This is really rather silly.

An Al-Qaeda website has said that, um, they endorse John McCain for American president. Apparently, it'll be easier to bring down the 'evil US empire', or something. Who knew endorsements were so vital to terrorist organisations?

In other news, my companies are doing well, despite the downturn: Google and Apple have surpassed expectations, bringing some cheer to beleaguered markets. And I read this really fun essay in the NYT a couple days ago, arguing that following the prescribes of great literature might not work out so well in real life.

I think I got the blues

Maybe it's the festive season, or certain facts of life just sinking in now, but I've been a bit gloomy recently. Of course, that could just be because of the economy in general and how the world is going down the toilet. But there's a lot to love, certainly, and I'm going to try to cheer myself up by posting happy links.

• A legendary investigative reporter tells it like it is in the Observer's profile of Seymour Hersh.
• Colin Powell points out the obvious in his endorsement speech for Obama. I love that someone has finally said it: Even if Obama were Muslim, that shouldn't have been a talking point.
  
• Also I really, really love the fact that Tina Fey said, in reponse to Carly Fiorina's criticism that her portrayal of Sarah Palin was sexist, "I saw one lady trying to form a thought that it was sexist on the news, but she didn't really get it together. Probably because she was a lady and she was dumb. (beat) Wait. Is that sexist?" HAH. This is old, now, but I only just found out and I love Tina Fey more than ever.
• Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics (or the Bank of Sweden.. whatever, if you want to get technical). Yay!
  

So much news!

The two weeks or so I haven't blogged have been incredibly newsy -- from the nuclear deal Finally getting passed, to the economy in meltdown, to new Sarah Palin shenanigans, Tata pulling out of Singur and the ever-worsening situation in Orissa and Karnataka. So I'm not sure where to start, except with... me. I went to Milan, and it was fun! I also took advantage of having been to Milan before and travelled to Bergamo one day and Como another. Both were beautiful, in different ways. Italy is a gorgeous country and the gelato and the buildings are wonderful. I even found the requisite South Asian in Piazza Del Duomo, which is like the centre of the city. In fact, I found two -- one was a Bangladeshi who owned one of the tourist kiosks in the square and sweetly gave me a discount once he found out I was Indian, and the other was an Indian man selling flying helicopters who wanted to know if all was ok in Delhi (this was just after the blasts).

Speaking of, it's humbling to be inside Milan's Duomo. It is Beautiful. So Spectacular and so peaceful. The Duomo in Como was also lovely, though unlike the one in Milan, it was not gothic in the slightest and had many German influences. Bergamo had an incredible one in its old city, and the new one had a wedding in progress!

I've been watching the Daily Show religiously now. Jon Stewart is on such a roll, he's been pretty fantastic lately. Political satire, Yay! I loved the Ricky Gervais/Steve Carell bit at the Emmys -- could they please host next time, please, since you won't ever give BSG its due, you may as well do this, Academy.

And the Saturday Night Live skits with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. OMG. She got it SO RIGHT. The US election continues to be the best dramedy to follow. Apparently, some 70 million Americans tuned in to watch the vice-presidential debate -- more than the presidential debate, btw -- and that's not counting the international audience. Wow.

More Palin

Wow, this woman has inspired comment like no other. Now, bringing you more about Palin and feminism, here are:

• Camille Paglia ('dissident feminist') in Salon about Palin as a feminist icon.
• Judith Warner in NYT about Palin as an anti-feminist icon.
• Also in Salon, my hero Rebecca Traister and another columnist, Cintra Wilson are Pissed about Palin.
• How Biden should debate Palin, in Slate.
• On a more general note, Paul Krugman has written in the NYT about how 'the resentment strategy' might lead to a Republican victory.

Another very cool thing I found out about yesterday is The Bechdel Rule. It's kind of awesome.

N-deal, Gun mamas and other tamashas

Much Ado about nothing, as usual. The Post managed to get ahold of a sekrit!letter to the US Congress saying the US would stop supplies to India if India conducted a nuclear test. Um, didn't we already know that? What's all the hullabullo about then? Who knows? Something more for the TV channels and the opposition to yell and scream about.

Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican Convention accepting her nomination as the party's vice-presidential candidate was an unqualified success. Lots has been written about this relative unknown, particularly about her pregnant teenage daughter. But I want to highlight some articles discussing what her candidacy means for women, in a year where we seemed to come so far with Hillary. The first one is Gloria Steinem in the LA Times, which I liked, but am a little uncomfortable with. It's probably because it's Steinem, and she has so much baggage, but she puts forward what is my knee-jerk reaction to Palin quite eloquently in her article. I also appreciated that she criticised the focus on whether Palin, as a mother, should take such a consuming job. Then there's a lot of interesting stuff in Slate, particularly this piece, which draws comparisons between Michelle Obama, who I think is a kick-ass, strong woman who can be a great role model and Palin who... well, is not, IMO. Then there's this article, also from Slate, which attacks (rightly) those saying Palin is being an irresponsible mother by accepting her nomination. And of course the point she makes about the culture wars is interesting. This is yet another piece in the Guardian, which is more about the culture wars in the context of Palin's candidacy, but one I think makes some interesting points about the women's movement. And the NYT is just bitchy (in a good way!), sometimes obviously (cf: Dowd in here and here) and sometimes classily, as with Gail Collins in Sarah Palin Speaks! Salon has a great here and now analysis of the immediate politics surrounding McCain's choice. And this one analyses the new gender vs. race war.

