowski, a blue-blood political family. The way [...]

What the mid-term results mean for reproductive rights

Okay, so there were some bright spots in the mid-term election results from Tuesday. Like the resounding defeat of an anti-choice ballot initiative in Colorado, and the seeming triumph of Alaska’s write-in candidate Lisa how-the-hell-do-you-spell-her-last-name Murkowski, who ran against Sarah Palin’s man Joe Miller. But the rather bleak news is that the House of Representatives is now in the hands of politicians who play a little too fast and loose with reproductive rights for our liking.

100 best signs at Sanity/Fear DC rally

The always reliable BuzzFeed scoured the Interwebs for the 100 best signs from this weekend’s Colbert and Stewart sponsored rally to “Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in DC.

Bill Maher for President

On Facebook this week, during you know, the times the site was not down, I wrote the status update “Bill Maher should be president.” I don’t think I’d ever gotten as many “likes” as I did with this post. It got me thinking about Maher. He’s in the group of comedians turned political voices, that includes the intentional comics (Colbert, Stewart) and the unintentional comics (Beck, Coulter). But he’s better than them. He’s never acting. He just tells it like it is.

Al Franken chokes up over Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

We should all be choking up, now that Congress has blocked the defense authorization bill (the bill that funds the miliatry) for the first time in decades simply because conservative members (and two Democratic senators!) don’t want to support gay rights, either because they think homosexuality is wrong or, more likely, they’re afraid of pissing [...]

Marriage = an institution free from state-mandated gender roles

Everyone’s saying you’ve just got to read the full text of Judge Vaughn Walker’s overturning of Prop 8 in California last Wednesday — apparently it’s a page turner! You can view it here in full. We admit, we haven’t yet read the whole thing ourselves, but thanks to Rachel Maddow, we were apprised of one [...]

Graffiti art to be displayed in White House?

There may be street art hanging up inside the White House thanks to the British Prime Minister David Cameron’s gift to President Obama. In his first official visit to the White House, the Prime Minister presented a painting “Twenty First Century City” by Ben Eine, a familiar presence in the London street art and graffiti [...]

Q&A With Artist Robbie Conal

Robbie Conal was born in New York City in 1944. He studied art at San Francisco State University and obtained his MFA at Stanford University before moving to Los Angeles in 1984. It was during this time in the 1980s that he combined his art with his social concerns: politics, power and the abuses of both.

Realizing the limited opportunities for art institutions to showcase his work, he transferred his paintings to posters and showcased them on the streets of Los Angeles with the help of his volunteer “guerrilla army.”

His books include “Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of A Guerrilla Artist” and “Artburn.”

Sundance Channel caught up with Robbie at his studio in California to discuss his background, influences, work, and future projects.

Senator and artist Al Franken multitasking during Kagan hearing

Last year I blogged about Al Franken’s (talented) ability to free hand draw an accurate map of the United States from memory. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, the AP snapped this photo of Senator Franken multitasking and demonstrating that his illustration abilities extends beyond cartography with his sharp sketch of [...]

10 thoughts on the separation of Al and Tipper Gore

1. Really? The Gores? The couple most likely to make it to old age on a rocker-for-two on the front porch?!
   
   
2. Not the Clintons? We have to admit, it’s a little refreshing to know that even such public marriages can have their secrets and mysteries.
   
   
3. We now feel truly bad about the number of times we made fun of the Gores’ ew-Mom-and-Dad-are-kissing smooch at the 2000 Democratic Convention.

House votes to allow repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Just in case you missed it over this long holiday weekend, at the end of last week the House voted to allow the repeal of the military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy against gays, as did the Senate Armed Services Committee. It’s [...]

Will the real Elena Kagan please stand up?

We have mixed feelings about Maureen Dowd: on the one hand she is a totally awesome butt-kicking columnist who can swing with the big boys while pointing out how many of them are actually just whiny little boys. But on the other hand, she seems to phone it in a lot these days. That said, her recent columns about Elena Kagan have made us swoon again.

The 50th anniversary of The Pill

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Pill, and there’s been some interesting coverage of it by the media. Margaret Marsh, one of the first researchers granted access to the personal letters of the Pill’s co-developer, John Rock, discusses his Catholicism, among other Pill tidbits.

Illinois state lawmaker makes a personal case for gay marriage

Last week, Illinois lawmaker Deborah Mell spoke on the state House floor to announce her “bittersweet” engagement to her girlfriend of six years — “bittersweet” because she’ll have to go next door to Iowa to tie the knot instead of doing it in the state where she grew up, where she now represents 100,000 people [...]

Tea Party crashers!

If Jason Levin’s plan is successful, the Tea Party just got a bit wilder with some uninvited party crashers at their rallies and protests. Levin, an Oregon technology consultant, is spearheading the “Crash the Tea Party” movement which is encouraging people to join the tea party’s public gatherings where they’ll be indistinguishable except for one [...]

Pres. Obama’s edits to HCR speech

The political and news blogosphere was recently ablaze over this amazing photo (view larger size here) snapped by White House official photographer Pete Souza and posted on the White House Flickr site. Back when the outlook on the passage of a health care reform bill seemed bleak, President Obama went on the offensive to persuade [...]

Naked News: health care, gay census results, and prison sex

• House passes health reform bill (aw yeah), albeit along with an executive order restating and expanding on restrictions on public funding of abortions (aw crap). If you’re feeling as confused as we are as to what health reform actually means for your own coverage, check out this Q&A.
  
  
• An auction for Sex.com was canceled after three creditors filed a petition forcing the owner into bankruptcy.
  
  

The GQ interview with Rielle Hunter

Have you read the no-holds-barred GQ interview with Rielle Hunter, John Edwards’ mistress during his presidential campaign and father of her only child? It’s required reading. Not necessarily for the intimate behind-the-scene details you learn about Edwards’ relationships, both with Hunter and his wife Elizabeth, but for the voyeuristic door it opens into the mind [...]