videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we ever had!

After what seems like decades (seriously, that girl he allegedly raped and urinated on is probably a grandmother by now), R. Kelly has finally gone to trial for child pornography. And it’s not going so well. Apparently Kelly’s lawyer slept through the first day of law school, when you learn never to introduce evidence without first making sure it doesn’t further incriminate your client:

A defence lawyer argued then that since the man in the graphic 27-minute tape did not have a mole, that man could not be Kelly. But on Thursday, video forensics expert Grant Fredericks froze several frames of the sex tape where a dark spot was visible on the man’s back. For comparison, Fredericks showed the jury a still photo taken of Kelly’s back after his arrest in 2002, revealing a dark fingernail sized mole. “There is a mark on the man’s back in the exact same position,” Fredericks said, referring to the tape.

Kelly and his lawyers looked grim and dejected during the expert’s testimony, while prosecutors looked pleased, appearing to smile as they sat at their courtroom table.

Aww, don’t fret, R! I bet there are lots of watersports fans in our country’s fine maximum security prisons. You’re probably going to be on the receiving end, though.

the daily mail: another reason to celebrate the 4th of july

That hideous rag The Daily Mail is currently running an essay by Rebecca Walker, the daughter of celebrated black feminist author Alice Walker. Apparently Rebecca would have been better off being raised by wolves, and she grew up to have, in the words of a former co-worker of mine, “issues like tissues”. Somehow, this is all feminism’s fault!

One of my biggest pet peeves is anti-feminists assigning way more weight to feminism than it actually has. The dictionary definition of “feminism” is the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. That is all that it means.

It doesn’t mean that feminists have to hate men, leave their husbands, or spurn marriage. It doesn’t mean that feminists have to resent children, dismiss the idea of having them, or mistreat the ones they do have. It doesn’t mean feminists have to refuse to shave their legs or use make-up, feel guilty if they accomplish less with their lives than practice neurosurgery or write Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, or spend all their free time filing federal lawsuits and going on marches. It certainly isn’t, in the immortal crazed ranting of Pat Robertson “a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”.

You can do all those things and be a feminist, of course, but it isn’t a requirement. The only requirement is the belief in the social, political, and all other rights of women being equal to those of men.

I’m sorry that Rebecca Walker thinks her mother interpreted this belief as permission to raise her daughter in ways that obviously emotionally damaged her. I’m sorry she seems to have had a terrible childhood and now has an irrevocably damaged relationship with her mother. But this is not feminism’s fault. Some people were unfortunate enough to have shitty parents and lousy childhoods long before the concept of feminism; this will no doubt continue to be true until that mythical, longed-for day when the human race achieves total perfection.

great generation, or GREATEST generation? WWII vet delivers epic bitchslap to member of wingnut brigade

The far-right media fringe seems to have moved off the whole Jeremiah Wright thing, leaving it for the MSM to rip every last shred of rotting flesh from its mouldering bones. Now they’re yammering about Obama mistaking exactly which concentration camp his great-uncle helped liberate at the end of WWII in a Memorial Day speech. He initially said it was Auschwitz, but the Soviets liberated that camp. Turns out it was actually Buchenwald.

To-may-to, To-mah-to. Both were horrible places where the Nazis perpetrated hideous crimes against humanity. It’s not as ridiculous as Hillary’s “I landed under heavy fire in Bosnia!” gaffe, seeing as how Obama was talking about events that happened more than 60 years ago to someone else.

Never a group to let logic stand in the way of a good rant, some of them are desperately digging for a scrap of proof that Obama lied outright. Leading the charge is Steve Gilbert of Sweetness & Light, who sent an email to the owners of a website that preserves the history of the 89th Infantry Division of WWII (the division that liberated the camp), asking if there was any record of a “Charlie Payne” and including links to his insane blathering on the subject.

The reply was about what I’d expect from a veteran of horors that would probably make Gilbert and his cohorts piss their pants and start crying like little girls:

Please crawl back under the rock you came out from.

Good day

Raymond Kitchell, veteran 89th Inf Div

Raymond Kitchell, truly you, and the rest of the 89th Infantry Division, deserve the appellation “The Greatest Generation”. I tip my hat to you, sir!

 Via Sadly, No!

holy joe!

