First Draft

Insert Own 'Severance' Joke Here

Oh, those family-values Republicans:

LAS VEGAS – The sex scandal engulfing Sen. John Ensign has deepened now that his former mistress's husband has revealed new details about the relationship, saying the Nevada Republican paid the woman more than $25,000 in severance when she stopped working for him.

Doug Hampton also provided a letter to the Las Vegas Sun that he claimed was a handwritten apology from Ensign to Cindy Hampton, a former treasurer for the senator's campaign committees.

"I used you for my own pleasure," the letter reads, later adding. "Plain and simple it was wrong; it was sin."

I think I speak for everyone in the room when I say ewww.

A.

Freedom's Just Another Word for Get Over It Already

OMG WOMEN WILL USE FREE HEALTH CARE TO GET GAY ABORTIONS!

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee are pushing for language in health care reform legislation that would eliminate coverage for abortion services. If this happens, many women could lose coverage for abortion services that their private insurance currently includes. Plus, millions of uninsured women will still lack a basic health care service despite having been promised a better quality of life.

If these senators are allowed to deny coverage of abortion services, the burden will inevitably fall on low-income women and widen the huge gap in health status and access to health care services that reforms are meant to remedy. Compared to their higher-income counterparts, low-income women are four times as likely to have an unintended pregnancy and five times as likely to have an unintended birth.

This is, natch, an outgrowth of the usual Republican nonsense of getting restrictions on something however they have to, and I have no doubt that with our 60 votes we can now tell them to suck it continue kissing their asses as if their opinions matter.

But it's also an outgrowth of the most pernicious argument against any kind of public health care plan, be it single payer or whatever watered-down half-a-loaf bullshit we're going to end up stuck with after the Blue Dogs get done: Somebody, somewhere, will get something I didn't approve of. Somebody who's overweight, maybe, or smokes, or drinks too much, or took drugs once or a thousand times. Somebody who has been ignoring a nagging illness, somebody who should have eaten more vegetables, somebody who lives near a power plant, somebody who had a family history of something and gave birth anyway and now has the temerity to want ME to pay for her kid's care with MY TAX DOLLARS and OH MY GOD THE HORROR I NEVER SAID YOU COULD DO THAT.

And the only possible response to any of that is the one nobody in elected office really wants to make, which is fuck you, you smug, self-satisfied, sheltered bitchweasel who thinks the only virtuous choices are the ones you made and that everybody else is scamming you.

I am dreaming nightly of the day when someone at the forefront of this debate points out that most of this wanking — about how women will use free health care to get abortions when they shouldn't have been such sluts, and fat people will use it to get treated for their heart disease when they should have just laid off the cheeseburgers — is just people being judgmental dicks and YES IT IS THAT SIMPLE. All the people in this country who have made choices you or I might not approve of do not constitute a greater drain on America's vast resources than a single week of either war we're fighting, nor a single lifetime of a gazillion-year-old senator who works on Tuesdays and spends the rest of his company time eating oatmeal in the Senate cafeteria on your and my dollar.

The reason this argument gets any traction at all is that for years now we've thought of health care as a reward, as a sign of your virtue, as something you get because you're a contributing member of society who works hard at a good job and tries on average not to drown in Bugles filled with spray cheese every night (mmm, Bugles/spray cheese, food of the gods). Health care is something everybody doesn't get, so if you get it, you must be doing something right. Like eating salads, or exercising, as if people who do those things don't ever get clobbered by potato chip trucks on their way to work.

If it's not a reward, though, if it's something everyone should get, then how on earth will you know you're special? It seems all we do, in this new reality these days, is take away the things assholes can cling on to make themselves feel superior to everybody else. And if we want this to work, that's how it's going to have to be. Somebody you think is a totally irresponsible slut is going to get a free abortion, somebody you think shouldn't have any more kids is going to get IVF, somebody you think is a hambeast is going to get blood pressure medication, somebody you think is a goddamn worthless drunk will get treated for liver disease. If we want this to work, people are going to have to look at those possibilities, yawn loudly, and say, "So fucking what?"

A.

Once Again, Black People Fail to Please Bill O'Reilly

It's hard out here for a simp:

So Bill O'Reilly and his twin blondes of the apocalypse would like to know where all the mourning black people were when John Lennon died or something. Leave aside that no one is required to mourn anyone, that you should love people while they're alive and then recognize that after their deaths it's about you and not them, that everybody deals with death differently. Leave aside that this isn't a contest of pop culture death bingo or something where you have to fill in all the squares of people you've grieved for in equal measure. I just don't know where on earth Bill O'Reilly gets the idea that anybody's process of dealing with the death of someone whose work was important to them is in any way even a thing. I mean, the fuck does he care? 

 

While we're on the MJ topic, I so loathe the pressure to conform to group grieving on cultural pundit command. It's a transparently fake attempt to create a sense of national "unity" around something that more often than not doesn't actually affect those coping out loud on television. I felt this way when Princess Diana died and I felt this way on 9/11 and shortly thereafter, like, it's not Good Morning America's job to tell me what to be sad about and how to talk to my children about how the world is full of assholes who suck, and it's not my job to grab a piece of somebody else's tragedy and hold on tight to give my life temporary and pathetic importance.

 

Mike calls this the Oprah effect, in that newscasters hope to glom onto some guru's popularity by doing the same thing she does, completely forgetting that THAT'S NOT THEIR JOB and it's bullshit besides, like, not everybody needs to be told how to talk to their children. Some people, by virtue of not being complete fucktards, know how to do it all on their own. Whenever Matt Lauer or some similar featherhead comes on TV to tell me how to cope all I can think is how satisfying it would be to kick the kind advice-giver really hard in the genitals. Which I guess is a coping mechanism, albeit one not usually prescribed by Dr. Phil.

Still, it's about as stupid to tell someone not to grieve as it is to tell someone to do so, and I don't think O'Reilly's vast black viewership is going to be heartbroken that they missed the chance to satisfy him.

 

A.

 

 

 

Unless You Cheat, You're a Pussy

Seriously, Ross Douthat:

So which is the real America? Is it Tsing Loh’s dystopia, where everyone “works” grimly on their relationships, and post-feminist husbands happily cook saffron-infused porcini risotto but rarely practice seduction on their wives? Or is it tabloid country: The land of Jon minus Kate, and governors who vanish to “hike the Appalachian Trail” — not to mention gossip-column fixtures like Britney Spears (rumored last week to be contemplating her third marriage in six years) and the mistress-parading Mel Gibson?

First of all, there is no one I want giving me romantic advice LESS than this man. Leave aside that he looks like a young Wilford Brimley, leave aside the creepy idea that either you cheat on your wife or you cook, the dude seems to fundamentally believe we need him to tell us how to be. Which is an epidemic Republican disease, but there you are.

I hate this about writing about relationships, the assumption that you're categories, roles, that you fit into boxes and once you're in, you're in for life. You're either passionate or "post-feminist," which seems to be Douthat's way of saying gay, with the cooking with saffron and all. Is everybody in his world that self-conscious, eager to find a social movement on which to blame their behavior? I honestly do not get this: if you do not want to cook for your wife, don't do it. If you don't like saffron, I know of no one, not even the most doctrinaire feminist, who would force you to eat it.

Yes, yes, metaphor, but that's exactly my point. I don't think we have to make some kind of choice between cheating and having a series of ugly public divorces and shaving our heads and hitting the paparazzi with baseball bats, or having a sexless marriage that you deride in public as being about "companionship." As if having a nice friend is the worst thing in the world, as if that's something about a billion people wouldn't want. These aren't the choices: instability + passion or companionship - sex. And perpetuating that idea just gives license to men and women conditioned to think that stalking, controlling and over-dramatizing mean that love is real. See Twilight, every romantic comedy ever made, and half the novels on the planet.

I so hate relationship trend stories, across the ideological spectrum. I want everybody to have what they want. Women, men, nobody, everybody, whatever. I want to live in a world where everyone can make the choices that suit them best, and I want to work to make that world a reality.

Ross Douthat, apparently, either wants you to cheat to prove you're a Real Man with Passion, or shut up and eat your saffron like a good little wuss.

A.

Fair and balanced wishful thinking

Like shooting fish in a barrel

Dedicated to Republican moralists everywhere:

Our business within this common mortal life

In case anyone has ever wondered, I DO realize I'm an inconsistent, intellectually sloppy, lazy asshole a great deal of the time, online and off. I've seldom been accused of being a fierce activist, a rigorous thinker, or good soldier.

This isn't self-deprecation, just acknowledgment that I am those things many probably would describe me as. And yes, of course, I am more. It's almost 1 p.m. right now, I'm likely to be at least three people before I leave the office for home this afternoon. Like all of us, most of us anyway, I'm many selves and some of them on occasion are wonderfully brave, selfless, focused, and righteously eloquent. Mostly though, it's hit or miss.

The above musing has been brought to light by some restlessness I've felt lately, observing, as I am wont to do, the political spectacle surrounding us. Observing: most days it's that, a game watched from the distance. During the last season, the long election second half, we were players, or maybe at least waterboys. Closer to the field at least,  more invested, enfranchised, stakes were real.

Now back to observing mostly. Of course, that's a false construct (I hope) but it's helpful. Otherwise, what are we? Referees? The ball itself?

It's the "otherwise" that's making me fidgety lately. I'm a realist, I have a pragmatic, albeit fairly rudimentary, understanding of how our government organization works, how political capital is gained and spent, how consensus is built toward lawmaking, and sometimes even justice. I get that the players, and here I mean the elected, have to stay in the game to score.

So anyway, when I say that I admire our new president, it's the truth. I'm being honest when I say I was inspired by his campaign and by much of what he's done in office so far. It's also true that I've been heartbroken by more than a few of his compromises, none more so than those dealing with torture. So far I cannot discern a genuine moral or ethical motivation for his choices in this regard. I wish he was 10 times braver, I find some of his "changes," if not counterfeit, already devalued, and I wish he was more a leader and less a politician.

Likewise: when I see the progress of my own chosen tribe toward marriage equality and bringing down DADT, I'm genuinely excited. I know these are moves toward justice, and I think they are worthwhile struggles. At the very same time, I feel squeezed in by the accompanying trappings of conformity and assimilation. If I have one true self somewhere in that crowd of changing identities, I recognize that self is inherently an outsider, and I trust the strength and perspective one gains from being counter to, outside of, the mainstream.

That self wonders what marriage equality and serving in the military means when at this exact moment somewhere, there's a queer or transgendered kid who had to sleep in a bus station last night, no family, no home, no decent job, no supporting circle of loved ones.

Would the fights we are spending so much money and energy on have made a difference to the 10 year old that hung himself because the kids at school called him a faggot every day? And speaking of fighting, many of the elders whose collective shoulders we were lifted on are languishing in single rooms where the only visible culture is one of aging and death. Did they get what they fought for? Are we carrying on with them in mind?

