I love gossip.  Love it.  I’m into good old-fashioned dirt, not the phony baloney that is manufactured by Kris Jenner and shoved down our throats in a series of “exclusive” photo spreads and television specials.  Brangelina delights me, as did All My Children before it went off the air.  The scandalous campfest Valley of the Dolls is one of my favorite movies of all time.

But there remains a species of gossip so tantalizing, so unbelievably marvelous that it blows away the timeNeely O’Hara flushed Helen Lawson’s wig down the toilet.  I’ll give you a hint: Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, George Rekers. When a “family values” politician or activist gets caught with their hands in the cookie jar!

First, let us travel back to a more innocent time, namely 2009, when Minnesota Senator Amy Koch sponsored a bill that would amend our state constitution to limit marriage to heterosexuals only.  Koch, herself a heterosexual, is married to a man named Christopher.  One assumes that she felt her civil marriage contract with Christopher might be threatened by happily hitched gay folks, I dunno. It was something she felt deserved her time and attention during a recession, anyway.

It’s worth noting that in the 2009 session, Koch received a 100% rating from the Minnesota Family Council, a group so retrograde they oppose even popular measures like civil unions and, y’know, stopping the bullying of LGBT students (I hear their next piece of legislation will be to ban the phrase “don we now our gay apparel” from “Deck the Halls”).

In 2010, Koch became Senate Majority Leader, just in time to cram the divisive, expensive, and just gosh-darned Grinchy Marriage Amendment down our throats, which is just what Minnesota needed to create jobs…..for the soulless hacks at the ad agency for the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese.

But wait!  What’s this?  Did Santa leave a present a little early for us this year? Via CityPages:

Santa, who puts hypocrites, not necessarily adulterers, on his Naughty List, has made sure that this story gets the viral treatment it so richly deserves.  The giant, sparkly bow on this gift that many national outlets are missing?  That Koch’s alleged paramour is none other than Michael Brodkorb, founder of the giant blog o’ sleaze that is Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a site that deals in hearsay, innuendo, and “reliable sources.”   MDE joined my personal naughty list in 2008 when it implied that writing an article in an old issue of Playboy magazine OBVIOUSLY made Senate candidate Al Franken a misogynistic pornographer (the President of Minnesota NOW, however,  begged to differ).  The humiliating exposure of a former exposer is an irony even more delicious than eggnog.

I love gossip.  I love just deserts. I LOVE THE HOLIDAYS!  Enjoy, all!

Me & my buddy Farheen at SlutWalk Minneapolis, October 1, 2011

Farheen Hakeem is one of the smartest, funniest, and most forthright people I have ever met.  These are wonderful qualities to have in a friend, but they are even better to have in a public servant. Luckily, Farheen is running for Minnesota State Senate, and tomorrow, I will cast a vote for her in a special election to replace retiring Senator Linda Berglin.

There are many on the political left here in my state who find Green Party members like Farheen pesky at best and scary at worst.  They say they would never vote for a non-Democrat in the state that gave the world Dem idols like Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, and Paul Wellstone.

But you know what I find scary?

• Last year, 18 Minnesota Democrats voted for the so-called Pain Capable Unborn Child Act that would criminalize any abortion after 20 weeks’ gestation, and 15 Minnesota Democrats in the State House and Senate voted in favor of a law that would ban state funds for abortion care, despite the 1995 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that struck down an earlier ban, saying such a law places “undue financial constraints” on low-income women.
• Last week, Minnesota Democrat Collin Peterson voted YES on HR 358, nicknamed the “Let Women Die” Act, which greatly expanded permission for health professionals to refuse to perform reproductive health care services, including immediately life-threatening ones.
• Today, Minnesota Democrat Mark Dayton (who thankfully vetoed the two insane anti-choice bills mentioned above) is holding meetings to discuss building a new stadium for the Vikings, with $300 million in state funds, during an ongoing economic crisis that has left my kids’ two south Minneapolis schools overcrowded, understaffed, and gutting their desperately needed special education, sports, arts, and gifted & talented programs.

Does THAT sound like Wellstone’s legacy to you?  I didn’t think so.

The days of trusting one party blindly are over.  Farheen Hakeem is not beholden to a system that favors the status quo over positive change in our community.   She’s an experienced community organizer (like some other politicians we know), as well as a math teacher and foster parent to a child in public schools.  She knows that people in Minneapolis need jobs, educations, health care, and homes–they don’t want the legislative priorities to be tax breaks for millionaires or billion-dollar sports venues the average person can’t afford to enter.  Farheen is the 99% and is committed to working for the 99%!

I hope you’ll join me in casting your vote tomorrow for a true Minnesota progressive: Farheen Hakeem!

