Skyway to Tomorrowland

Enter your annual income below to find out how long it would have taken Mitt Romney to earn the same amount of money.

The woman born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, was far more than just a torch song singer, and was not at all the tragic mulatto with a white daddy complex that “Cadillac Records” constructed. In many ways, James’s personal and artistic journey, as opposed to the film’s caricature, has a lot to teach us about the shifting politics of race, class and feminist politics over the course of the last half century.

People who have never been poor love to point out overweight people in the ghetto and sarcastically exclaim, “Yeah, it really looks like she’s starving!” And they have no idea that the reason many of them have weight problems is because everything they’re putting into their bodies is dirt-cheap, processed bullshit. Grab a TV dinner and look at the nutritional information.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.

I wonder what would happen if, in every town and county where there were at least a dozen trans people (so, almost anywhere), groups of trans people got together to ensure their safety as they used public accommodations. I wonder what would happen if the owners of health clubs and dressing rooms and other sex-segregated public accommodations, instead of being able to marginalize one or two very silent and frightened trans people, were faced with two groups of trans people — one group of trans men and one group of trans women — that simply said to whomever had authority over the public accommodation in question, “Where do we go to change?”

Are you waiting for Ronald Reagan to return from the dead? Mitt Romney? That’s the best you got? Really? Good luck with that. If Willard is your best hope, I’d say you’re not trying very hard.