Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Not all heroes wear capes.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

“But what about the lurkers?”

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

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Women's Rights

Shifting the Overton Window, to Recalibrate the Evil-Stupid Axis

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Reporting from the intersection of Oversharing Ave and Political Grandstanding Blvd, Adrian Chen at Gawker introduces us to the worst pro-life campaigners since Beccah Beushausen’s Internet hoax:

The Arnolds are having a baby. Unless the public votes to have the child aborted. Meet the couple behind Birthornot.com, where “you can vote and choose whether we abort or keep our unborn child.”
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Pete and Alisha Arnold, both 30, both tech professionals, live in the Minneapolis suburb of Apple Valley and have been married for 10 years. Since September, they’ve blogged about their expected child at birthornot.com, posting health updates about the mother and the fetus (which will be 17 weeks-old tomorrow), and ultrasound pictures and video. But at the top of the blog is a poll hosted by PollDaddy.com. The question: “Should We Give Birth or Have an Abortion?” “Give Birth” has 46 percent of the vote at the moment, with “Have an Abortion” at 54 percent. The poll closes on December 7th.
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That someone would do this is almost impossible to believe, of course. We asked the Arnolds if this was some sort of a prank. “No, it’s not. We are taking this very seriously,” Pete replied. We then asked if this was some sort of convoluted pro-life stunt. Alisha laughed. “It’s definitely not a pro-life campaign,” she said. “I believe in a woman’s right to choose.”
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According to the couple, they’ve been unsure about whether they’re ready to be parents and have concluded that the best way to proceed is to ask random people on the Internet if they should have the child. (Tests have revealed that the fetus is a boy.) Alisha said that two pregnancies ended in two miscarriages in the past year and a half. During the second pregnancy, the couple bought the birthornot.com domain, and were in the process of deciding whether to put the birth up to a vote when they lost the baby. When Alisha got pregnant a third time a few months ago, they decided to launch birthornot.com…

I went and read their website. My vote: Read Chen’s article, which is more than fair, and don’t give these poseurs further clicks. Yes, the Arnolds are “pro-life” (anti-choice); not even the most committed thought-experimenters posts ultrasound pictures of the fetus they’re calling “Baby Wiggles” (and blogs exhaustively about their deeply felt love and commitment to each other and posterity) just to establish their impeccable impartiality. The whole thing is a deeply unserious attempt to “creatively” re-frame, yet again, the same tired arguments about a medical procedure:

Pete, who described himself as a Libertarian, framed the couple’s majority-rule abortion as kind of an extreme civics lesson that he hoped would bring the abortion debate home. “Voting is such an important part of who we are as a people,” Pete said. “Here’s a chance where people can be heard about whether they are pro-choice or whether they are pro-life, and it makes a difference in the real world.”

And once Pete & Alisha have finished their long-tried-for, hopefully successful pregnancy, they’re going to start protesting insurance coverage for gall bladder operations (the greedy pigs who need them could just commit to living on an ultra-low-fat diet, after all). Or take up the burning question of our tax dollars being wasted on Medicaid prostate-cancer screening, since most of those old goats will die from other causes long before their tumors metastasize. No woman with the resources to access blogs on the internet fails to realize that abortion terminates the existence of a potential human being; serious arguments involve weighting an individual pregnant woman’s needs against those of the individual fetus(es) within her body. Those of us who are proudly pro-choice believe that each woman should be free to decide for herself whether or not to carry a particular pregnancy to term; all else is commentary.

I’ll give the Arnolds this much credit: No “DONATE” button on the front page of their blog, at least. But I vote with Chen:

Regardless of your position on abortion, all of these possibilities suggest these people should never, ever raise a kid.

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It’s All Fun & Games Until Someone Loses An Election

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… or a job. Well, to be fair, “[Isabel] Santa’s attorney, Christopher Markham, said even though Santa’s duties were taken away from her, she is still on the Project Veritas payroll.” As is James O’Keefe! And you thought the watercooler chats around your workplace were strained!

Maureen O’Conner at Gawker phrased it nicely:

Basically, “the right’s Bob Woodward” is the journalistic equivalent of a guy who shows his penis to you on the subway, then stands there chuckling under his breath.

