David Brooks spends a column on men and women, their self-image, and the implications for society.
I know he means well, but given his history of gross generalization and psycho-babbly concern trolling, I get the impression he’s trying to pick up a turd from the clean end.
Just leave it alone, Bobo. You’re in over your head.
Two Judges — Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic profiles the two GOP-appointed judges whose rulings brought DOMA and Prop 8 to the doors of the Supreme Court.
I don’t know about you, but for me, the run-up to next week’s Supreme Court same-sex marriage arguments now has the feel of an endless Super Bowl pregame show. The analysis, the speculation, the sidebars, the color, the posturing, the winks and nods to insiders, the profiles — it just goes on and on, when all anyone really wants is for the arguments to occur, and to be done with, and for the justices to render their decisions the last week of June. That, and for Beyonce to sing the anthem when the justices enter the chamber Tuesday at 10 a.m.
Supporters of same-sex marriage have virtually all the legal, political and cultural momentum going into the arguments over California’s Proposition 8 (Tuesday) and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (Wednesday). Justice Anthony Kennedy, who will almost certainly determine the outcome of both cases, therefore has plenty of cover to do what many suspect he wants to do, which is to protect same-sex couples in whole or in part from the discrimination inherent in both the state initiative and the federal statute. It would be very surprising if he did not so rule.
So on the eve of the start of what promises to be a dramatic week in the history of the Court, and also in the history of the gay rights movement in America, and because I cannot think of anything else to mention that someone smarter than me hasn’t already covered, I just want to remind everyone waiting for the sanctification to begin that it was two Republican-appointed federal trial judges, at opposite ends of the country, who got all of this rolling three years ago with rulings that vitiated both the legal and factual rationales behind these dubious measures.
Judge Joseph Tauro
On the East Coast, it was U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, the Nixon appointee, the revered son of a revered Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, who declared in July 2010 that “no fairly conceivable set of facts” could justify the classification of marriage contained in Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. If this section of the statute really is doomed, it was this ruling, from a judge who now has served 41 years on the bench, that marked the beginning of the end of the heart of the law.
[...]
Judge Vaughn Walker
On the West Coast, it was the now-retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, who first struck down Proposition 8 — and also exposed the paucity of the arguments once made on its behalf. At one point during the Proposition 8 trial, without a trace of irony, Judge Walker asked Charles Cooper, the lead attorney opposed to same-sex marriage: “Seven million Californians, 70 judges, and this long history that you described. Why did you present but one witness on the subject?” Cooper had no good answer. He still doesn’t.
[...]
Although both men have played an enormous role in shaping the legal and political history of these two cases, and thus the history of same-sex marriage itself, it is unlikely that the work of either will be identified (much less discussed) during oral arguments next week. Unfortunately, there is only one former trial judge on the current Court — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who presided in New York. The rest of the justices rarely express interest in the trial record, especially where, as here, the core questions are ones of constitutional law.
But before we all move on to whatever comes next for same-sex marriage in America, we ought to pause to remember what has come before. Two Republican judges, two senior-status members of the federal judiciary, directly confronted one of the most divisive social issues of our time. They issued clear and direct rulings that swept away one myth after another about same-sex marriage and the legislative and societal rationales against it. And, in doing so, they gave constitutional cover to the executive branch to alter its course.
The Supreme Court may disagree with the assessments of Judge Tauro and Judge Walker — at least three justices in Washington almost certainly will — but that won’t change what we already have seen with our own eyes. Judge Tauro explained why the DOMA is indefensible. Judge Walker explained why Proposition 8 is unjust and unequal. Each in his own way did, in other words, precisely what we hope and expect our life-tenured federal judges to do when the whims and caprices of the majority are turned loose upon a distinct and vulnerable minority.
Final Judgment — George Packer of The New Yorker on Iraq.
The week of the invasion, I was in Ivory Coast, on assignment for this magazine to report on a civil war. In fact, I was travelling through rebel-held territory near the Liberian border with Mike Kamber, whom I had just met, and with whom I spent many hours driving over dirt roads through hair-raising checkpoints guarded by drunk or stoned or just zoned-out teen-agers with Kalashnikovs. But we kept discussing the other war, the one that the rest of the world was waiting for. I think we both were anxious to finish up our reporting in West Africa and head to the Middle East. An overwhelming tide of history was about to wash over Iraq.
