CommuniKate: Blog

May 08, 2008

Jenna Bush is getting married – because SHE can – what will you be sending for a wedding present?

Kate wants to hear from you! The next question of the week, straight from Kate, is: Jenna Bush is getting married – because SHE can – what will you be sending for a wedding present?

To get your voice heard, simply hit the Comment link below and tell her what you think! No registration is necessary, and you can post anonymously if you want.

Posted by admin at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 07, 2008

The Yearning for Scion Ranch

Enough with the Hillary Deathwatches, the Eight Belles comparisons, the Wednesday morning quarterbacking, the super-annuating, the gloating not gloating, the Wright stuffing, the obliterating, the primary parsing.

Everybody take a breath, sit back, have a lovely European style coffee, and play your old “Come Together” LP. Don’t try to figure out what it means. Toe jam football. Walrus gumboot. So? Chill.

Especially you, John King. You must be exhausted from a late night of poking your ouiiga board, finger painting, expanding/contracting your counties, while the best political team on television was laughing at you behind your back. You made your OCD work for you, now take a rest.

The Jenna One is getting married – because she can - down at the Yearning for Scion Ranch this weekend. Keep Jim Baker busy. The Bush Dynasty is all compounded down in Texas.

It’s Mother’s Day weekend. In honor of Mom, let’s have a primary worry free weekend. Play some hoops. Rest your voice. Sleep in your own bed.

The Swiftboats for McBush are gassing up. Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal is being vetted. John McSupreme Court is loving him some strict constructionists. John McSharraf has his flag pin stuck in his chest. Limbaugh lower now.

Rest up, you two, dear warriors, then come together right now over me.

Posted by admin at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 02, 2008

Yes, They Can

Yes, they killed the DC Madam. Another woman who was employed at the same escort service was arrested on prostitution charges and committed suicide before she could go to trial.

I know, I know, I live in the house that conspiracy theories built, but yes they killed the DC Madam. “She left two suicide notes,” just ain’t making it for me. All those pompous ass, family values boys were afraid of getting outed. Come on.

Rest in peace, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. I hope you were running a second set of books and a really good friend knows where they are and where the key is.

In other news – three darling citizens of Lesbos who have nothing better to do, have sued a local GL organization for use of the word “lesbian”. One guy said his sister can’t say she’s a Lesbian because her identity has been usurped by “certain ladies.” Whom I’d like to meet.

Have an ouzo and calm down. Get your chitron out of the twist. You are so last century. The kids have already moved on to queer and questioning and transitioning. And I still know women who wouldn’t say lesbian if their mouths were full of one.

FYI Lesbos is also known as the island of Mytilene, so from now on I’d like to be known as a mytilene-feminist. Efcharisto very much.

And another thing. I am denouncing my pastor. Actually, I denounce all pastors.

Posted by admin at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

Crabby Putinesca

It is an amazing spring day here in New York City. Finally. The trees are leafing out, providing cover for the tattered, plastic Fairway bags lufting all winter in the bare tree branches. The yellow forsythia petals have given way to green leaf. The jonquils are past. But it is high bloom time for the flowering crab trees in Riverside Park. I wish I could freeze frame them, but their mutability is their poignant charm.

To reverse one of my favorite literature tropes, that old “pathetic fallacy” of the personification of inanimate objects, allow me to floral-ize myself. This long primary season, I am one flowering crab, but without the charm.

As the post-primary letdown sets in Pennsylvania and Keystone staters get back to actual bitterness, Indiana and North Carolina are now in the media spotlight. The big Good Sam Club RV map of where we’ve been will have the last magnetized states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, South Dakota and Montana all filled in by June 3. And then the gas-guzzling behemoth of the Democratic Party will trundle off to Colorado, the Rocky Mountain State and Denver.

Donner, party of one.

Unlike many of my friends, I am not cranky that the race goes on. I am not calling for Hillary to leave the race or for Bill to leave the human race. Okay, maybe the latter. I remind my impatient friends, this too is what democracy looks like. They haven’t seen it for seven and a half years, so they’re confused.

