Please donate. The uterus you save may be your own.
To read the full fundraising spiel, click here. To get right to the bitchfork-buying, click here. To check out our bitchflickr photo stream, click here.
Long story short, I am in the process of forming a lady-business nonprofit organization that was a PAC but which is no longer a PAC (for reasons explained here) in order to complete the TeamUterati Wiki Project which I conceived in February and which my partner Heather Chase and I built using her technical skills and my “oooh! oooh! Can you make it do this?” skills.
The organization is called People Organizing for Women’s Rights (check out the website: POWR). It takes up to nine months to complete the formation of the organization (we have attorneys on it), but in the meantime, POWR/TeamU needs money to upgrade our server so that we can complete our database of ALL ANTI-WOMEN AND ABORTION LEGISLATION. It is slow-going right now (although we have some volunteers ::ahem @Dcybele::) who have been working so hard that I wish I could hug them every day.
Every last single bill that infringes on women’s rights as human beings will ultimately be housed in the TeamU/POWR database, starting with the 1100 that have been introduced since 2010 (of which about 162 have passed). The database will also contain voter information, links to relevant information at other women’s organizations (Guttmacher, Planned Parenthood, etc.) as well as locations of women’s health clinics. (For a short video that demonstrates the functionality of the database, click here, and for a short video tutorial, click here.)
Why are we doing this? Because this —
— has to stop.
How long it takes for our project to be completed depends on how much money we can raise. Our database is unique — there is nothing else out there like it.
So, if this —
Uterally Yours,
Imani Gandy, ABLxx
#BITCHFORKS FOR SALE:
Because a proper fundraiser should always have perks, we are starting off the TeamU Fundraising Bonanza with BITCHFORKS from Esma Designs.
You can represent TeamU in style with a custom-made Bitchfork with Team Uterati military dog tag handcrafted by the fabulous @ThundarKitteh of Esma Designs, LLC.
- For a 5 dollar donation, you’ll get a Team Uterati military dog tag necklace.
- For a 10 dollar donation, you’ll get a personalized Team Uterati military dog-tag necklace. @ThundarKitteh will stamp whatever you want on the dog-tag — within reason, of course. Then again, Mona Eltahawy ordered a personalized dog tag with “Fuck misogynist bastards” on it, so feel free to express yourself!
- For a 25 dollar donation, you’ll get a Team Uterati military dog-tag necklace with a copper bitchfork, pictured here. (And don’t forget, real men wear bitchforks (as pictured here), so men? Get on the bitchfork bus.)
- For a 50 dollar donation, you’ll get a Team Uterati military dog-tag necklace with a silver bitchfork (pictured here).
- For a 500 hundred dollar donation, you’ll get a 14K gold bitchfork necklace (pictured here), and you’ll be a baller.*** (The gold ones don’t come with a TeamU military dog tag because I can’t have you representing TeamU looking like P.Diddy. It’s just not right.)
Shipping and Handling ($5) not included. (It’s a fundrayzah, after all.)
Click here to purchase using PayPal. Credit cards are also accepted.
Thank you for your support!
***Special thanks to our gold bitchfork ballers: @markchamp48, @ExLobbyist, @bubblegenius, and @sherifffruitfly. Join this VIP list. Buy a gold bitchfork. Do it now!
[cross-posted at TeamU Blog]
Cassidy
If you haven’t put this up on Kickstarter, you’re missing out on some funds.
sweaver
Just bought mine, and way to go, Uterati! I’m so glad somebody’s doing something about this latest assault. Well done.
ABL
@Cassidy: I tried, actually. I spent an entire month putting together some really awesome rewards, but kickstarter rejected the application because they said that the project was not discrete and needed to be maintained.
I may try Indiegogo next. I think the fundraising will go a lot faster once our server isn’t so damn slow and people can actually poke around the database and see what it does. It’s super cool!
ABL
@sweaver: Thank you! I was nervous about posting the fundraiser here, but I figured it’d be good to get some reactions, comments, etc. about what I’m doing. Also, too, money. :)
Cassidy
@ABL: The concept is a good one. The real problem is getting noticed and used by major parties. If something like this is largely ignored by mainstream personalities, media or political, then it won’t be much more than a resource for political junkies.
And haters are gonna hate. You should have x-posted part of this just to piss them off.
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
I have a couple of friends who’ve used IndieGogo for dance projects with success, and of course there’s the story about The Oatmeal comic that recently raised the charity funds via that site. If KickStarter (for whatever inane reason) won’t take it, I think IndieGogo’s a good fallback — and this is a project that deserves a lot of visibility.
And I’ll be throwing funds your way on the morrow.
Cassidy
Something else to consider is reaching out to women’s sporting organizations. Beleive it or not, women’s MMA has sponsors that cater only to women and they are starting to get more visibility with 3 different national level organizations. I don’t know their politics and that largely is not talked about, but I’m sure some people would be open to it.