The decade between that fateful week and the present moment has telescoped, compressed down to a single, terrible judgment: the war was a disaster for Iraq and the U.S. alike. It was conceived in deceit and born in hubris, a historic folly that took the American eye off Al Qaeda and the Taliban, while shattering Iraq into a million bloody pieces. When the last American troops departed a little over a year ago, there was no sense on this side of triumph or satisfaction–nothing but sadness and relief. Iraq, meanwhile, remains a dramatically violent country. Its politics are oriented toward Iran and the broader Shiite side of a looming regional war. After two trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, and over a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, there is so little U.S. influence that we can’t get the government of Iraq to interdict Iranian weapons shipped across its territory to arm the soldiers of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iraq has rejected the organ transplant and gone its own way. I imagine that there are far fewer American traces left in Baghdad than there were in Saigon after 1975.
No Safe Spaces — Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon on how women aren’t safe in social media.
The wheels of justice turn slowly – unless you’re talking about the court of social media. There, the past few days have been an object lesson in instant payback – mostly aimed at females who’ve had the audacity to speak up.
The week started with the arrests of two Steubenville girls after the guilty verdicts in the rape case against two local teenage football players. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer explained, “The 16-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of aggravated menacing for threatening the life of the victim on Twitter. The 15-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of menacing for threatening bodily harm to the victim on Facebook.” The threats against the victim were merely the latest ugly attacks in a case that was, from its beginning, about the devastating power of online community’s hostility toward girls and women.
Then, in a remarkably familiar-feeling case in Connecticut, a 13-year-old girl who’d accused two local football players of sexual assault found herself the target of online harassment. Writing in the Register Citizen, Jessica Glenza chronicled the outpouring of anger toward the young “whore” whose “snitching” was “ruining the lives” of the boys involved. As one observer mused on Twitter, “I wanna know why there’s no punishment for young hoes.”
And then, for the grand finale capping off the week, there was the crapstorm unleashed after Adria Richards tweeted a photograph of the men she claimed were making explicit and offensive comments during a recent conference. The tweet set off an explosive chain of overreaction, one that led to the firing of a PlayHaven developer and then, inevitably, an outpouring of wrath aimed at Richards.
[...]
At its best, social media illuminates aggression and injustice – Steubenville surely would have played out very differently were it not for the loathsome virtual trail the participants left in their wake. But the mob mentality of “punish the bitch,” a pattern that shows up again and again and again with sickening predictability, is real and it’s got to change. This week, the bullies, feeling offended about rape and sexism, went on the attack. And the bullies won.
Doonesbury — What sells.
This isn’t just some day to commemorate important women and then go have a picnic. It’s a day to do something about equality in every way.
Feminism is not about gender. It’s about humanity.
HT to Anne Laurie.
I sometimes wonder if the racists and the bigots get their franchise like some Amway promotion: find one person, then get them to find another, and then that one finds another, and so on. That’s about the only way I can explain how stupid spreads across the land. For example:
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday openly admitted that she opposed the latest reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) because it included protections for LGBT, Native American, and undocumented victims of domestic violence.
In an appearance on MSNBC, Blackburn pointed out that the latest iteration of the law protects “different groups” and thus dilutes funding for straight, non-Native American women with the proper documentation…
Because of course if you’re a lesbian or Native American or undocumented, you probably deserved whatever happens to you because, well, you’re just not one of us.
Not just to pick on Ms. Blackburn — she regularly turns up on cable TV as a second-string Michele Bachmann and entertains with all sorts of harebrained stuff including birtherism — because I’m pretty sure that she didn’t come up with this justification for voting against VAWA on her own. She’s not that creative. Someone had to hand this talking point to her, or there’s some website where she downloaded it.
Then there’s this guy, who’s just plain goofy.
On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced that the across-the-board sequester cuts will result in the cancellation of all White House tours indefinitely. This no doubt upset ticket holders, but it also seems to have struck a nerve with Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who introduced an amendment to a continuing resolution on the federal budget that seeks to block President Obama from using federal funds for any future golf outings until the tours are reinstated:
None of the funds made available by a division of this Act may be used to transport the President to or from a golf course until public tours of the White House resume.
You can’t make this stuff up on your own.
Enterprise Florida — which sounds both business-like and sci-fi — spent a lot of money to come up with a logo to attract business.
Great idea… if you’re selling the state as a great place for men to work and the ladies to stay home, mind the kids, and do all those wifey things that women-folk do.
HT to Betty.
From ThinkProgress:
Eight Senators on Monday voted not to consider the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a bill that protects victims of domestic violence. The Senators who voted against moving to debate on the bill were: Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Tim Scott (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Johanns (R-NE), Rand Paul (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), and James Risch (R-ID).
