First Draft

How Life Began at Conception

Via Ntodd, here's a great piece of history: 

That year, Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion. That issue included many articles that today would get their authors, editors — probably even their readers — fired from almost any evangelical institution. For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:

God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.

Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.

Quite frankly I think the debate over when life begins is a way to distract people from the fact that this entire debate is about the power of the state, and whether government should have the ability to force you to bear a child against your will. Not to mention prevent you from obtaining much-needed medical treatment in the guise of morality, should your pregnancy go terribly wrong in the way that pregnancies can. 

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to see the way the desire for power has shaped the public positions of evangelical Christians who claim their authority comes straight from God. Go read the whole thing. 

A. 

A Losing Issue

In my frustration that we were event talking about birth control at all, I missed how completely sure those mythical "some Democrats" and "even the liberal media's" Howard Kurtz thought for sure Obama should capitulate to the bishops in order to secure the votes of ... stuff: 

Last week, even Democrats were nervous the White House was screwing the decision up. "Why aren’t we messaging this better?," Sen. Barbara Mikulski demanded of President Obama's campaign manager, Politico reported. Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski sounded triumphant February 9, telling ABC News, "The reality is Democrats are starting to break from the president because he overstepped on a fundamental right we all believe in whether we are women, men, Republican or Democrat." The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz declared his own colleague Andrew Sullivan "wrong" for arguing that the contraception debate would help President Obama in the longterm. "The White House got killed on this issue last week," Kurtz said emphatically February 13. It was "a losing issue."

If Kurtz meant "losing" the sense that "Republicans have become a national joke" and "Darryl Issa being a fuckstick is now an actual meme" and "seriously, you guys, the aspirin joke even my grandmother thought was oldsauce," then yes, Democrats were losing horribly. 

I know there's no amount of being wrong about politics that can get you fired from being a political commentator so long as you continue to slap your byline on the table, but can we at least get together on the idea that one should understand what politics IS and that sometimes it involves standing back and letting your opponents fall dick-first into the bees' nest? 

Kurtz went on to say Obama was "losing the culture wars" and I have to say, I can't fucking WAIT for everybody who was old enough to get media boners over Bill Clinton's sex life to fucking retire already, because if there's one surefire way for Obama to lose the culture wars, it's to fucking HAVE the culture wars at all. We are sick of the culture wars, out here. We are done. We don't have time to worry about other people's abortions. We do not give a shit who you love. We cannot fathom why we have to keep talking about how the pill is a thing, like we're our mothers and have to attach maxi pads to fucking belts. 

I'm not saying Obama should do nothing, any more than I agree with Kurtz that he should wade into this fight and find a way to surrender. It's not having "the culture wars" to promote and defend common-sense healthcare for women. It's not having "the culture wars" to sign legislation saying if you want to die for your country we really don't care who you fuck. It's not having "the culture wars" to not lose one's damn mind every time a girl wears a low-cut top on TV and it's not having "the culture wars" to refrain from using every moment at the presidential podium doing anything BUT denouncing hip-hop lyrics and talking about how ladies these days are such sluts. 

The best way to win the culture wars is to just do the stuff that makes sense, and let others scream "culture war" and "God, guns and gays" and let accomodationist morons like Kurtz blither all over TV that Obama is sure to lose the presidential election in 1988. Out here in 2012, we'll be getting back to work. 

A. 

Not All Unpopular Things Are the Same

Issa is a bag of assholes, not that we didn't know this: 

We heard from religious leaders whose positions might not be popular, like MLK's position was not so long ago: http://bit.ly/yyNhUb #p2

This is a constant refrain from these professionally aggrieved penile implants, this "SEE, I SAID IT AND NOW I'LL BE ATTACKED FOR IT" wishful martyr bullshit. Their running around yelling the n-word or opining that rape is fantastic is somehow okay because being called a douchebag means they're automatically awarded underdog points and we all have to root for them then, right? 

And, no. Saying something unpopular is not, in and of itself, brave. There is nothing virtuous in hating something other people like full stop. We tend to romanticize the existence of the voice in the wilderness in and of itself, instead of actually listening to what that voice is saying. If a moron yowls in a forest and nobody agrees with him, that doesn't mean he's making a sound. 

Some things — that birth control is evil, for example — are unpopular for a reason and speaking out in their defense is not a brave act but a middle-school cry for attention. Look at me, saying the unpopular thing! Yes, look at you, the lone voice against the world. Look at you, the fucking idiot. 

A. 

The Suffering Olympics

WHITE PEOPLE WIN THEM ALWAYS AND FOREVER: 

Ness said he's also heard "heartfelt objections" to the campaign from many "thoughtful, well-meaning" Duluthians.

One of those citizens, Phil Pierson, created a Facebook page called "Stop Racist Unfair Campaign" to air objections to it. More than 425 people became members.

Pierson frequently posts messages admonishing members to keep the discussion civil, and he deplores the white supremacist rhetoric showing up in some messages to community leaders.

Still, said Pierson, the campaign erred by opening with such jarring messages and images.

"You can't open a discussion on race and hope to see it move in a positive direction when you raise the topic by stereotyping an entire race," Pierson said. "It spreads animosity and hate, teaches a new generation to point fingers and [focuses] on the color of our skin instead of the idea that we're all human."

Why yes. Imagine what it must be like to walk around feeling like you have to constantly apologize for all the stupid shit people who look like you in the tiniest way are doing. How much would that suck, right? Every time Lindsey Lohan shows her cooter on TMZ or some stupid asshead crashes a car into a kindergarten, there has to be a panel of experts discussing The Problem With Those People and a column or two in the newspaper about what's wrong with Your Culture. Boy, would that blow. 

I am ashamed of my fellow white people frequently. We do fucking stupid things like employ Tim Allen or let people sell us something called a "prosperity gospel," and also tend to go around enslaving other people on the basis of they're weird-looking so fuck 'em. However, lately I'm never more ashamed than when we need to prove we're not racist by throwing this kind of epic hissy whenever somebody points out how racist we are.

Nothing says "I'm not a racist" like comparing being asked to consider your racism with actual, you know, racism.  

A. 

War on the Modern World

Go for it. Just go for it. Burn it all down. Pile everything you've ever said was important to you in the street, douse it in gasoline, and let the blaze light up the sky. 

This puts it all on the table. Republicans and Catholics and Republican Catholics and Republicans who just say they're Catholic and Catholics who are Republican because abortion seems yucky are now all just going to have to say it now. 

They would rather lots and lots of women die from preventable conditions, too many unwanted children, and abortions that should never have to happen, than that they have to put up with the thought that some woman somewhere is making her own decisions regarding who she has sex with and when. 

I got news for a lot of people what think this is some kind of winning argument about religious freedom for Catholics. Catholic women have memories of the battle over the Pill and the issuance of Humanae Vitae the first time around.

For instance, the Belgian bishops stated: "Someone, however, who is competent in the matter under consideration and capable of forming a personal and well-founded judgment--which necessarily presupposes a sufficient amount of knowledge--may, after a serious examination before God, come to other conclusions on certain points. In such a case he has the right to follow his conviction provided that he remains sincerely disposed to continue his inquiry." Of those who arrived at conclusions differ­ent from Humanae Vitae, the Scandinavian bishops stat­ed: "No one should, therefore, on account of such diverg­ing opinions alone, be regarded as an inferior Catholic." The Canadian bishops made a similar statement: ’These Catholics should not be considered, or consider them­selves, shut off from the body of the faithful."

Catholic women remember the woman in the pew next to them in church, dragging 13 children behind her, her husband dead or gone and no help at hand. They remember the neighbor who died in childbirth because her doctor was bound by faith to save her baby at all costs. They remember the relative whose husband defied the hospital's orders to make sure there were no more children, who suffered horribly before the end. They remember their own miscarriages, stillbirths, when God wanted them to have just one more baby, at the age of 45 in 1953.

And those were the married women who wanted the children they had. Those were the ones doing it right, in the eyes of the more conservative bishops and members of the church. That was the fate due the good girls. I don't need to go over what happened to the bad ones, and what we remember about them. 

So go ahead, tell those women that a condom is cause for excommunication. Tell those women that the greatest threat to their liberty is some other lady in their health plan getting the pill for free. Tell those women, who lost their sisters, who lost their aunts, who lost their mothers, who saw the women around them worn out and rubbed down to nothing, that they don't have the right to painlessly, reasonably ensure that they live to care for the family they want. Let's have that fight. Let's haul out all the arguments. 

Let's talk about how God really wants our infant mortality rate to skyrocket. Let's talk about how many women, exactly, God wants dead. Let's make adherence to a rule of the modern world the be-all and end-all test of who is a true believer. That's never gone horribly wrong before. 

Let's have that fight, because there's no way it goes the way the bishops think it's going to go. This is the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, writing in 1968: 

In view of the American tradition of freedom and pluralism, it would be a serious mistake to use the encyclical as a kind of Catholic loyalty test. Nothing could so quickly snuff out the spirit of per­sonal responsibility, which has done so much to invigorate American Catholicism in the past few years.

Nothing could be more discouraging to young people and intellectuals, upon whom the future of our Church so greatly depends. Nothing could be more destructive of the necessary autonomy of Catholic universities and journals, which have begun to prosper so well. Nothing, finally, could be more harmful to the mutual relations of trust and cordiality that have recently been established between bishops and theologians.

He could have been speaking directly to the bishops and their power-hungry enablers in Congress today. Have that fight. Go ahead. You won't like the outcome. I've been saying for years that our vicious abortion politics are burning down everything else the Church has ever considered important, and this? This is like throwing a bottle of lighter fluid onto the kindling before striking the match. 

A. 

Silly Women and their Silly Need for Abortions

Fuck you, Ron Paul. 

PAUL: No. If it's an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen or give them --

MORGAN: You would allow them to abort the baby?

PAUL: It is absolutely in limbo, because an hour after intercourse or a day afterwards, there is no legal or medical problem. If you talk about somebody coming in and they say, well, I was raped and I'm seven months pregnant and I don't want to have anything to do with it, it's a little bit different story.

Right, see, if she's this dumb whore, then she has no right to legal medical procedures. If she's a nice girl, who was "honest"ly raped (by which I am sure DOCTOR Paul means she was as sober as a judge and wore nothing provocative) through no fault of her own, then sure, it's fine, give her Plan B.

But if she's just too stupid to not get herself raped right, and goes around all "la la la, I'll ignore my pregnancy because tha'ts something WE ALL TOTALLY DO, la la la" then she ought to bear that child for society. 

I don't know what's more offensive, the idea that there's this conspiracy of fake rape out there on the part of evil bitches who just want to abort their children, or the idea that the majority of women who are pregnant as a result of rape all just put it out of their heads until they get the silly notion to have themselves a quick and easy abortion. 

For all that movement anti-abortion people like to hold up pictures of bloody, violent body parts at intersections, they don't really seem to understand the reality of what that procedure does to a woman's body. What an abortion at 28 weeks would look like, feel like, leave behind. The idea that it would somehow be taken lightly, the idea that somebody would do that out of anything but medical necessity or desperation, is such an condescending assault on reason that it makes my vision go white. 

They really do think women are children: flighty, silly, unable to take responsibility for their actions, unable to know their own physical and mental limitations, so unaware of their own bodies and what happens inside them. They really do think that given the option, women would just do this at random. That they'd take those risks as if they were nothing. That they'd look at their bodies, turned enemy, and be able to go on about their days without thinking about it. That they'd be that stupid. That they'd be like that at all. 

A. 

The Komen Crack-Up

Watching this ongoing pig fuck would be amusing if it wasn't so predictable and sad. 

Look, once and for all, let's settle what happens when you get in bed with factually challenged wingnut lunatics. This happens. I have seldom seen a clusterfuck play out this quickly or intensely, and I watch this kind of stuff like it's my job. 

The apperance of political neutrality is utterly critical for a charity like Komen. Conservative women get breast cancer. Liberal women get breast cancer. Politically ignorant as hell women get breast cancer. From a fundraising perspective, if not from a human-decency perspective, you don't want to only fish in half the lake. You want to throw your net over the whole damn thing, and taking sides in the abortion debate isn't just not doing that, it's setting the net on fire and shooting a hole in your boat. 