I don't have an answer for any of this. Except that politics as a pastime seems very often incompatible with the complexities of engaging with the world.

Also that I probably watch too much television.

Bad Things Don't Happen to Good People

Amanda hits on something interesting during this discussion of Oprah:

No matter how bad you feared it was, Oprah’s even worse than you could have imagined, letting her “experts” push ideas such as “diet will prevent you from catching HPV, so don’t worry about the vaccine” and otherwise encouraging her viewers to take health measure that will actually degrade their health and work against their interests.  It also functions a neat examination of the sort of motivations that keep health woo alive, despite all evidence and common sense against it.  I somewhat disagree with the authors, who seem to think that the emphasis on woo on Oprah’s show is all about her massive ego.  It actually seems to me that it’s ratings-grabbing pandering, and Oprah just has, for whatever reason, a real ear for those things that will trip up her audience’s wishes and anxieties.  Health woo tends to rely on a few principles to keep people’s interest and money flowing:

1) Bad things don’t happen to good people.*
2) There must be a way of understanding the body that doesn’t involve actually gaining difficult and often embarrassing knowledge.
3) The world is out to get me.
4) There must be a quick, easy solution out of any problem, and it’s just a matter of finding out what it is.

Since Oprah’s audience is largely female, they aren’t completely off in their sense that the world is out to get them.  But the reasons for this and the ways to fight it that Oprah offers are fucked up.  Yes, people routinely discredit women’s intelligence.  But the solution is not, as Oprah protege Jenny McCarthy suggests, to claim a special female-only “mommy knowledge” that automatically trumps evidence and reason.

Emphasis mine, because I think there's a step farther to go here: Bad things don't happen to good people, and I am a good person. That's the assumption. You hear it every time someone is featured in the news as being poor or unfortunate, the subtext (or, increasingly, text) that "she should have done this, that, the other thing," that "I would never make that mistake." You'd evacuate before the hurricane, you'd sell some bling to buy health insurance, you'd refuse a cheap mortgage if someone dangled it in front of your face and told you to take it, etc, etc, etc. Nothing bad would ever happen to YOU, because you're smarter, more virtuous, you're destined to be okay.

And then. My years doing weekend cops reporting taught me nothing but the randomness of horror: the couple on their honeymoon pasted all over the freeway, the father out getting milk who got shot in a drive-by, the lightning strike, the swimming accident, the disappearances and deaths and illnesses all preceded by the absolute assurance that everything was fine. When bad fortune whallops you one, you always wonder, once the little cartoon birds have stopped circling overhead, where on earth everybody is who's supposed to be taking care of you? And they're off doing what you did once: picking your life apart to see where you went wrong to deserve what you got.

Then you realize, if your'e remotely self-aware, that the world is full of random shit designed to blow your life to smithereens, and that we need to take care of each other because you never know when it can happen. Or you don't realize that, and keep looking for a way to make yourself tragedy-proof, maybe through eating acai berries or something. If you find that way, would you drop me a line? Let me know, if you run across something that works.

A.

The Political Process Has Been Closed

If only someone would give right-wingers the vote.

Wait.

Did that.

Back in '76.

1776, or thereabouts, anyway.

Shit.

If only someone would ... wait, I know! Give right-wingers more votes than everybody else!

THEN everything would be fine!

Using the political system to stomp on radicalized fringes does not seem to be very effective in getting them to eschew violence.  In fact, it seems to be a very good way of getting more violence.  Possibly because those fringes have often turned to violence precisely because they feel that the political process has been closed off to them.

Lady, are you smoking crack? Are you smoking crack while sitting in a cloud of crack-smoke wearing a T-shirt that says I HEART CRACK while waiting for your crackhead boyfriend to come home with more crack that you sent him out to get so that you'd have some crack when you were done with the crack you're smoking now? Seriously? Because last I checked, "not being able to convince somebody else that you're not a fucking lunatic and that your ideas about everything should be adopted by everybody" doesn't qualify as "the political process has been closed off" to you. That's not how this works, that's not how this has ever worked, and to coddle domestic terrorists by saying they were just pushed to it because they weren't handed everything they ever wanted is ... special. Some kind of special. Some kind of something, that's for sure. What the fuck, today? It's like all the stupid were set free from their stupid-farm for some kind of idiot rumspringa of 24 hours.

For eight fucking years anybody to the left of Pinochet had to kick back and watch while sensible centrists and the Coalition of the Involuntarily Committable got together and raped the country and fucked up the whole world. For eight fucking years we were told that marching in the streets with giant puppets was the most horrific form of treason imaginable, was demoralizing our troops and hurting the debate and making the baby Pope Benedict cry. Not once did I ever in that time hear Megan McArdle or any of her other sensible friends discuss how maybe, just maybe, President Bush and his administration had PUSHED us to the edge, where we HAD to make those puppets because we felt the political process was closed to us.

No, back then it was "elections have consequences" and "you lost" and "look upon my works, ye mighty, and fuck off," and anytime anybody had the temerity to say, "erm, dude, if you don't mind I'll be over here with this sign on a stick" they might as well have been plotting to shoe-bomb Air Force One the way the whiners in the nuttersphere howled and shrieked. There was none of this, "you just don't know how hard it is to be on the losing end of everything including your soul" back then. Just them, partying with Free Republic on the White House lawn, waving their big foam fingers in our faces going "nyah nyah nyah."

Now that they're out of power, natch, what choice do they have but to go shoot up church lobbies in the hopes of bagging abortion doctors for their trophy wall of American apostates? Really, what else could they do? It's not like they could vote, or convince other people to listen to them, or organize, or do any of the damn things I feel like we've been doing since before there was dirt in order to get a not-entirely-crazy in-another-life-he'd-be-a-moderate-Republican dude finally elected so a third of the country could act like Satan just put his feet up on their mother's white-clothed dinner table. It's not like they could do anything else, right? They had to start shooting.

Right?

A.

Oh For the Sake of God's Magic Unicorn Pajamas

Far be it from me to defend Michelle Malkin, since she pretty much thinks I and all my friends should die in a fire, but this is just horseshit.

A.

How the World Actually Works

Awful. Just awful. And from the comments:

I remember my wife, foggy with sedation after the final procedure, being helped from the exam table. He had her sit up and put her arms around his neck, and then he lifted her into a wheelchair. “You give good hugs” she whispered. He paused just for a moment. “You’re just fine,” he told her.

I've been on intimate terms with the fertility-medical-gynecological complex for going on three years now, and I have to say, never in my life have I met more tone-deaf compassionless sexist assholes than in that time. I'm not kidding, the meanness and stupidity and judgmental dickitude is constant and egregious. This  at a time when you're either pregnant or trying to get that way, being shot full of hormones and given well-meaning advice by every fucking busybody on the planet, so really, you'd think people would be gentle and kind. BUT NO.

This isn't just my experience, everybody I know has had at least one episode of professional dumbassery so profound it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. I've been seeing like eight doctors and there's only one of them I can remotely stand, and that's just because he barely speaks. And I'm a relatively run-of-the-mill patient. I cannot fathom going through what the commenter DougJ quotes went through with any of the doctors I currently have, nor at all, nor with anyone less than absolutely merciful and kind. In this field, decency and warmth seem to be in short damn supply.

And it strikes me, having ducked my head into some of the Freepi threads about Tiller's murder yesterday, that most people who rail against abortion even under these kinds of circumstances just have no honest-to-god fucking clue how any of this stuff really works. The dangers, the fears, the very real medical complications pregnancy can cause and what that MEANS for the people involved. I get that, I mean, it's easier to maintain your worldview if you don't think about what Tiller did as anything other than the horrendous thing it sounded like. I get that it's easier not to think about this except as the clinical description, and not as some situation where a woman and her husband were expecting a baby. Were happy. Were hopeful. And then had that all taken away.

It's easier not to think about it and to hold up the anecdote of some irresponsible, stupid girl as what we think of, to make the distinction. But this is the reality of the situation. This is the way this stuff actually works. There's nothing about it that isn't awful, and those standing by and cheering Tiller's death would do well to remember it.

A.

Thank Heaven, Here is Not All the World

Good God, there are days when it seems like the fight will never, ever, ever be over, right?

A new ballot initiative will put California back into the gay-marriage fight, which has considerably broadened in the months since Prop 8 passed. States like Vermont and Maine have embraced gay marriage, and New York is among others that may do so soon. And in a telling bit of irony, Moreno began his dissent by quoting not from his own court's historic 2008 opinion, but from one issued earlier this year in Iowa. "The 'absolute equality of all' persons before the law [is] 'the very foundation principle of our government,'" he wrote.

For my disappointment and anger today, I have to thank not just the power of the Mormon church and the fearful bigotry of right-wing sex scolds everywhere in making what is the fundamental issue of equal protection under the law into a farce about sodomy in schools and someone else taking away your marriage.

I also have to thank my parents, who from the time I was old enough to point told me that mocking someone for his difference, or implying he is worth any less than me for it, was unacceptable, out of bounds.

I have to thank the young man who came and spoke to my (Catholic) high school "human sexuality" class about being gay, about always knowing he was different but never knowing quite how at first. I have to thank his courage and his humor and his generosity toward a bunch of privileged brats who wouldn't know until years later what his words meant.

I have to thank the poor guy who suffered through being my ignorant ass's first close, and out, gay friend, for slapping me around when I said something stupid, for talking to me and arguing with me and educating me when it really wasn't his job to do so at all. 

I have to thank my friends today, who every day live lives of beauty and joy that should be the envy of everyone, and against whom the very thought of pain is unthinkable.

I have to thank hundreds of thousands of people who stood up and fought discrimination in all its forms and continue to reach out to others despite setback after setback, insult after insult. Without them I would not be disappointed today. Without them I would not be angry.

Wiithout them, too, I would not be hopeful for the future. I would not be sure that we are now and have ever been on the road away from these small fears and toward hope and common decency, however long and rocky that road might be. For all that I have to thank those who fought Proposition 8 and everything like it. I have to thank them because even in defeat their voices raised are those that call to us from a better world, where we are better people. And hearing them, we can see the way clear to get there.

 

Photo by Derek Powazek.

A.

There's Always Somebody Making All Rich Assholes Look Like Assholes

Via Chicagoist, here we have a mishmash of fear of poverty, racism, crap communication, typical city bullshit, and the entire classist sundae is topped off with a heaping spoonful of entitlement:

One of Chicago's more successful public schools sits just a stone's throw from the new Barneys store in the Gold Coast. Ogden Elementary is the type of place where well-heeled parents pick up their offspring in luxury cars, with many of the children destined for a full slate of after-school activities to foster their development.

But the aging school at 24 W. Walton St. will temporarily close next month while it gets a nearly $60 million makeover, and exactly where the 400 or so kindergarten through 4th-grade students will learn while the hard hats go to work has become quite a controversy in the swanky neighborhood.