VAWA’s reauthorization has been caught up in partisan gridlock over added provisions that would protect undocumented immigrants, as well as LGBT and Native American victims of domestic violence. Congress failed to reauthorize the bill by the end of 2012, and the Senate is now considering the same legislation again, in its new legislative session. [Emphasis added.]
This was not a vote to pass the VAWA; this was a vote to consider it. This was about debating it. And yet the junior Senator from Florida, along with the rest of the Tea Party contingent in the Senate, didn’t even want to discuss it.
As he has in the past, I am sure that he will have a very cogent, lucid, and well-thought-out explanation as to why he is against the VAWA. Something to do with spending money we don’t have on things we can’t prevent, or protecting undocumented immigrants against horrific abuse isn’t really what taxpayers want, etc. That was then. I’d really like to hear his explanation this time.
What it actually comes down to is that he’s far more concerned about violence against his right-wing creds with the Tea Party folk than he is about the undocumented immigrant getting pummeled because, hey, they don’t vote for him.
I sometimes — well, actually quite often — think the only reason Tucker Carlson exists is so that people can make fun of him.
Case in point, here he is in a tweet last week on the Pentagon’s lifting of the ban on women in combat:
The administration boasts about sending women to the front lines on the same day Democrats push the Violence Against Women Act.
Yes, because volunteering to serve in a combat role in the military is exactly the same thing as getting the shit beaten out of you by an abusive spouse. So there.
Via the Washington Post:
Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta plans to announce Thursday a lifting of the ban on female service members in combat roles, a watershed policy change that was informed by women’s valor in Iraq and Afghanistan and that removes the remaining barrier to a fully inclusive military, defense officials said.
Panetta made the decision “upon the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” a senior defense official said Wednesday, an assertion that stunned female veteran activists who said they assumed that the brass was still uneasy about opening the most physically arduous positions to women. The Army and the Marines, which make up the bulk of the military’s ground combat force, will present plans to open most jobs to women by May 15.
The Army, by far the largest fighting force, currently excludes women from nearly 25 percent of active-duty roles. A senior defense official said the Pentagon expects to open “many positions” to women this year; senior commanders will have until January 2016 to ask for exceptions.
I have never doubted that women are fully capable of fulfilling combat roles in the military, and in many cases, they already have been doing so. I don’t think there is anything they can’t do, and given the training and the skills, they will be every bit a soldier as anyone else.
I’m not worried about that at all. I just don’t like the idea of anyone, regardless of gender, being in harm’s way. But that’s because I’m a Quaker and a pacifist. I do not look forward to the inevitable day when the first official combat casualty comes home to Dover, even though I know that there have been many unofficial ones long before that day and going back generations.
The number of women in the United States Senate grew quite a bit yesterday, including Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, the first openly gay senator; Mazie Hirono of Hawai’i, the first Buddhist; and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is on the Banking Committee.
Women now make up one-fifth of the Senate, even though women represent the majority of people in the country.
HT to Digby.
Maybe Baby — Lauren Collins comments on where babies come from.
Ross Douthat’s column lamenting the declining American birthrate struck me as creepy when I read it, but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps as a childless thirty-two-year-old woman—not only an evolutionary dead end, but also a moral zero, in Douthat’s eyes—I failed to produce a response, as I have failed to produce a baby, as result of “late-modern exhaustion—a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies across the globe.” I wanted to tell Ross Douthat that there are many reasons that American women of my generation lag in both time and space, giving birth to fewer children than both our foremothers and our peers in countries such as France and the United Kingdom. Douthat is right that our government’s lack of interest in developing an infrastructure to help working mothers is a large part of the problem, if it is a problem. But so is the moralization of motherhood, which, as writers from Élisabeth Badinter to Pamela Druckerman and Katie Roiphe have recently pointed out, is rife in American society. As Badinter explains in “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines Women,” people have more babies in France, where breast-feeding is a fifty-fifty proposition and ninety-nine per cent of young children are enrolled in free, state-run daycare, precisely because having a baby in France is not such a freighted ordeal. (By the way, Douthat’s notion that the declining birthrate is linked to “a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage” is undermined by the fertile, cohabiting French.)
That’s what I wanted to tell Ross Douthat, but I had just gone for a walk, sapping myself of energy that probably would have been better used in childbearing.