(And can we just talk for one minute about the entirety of women's health being defined as their boobs and their babies, wanted and otherwise? I admit to some privilege here, as I'm not at high risk for breast cancer. The things that do risk my health -- heart disease, brain tumors, lung ailments of various kinds -- aren't nearly as fun to talk about on the evening news, because you can't say the word "breast" in relation to them. Not without sound like some kind of masturbating pervert, anyway.) 

I am tired of organizations that could be doing enormous good in the lives of others choosing instead to cave to fear and shame, either out of genuine ideological agreement or simple cowardice in the face of ten angry letters from assholes who have no idea what they're talking about. Look at the cost, people. Just look. I'm a dumb girl who went to state school and I could have told you how this was going to go. Anybody functionally awake in the world in the past 15 years could tell how you this was going to go. LISTEN. 

A. 

Malaka Of The Week: Susan G. Komen Foundation

Dissing the Susan G Komen Foundation would have once seemed like shitting all over motherhood, the flag and apple pie. This week, however, the Foundation has cut off funding to Planned Parentohood for MAMMOGRAMS. This is as egregious a case of institutional malakatude and cowardice as I've ever seen. Women could die as a result of this "policy shift.'

The best thing I've read on this subject was by the fabulous Mary Elizabeth Williams who is herself fighting a virulent form of cancer:

Along the way, Komen has become the McDonald’s of cancer — an easy-to-remember brand with a logo that demands little thought or effort from the consumer. Write a check, buy a ribbon, voila! You get to feel like you’re curing cancer.

It’s not that Komen is some questionable, Wyclef Jean-esque mess. It gets high marks from both the Better Business Bureau and Charity Navigator. Yet this is an organization that has repeatedly come under fire for its extravagant promotion of itself as an organization dedicated to a “cure,” when only a small portion of its expenses go to, you know, curing cancer. Komen itself cops to portioning just 24 percent of its funds to research – and 20 percent to fundraising and administration. For an organization with reported revenues of nearly $350 million, that’s still a lot of money for research. It’s an awful lot for itself, too.

This is a problem I often have with establishment charities: only a small slice of their bounteous funds are spent on research. How expensive can all those pink ribbons be? A mere 20% for research is obscene.  What they should do is spend some money on a backbone and refuse to cave into political pressure from  crazy people who value the "unborn" more than the born. The Komen Foundation can fold one of their pink ribbons five ways and stick it where the moon don't shine...

I'll let Mary Elizabeth have the last word about the Foundation's malakatude:

Women’s healthcare is not about lace-trimmed scarves and bottles of perfume. It’s sure as hell not about some feel-good, lip-service version of what my colleague Rebecca Traister calls “infantilizing Pepto-ed advocacy.” It’s not even — for anyone still stupid enough to think Planned Parenthood is some giant fetus-killing complex — about abortion. It’s about screening. It’s about treatment. It’s just that simple. The further away an organization gets from that mission, the more women suffer. It’s just that simple too. And you don’t make good on a “promise” to your dead sister by selling out women who need you most. 

Whose Life?

Susan G. Komen Foundation lowers the boom on Planned Parenthood: 

The nation's leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women.

The change will mean a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.

Planned Parenthood says the move results from Komen bowing to pressure from anti-abortion activists. Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress — a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.

Thank God none of the women in the photo accompany that story are sluts. Then they'd be out of luck. 

When you start turning away from funding actual things that will help cure women of the disease you were founded to wipe out, you look like you are more invested in achieving political power than in saving women's lives. Komen's probably done more than just about any organization in terms of raising awareness of breast cancer, but pulling shit like this makes it look like all they're after is helping companies produce pink merchandise that does zero good for actual real-life women.

Which is par for the course for movement pro-lifers, who want to outlaw abortion instead of ending it. They don't mind being national Republicans' political booty call every four years because the cocktail parties 4LYFE are awesome, so much more so than actual work. They're all pleased as punch that Komen's joined in the Planned Parenthood pig-fuck. Clownhall is overjoyed. 

These wingnut assholes really won't be happy until a lot more women are dead. From breast cancer, botched abortions, it really doesn't matter. It boggles me, still, after years of mainlining this stuff, that this is the hill so many organizations have decided to die on. These are the friends they've decided to have, forsaking all others and any good they might have done, in service to one facet of a vicious, hateful ideology of fear. What does the world look like, we keep going like this? 

A. 

Today in Total Nitwittery

If you own a toaster oven, you are not poor: 

Poverty in America is certainly a serious problem, but the plight of the poor has been moderated by advances in the economy. Between 1970 and 2010, the net worth of American households more than doubled, as did the number of television sets and air-conditioning units per home. In his book "The Poverty of the Poverty Rate," Nicholas Eberstadt shows that over the past 30 or so years, the percentage of low-income children in the United States who are underweight has gone down, the share of low-income households lacking complete plumbing facilities has declined, and the area of their homes adequately heated has gone up. The fraction of poor households with a telephone, a television set and a clothes dryer has risen sharply.

In other words, the country has become more prosperous, as measured not by income but by consumption: In constant dollars, consumption by people in the lowest quintile rose by more than 40 percent over the past four decades.

Income as measured by the federal government is not a reliable indicator of well-being, but consumption is. Though poverty is a problem, it has become less of one.

Look. I am not saying that there aren't degrees here, and that by and large somebody living without INDOOR PLUMBING in 20FUCKING11 isn't worse off than somebody who has it, but can we please stop with "your lack of income is not a problem if you have a waffle iron?" This line of thinking is a cousin to all those dicks who saw Slumdog Millionaire and were like, "Poor people in America have nothing to complain about har har har." 

Jude and I were talking about this recently, about just how few truly rich people have ever been to a second-hand store and know that you can get an air conditioner or a microwave for ten bucks. They might suck and be old, but they will be an air conditioner and a microwave and thus prove to this cockyank that you are not THAT poor. Not really poor. Not Charles Dickens/Appalachia movies poor. 

Some apartments come with a washer/dryer. They're still not mansions. Some apartments come with air conditioners. Doesn't make them summer homes in the Caymans. I used to live in a place that was billed "luxury apartments" and once a friend came to visit and was all "ooh, fancy!" until I drove her around and showed her that all the apartment complexes in the area said "luxury," regardless of how small/weird they were. And even if "luxury" meant something special (one place did have wood-burning fireplaces, which was kind of nice) it still wouldn't make me Donald Trump. 

American views about inequality have not changed much in the past quarter-century. In their 2009 book "Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality," political scientists Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs report that big majorities, including poor people, agree that "it is 'still possible' to start out poor in this country, work hard, and become rich," and reject the view that it is the government's job to narrow the income gap.

BUT IT'S NOT THE GOVERNMENT'S JOB TO KEEP WIDENING IT, EITHER, WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT YOU KITCHEN APPLIANCE. 

A. 

Ross Douthat: Love is a Bowl of Sugar

OH GOD IT'S NOT LIKE THAT YOU CLOWNASS: 

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

I've noticed that we have no more private contractors, because we have an army. Before 1776, life was paradise for Blackwater but the minute we formed militias, they were fucked. Such a sad state for a glorious private enterprise. 

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches.

Or to Applebees. Won't the government think of the jalapeno poppers? 

This is another "reasonable conservative" tic I've noticed from acquaintances of late: "I, personally, would give more money to charity or hire more people at my office if I paid less in taxes and various fees." And yes, you, nice person that I know, probably would. Ross might actually give more to charity if he had that money laying around. Does that mean we should give EVERY rich person free money on the off chance one or two of them might kick in $25 to the local food pantry? 

How is that any less governmental social engineering? 

Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

There is distinct lack of soup kitchens and food pantries, now we have a welare office. What a fucking idiot. 

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. 

A) No, it doesn't. 

B) This does not, actually, violate the consciences of anybody, and here's why: Hospitals and insurers only have to COVER contraception, and only if they employ large numbers of non-Catholic employees. Nobody who is Catholic has to take it. Therefore, we should be counting on the large numbers of Catholics who are so serious about this shit that they won't take the pill to stand up for their own morals and against the horror that is Obamacare. 

I'll give you a minute to stop laughing. 

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not.

Yes. Catholic hospitals are just in this for the decency of serving others. I'm not saying some of them weren't, in the beginning, but you can't pretend that a lot of this isn't profit-driven, and a lot of that profit isn't helped by massive tax exemptions. 

The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

Actually, that is exactly what Catholics leaders are saying by choosing not to follow the law. You know, this is a thing I keep hearing from Catholic officials in other contexts, this constant talk about church canon law, as if that should supersede actual real-life American law. I'm pleased as punch we all have our own ways of doing things and our own rules, but when you get right down to it, if you want to be a member of a community, you have to do more than just loudly demand that the entire community "respect" your beliefs by changing its morality to suit yours. 

The larger point Ross is making is actually more offensive, though: We can either have government or charity but not both. Our government cannot pursue any common good, because that will mean that everybody will assume shit is all handled and we can go back to watching the Super Bowl. If someone else has it taken care of, then I don't need to give a shit.

I don't know if Ross has met any of his fellow humans, but we're actually not like that. I post a lot of stuff about how stupid and selfish and mean we can be, but I believe people are basically decent and that given half a chance we will help one another. Given half a chance and a bit of encouragement, we will feed the stranger and clothe the naked and take care of the grandma whose car broke down on the freeway. I know this because I've seen it happen at least as often as I've seen people be awful, and I choose to believe that love isn't a bowl of sugar. There isn't only so much. If our government takes care of many of us, we will still take care of each other, because that's what we do. It's in our bones and blood, and hundreds of years of inhuman cruelty haven't beaten it out of us, not entirely. 

Decent government that acts in our interests doesn't kill the charitable impulse. It encourages it. It offers official approval of the nagging feeling in the pits of our stomachs that says, "somebody should be helping these people." It represents, outwardly, the best of us, and the only reason Ross or anybody like him has a problem with that concept is they don't want to be forced to give a shit about anybody but themselves. 

And that's fine, really. There are nice libertarian islands being built for people like that. 

Schmuck. 

A. 

Post-Racial Society

Boy, I'm glad we have one.

A. 

What We Can Afford

This one burns a little hotter than all the other rage-inducing hippie-punching poor-hating nonsense coming out of Wisconsin's legislature on a daily basis: 

In the Wisconsin Legislative session of 2009-2010, a bill passed both the Senate and Assembly providing health insurance to the families of firefighters killed in the line of duty.  For reasons unknown to me, police officers were not included in this legislation.  However, in May of 2011, a bipartisan effort led by Republican Senator Van Wanggaard and Democratic Senator Bob Jauch sought to remedy this.  Senate Bill 18 added the health insurance protection to the surviving spouses and children of Wisconsin's fallen law enforcement officers, retroactively.  The bill passed the Senate on May 17, 2011 by unanimous vote.

[snip]

At the last minute, the Republican legislators in control of the Assembly blocked the bill from being brought to a vote.  BLOCKED the bill that unanimously passed the Senate.  From what I have discovered, the Birkholz family was given the choice of coming to the Capitol for the resolution only, but understandably opted not to attend. In a horrendous display of partisan politics in what should have been a unifying issue, John Jagler, spokesperson for Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, called SB 18 an "unfunded mandate" on local governments that "isn't ready to become law."  

An unfunded mandate? Okay, I'll play. An unfunded mandate is a bad thing, let's stipulate. 

THEN FIND A WAY TO FUND THE THING. You know, like we do for wars, tax incentives for corporate headquarters construction, festivals and parties for rich people, and the goddamn fireworks. Find the money. You don't want your taxes going to the freeloading families of dead cops? Fine. Find a sponsor. Maybe one of those corporations we're handing out free money to can kick in the necessary amount. But don't just sit there and say oh, it's too hard, let's just kick back and bitch about how we can't do anything for people who sign up to GET KILLED IN OUR DEFENSE anymore. Take it away, Journal-Sentinel commenters! 

This is another perfect example of a feel-good idea that we simply cannot afford. Giving this kind of benefit to surviving spouses, which happens nowhere except in the public sector, is the kind of spending that has gotten us to the point we're at now - nearly bankrupt.