So far, Chicago Public Schools officials have narrowed the choices to two school buildings, both near the former Cabrini-Green housing complex. Though the Ogden students will have their temporary home all to themselves, moving them to the Cabrini area -- where only three of the original buildings remain -- has set off a dispute touching on everything from transportation costs to class and race.

"I am not sending my child there," said Michelle Herman, mother of two Ogden students, one of whom would be affected by the move. "That is directly across the street from the projects.

"The reason I pay so much money to live in this area is because [Ogden] is the school my kids go to," she added.

Although Ogden students would be dealing more with Cabrini's notorious reputation than the present reality of a rapidly gentrifying area, parents have not been shy about voicing their anger. Some say they've sent letters and placed calls to new schools CEO Ron Huberman, while others are trying to use "connections" to see if something can be done about the move.

That's right. You pay a lot of money for your kids to go to a school so wealthy it's getting moved TEMPORARILY so you can build another wealthy school in its place. You pay a lot of money for that privilege and you know, it's not even so much I want to deny it to you as I want you to shut the hell UP about it. Good God, do you listen to yourself? Somewhere in the lessons you learned about being a human being, lady, humility got missed.

I want to take you by the ear and drag you down 20 miles south to see schools with holes in the ceilings and chains on the doors with kids just as nice as yours, just as deserving as yours, just as blameless as yours trying to learn with parkas on because the boilers don't work. And I'd like you to explain to those kids how you pay a lot of money to live where you live. Not because I think they'll understand or give a good goddamn about you, but because I want to see your face when you do it. Good Lord. Be as rich as you want to be, far as I'm concerned, I'm not going to take your money away, but can you have the marginal good sense not to bitch in public that you might have to rub up against somebody your country club wouldn't approve as a member?

I'd like to call this racism (the Cabrini-Green area is historically black, the parents pictured in the story are white) but I don't think it's even that easy. I covered these stories for years; it's never just race. It's also the idea that poverty is catching, that people in "other" neighborhoods aren't people and wouldn't give you directions or loan you a cup of sugar or have lives anything like yours, that segregation is the answer to keeping you safe, that there is a way to wall yourself off from the problems of the world just by locking the doors of your minivan as you drive through "their" streets. It's the idea that crime is something that happens to other people; you move out to a rich suburb to get away from everything and everyone who could hurt you and then some wealthy mother smothers her children in their beds and everybody says, "This is such a nice community," confused and frightened: I thought we were safe here. It's about the idea that location equals immunity from fear.

The public school system in Illinois is joke and the one in Chicago more so; schools for the rich are palaces and those for the poor are demilitarized zones and it's been that way since the bottoming out of the manufacturing base in the late 1970s and it's only getting worse now as the state budget crunch is passed on to municipalities. Cabrini-Green isn't the worst of it; anyway that neighborhood now is really nice. My dad's friend keeps a store there and we've been watching it change while we visited D over the years; from coke deals out in the open around the corner (my first childhood education in the reality of drugs of any kind) to now a billion Starbucks shops and pedestrian traffic that isn't wearing plastic high heels. Anywhere I can't afford the rent is nice enough to put a school, in my opinion, so the argument is bullshit on its face.

But the argument isn't the point. The point is we've divided up this city, this country even, into safe areas and danger zones so real in our minds they might as well be marked out with concrete walls topped with barbed wire, and on my side I'm okay and on your side you're not and that's all right by me? Hell no, that's not all right by me and it shouldn't be by you as well.

Irate parents have become a common part of the city public schools' landscape, given the number of school closings in recent years.

Ogden, though, isn't being permanently closed because of low performance or declining enrollment. Instead, the district is building a state-of-the-art facility replete with underground parking.

I clicked over to the comments thinking it was gonna be a hellhole of "no nooooooo no noooo icky poor kids get away here's what I hate about black people my kids deserve to have things your kids are crackheads" but for once, newspaper commenters for the win:

What is more important is where the Schiller students are going to relocated to, to accommodate Ogden. Sadly, something always stinks with CPS.

---

Boo Hoo, let's give them special status because they are rich. Let them hire private guards for their kids with all their money or home school them.

I pay plenty of tax $$$$ and have no kids in CPS, do you want to give me a refund?

---

an underground parking garage? at an elementary school? What, for the limo and driver to wait in?

CPS, explain. I want use of that parking when I come downtown.

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I am a City taxpayer and do not have a decent school in my neighborhood! The kids are in mobile units due to overcrowding. Are we getting a new facility with underground parking? Heck no! I pay double as I pay to send my children to a private school with no overcrowding and a real building...not a mobile unit.

Huberman is making changes where the money is...not where it counts to the children!

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God forbid these kids see others live. It might interfere with their feelings of entitlement.

A.

"I used to tell God I hated him."

When they sent me to the sisters

For the way men looked at me

Branded as a jezebel

I knew I was not bound for heaven

I'd be cast in shame

into the Magdalene laundries. 

                        -Joni Mitchell, The Magdalene Laundries

The Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse released a long-awaited report today. The report, in five volumes of 2,500 pages, took a decade of investigation to produce, and catalogues 70 years of systemic child abuse by Catholic religious orders, of at least 35,000 victims. 

Sadly, that estimate is likely too low. Many of the victims, as well as their abusers, are long dead. Even sadder, no one will face prosecution for these crimes, or for the conspiracy to cover them up.  Some surviving victims are already calling the report a politically-motivated whitewash.

The Irish State colluded with the religious authorities to cover up child abuse that was "endemic" in Catholic-run schools and care homes for 70 years, a devastating report concluded today. The Child Abuse Commission catalogued sexual, physical and emotional abuse inflicted on 35,000 disadvantaged, neglected and abandoned children by both religious and lay staff over the last 70 years. 

The Commission has described the attitude of the Church towards its work as 'adversarial and legalistic.' 

Among the religious orders whose work was investigated were the Sisters of Mercy, responsible for the largest number of children's institutions, the Christian Brothers, which ran schools for boys aged 10 to 16, the Presentation Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. Several are expected to be explicitly criticized by the inquiry, headed by Justice Sean Ryan. The first head of the Commission, Ms Justice Mary Laffoy resigned in protest at a lack of co-operation by the Irish department of education. It was set up in 1999 when the allegations first surfaced.

1999 may have been when Ireland finally started to address the situation but allegations had "surfaced" long before that. People had heard these stories for years. The last Magdalene laundry wasn't shut down till 1996. Yes, 1996. My ex lived in Ireland for a couple of years in the late 1980s. I first heard about the laundries and industrial schools from her. I remember being incredulous, naively asking why, if it was so well-known, no one "did anything" about it. She just shrugged, "It's Ireland. It's the Church." 

Many of the institutions housed abandoned or neglected children, but courts also sent those guilty of truancy and petty crime. Some also housed disabled children. Unmarried mothers were also sent to institutions known as Magdalene Laundries, many by their own families, where they were forced into hard physical work, usually washing and ironing clothes, and lived in spartan, prison-like conditions.

"Those places were the Irish gulags for women. When you went inside their doors you left behind your dignity, identity and humanity. We were locked up, had no outside contacts and got no wages, although we worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. What else is that but slavery? And to think that they were doing all this in the name of a loving God! I used to tell God I hated him." 

"Those places" were the Magdalene laundries: convents throughout Ireland that contained huge washing workhouses run by nuns, which were originally set up in the early 19th century as a refuge for prostitutes. A hundred years later they had become prisons to which Irish Catholic girls and young women "in moral danger" could be sent by their parish priest - the term covered anyone from single mothers (who had often become pregnant as a result of rape or incest) to girls who were simply high-spirited or "bold." 

Many never saw their families or the outside world again but lived their entire lives behind walls until they were buried in unmarked communal graves. They, in their tens of thousands, are "the disappeared" of Ireland.

One Would Think, Reading This Story

That a president had never been protested before.

Somehow, though, I don't remember the worrisome coverage about those protests "clouding" the president's awesomeness, or the concern-trolling that they might diminish his authority to do whatever he damn well pleased, or the migration to top-billing on the news aggregators' sites on the basis of it all just being so awful, that a president was met with critics and signs and people getting arrested.

A.

The Definition of Friendship

Keeping those queers away from your kids.

A.

Scalia: Class Act

I would not be alone in a room with this man for all the beer in Green Bay:

David O’Neil, an assistant to the solicitor general representing the federal government, tried to steer a middle course.

The Fourth Amendment had been violated, he said, because school officials did not have a reasonable suspicion that Ms. Redding had secreted drugs in her undergarments. But Mr. O’Neil added that Ms. Redding should not be allowed to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search, because the law was unclear at the time.

Justice Antonin Scalia challenged him on the first point.

“You search in the student’s pack, you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs,” he said. “Don’t you have, after conducting all these other searches, a reasonable suspicion that she has drugs in her underpants?”

“You’ve searched everywhere else,” Justice Scalia said. “By God, the drugs must be in her underpants.”

He has thought WAY too much about this.

A.

La Cucaracha

Look, I know all about this, okay, how hating someone gives that person power over me and whatnot, how seething invective and furious anger may be what he deserves to receive but it is not what I deserve to give, I get it. Can we just stipulate that I realize I should be a better person and get on to how much I fucking hate that dishonest Nixonite shitbag John O'Neill?

That would be the John O'Neill first seen getting stunningly PWNED as a child by my once-and-forever  political boyfriend John Kerry:

That would be the John O'Neill who was put up to his dishonest shitbaggery by the biggest dishonest shitbag of them all:

Former Nixon special counsel Chuck Colson has said that Kerry was an "articulate" and "credible leader" of those veterans calling for an end to the Vietnam War and therefore "an immediate target of the Nixon administration." As such, the Nixon administration found it necessary to "create a counterfoil" to Kerry. Colson recounted, "We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could do to boost his group." Articles from the April 21 edition of the Houston Chronicle and the June 17, 2003, edition of The Boston Globe confirm close ties between O'Neill and the Nixon administration.

Clearly they hated one another:

[Cheap joke about how he gave Nixon one hell of a tea-bagging goes here.]

Not content with ruining our lives in 1971 and again in 2004, not content with doing as much damage as a punch-drunk tazmanian devil in a crystal factory, here comes John O'Neill again, to remind us through the charitable sharing of his thoughts that we are grateful the world is full of people so absolutely and utterly unlike him. Here he comes again, glomming onto the latest opportunity to look like a fucking jackass in a suit in front of a bunch of racists and whackos. What a bologna pony. I don't know why these fucks just cannot figure out that they LOST, and not just in 2008, either. The number of people who think Nixon ruled and that the Vietnam War was Teh Awesome is pretty fucking small. Most people agree that period of our national history hummed balls and we don't want to repeat it, and so to blither on about how it was totally badass how you're a Republican in the mold of the only president more unpopular than Bush the Second is kind of ... how can I put this ... stupid.