Mattminus
Grifter’s gonna grift.
Funny that she doesn’t point you to her vanity site when she’s asking for money, isn’t it?
ABL
@Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill: Thanks very much!
@Cassidy: I will look into that. Thank you!
Cassidy
@Mattminus: Yeah, crazy conspiracy pointing to the site that’s part of the project. Got any other revelations, Nostradamus?
Arm The Homeless
Expect some fundage from me Friday, obviously in the name of the douche-nozzle @ #8.
Also, to echo what @Cassidy: said, women’s sports should absolutely be part of the PR mix. We don’t have a lot of women’s leagues here in the southland, but the Roller Derby crowd tends to lean more progressive, and I know our local club has teamed up for cancer awareness and lobbying of our house-member.
ABL
@Cassidy: We sent Rachel Maddow a bitchfork last week, and ThundarKitteh is making one for MHP tomorrow. I’m hoping that’ll get us some recognition. It’s a cool project and there’s nothing else out there like it, as far as I know. The information contained in our database is available from a variety of sources, of course (state legislature websites, Guttmacher, etc.) but Heather really outdid herself in compiling that information*** along with all my other hairbrained ideas into a user-friendly online format.
Even if I’m ultimately unsuccessful and I end up grinding out the rest of my life at a law firm (boo hoo, I’ll be rich-ish again), I would still like to do as much of this as I can for as long as I can (analyzing the bills and case law, writing about them, and whatnot) and then pass it off to another women’s group.
We’ve got something like 300 registered users and about 20 of them have been actively crowd-sourcing info for the last couple months.
ETA: I should should have said building the wiki so that the information can be compiled.
Cassidy
@ABL: A bit of a shortcut: Strikeforce is a major (Zuffa owned) circuit with the most prominent women fighters. They’ve recently begun putting on events with female Main Events; pretty big deal considering the Women’s 135 lbs champ defended her title on the undercard about two years ago.
Bellator is a smaller circuit with high tv exposure on Spike. They are supposed to be introducing a women’s division if they haven’t started already.
Invicta FC is an all female circuit with a lot of crossover with the aforementioned SF. They just had their second card, streamed for free online, and it was pretty good, by all accounts.
Also, Fighter Girl and Pretty. Tough. Fighter are groups who concentrate on exposure, media, and advocacy for the sport.
ABL
@Cassidy: Brilliant. And it dovetails nicely with the boxing uterus zeitgeist!
ABL
@Mattminus: You should buy a bitchfork, kitten. It’ll make you feel better.
Culture of Truth
How do you track legislation?
Culture of Truth
How do you track legislation?
Yutsano
@Mattminus: You’re not clapping loud enough, because your inevitable VICTORY!! Has yet to materialize. That durn woman is STILL posting!
Cassidy
Fix-ed
Citizen_X
Hah, hah, silly women. How many divisions do the Uterati have?
Oh crap, three already! Bishops, RETREAT!
-The Pope
Culture of Truth
@Citizen_X:.
“We’re gonna need a bigger Pope”
ABL
@Culture of Truth: @Culture of Truth: Through our legislation database (which is slower than molasses in January right now (hence the fundraiser), but which is here: http://www.teamuterati.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Legislation+Database.)
Culture of Truth
I was wondering what tools you use to get your information. I know of some good products but I wouldn’t want it to look like I’m selling anything.
ABL
@Culture of Truth: Oh! By all means, please share. I’ve been just doing research on the state legislation by referencing Guttmacher and then going to the actual legislature websites, reading the bills, comparing the bills — all of that time-consuming nonsense. I probably should get a westlaw account, but the one that I would need is pretty expensive, I think.
gelfling545
Will be purchasing mine in a day or two when the checking account goes back to the + side. “Bitchfork” what a concept.
andrewsomething
You should look into hooking into something along the lines of the Sunlight Foundation’s openstates.org It’s an opensource legislation tracking project with a nice RESTful API and a python client library.
ABL
@andrewsomething: i’ll check it out. thanks!
Nethead Jay
@andrewsomething: Beat me to it. Sunlight Foundation is awesome and from what I’ve read openstates.org is nice and easy to work with.
geg6
I can’t think of a better way to use a small part of the teeny tiny annual check I get from an investment my dad left me. Can’t afford gold, but I’ll see what I can handle one the check arrives Wednesday.
I’m definitely in. And if it makes the haters cry, my work is done.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
So…yeah. District Court Judge Teilborg just upheld Arizona’s extreme abortion ban (You know, the one that bans it after 20 weeks from MENSTRUATION). Why? Because it’s not really a ‘ban’ since there are SOME exceptions. So it just overregulates it to ridiculous obsolescence.
Fuck.
HyperIon
Thank you for showing a graph with both axes clearly labelled. The last time somebody used this data, the graph had no labels on the y axis. It was (as I pointed out at the time) CHARTJUNK.
Now everybody can see exactly what is going on numerically.
Excellent.