Not exactly a slow news day

By Violet Socks · Friday, July 30th, 2010 · 9 Comments »

Okay folks, I’m just going to call this an open thread. There’s so much in the news:

1. TIME Magazine puts mutilated Afghan woman on the cover. I’m linking to the Jezebel article about it because Irin Carmon has the most thoughtful take I’ve seen.

2. Shirley Sherrod is going to sue Andrew Breitbart. Professor Hutchinson at Dissenting Justice argues that she would probably have a stronger legal case against the USDA.

3. Phyllis Schlafly still alive, still hates women. What’s really cool is that her hairstyle hasn’t changed since 1978 either.

4. “Tea Partiers Aren’t The Bigoted White Guys You Fear” claims the New York Press. It’s an interesting piece by Spencer Wilking, who apparently spent some time with the Tea Party in New York. It turns out that the Tea Partiers aren’t just deluded Fox-News-brainwashed white males; they’re also deluded Fox-News-brainwashed women, black men, immigrants—everybody! Actually this doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s clear that there is a lot of racism in the Tea Party, but that’s just because there is a lot of racism in rightwing propaganda. Fundamentally, the Tea Party is a creation of the rightwing noise machine: talk radio, Fox News, the whole Rush Limbaugh-Glenn Beck axis of evil. I don’t mean that the Tea Party doesn’t really exist; I mean that Tea Partiers are Tea Partiers because they’ve been listening to this wingnut garbage for years and they think it’s true. They think Democrats are socialists, that Obama is a communist, that we must cut taxes on the rich, and so forth. The Tea Party is what you get when you have an unbridled giant propaganda machine running 24/7 for 30 years.

5. Four out of five women on “The View” appear to be dressed uncomfortably. Yeah, I know that’s not really the lead story, but it’s what caught my attention. President Obama went on the show, yadeyadeyade, but at least he had on pants and comfortable shoes.

view500

~

6. Last minute addition! Rare zedonk born in Georgia. She’s an adorable little thing:

zedonk

I clicked over to the ScienceBlogs link to the story, since I thought a scientist might have some interesting points to offer. Alas, the “scientist” turned out to be Jason Goldman, whose post is noteworthy for its repeated references to the zedonk as male. Even as he’s quoting news stories that clearly refer to the animal as female (emphasis added):

I’m not going to create a new category for this creature, because I never expect to blog about these critters again. At least it’s clear that he’s a mammal.

A zedonk, an unusual cross between a donkey and a zebra, is attracting attention at Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in north Georgia after being born there about a week ago.

The animal, which has a zebra father and a donkey mother, has black stripes prominently displayed on her legs and face.

C.W. Wathen, the Dahlonega preserve’s founder and general manager, says the foal has a zebra’s instincts. Wathen says she sits up instead of lying on her side, as if she’s staying alert for predators…

…Donkeys and zebras don’t usually mate, but zedonks turn up occasionally. In 2005, a zebra gave birth to a zedonk in Barbados, according to the news website Science Daily. And in the 1970s, three zedonks were born at a European zoo to a donkey mother, according to the website of Britain’s Colchester Zoo. (via boston.com)

According to Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic:

Now, the zedonk can finally take its place in the menagerie of weird hybrid animals like ligers, wholphins, and camas (camel-llama mixes), all testaments to the power of “love” to transcend all obstacles, even speciation.

I just wonder what they’re gonna name the little guy.

Actually, they named her Pippi Longstocking. Seeing as she’s a girl and all.

So I’m reading this thing, wondering about this clown who is so saturated in the maleness-as-norm viewpoint that four feminine pronouns fail to impinge on his consciousness, and I thinks to myself, “Hang on! Could this possibly be the same guy who did that dude-centric Porn Is Good post Twisty wrote about?”

And whaddya know: same guy.

What’s hilarious is that Goldman describes himself as a “graduate student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California,” with an interest in “the way that the environment interacts with biology in producing innate or skilled behavior, and the evolution of the mind.”

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A video that made me happy

By Violet Socks · Thursday, July 29th, 2010 · 3 Comments »

Maybe it will make you happy too:

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Proof that American idioms are better than British idioms

By Violet Socks · Monday, July 26th, 2010 · 27 Comments »

First of all, I should start by saying that I’m very tired. I was up all night trying to find a good solution to stationery needs for the Secret Feminist Cabal (which, while terribly powerful and awe-inspiring, can’t afford to pay much). But my mood is good! Cheerful, even. Or maybe just punchy.