While I get that it has to be galling there's video evidence of you being wrong all over the Internet and the world, what I do not get is perpetuating the idiocy by finding every opportunity to be on the wrong side of everything all over again. Just LET IT GO already. Stop being wrong and ruining people's lives. Stop sucking and lying and go sit in the sun under a beach umbrella. What IS this? Whatever gods are testing us with this pointy little creep, we are OVER IT.

I'll bet his speech is just gonna be precious.

Tea Party link via Jane on Twitter.

A.

Amazon

WHO SUMMONS THE FAIL WHALE?

A.

What The Editors Said

Here:

Indeed, there was a time - long ago, in the reckless days of my youth - when I quite literally hated the President of the United States, and said some very divisive things along those lines, possibly involving metaphorical violence, possibly involving the forceable insertion of frozen pineapples into delicate orifices and perhaps breaking into people’s houses and peeing on their pillows and shaving their pets.  I seem to recall hearing a lot about “responsible dissent“, and “fever swamps”, and how saying mean things was tantamount to fascism, and I recall thinking that the people saying these things should blow it out their pasty, pockmarked asses.  But who can remember, so long ago?  The point is, there’s a difference between openly advocating violence and calling people not nice names, or needing to calm the fuck down and stop being such a spaz, or being an idiot, or making shit up, or any of the myriad forms of douchebaggery which are the inevitable result of letting people speak their minds in our infinitely stupid democracy.  I’m not saying there’s some invincible firewall between militialand and FOX News - there certainly isn’t - but that doesn’t mean they are the same thing.  Being a terrorist and being a crazy loser are distinct modes of being, even if there are occassional overlaps on the reading list.   Being vague about this, or purposefully conflating the two, gives cover to the former as it smears the latter.

I think the obvious difference between so long ago and now is that the majority of the comments that caused wingnuts to yammer about responsible dissent and fever swamps and fifth columnists were made by filthy hippies in the streets and on web sites a relatively small percentage of the population reads and not, you know, by US CONGRESSWOMEN and nationally televised commentators. I think what largely freaks out people right now is that the people who are now calling for uprisings have a slightly bigger microphone into which to yell, by virtue of being employed by wealthy douchebags or elected by the same. And there's the hypocrisy, too, which is always a nice whipped shit topping on the shit sundae.

Still, in the same way Julia Roberts gets to say whatever she wants about America because she pays her taxes like everybody else, Michelle Bachmann gets to be batshit crazy as much as she wants without actually handing out ammo on the street corner (can you do that in Minnesota? if it's legal I guess she can) and stupid lunatics get to take their cues from her or not. Is it vile? Should people say it's vile? Absolutely on both counts. But that denunciation has to also recognize that Glenn Beck and Rush and Michelle are morons who no more intend to join the actual revolution than I do, and not excuse the idiots who follow them by saying they were mind-controlled. Deluded, sure, but not robbed of the responsibility to seek out truth and knowledge for themselves.

A.

The Sir Edmund Hillary Theory of Cheating

The moron-driven life:

It’s lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, the pride of life, and you have to know the antidotes, and you have to set up the parameters that keep you from even being tempted in those areas, which means for instance, I’m never alone, ever, ever alone with a woman, or even my myself when I’m traveling.

Jesse takes this to mean, natch, that Rick Warren is his cock to such an extent (and by the way you can all thank me now for making you think of Little Rick) that he cannot be alone with a woman without cheating on his wife. And I get that, I do, but I also get misplaced hostility and fear from what he's saying. There's something really hostile about a man who views women as having the sole purpose of tempting him into having sex. He's in a room with them, they're there for sex, and not just for sex but to maliciously drive him from the decent and upstanding path he's chosen. That's their purpose, to him. I mean, eww.

John's peeps theorize he was trying to talk about the importance of appearing aboveboard, which I don't necessarily think makes things better, just smaller and slightly less sordid. I can see the argument that he's saying it's important not to repeatedly put yourself in situations you know could lead to bad behavior, like not hanging out in bars if you're in AA or something? Still, I don't know, I've been alone with tons of dudes not my husband and have managed not to screw them, and not solely by virtue of there being nobody else around. Is Warren really advancing the theory that if a chick shows up in a room with you, you pretty much have no choice?

I see this as just the latest utterance of a power structure bent on making women responsible for all that is evil in the world, with men as their helpless victims. The temptation for Warren here is being alone with a woman, and she barely exists, except as his gateway to sin.

A.

Well, I'd Have Been Thrown The Hell Out of High School For Sure

If these kinds of rules were in effect way back when:

For two decades, many schools have set zero-tolerance policies on drugs. That means no over-the-counter drugs, no prescription drugs, no pretend drugs in student lockers or pockets. When many teens have ready access to medicine cabinets filled with prescription medications such as Xanax and Vicodin, any capsule or tablet is suspect.

Still, some parents and civil rights advocates say enforcement has been overzealous. Stringent rules have ensnared not only drug dealers and abusers, but a host of sniffling and headachy students seeking quick medical relief. The Supreme Court will consider this month the case of a 13-year-old Arizona student who was strip-searched in 2003 by an administrator who suspected that she was carrying ibuprofen pills.

Fairfax School Board members have debated over time whether to allow students to carry Tylenol or other over-the-counter medicines without registering them with the school nurse. County policy permits cough drops to be carried on campus, for instance, but not shared. Arlington County policies permit high school students to carry over-the-counter pain relievers. A 2006 state law in Maryland overturned some local rules requiring a doctor's note for children to use sunscreen at school.

In Virginia, school systems must comply with state code regarding prescription medications and illegal drugs on campus. Students face expulsion if they bring to school any "controlled substance" or addictive drug regulated by the federal government. "Imitation controlled substances," which could include virtually any prescription pill, are subject to the same hefty repercussions. Local school boards can give a lighter punishment after a review.

In Maryland, school systems have more leeway to set their own drug policies. In the District, prescription medications should be confiscated if they are brought to school without a doctor's order, Dena Iverson, a spokeswoman for the school system, wrote in an e-mail.

Health advocates say that harsh penalties for students who take birth-control pills at school conflicts with a campaign schools are waging against teen pregnancy.

A small portion of school health clinics across the country distribute birth-control pills to teens. But in Fairfax, even carrying the pills in a backpack is counted among the most serious offenses in the Student Responsibilities and Rights handbook.

During two weeks of watching television game shows and trying to keep up with homework online, the Fairfax teen, an honor student and lettered athlete, had time to study the handbook closely. If she had been caught high on LSD, heroin or another illegal drug, she found, she would have been suspended for five days. Taking her prescribed birth-control pill on campus drew the same punishment as bringing a gun to school would have.

Okay, so forget birth control for a minute? No ibuprofen? SO much better to have debilitating muscle or headache pain while taking tests, yeah. No sharing COUGH DROPS? Does this do anything but encourage clandestine use of EVERY drug, making it much harder to spot the illegal ones? Not to mention put kids through the unnecessary hassle of taking time out of class to go to the nurse (who in my high school worked a half-day on Tuesdays, so good luck if you got sick any other time) and beg for an aspirin?

This kind of stuff makes me so crazy, and I KNOW, okay, I know about the anecdote about the doctor's kid selling Vicodin in the parking lot, and I KNOW my inability to understand treating teenagers like criminals is the inevitable byproduct of my not having them myself, but I was one before mandatory strip-searching for decongestants came about and I can't say the real problem with my classmates was rampant and illegal abuse of Tylenol.

The real problem was the boy everybody knew was doing coke in the bathroom during lunch hour, who these kinds of rules would have done nothing to help.

A.

Four Years Later

They're still making hay out of Terri Schiavo's death:

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo, a cause célèbre for the "right to life" movement, sparking controversy from Tampa to Washington and beyond. (Remember, for example, then-Sen. Bill Frist's long-distance dedication ... I mean, diagnosis?) But the folks who claimed that Schiavo's persistent vegetative state was reversible and that her desire to be removed from life support (according to her husband) was, well, just not relevant? Well, they'd rather exploit her than treasure her memory.

A.

'Never A Quiet Force'

Is it me or is there something vaguely and uncomfortably adulatory about headlines like this?

Wayne Anthony Ross never a quiet force

Especially when they accompany stories about people like this?

During a fight several years ago over gay rights, Mendel helped organize Anchorage lawyers in support of an anti- discrimination ordinance. Ross wrote a nasty letter to the Bar Association newsletter, using words like ''immoral, '' ''perversion'' and ''degenerates.'' The language went way beyond reasonable disagreement, Mendel and others said.

It's like they're trying to find a way to say "lunatic bigot" or "one crazy motherfucker" or "says any damn fool thing what pops into his head and foists his fear of penis onto the world at large through advocacy for denying people equal justice and access to, you know, health care, as if that's going to help with his fixation on man-meat" without saying exactly that so they end up with what sounds complimentary because when you extract all the epithets this is what you end up with: Outspoken. Unabashed. Passionate. Never a quiet force.

I get that the Anchorage Daily News can't refer to him as "Wayne Anthony Ross, professional asshole elevated from small-scale fucktardery to statewide goat-fellating through the ingenious maverickiness of Sarah Palin which is why anybody outside of Alaska noticed him at all," but one wonders if there isn't an adjective that applies to Ross which wouldn't also apply equally to someone who didn't spend every hour of every day trying to make the world paranoid and hateful.

Via ONTD.

A.

Finding A Use For A Mickey Kaus Post

In publishing this excruciatingly boring excerpt from a list of people bullshitting with each other, he quotes someone saying something that's always pissed me off:

A friend of mine who works for Pelosi and has been active in California
politics for a long time claims that Savage's bizarre, racist, homophobic
schtick is a complete act. He knows Savage a bit--or at least did when
Savage started his show. This obviously does not excuse it in any way, but
for Savage listeners it is interesting to think about.

Why do dickheads like Savage and his supposed real-life friends think this kind of thing is a defense? If it's an act, to make money or achieve some other end, I mean as with most things wingnut the truth makes matters more repugnant, not less. I'd have LESS respect for Savage knowing this was some "character" he created to cash in than thinking this was really a reflection of his innermost thoughts and convictions.

I'm more inclined to see this as a dodge for getting out of being the kind of socially radioactive scumbag children spit at in the street than a genuine attempt at explanation, thanks. 

Once you've told a caller to your show to get AIDS and die, there's really nothing you can say after that to redeem yourself. After that, it's pretty much a decision tree of how much more additionally fucked you wind up. You're already going to hell, now it's just a matter of picking your circle.

A.