A feel-good idea. That's what health insurance for other people is. A feel-good idea. Yep. It does in fact feel good to take care of people who've suffered an unimaginable tragedy in defense of the public. You know why it feels good? BECAUSE IT IS GOOD. That's a sign that we should DO it. That impulse that tells you what the right thing to do is? You LISTEN to that. You don't take it out behind the barn and kick it to death. 

I feel like we could all use a refresher course in this right here: In the past 10 years we have managed to find the money for massive tax breaks for wealthy people, two unwinnable wars, a bunch of drone attacks to blow up stuff in a couple of other countries, secret service protection for various morons running for office or actually in it, and yes, the president's vacations. In Wisconsin alone millions of dollars are going to go to companies that do what they're already supposed to do, which is hire people to do stuff. 

But we can't afford to give health insurance to the families of people who die serving the public. That, we can't pay for. That's fiscally irresponsible. That's an unfunded mandate. That's a bridge too far. And lest we get all crazy about "well, my family doesn't have that guarantee," hey, guess what. The point of us as people is not to make sure everybody's life sucks just as much as yours sucks. The point of us as people is to make things better. 

So light 'em up: 

The following politicians are responsible for the failure to bring this bill to a vote.  Please send them emails on behalf of Ashley Birkholz and the families of Wisconsin's other fallen heroes, and ask everyone you know to do the same.  Please spend 5 minutes of your time serving those who sacrificed their lives serving us. Demand of these legislators that they bring this important piece of legislation to an immediate vote. 

Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald: Rep.Fitzgerald@legis.wisconsin.gov

Representative Bill Kramer: Rep.Kramer@legis.wisconsin.gov

Representative Dan Knodl: Rep.Knodl@legis.wisconsin.gov

Representative Joan Ballweg: Rep.Ballweg@legis.wisconsin.gov

Representative Mary Williams: Rep.WilliamsM@legis.wisconsin.gov

Representative Samantha Kerkman: Rep.Kerkman@legis.wisconsin.gov

 

A. 

Tough Cookies

Courtesy of the most Republican parish in the Gret Stet of Louisiana:

A Girl Scout troop on the north shore has collapsed after parents withdrew their children in the wake of a decision by a Colorado troop to admit a 7-year-old transgendered child. That's a move they saw as an objectionable leftward drift in Girl Scouting.

Louisiana Girl Scouts have never been asked to admit a transgendered child, said Marianne Addy, the spokeswoman for Girl Scouts Louisiana East, which provides scouting activities for 17,000 girls. And soon after the Colorado decision last fall, Louisiana Scouting directors, who are free to set local policy, decided transgendered children would not be allowed should one ever apply.

The policy is now posted on the group's website.

But Susan Cramond, a troop leader who had two children in the group that met at Northlake Christian School in Covington, said she and other like-minded parents felt Louisiana Scouting policy-makers should never have had to discuss the transgender issue in the first place. Cramond said when she first contacted Louisiana’s Scouting leaders to ask whether a transgendered child could be accepted into a local troop, she didn’t get the quick and unequivocal “no” she was hoping for.

So Cramond and fellow troop leader Susan Bryant-Snure, a Lacombe doctor, informed other parents. She said they collectively decided to abandon the Girl Scouts and seek affiliation with American Heritage Girls, a similar organization that describes itself as a “Christ-centered leadership and character development ministry.”

Bryant-Snure said by banning transgendered children, the Louisiana board eventually made the “right decision; they just made it in a way that made us nervous.”

Ain't bigotry grand? Guess they're afraid that a transgendered Girl Scout might whip it out and roast their weenie over the old camp fire or some such shit.

My friend Kevin who is Allman directed me to the most obnoxious comment at NOLA.com, which is notorious for its nasty right wing commentariat:

Surely a red flag went up for me when it was revealed that the Girl Scouts is a platform for promoting sexual promiscuity, contraception and abortion.

So, eat a Samoa and promote decadence? Cool. I'll take samoa right here on the floor. Holy Dinah-Moe Humm, Batman:

 

'Nature Takes Its Vengeance'

All you peeps with children who have special needs? You're being punished by God: 

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically.Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” said Marshall, a Republican.

Yeah, you know, every once in a while somebody comes along and provides the kind of vicious clarity this party really needs in communicating its worldview. No messing around, here. No opaque language or weasel words. It's refreshing. 

What an unredeemable monster. What kind of obliviously nasty fucker do you have to be to say to an audience of people ANY OF WHOM may have a disabled or challenged child that it's their fault for having an abortion or otherwise being whores? Why kind of horrifying God do you worship, that he rains down hellfire upon your innocent children, for some wrong you've committed? I get that about half the Old Testament was Yahweh being a total schmuck, but I think even Job would find this a bridge too far. 

I have news for this asshole. Everybody who's ever had a child who had anything different from a textbook conception, easy-peasy delivery, and total typical physical and mental condition questions whether that child's problems are their fault. For something they did, or thought about doing, for drinking coffee or not drinking coffee or driving too fast or not breastfeeding or whatever. EVERYBODY. Childless whore, sure, but I know a lot of parents, and in the dark hours they all wonder if they're fucking up their kids on some level, somehow. 

SO THANKS FOR HELPING, in reinforcing the message that they're at fault. And by the by, how does this explain the phenomenon of special needs children born to those virtuous girls who haven't offended God by having an abortion? Did they commit some other sin? How else did they deserve their children's fate?

I really can't fathom living in the world this guy's living in, watched over by the God in whom he believes. I can't imagine what it's like there, always under threat. Nature's vengeance would be the least of my worries. 

A. 

The Cost of Living Well

Stop having kids, you ghetto slut: 

For example, in Manhattan, after paying "millionaire's tax" on everything from apartment purchases to income tax "surcharges", $150,000 per year for school (if you have four kids and want them to have a primary school education close to what you get for free in a decent suburb), send them for a few weeks of day camp in the summer for around $30,000--unless you want them to play video games all day, pay a mortgage on an apartment barely large enough to house the family (no one with a bedroom of their own) $100,000 year, pay $800/ month to park your car (no, not a luxury car), make some meaningful charitable contributions, etc. there is little left.

I mean, really. Just keep your legs closed, amirite, folks? FOUR kids? There's eleventy-billion forms of birth control out there, fella. No glove, no love. Wait, you wanted a big family? Well, guess what. You should only have kids if you can afford them, and it sounds like you can't afford them. Family is a luxury, you know. Everyone who doesn't make a squillion dollars should be alone. 

You want more money? Sell some bling. Get a job. Get another job, it's the American way. You lazy fuck. Learn to clip coupons like our parents did back in the day! Maybe you should be getting your food at a cheaper store. Maybe quit buying those T-bone steaks, buddy. You don't have a luxury car? Well, get a USED car, and like it! 

You would get a better education for free in a suburb? Move to one, then. Where you want to live makes no difference at all if you can't afford it, so you just fix yourself right up there. It's easy, after all. Anybody can buy or sell a house these days. Go for it. 

You want a better life? Make better choices. 

A. 

In Defense of Dana Loesch

She happens to be right, after all: 

After playing a news clip describing the video, Loesch said, "I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me, though. I want a million cool points for these guys." She wondered why there was any kind of scandal surrounding the incident.

"C'mon people, this is a war," she said. "Do I have a problem with that as a citizen of the United States? No, I don't."

Not about the "million cool points" the people who desecrate corpses deserve, or about how she would do it, too (anybody predicting how he or she would react in that situation is a liar; you have no idea), or about how pissing on corpses is somehow anything but offensive and filming it so as to brag to the world isn't catastrophically stupid. But about how this is a war. 

This is a war. And this. And this. And this. 

This is a war. 

This is a war. 

And it's not that this is a war, and we should be okay with any sickness that comes out of it. There are reasons, after all, that we have rules about safe conduct and treatment of prisoners and enemies, good reasons. 

But this is a war, and we should know before we start that sickness like this WILL come out of it. You start a war, which means you take people, not all of whom are geniuses, not all of whom are decent and compassionate and capable of restraint, and you throw them into a horror unlike anything they've ever known. It is not excusing them, in the least, to understand what happens then.

You march them through charnel houses and you kill their friends in front of them, and in the case of our current conflicts you add a sense of futility and endlessness and obliviousness on the part of people at home who are making movies about this stuff like it's over already, and even some of the decent, compassionate, restrained ones are going to absolutely lose their shit. 

This is a war. Which is why you don't start them in the first place. Which is why you don't start them unless you absolutely have to. Unless you know you have no other choice. Unless you know how to end them as quickly as possible. Unless you're ready not only for what will be done to your enemies, but what doing that will do to you. Unless you think you can carry that, because you sure as hell can't prevent it all. 

That's not what Loesch meant, but it is what she said, however unintentionally.

This is a war. 

A. 

The long arm of the law, in your uterus

I feel more empowered already.

"Today's ruling is a victory for all who stand in defense of life. Every life lost to abortion is a tragedy, and this important sonogram legislation ensures that every Texas woman seeking an abortion has all the facts about the life she is carrying, and understands the devastating impact of such a life-ending decision. We will continue to fight any attempt to limit our state's laws that value and protect the unborn."

We will, however, continue to dismantle and destroy those laws and systems that value and protect living children. Once they're born, those little suckers are on their own

Life without Louie

Five years ago this week, Louis Ingelhart died at the age of 86.  I don’t know what student press freedom was like before him, but I know that it would never have been the same without him.

Louie, as he was known by those who loved and admired him, was a staunch believer in the First Amendment and had no qualms about expressing his beliefs in that area. When his beloved Ball State University got a new president in May 2004, Louie attended the press conference. He sought out the reporter for the student newspaper, tugged on the kid’s sleeve and told him to take Jo Ann Gora a message.

“You tell that woman that no one has ever censored the student paper on this campus,” he said. “And no one ever will.”

Louie wasn’t a hypocrite when it came to that issue. He was the first chairman of the department of journalism on his campus, serving from 1953 to 1979. During that time, the university grew and the paper changed, but he worked tirelessly to keep student media a free and open public forum.

And it worked too.

During his tenure, the newspaper only had four full-time faculty advisers, indicating that working under him wasn’t a constant battle to keep the kids safe. He also helped turn the heads of administrator, making sure they understood why it was important to let the students have their own triumphs and deal with their own problems.

He was so successful at that task that the university now bestows the Emens Award to college administrators who have gone to great lengths to keep meddling censors away from their campus media. The award is named after the university’s former president John R. Emens, with whom Louie worked frequently and often considered an ally.

Shortly after Louie stopped being the chair of the department, but before he retired, the student newspaper ran a three-part series that uncovered how university trustees were feathering their own nests by investing university money in under-performing assets that helped the trustee-affiliated banks. The adviser at the time was threatened, the kid who wrote the series was a target and yet, in the end, it was the board that crumbled. That kind of thing doesn’t happen without a guy like Lou setting the foundation for a campus that treasured the freedom of the press.

I got to thinking about Louie and my encounters with him this week after an advising colleague of mine was sent packing.

Paul Isom of Eastern Carolina University was fired two months after his paper published full-frontal shots of a streaker who interrupted a university football game. The kids ran three images, including one of the guy with his knees to the breeze, and covered the story thoroughly. After that, they followed it up with stories as to the guy’s arrest and his pending court date. In other words, they practiced journalism. (NOTE: people covering this have blocked out the guy's dick. They went Full Monty in their photos.)

Did they need a picture of the guy’s dick on the front page?   I don’t know, but that’s not the point. It wasn’t my call or your call or the adviser’s call. It was up to the staff of the paper. They debated, they discussed, they made a call.

And it was their call to make.

When people of an administrative age decide they don’t like seeing something and decide to get all hand-wringy about what’s wrong with kids these days and their Intertoob porn and such, I have to laugh.

After a congress-critter who had attended school at one of my previous stops argued with something we ran that was somewhat provocative, I went back into the archives to see what ran when he was on campus.

Turns out, there used to be an annual pictorial of the “Nude Indiana Competition” or some such thing with a ton of nudie shots in black and white. I bet that was laminated to the ceiling of his dorm right above his bed.

Even on a campus where I’ve got kids reading Glenn Beck books like they’re the next installment of “The Hunger Games,” the paper has had its moments of “whoa!”

A former department chair stopped by my office a couple months ago and handed me a copy of the student newspaper that was about as old as I am.

It was an April Fool’s edition that had a guy standing in a field holding a giant inflatable banana between his legs on its cover.