Sure, the jokes practically write themselves, and yet here’s the scary part: O’Keefe’s closest female associate is reported to have told her attorney that she “… didn’t want what could have happened to occur. She thought it may have been a threat to the organization, and didn’t want it to happen to [Boudreau].” Us ladies, always so paranoid about guys when all they want is just to have a little fun, probably!… or so we all sincerely hope. We’re trained from an early age to be skittish about men who stand a little too close, stare a little too long, embarrass themselves trying for ‘romantic’ and landing on ‘stalker’. Spare a tear for all the genuinely Nice Guys who never get the chance to prove themselves (and say a prayer for the women who didn’t trust their own instincts).

Because — and since most of you are probably bicoastal elitists who went to the kind of High Progressive educational institutions where ‘women’s studies’ are not automatically a punchline, you’ve already been exposed to this theory — quite often, rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. It’s a “weapon” that a person, usually male, resorts to when he believes he has been disrespected, humiliated, made less. And the disrespect is quite often not personal but institutional. The cultural stereotype is the guy who gets yelled at by his boss who goes home and beats his wife, but in this cruel modern world even men with dependent spouses are constrained by changes in law-enforcement policy around the concept of ‘domestic violence’. So some guys who feel they’ve been pushed beyond their limits go postal, while others… spend a lot of time documenting their proposed acquisition of “Viagra and stamina pills” and “fuzzy handcuffs”.

As the first Gawker commentor wondered: “Does he get to expense the sex toys to Fox News or did Andrew Breitbart already have them stocked in their top secret bunker?”

The humor, it is irresistable! And yet, slightly terrifying! Maybe it’s just, as Steven Thrasher reports in the Village Voice, “White America Has Lost Its Mind“. But how, in less than thirty years, have we moved from a young, overprivileged white guy attempting to use a presidential assassination as a tool to seduce the movie star he was stalking, to another young, overprivileged white guy attempting to use a “prank seduction” as a tool of… political assassination?

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Always the Cheerleader, Never the Candidate?

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Dave Weigel at Slate reports from the Values Voters Summit straw poll, where Sarah Palin came in fifth (behind Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich):

… Politico’s Jonathan Martin asked [FCR president Tony Perkins] whether Palin’s weak showing in the presidential poll, and stronger showing in the VP poll, suggested that conservatives were more interested in Palin as a spokesperson than as a presidential candidate.
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“I think she is a great spokesman,” said Perkins. “I mean, I think that she challenges the status quo. She says what a lot of people think. But, you know, a lot of people sometimes realize we shouldn’t say everything we think. Maybe it is that she is more of a cheerleader and one who rallies conservatives together as opposed to being their top choice for president.… “

In a loopy-even-by-her-elastic-standards piece, Maureen Dowd spends half her column bashing Christine O’Donnell (before deciding that O’Donnell’s temporary elevation is all the fault of That Man In the White House):

Christine O’Donnell is in a fantasy world. Literally. The pretty Palin Mini-Me identifies with the women of Middle Earth…
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O’Donnell said she liked Tolkien’s outlook on gender: “On the one hand, there’s the attitude that’s normally on the conservative side — as a conservative woman, I feel I can say this — that stifles women. There’s almost the stereotypical attitude of, to be a true woman, you have to stay at home. And I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Why do you choose a career over marriage?’ Honestly, I’ve had only a few significant relationships, and they’ve broken up with me. And one of the things I’ve been told is, ‘If you weren’t so strong, you’d be married by now.’ ”…
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Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox, Karl Rove dismissed O’Donnell as an absurd choice with a sketchy background and dubious character. He alluded to facts in The Weekly Standard that chronicled her lawsuit against her former employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative nonprofit based in Delaware.
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Although O’Donnell said in 1998 that wives should “graciously submit” to their husbands, her 2005 suit charged that she suffered “mental anguish” after being demoted and fired because the institute’s conservative philosophy deemed that women must be subordinate.
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We the People in the Ruling Class Elites do think O’Donnell comes across as alarmingly loopy. But maybe she’s smart as a fox in doing a Single-White-Female, Fox anchor makeover to look more like her queen-maker, Sarah Palin…
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She might have gone a broom too far, though, when she once told Bill Maher that she had “dabbled into witchcraft” and went on a date with a witch that included “a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”…

And Vanity Fair reprints an email from “right-wing pastor and political activist” Lou Engle to Sarah Palin: “… I believe this is an Esther moment in your life. Esther hid her identity until Mordecai challenged her to risk everything for such a time as this. Your identity is “Sarah Barracuda”… I’ve been praying for five years for an Esther, with dreams of being a Mordecai to that Esther.” But the biblical Queen Esther was not a ruler in her own right; she was a young concubine, a beauty pageant winner, whose ‘triumph’ was orchestrated by her uncle Mordecai to successfuly enrich his own political career. Even Joan of Arc waited five hundred years for full acceptance from the Church hierarchy.

