Earlier in the week, I posted three short clips of a documentary created by Therese Shechter called, “I Was a Teenage Feminist”. As it turns out, Therese Shechter, a documentary filmmaker, is in the midst of creating another documentary, called “The American Virgin”. Therese visited The Widdershins to thank us for linking to her previous film, and to clue us into her latest work!
I have checked out the link to her new documentary website “Trixie Films” and her companion blog, “The American Virgin” . I must say that I absolutely love her blog. I find it to be funny, witty and insightful. I liked it so much that I have added her blog to the blogroll. Please check it out often!
Here is the trailer for her new film:
And here is a conversation about virginity for the new documentary:
Now, after watching the videos here is the hard part! Therese Shechter has posted a rhetorical virginity quiz on her movie website to get the conversation going!
1. Virginity plays its most vital role as:
a) the cornerstone of modern civilization
b) a marketing tool for pop stars
c) the only thing you can discuss in abstinence-only sex-ed class
d) ideology, myth and tradition
e) something to restore with plastic surgery
f) a staple of teen sex comedies
g) a time-tested way to keep the gals in line
2. Over the last 10 years, the US government has spent a billion dollars telling kids not to have sex.
Was over at The Advocate this morning and they have a great article about a new report issued by the Palm Center regarding DADT and how LGBT leaders have basically handed the White House it’s talking points and given them excuses to turn it’s back on the LGBT community in this fight:
The Palm Center blasts LGBT groups, including the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, for not pressing President Obama to issue an executive order to stop enforcement of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The report claims the gay community has “taken its foot off the gas pedal” by focusing solely on the legislature to overturn the ban.
Here are some of the corrections the working group on DADT for the Palm Center have come up with the help get things back on the right track:
The DADT Working Group addressed the following statements:
President Barack Obama: we cannot ignore the will of Congress
“I also want to make sure that (a) we are not simply ignoring a congressional law. If Congress passes a law that is constitutionally valid, then it’s not appropriate for the executive branch simply to say, we will not enforce a law.”
Why this needs to be corrected: Congress has authorized the President, via statute, to suspend any law regarding military separations during national security emergencies. Hence, an executive order would not be a matter of the President choosing to “not enforce a law” but an appropriate exercise of executive authority granted directly by Congressional statute.
Representative Patrick Murphy (D-PA): an executive order would ignore standing law
“[The president] — to his credit — seems not to want to ignore standing law that was passed by the Congress. It shows why Congress needs to change it.”
Why this needs to be corrected: Congress has authorized the President, via statute, to suspend any law regarding military separations during national security emergencies. Hence, an executive order would be consistent with, not ignore, standing law.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: the military is bound by legislation in its enforcement of “don’t ask, don’t tell”
“The key is to remember it’s not a policy, it’s a law. And so before we can change what we do, the Congress has to change the law. And once the law is changed, then we will do what the law says and what the president tells us to do.”
Why this needs to be corrected: “Don’t ask, don’t tell” as codified by Congress, grants significant authority to the Secretary of Defense to devise and implement the procedures under which investigations, separation proceedings, and other personnel actions will be carried out.6 In fact, Secretary Gates has said he is looking for ways to relax enforcement of the law without approval from Congress.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen: the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” would affect military families
“…what I feel most obligated about is to make sure I tell the president, you know, to give the president my best advice, should this law change, on the impact on our people and their families at these very challenging times. ”
Why this needs to be corrected: No research shows that allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly would impact heterosexual military families.
Wow! Sounds familiar, huh?!?
What the hell took them so long and will they be able to keep themselves off the kool-aid!?!?
According to Mother Jones, an amateur historian may have found a way to determine what might have been discussed during the 18 1/2 minute gap on the Nixon Watergate tapes. Most people have focused on electronically retrieving the lost minutes on the tape, but this amateur historian, Mellinger has figured out another way to hopefully determine what was discussed. It looks like this technique is going to move forward and hopefully a little bit of history will be discovered using a technique that can lift hidden words off of paper.
ON JUNE 20, 1972, President Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, met in Nixon’s hideaway office at the Old Executive Office Building. Three days earlier, White House-connected dirty tricksters had been nabbed breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate offices, and the 79-minute-long conversation—with Nixon’s secret taping system running and Haldeman taking his typically meticulous notes on a tablet of yellow lined paper with a ballpoint pen—at one point turned toward the break-in and how to craft a counterattack. What exactly the two men said to one another would become one of the great political mysteries of the 20th century: Sometime during the Watergate scandal, 18 ½ minutes were suspiciously erased from the tape recording of this meeting.
As Mellinger shared his ideas with other Watergate researchers—a contentious and finicky lot—he was repeatedly asked what proof he had. He started thinking about physical evidence that might back up his theories. That led him to Haldeman’s notes from the June 20 meeting. Last October, he visited the National Archives repository in College Park, Maryland, near Washington. A white-gloved employee brought out a pair of handwritten pages. “Immediately I could see what had happened,” Mellinger says. The first page tracked with the first four minutes of the meeting, when Nixon and Haldeman didn’t discuss Watergate. The top of the second page referred to a “PR program,” and the notes seemed to correspond to a conversation about how the White House could attack political opponents looking to exploit the Watergate break-in. This, it seemed to Mellinger, must be the tail end of a longer discussion of Watergate. (A memo from the files of Rose Mary Woods, the Nixon secretary who claimed she had accidentally erased about five minutes of the tape while transcribing it, estimated that the PR portion of the conversation lasted only one or two minutes.) The rest of the second page related to non-Watergate matters.
“I went, ‘Holy cow!’” Mellinger recalls. There were only two possibilities: Either Haldeman had sat through a long stretch of discussion with Nixon and had written nothing down until the last minute or so, or he had taken notes for the rest of the time, and they had somehow gone missing. (Stanley Kutler, a prominent Watergate historian, says that a conversation of this length would normally have caused Haldeman to produce several pages of notes.) Mellinger took a close look at the two pages. There were four sets of staple marks at one corner—as if the pages had been taken apart and put back together several times.
I find it amazing that up until now, no one else has discovered that some of the notes that Haldeman meticulously transcribed during that conversation were missing. And to top that off, the missing pages more than likely corresponded to the missing 18 1/2 taped minutes.
Earlier in the week, I posted three short clips of a documentary created by Therese Shechter called, “I Was a Teenage Feminist”. As it turns out, Therese Shechter, a documentary filmmaker, is in the midst of creating another documentary, called “The American Virgin”. Therese visited The Widdershins to thank us for linking to her previous film, and to clue us into her latest work! 
Was over at 
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