He also gave me a photo print he found that ran in one of the regular issues.

“Check out the cockshot they ran,” he noted pointed at the two streakers who donned masks and jogged through campus.

One guy, hey, I hope it was cold outside but the other guy? Damn…

I doubt Lou Ingelhart would have been a huge fan of the nudity running in the paper.

(Then again, maybe he would. One of my most vivid memories came from spending some time with him at a convention. He was in his early 80s at the time. We had to catch a shuttle to the airport and he was going with our group, so I found him in the hotel lobby. He was talking to a woman less than half his age, at least, and when I approached, she left. “How are you, Dr. Ingelhart?” I asked. “Good until you showed up,” he wryly responded. “I was talking to a blonde until you chased her away.”)

However, Louie would have been stark, raving pissed that an adviser was removed for essentially doing his job.

He once told me that he didn’t like administrators who decided it was their job to kick kids around. He also knew that if you couldn’t kill the paper or destroy the editor, shooting the adviser was the next best trick administrators would use to silence the press. It appears to be working as well. The kids at ECU had noted a chilling effect in the wake of Isom’s firing.

ECU is not unique in this approach, unfortunately. The Student Press Law Center has a running list of advisers who were fired for not stepping in and conducting prior review or prior restraint. Also, keep in mind that while some advisers in high school are required to do this and that private universities are different than publics, we are talking about young adults availing themselves of their Constitutional rights. Just because we call them “college kids” doesn’t mean that they’re not at the legal age to enlist in the military, vote, marry and buy smokes (but not road beers…).

I’ve always believed that student newsrooms are amazing learning environments.

What ECU has decided to teach them through the school’s actions against the paper’s adviser is deplorable.

Not That It Is News That Rick Santorum is a Fuckstick

But he just pretty much declared all childless (or childfree) marriages invalid in the eyes of God: 

Still, he defended his position to keep marriage a union between a man and a woman: “Because I believe we are made the way God made man and woman and man and woman come together to have a union to produce children which keeps civilization going and provide the best environment for children to be raised,” Santorum said. “I think that is something society should value and should give privileged status over a group of people who want to have a relationship together.”

Fuckmook. Should people be fertility-tested prior to marriage, then? Let's have the state do that! Unless your DNA is compatible and your breeding capabilities are verified, you are not allowed to marry, or mate. There could be, like, large laboratories all over the country and everybody could be subjected to mandatory testing upon the onset of puberty. Of course, fertility at one point in one's life is not fertility forever, so there would have to be ongoing monitoring, say, every year? 

There's no way that could ever go wrong.

A. 

What the Hell Kind of Place Were You Running, Scotty?

Jeebus. 

Tim Russell, a former campaign and county aide to Gov. Scott Walker, was arrested by authorities on Thursday and charged with three theft counts as part of the ongoing John Doe investigation into Walker staffers, sources said.

Computer records show Russell was charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor count of theft. One source said the charges are tied to Operation Freedom, an annual military appreciation day held at the zoo.

In 2010, Walker's county administration had asked prosecutors to investigate what had happened to $11,000 raised in 2007 for the event. 

Russell's attorney, Michael Maistelman, could not be immediately reached for comment. 

Also charged Thursday was Brian Pierick, Russell's longtime partner. Pierick was charged with one felony count of child enticement. 

There's so much FAIL and WRONG here that I hardly know where to start. 

A. 

Austerity

Does it occur to no one that we are creating more problems than we are supposed to be solving? 

She was broke and about to lose her home after her father died. Although she had a doctorate in literature and had once taught at a college in California, she had been fired from the only job she could get — as a clerk at a local drugstore.

The job was gone. So was her will to go on. But a friend persuaded her to give the Beverly center a chance. “They treated you like you were a human being, like you were normal,” Sullivan said.

She continued to go back, but even after six years of therapy she kept “suicide as a backup plan,” she said. Eventually, her therapist convinced her that she could not get well “if I always had an exit strategy.”

The city’s plan to close Beverly-Morgan Park Center and five others — Auburn Gresham Mental Health Center, Chicago Woodlawn Mental Health, Northwest Mental Health Center, Back of the Yards Mental Health Center and Northtown Mental Health Center — literally puts lives at risk, Sullivan said.

“I wouldn’t be here without my clinic,” she said.

A. 

Local Church Acts Reasonably; Church Hierarchy, Not So Much

Oh, sit DOWN like you supposed to: 

CHICAGO — On the heels of an agreement about parade times reached between Chicago LGBT Pride organizers and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel church — which sits on the June parade route — the Windy City’s Cardinal Francis George compared the event to “something like the Ku Klux Klan.”

“You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism,” the Cardinal told Fox News Chicago on Sunday.

When FOX tells you to chill out with the inappropriate and inflammatory rhetoric, you might want to consider heeding their advice, but no: 

“That’s a little strong analogy, isn’t it? Ku Klux Klan?” the Fox reporter said to the Cardinal in response.

“It is, but you take a look at the rhetoric,” he responded. “The rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan, the rhetoric of some of the gay liberation people. Who is the enemy? Who is the enemy? The Catholic Church.”

The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, pal. The fact that the parish in question was just fine with the parade (just not with the timing, which would have snarled the hell out of traffic, so parish leaders acted like grownups and reached an actual solution) makes it all the more ridiculous that His Eminence went out of his way to fall on his keys, in a public-relations sense.   

A. 

 

Memo to His Young Fans: Ron Paul is OLD AS HELL

I don't mean old in years, because look, Jimmy Carter is 457 and I think we should run him again tomorrow. Also being old is not a guarantee that one will be a racist, homophobic moron. One of my least favorite things is the idea that you have to attain a certain age to hold an opinion, and that once you hit 40 everybody's Republican, and nobody younger than 25 knows anything at all about taxes or responsibility, or similar forms of reductive, ageist bullshit. I mean old in thinking, old in the world he inhabits, and old in his approach to people with whom, as a politician, he will most certainly have to deal: 

He is what I would describe as “out of touch,” with both Hispanic and Black culture. Ron is far from being the hippest guy around. He is completely clueless when it comes to Hispanic and Black culture, particularly Mexican-American culture. And he is most certainly intolerant of Spanish and those who speak strictly Spanish in his presence, (as are a number of Americans, nothing out of the ordinary here.)

[snip]

Is Ron Paul a homo-phobe? Well, yes and no. He is not all bigoted towards homosexuals. He supports their rights to do whatever they please in their private lives. He is however, personally uncomfortable around homosexuals, no different from a lot of older folks of his era.

Cole takes this all to mean that Paul actually is a racist, homophobic anti-Semite, and while I certainly wouldn't argue those, I would say a larger problem that this letter reveals is that he is, like lots of people once favored by a power structure, totally out of his depth when it comes to life these days, and what's more, DELIBERATELY out of his depth.

Which wouldn't all be a problem for him if he wasn't running for president, after all. One can be a racist, homophobic, anti-Semite in the ways the above letter defines and have lots of friends and live in a town and do a job and live what is deemed by society to be a reasonably respectable life. So long as you arrange things such that you have minimal contact with anyone who is not like you, you won't ever be unhappy and thus will have no reason whatsoever to learn to deal. 

Every single person reading this knows ten people like this. It's just they usually confine their clueless pondering about why those black kids don't pull up their pants and why all those homeless don't get jobs and why men would ever want to kiss other men to embarrassing the younger relatives at the family party, instead of putting themselves in the position of having to decide on policy that concerns those about whom they know nothing on purpose.

That the world doesn't work like this anymore, that it's so much easier to be exposed to information about people different from ourselves and thus grow and change and push each other, that makes anyone -- of any age -- tolerant and curious and young, intellectually speaking. And anyone who doesn't want to come along might as well be a fossil. 

A. 

Man on Man Penguin

Via ONTD, apparently our schools are now teaching Penguin Sex [Facebook link]: 

Jeff's 6yr old son came home with a somewhat controversial book about gay penguins. Should the school have had this book in the library for kids in kindergarten and first grade? Let Deminski & Doyle know your take on it now. 1-800-283-1015

The comments to this post are full of angry parents who have lots of opinions about what should be taught in school and what should be taught at home. Spelling and grammar, for instance, is clearly something these kids are not going to get around the dinner table. : 

If my 6 yr old comes home with that book..!!! There will be trouble knocking at the school door ...!!! They can barley read at that age ... Let alone understand man on man penguin ..!!

---

I think it should be up to the parents to teach there young children about homosexuality the school has no right doing it n the teachera are not yr childrens parents . Its the bama minastration doing this .i have no problem with a person thats gay i have alot of gay friends but dont let schools teach it to yr kids it schould be the parents who tells there kids

---

There is a video i saw about this..is was about the goverment doing what they want with your child and taking your rights away and you dont even know it. i dont see anything wrong with the book..however a newsletter home about "hey we now have alternative lifestyle section added to our library" would have been nice and if the parents dont want the kids in that section taking out books then a form shld be signed.

I think these folks could use a few more gay penguins in their lives. 

A. 

Assets, not liabilities

Merry Christmas everyone!

Having served various administrations, we know that politicians of both parties love this country and want to keep it safe. But right now some in Congress are all too willing to undermine our ideals in the name of fighting terrorism. They should remember that American ideals are assets, not liabilities.

You may know that, General.  Me, I'm not so sure anymore.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

That listening to batshit crazy shitballs who see Islam in their coffee grounds every morning would lead to bad things. 

Also the best lead ever is at the link. 

You know, after the whole Rachael Ray-is-leading-the-donut-jihad nonsense, after the Sharia Turkey thing, after ACORN and NPR, after Sears and porn, and every other time that any conservative outrage avalanche turned out to be made of horseshit, you would hope that corporate PR folks would learn, and would have a meeting with their bosses in which they were able to say, "look, these fuckballs don't shop at our stores anyway, most of them can't spell worth a crap, so fuck 'em in their faces and can we please get back to making buckets of money on cordless drills, please thanks." 

A. 

What Do They Think Goes On in Girls' Bathrooms?

Via Shakesville, this entire story is worth a read, but this type of thing kept jumping out at me in places: 

When fifth grade started, Wyatt was gone. Nicole showed up for school, sometimes wearing a dress and sporting shoulder-length hair. She began using the girls’ bathroom. Nikki’s friends didn’t have a problem with the transformation; there were playdates and sleepovers.

“They said, ‘It was about time!’ ’’ Nicole says. She was elected vice president of her class and excelled academically.

But one day a boy called her a “faggot,’’ objected to her using the girls’ bathroom, and reported the matter to his grandfather, who is his legal guardian. The grandfather complained to the Orono School Committee, with the Christian Civic League of Maine backing him. The superintendent of schools then decided Nicole should use a staff bathroom.

[snip]

Last winter, Maine state representative Kenneth Fredette, a Republican from Penobscot County, sponsored a bill that would have repealed protections for transgender people in public restrooms, instead allowing schools and businesses to adopt their own policies. The bill was a response to the Maines’ 2009 lawsuit against the Orono School District.

It keeps coming back to bathrooms, and thus the conflation of "transgender" with "sexual predator." But I just have to ask what exactly Republicans envision when they think of a ladies' room?

Every girls' bathroom I've ever been in has either been a one-room thing with a lock on the door, meaning you go in and only people you allow in are in there with you, or it's got individual locking stalls so that you're not, like, looking at people peeing or anything. Outside the stalls we often do secret sexy things like wash our hands and put on lipstick, things many women do in the presence of a penis on a regular basis without the world fucking ending. So what is the deal? What is going to happen that is some kind of violation? 

Yes, in men's rooms there are urinals, but I have yet to see a horrible panic in Congress about female to male transgender folks invading the guys' shitter. It's always the poor helpless chickadees who need protection from the presence of a Seekrit Dude. And if peen is the issue, where is the worry about women who bring their 12-year-old boys in there with them because Junior can't be out of mommy's sight for ten seconds, not even to pee? That makes me far more uncomfortable than wondering what kind of equipment the woman the next stall over was born with. 

Is this some kind of fixation you get from watching too much repressive porn, or something? Where you think it's a nonstop lesbian orgy in there, or it's some kind of secret world where we're all taking off our bras and dancing to Enya? I'm not in a public bathroom for a second longer than I have to be, because a) gross, almost always and b) better things to do. It's not a hangout. 