At any rate, my post this morning is occasioned by this piece from Tina Brown in the Daily Beast:

Let’s NOT have a conversation about race. The calls for Obama to now make the Shirley Sherrod debacle a teachable moment fills me with panic that the president will retreat to the Oval Office and craft a soaring piece of oratory, instead of getting on with the humdrum business of firing the stumbling, bumbling members of his own team who, as the saying goes, can’t find their ass with either hand.

Good idea, sez me—but is that really the way they say it over there? “Can’t find their ass with either hand?”

The American expression (or at least the version I grew up with) is “can’t find their ass with both hands tied behind their back.” Which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is vastly superior.

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Thank you, Lord Saletan

By Violet Socks · Saturday, July 24th, 2010 · 6 Comments »

Dude is not exactly my favorite person, but he’s done a Good Thing. And now I don’t have to do it, which makes me happy because I’m in a bad mood anyway.

Here’s the deal: one of the things that’s been annoying the living fuck out of me about the Sherrod business is the wingnut claim that the NAACP people in the video laugh and cheer at racial discriminination. No, they don’t. It’s a weird upside-down kind of world where you can watch a video in which people clearly do not laugh and cheer, and still come away saying ooh look, they laughed and cheered! What the fuck?

So Lord Saletan has done exactly what I was getting ready to do, which is parse the goddamn video (since apparently people can’t be relied on to simply watch the thing; no, we have to provide a blow-by-blow narrative of the action):

Breitbart’s followers have parroted this indictment in messages to numerous media outlets, including National Review and Slate. But is it true? Let’s look at the video. The key section starts around 16 minutes in. I’ll quote the speech and describe the reactions from the audience, to the extent I can discern them. You can check my version by listening to the audio as you follow along. Here’s Sherrod:

When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people, and to black people only. [Pause. Silence.] But, you know, God will show you things, and He’ll put things in your path so that—that you realize that the struggle [Audience: Alright] is really about poor people. [Audience: Alright, alright.]

Racial appeal met with silence; non-racial appeal met with approval. Sherrod’s next words:

You know, the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he—he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. [Audience: Alright. Murmurs.] I know what he was doing. [Audience: Alright.] But he had come to me for help. [Audience: Amen.] What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. [Laughter.]

The audience seems sympathetic to Sherrod’s resentment of the farmer’s arrogance, as she perceived it. How should we interpret the laughter? Is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a white man? Or is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a guy with an attitude? The evidence so far suggests the latter: The audience has embraced an appeal for “poor people,” shunned an appeal for “black people only,” and given Sherrod her only Amen when she noted that despite the farmer’s attitude, “he had come to me for help.” But let’s keep listening.

I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. [Audience: Mm-hm.] So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. [Sherrod smiles and pauses. There's a single staccato noise somewhere in the room. No words, no laughter.] I did enough so that when he—I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. [Pause. Silence.]

This time, Sherrod has mentioned only the farmer’s race, not his attitude. She delivers the crucial line—”So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do”—with a smile and a wry tone that invites any racist to laugh or blurt out approval. But she gets nothing. I had to listen to this clip more than a dozen times before I realized that the “applause” Breitbart describes could only be the staccato noise. To interpret this as applause, you would have to believe that a single person, representing an otherwise silent audience, suddenly decided to change the congregation’s language of affirmation from call-and-response to clapping—and just as suddenly, after a single stroke, decided to stop.

As Sherrod renounces her old attitude, the audience comes alive:

Well, working with him made me see [Audience: Mm-hm] that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t [Audience: That's right, that's right], you know. And they could be black, and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don’t have access [Audience: Mm-hm] the way others have [Audience: Mm-hm].

So, let’s review the Breitbart gang’s allegations:

When … she expresses a discriminatory attitude towards white people, the audience responds with applause. False.
The NAACP … is cheering on a person describing a white person as the other. False.
The NAACP audience seemed to have approved of her actions when she talked about not helping the white farmer. False.
They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination. False.
As Ms. Sherrod recounted the first part of her parable, how she declined to do everything she could for the farmer because of his race, the audience responded in approval. False.

First Breitbart and his acolytes falsely accused Sherrod of discriminating against whites as a federal employee, despite having no evidence for this charge in the original video excerpt. Strike one.

Then they misrepresented Sherrod’s story as an embrace of racism, when in fact she was repudiating racism. They later pleaded ignorance of this fact because they didn’t have the full video. Strike two.

Now, with the full video in hand and posted on their Web site, they’re lying about the reaction of the NAACP audience.

