It’s no secret that I have few beefs with my President.  I like him, but I’m not willing to follow him everywhere he goes, for Obama has a tendency to meander into political territory that I find disturbing, to say the least.

There is, however, one man for whom I would gladly march off a cliff if he led me that way.  One man whom I love deeply and unequivocally, a man whose makes me smile just thinking about him, a man who has brought immeasurable joy to my life (except for, uh, my husband of course).

That man is Al Green.

I MELT.

The only way this could be improved is if he were crooning my absolute favorite Al song, “What a Wonderful Thing Love Is,” from the brilliant I’m Still in Love With You.  If that were the case, I would quit my housewifely duties on the spot to join an Obama 2012 phone bank team in Cincinnati. Or Scranton. Or Tallahassee.  Or anywhere, really.*

If you don’t have a copy that record (or Call Me, Gets Next to You or Let’s Stay Together for that matter), please don’t make an Obama campaign contribution until you’ve hurried to your nearest independent record store to make your life complete.  It’s easy to find, for it will be the only album in stock featuring a white wicker chair on the cover.

*confidential to David Axelrod: while this is an admittedly kick-ass housewife recruitment strategy, please don’t have your candidate actually do it. My children need me.

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe universal health care to be an absolute, rock solid, no-compromise 21st Century Family Value–especially the health care coverage of children, for cryin’ out loud.  Any candidate who has espoused “family values” on the campaign trail while voting against expanding Medicaid’s Children’s Health Insurance Program is guilty of hypocrisy on a truly epic level (yes, I’m talking about Michele Bachmann, but you knew that).

Regular readers of this blog also know that I believe in encouraging kids themselves to participate in the political process.  I also believe that the kids in my family are unusually good-looking.  Happily, the ad below, for Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, combines these two obsessions!

Would you look at that cutie??  It’s my gorgeous neice Hadley, whom you may recognize as the tiny brunette in a yellow raincoat in my blog banner.  The text of the print ad (which you should really try to see, in the Twin Cities mag of your choice, for this JPG does not do Hadley’s beauty justice) notes that “last year alone, Children’s provided more than $50 million worth of medical care that wasn’t covered by insurance.”

I see a great future for Hadley as a model for social justice campaigns.  Why, this very picture could be used to illustrate an appeal to contact your president about the disaster that is Plan B availability!  Picture Hadley’s grumpy face attached to this message: “Mr. Obama, are you seriously allowing public health policy to be guided by the Conference of Catholic Bishops instead of the SCIENTISTS at the Food & Drug Administration??”

OMFG. I love it.

PR folks may send requests for Hadley’s talents to theradicalhousewife at gmail dot com, and I’ll put you in touch with her momager.

I am the Radical Housewife.  I write about feminist parenting and politics on this blog, for a variety of other media outlets, and in a book I wrote that will enter the world in 2012.  A sensible career strategy at this point would involve pounding out reams of copy on the “ethical response” to witnessing child abuse (!!!!!!), but seriously, the fallout from the Penn State scandal has me ready to quit humanity and live in my backyard oak tree with the pumpkin-fattened squirrels.

In what could have been my darkest hour, THIS arrived at my door:

Now what on earth does the Beach Boys’ Smile Sessions box set have to do with feminist parenting and politics?  Nothing whatsoever!  And though I want desperately to sell out like all the cool mommy bloggers, I wasn’t given a nickel by Capitol to hawk this thing.  There is no obvious reason to write about it here, for to do so would not boost my platform in the slightest.

So why do it?  Because listening to this baby, all 144 tracks of it, is pure joy.  It’s unbelievable.  It’s fan-fucking-tastic.  I’ve been moved to tears on more than a few occasions.  To hear this music clearly, without the scratchy fuzz from forty-odd years’ worth of bootlegged copies, is an experience so profoundly wonderful that I couldn’t NOT write about it.  You have to hear it.  Buy the two-disc version if you’re not an obsessive nut like me (and like Brian Wilson, thank heavens), but for cryin’ out loud, be sure you BUY IT.

We all need joy in our lives, no matter who we are or what we do.  That’s relevant, don’t you think?

Yes, it’s true: I brought a kid in a Vikings hoodie to the (literal) capital of Packers country.  Happily, Madison’s Occupiers were a peaceful bunch.

Miriam’s flowered hoodie was a bit out of place, too. We also forgot to pack our clown noses.

I had to photograph my proudly public-schooled daughter with my favorite sign. To my readers who are teachers: THANK YOU.