The self-proclaimed conservatives who have made Palin, and now O’Donnell, symbols of Heartland American Values(tm) are not, to phrase it politely, defenders of gender neutrality. Fundamentalists and authoritarians still loudly prefer their women to be decorative, and subservient. Whatever the mooted power of the PUMAs, it’s not going to be easy for the most hardcore “traditionalists” to accept a woman in a position of real authority.

It could be argued (probably has been) that the teabaggers’ willingness to promote female politicians (Palin, Angle, Bachman, O’Donnell) is inversely related to the possibility of a ‘Tea Party’ candidate actually achieving significant political power. Women are excellent figureheads, especially for a minority rump party fueled by nothing more significant than spite and nostalgia, but professionals don’t waste serious resources on figureheads. Especially since the last time they installed a former cheerleader as a sockpuppet, events went so badly awry.

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“Call When You Get Honest Work!”

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Does a career politician who’s spent his professional life (like his father before him, and his son after him) on the public tit really want to go there?

If it’s easy to make fun of the Cat Food Commission, it’s even easier to mock “Pink Panthers” and their (our) sensitivity about “degrading, sexist, ageist and profane language”. Silly HuffPo firebagger ladies and their PC pablum, so pre-post-feminist! But, chroist jaysus nekkid on a pogo stick, has Distinguished Ex-Senator A.K. Simpson, VSP changed his first name to Abe?:

The flamboyant (some would say plain nutty) co-chair of President Obama’s Fiscal Commission, Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who became an instant You-Tube star earlier this summer with a rant against senior citizens, is at it again big-time.
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Evidently smarting mightily — and mighty belatedly — from an April 27th Huffington Post blog by Ashley Carson, Executive Director of the Older Women’s League (OWL), Simpson fired off an email Monday. He accused Carson of lying and “babbling into the vapors about disgusting attempts at ageism and sexism and all the rest of that crap.” Piling on the sexist rhetoric, he then instructed her to read a graph which “I hope you are able to discern if you are any good at reading graphs.”
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Declining to address whether or not he accepts his own Social Security benefit (he’s pushing 80), Simpson saves the best for last: “And yes, I’ve made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know ’em too. It’s the same with any system in America. We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!”

John Kenneth Galbraith, a lifelong defender of America’s Social Security system, often pointed out that those who spent their careers at highly-compensated “intellectual” tasks were more liable to resent mandatory retirement than fear physical breakdown. Someone whose greatest daily challenge on the job is finding a greenroom muffin that satisfies both a rarified palate and the minimum daily fiber requirement may find it easy to forget that working twelve-hour shifts at Wal-Mart isn’t just less monetarily rewarding, it’s also considerably harder on an aging body. As the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) points out:

Forty-five percent of women over age 65, who live alone, do so in poverty. Women, who earn less on average for the same work as men, are hit again upon taking Social Security benefits; due to lower lifetime earnings, women receive on average less than $12,000 per year in Social Security benefits, while men receive nearly $14,000.
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Further, women are not living longer in retirement (low-income minority women have seen decreases in life expectancy), and cannot continue to work more years in physically difficult or demanding jobs. Social Security is not an overly generous program helping all seniors live out luxurious retirements. Social Security provides a base level of replacement income for older Americans who can no longer work, and any cuts to benefits, either in the form of smaller checks or by raising the retirement age, will hurt all generations, forcing more and more Americans back into poverty.

I agree with Paul Krugman on this — it’s time for Obama to fire Alan Simpson.

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New Treatment for Psychotic Depression?

