Click the image to see the whole cartoon.

From The Superficial. Which I am merely citing, not endorsing. The same goes for this other link, which has another repulsive doll to wretch at. Seriously, look at those anorexic legs! Those narrow-set heavily-painted cat eyes! But don't gaze too close lest thou lotheth thy thoul.

All said, as nasty as the doll is, nothing tops Paris.

Narrowly squeaking by in Indiana last night, Senator Hillary Clinton has donated another $6.4 million of her own moolah to a campaign that her own spokespeople admit will not reach the necessary number of delegates to secure the nomination, even if they succeed in seating the delegates from Michigan and Florida.

Earlier in the call, Clinton officials were asked to lay out the math by which seating the delegates from Michigan and Florida would get Mrs. Clinton significantly closer to the nomination. The reporter asking the question, from the Detroit News, said that it appeared, based on estimates of pledged delegates, that even if those delegations were fully counted, “it’s likely you’ll come up behind.”

Mr. Singer said that even if the delegates were counted, the campaign would still be about 100 delegates shy of the number needed. The implication was that the gap could not be made up, even if she wins more delegates in the remaining contests, as she is expected to do. He also said he expected the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida to ensure that all voters are represented.
Asked again if it was correct that the Clinton campaign would still not reach the full number of delegates, Mr. Singer said, “That is correct.”

Howard Wolfson and Singer argue that "the process must play itself out" to ensure all votes are counted, no one is disenfranchised and democratic values are upheld. Or something like that. Hot air. This has become a vanity campaign, a multi-million dollar venture in self-aggrandizement. As my friend Amanda commented to me this morning, "She's turning into Mitt Romney." Given Clinton's tendency to echo whatever Republican talking point she can use against her Democratic rival, that characterization ain't much of a stretch.

The only compelling argument I have heard for Clinton to remain in the race is the history-making aspect of her status as a woman coming within an hair's-breadth of winning a major party nomination. I have a great deal of sympathy for this argument, because a) who knows when a chance like this will emerge again, b) were the tables reversed, Senator Barack Obama would be in a similar situation and faced with similar calls to drop out prematurely, and c) Clinton and Obama both have been handed the tricky task of blazing trails for their respective identities as a woman and as an African-American, so that (to extend this much extended metaphor) they are both operating without a map of defined trails. Women of all ages deserve a pioneering candidate who will provide an example to emulate, someone whose history will demonstrate the political power of competent and hard-working women. Women deserve someone who will speak directly to issues that affect them, something Clinton has done significantly better than Obama.

Yet at some point Clinton's value as a history maker has been undermined by Clinton the typical pandering Democrat, Clinton the Neo-Liberal who runs to the Right when its convenient, Clinton the Neo-Con Dupe, Clinton the bourgeois white feminist willing to exploit racial divisions to her advantage. If Clinton were running a campaign that did not consistently appeal to lowest common denominator Republican talking points and to the worst aspects of American racism, I'd happily encourage her to carry on. As it is, it's become a ginormous headache.

Click to enlarge.

Kate Beaton (aka beatonna) is a consistently funny cartoonist I only recently discovered. Funny shit!

Having commented and posted links to discussions on the out-of-character and misogynist dialog Brian Michael Bendis put in the vented mouth of Doctor Doom, I thoroughly enjoy the alternatives thunk up by MightyGodKing. Here's one of several:

Possibly Irrelevant Information blames Brian Michael Bendis for the words he put in Doctor Doom's mouth:

That's not Doom. That's a SKRULL that watches too much Bill O'Reilly filtered through Frank Miller. Wait, I take that back. The Skrull aren't sexist. That's Otto Weininger filtered through Bill O'Reilly filtered through Ann Coulter filtered through Norman Mailer filtered through Frank Miller.

Found via Blog@Newsarama, who elaborates:

Without making judgments as to whether or not Mr. Bendis feels that being a “badass supervillain” is admirable or not, there’s nothing wrong with an asshole sounding like an asshole. It’s indicative of a larger issue, and the problem is not the attitude towards women. The problem with this, as with the vast majority of what Mr. Bendis writes, is a lack of diversity. Diversity in character, that is. Victor Von Doom speaks with the same meter and slang as an NYC street hood. Doom’s a very different sort of villain, from a different background, from a different country, from a different “school of evil” so to speak. He’s always been refined in his arrogance, and old-fashioned. I could certainly see the words “stop your whore heart” coming from this character (though “before I tear out your heart from your whore’s breast!” is more his style), but “shut your cow mouth”? Certainly not. Doom says cheesy things like “SILENCE, WOMAN!”

I can't add anything to that, other than my approval. I am not the biggest supertights fan, but I have always had a fannish love for Doctor Doom. Because he's cheesy. He's proto-Vader. And cheesy guys are easy to misunderestimate, as we have come to learn these last 8 years.

Click to see the full cartoon while it's still relevant!

Why does she need to be told this? Who the hell is Anthony to have to explain this crap to her? What happened to her brain?