I’ll add one other thing, which I daresay is outside Lord Saletan’s experience. The part where the NAACP audience laughs? What they’re laughing at is the kind of anecdote all black people and all feminists know very well: the sexist/racist white guy who needs your help but can’t resist trying to show how much better he is than you. I personally think the NAACP audience is laughing in recognition of the situation and Sherrod’s very human response (”how much do I want to help this schmuck?”).

Not that I suppose any of this really matters. Andrew Breitbart is a white supremacist hoaxer, and he’s going to keep right on with his lying bullshit.

*************

Update: You know what else Andrew Breitbart is? Not anonymous. Yeah. He’s totally, completely, not anonymous. Everybody knows his name. His whole media empire is named after himself. So why in the fuck did CNN use the Sherrod hoax as an excuse to complain about “anonymous bloggers” who do terrible things like this?

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Two posts on the Sherrod mess

By Violet Socks · Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 · 37 Comments »

Both well-written, both offering cogent summaries of key aspects of the case.

Amy Davidson’s Two Minutes in Georgia, from the New Yorker blog, is superb:

The most obvious aspect of the Shirley Sherrod affair is its shabbiness. How many minutes do you spare before deciding to destroy someone’s life? It would be nice if the answer to that question were a number greater than two. In March, Sherrod, the director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture in Georgia, gave a speech at a local N.A.A.C.P. Dinner. It was about forty-three minutes long. A few days ago, Andrew Breitbart posted and publicized a clip from the speech. (Who is Andrew Breitbart? See Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker Profile for more on that.) The clip was two minutes—long enough for N.A.A.C.P. officials to condemn her, and for frightened Department of Agriculture officials to call Sherrod on her cell phone and demand that she resign. She says that the final call came when she was driving, and that she was told to pull over and end her career before she even got where she was going.

It’s the pull-over-and-resign-now incident that really gets me. If you’ve ever been wrongfully accused of something, you know that what’s worse than the initial accusation is when people who ought to know better—or who should at least be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt—believe it.

As for the false accusations against Sherrod and the breathtaking dishonesty of Andrew Breitbart, Davidson’s summary is elegant:

It’s not just a matter of quotes being taken out of context (although there is that). The two-minute clip Breitbart ran is introduced with this text: “Ms Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing a billion dollars… She discriminates against people due to their race.” And here’s Breitbart’s description of the action:

This federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

No, she doesn’t. She tells the story of how, twenty-three years ago, she initially assumed that a white farmer, with the law on his side, unlike a black farmer, didn’t need much help beyond being put in the hands of a white lawyer; when she realized that he did, she sprang into action, and saved his farm. She says that God put the farmer in her path to show her what her full mission was: helping poor rural people of all races. (This was during the farm-foreclosure crisis of the eighties.) She was not an “executive bureaucrat” then, and the whole thing had nothing to do with “federal duties” or “a billion dollars.” And anyone who saw even a couple of minutes more of the video would know it. Surely, whoever put the clip together did.

Breitbart, of course, is a toad; whether he’s a mentally deranged toad, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, is unclear (though I daresay Sully would know about that sort of thing).

But it’s the reaction of the Obama administration that is so disheartening. Archie Bland explains why, in The Obama administration’s most unlikeable moment yet:

Now, one obvious fact to emerge from this is that the conservative blogosphere, and its allies in the media, are not especially careful about who they hurt in pursuit of a political scalp that will hurt the Obama administration. But that’s so obvious as to be barely worth noting. No one will be especially surprised to learn that Bill O’Reilly issued a swift call for Sherrod’s resignation, or that Breitbart’s most salient comment after the full facts emerged was that he “could care less about Shirley Sherrod.” Indeed, as this Washington Post story makes clear, Fox News was far from the biggest villain of the piece.

What’s much more striking and worrying is the way the Democratic administration and its allies acted. Sherrod was called three times in the same day by Agriculture Department officials urging her to resign; she was told that she had to quit immediately because the row was “going to be on Glenn Beck tonight”. Nor did the NAACP try to contact Sherrod before issuing a ruthless condemnation designed to put as much distance between the organisation and the story as possible. The reason for all this, of course, is that establishment liberals in America are utterly terrified of the brutality of the right-wing media, and will do whatever necessary to cut off those attacks before they happen – including throwing one of their own under the bus.

What a distressing lesson in the realities of public discourse in America. There’s been plenty of evidence before that the Obama administration is ruthless to the point of being callous when stories of this sort arise, that they’re petrified at the slightest whiff of a story about black-on-white racism, but this is just a different league of awful. I have never liked the president less.

