"Saturday Night Live" highlight was a sketch alluding to the zeitgeist currently surrounding Ellen Page: the tongue-wagging about her sexuality.

It's hard to say whether this was written before or after Michael Musto's blog post over at the Village Voice [below] brought Ellen Page Sexuality Watch to its boiling point. But that doesn't matter because, as this sketch shows, it doesn't matter.

Moreover, it seems Page couldn't really give less of a crap what people think. (Respect.) Homegirl isn't one to suffer fools, and she ain't about to start. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Musto.)

Not that this skit is really all about a "message." Page compassionately terminates a slew of stereotypically lesbian sacred cows.   more »

"The issue that's not being talked about in this campaign is the blatant sexism," Wagner said, her words echoing off the granite walls.

"There are some people who promote Barack Obama because they want anybody but a woman. Would they like a white man instead of a black man? Of course. But they'll take a black man over a woman. I never thought, in 2008, that we'd still be dealing with this."

Although women have been the dominant force in the Democratic race, making up nearly six in 10 voters in caucuses and primaries, things have not gone the way Wagner and other feminist supporters of Clinton expected.

The same campaign they once celebrated as a sign of tremendous progress, with its promise of the first female president in the nation's history, has instead reinforced their impressions of gender inequity.   more »

Nobody would mistake Obama for a Republican — although contrary to claims by both supporters and opponents, his voting record places him, with Senator Clinton, more or less in the center of the Democratic Party, rather than in its progressive wing.

But Obama, instead of emphasizing the harm done by the other party’s rule, likes to blame both sides for our sorry political state. And in his speeches he promises not a rejection of Republicanism but an era of postpartisan unity.

That — along with his adoption of conservative talking points on the crucial issue of health care — is why Obama’s rise has caused such division among progressive activists, the very people one might have expected to be unified and energized by the prospect of finally ending the long era of Republican political dominance.

Some progressives are appalled by the direction their party seems to have taken: they wanted another F.D.R., yet feel that they’re getting an oratorically upgraded version of Michael Bloomberg instead.   more »

The Earth Liberation Front published guidelines for action are:

* To inflict maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment.

* To reveal to, and to educate the public about the atrocities committed against the earth and all species that populate it.

* To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal - human and nonhuman.   more »

Meanwhile, as McCain was nimbly moving around, Obama would be standing still, stuck in the one-note posture he has assumed from the beginning of the campaign.

In the democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama’s strong suit – the club he used to beat up Hillary Clinton – has been the absolute consistency of his position on the war: he would have voted against it had he been in the senate at the time.

He has spoken out against it repeatedly since becoming a senator; and he has promised to end it and bring the troops home within a short time.

But once McCain, and not Clinton, is his opponent, that position becomes a liability, because it can be attacked as being inflexible and without nuance.   more »