Unless you're a family-values conservative trolling for some airport beejers, I guess. 

A. 

Shaming Her Will Fix Everything

God Almighty: 

While the arguments fly, McCormack waits quietly in her small, dark apartment. A bedraggled bouquet of silk flowers hangs outside her front door along with a plaque that says “Welcome” in Spanish, French, and German. Even if her suit succeeds, there is no victory for her. She says she has “no friends at all, no one to talk to.” She knows no one who’s had an abortion, or at least no one who will admit it. “My mother, she’s Mormon, you know? She’s a proud person, and this is a terrible thing for her to have to look people in the eye.” After her picture appeared in the paper, McCormack got a part-time job at a dry cleaner, using another name, but people figured out who she was and stopped letting her bag up their clothes, so she quit. On a recent trip to a local state office to apply for aid, she was ignored for hours. “They made it clear what was happening,” she says. “For a while I just sat there, sort of amazed that they were just letting me sit there.” Eventually, she picked up her son and went home.

Even her attempts to bury her fetus have been thwarted. Hearn put in requests to the district attorney to have the remains released from the evidence locker, but no one has responded. “I never wanted to be someone public, to make a point,” McCormack says. “This isn’t a cause for me. I just didn’t know what to do. I did what I thought was right for my kids, that’s all.”

I'm sure that helped. I mean, I'm sure it did. She can go back and un-abort now, that you've taught her a lesson. She won't be poor and desperate anymore, now that you've denied her aid to prove what a virtuous person YOU are, to refuse to touch her unclean hands or the hands of her children. She'll just disappear now, and you won't have to think about the options our society offers somebody who made the horrible, cardinal sin of having sex like a human being. 

Life would have been so much better if she'd been forced by the state to bear that child, by the way. Then you could have shamed her in the ordinary way we shame people who seek public aid, or who happen to be less than perfectly dressed, or who eat fast food, or something. Then, at best, she could have gone back to being invisibly desperate, instead of all up in our faces, reminding us of our shortcomings and other inconvenient things like that. 

A. 

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - Putrid Potpourri edition

OK guys - I've put Mr. Peabody's Wayback machine inside the iso chamber, so we can fly back to a better time - a simpler time - a time when there were still "Our Sarah For President" signs.

Here we go! First up - Are you ready for some FUBO???

ESPN pulls Hank Williams Jr. after he compares Obama to Hitler
sports.yahoo.com ^ | 10-3-11 | Chris Chase

Posted on Monday, October 03, 2011 8:51:51 PM by Justaham

Hank Williams Jr., the singer whose various videos for the hit song "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Monday Night" has served as the intro to "Monday Night Football" for 23 seasons, compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler during a Monday morning appearance on "Fox and Friends." The statement led to ESPN pulling his popular intro segment, best known to fans for its "Are you ready for some football?" ending, for Monday night's game between the Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

During a discussion on the 2012 presidential race, Williams began discussing Obama's golf outing with Speaker of the House John Boehner. He said it was a political mistake, on par with "Hitler playing golf with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu."

1 posted on Monday, October 03, 2011 8:51:55 PM by Justaham

He then said:

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"Well you may not know it but this man is a spy.
He's a undercover agent for the FBI
And he's been sent down here to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan!"

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I said "Would you believe this man has gone as far
As tearing Wallace stickers off the bumpers of cars
And he voted for George McGovern for President."

"Well he's a friend of them long haired, hippy-type, pinko fags!
I betchya he's even got a commie flag
Tacked up on the wall inside of his garage."

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Further respondent sayeth not.

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To: Justaham

I heard about Bush being ‘hitler’ for years. Someone says it from the other angle? Fired. NFL expect repercussions.

2 posted on Monday, October 03, 2011 8:55:20 PM by allmost

I'm sure they're absolutely terrified.

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To: Justaham

Hank shouldn’t be working for those light in the loafers fairies at ESPN anyway. He’s better off.

7 posted on Monday, October 03, 2011 8:58:42 PM by FlingWingFlyer (If you always tell the truth, you won't have to remember what you said.)

"Light in the loafers"?  They'll fuck you up, son.

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To: Justaham

Actually he never compared Obama to Hitler. What he said was Boehner and Obama Golfing was like Hitler and Netanyahu golfing. In other words, you could not find two more diametrically opposed people to play golf. He was no more likening Obama to Hitler than he was calling Boehner Netanyahu, ( which wouldnt even make sense as Boehner on his best day couldn’t even polish Bibi’s shoes.)

Well, "Bibi" has your spittle to do that with, doesn't he?

Stupid Gretchen Carlson and Stupid Stupid ESPN. Oh well two less things that I don’t watch that I will now avoid even more.

9 posted on Monday, October 03, 2011 8:59:21 PM by 1malumprohibitum

How do you not watch something even more than you're already not watching it? 

Expect repercussions.

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To: Justaham

Could sports be more racist?

It's all gone downhill since they started letting the coloreds in.

It’s sickening. It was Gretchen or someone who made something out of that question. I knew the minute she emphasized it that he was out.

Bocephus is gay?

He went on the show to publicize some newly discovered music by his father that’s out now on TV but they had to delve into politics.

Maybe you could tell him to shut up and sing?

I think this is kinda sad.

20 posted on Monday, October 03, 2011 9:05:49 PM by altura ( Palin/Ryan---or Palin/Perry or Palin/Rubio

Based on your sig line, I foresee a lifetime of "kinda sad", bitter disppointment, and hearbreak ahead of you, due to your inability to distinguish your fantasies from reality.

You will then blame your hearbreak and wasted life on hippies and "commonists". 

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To: PrkChps

We’ve decided to BOYCOTT MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL for the rest of the season! Support Hank Williams Jr and BOYCOTT MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL!!

35 posted on Monday, October 03, 2011 9:39:47 PM by goron (communism)

So how did that work out for ya, Freepers?

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'Monday Night Football Wins the Night for ESPN'

Written By Robert Seidman

November 30th, 2011

Monday night’s ESPN Monday Night Football telecast – a 49-24 New Orleans Saints victory over the New York Giants – helped ESPN win the night among all networks – broadcast or cable – in households, viewers, and all key male and adult demos. The telecast averaged:

• 10.7 household coverage rating (9.3 U.S. rating)
• 10,624,000 households
• 14,423,000 viewers

 

Notes:

• ESPN won the night among all networks in households, viewers and all key male and adult demos;
• MNF led all programs Monday night in the delivery of households, viewers and all key male and adult demos
• The game ranks as the seventh most-viewed telecast of the year on cable among households (ninth among viewers).

Wow - looks like you morons continue to have the same effect on the outside world that you always have.

None.

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More time-travelling after the Tebow-approved jump.

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Gay rights are human rights

 

 

Conservatives, of course, beg to differ

 

 

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - "The Cain Mutiny" edition

OK folks - looks like the Putrid Potpourri Edition is gonna have to be put off one more time,

Let's suit up, enter the airlock, and see what's been happening on the Cain Trainwreck.

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Cain Denies New Allegations, as Woman Claims They Had 13-Year Affair
FOX News ^ | 11-28-11 | FOX News

Posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:16:15 PM by Lazlo in PA

ATLANTA -- Herman Cain on Monday pre-emptively denied a forthcoming accusation by a woman who is expected to say she had a 13-year affair with the Republican presidential candidate.

In an apparent effort to get ahead of the story, Cain appeared in a cable news interview to say the woman is "someone who I know, who is an acquaintance, who I thought was a friend."

MyFoxAtlanta.com released some details of the story, which is scheduled to air Monday night, shortly after Cain appeared on CNN -- identifying the accuser as an Atlanta businesswoman named Ginger White.

"It was pretty simple," White told the station. "It wasn't complicated. I was aware that he was married. And I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship."

(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...

There have been rumors that the Regime had something else up their sleeves to slam Cain again. This may be it.

1 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:16:20 PM by Lazlo in PA

Denial:

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To: Lazlo in PA

She is bufugly and looking for money.

2 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:19:09 PM by coon2000 (Give me Liberty or give me death!)

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.So if she were gorgeous she's be believable? And he was already giving her money.

To: coon2000

I just saw her on Special Report. She is a hard looking broad and they said she was unemployed. She looks like a perfect candidate for chicanery by this Regime. She had absolutely nothing in the way of proof of any affair and was also very vague.

8 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:23:38 PM by Lazlo in PA (Now living in a newly minted Red State.)

.

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To: Lazlo in PA

This is ridiculous. Where do they does he find these women?

13 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:25:06 PM by RockinRight (If you're waiting to drink until you find pure water, you're going to die of dehydration.)

FIFY..

To: Lazlo in PA

Someone needs to “James O’Keefe” these MSM bastards who are setting up Cain,

What? Dress them up like 80's movie pimps?

they need to tape phone calls of the DNC offereing money to get people to tell lies about Cain and blow it all up in the faces.....

16 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:26:14 PM by GraceG

Anger:

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To: Lazlo in PA

Cain may deny it, but his attorney did anything but:

Rather, this appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults – a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public. No individual, whether a private citizen, a candidate for public office or a public official, should be questioned about his or her private sexual life

If Cain did not do it, he should fire his lawyer.

30 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:31:35 PM by PghBaldy (War Powers Res: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/warpower.asp)

.

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To: Lazlo in PA

She’s a cocktail waitress at an off airport lounge for crying out loud.

The eyeliner, black dress and pearls provided by the designer Accusa Trottier

57 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:42:28 PM by Eddie01 (Liberals lie about everything all the time.

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To: marty60

It takes a staggering amount of narcissism and arrogance for someone to run for president of the United States with this much baggage. He must think he is too big to fail.

60 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:44:11 PM by varina davis (We grow too soon old and too late smart -- Pennsylvania Dutch adage)

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To: marty60

How about you provide some actual evidence before just spouting off?

62 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:44:41 PM by Apollo5600 (Cain 2012)

Bargaining:

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To: Apollo5600

I guess suitable proof for me would be a saucy voice mail. For some reason Herman Cain doesn’t strike me as they type to send raunchy texts. Maybe a Valentine’s day card saying “I love you with all my heart”??

67 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:47:11 PM by ReveBM

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To: umgud

Sadly, the drive-by hits will continue until Cain is nominated.

This is not going to affect my support one iota.

Hollyweird mentality pizzes me to no end.

70 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:48:47 PM by OhioBuckeye ("Here sir, the people govern." - Alexander Hamilton)

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To: Lazlo in PA

It’s the typical slimy DNC Cr*p, any kind of dirty, filthy, no good trick is OK if the end result is what the filthy SOB’s want. They are all hypocrites and liars, I hate commies and socialists with every fiber in my body. A pox on them all, may they all die screaming of rectal cancer every single last one of them!!!

80 posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 5:51:36 PM by mongo141

 

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Whups - seems like we've veered back into Anger.

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Depression and Acceptance below the thin blew line...

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Black Friday's Instigators

I don’t do Black Friday. I’m hideously claustrophobic and large crowds often set off my I’M TRAPPED MUST GET OUT OMG STABBITY reflex, so pretty much from now until Christmas my shopping will be confined to stores in my ‘hood and online.

However, I have relatives who go out at the crack of dawn and take care of their whole list off those sales, who prep all week to line up at 10 p.m. and come home at 3 a.m. having had one hell of a good time. I don’t really have a cat in the Authenticity Olympics here, and I find the endless bitching about Black Friday almost as irritating as the ritual itself.

Every year someone behaves like a rampaging rhinoceros in a store, every year someone is injured or killed, and ever year we fill the airwaves with glib jokes about fat stupid Wal-mart people and Facebook cracks about how our society is doomed because somebody wanted a TV and commentary about “those people” and how they don’t truly understand the meaning of Christmas like they should.

Here’s the thing. It’s easy to shame the nutjobs who behave badly, like the woman in the video who pepper-sprayed people, or the shoppers who kick or punch or trample, or those who just plain yell and shove like assholes. We can all shake our heads in disgust at people crowding in for $2 waffle irons and talking cartoon character dolls and whatever else; by and large the people in those videos are lower- to middle-class, not very attractive, and they are actually behaving badly. Obligatory disclaimer: Please do not pepper-spray anyone in a store to get to a cheap toy because that is bad.

