I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Oh hey! Australia has a lady prime minister! But the Christian Science Monitor reports: “A formidable political operator, she has been the subject of endless commentary: about her hairstyle, her fashion sense, her dislike of cooking and her unmarried, childless status.” Gah.
Want to know more about SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan (who is probably going to be confirmed)? This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen and a major leap for transparency: The Sunlight Foundation has taken her e-mails, released to the public in a giant heap, and turned them into “Elena’s Inbox,” which you can search just like your own e-mail inbox. Coooool! So…let’s see. One day in 1995 Kagan made plans to have lunch at Red Sage, the Mark Miller joint in D.C. that I always thought was overrated. Hmmm…what does that say about her?
I forgot to mention this earlier, but the FDA last week shot down a drug that purported to be Viagra for women. My favorite headline: “Female Viagra fails to turn on FDA.” Do women really need Viagra? Because Tab A and Slot B are not so similar, despite a major marketing push for the drug, The New York Times points out.
Also: The Stranger’s cover story this week. NSFW.
Meanwhile, in an opinion piece in U.S. News and World Report, Mary Kate Cary writes about the emerging conservative feminists running for office:
And they’re running not on gender, but on work experience: Meg Whitman as former CEO of eBay; Carly Fiorina as former CEO of Hewlett-Packard; Nikki Haley as an accountant. Many are pro-life moms, rather than pro-choice activists. These women are no more likely to burn their bras than burn the flag, but they aren’t so much social conservatives as limited-government fiscal conservatives, worried about the scope and reach of the federal government into the daily lives of their families. They speak for the majority of American women who make the healthcare decisions, pay the bills, worry about the retirement accounts, and, yes, eat peanut butter sandwiches with their children. As Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a moderate Republican from Missouri,told the Boston Globe last week, they saw Sarah Palin run on the national ticket with five young kids, and said to themselves, “If she can do it, I can.”
Palin calls them “mama grizzlies” and recently said this transformation is an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity,” provoking an immediate reaction on the left because many still equate “feminist” with pro-choice, which Palin is not. But she is on to something; these conservative candidates are agents of change not only in the electorate but inside the women’s movement.