I know there are millions of posts that we blog addicts deem “must-reads,” but yesterday’s by s.e. smith on TigerBeatdown is one that truly earns that title.  In an essay called “On Blogging, Threats, and Silence,” smith writes about her experiences with online threats, opening her piece with the very startling revelation:

I got my first rape threat as a blogger when I was on Blogspot, so new that I still had the default theme up… someone really had thought it was appropriate not just to write this email to a complete stranger, a totally unknown person, but to send it.

Smith’s point is not just to reveal how very often this happens to women bloggers, but also to illuminate how often our concerns are minimized with the advice “don’t feed the trolls.”

It’s concerted, focused, and deliberate, the effort to silence people…..this is the strategy that has been adopted, to not feed the trolls, to grin and bear it, to shut up, to put your best foot forward and rise above it….when it happens to people for the first time, they think they are alone, because they don’t realise how widespread and insidious it is.

Regular readers of The Radical Housewife know about my resident antagonist, one Neal Krasnoff.  He’s been on my case since a 2008 Minnesota Women’s Press column in which I expressed support for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. At the time, he blogged under a pseudonym, Nachman, and the depth of his venom so rattled me that I did a little digging and discovered that his was typical of a million pseudonymous blogs in which the author assumes that “anonymity” grants carte blanche to express opinions that would never be tolerated in polite company.  Among Neal’s bugaboos were feminism, LGBT rights, and any support for Palestinian human rights, and in his blog he heaped scorn upon Twin Cities folks active in any of these civil rights movements.

But Neal wasn’t anonymous, really.  It took only a handful of Google searches to discover his real name and that he was, in fact, a local activist with the Minnesota DFL Party.

The DFL?? Minnesota’s Democratic Party? Really? Why, yes!  This is the party whose platform states opposition to “discrimination against any person on the basis of race, creed, religion, immigration status, sex, sexual or affectational orientation, HIV status, gender identity or expression, marital or homemaker status, disability or age.”

Huh.

Do you think Neal would allow his Nachman persona to speak aloud at DFL meetings?  Not likely.  Do you think Neal, like those who targeted s.e. smith, TigerBeatdown, and other bloggers, took advantage of this perceived “anonymity” as well as bloggers’ ongoing reluctance to talk about it?

This summer, I had enough.  Inspired by news of  the upcoming SlutWalk Minneapolis, Neal wrote as disturbing a piece of rape apologia as I have ever read, and he made sure the post included the name of its director, my friend Kim Sherva, in an attempt to rattle her as I had once been rattled.  I responded with a piece I called “To our male allies: a challenge,” in which I identified Neal by name.  And take it from me, friends: NOTHING TERRIFIED HIM MORE.

He closed up his blog for a time.  He officially resigned from the DFL Party.  He begged me to redact his name, to stuff the genie named Nachman back in the bottle.  Today, his blog contains the longest rant against me yet, with specific threats of legal action against me and veiled threats of personal harm in calling me  ”Shannon Drury (YM”SH).” For those whose Hebrew is rusty, this is apparently a curse that calls for the destruction of a person and her memory.  I’m not certain myself, so I think I’ll ask the rabbi with whom I’m meeting next week (I’m not kidding–I really am).

In the words of s.e. smith:

I’m still not going to shut up, and not just because I am bullheaded and don’t take kindly to being told to be silent or die. I don’t shut up for all the people who were forced to shut up, for the ghosts who drift through the Internet, for the people too terrified to leave their homes at all, let alone try to coordinate safety concerns to attend events, for the people who ask friends to open and sort their email because they can’t handle the daily vitriol. I don’t shut up for all the people who have been silenced, who did throw in the towel because they just couldn’t take it anymore. 

I hope you, dear reader, will join me in accepting smith’s call to keep talking about this on our blogs,  our social media sites, and in our communities.  Refuse to be silenced.  Demand accountability.  Speak out!

Since you ALL watched the video in my last post, you’re ALL fans of Barbra Peterson, and where she leads, you follow.  Amirite?

Here’s a photo of Barbra with her friend, and the latest entrant in the race for Minnesota’s 8th House District,  Daniel Fanning.  Fanning, a longtime DFL activist and Iraq vet who most recently worked as field coordinator for Sen. Al Franken, will formally announce his candidacy in Duluth next Sunday.

Fanning is not only in gorgeous company, he’s in fine fashion!  When was the last time you saw ANY candidate announce support for feminism so unequivocally, no matter what their gender?  I mean, Sen. Franken is kickass fighter for women’s rights, but I have yet to see him “wear the shirt,” as Gloria Feldt would say.

Barbra can sure pick ‘em!