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Memories…light the corners of my mind

By Violet Socks · Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 · 10 Comments »

Misty watercolor memories…..

Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards’ Statement on Abortion Ban in New High-Risk Insurance Pools

“Based on the Obama administration’s statement, we are deeply disappointed that the administration has voluntarily and unnecessarily decided to impose limits on private funds used to purchase health insurance coverage for abortion care in the new high-risk insurance pools…

“The very women who need to purchase private health insurance in the new high-risk pools are likely to be more vulnerable to medically complicated pregnancies. It is truly harmful to these women that the administration may impose limits on how they use their own private dollars, limiting their health care options at a time when they need them most. This decision has no basis in the law and flies in the face of the intent of the high-risk pools that were meant to meet the medical needs of some of the most vulnerable women in this country.”

….of the way we were.

Bless her heart, Cecile is upset. No wonder. After what she did to get Obama elected! Handing over the Planned Parenthood mailing list, even allowing an email campaign to spread what she knew were falsehoods—but it was worth it to elect Obama. Wasn’t it, Cecile?

God, I’m so sick of these clowns. All of these clowns.

I just spent a few minutes getting up to speed on the latest from the TriboList archives, and I wish I hadn’t. Not because there’s anything so bad there; it’s just people shooting the shit. What’s depressing is the delusional view from inside the pro-Obama tribe.

Witness this bit from Kevin Drum during the discussion on how to deal with the Jeremiah Wright business:

Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”

Notice the caveat: “or says he’s trying.” Anybody who was really paying attention to the Obama campaign knew perfectly well that it was every bit as muddy an operation as you’ll find anywhere in politics. Obama would go out and give a speech about how “there’s no place for that kind of thing” while his operatives would furiously push every smear against Hillary they could scrounge up. They did it again with Palin. Rather than just opposing Palin and McCain on policy (and god knows there was enough there for that), they orchestrated a huge character-assassinating sexist mudfest, including the above-referenced Planned Parenthood email campaign.

Now here’s the funny thing: all these people who carried on like this did it in the belief that somehow it would be worth it. That somehow, Obama would be different. Think about that. Nothing about him or his campaign was in any way, shape, or form different from politics as usual. Nothing about the pro-Obama tribalism and uncritical reportage was in any way, shape, or form different from punditry as usual. So how did these people fool themselves into thinking this swamp of muck was somehow going to sprout kittens and rainbows?

Meanwhile, we have the example of Breitbart to show us how profoundly and hatefully dishonest the rightwing media is. That’s nothing new, of course. Years ago I remember being amazed when NewsMax edited a Hillary Clinton speech to make it look like she was endorsing Soviet-style communism. The Sherrod video is more of the same.

The left isn’t nearly that far gone yet, but if you lived through 2008 on the Hillary team, you know what I’m going to say next. Let’s see, who was it who doctored that video in Indiana to make it look like a Clinton adviser used the N-word? Who was it who spread the story that Hillary had called for Obama’s death? And jesus, I’m not even going to get into the Palin stuff.

People will say, oh you can’t compare the two, but here’s the thing: it’s all mud. It’s all fucking mud and mire. Our whole political discourse. Just mud and tribalism and hatefulness and secret lists and inside-the-beltway fart-breathing and meanwhile, millions are out of work and lives are being broken. Ain’t no kittens and rainbows gonna come out of this mess.

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Women’s rights, 162 years later

By Violet Socks · Monday, July 19th, 2010 · 3 Comments »

Today is the anniversary of Seneca Falls. Two years ago I used this occasion to publish a review of how much progress women have made since 1848. Since the topic is still relevant (and since an html table, once made, should never be put to waste), I decided to republish it today.

********************************************************************

Elizabeth Cady Stanton July 19, 1848: one hundred and sixty years ago today. In Seneca Falls, New York, 300 women and men gathered to discuss “the social, civil and religious condition and rights of Woman.” It was the first women’s rights convention in American history.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a young firebrand then, sharp of tongue and sharper of wit. She’d spent the week before the convention laboring over a Declaration of Sentiments, modeling it closely on Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal,” she scribbled on a long sheet of foolscap. “We insist that [women] have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.” Her husband was so alarmed he decided to leave town for the duration.

Just as the Declaration of Independence had enumerated the colonists’ grievances with King George, Stanton listed “injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” The Declaration was read aloud at the convention and adopted unanimously, with 100 women and men affixing their signatures to the document. “In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule,” Stanton wrote, “but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object.”

