… this got in my brain like a worm in my ear, and now I can’t bring myself to turn out the light.
[ETA: Warning: The image that follows after the jump is incredibly puerile and may scar you for life.]Late Night Open Thread: The Obama Campaign Playlist
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Cause the last one’s filling up (watch Cole pop up within the next 20 minutes). Via Dave Weigel, “the ultimate Jack Tapper post” reports that “President Obama’s re-election campaign even has an official soundtrack.”
Late Night Open Thread: The Obama Campaign PlaylistPost + Comments (35)
Worms crawl in, worms crawl out
What are the worst ear-worms you have ever experienced?
For me, it’s John Mayer’s “Daughters”, which has afflicted me for the better part of the last decade (the “girls become lovers who turn into mothers” part), “Sister Golden Hair”, which threatened my already tenuous hold on sanity last fall (the annoying guitar intro part), and a battery commercial Stevie Wonder did in the early 80s (“you can depend on me”, don’t pretend you don’t know it, fellow oldsters) that my therapist suggested I try to forget.
Open thread
For some reason, I really love this song, even with the awful video.
Talk about whatever.
Saturday Evening Open Thread: Cookie-Hater-Gate Update
Indiana’s own Doghouse Riley provides a news update from the field:
Perhaps you heard, in one of those “Pig Ignorant News Roundup” or “Signs the Coming Apocalypse is Wholly Justified” segments, about Indiana State Representative Bob Morris, who explained in an email to his Republican colleagues that he didn’t join in a resolution honoring the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts because “a small amount of web-based research” had proven to his satisfaction that the Girl Scouts’ real mission was turning America’s self-identified girls into Satanic, pro-abortion, Sapphic analinguettes, using instructional materials thoughtfully provided by Planned Parenthood. The apparently contradiction–that turning girls into lesbians would interfere with Planned Parenthood’s mission of giving every teenager in America an abortion before age 16–can probably be resolved by doing a slightly larger amount of web-based research…
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Anyway, tacked onto whatever news coverage you may’ve seen was the quick action of House Speaker Brian “Jesus is my Tambourine Man” Bosma, who spent the day passing out Thin Mints. You know you’ve gone round a big, and possibly un-retraceable, bend when Brian Bosma goes out of his way to call you nuts. This, of course, proved to our newscasters’ satisfaction that Republicans aren’t some religiously-mazed gang of anti-sex weirdos who’ll fall for any piece of urban legend that touches them in their secret hot spots. Just a lone nut.
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My personal favorite, though, you probably missed, unless you too are subjected to local Indianapolis teevee: Democrats, faced with a golden opportunity to simply point at the sheer mouth-foaming insanity on the other side of the aisle, instead dug up a picture of Ronald Reagan surrounded by Girl Scouts! Take that, single crackpot Representative his own party had already pummeled half to death!
What’s on tonight’s agenda that isn’t a Klown Kar full of paid-up He-Man Wimmen Haters Club members?
Saturday Evening Open Thread: Cookie-Hater-Gate UpdatePost + Comments (102)
GOP Profiteers Stealing Susan B. Anthony’s Good Name
Given all the news this week about the GOP’s ongoing war against women, seems like a good time to share Monica Potts’ article from The American Prospect on “Susan B. Anthony’s Hit List: how a group founded by anti-abortion feminists became a powerful foe of Democratic women”:
… In 1992, Rachel MacNair, a Quaker pacifist and activist, watched a 60 Minutes segment about EMILY’s List in her living room in Kansas City, Missouri. EMILY’s List was raising money to help elect four women to the Senate, the most in a single cycle. MacNair was president of Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion organization that primarily promoted alternatives to abortion for college students. She was an activist against both nuclear weapons and abortions, views united by her stance against violence in all forms. Her advocacy for peace can have a confrontational bent—she’s been arrested 17 times—and her speech comes rapid-fire, accented with a mid-South twang. Feminists for Life, which still operates, was founded during the pre–Roe v. Wade fights in 1972, when the issue of abortion split groups like the National Organization for Women.
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MacNair had always been angered by the assumption that all feminists support abortion rights, and as she watched 60 Minutes, she felt the same assumptions were being made about EMILY’s List—that by electing pro-choice Democratic women, the group was acting on behalf of the entire gender. MacNair was anti-abortion, but she’d always called herself a feminist. In fact, she believed that opposing abortion was essential to being an empowered woman. As EMILY’s List gained prominence, she wanted to see her brand of feminism represented in politics, too. With two other Feminists for Life leaders, Helen Alvaré and Susan Gibbs, she decided to found a PAC that would help elect anti-abortion women to Congress. It would, of necessity, be nonpartisan; the Democratic Party had become a home for most political women, but the Republican Party was increasingly anti-abortion. This new group would have to find candidates—and funders—who bridged the partisan divide…
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After three years, MacNair, Gibbs, and Alvaré moved on to other projects. Electoral politics, for all three women, was unfamiliar and trying territory. But that wasn’t the case for two of the group’s earliest volunteers, who now stepped into its leadership. Marjorie Dannenfelser, who became executive director, was politically savvy and well connected in Washington conservative circles. Her husband, Martin, worked at the Christian-right Family Research Council from 1995 until 2001, ultimately becoming its vice president. The List’s new president, Jane Abraham, was the wife of GOP Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, who would later serve in President George W. Bush’s cabinet. During this time, National Right to Life, another anti-abortion group, and the Family Research Council were gaining prominence in the Republican Party and raising far more money than a nonpartisan group devoted to electing anti-abortion women could ever hope for. Abortion was increasingly a central part of the GOP’s strategy for courting evangelical Christians—and four years later, with Bush’s first presidential campaign, it would become more important than ever. Taking the reins of the Susan B. Anthony List, Dannenfelser and Abraham had two options: stay true to a narrow mission that would win it few friends and little influence or change the group’s direction…
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The List is now an integral part of the Republican fundraising machine. The operating funds for its nonprofit arm have grown from $2.8 million in 2009 to more than $7 million in 2010. While the nonprofit arm does not have to disclose its donors, its PAC now receives money from Republican heavyweights, like the industrial-appliance-manufacturing Kohler family in Wisconsin, former Rite Aid president and Republican candidate for New York governor Lewis Lehrman, actor and commentator Ben Stein, and Amway scion Nan Van Andel…
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It is ironic, of course, that the Susan B. Anthony List has exacerbated partisanship. The group’s original vision was admirable, if perhaps doomed to failure: MacNair and the other founders wanted a Congress full of women with opposing views, working together to end a practice MacNair believes is murder—and that the majority of Americans would like to see diminish. Now, the group they helped start works against that.
I’m a pro-choice absolutist, and would never have contributed to the SAB List under any circumstances that I can imagine. (Neither, I suspect, would Susan B. Anthony herself.) But it’s an instructive story on how any activist group, no matter how well-intentioned, can be undermined and co-opted by the One Percenters and their Republican enablers.
GOP Profiteers Stealing Susan B. Anthony’s Good NamePost + Comments (8)
The Action Is Affirmative
It was so worth watching the last half-hour of the MHP show this morning for this discussion on affirmative action, and especially for Elon James White taking Reasonoid emperor Matt Welch’s lunch money, buying a milkshake with it, then then drinking it all up in front of him.
Elon also had a nice exchange with Nona Willis Aronowitz from GOOD Magazine on this too, and he was having none of the Glibertarian nonsense at. All.
I’m loving this show more and more.
Open thread, also too.