The Comics Curmudgeon nailed this one in a comment on yesterday's strip:

There’s an entire Women’s Studies thesis waiting to be written about the Foobs today. Elizabeth’s abject terror and panic that Anthony will think she’s a two-timing ne’er-do-well would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic and queasy-making. The fact that Anthony isn’t being a total douche for once (“Gosh, sorry you’re terrified about being caught alone with a man after sundown … I didn’t realize that this phone could call the 19th century”) just makes it ickier. Presumably Liz will agree to Anthony’s inevitable proposal to “make it up for him,” setting a firm foundation for a future life of quiet desperation and self-loathing.

For the unindoctrinated, "Foobs" are the characters in For Better or For Worse.

Shaenon Garrity wrote the definitive case against Anthony a couple months ago.

UPDATE: The Curmudgeon comments on today's strip, too. Iz hilarious.

A post linking to articles on the increased sexual liberty and assertiveness enjoyed by French women appeared at the Huffington Post with this incredibly EFFED UP headline:

French Women: The New Sexual Predators?

This headline makes a question out of a headline appearing in the London Telegraph:

French women "are the sexual predators now"

If you are not immediately experiencing the cognitive dissonance, let me explain. Sexual predators tend to be folks like these fellows profiled by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement: rapists, molesters, sexual batterers, and kidnappers. Women enjoying sexual emancipation feel free to choose partners, enjoy multiple partners and, at least in the case of Italian model and singer Carla Bruni (now married to French President Nicholas Sarkozy), are brave enough to declare that monogamy "bores me."

Or, as the Telegraph reports:

The proportion of French women who claim to have had only one partner has dropped from 68 per cent in 1970, to 43 per cent in 1992 and 34 per cent in 2006. A woman's average number of partners has risen from under two in 1970 to over five today, while a man's has remained the same for four decades, almost 13.

French women's first experience of sex is now almost as early as that of the opposite sex: in 1950 there was a two-year difference, but the gap has narrowed to four months, to around 17 and a half. Meanwhile, more women remain sexually active for longer than previously: nine-out-of-10 women over 50 are sexually active today, compared to just 50 per cent of that age group in 1970.

How "predatory".

Except in rare cases, men tend to be sexual predators, and women tend to be their victims, although young boys also appear in several cases. These guys do not typify men, however, but are influenced by pathologies of power, misogyny and anger that are rooted in extreme definitions of manhood and patriarchal violence.

So it's important to keep that in mind when reading the article from the Telegraph:

"Are women just like men?" asked Le Nouvel Observateur yesterday, which released extracts of the Study on Sexuality in France, a 600-page tome that brings together 12,000 in-depth interviews with people of all ages conducted during 2005-06.

One of the biggest changes in recent years, according to the report, was that male and female sexual behaviour had become increasingly similar.

Okay, get it? Men are inherently "predatory" in their behavior. That gives them license to rape and abuse women. Women who don't feel like being in a committed relationship and want to enjoy sex are doing so at the expense of emasculating male sexual power.

I could continue to count the ways in which this article is fucked up, but you're intelligent people. You work it out. Meanwhile I'm gonna grind my teeth.

If you had read Robin Morgan's Goodbye to All That (#2) and felt both alienated and emotionally blackmailed, Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler write an excellent response to the kind of "either/or" feminism Morgan's essay typifies:

Because we believe that feminism can be expressed by a broader range of choices than this "either/or" proposition entails, we again find ourselves compelled to say "no"--this time to a brand of feminism that betrays its inclusive and global commitments. We believe we stand in unity with many feminists who will say, "Not in Our Name" will this feminism be deployed.

Young feminists have been vocal and strong in critiquing the claim that a vote for Obama represents some form of youthful naiveté, a desire to win the approval of men, or a belief that sexism no longer factors into their lives. While paying respect to those women who carried the banner for so many years, these young women have reminded us that feminism is not static but evolutionary, changing in content, scope and tenor as new generations elevate their concerns and aspirations. And while we agree that this "either/or" brand of feminism fails to capture the imagination and hopes of countless numbers of women who refuse to entrust this capital into the hands of a candidate just because she is a woman, we think it important to add that this is not simply an intergenerational difference at work here. At issue is a profound difference in seeing feminism as intersectional and global rather than essentialist and insular. Women have grappled with these questions in every feminist wave, struggling to see feminism as something other than a "me too" bid for power whether it be in the family, the party, the race or the state.

For many of us, feminism is not separate from the struggle against violence, war, racism and economic injustice. Gender hierarchy and race hierarchy are not separate and parallel dynamics. The empowerment of women is contingent upon all these things. Despite the fact that we know that identity does not equal politics--especially an antiwar, social equity and global justice politics--we are led to believe that having a woman in power is the penultimate accomplishment. And even when the "either/or" feminists back off this claim in general, we are told, it is true in the case of the particular, Hillary Clinton. Experience and judgment go hand in hand, we are told, but one has to wonder how is it that so many ordinary citizens who were outside the beltway instinctively sensed what would come with the war, but the female candidate running for President did not?