Frozen Weirdo Sci-Fi Babies

I keep trying to post this in the Balloon Juice comments but it keeps getting too long. DougJ on Kinsley and Douthat (always looks like I've typed it wrong) wanking about IVF and stem cell research:

But here’s my question: if the embryos can’t be used for research (as they would be under new laws) or destroyed (as they currently are in many cases), then do they have to kept frozen forever? Isn’t that even stranger and more science-fictiony (one argument people seem to make against stem cell research is that it’s strange and science-fictiony)?

I think Kinsley is right about the politics of this, that screwing with IVF will just piss off people who are trying hard to get pregnant and thus will further ghettoize the conservatives who push for it. But Douthat may be right that conservatives will push for it anyway.

Well, the fundie argument against IVF is that it's strange and science-fictiony too, so I don't see that being the block here. I don't think conservatives will push too hard for this, because despite what the Pope says about IVF being all wrong and sick and shit, it's a $3 billion industry knit into our national obsession with women and sex, families and babies, who has how many kids and when, blah blah blah octuplets. That's not a can of worms you want to open as a party not precisely attractive to chicks at this point.

Also, not to be crass about it, but most people who can afford to go into this stuff headfirst right now are well-off enough to qualify as the potential Republican base. Whether everybody who's undergoing fertility treatments at the moment is rich or not (some just get lucky with their insurance), they're still high enough up on the economic scale not to be written off lightly. If I had to take a guess as to why the fundie Republican base would get nowhere with demonizing women trying to get pregnant, I'd go with "fear of them closing their wallets" over "fear of looking like compassion-less assholes."

A.

There's Always Somebody Ruining the Fun for the Rest of Us

Lady, if you don't want him, we'll take him:

Rick likes that he can be there for their 7-year-old daughter, but Eleanor says, "I don't like coming home and seeing him in my apron." Eleanor says she doesn't know if she can learn to respect her husband if he can't find a job because, "that's one of the basic things that little girls grow up thinking, that the man is going to put a roof over her head he's going to support the family."

All sexist crap aside, what the hell is going on? There are places to go for sensitive discussion of the erosion of traditional gender roles in our society and the effects on people's marriages, especially during times of economic upset, but Good Morning America wouldn't be on my top ten list of them.

Modern American Journalism: Like marriage counseling, in a way.

Stories like this always amuse me — and by amuse I mean enrage — with their total ignorance of any kind of history at all. World War II, anybody? Great Depression? I mean, this movie came out in 198FUCKING3, but leave it to GMA to act like the world began yesterday just because they noticed a really big bang.

A.

Pushed To The Wall

Glenn Beck, still not king:

BECK: But as I’m listening to him. I’m thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now. That feel like nobody’s hearing their voice. The government isn’t hearing their voice. Even if you call, they don’t listen to you on both sides. If you’re a conservative, you’re called a racist. You want to starve children.

O’REILLY: Sure.

BECK: Yada yada yada. And every time they do speak out, they’re shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?

O’REILLY: Well, look, nobody, even if they’re frustrated, is going to hurt another human being unless they’re mentally ill. I think.

BECK: I think pushed to the wall, you don’t think people get pushed to the wall?

Obligatory disclaimer: I don't know and frankly don't care what was going through the head of the Alabama shooter or any one of a dozen people who've gone on shooting sprees in the past decade. I don't know if he did it because he was liberal or conservative or nuts or what, and I don't think it matters in terms of the dead being dead.

What does matter is what's inside Glenn Beck's head, because people keep having him on their shows to speak to the American news audience about this crap and I am becoming concerned that Beck is moving from unhinged to really unhinged. The distinction might not seem that great to other people but there is in fact a line with our media; only problem is nobody knows where it is and it's different for everybody, but let's call it The Glenn Beck Nutbag Threshold and keep an eye on it, mmmkay?

Because really, pushed to the wall? By "political correctness?" And what are his examples of the onerous burden he and his like are obligated to shoulder? Being called a racist. Most likely for avowing support for a party that built its electoral gains for years on institutionalized and overt racism in varying amounts of each until they found what worked. That's the kind of mental strain that would drive you to start blasting away with a gun? Being told you want to starve children? Who exactly said this to Glenn Beck? What imaginary tie-dyed dreadlocked hippie said this to him in his darkest nightmares? And why, again, is that the thing that would cause you to go over the edge?

I really wish conservative pundits could decide once and for all if they are, in fact, the most powerful and manliest defenders of masculinity in the world, the last American cowboys, the upholders of all that is tough and resolute on earth. Most of them seem to think they are, slapping Strike Force badges on themselves and bragging about how many liberals they'd off if only it was legal. Most of them seem to like pointing out how steeped they are in badassery, yelling that "We Surround Them" crap (Here's a hint, if "you" surround "them?" You're no longer an oppressed minority, you're a majority too stupid to figure out how to leverage your numbers, capable only of whining about the breathing space you occupy.) for all and sundry. They're the last examples of John Wayne, ready to teach us all a lesson.

Unless they're delicate flowers whose sensibilities are so easily offended that telling them you can't throw racial or sexist epithets around anymore in public is akin to destroying the very essences of their beings. I'm as steeped in white straight middle class privilege as anybody else and it's uncomfortable, sure, to be told you hold some view that is outdated or prejudiced, but I'll never understand why updating someone's outlook on life to the 20th century is equal to an oppression due resistance with armed violence. It's that bad, not being able to tell racist jokes in public anymore? It's that bad, not being able to call somebody this or that name, and reduce them to something less than you solely on the basis of something they can't do anything about? Really? Your life is that empty, that if they take away your ability to call somebody the N word or say maybe you should think twice before bashing that gay guy, you've got no choice but to start popping fools?

And you'll notice it's always someone else forcing them to grow the fuck up, too. For a party that likes to crow about personal responsibility, they seem to take a lot of leading around. Left to their own devices they'd be happy to be racist, sexist, homophobic fucknuts jawing on all day about how if it wasn't for affirmative action they'd be king right now, and they're happy to trumpet that to the heavens by talking about being pushed to the wall.

Pushed. As if left to their own devices, you'd be able to get a sheet of plastic wrap between them and the wall. As if they wouldn't be smashed right up against it, entirely on their own.

A.

Is Joan of Arc Gonna Have to Start Breaking Fools?

I'm asking:

After a wife has respectfully appealed her spouse's decision—a privilege she should not abuse—she must accept his final answer as "God's will for her at that time," Peace advises. The godly wife must also suppress selfish desires (for romance, a career, an equitable marriage), practice addressing her spouse in soothing tones, and maintain a private log of bitter thoughts to guide her repentance. "If you disobey your husband," Peace admonishes in The Excellent Wife, "you are indirectly shaking your fist at God."

The popularity of her audiotapes and books, translated into several languages and used as curriculum by Christian women's groups, has made Peace a celebrity in fundamentalist circles, with appearances at conferences and Bible meetings throughout the world. But she's just one among hundreds of professional Titus 2 mentors, older women who help younger ones—as outlined by Apostle Paul in Titus 2:5—"to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God."

A couple quick things. First, this reminds me less of faith or even religion than it does fucking Pampered Chef. A whole cottage industry, Ms. Martha Peace has here, taking women's subjugation and guilt and selling it back to them all packaged up in a bow, while their female friends look on approvingly and talk about recipes. Yes, you need that vegetable chopper, and the audiotapes that tell you how to best fulfill God's plan while still giving your husband oral whenever he wants it. Sign on the dotted line. Host a house party yourself one day!

(Then again, I'm a girl who gets most of her deep thoughts these days from a show about hot space chicks, what the fuck do I know?)

(I also have a kickass chef's knife from Pampered Chef, just in the interests of full disclosure here. Cuts peppers like a motherfucker.)

Second, I would at some point like somebody to ask one of these women who makes a gazillion dollars preaching submission and helplessness to other women to please kind of explain the fucktardedness inherent in her scenario. I'm supposed to give her my money so she can teach me to be a helpmeet and comfort to Mr. A (who would likely be confused and frightened by this turn of events) and then she gets to climb back on the plane while I rub his feet and cook for him every night instead of most? I know critical thought is one of those feminist tendencies she ought to be able to help me overcome, but only after she answers the damn question already.

Which she seems to think she is, here:

Sensitive to charges that her busy career might contradict her message, Peace reassures audiences that she ministers only to women, and only under her pastor's supervision. Indeed, the Titus 2 movement finds its most prominent voices in the Kentucky-based Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and a roster of conservative male theologians that includes John Piper, founder of Desiring God Ministries; John MacArthur, megachurch pastor of Grace Community Church; Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Bruce Ware, president of the Evangelical Theological Society, who caused a public stir last June when he told a Texas audience that domestic violence often stems from women's lack of submission.

Last I checked ain't any of those hoary old creeps your husband, girl, so ... no.

A.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

That professionally-full-of-fail conservative John Ziegler would be a lousy date.

Ziegler opined about relationships and in a nutshell, he thinks women are foolish. He believes marriage should have contracts that come up for renewal and review every five years. Isn't that romantic?

When he said, "I realize talking about women and being rational is an oxymoron", that did it.

A.

Their Entire Argument In One Easy, Yelly, Loud, Obnoxious Brain Fart

This is it, guys. This is the culmination of it. This is the apotheosis of the asshole dude we all know at the party, sitting there sure that if all the imaginary undeserving dicks in his head just disappeared he'd be king of the fucking mountain. This is the entire GOP argument of the past 40 years, that the reason we are always vaguely and sometimes explicitly screwed up as a country is that somebody out there is getting what you deserve and even though you don't know who that is, hey, you should be really fucking pissed off!

(And by the way, if you don't know who that is, we'll gladly tell you. I think today it's the gays again, but it might be welfare queens. Nobody called from Asshole HQ with the lottery numbers yet.)

And from that argument — DO YOU WANT YOUR TAX DOLLARS SUPPORTING SOMEBODY WHO PICKS HIS NOSE? WHO HAS FOUR HUNDRED BABIES? WHO'S TOO LAZY TO PAY THE MORTGAGE? WHO COULD BUY FRUIT FOR HIS KIDS BUT FEEDS THEM GROUND UP GLASS INSTEAD? WELL? DO YOU? — issues every other one, about government spending and pork (otherwise known as infrastructure projects in towns not your own but paid for with money you could otherwise use to become king) and contraception/family planning (otherwise known as fixing mistakes made by dishonest slutty girls not your daughters with money you could otherwise use to become king) and wars of choice (fought against people who don't look like us and therefore want to take our shit and actually, this time we could have used that money to become king, because it cost just that much, so DAMMIT) but this is it:

You are worthy. Everybody else is getting away with it. Everybody else is just some lazy asshole who's scamming people dumb enough to work for it. Everybody else is your enemy, and I feel for these people, honestly, because it's got to be so exhausting living constantly under siege like this, but my sympathy stops at the vague desire they'd get some therapy. I don't intend to reward their pathetic horseshit with legislation, come on.