A conversation we’re not at all willing to have is who encourages them to show up at the crack of dawn, camp out, crowd around, and go bonkers when the doors open? Who runs the deals that create a frenzy, and who feeds that frenzy? Who knows damn well after how many years of this that if you offer people a break on something for their kids during the worst economy in the history of the world, more than, say, five decorous ladies in car coats gonna show up and take advantage?

We don’t see much discussion of whether Best Buy and Wal-mart and other big-box stores should treat the day after Thanksgiving like something other than tryouts for the Packers’ offensive line. Whether they should be kicking campers out of their parking lots, off their sidewalks, telling them to go home to their families. Whether they should let their own damn employees have a holiday for once, and not knock them awake at midnight to be there for the 2 a.m. rush. What responsibility they bear, for deliberately creating an unsafe situation and then acting very sad and disappointed in society when people show up and act in a less than safe manner.

It’s hard to have that talk, because it turns into one about valuing profits over safety, and that’s class warfare after all. Easier to blame the people buying all the cheap electronics and maybe hurting each other along the way, than the people pricing and selling the stuff in the first place.

A.

x-posted at Firedoglake

 

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - "It's so good to be home for the Halalidays" edition

Yeah - I know this was supposed to be a "Putrid Potpourri" edition, but there's been alarming real-time developments in Freeperville.

You know how every so often a little reality creeps into the eternal ragefest, when they catch themselves during the rage ramp-up and realize they're being played? This was one of those times. However, the True Believers quickly regroup and counterattack. Suit up, gentle people, because the first offering is - Satanic Butterballs!

Happy Halal Thanksgiving (Boycott Butterball)
American Thinker ^ | November 21, 2011 | Pamela Geller

Posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 8:47:27 PM by Mount Athos

Did you know that the turkey you're going to enjoy on Thanksgiving Day this Thursday is probably halal? If it's a Butterball turkey, then it certainly is.

I discovered that only two plants in the U.S. that perform halal slaughter keep the halal meat separated from the non-halal meat. At other meat-packing plants, animals are slaughtered following halal requirements, but then only a small bit of the meat is actually labeled halal.

Wendy Howze, a Butterball Consumer Response Representative, responded: "Our whole turkeys are certified halal."

Halal slaughter involves cutting the trachea, the esophagus, and the jugular vein, and letting the blood drain out while saying "Bismillah allahu akbar" -- in the name of Allah the greatest. Many people refuse to eat it on religious grounds.

Others object because of the cruelty to animals that halal slaughter necessitates.

Still others refuse to do so on principle: why should we be forced to conform to Islamic norms? It's Islamic supremacism on the march, yet again.

Non-Muslims in America and Europe don't deserve to have halal turkey forced upon them in this way, without their knowledge or consent.

The same Islamic law that mandates that animals be cruelly slaughtered according to halal requirements also teaches hatred of and warfare against unbelievers, the oppression of women, the extinguishing of free speech, and much more that is inimical to our freedom. Don't support it on this celebration of freedom. Join our Facebook group, 'Boycott Butterball'.

Don't buy a Butterball turkey for Thanksgiving.

1 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 8:47:29 PM by Mount Athos

Cue the Freepers who are not convinced that this is ragegasm material:

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To: Mount Athos

Too late. Can I make up for it by passing gas in the direction of Mecca?

2 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 8:50:10 PM by Ingtar

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To: Mount Athos

Gee, great idea to demand a Butterball Boycott when most people have already bought their birds. That’s like the TV News showing the wild drinking, drugs and sex binges of Spring break 2 weeks after break has taken place. Boycotts seldom work. And most people won’t care much of a drat where the throat was cut, just as long as the bird isn’t still flapping when being stuffed into the oven.

5 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 8:53:33 PM by theDentist (fybo; qwerty ergo typo : i type, therefore i misspelll)

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To: theDentist

If I boycotted every company that ticked me off I’d be living a subsistence life in a tiny little hut in Montana.

7 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 8:56:07 PM by Mr Ramsbotham (Laws against sodomy are honored in the breech.)

You mean you're not?

What about the always-imminent SHTF? Are the weapons buried? The gold stacked? The dry provisions catalogued (anyone besides myself ever wonder where the potable water to rehydrate their dried crap is gonna come from once the taps stop running?)?

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To: Mount Athos

If you don’t believe in Allah, what difference does it make? Buy Butterball and don’t give away your power. By boycotting you admit it makes a difference.

9 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 8:57:23 PM by turbocat

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To: Mount Athos

Good grief! Why shouldn’t companies provide food that ethnic customers are willing to purchase? Makes for increased sales and a better bottom line. Why punish a company simply because you don’t like the customer base to which it’s trying to expand?

12 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 9:01:02 PM by SuziQ

Ah - but the True Believers are mounting a counterattack!

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To: SuziQ

This I don't like.

while saying "Bismillah allahu akbar" -- in the name of Allah the greatest.

This makes me lose my appetite.

18 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 9:06:59 PM by DManA

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To: DManA

It has been an ancient custom to pray for the animal that's been sacrificed for your meal. This is not at all peculiar to Moslems. Christian Arabs would traditionally use terminology very similar to that.

So, prayer makes you lose your appetite, or Arabic, or the self-identity of the guy making the prayer?

28 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 9:15:43 PM by muawiyah

.

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To: muawiyah

Prayer to a demon does.

29 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 9:17:54 PM by DManA

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To: DManA

Isn’t that the same Mohammedan chant used when they behead Infidels?

51 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 9:46:48 PM by SERKIT ("Blazing Saddles" explains it all......)

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To: Mount Athos

Another tidbit on Halal. All and I repeat all of Costco’s lamb is now halal and their Coleman organic chicken. So since we loved the lamb and the organic chicken this is our last year with Costco. We are looking into Sam’s or BJ’s.

It's too late.  You ate the Satanic lamb chops and your family is going to Hell, you baaa-aaaad man.

Most people just think that Halal is like Kosher. It is not. Kosher slaughter is just a way of processing so all of the blood gets out of the meat. Halal is actually a sacrifice. They point that lamb/turkey in the direction of the Black Rock of Mecca and sacrifice it to Allah. We are all Muslims now.

62 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 10:26:03 PM by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose of a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped.)

Waitaminnit.

COSTCO?????

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"Get thee behind be, thou evil side-dish of Satan!"

Emo Phillips

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To: Ruy Dias de Bivar

I absolutely agree with you.

Now that I know what they do with this meat I have a moral choice to make.

69 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 11:39:50 PM by DManA

.

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To: MontaniSemperLiberi

Thank you. That means something to me. It is a matter of being a good steward of God’s gifts giblets.

68 posted on Monday, November 21, 2011 11:37:23 PM by DManA

FIFY.

So much more after the Islamic order to "Continue Reading, Infidel!"....

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Okay, Wisconsin Right to Life

I can't bring myself to praise them, but at least in this, they are being practical: 

In a twist, Wisconsin Right to Life, the largest anti-abortion group in the state, has come out forcefully against the personhood amendment strategy, calling it "just plain wrong for Wisconsin."

In a statement on its website, the organization says Wisconsin is "already in the best position possible to protect unborn children" because the state has a law on the books — currently superseded by Roe v. Wade — that prohibits abortion. The organization believes passage of the personhood amendment would invalidate that law. (Others, including Pro-Life Wisconsin, disagree.)

Wisconsin Right to Life also contends it would cost millions of dollars to win a ballot measure, and that, even if the effort were successful, the personhood amendment would be challenged in court and struck down.

Well, and also again forever too, it plays badly on the news to storm reproductive health clinics to liberate the frozen embryos in the lab and send the cops to bust down the doors of women who've just miscarried. But whatever gets them there, really. The practicality argument is one I've had with several acquaintances who are opponents of abortion rights, because I feel like it's the most persuasive for the non-movement people, those who aren't actively organizing against sluts having sex. HOW, exactly, would this work? 

A. 

It Begins

Recall, you fools!

Indeed it does.  Yesterday was the kickoff of the drive to recall Scott Walker and Rebecca Kleefisch here in Wisconsin--I believe this fact was noted at this very site yesterday.

But, of course, it was also the beginning of stupid Republican nonsense against the recall.  Including vandalizing a business (auto-play video at that link) here in liberal-ass Madison.  Keep it classy, Walker supporters.

Oh, and the first person who compares dumping a glass of beer on someone's head to hurling a large and heavy projectile into a place of business gets a free punch in the dick, courtesy of me.  While it's rude, unless you're dealing with the Wicked Witch of the West, throwing a glass of slightly alcoholic water on someone's head won't kill them.  If someone would've gotten brained with that rock, it could've been fatal.  I mean, imagine there's a little kid in the path of that.  Christ, people. 

Failures of Leadership

I don't like generational sniping. First of all, there's no contest to win Greatest Generation, pace Tom Brokaw. Second, I think it obscures complexity and makes it easier for us to fetishize the good old days while dismissing the contributions of the young (and thereby letting the young off the hook in the process), but there's something in this otherwise messy piece that I've talked about a lot: 

We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us -- at the orders of our leader -- to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.

The times following September 11th called for leadership, not reckless, gluttonous tax cuts. But our leaders then, as now, seemed more concerned with flattery. Then -House Majority Leader and now-convicted felon Tom Delay told us, “nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.” Not exactly Churchillian stuff.

Those of us who did enlist were ordered into Iraq on the promise of being “greeted as liberators,” in the words of our then-vice president. Several thousand of us are dead from that false promise.

We looked for leadership from our churches, and were told to fight not poverty or injustice, but gay marriage. In the Catholic Church, we were told to blame the media, not the abusive priests, not the bishops, not the Vatican, for making us feel that our church has failed us in its sex abuse scandal and cover-up.

I can see where you'd read that and say, look, don't wait for a leader, just be one, it's not magic. I think a lot of our problems have come from the idea that we have to sit around and wait until just the right, perfect, sinless person comes along and THEN we'll get off the couch. THEN it won't be a risk of any kind to do what we've known for years we should do, which is fight for the powerless against the great. Just get off your entitled ass already, Generation X/Y/Whatever. 

This is speaking to something else, though, and it's how the leaders we do have underestimated us at a critical point in our history. They took people who were, by and large, willing to do just about anything after 9/11. Those who weren't taking the opportunity to be bigoted assholes and burn down Pakistani-owned gas stations were as ready as anyone sitting by the radio listening to FDR to be called upon to serve. And when no such moment came, the adrenaline and energy went directionless, turned inward, became exhaustion and fear and despair. 

We fear asking great things of others because we're afraid we'll lose them. If you grab your pennant and jump on your horse and yell, "This way!" and no one follows you, you'll look like an asshole, right? Better to mill around in the field with everybody else. I think, and I know how ridiculous this sounds because how much power do these people have, that they're actually afraid to lead. Look at the way Democrats always back down, at the first sign of opposition. "Ooh, it's about to go bad, better cut our losses now." Even look at the way Republicans always run back to the safest parts of their orthodoxy, to old ideas that even they know won't accomplish a fraction of what they say they want. 

And it's HORSESHIT. You never lose people because you ask too much of them. You lose people because you ask too little. Eventually everybody's going to get sick of camp food and sleeping outside in the rain and go home, if nobody says, "this way!" and sounds the call to arms. 

Hell, if nobody follows you at least you're going somewhere. 

A. 

Rioting Kids are Only Part of the Problem

From the Penn State Daily Collegian, which did outstanding journalism all week: 

If anything, it is clear from the allegations that the university’s investigation was not handled properly. Curley and Schultz brought their course of action to Graham Spanier in 2002 — and he signed off on it. Their action plan? Sandusky was not allowed to bring any more children from his charity, The Second Mile — which works with at-risk children — on campus.

This was not enough.

Penn State’s reaction to these allegations would suggest that the university didn’t mind what Sandusky did, so long as it wasn’t in its backyard.

The moral failure of every single person involved is appalling. No one did anything more than try to sweep this problem off-campus.