New Ways of Seeing

So I was reading an old issue of NY Mag (the Jun 23 issue) which profiled Hillary after her loss to Obama as the Democrat presidential nominee. There's a few articles written by various commentators, and the thrust is that even though Hillary lost the nomination, she's become an icon above and beyond the president's office. Some excellent pieces there, and there's one by Bernard Henri-Levy that made me reconsider something about Hillary's marriage.

Now, I've never been one of those who've held against Hillary that she stayed with Bill even after it came out that he'd been having affairs. I thought, hey, political ambition comes first and maybe she's really OK with it, so whatever. And Bill's little peccadilloes (God, I hate that term) are never something I laid at her door. But Henri-Levy has this great insight, when he suggests:

"And in Hillary's case, an additional dimension, flabbergasting for a Frenchman, because related to this typically American illness called puritanism: the memory of the Lewinsky affair. How many conversations in Starbucks of Des Moines, and even sometimes in New York, among "desperate housewives" claiming that only amibition - the most opportunistic, the ugliest, the fiercest of ambitions - could explain her leniency?"

Guilty as charged. I'm no desperate housewife, but I did think she stayed because of her ambition. That I didn't hold it against her is my only defence. Henri-Levy continues to tear my assumptions apart:

" "If my husband humiliated me like he humiliated her...I would have ... I would move out... so to go back to the scene of the crime to push the vice and the complacency to th point of wanting to occupy myself the same office where the act was committed...what a horror! What a shame and what a horror!"

It could have turned out differently. A taste for spectacle and brand-new scenarios could have given us a desire to see the scorned woman put in the unimaginable but fascinating position of entering the devil's house to drain his chalice to the dregs. But political correctness decided otherwise. I believe American feminism chose to punish Billary and their criminal liberalism. [Emphasis added]."

I never for a moment considered: hey, they could've had a open-ish marriage. They might've been okay with their spouse sleeping with someone else. That her husband had an affair didn't automatically mean for her that her marriage was over. Lots to think about, particularly about the assumptions we make, based on our own moral codes. This doesn't have to be the correct explanation (I still believe ambition played its part, though I wonder if she couldn't have got more mileage as the wronged wife) but it could certainly have been part of the reason why she stayed, or even why they could still have a good marriage. Many marriages, after all, don't place a premium on sexual fidelity and get on just fine -- indeed, they might even survive because of the relaxed boundaries.

Texas and Ohio

So, Hillary Clinton is back in the race! This is very much of the good. I truly believe she's the better candidate at this point in time, she has the experience and the policies. There's lots of good stuff around the Internet on the gender vs. race question as well as on the primaries. NYT's Maureen Dowd, who has in recent times ripped Hillary Clinton apart in not nice ways, raises an important point when she says here:

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts. People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

While I disagree with her on many counts, not least the extremely snide way in which she derides the Clinton campaign, I think this is a very important point and one that is aiding the Republicans more than anything. While the Democrats are busy fighting amongst themselves, John McCain has formally won the Republican nomination. This means that he can now start campaigning for President - a hell of a head start.

There are also other, very interesting pieces. Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post has argued that if Clinton loses the nomination it will have more to do with things other than her two X chromosomes. The most intriguing piece for me was this one, from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. The blogger, Monica Guzman, argues from a perspective I think many young women my age will be familiar with. We take so many things for granted as women that our mothers and grandmothers had to fight to achieve. And so in a large way in our day to day lives are removed from the issue of gender, and this, I imagine, holds true particularly for women living in developed liberal societies. But I don't agree (entirely) with her concluding thoughts:

That voters can see beyond gender when picking a candidate should serve as reward to the generation who fought so hard to make that possible.

I think her earlier paragraph contradicts this. She says:

But a female presidency, like a black one, will reflect a truly equal world only when the candidate's gender or race is as important as his or her hair color -- which, ironically, is when the fewest people will notice. That gender is an issue in this campaign should remind all us young women that the battle is not yet won.

More on the Democratic identity politics can be found here, in an excellent analysis of how much the race vs gender campaign is hurting the Democrats. And this piece on CiF should be read for different reasons entirely. The second comment is a good response, so I don't want to say much. Except I will link to this absolutely no-holds-barred indictment of all the people - liberals and otherwise - intent on either dismissing gender as a factor in the elections or arguing that its somehow less of an issue than race. And here is yet another excellent Washington Post piece on how much Hillary's candidacy means to women voters.