What's truly interesting to me, as this morning's poll numbers indicated, was that this argument, so stunningly effective for decades now, has suddenly stopped working. People don't believe they're the only worthy ones any more. People don't believe the mortgage crisis was caused by poor people buying houses or by ACORN. People don't believe our economy will get better if we just deport all the Mexicans everywhere, even the ones in Mexico. They aren't buying this shit anymore, and while I'd like to put it down to the fact that we're finally coming around to a more realistic and compassionate view of the world, I think what's actually happening is that enough of us are fucked enough that the lies don't hold up the way they used to. EVERYBODY knows at least ten people who are monumentally hosed right now, EVERYBODY. You can't say, "That isn't happening where I live."

I mean, c'mon, even Peggy Noonan caught which way the wind was blowing when the Talbot's closed.

A.

Stupidest. Conservatives. Ever.

Damn, Utah:

And even though Buttars says in the documentary interview,..."the ACLU - bless their black hearts...," it’s his other comments which may get the strongest reaction.

Like this one which the documentary maker confirms is about gays.

"They're mean. They want to talk about being nice. They're the meanest buggers I have ever seen."

And just seconds later, Buttars draws a comparison between some gays and radical Muslims.

“It's just like the Muslims. Muslims are good people and their religion is anti-war. But it’s been taken over by the radical side.”

Buttars also claims he's "killed" every gay rights bill in the legislature for the last 8 years.

He also talks about gay marriage being the beginning of the end.

Buttars: "What is the morals of a gay person? You can't answer that because anything goes."

And finally, this is how senator Buttars refers to the "radical gay movement."

"They're probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of."

That's right. Yes, that's right, you chewy little creep. Two dudes getting married is the greatest threat to America "going down" that you know of. A bigger threat, say, than the total annihilation of a city by a suitcase nuke, or somebody flinging a vial of smallpox into Times Square, or newspaper ads calling Gen. Petraeus mean names. It's still gays, gays, gays, with the music and the buttsex and THE AIDS. Has nobody updated this guy on the Wingnut Priority Rankings since 1992? He's still on people shoving stuff down his throat:

Now, in the interview, senator Buttars also talks about a certain type of reported gay sexual activity which he claims is taking place.

But ABC 4 does not consider that appropriate for its news content.

Must ... resist ... cheap ... "Buttars" joke ...

Must ... resist ... cheap ... how the hell does he know what new techniques are happening in the gay sex scene ... comment ...

Ah, fuck it. Seriously, not everybody who hates gays is a closet case, some of them are just jerks, but anybody who thinks this much about who's doing what to who in a seekrit, sexy subculture that the world may not know of has a real problem he needs to work on with a therapist or possibly a dominatrix.

While we're on the subject, anybody want to clue me in as to what this new type of gay sexual activity is? I try to stay on top (must ... resist ...) of all Internet traditions but lately nobody's sent out the postcards listing the new positions we're all supposed to try with men, women and pets before the ACLU meeting and flag-burning party. Help me out here.

Via ONTD.

A.

I Would Like To Be Referred To As A Supermodel

If you don't mind, you can all start calling me Elle Macpherson.

A., I mean E.

Yes, I Am Going To Talk About Octuplet Mom

For just a minute, to agree with Amanda here:

There’s no doubt in my mind that the reaction to Suleman is hostile for sexist and possibly racist reasons, because if you do think she’s off her gourd to have so many kids (especially at once), then the proper response is compassion and not anger.  But the anger aimed at her is interesting, because the official response right up until she gave birth to 8 babies while unmarried is to treat ridiculous levels with fecundity with open arms, and never, ever to question our culture’s preference for child-bearing over not.  I don’t think the sea is changing on that because of Suleman---if she was married, the question of sanity would never come up in polite company---but there’s a few indicators that this economic crisis, amongst other things, might be causing Americans to rethink their opinions. But maybe we’re going to see the decision not to have a child (or have a child right now) start to gain equality with the decision to have a child.  With the caveat that some groups of women’s child-bearing has always been considered suspect depending on their age, race, or socioeconomic status.

Perhaps the first act of of a compassionate response would be to let this woman and her family work out their stuff in some other fashion than on the Today show and yes, on blogs. I swear, I feel the same way about this that I felt about Terri Schaivo: I don't know whose side I'd be on if this was my life but I do know it's not my life and I don't understand why anybody else thinks it's theirs. Every time I scan the headlines and see some other tidbit of this private family feud being played out I have the same cringe response I had five years ago: This is none of our business.

And that's really the heart of the matter. It's really what's at the heart of the discussion of this woman (who, by the by to everybody who's trying to justify their prurient interest with some kind of responsible-taxpayer standpoint, is not consuming a fraction of the country's resources that are consumed by your average U.S. Senator) and her children. It's about how, even within the confines of a health-care system that says you can do this if you want to, we still want some kind of collective, societal say. We want to be able to tell this woman, that's enough kids for you, back away from the table.

 

We as a society are deeply screwed up when it comes to how we look at having babies. We fawn all over large families on television and in magazines (Brangelina, anyone?) and then carp that anybody who wants that many kids is nuts. We laud every fertility advancement but then look down on women who avail themselves of medical means to conceive. We talk about "miracle" babies but then say, "Why didn't you just adopt?" We tell women they have to have children to be "real women," or to complete their marriages, or to fulfill their lives, or just to have a goddamn conversation at the dinner table, but it's only so many children, and only so many ways. It's no wonder women going through infertility feel alone, scared, ashamed.

 

And God forgive me, I'm about to defend the Duggars, since they're our self-designated national poster family for Clown Car Vaginas these days. There's no law against what they're doing and lifing them about being freeloaders on the public system starts to sound like Republican cracks about welfare queens. Judging women for bearing (in our eyes, too many) children isn't any more sensible in defense of reproductive freedom than judging them for not having children. This is the way the world works. If somebody gets to choose they get to choose, and if you approve or not, nobody gives a damn what you think.

If somebody gets treatment they get treatment. If that treatment gets paid for, under our current system, it gets paid for, and speaking only for myself until someone mounts a campaign to divest my taxes from wars and tanks, I won't get too het up about it paying for women having children, however "irresponsible" their choices may seem to me. The question of whether IVF should be performed at all (remember, it's the Pope who thinks it's the murder of helpless proto-babies, and his fundie allies who think it's immoral and that you should only have kids if God rewards your virtue with them) and under what circumstances is not even on the top ten list of most urgent issues in this country at the moment.

Which top ten list includes yet more stimulus dumbassery nobody will be talking about in the grocery store aisles while we cluck over OMG FOURTEEN KIDS. Can the involvement of Congress to support or condemn Suleman be far behind?

A.

People

I can't believe I even have to tell you this, but:

Don't mess with animals. Just. Don't.

Via Virgo.

A.

Dear US Government: You Suck.

I'm serious.  You suck.

All of you.

Republicans, Democrats, the House, the Senate, even you, Mr. President.

I'm getting over a bad flu, I'm cranky as hell, and I do not have patience for this kind of shit, so please god, take your heads out of your asses, straighten the f*ck up and do what we sent you there to do.

I don't care if it's bipartisan, I don't care if it gets rammed down the throats of the Republicans, I don't care if you trim a few billion here or there, just fix this stimulus bill and get it passed...

WITH the contraception spending put pack in.

For example, Republicans, stop pretending you don't understand how birth control might help the economy.  It's not rocket science and besides, as Katha Pollitt points out:

More important, what about the economics of actually existing women and families? This is no time to be saddling people with babies they don't want and can't provide for, who will further reduce the resources available for the kids they already have and further limit parents' ability to get an education or a job. In a Depression, birth rates go down for a reason. People. Have. No. Money.

Dems, stop pretending your legs are painted on and suddenly you can't stand up and defend spending on family planning just like you defend spending on vaccination programs.

And while you're doing it, would it kill any of you feminists to take a few seconds to point out what  Republicans really want?

 For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historic rupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.

 I understand why that rupture is unsettling. Ironically, I was on my way to lecture about Margaret Sanger in my history course at U.C. Berkeley when I heard the news. Sanger was vilified for wanting to give women the choice of when or whether to bear children. In short, she challenged all of human history by proposing an historic rupture between sexuality and the goal of reproduction. If reproduction ceased to be the goal, sexuality might become yoked to pleasure and that is quite unsettling to many Americans.

 That is the legacy the religious right has fought against, and it's that agenda that cut funding for family planning.

Maybe calling it period control would work after all.

Oh, and Just In Case You Were Wondering if Anything Real was Going On

Kentucky's turning into fucking Narnia, but by all means, let's keep talking about Obama's advisors' tax problems.

How to help.

A.

I'm Sorry You Suck So Hard

Jesus tits, Peter LaBarbera.

I hate being called a homophobe. It has such an ugly connotation. Its especially unpleasant because, as a Christian, I'm supposed to have a reputation for loving people, not hating them. So I've worked really hard over the years to try to get the homosexuals to stop calling me a homophobe...

As usual with the wingnut welfare set, it's not what you are, it's what you're being called that bothers you. Even racists know being a racist is a bad thing, so they try to make it about you being a name-caller, which is when I stop arguing and start looking for non-mission-critical objects to break. Here's an idea, Peter: If you want to not be called a homophobe, stop, you know, BEING ONE.

Is it me or is the majority of wingnut commentary devoted to making simple things unnecessarily complicated? I mean, you want to not be called a homophobe, I get that. Why not stop acting like two chicks living together is the end of the fucking world? Wouldn't that be easier than writing endless screeds about how meeeeeeeeeeeeeen everybody is, going up to people asking them to stop it stop it stop it stop it, yelling 'LALALALALAPENISDOESN'TBOTHERMELALALA" all the time? I realize getting over your issues isn't easy; after all, I'm still working on the equivalent of a full run of National Geograpics myself. But it's got to be simpler than THIS.

A.

National Security

A 93-year-old veteran.

Schur lived by himself. His wife died nearly two years ago, and the couple had no children.

The city had placed the power device on his home Jan. 13. Four days later, his frozen body was discovered by a neighbor.

Among the issues being investigated by authorities was whether Schur suffered from dementia. They're checking to see if he was treated by doctors for the disease.

When Schur's body was discovered, his unpaid power bills sat on a kitchen table inside the house.

Clipped to the bills was cash that he was going to use to pay them.

We live in a country of assholes, we really do:

In Bay City, City Manager Robert Belleman said the city would review its use of the equipment in the wake of Schur's death.

Belleman and Schur's neighbors got into a war of words over who was responsible for the death.

Neighbors said they didn't believe the city had explained to Schur that he could reset the device. And even if it did, Schur might suffer from dementia and have trouble following directions, they said.

"We're a small enough town where someone like Marvin should get a little bit extra care," said neighbor Jim Hernden.

But Belleman said neighbors should have contacted the city if they were concerned about Schur.

"I've said this before and some of my colleagues have said this: Neighbors need to keep an eye on neighbors," he said.

