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In Our Shoes, this new webpage, is your voice.
Here you can tell the media wha t you think about their unfair and slanted coverage of Hillaryí s campaign and their dismissive treatment of you as Hillary ís most important group of voters and supporters! Register and HillaryVoices will send Action Alerts and Updates to you. Time is very valuable now and here you can help fight for Hillary from your own computer. You can join a Virtual March against bias by national media giants like CNN and NBC, or organize a real march in your home town to get fair treatment from your TV or radio stations.
Our Call to Action, Winter Soldiers, is below. We will not be denied!! Come, ask the media to walk a mile in our shoes...
We Are The Winter Soldiers We are the winter soldiers*. We of the sensible shoes who do not go to Aruba in January, or to the Costa del Sol, or even get time off to caucus. We who stand all day at nursing stations, in factories, in classrooms teaching the nation's children, serving coffee and donuts at the diner and remembering to smile and make a joke.
Many of us, and the TV is right, just finished high school. But do we deserve the small, knowing smiles when this is mentioned? When they say that women over 40 or 50 who just finished high school are backing Hillary?
We are vigilant trying to keep our families warm and fed, our children smiling. We have built-in lie detectors, and we are vigilant, spotting those who would condescend. Sweet talk. We don't like it.
We know what hard work every day is. We come into your lives when you buy what we build and repair and into your homes to fix things and make them work; we want a fixer to make this nation right again. We need better jobs, healthcare, education for ourselves and our kids. We are not kidding. We are as serious as stones. We are for Hillary. And we are proud of it.
* Winter Soldiers stuck by George Washington that terrible winter at Valley Forge. They starved and froze while, as Thomas Paine wrote, the "sunshine patriots" went home to their firesides. Vietnam Vets Against the War called themselves the Winter Soldiers to refute the charges that they were less than patriots or were sunshine patriots.
Virtual March--Join Us
Sunday, February 17
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Unifying the PartyAnglachel's Journal
Sunday, May 18, 2008"I've tried to come up with some sophisticated, nuanced, theoretically meaningful way to say this but nothing is working, so I'll just say it plainly.
I don't see the Hillary campaign saying a bad word about the voters, even those who vote for her opponents. I don't see the campaign explaining away their losses because of some flaw or failing in the voters. Even the group of Obama voters most vociferous and adamant in their objections to her do not get criticized or condemned. To the contrary, she defended MoveOn from politically motivated attacks. She went to Yearly Kos and spoke without rancor or defensiveness to a deeply hostile group.
When she says she is impervious to attacks from the right-wing noise machine, the MSM and political opponents, it shows up in the way she will not be badgered and baited. She can look Richard Scaife in the eye and tell him exactly what she intends to do as President without belligerance and without apology. Their cruelty and crudeness cannot disrupt her calm civility, though she may poke some sly fun at them.
This is not someone who has burned bridges on the Democratic side. In a hard-fought campaign, she has been firm that there will be nothing from her side to prevent resolution and reconciliation within the party. She pulls no punches on issues, but has not stooped to personal attacks of the kind leveled at her by her opponents and even by some party leaders. When somone on her campaign has behaved dishonorably, they are told to leave at once. "
Plain Dealer Columnist: We bruise our daughters when we bash Hillary Clinton -- Connie Schultz
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
When I was 11 years old, my girl friends and I used to talk long into the night about how one of us was bound to become president of the United States.
We had no reason to believe that, except that we were young girls watching and learning from the chaos swirling around us. It was 1968, and the change blowing across the country was kicking up quite a breeze in our own small Ohio town.
It seemed like every other week someone's older sister was getting suspended for wearing a see-through blouse. Mothers were starting to take jobs and earn their own paychecks. Heroes were murdered, and neighbor boys were leaving for Vietnam. Fistfights were breaking out behind the high school over where boys wore patches of the American flag.
My parents acted strange, too. My father grew sideburns wider than matchbooks and didn't flinch when I used my baby-sitting money to buy the Beatles' White Album. Only months earlier he had grounded me for explaining the back story of "Mrs. Robinson" to my younger sisters, and now I was walking through the dining room singing "Happiness is a warm gun, momma" and he didn't even look up from his newspaper.
My normally traditional mother bought a disposable dress and then modeled it for the ladies from her canasta club. Being on the cusp of adolescence, I was concerned about it splitting in all the wrong places, but my mother assured me in front of her friends that she could sit down just fine.
"It has give," she said, wiggling her hips as the women howled.
Lord.
I figured if my mother could shimmy in a sheet of paper, and Dad wanted to look like Elvis, then the whole country was falling off its hinges. Talk about a door blown wide open. It was a time for dreaming.
Forty years later, I'm still waiting for the first woman president, and it's hard to imagine any 11-year-old girl dreaming of running if she's been paying attention to the current race.
I don't think every woman should support Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman. Smart women disagree all the time, and that has never been more obvious than in our heated discussions about Clinton. I do, however, think every woman should support the notion of Hillary Clinton. That means judging her by her record and her plans for our future, not by her marital stamina, her choice in suits or her version of femininity. Even if we can't support her as a candidate, we ought to acknowledge the history that she is making -- for us and for our daughters and granddaughters. And we ought to point out to them that making history sure has a downside.
Recently, I learned that some airport shops are selling a "Hillary nutcracker." She has a smile on her face and metal spikes between her thighs. I don't worry about the candidate, who has learned how to handle such misogyny, but I do dwell on the young girls who might catch a horrifying glimpse of those steel jaws and decide that no woman should invite such vitriol.
Last week, NBC suspended reporter David Shuster for accusing the Clintons of "pimping out" their daughter for her mother's campaign. How many girls saw or heard about that? How many decided on the spot that Chelsea Clinton was nuts for putting herself out there?
And then there are the books -- by women. The latest slice-and-dice of Hillary Clinton is a volume of 30 essays. Most of these writers live on the East Coast, where it's apparently sport for educated, accomplished women to excoriate another educated, accomplished woman with such clever titles as "Elect Sister Frigidaire," "The Road to Cleavagegate" and "Hillary's Underpants."
Katie Roiphe writes that she has "yet to meet a woman who likes Hillary Clinton." Lorrie Moore calls Clinton "a freak." Amy Wilentz declaresthat Clinton's recipe for chocolate-chip cookies "sounds awful" and that when Chelsea was a newborn, Hillary's hair was "a wreck."
On and on they go, bruising and battering the only woman to do what they -- and the rest of us -- could only dare to imagine.
All the while, 11-year-old girls watch.
And learn.
http://www.cleveland.com/living/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/living-0/120