What I am most crabby appleton about is the media coverage. John King obsessively poking his military-inspired voting GPS system as Wolf looks on over his shoulder, slack-jawed, like a Cro-Magnon discovering fire.

Furrow-browed and deeply caring Rev. Bill Moyers hearing Jeremiah Wright’s confession.

Mary Matalin, not the one who can’t hear, the Matalin who doesn’t listen, tight-lipping her theory that the Democrats really don’t want to win the White House. They are more concerned with solidifying their hold on Congress. They could care less.

Well, I don’t care what Democrat wins the presidency; I just want her to appoint me as Media Czar. And I don’t mean the new nice kind of czar Bush appoints when he has no clue what to do. War Czar, for example. The place should be crawling with Katrina Czars, Gitmo Czars, Sub-Crime Mortgage Czar. I mean the old Russian crabby czars. Like Putin.

When the story broke that Putin was having an affair with a Russian Olympian, a gold medal gymnast in rhythmic gymnastics, he was asked about it at a press conference. His wife did not appear at his side. Putin, whose soul George had seen during a staring contest, waxed on creepily about how Russian women are the best, Italians second and then groused about people who with “infected noses” dig into other people’s private lives. Which was how he got his start.

The next day the reporter’s paper was shut down. The picture of the gymnast with the sole of her foot on the back of her head disappeared. No word on the poor guy who asked the question at the press conference.

That kind of Media Czar, but a little less gulagy. I would institute mandatory term limits on all pundits. I would make it illegal to use your own name in the title of a news show. I am hoping Rachel Maddow will agree to be my Deputy Czar.

Posted by admin at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 21, 2008

If you were the new Democratic president in 2009, what would be your first presidential proclamation to signal "change"?

Kate wants to hear from you! The next question of the week, straight from Kate, is: If you were the new Democratic president in 2009, what would be your first presidential proclamation to signal "change"?

To get your voice heard, simply hit the Comment link below and tell her what you think! No registration is necessary, and you can post anonymously if you want.

Posted by admin at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

April 15, 2008

Bitter? Moi?

Hold up, let me just get this gun back in my gun rack. I had it out after Church. No, not to go see the His Extreme Narrowmindedness in New York. I’m not the kind of gal.

I know it’s not fair to take Barack Obama’s words out of context. I actually agree with him about the dreary economic dead-endedness many Americans feel. Grocery-buying, tank-filling, tax paying American citizens, unlike our faith-based economists, are realists. Class resentment is a bitter pill whether you swallow it with rods or religion.

But it’s Pennsylvannia pre-primary pounce time and mountains will be made. It’s not like Obama was wind-surfing off Nantucket. Roll tape of pick-up basketball game. Ixnay on the bowling footage.

Okay, I’ll take back the thing about the gun rack and church.

But don’t you be going after my Annie Oakley! Have you no decency?

I was raised on Little Miss Sure Shot. In my impressionable single digits, I watched her on TV. Hence the photos of everyone in the family pictures posed in civvies, except me. I’m in the red and black, fringed cowgirl shirt with holster tied to my right thigh with a piece of rawhide. You can’t see the rawhide, but it’s there.

Annie Oakley, whose offspring went on to make a fortune in high-price, sporty sunglasses, and the very sexually ambiguous fly-girl, Mary/Peter Martin/Pan, were my early role models. I never warmed up to the lives of the young Christian martyrs which were bedtime stories for the tween Ratzinger. To me, the stories of girl-martyrs having their eyes gouged out in early abstinence-only programs or boy-martyrs asking to be turned on the barbie for Jesus, were more unsettling than inspiring.

But Annie Oakley! She was one sharpshooter! She could split a playing card edge at 90 feet with a .22 caliber rifle. And put five or six more holes in it before it touched the ground. And dodge sniper fire from Wild Bill at the same time. And she never shot anyone in the face. I’m not sure about the last two.