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The temptation is to make a joke about timeliness, but too many of us know how crippling (sometimes fatal) a disease depression can be. Or perhaps that knowledge is why we make such jokes. From ABC News, “Controversial RU-486 Studied For Treatment of Psychotic Depression”:

… The drug, a synthetic steroid compound known as mifepristone, is known as RU-486 in Europe, and marketed as Mifeprex in the United States. In combination with misoprostol, the drug was used in 161,000 medical abortions in the United States last year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
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But in clinical trials over the last decade, researchers have been using the drug to treat psychotic depression, a terrifying form of depression that carries a high suicide risk, and for which there are few sure-fire cures. They say the drug acts on the brain’s receptors for cortisol, the so-called “stress hormone.”
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The Food and Drug Administration will review an application for use as a treatment for psychotic depression at the end of the year.
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“When people are stressed, we know that there is an increase in inflammation and cortisol,” said Kenneth Robbins, medical director of psychiatry at Stoughton Hospital and professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. “I think this hypothesis is really interesting, and has to do with inflammation and cortisol metabolism, and treating inflammation somehow improves mood.”
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As for the potential for RU-486, which is so highly regulated that the distributor — Danco Laboratories — has offices in a secret location so they are not hounded by anti-abortion protesters, Robbins said, “I think we have to keep an open mind.”
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What interests Robbins is how steroids, which are used to decrease an inflammatory reaction, play a role in depression. And RU-486 is known to decrease the body’s steroid system.

The raw scientific information here is literally half the story. I’ve left out the personal saga that actually headlined the article: “Woman Buys Abortion Drug Illegally to Stop Psychotic Depression”. Mifepristone is a Schedule 1 drug here in the United States, put in the most tightly controlled class because of what in another drug would be treated as “an unfortunate side effect”. The American profiled in this piece is “uninsurable except in an expensive high-risk pool” ; she travels overseas to spend an estimated $15,000 – $20,000 every year to buy the drugs illicitly which enable her to function well enough to afford her medication. Just another statistic in our neverending War on Some Drugs. But at least we’re getting an FDA review!

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Guns Don’t Kill, Pubes Do?

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Via Jezebel, Lisa Russ has a modest proposal regarding sex education in our schools:

… Despite the fact that Texas ranks third in the rate of teen pregnancies and that its students are more sexually active and that they have more sex partners than the average U.S. student, sex ed here is nearly exclusively devoted to abstinence education, often with a religious bent. Information about contraception, disease prevention and STD testing is most often scarce or, worse, wildly inaccurate.
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Like Texas, many of the same states that resist comprehensive sex ed are the same places that pride themselves on loose laws for gun ownership. Gun-rights advocates maintain that straight-forward education, not regulation and licensing, is the best way to keep kids safe.The National Rifle Association leads the way: they have a cool program called Eddie Eagle… According to the NRA, it doesn’t aim to teach kids that guns are either “good or bad”, but rather how to stay safe when you see one. “Like swimming pools, electrical outlets, matchbooks and household poison, they’re treated simply as a fact of everyday life. With firearms found in about half of all American households, it’s a stance that makes sense.”
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I don’t have a gun in the house, but I can agree with that line of thinking. Like it or not, guns are around, so kids at an early age should learn how to be safe around them.
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Now, genitals, at my last count, are in 100% of households. Why not use the same common sense approach that knowledge is power, and give our kids straight forward, age appropriate information? That is exactly why a new toolkit launched by EMERJ called The New Sex Ed is so important. The New Sex Ed is full of useful community-created and tested strategies to help parents and educators implement useful and effective sex ed programs that are based in real people’s experiences. Given the fight the Right has picked against teaching science, health, and touchy subjects like evolution and global warming, advocates for the truth need great resources like these to support parents, communities and school boards in making informed choices about educating their kids.

Read the whole article for more snark, the second-best weapon (after good information) against ignorance and stupidity .

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A Disgrace to Her Gender

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Shorter Maureen Dowd: My status as a childless, never-married woman in the Ladies Sodality DC Media Village makes me the perfect expert to criticize Michelle Obama’s marital and child-raising talents. But I’m using the classic “feminine” passive-aggressive trick of lovingly retailing every nasty rightwing slur ironically, because I am just that hip, so it proves that I am not only up-to-the-minute on all the kewl gossip but also more sophisticated than both those trash-talking luzers and you deluded Obots.

And I would have ignored this as just another “Maureen Dowd, straight from junior-high Mean Girl to dried-up old spinster without ever passing through adulthood” column, but the shallow twit drags Mary McGrory’s good name into it, something she’d never have dared do when McGrory was still around.

Mary McGrory would kick Dowd’s arse, and not just metaphorically, for phoning in this kind of third-rate repackaging of cheap right-wing tropes.
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A Disgrace to Her GenderPost + Comments (87)