Schur had owed more than $1,000 in unpaid electricity bills, Belleman said.

Really, neighbors need to keep an eye on neighbors? Really? Because honest to fucking God what on earth about this country would ever give anybody the idea that that would be an answer to any question anybody could ever ask? I don't know about all of you out there in real America with your small town values and your bootstraps and shit, but the overwhelming response to a neighbor's plight in my entire lifetime has been "oh well, too bad, he should have paid his bills, he should have done this, he should have done that, I'm not responsible, if only he'd have saved money, somebody else should have handled it, not my problem, don't make me give a damn, stop whining, whatever."

Fucking assholes. I keep hearing about back in the good old days neighbors would take care of neighbors, just like the city manager says. I keep hearing about how in little towns and real neighborhoods where people do shots with their beer people do take care of each other. "When my grandma was a kid ..." And then something like this happens and the response in the newspaper comment sections is shit like this:

Old people always die eventually anyway. What's the big deal?

---

I don't think the City did anything wrong. If this poor man chose to live an isolated life, had so few social contacts, no agencies were involved and this is an isolated incident, this sad case is not the fault of the utility company. Some people choose to be hermits and disregard the financial responsibilites, his age certainly was not an assest to choosing to live alone.

---

A little Global Warming would have helped.

---

Sometimes the elderly are so stubborn and refuse help from anyone...unfortunately in this case it was fatal.

---

Let this be a lesson to all of you who think you don't have to pay your bills. It doesn't matter how old and ancient you are.

Que sera...

ASSHOLES. I'm sorry, I don't have much more than that. This man was a veteran of World War II. This man came home from Bastogne or Iwo Jima or whatever, I don't care if he sat at a desk in Kentucky, this man put on a uniform and this is what he gets? Fuck this bullshit, really. Eight solid years of jawing about terrorists under the bed, another three or four decades about welfare babies and people needing to do for themselves, and this isn't about what government did or didn't do in this one particular case, this is about what we wound up as, which is this. THIS.

Neighbors need to keep an eye on neighbors. For what it's worth, I agree. Here's the thing, though, the real question, that I'm going to phrase this way because Mom dragged me to church and I listened for a while: Who's my neighbor? If this man is my neighbor how do I keep an eye on him, how do I care for him? How do I keep an eye on my neighbor halfway across the country, a man who already sacrificed for me, kept an eye on me, how do I keep an eye on him? Tell me this is a Christian nation, how do we care for one another? This way? 

Take all the things the supposedly moral values party tells us and turn them on this case: This man was a veteran. Freedom isn't free, right? Apparently it costs $1,000.

A.

More "Pro-Life" Bullshit

Behold Lucifer himself.

This is why the "conscience clause" is transparent, anti-woman bullshit.

A clinic nurse first removed her intrauterine birth-control device without permission, says the patient in a federal action, then told her that "having the IUD come out was a good thing," because "I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don't know how you feel about abortion, but I am against them."
The patient sued Presbyterian Health Services Rio Rancho Family Health Center and nurse practitioner Sylvia Olona in Federal Court.
The plaintiff says she went to Rio Rancho to have the strings on her IUD shortened.
The complaint states: "As soon as Defendant Olona began speaking to (the plaintiff), she questioned her about her choice of contraception.
"As Defendant Olona began the procedure, (the plaintiff) felt Olona pull on the strings of the IUD. (The plaintiff) felt a distinct pulling on the strings followed by a sharp pain in her uterus similar to a very strong menstrual cramp."
As that happened, Defendant Olona stated, 'Uh oh, I accidentally pulled out your IUD. I gently tugged and out it came.' She then explained, 'I cut the string than went back and gently pulled and out it came. It must have not been in properly.'
"Olona then stated, 'having the IUD come out was a good thing.' She asked (the plaintiff) if she wanted to hear her 'take' on the situation. Without receiving a response, Defendant Olona stated, 'I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don't know how you feel about abortion, but I am against them. What the IUD does is take the fertilized egg and pushes it out of the uterus.'
"Defendant Olona stated, 'Everyone in the office always laughs and tells me I pull these out on purpose because I am against them, but it's not true, they accidentally come out when I tug.'
"At this point, Defendant Olona advised that (the plaintiff) needed to take a pregnancy test. (The plaintiff) did, and the test was negative.
"Defendant Olona told (the plaintiff) that is was better that she did not have the IUD because she could now use a "non-abortion" form of contraception. Defendant Olona suggested the deprovera (depo) [sic] shot or the pill, and made clear that she would not insert a new IUD."

"Accidentally," huh?  Funny how she repeatedly has these accidents. 

People like this have no business making decisions about your health.  In fact, this woman has no business being outside of a prison cell.  That the Republicans want to give people like Ms. Olona job security and immunity from prosecution for their criminal misconduct says all that you need to know about them.

Oh, and on top of that, she's just dead wrong about IUD's causing abortions.  Naturally.

A Summation

Of the Bush years:

A.

You Are From Uranus

Dennis Prager doesn't like women, sure, we knew that. But it turns out he doesn't like men all that much either:

If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex. When most women are young, and for some older women, spontaneously getting in the mood to have sex with the man they love can easily occur. But for most women, for myriad reasons -- female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested -- there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.

Because while everything he's saying is wrong and repulsive and indicative of misogyny and whatnot, what I can't get past is the assumptions. Men want sex all the time. Men are their cocks. Men are like dogs humping on a leg. Men can't see a pair of boobies, even in a turtleneck, and not jump out of their chairs and go fuck something, anything, a woman, a man, a sheep, a Dixie cup, a stuffed animal, what have you. Men can't see a woman of any kind without thinking of her naked, even if she's not attractive to them. Men are animals. Men have urges and those urges are constant and all-consuming.

(Seriously, guys, how do you build buildings and dig ditches and cure diseases, what with all this going on? I mean there's chicks EVERYWHERE, walking around with tits, how the hell do you concentrate?)

We girls, on the other hand, don't like sex. Except occasionally. On our birthdays, Valentine's Day, Sweetest Day, Mother's Day, when you bring us flowers or chocolate, when we've eaten chocolate, or after watching That Scene in Casino Royale six or seven times. Even then, we don't really want sex. We'd rather have a Journey pendant from Jared. We don't think of men as sex objects. We think of you as puppies, whose fur we'd like to brush. As such, sex is something we do to keep you happy, but we don't need it for ourselves. It's a favor. Occasionally we condescend to be your receptacles.

The discussion in Jesse's comments goes off down the rabbit hole of the merits of faking, faking till you make, making, and the critical difference between me taking your phone call when I'd just as soon be left alone and having you stick your dick in me when I don't want you to, the former being something I do to be nice and the latter being rape. What I'm stuck on is how aggressively dumb it is to trumpet male privilege when you really doesn't seem to like men all that much. Because make no mistake, telling men that the ideal to which they can aspire is not a sex partner but a sex slave is to be reductive and cruel, and stupid into the bargain, and tell guys they're nothing and deserve nothing.

Nothing but some girl who's gonna put up with you, even if she doesn't feel like it that night.

A.

Love Isn't Feelings

Yeah:

I don't care if these people have gay friends. Because if these folks think that their friends are perverts out to destroy the world, they're probably pretty shitty friends anyway.

So it's done. If you have a friend who's gay, it doesn't get you off the hook anymore. You still have to take responsibility for your beliefs, actions, and words. And if you can't do that, then your friends are putting up with a lot of crap from you, and you should just be grateful that you have any friends.

This movement isn't about people being friends. It's about autonomy, safety, and equality, but definitely not making friends. And if you're flapping your mouth about the sinfulness of a group of people, and that group of people is getting shot down in the streets, you really need to look up the definition of friendship in the dictionary. Because you're doing it wrong.

This is the problem with the whole  "love the 'sinner'" stance a lot of fundies have adopted in order to not look like hateful bigots anymore. Love isn't that kind of snide condescension. Love isn't a platitude and it isn't a statement and it isn't even an expression. You can sit around all you want, feel warm and fuzzy and get that sensation that your chest is about to burst and jump up and down with joy and smile until your face splits in half. That isn't love. That's not even close to love, so stop thinking it gets you out of anything.

Love is action. Love is work. Love is DOING STUFF. Love is picking somebody up at the airport, bringing somebody a beer, sending somebody a care package, wrapping somebody up in a blanket, even though with every fiber of your being you'd rather be doing something else, even though you're too tired and there's good TV on and god damn it's too cold to go out and get you half and half for your coffee just drink the goddamn milk already.

Love is resisting every urge to be an asshole and treating someone else with great and good care. Love is listening to someone even though you have your own stuff going on. Love is letting someone get away with something you could make a big deal out of. Love is not letting someone get away with something even though you could. Love is posting bail. Love is calling the doctor.

Love is cooking dinner. Love is doing the dishes. Love is showing up at the party. Love is taking the pet to the vet. Love is picking up the phone. Love is grocery shopping. Love is laundry. Love is changing the oil. Love is scraping all the snow off the car even though you're not the one driving it that day. Love is vacuuming.

And feeling something gets you off the hook for exactly zero. "But I love you" doesn't mean shit. Love is what you do. Love is how you act. And if you act hatefully toward someone, if you demean him and punish him and strip him of his rights, if you say that you don't want for him the same protection — much less the same joys — that you have, you don't love him. I can tell that from your actions. I don't care how you feel.

A.

The Cash-Driven Life

Okay, so, Rick Warren. I tend to agree with John's posters that it's a nice opportunity to slap Dobson in the head, and with Atrios that it's such bullshit to think that anything that pisses your base off is good politics if you're a Democrat but dangerous if you're a Republican. I also tend to think that anybody screaming OMG I TOLD YOU SO YOU GOT FOOLED BY YOUR MESSIAH OBAMA HAH HAH HAH AREN'T YOU SORRY NOW ADMIT I'M RIGHT DO IT LOUDLY DO IT ON THE TODAY SHOW DO IT IN SKYWRITING TAKE A PICTURE OF IT should consider whether screaming "I told you so" has ever changed anybody's mind about anything.

Here's my problem with Warren. It's not just that he's an anti-gay bigot, actually. He's not the first at that nor is he frankly the best. My problem with Warren is that he's reduced a particular interpretation of Christianity, with bigotry included, to a brand, a marketing ploy, designed to appeal to comfortable people in comfortable lives who buy a sense of satisfaction and get this — to use a fundie favorite phrase — shoved down their throats too. It's particularly insidious, this fluffy feel-good Christianity that reinforces what you already think and takes your credit card statement to prove it. Buy the book! Then buy the special edition just for commuters! (The fuck?) Then buy the one for graduates! Then buy the journal! Then the soundtrack! Then the wall calendar! You'll have really done something then! Way to go, you! Don't forget the VHS tapes! DVDs! Study guides! Don't forget this thing:

It's the holidays -- thank God there's a Christmas edition! How else would I know how to think? And if along the way I happen to buy into an ideology that tells me America needs to abandon that whole "equal protection under the law" thing along with my daily affirmations, well, joke's on me, and Rick Warren's laughing all the way to the bank.

