The president’s job plan would have a positive impact on women’s jobs, woman-owned small businesses and small- to medium-sized non-profits. It also includes payroll tax savings for some 78 million employed women and an extension of unemployment insurance for those out of work, who include some 2.6 million unemployed women. Many of the proposals for […]
Barack Obama and the Obama Administration
The Care Crisis
Job creation is the word of the day. In his speech on Thursday night, President Obama outlined his proposal to reinvigorate a stagnating economy. It included a mix of tax cuts, aid to small businesses, federal money for infrastructure projects and a commitment to the public sector. The goal, quite simply, is to put Americans […]
Pirates Have Seized the Ship of State
As the debt ceiling negotiations progress, it feels like pirates have boarded the ship of state and are holding us all hostage until their demands are met. They want us to slash and burn the financial underpinnings of the country in the name of their Holy Writ of Deficit Reduction. If we accede to their […]
Michelle Obama’s Milkshake and Other Non-Stories About Women
Want to know how women politicians accessorize? How many calories they consume? Us neither. And yet that’s exactly the kind of hard-hitting journalism we’ve been seeing from major news outlets this month. A few weeks ago, Washington Post reporter Natalie Jennings hit us with the investigative scoop, “Michelle Obama Orders 1,700-calorie meal at Shake Shack“: […]
Respect Marriage, Repeal DOMA!
The past 24 hours have been exciting ones for supporters of gay marriage rights. If the President and progressive members of the Senate get their way, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is on its way out. At a press conference yesterday, White House press secretary Jay Carney released word that President Obama supports the pending […]
Take Off the Cap: How to Protect Women Under Social Security
by Martha Burk When former senator Alan Simpson, Republican co-chair of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits” last summer, it was not only a misogynistic insult but a symbolic shot at the benefit program older women depend on most. Started in 1935, […]
Obama Administration Says Marriage is Between a Woman and a Woman
Karen Golinski has a wife. She and Amy Cunninghis have been legally married in the state of California since August of 2008. And now, even the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has officially recognized the validity of that marriage, emphatically stating that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to deny same-sex couples the […]
A Single Lady Watches “Single Ladies”
For the past few years, single women of all races, shapes and sizes have pumped their fists in the air, lip-synced, writhed their hips and/or done the ring-finger-hand-flip dance to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” an anthem for unattached women who know what they want and when they want it. But on Monday night as I, a […]
Beyonce: Girls Run the World (Cue the Apocalypse!)
I’ve been an admirer of Beyonce since her Destiny’s Child days and always appreciated that group’s “girl power” anthems (think “Bills, Bills, Bills,” “Independent Women,” or “I’m a Survivor,” ignoring for the moment that they’ve also put out more submissive songs like “Cater 2 U“–which I’ve been guilty of playing on a loop). I’ve attempted to […]
Today is the 2011 International Day Against Transphobia and Homophobia
Today marks the 4th annual International Day Against Transphobia and Homophobia, spearheaded by Quebec-based organization Fondation Émergence. The holiday commemorates the date–May 17, 1990–that the World Health Organization (WHO) removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The years since have been an up-and-down battle for LGBTQ folks on the international level, with the criminalization […]