Senator Joseph “Droopy Dog” Lieberman (I-CN) has criticized Pastor John Hagee for calling Hitler a “hunter sent from God to drive the Jews back to Israel” (well, except for the 6 million or so that Hitler killed in the process — God didn’t want them to live in Israel, I guess), a statement that made McSame finally reject his endorsement. Hagee: “You can’t fire me, I quit!”

However, that won’t stop Joe from hanging out with Hagee and a bunch of his minions at their big revival meeting — or whatever the hell the deceptively innocuously-named “Christians United for Israel” really is — in July.

I bet he wouldn’t dare do this if his mother was still alive. Can you imagine the sheer tonnage of disaproval that a Jewish mother could generate towards a son whose friend is kind of a fan of Hitler? That would make for some awkward Thanksgiving dinners.

put on your party hats, bitches!

Everyone’s favorite bachelor activist/actor and that skank he was dating are splitsvilles! Rejoice, Cougars and Younger Women With Daddy Issues! Your chances of briefly dating the man have increased from .00000000001% to .0000000001%!!

Seriously, y’all. Clooney didn’t really catch my attention until he left ER and started getting some gray hair and crow’s feet. That man is aging like a Chateau Lafite.

How come us Younger Women With A Thing For Hot Older Men don’t get a cute nickname? Oh right, because the media–even the frivolous, celebrity-obsessed wing of it–is still dominated by men, and they consider old man/bimbo half his age to be the default.

teevee actors still gotta pay bills during the summer

Via INF Daily comes some photos of Wentworth Miller dressed as a waiter:

So either next season of Prison Break isn’t going to be quite the white-knuckle thrillercoaster that the first 3 seasons were, or Miller’s got some big expenses that just won’t wait until the paychecks start rolling in from Fox again come autumn.

It’s still more dignified than that bullshit “This is about a serial killer–psych! It’s really about a man-eating crocodile!!” flick that his co-star Dominic Purcell made last year.

michelle malkin needs to lay off the coffee, methinks

I don’t pay much attention to Michelle Malkin. It’s obvious she’s only tolerated by the conservanuts so they can go “Look, we have hot ethnic women on our side!” Considering that the next best-looking woman they have is clearly an anorexic transexual, I don’t begrudge them.

But every so often she catches my ear by spouting some crazed nonsense that’s even more bizarre and paranoid than the usual rantings of the right-wing water-carriers.

When I look at this ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, I only wonder why the fuck Rachael Ray is wearing a warm scarf with a lightweight, short-sleeved blouse. Thank god Ms. Malkin is here to inform us what’s really going on: Ray is sending coded messages of support to Palestine. No, really.

…Dunkin Donuts’ spokeswoman Rachel Ray’s clueless sporting of a jihadi chic keffiyeh in a recent DD ad campaign. I’m hoping her hate couture choice was spurred more by ignorance than ideology.

Michelle honey, it’s just a damn scarf. Wipe the rabid foam from your chin and relax with a cool cup of DD iced coffee. I recommend decaf.

Via Sadly, No!

i’m one of those people who moves around a lot

I’ve have 2 blogs, a LiveJournal that’s all friends-only, and a public one that I’ve been keeping on Vox for the past couple of years. There’s a lot of overlap between the 2, but basically I operate on the assumption that co-workers/ex-boyfriends/nosy friends-of-friends will eventually find my public blog, and anything that I would be the slightest bit embarassed to have one of them read goes into the LJ. I’m not secretive about the fact that I’m a liberal, atheist, feminist, child-hating bitch, so that’s all up for public consumption.

So, anyway. Vox. It started out good, it was this fun little small community and sometimes complete strangers would wander by and leave a comment. Of course, that wasn’t always a good thing, but usually it was. I had a lot of interesting people in my neighborhood.

But somehow it just didn’t seem to keep their attention. The best bloggers started negelecting their blogs or moving on to greener pastures, and the comments and content started getting more and more, in the very apt word of a LJ friend of mine, “insipid”. It was hard to find new readers too, because of how badly the Vox groups are set up. Lately I find myself skimming over the new posts, and almost every comment I receive irks me in some way.

So I’m starting over here. I think I need a platform that’s got less “community”. The problem is that Vox’s mission statement was to attract people to blogging who never thought about blogging before, and frankly… it shows. In the beginning quite a few established bloggers were on there, purely for the novelty, but they all eventually left, and now there’s nothing left but the dregs.