Speaking on the day we visited was Dr. John Carlos, the 1968 Olympic bronze medalist whose raised fist on the awards podium remains one of the most iconic images of the American civil rights movement.  He expressed support for and solidarity with the nationwide movement–beautifully, I might add.

Miriam had no idea who John Carlos was, but she knew that her mom was freaking out that he just shook her hand and complimented her on being an Occupier at such a young age. That kind of excitement is always contagious!

“We live to make history. Much love, Dr. John Carlos 68 & 2011″

Activism doesn’t get any better than that.

Proof that activism should neither be limited to grownups nor devoid of fun: scenes from the first day of Occupy MN, Friday, October 7, 2011.

Friends, fans, flamers: I give you Barbra Peterson.

“We’re challenging you here today. We demand that you start covering the crime itself.  Start now doing stories about the backlog in processing rape kits.  Start now doing exposes on why only six percent of rapists serve any time.  That’s a crime in itself, don’t you think?  And how about how colleges try to discourage the victim from reporting the crime? Do you think the newspapers should be doing stories about that? Instead of a word we choose to call the event? What do you think?”

What DO you think?  Tell me in the comments.

One thing that we won’t debate, however, is the brilliance of Barbra, a woman I cannot BELIEVE I am lucky enough to know.

Pinch me!

As predicted, following the advice of The Feminist Breeder resulted in a large bump in my blog traffic–not because the subjects of Abortion & Menstruation are really that hot, after all, but because TFB has some of the most loyal readers anywhere on the web.  To my great delight, they left comments in abundance, and not simply ones that parroted back my point of view.  In some cases, the comments challenged me directly, but they did so without calling me a “pro-choice whore,” a “matriarchal gynecentrist,” or a homicidal maniac who looms over my children’s beds at night with an icepick.  How refreshing!  Thanks, all!

To welcome my new readers, I present my favorite feminist menstruation story of all time.  Believe me, it kicks the ass of The Red Tent.  ENJOY!

Via Spinner.com:

Date: August 28, 1992

What Went Down: When L7 got pushed, the all-girl grunge band pushed back. The crowd at England’s 1992 Reading Festival learned this the hard way. During the band’s set, guitarist Donita Sparks got fed up with all the crap fans were hurling onto the stage and retaliated by removing her bloody tampon and throwing it into the crowd. Some (un)lucky fan walked away with one of the most unsanitary souvenirs in alt-rock history.

The sharp-eyed among my blog readers have noticed that a wee-little Amazon.com widget has been added to my page of late.  This is only the beginning of my devious plan to sell out to corporate America so that I can give my dirty millions to feminist causes.  For now, the list is a few of my favorite feminist titles as well as a great memoir by a friend (Sonya Huber’s Cover Me) and the book that has inspired my late-in-life freelancing career (Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead).  I will add more once I learn how to do such a thing.

In the meantime, one of my feminist idols who hasn’t written a book yet but should (I may get her the guidebook for Christmas) recommended that I get schooled on one of HER feminist idols, the late Florynce Kennedy.  You may know her from such phrases as “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”  Since I gain all of my knowledge from books, I requested Color Me Flo: My Good Life and Hard Times from the dusty stacks of the Hennepin County Library.  I picked it up at my local branch yesterday and about dropped dead from joy, for THIS was the cover:

Have you ever seen anything so wonderful in your life?  If not, take a closer look at her shirt: it reads BULLSHIT, ad infinitum.  Yet as brilliant as the cover is, it’s merely a warm-up to the jewels that are inside.  The gospel of Flo:

• “When I get all these mailings about sending money to the little starving children in Africa, I can’t understand how anybody smart enough to write that stuff can be so dumb as to not realize that’s not the way to make the change.  How can they think that the way to deal with starving children in Africa is to have people who have already paid their taxes write checks, when all that tax money goes into the imperialist wars that bring about the misery in the first place?
• “A lot of people get upset when you say ‘shit’ or something like that.  But do you realize that almost our entire country sat still while they barbecued people in Los Angeles, firebombed a house, burned the people to death?…and you see, this is part of the pathology of people who are so sensitive to some kinds of stylistic offensiveness, and so callous to real cruelty and brutality.”
• “It’s absolutely necessary in order to control people and get them to want to take the shit that you dump on them.  You must make them think they are not entitled to the freedom from corruption or freedom from oppression….You must select something that is common to all people to establish the pall of guilt….if you can use sexuality as the modus operandi for oppression, you’ve got a rather simple way to get at the people.”

Riding the bus to elementary school!

Walking to middle school!

And for mom….. BLOGGING!  Stay tuned as this tired mom gets her writing groove back.