It's easy to subject dumbass football fans to contempt on Facebook, but students don't just come to the independent conclusion that their football coaches or athletic directors or chancellors or whatever are adorable mascots without any flaws, rather than incredibly powerful and wealthy actors in a system. Any major university, including my own, makes millions of dollars pretending their sports programs are the realms of heroes, and everybody gets inundated with it. Plenty of kids didn't lose their fucking heads, and with all the misery in this story, we need to remember that not all of humanity sucks as bad as those tipping over news vans, if only so that we don't slit our wrists:

“I’ve heard many, many people express that not enough is being done for the sexual assault victims,” said Kyle Harris, 21, a senior public relations major from Massachusetts who is helping to plan the vigil. “We want to support these victims. We’re just horrified.”

You know what WILL change the culture of admiring those who helped protect a child molester and helped him continue to prey on victims? FUCKING PRISON TERMS FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED. The court of public opinion is one thing, but depending on there never to be any total idiots who will stand up for those in power no matter what is not, shall we say, realistic. Throw a few more bastards in jail, instead of starting a bidding war for their memoirs or letting them disappear back into academia, and the idea of getting outraged on behalf of anyone caught doing this again will start to seem a lot less attractive, no matter how may kegs got tapped at the frat house. 

A. 

Whose Tragedy #PennState Is

What is happening at Penn State is not a tragedy for Penn State.

It's not a tragedy for Joe Paterno, or Graham Spanier, or any one of a thousand students whose school just became a national punch line. 

It's not a tragedy for alumni who will have to answer questions for a week or two from prurient and stupid work colleagues. 

It's not a tragedy for football fans, or for student athletes. 

This is a tragedy for the children raped by Jerry Sandusky, and that is IT. 

I am just about done hearing everybody describe this as a terrible situation for all those involved. It's actually not a terrible situation for all those involved. It's a difficult situation for just about everybody who will maybe do some interviews, write a book, and otherwise not miss a meal or have any problems beyond a couple of seriously awkward Thanksgivings. This includes Joe Paterno, who by the most charitable description of his conduct was deliberately oblivious to a very sick man in his employ. This includes Graham Spanier, who actually comes off looking the worst in all this, as the guy who said, "Look, an adequate response here is that we just ask him not to bring his victims around here anymore." 

I am just about done with pontificating about what this all means for the future of the football program and what it means for college athletics and what it says about our culture and blah blah blah, because none of those consequences are actual, you know, things. Joe Paterno's "legacy" will be tarnished as a result of this.. Penn State's legacy will be tarnished. Let me ask you this: SO WHAT? Tell me in actual terms what that might mean. No applause at the alumni dinners? Maybe donations take a little bit of a dip for ten minutes? Paterno and Spanier don't get invited to the swank parties anymore? 

None of that can even compare to the damage done to those Sandusky harmed and others failed to protect. What has happened to Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, and Penn State is an inconvenience. What has happened to Sandusky's victims is a tragedy. Paterno and Spanier may be publicly embarrassed, footnoted in Wikipedia, and looked at sideways for a while. Sandusky's victims will carry this forever, and there will be no sympathetic retrospective for them in 10 years, in which they can thoughtfully reflect on how hard it all was but how it brought them closer to Jesus or whatever it is these people will say. 

I used to cover stories like this, back when the priest abuse scandal broke. I covered a trial in which victim after victim testified to the harm done to them, to the lives they had after being used so cruelly by someone they trusted. I sat next to a father as he wept outside the courthouse, because he had encouraged his children to spend time with the man who ruined them. It saved some of them, coming forward. It ruined others. A few years later one of those same victims was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography. This ruins everything, stains everything forward. Very little that can be done in the way of firings, resignations, or public humiliation can even come close. 

A. 

What the ... Just ... Seriously?

Does your wife suck because she is now fat? Cheat on her! 

Unfortunately for many, they wake up one day to realize their partner is not recognizable to them anymore (physically, emotionally, personally…) and so while our service may "offend" some we "satisfy" millions by offering them an alternative to the monotony of monogamy.

The model in the ad gives a hell of a response here, but the first commenter gets it the best: 

Here's my thing, if you don't want to fuck you wife, tell her. Leave it up to her to say "that's cool, let's swing" or "get the hell out." Communication in relationships, what a novel idea. 

Because there's already an alternative to the monotony of monogamy: It's called not being monogamous. You don't actually have to be married or in an exclusive relationship if you don't want to be. I get that there's tremendous societal pressure to be coupled up, but if it is that important to you to fuck people other than your wife, you either find a wife who is cool with that or you don't find a wife at all. 

Relationships break down, people use sex or the lack thereof as a weapon or a currency or both, etc. And it's one thing to have an honest conversation about that, about if you and your spouse still care about each other and if the original rules still apply (by the way, there's of course no male equivalent ad with a big dude with uneven neck fur giving a come-hither look at the camera). It's another to make the independent decision that you have no choice but to use a skeezy web site to fuck around due to the unbearable burden your plump lovely has placed upon poor you. 

I have no righteous opinion on monogamy or marriage as it relates to the choices of anybody else. What gets my back up is the idea that it is ever okay to excuse yourself from having to decide just what it is you actually want, and disguising it with a bunch of crazy bullshit behavior that's unnecessary. 

A. 

Odds & Sods: Ick Factor Edition

It was a busy news day yesterday and many of the top stories went beyond cringeworthy into pure ickiness.

--> Women who have been groped, harassed and crudely propositioned by Herman Cain are sprouting like mushrooms after a monsoon. The latest accusation is the ickiest and it goes well beyond sexual harassment into the realm of sexual assault. Cain's hold on wingnuttia's imagination had been ebbing for days but he still has the hardcore misogynists like Rushbo on his side. What was described by Ms. Bialek was an assault, which is an unwanted touching of any kind. I wonder if the Hoaxidate has learned to keep his hands to himself. Probably not.

--> I wrote about the uplifting side of college football yesterday as the Penn State perv case unfolded. It's such an icky story that I ended up in a rare serious conversation on Twitter about it. Our conclusion was that Penn State is the Catholic Church of the NCAA. It's a good analogy since Joe Paterno has been called the Pope more than once over the years. It's time for him to go. I bet Pope Benny could find a spot for him...

---> On a *somewhat* less icky note, I saw Jack Abramoff on 60 Minutes. I don't buy Casino Jack's contrition for a nano-second BUT I now understand the secret of his success. The man could sell ice to the Inuits and synthesizes sincerity with the best of them.

---> Finally, let's move into the celebrity ickiness zone. Director Bret Ratner is well known for making "blow stuff up movies" and his latest popcorn flick, Tower Heist is a hit. Ratner harshed his own buzz by saying "rehearsing is for fags." Ratner later apologized but this has got to be the dumbest slur ever. I have no idea what the hell it means since manly directors have been known to rehearse too.

Malaka Of The Week: Shorter University

It's institutional malakatude time again. Until recently, I'd never heard of Shorter University, which is the long and, uh short of it. It's obviously not the most enlightened school:

Shorter University, a Christian Baptist school in Rome, Ga., is forcing its 200 employees to sign a statement declaring that they reject homosexuality. Anyone who doesn't sign the pledge risks losing their jobs.

Atlanta’s WSBTV reports that employees who sign the "personal lifestyle pledge" also must reject premarital sex and adultery, and other behavior the school deems to violate the Bible’s teachings. The statement also bans drug use and drinking alcohol in the presence of students, and requires employees to be active in local churches. The lifestyle statement was adopted by the school's board of trustees last month and presented to employees three days later, on Oct. 24.

All new employees will have to sign the pledge upon being hired, and all current employees will have to sign it in order to renew their contract. The pledge notifies employees that they can be fired for violating the new policy.

An anonymous employee voiced his/her concerns to the Georgia Voice:

"A question about these things is how they will be enforced. We now will live in fear that someone who doesn't like us personally or someone who has had a bad day will report that we've been drinking or that we are suspected of being gay. What happens then? There is no defined process and even if there were, there is no way to absolutely prove or disprove the accusation."

Shorter President Don Dowless told WSBTV that the goal wasn’t to offend people, and that lots of Christian schools have similar pledges. "These are biblical positions," he said.

School officials say that since the school doesn’t receive federal funding, it believes its actions are perfectly legal.

Biblical positions? Missionary I suppose, but never never doggy style.

Not only is this policy indefensible, it's stupid. Do they really expect the gay hordes to descend on their litle Christian college? Perhaps they think that "those people" will confuse Rome, Georgia with the *real* Rome and will flood them will job applications. Where have you gone Marcello Mastroanni? Yeah, I know, he's dead but it's fun name to say...

The whole thing sounds like a recipe for a witch hunt, which is the worst kind of malakatude imaginable.

In Vitro vs. Plan B

Drum describes something he thinks is a conundrum of some kind:

Life, Haley is suggesting, begins not at fertilization, for some reason, but only at conception — which means what? Implantation in the uterus? But if that's the case, then the Plan B emergency contraceptive should be fine and dandy, shouldn't it? But the anti-abortion crowd hates Plan B. And they're OK with in vitro fertilization. Even by their standards, does this make any sense?

It's actually pretty simple.

Demonizing women who are trying to get pregnant plays a whole lot differently than demonizing women who don't want a baby. That's all there is to this. It's not about moral consistency. It's about how it would play on the six o'clock, how it would read in a fundraising letter. It's about the difficulty of punching up and the ease of kicking down.

Most of all, it's about about making sure as few people as possible notice that the organized anti-abortion rights movement is full of total assholes who don't know the first thing about women's bodies and assume we're all just as ignorant as they are.

Via Atrios.

A.

Jindal blows a gaping hole in Perry's waterline even wider

 

All right - excuse me for getting out of my box, but I don't see this anywhere else on the interwebz. It made me choke on my ham, onion, and jalapeno omelette.

The MTP bobbleheads had the surrogates for Romney and Perry on this morning, and the subject turned to the M-word:

(Gregory) There’s this issue of”Governor Romney is a Mormon”, this has become an issue in the campaign, pastor Robery Jeffress introduced Rick Perry and said the following:

 (clip runs)

(Jefferson) “So we want a candidate who s a good, moral person? Or do we want a candidate who is a born-again follower of the lord Jesus Christ? Mitt Romney is a good, moral person – but he is not a Christian. Mormonism is not Christianity, yet it’s always been considered historically to be a cult by evangelical Christians,”

(clip ends)

 (Gregory) Has Governor Perry satisfactorily distanced himself from this pastor in Governor Romney’s mind?

 (Pawlenty) Well, in my view, David, it’s disappointing that Governor Perry and others who didn’t denounce pastor Jeffress and those comments more directly, We have a country where we don’t have prohibitions on a particular church attendance for public office. In fact, it’s prohibited in the U.S. Constitution.

 (Gregory) Governor Jindal, are you disappointed in Governor Perry? Have you told him he should more formally denounce…

 (Jindal) I don’t think it’s for any of us to judge somebody else’s religious views, their relationship with God. The Bible is very clear, that’s up to God, not us. (…) It’s not for any of us to judge somebody’s faith, relationship to God, I think that would be inappropriate. The Bible is very clear, that’s not our role.

OK.

Pawlenty says that religious tests are against the Constitution, and Jindal says the answers are RIGHT THERE IN THE BIBLE!!!

Even Perry has to be doing a facepalm over this one.

Today In Wisconsin Republican Heroics

Republican legislative consultant (file photo)

In their continuing quest to right all of the wrongs in the state, the Wisconsin Republicans have made a great leap forward.

Assemblyman Joel Kleefisch (R-Newgate) woke up recently, opened the lid of his coffin, and said to himself "You know who has it too easy around here?  Ex-cons.  Blah blah!" (Note--this is only a partial transcript.)  So the good Representative took it upon himself to do something to rectify this grave injustice. 

He thought and he thought, and he puzzled some more, and it finally came to him.  "Aha!" he said.  "I'll make it so that bosses, the most downtrodden group in this society, can refuse to hire people (or fire them) based on prior felony convictions!  This will restore balance to the world, and give those poor bosses a break they so sorely deserve."

So he drafted up a bill with the aid of the Captain up there, and presented it to his fellow freedom-defenders in the legislature today.  You see, Wisconsin law already allows employers to consider convictions in relevant fields when hiring, but it's not enough that a forger be kept away from banks and financial institutions.  What about poor Wal-Mart?  Who will stand up for them when a former embezzler is looking for a minimum-wage job?  Joel Kleefisch, that's who.  I mean, if those felons had wanted to reintegrate themselves into society, they should've thought of that before they committed their crimes, right?  It's only right that someone who was once in possession of one gram of cocaine should never be able to secure employment again.  Same for someone who gets into a bar fight and gets busted for felony assault. 