Could our darling Dems please hold their fire at each other? I’m much more interested in how they intend to set their sights on John McCain who each day girds himself in more media-made Reagan Teflon than any Iraqi soldier was ever issued.

Enough with the sappy Compassion Forums. It’s time to get out to the target-practice range of our nation’s Rod and Gun Club and show us some sharp shooting. Whoever hits the most skeets wins all the super-delegates. Pull!

Posted by admin at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 14, 2008

Big Fun in Chicago

In what we like to think of as “personal time” my dear partner and I went together to Chicago for some almost simultaneous gigs. Luckily we were scheduled to fly United to Chicago. Oops, I thought you were checking the electronic wiring in the wheel wells.

Urvashi spoke at the Race, Sex and Power Conference at Illinois University’s gorgeous new Forum Building. Her panel on “Sexual Citizenship” followed the opening plenary talk given by the indefatigable Dr. Jocylen Elders.

Dr. Elders had been Surgeon General in the first Clinton Presidency but was fired when she said that masturbation is a healthy part of safe sex. Bill did not stand by his woman. It’s his male-pattern badness. In the question and answer period after her wonderful talk, she remarked that more vows of abstinence have been broken than condoms.

I always wanted to make a bumper sticker that said, “I Masturbate and I Vote.” It gives a whole new meaning to “pulling the lever.”

After Urvashi spoke, she flew on to Minneapolis to address nine hundred attendess at the ninth annual “Rainbow Families” Conference. I stuck around and enjoyed the April lake effect snow in Chicago and emceed the 19th Annual LGBT Center Dinner at the gorgeous old Chicago Hilton Hotel.

On the morning of the dinner, the Center Board Chair, Robert Kohl and board member Vickie Raymont gave me a tour of The Center, opened just this year to serve the LGBT community. I thanked them for their time on such a busy day, but they said they love to show off their dream become reality. I soon saw what they meant.

The Center on Halsted is a stunning, welcoming, exciting space and even at 11a it was hopping. A cyber center, a gym, a counseling center, expandable meeting rooms, a theater, a community kitchen are all beautifully designed for the needs of the Chicago LGBT community.

A beautiful new Whole Foods Market rents space from the Center and they share a common café space. It’s a genius, innovative win-win situation. Other organizations should take note: GLAAD linked with Blockbuster, HRC with a Prada Store, The National Black Justice Coalition with Restoration Hardware, NGLTF with Cinnabon. Everybody loves Cinnabon.

The dinner was a real celebration of the opening of the Center. I introduced Lorna Luft. A friend at the Race, Sex and Gender Conference asked if it was the real Lorna Luft or a drag Lorna Luft. She was mighty real. After a great dinner, the dance band “Big Fun” cranked it up and Chicago got down.

I couldn’t wait to get back home to tell my friend, Richard Burns what I’d seen. Richard, who runs the NYC GLBT Center and is in the middle of a Capital campaign for an addition to the Center, was way ahead of me. He and his board already visited and stolen plenty of ideas!!

Posted by admin at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well hello there.

Welcome to Kate Clinton's blog, CommuniKate, rated one of the Top 10 Lesbian Blogs by About.com.

Search

Subscribe to this blog's feed
[What is this?]

Join CommuniKate

KateMart

All of Kate's DVDs, CDs, books, and other merch - it's a one-stop shop! Stay warm and cozy this winter with all-new Hilarity Clinton '08 apparel. We've also whipped up tons of new items, including a 2008 Kate Clinton "Resolutions" calendar and an "I'm for Hillary" coffee mug. Visit KateMart.

Booking & Publicity

If you're interested in booking Kate, or if you're looking for a press kit, or high-res photos and logos, come check out the Booking & Publicity section. You'll find everything you need, including complete contact details.

Hilarity Clinton '08 Blogging & Vlogging

In addition to writing her award-winning blog, CommuniKate, Kate is now vlogging at Logo Online's Visible Vote '08 and AfterEllen.com, as well as at The Bilerico Project. You can also catch Kate blogging at Huffington Post and Olivia Connect.