CatherineRhodes.com

The glass ceiling is a myth

Anyone who doubts the success of feminism hasn’t been paying attention to California politics. Currently, the two senators are women (Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein), my Congressperson in the 33rd District is a woman: Diane Watson, and the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, resides in my home state.

It’s an election year, and the challenger for governor is Meg Whitman, the nominee to fill Watson’s seat when she retires is Karen Bass, and there’s Janice Hahn running for Leutenant Govenor. Holly Mitchell wants to replace the speaker in the state Assembly. In the 36th district, it’s Jane Harman against Marcy Winograd.

On and on,  you get the picture. It’s such a girl’s club in California politics these days, makes you wonder what happened to the boys.

My trophy wife upholds family values

Conservative radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, 59, is taking a fourth stab at marriage with a weekend wedding to Kathryn Rogers, 33, an events coordinator 26 years his junior… and will presumably continue to crusade against gay marriage in defense of the sanctity of traditional marriage without even sensing the irony

This brilliant piece of writing from Joe Klein over at Time.com.

Sean Hannity called the spill “Obama’s Katrina,” but it was actually George W. Bush’s second Katrina. Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh from his days at Halliburton, had presided over the weakening of drilling regulations, including the exclusion of remote-shut-off switches (commonly used in the North Sea oil fields), which might have prevented the disaster.

The Bush Administration’s petro-bias and antigovernment sensibility soiled the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with regulating offshore drilling. Indeed, the MMS soon emerged as a caricature of bureaucratic lassitude and corruption. A 2008 report found that the agency’s regulators were taking gifts from, and having sex with the employees of, the companies they were supposed to be monitoring.

Another report, about MMS activities from 2005 to 2007, will show, among many other things, that MMS staffers allowed oil companies to fill out their own inspection reports in pencil, which were then committed to ink by stenographic MMS regulators. Other studies found that the MMS was remarkably, perhaps criminally, lax in collecting the royalties due the government for the right to extract oil from public lands, nor was it fulfilling its rig-inspection responsibilities. The encyclopedic catalog of the agency’s sleaziness boggles the mind.

They have 131,427 followers

Faced with a travesty of these proportions, the best volley back is always a satirical Twitter page. Behold, the power of 140 characters. Sample posts from @BPGlobal_PR:

Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.

Words can not express how sorry we are. So we are going to stop apologizing and just give our investors 10 billion dollars.