One hundred and sixty years later, where do we stand? How many of those “injuries and usurpations” have been fixed? I thought it would be interesting to list the items in a table, a kind of feminist punch-list, as it were, with a status note on each item. Fixed or not fixed?

# “Injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman” from the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments Fixed in the U.S.? Fixed world-wide?
1 He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
2 He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
3 He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men–both natives and foreigners.
4 Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
5 He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
6 He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
7 He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master–the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
8 He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women–the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
9 After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
10 He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
11 He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
12 He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
13 He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
14 He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
15 He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
16 He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.



Making this little table was partially an exercise in translating Stanton’s 19th century prose to modern concepts. Item #11, for example: that’s the glass ceiling. Granted, we’ve made immense progress in the professions (though “theology” doesn’t have quite the cachet it used to), but the ceiling is still there. Hence the big red X.

But mostly I’m gratified by how far we’ve come, at least in the United States (and other countries that have experienced the feminist revolution.) All of the legal restrictions listed by Stanton have been removed, and most of the social barriers of her day have fallen as well. Even the unfixed items show significant progress. The women of 1848 would hardly know what to think if they were plopped down in the midst of modern America.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a sharp cookie, though, and she would have quickly grasped that there’s still a world of hurt buried in items #14 and #16. Changing laws is hard; changing hearts and minds is harder.

The tragedy of this little table is in the column for “Fixed world-wide?” Not a single checkmark. Not a single one of those “injuries and usurpations” has been completely removed from the face of the Earth. It’s all red Xs, all the way down.

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Attention, Mr. Erskine Bowles

By Violet Socks · Monday, July 12th, 2010 · 11 Comments »

I’ve prepared this brief Q&A for your edification:

How is the federal government’s “debt” like ordinary debt?

It’s not.

How is the federal deficit like a cancer?

It’s not.

Now shut the fuck up you goddamn lying moron twit.

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Attention anyone who has emailed me or is expecting any kind of reply from me on anything

By Violet Socks · Monday, July 12th, 2010 · 1 Comment »

Sorry. Last week my email connection kept getting hosed, so everything got backed up. On top of the stuff that was already backed up because I’m so goddamn busy.

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Coming soon to a parade near you: Amelia Earhart

By Violet Socks · Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 · 14 Comments »

It’s the Fourth of July weekend, and those of you in climes where it isn’t 470 degrees outside may be planning to attend a parade. (Those of you where it is 470 degrees and you’re still planning to attend a parade — god help you. Really.) At any rate, while you’re at the parade, take stock of the balloons. Who are the characters? How many of them are female? Any?

Parades are one of those things that, like currency and stamps and statues, we don’t really think about. We’re awash in male imagery and role models, but we’re so used to it we don’t notice. Fish can’t taste the water, and all that. That’s why EVE is tackling this stuff: to change the silent messages our kids absorb.

But back to balloons. EVE is kicking off a new project to introduce a line of parade balloons featuring “great American women,” with Amelia Earhart as the first entry. From the blog post:

A couple of weeks ago I promised that we had two big announcements coming, both related to Amelia Earhart.

Well, here’s the first one: EVE is sponsoring a giant helium balloon of Amelia Earhart to appear in parades all over the country! Actually the balloon will be a replica of her famous red Lockheed Vega, with an oversized Amelia in the cockpit.

The Amelia Earhart balloon is going to be the first in a series of parade balloons featuring American heroines, which we’re developing with StarBound Entertainment, one of the top balloon suppliers for parades all over the country. Here at EVE we’ve talked about the way character balloons are overwhelmingly male; the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, has only had 10 female balloons in its entire 85-year history. Our “great American women” series will bring heroines to parades all over the country. Can you imagine how cool that will be for families and kids? Can you imagine how inspired little girls will be?

“Mom, who’s that?”

“Amelia Earhart! She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic! She was the first person ever to fly solo over the Pacific!”

Read more about it here, watch the slideshow, and check out the press release we issued this week.

We need to raise the money to finance the balloon, so we’re asking people to chip in $99 — that’s in honor of Amelia Earhart’s Ninety-Nines, the organization she founded in 1929 for women pilots. Our goal is to raise $9,801 (that’s 99 people x $99 each). Donors will be inducted into EVE’s 99 Club and have their names listed on the Wall of Fame (unless they want to be Howard Hughes or something, in which case we promise not to tell).

EVE has a little fundraising widget you can put in your sidebar, which I’ve already done. Now let’s spread the word!

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