And when something comes along like Prop 8 that he has to talk about, he cloaks his bigotry in dishonest canting about freedom of speech and loving the sinner, civility and acceptability, so that he wouldn't turn off potential congregants customers who could be slightly uncomfortable with all the hating going on. At least with the dude on the street corner ranting about sinners burning in hellfire for all eternity, they're up front about what they think, and if they're trying to make a buck off it, at least you know what you're buying.

A.

Slam The Door

Paging Nelly Bly:

MURRAYVILLE, Georgia (CNN) -- A few weeks before 13-year-old Jonathan King killed himself, he told his parents that his teachers had put him in "time-out."

"We thought that meant go sit in the corner and be quiet for a few minutes," Tina King said, tears washing her face as she remembered the child she called "our baby ... a good kid."

But time-out in the boy's north Georgia special education school was spent in something akin to a prison cell -- a concrete room latched from the outside, its tiny window obscured by a piece of paper.

Called a seclusion room, it's where in November 2004, Jonathan hanged himself with a cord a teacher gave him to hold up his pants. 

An attorney representing the school has denied any wrongdoing.

Seclusion rooms, sometimes called time-out rooms, are used across the nation, generally for special needs children. Critics say that along with the death of Jonathan, many mentally disabled and autistic children have been injured or traumatized.

Few states have laws on using seclusion rooms, though 24 states have written guidelines, according to a 2007 study conducted by a Clemson University researcher.

Texas, which was included in that study, has stopped using seclusion and restraint. Georgia has just begun to draft guidelines, four years after Jonathan's death.

Via ONTD_Political.

A.

'Rotund Christ'

Christ-lovers on our nine:

"Jack Black should remember from his days at Hebrew School that homosexual acts aren't funny and are roundly condemned in the Bible," said Dr. Gary Cass, of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission. "Appearing as a sarcastic, rotund Christ, Black distorts the Bible and condones shameful, homosexual acts. Associating Christ with perverse activity is an affront to all people of faith, especially Christians. Apparently Black and company find it hilarious to falsely accuse Christians while they intentionally distort the Bible. Black ought to apologize."

Virgo posted the original video Dr. Closet Case is whining about here.

A.

Cal Thomas: Still A Religious Bigot, In Case You Were Concerned

I think out of all the clowns at ClownHall, out of all the halfwit fascisti populating the political landscape today, the one I really dislike the most is Thomas. Back in 2004 he was opining that it was strange that Howard Dean would be married to a Jewish girl and still all ... running for president and shit, and now Thomas is imposing birth quotas and counting the number of bricks devoted to mosque-building in the U.S.:

The killers -- these and others over many years -- use Islam as the foundation for their indoctrination, coupling it with the belief that Western society is weak and unwilling to do what is necessary to properly defend itself. They have literally bet their lives that the West will meet their force with something less commanding. And that is why they have -- and are -- infiltrating Britain, much of Western Europe, America (and India) through immigration and high birth rates.

[snip]

At the very least, all non-Western immigrants to Britain and America should be told prior to their arrival that our intention is to westernize them. They must learn English, study and embrace the history of their host nation and, if they are Muslim, they will be allowed to worship only in existing mosques. No new ones should be built. Existing mosques must be monitored to make sure that hate is not taught and aggressive behavior toward their host countries is not promoted. If such behavior and speech are detected, the mosques should be closed and the imams arrested or deported.

And in the process quoting South Pacific and thus digging up irony only to kill it, once more, entirely dead. Rodgers and Hammerstein called, they say you're a dick.

A.

We Must Have The Important Stuff Covered

I'm so glad we've got all those starving people fed.

Especially the kids. The kids were the worst. Children, through no fault of their own, without enough to eat. It was shameful, in the richest country in the world, to see them going hungry.

I'm so glad nobody's homeless anymore. Everybody has a roof over his or her head this Christmas, isn't that fantastic? We managed to build all that affordable housing and settle everybody into a place of his or her own. What a job that was, but we did it!

Cured that AIDS, too. Cured AIDS and cancer, same week! There isn't a school in this country that doesn't look like a palace, not a teacher paid less than $100K. Plus we colonized Mars, built a fleet of cars that inhale carbon dioxide and exhale polar bear chow, and kicked Japan's ass at the last science fair.

Forget America, though, can you believe the world peace we've got going on these days? Hol-eee crap. Israelis and Palestinians are making out in the streets, India and Pakistan got invited to each other's birthday parties, and across all of the continents of the entire planet Earth, guns fell silent as we joined hands to love and acknowledge one another as fellow human beings worthy of dignity and respect.

I'm serious, guys, we freaking rule.

I'm so glad we finally got our shit so completely together that this is all that's left for our legislators to do.

Sen. Chris Buttars wants Utah's Legislature to declare its opposition to the "war on Christmas."

The West Jordan Republican is sponsoring a resolution encouraging retailers to embrace Christmas in their promotions rather than the generic "holidays."

"It would encourage the use of 'Merry Christmas,'" Buttars said of the non-binding statement that is still being drafted. "I'm sick of the Christmas wars -- we're a Christian nation and ought to use the word."

Because if we don't have our shit completely together, if we haven't done all of the above, if we aren't just casting about at this point for a homeless kitten to give a diamond collar to, or a street to pave with gold, if we aren't at that point right now, then it is so disgustingly immoral to waste the time on this crap to have it photocopied as to blight the name of the God it claims to honor. It is appalling in its narcissism.

Forget the Republican-bullying aspect of all this. Forget that. It's just so tremendously ... small. I think that's where a lot of my frustration with the Christmas Wars comes from, actually, not so much that the arguments for enforcing good will toward men are made with all the generosity of spirit of a Bund rally or that they're about as attractive as a plate full of Gorgonzola that's been sitting in the sun for seventeen hours. It's more that I cannot believe we are having this argument at all. In the face of all we have to do, and I do get that my priorities are not everybody's priorities, but in the face of all that we have to do, we're doing this?

Whenever someone brings this shit up to me in real life I want to argue back and make all the points you make in an argument like this about the separation of church and state and so on but I just cannot wrap my brain around ... this? Really? This, today, is what you want to do? I mean, okay, I guess, if you want, but ... I don't know, you seem invested in my getting excited about this and I'm sorry, honey, no.

I could see fighting this fight once we've got all the rest of our shit handled like grown human beings. I could see passing resolutions back and forth then. But as Ebenezer Scrooge himself would say, "Are there no prisons? No workhouses?" Shouldn't we close them down first?

A.

Bullying

Read Amanda and then come back here and bear with me a second while I kick this around:

Anyway, a reader of Digby’s wrote a great email explaining that to white Southern racists and their allies who hang the Confederate flag in non-Confederate states, the flag has always represented Christian values, honor, freedom, hating commies, puppies and kittens.  As someone who lives in one of the Confederate states, I can also attest to the fact that some morons still call it The Rebel Flag, as if it’s some symbol of a strike for justice and freedom, instead of the reality, that it was a strike against freedom for enslaved people.* The reason that puppies and kittens have been attached to the Confederate flag is for the same reason that homobigots have to paint their opposition to gay marriage as “protecting traditional marriage” and their ancestors who protested interracial marriage claimed that god separated the races for a reason---because no one wants to admit they’re a straight-up bigot. It’s always something else.

I've thought for a while that to ascribe to racism the urge to hoist a patently offensive symbol and wave it around is to overcomplicate the situation. It's not so much about race (or in the case of Christmas about Christmas, or in the case of marriage about marriage) as it is about yelling FUCK YOU in a crowded theater, and this maddening cutesy-bigotry happens at the moment to be the most effective way to piss off everybody in a 50-mile radius.

Bullies are racists and bullies are sexists and bullies are homophobes and bullies are smug self-satisfied semi-pro pseudo-Christians but what they are at heart are bullies, first and last and always, and until you get at that you won't change anybody's outlook on anything. The racism and sexism and religious bigotry are all ugly clothes they put on over their ugly selves, which is why they cloak their racism in the kinds of weasel words Amanda notes above.

The doctrinaire racists are off shaving their heads and building compounds in the woods and putting out pamphlets about the way race-mixing is evil as if that ship hasn't sailed; the leaders of the more mainstream CCC-type movements are out there talking about people who don't want to work and law and order being restored in the inner cities. Your rebel-flag-flying bemulleted dickweasel talking about his Southern heritage and the gloriousness of the Lost Cause, on the other hand, is trying to be a badass in the most pathetic fashion offered by our society: He's saying something offensive, and then sitting back, waiting for your respect that he "said it" and "put it out there" and "if you have a problem with how much of an asshole I am it's YOUR PROBLEM, heh" and such.

And the madder you get the more right you prove he is, in his mind, which is why argument is impossible. At some point in like grade school a large percentage of the population of this country became convinced that pissing everybody off was not only a personal imperative, it was an actual virtue. This is a cousin to "keeping it real," as the kids 10 years ago would say. 

Until you get at the need to shove somebody else down to make the shover feel like a big man you can teach all you want about the words that are offensive and the words that aren't, about what flag it's okay to fly and what flag it's not, and eventually they'll just find new words to cover their neediness and desperation. It's not about bigotry, it's about the power of the bully to smash someone else's face in the dirt and make all his friends laugh. I really don't believe it's any more complicated than that.

A.

Steve Chapman Finds A Nut

He's gonna join Kathleen Parker on Wingnut Exile Island if he keeps this up:

Consider the implications of the policy in this case. It would mean removing the children from the home in which they have been raised—"one of the most caring and nurturing placements" the guardian has ever seen. It would mean putting them through the trauma, once again, of being uprooted and placed with complete strangers. And because of the difficulty of placing kids their age, the child enrichment center said, it could mean the brothers would be permanently separated from each other.

And for what? Solely to shield them from the supposed perils of gay parents. Gays are treated as more dangerous than felons, drug offenders and known child abusers—none of whom is categorically barred from adopting.

As it happens, those dangers are mostly imaginary. According to evidence cited by the judge, gays are slightly more likely than heterosexuals to suffer psychiatric problems, engage in substance abuse and smoke, but so are lots of other groups that are allowed to adopt. The American Psychological Association says it finds no difference between the parenting of homosexuals and heterosexuals.

But Steve! Traditional marriage! God and Adam and Eve and Steve! Noooooo! They'll be marrying you to your box turtle next!

Still, he manages to point out he's only in favor of giving kids to a couple of dudes because there's no way around it:

Would orphaned and abandoned children be better off if every one of them could be raised by stable, loving, heterosexual couples? Possibly. But that's not an option.

'kay.

Hat tip to AB.

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