Thank Jesus for brave patriots like Joel Kleefisch.  I know there's no one who would be more approving of harsh penalties for criminals that Christ Himself. 

And the best part of this all?  There are no possible ill effects!  Fine, upstanding employers get to have ever-more control over the workforce, criminals won't be taking jobs from reg'lar folk, and everyone lives happily ever after.

 

 

In all seriousness, it's this kind of motherfuckery that makes me cheer for that goddamn meteor.  I don't know, but I'd be willing to bet that Rep. Kleefisch has ties to the for-profit prison "industry."  By making a class of people permanently unemployable, where do you think they're gonna be headed?  And, of course, there's the racial aspect to all of this; Black people make up about 6% of the population of the state, yet over 60% of the people sent to prison here are African-American.  That's a crying goddamn shame, and it's a stain on the state.  So who's disproportionately hurt by this?  The poor, and (especially) Black. Finally, since one of the stipulations of the bill is that counties and municipalities cannot pass more lenient laws, I guess we can finally put that "Republicans believe in greater local control of government" bullshit to rest, right?

Will this pass the legislature, get signed, and become law?  I don't know.  But in any event, this is some Class-A Motherfuckery, Joel Kleefisch. 

Dealing with Bullying

Bullies are profoundly fucked up:

Studies show that kids who are involved in bullying — bullies, victims and a third subgroup of particularly problematic kids who engage in both behaviors and are referred to as bully-victims — are more likely to have started out with depression, anxiety and other mental health issues that predispose them to lashing out and to self-harm.

We knew this, right? I think we let a lot of stuff go that, were adults doing it to each other, would land someone's ass in handcuffs, because "it's just kids being kids," and hell no. A lot of the commenters over at ONTD hit the article for drifting into victim-blaming, and it does (the last graf is particularly WTF). But there's also important info in there about attempting to understand why somebody would torture somebody else, and what that would do. Which goes back to what we say around here all the time, right? It's not about if somebody else deserves the treatment, it's about if you deserve to dole it out. If you deserve to carry that.

Looking back at my own childhood experiences, it was mostly the stupid girl-bullying that goes on, the "your hair is stupid" and very loudly not being invited to parties and being given the side-eye over clothes. There was no Internet. It was pretty mild, though of course it didn't feel that way to me. I did a lot to ask for it by being too loud and too eager and too desperate to join in with people who I now thank GOD were not my friends because ick. It's only in hindsight (and running into some of them at parties later) that made me realize how scared and aggro and weird they were, too. This, though:

The concept of the menacing bully with problems at home is as established in the culture as it is in the research, but most people shy away from addressing the existing mental-health struggles of the bully's victim for fear of appearing to blame the more vulnerable party. But in viewing the victim as an actor in the relationship, educators and researchers may be able to provide him with the correct kind of support.

It took me forever to figure this out, and I mean I just got it like two years ago, that there is nothing you can do to make yourself inoffensive and invisible to an abuser. You will always trip up. You will always say something today that is like Armageddon but yesterday was fine. You will always talk too loud or run too fast or knock over a glass of milk at the table and it will be like the end of the world, and walking on eggshells is exhausting and not possible. We cannot prevent bullying by nobody acting like a target.

So how to do it? It's not blaming the victim to say bullies have their own shit going on, and we should be dealing with that, and THEY should be dealing with that, with the fear and lack of compassion that makes them need to kick somebody smaller than them. Trouble is, the grown-ups they see all day long ... have you noticed what a country of assholes we are, how concerned we are that everybody else's behavior be above reproach in any way? Have you noticed our pathological inability to let anything go?

It's no wonder kids pick up on that, and act accordingly. I swear to you, I would not be fifteen right now if you put a gun to my head.

A.

They Cannot Muzzle The Light

You know that famous picture from the Westboro Baptists protests and counter-protests? This one?

I feel like standing next to Capitol Hill with that sign right now. Or the DNC headquarters. Something.

Thousands of people are in the fucking streets. Thousands. In New York, Boston, Cali, Philly. Thousands.

Yet Washington Democrats cower in the corner for fear of joining them.

I can see why. What if one of the hippies has a rude shirt?

And doesn't it make Obama look bad to point out that the earth is caving in on his watch?

What if somebody at the rallies compared Republicans to Satan? What would Chris Matthews say?

What if somebody at the rallies once sold his food stamps on Facebook?

Won't that give Republicans and the pundits who hold Washington hostage cause to say mean things about us? Won't that give them cause to talk about how we're all about the smelly kids and faggots and welfare cheats and others who are anathema to America? Surely they wouldn't be doing that anyway so I'd best stay over here, and pretend those protesters don't speak for me.

Surely I'd better not note that these are my people, my constituents, the middle class workers for which my party is supposed to have fought, once upon a time, in a land far, far away. Surely I'd better not concede that even if they are just "college kids," they're goddamn citizens of this country whose concerns deserve a voice and whose voice is a vote. Surely I'd better not worry that where there are ten of them today there will be sixty tomorrow, because when in history has that ever happened?

Surely it's safer to stay indoors, keep my powder dry, and hold off having this fight until things get just a little bit worse. Surely, when the right moment comes along, someone will let me know.

In case it's escaped anyone's notice, the Occupy All That Shit protests aren't going away. They're growing. They're going from city to city. They're getting louder. They're gaining friends and allies. They're becoming more. And I don't know how much more, how many more people it's going to take before somebody supposedly on the side of the middle class takes fucking notice and gets his ass down to the microphone. 

Isn't there a single strategist in Washington yelling that there are thousands of votes out there to be won by actually acting like a Democrat? I know that hasn't exactly been in high favor the last 10 years, but do thousands of people in the street express anything BUT a deep hunger for a world that isn't going to screw them over? And isn't that a political opportunity of which someone should avail himself?

Yes, the Tea Party was funded, and marketed nonstop by Fux News. You know what else it was? Supported by every major Republican candidate, who looked at the racist signs and the ignorant-ass 'necks in attendance and said sure, some of them are gaping assholes but all of 'em are gonna vote and they might as well vote for me. That's part of how that movement gained legitimacy. If tea partiers held a march against Obama's wars, they wouldn't lack for grand marshals.

Our leaders, even among those who do nothing but comment, just snipe about hippies and kids, as if they have any economic or demographic data on these crowds at all. That's if they notice; most are too busy figuring out how much to cut from Social Security. I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them. Yes, everybody's tired, but eventually your exhaustion is just self-indulgence, and it doesn't matter what's on the back of the trustafarian's shirt at this point.

You go to the revolution with the revolutionaries you have.

I'll be at Occupy Chicago tomorrow with food and coffee for the demonstrators. Where will our leaders be?

A.

Poor Moral Character

Digby:

I think all these elites believe they are wealthy and secure due to their superior morality and work ethic. Therefore, it's important to make sure the plebes feel some pain for their excesses so they'll adopt the higher standards of their betters. Just as Michael Kinsley believes that Chris Christie's obesity reveals a slothful character, the Central Bankers are apparently all convinced that sovereign debt is due to the character flaws of slothful citizens who have failed to become wealthy. Neither belief is relevant to fiscal policy. Or even true.

In the first place, who gives a flying fuck how much Christie eats? He could order a barbecued elephant every night at Morton's and I wouldn't give a toss, so long as his approach to public policy didn't make me want to tear my hair out. But in the second place, how does having a byline at Slate make you a better person? How does that prove anything about you? 

I get that this is a complicated and uncomfortable line of thinking that leads to feelings of inadequacy, laziness, obligation, guilt. It's hard to be proud of what you've achieved when you know how much of it depended (as in my case, for example) being born white and middle class in the United States of America. And the reason we can't hold the idea of "I worked my ass off" in our heads right along with "and thank God the system was designed to help people like me succeed" is that we've confused pride in achievement (and anyone who isn't presently in prison for raping children can probably take some pride in an accomplishment of some kind) with achievement as proof of virtue.

If being successful makes you good, what then does a turn of bad luck make you? Can you just spin right back around and say, "Well, it wasn't my fault I got laid off, etc?" Sure, you can, but if you're even the tiniest bit self-aware and all this time you've been lecturing others about how success is tied inherently to decency, you're going to feel kind of sick to your stomach.

Or as a very wise woman once said to me, nobody wants to think they are the victim or beneficiary of a system they cannot control. If you're not rich because of your superior virtue, if you're not successful because of your own hard work and nothing else, well, then you have to think about whose shoulders you stand upon, and ponder that a system which raises you up can also cast you down.

A.

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - "White Fright" edition

Good mornong, gentle people!

You know, the recent teabagger love for Herman Cain has made me wonder if the baggers and bagger-ettes have found a way to let their admiration of greed and social darwinism trump

their hatred and fear of the dusky-hued "other".

Now why in God's name did I even think that?.

You see, it's all going downhill for whites!

Census count finds decreasing white population in 15 states
The Washington Post ^ | Thursday, September 29, 2011 | Carol Morello

Posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 9:50:38 PM by MinorityRepublican

Non-Hispanic whites are a dwindling share of the U.S. population, with their numbers dropping in the Northeast and Midwest and growing only modestly in the South and West, the Census Bureau said Thursday.

Whites declined in 15 states, almost all in the industrial and farming states from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, and from Kansas to Ohio. They also declined in California and three Southern states, including Maryland.

A Census Bureau analysis of the 2010 count showed that the number of non-Hispanic whites rose over the decade from 194.5 million to 197 million, but the 1.2 percent growth rate fell far short of the national increase of 9.7 percent. Non-Hispanic whites are now 64 percent of the population, down from 69 percent a decade ago.

The census also reported that the black population grew by 12 percent. African Americans now make up almost 13 percent of the population, a small increase over the decade. More than half, 57 percent, live in the South, up from 55 percent a decade ago. And six out of 10 blacks live in 10 states, including Virginia and Maryland.

The census analysis of the nation’s white and black population underscores the transformative nature of growth in the 21st century. The number of Hispanics and Asians is soaring, the number of blacks is growing slowly and whites are almost at a standstill.

1 posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 9:50:41 PM by MinorityRepublican

I think that a "minority Republican" (is that anything like a "award-winning British Chef"?)  posting this is precious, in light of the Fine White Whine that's about to be served.

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To: MinorityRepublican

there are 2 schools within a half mile of my house. 10 years ago it was 90/10 white minority it is now 10/90

2 posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 9:55:08 PM by Breto (never accept the premise)

Well, I guess either it's time to move, or else go down to the school with your AR-15 and even the odds. no?

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To: MinorityRepublican

Section 8 is the Liberal version of block-busting.

They use it to move the termites into the areas where people moved to escape the termites, forcing them to move again.

4 posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 9:57:21 PM by E. Pluribus Unum (Palin is coming, and the Tea Party is coming with her.)

I guess de-humanizing your scapegoats by comparing them to vermin is old hat.

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...now it's "insects".

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To: E. Pluribus Unum

When we take the grandchildren to the playground at a nearby park, they're the only white children there. All of the others are Mexicans and blacks. And this is in a nice neighborhood in suburban Dallas, Texas.

Uh Oh.  Does this mean I'm in danger? And if the brown people are overrunning the neighborhood, how could it possibly be described as "a nice neighborhood"?

Did you mean to say "it was a nice neighborhood before the insects moved in"?

Likewise at the grocery store, the white people are are, like me, elderly.

The younger adults are all Mexican or black.

I realize that Pat Buchanan is ostracized by many here, but he was quite prophetic in The Death of the West. In particular Chapter 9 of his book ("Intimidated Majority") describes the current situation aptly.

21 posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 10:15:30 PM by re_nortex (DP...that's what I like about Texas.)

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To: re_nortex

I know same here! I take my grandson to the parks around his house and mine and he is almost always the only white kid there. It makes me wonder do white parent just not take their kids to parks or what’s going on? Where ARE all the white people?

62 posted on Friday, September 30, 2011 1:11:02 AM by kelly4c

At the RNC convention?

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,

Masks all the way off after the singularity.

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They're Such Lovely People

Teabag drama.

A.