The next day, I read that the Duchess of Cambridge was expecting a child, and that she had been admitted to the hospital with hyperemesis gravidarum. She was very early in her pregnancy, and it felt invasive, hearing such intimate news. The way that commentators felt entitled to have an opinion about her womb, and the way they were rooting for her to reproduce, in the name of God and country, gave me a queasy feeling. Douthat wrote that a sagging population is the result of a society that “embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity,” but might not women also be hesitating to have children, or struggling to find a way to do so, in a culture whose conception of family life is so primitive?
Carl Hiaasen has some advice for the GOP.
Based on the grim exit polls, you’d think Republican leaders would comprehend the futility of sucking up to the beet-faced Limbaugh fringe and pushing an agenda that most Americans viewed as extreme, exclusive and intrusive.
That tone had been set in the primaries by the lamest, flakiest set of candidates in modern memory. The only one who ever stood a chance was Romney, who veered so hard to the right that he couldn’t ever find his way back.
Want a sure-fire recipe for blowing another national election?
1. Keep badmouthing the poor, and bowing to the rich. This is an especially clever strategy while the country is clawing out of a recession.
2. To drive away as many women voters as possible, keep talking about banning abortions and cutting off funds for birth control.
3. Another brilliant campaign topic: Outlawing gay marriage. Keep that one on the front burner if you’re keen on alienating millions of highly motivated voters.
4. Don’t forget to bash big government every chance you get — just pray that a major hurricane doesn’t hit, and the whole country doesn’t get reminded of the importance of FEMA, the National Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and other tax-gobbling slackers.
5. Finally, keeping pushing for laws that would allow anyone who looks vaguely Hispanic to be pulled over in their cars and frisked for citizenship documents. This is how you keep your “base electorate” fired up, your base being angry, white, old and dwindling by the day.
Marco Rubio can’t avoid Iowa with its freakishly homogenous demographics (91 percent white), but he can certainly avoid coming off like a jabbering loon. He’s already separated himself from the likes of Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann by stating that he actually believes in science.
Now we’ll see if the GOP can evolve enough to let him lead the party out of its cave.
An Unexpected Party — Jon Michaud on why he thinks The Hobbit is a better book than its sequel.
With the imminent release of the first of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of “The Hobbit,” I revisited J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel, which I had not opened since I was a teen-ager. Re-reading “The Hobbit” turned out to be something of a revelation. Formerly, I’d seen it as nothing more than an appetizer for the big feast of “The Lord of the Rings.” Now, I realized, it was a perfecly balanced meal of its own—one that left you feeling sated rather than gorged. A good case can be made that “The Hobbit” is a better and more satisfying read than its gargantuan successor. Herewith, some arguments in the little book’s favor:
1. Only one hobbit.
There’s a reason Tolkien begins both novels by getting his hobbit protagonists out of the Shire. Hobbits, though possessed of many admirable traits, can be kind of a drag, especially in large numbers. One is plenty. Four is too many. After twelve hundred pages of “The Lord of the Rings,” I’d had just about enough of the hobbits’ endless pining for home and their tiresome whingeing about not having a second breakfast. Particularly grating is Sam Gamgee, the loyal, kind-hearted servant who accompanies Frodo all the way to Mt. Doom—and insists on calling him “Mr. Frodo” the entire time. Mindlessly devoted and masochistically self-denying, he is held up as the truest expression of hobbithood. No thanks. I find Bilbo, the hero of the earlier book, a far more engaging character. While he does yearn for the comforts of the Shire during his journey to the Lonely Mountain, he is no straight arrow. He’s an opportunist, willing to fudge the rules when it suits him. He outwits Gollum with a not-quite-kosher riddle. He steals the Arkenstone from Smaug’s hoard and uses it as a bargaining chip; and he hides the magic ring from his companions as long as he can. Next time I re-read “The Lord of the Rings,” I am sure to ask myself, What would Bilbo do?
2. Lots of dwarves.
I propose a rule: the ratio of dwarves to hobbits is directly proportional to the quality of the tale. Wagner and Walt Disney understood this. Pompous and irritable, industrious yet bumbling, dwarves are much more enjoyable to read about than hobbits. Though motivated always by gold, they are makers as well as takers. Skilled blacksmiths, miners, and engineers, they are responsible for many of the wonders of Middle Earth. Moria is to a hobbit hole as the Pyramids are to a thatched-roof cottage. There is just one dwarf in “The Lord of the Rings”: Gimli. He is the son of Gloin, one of Bilbo’s companions in “The Hobbit.” (Gloin does make a brief appearance at the Council of Elrond, but that hardly counts.) Having one dwarf in your epic fantasy novel is like having one acrobat in a circus. You need a troupe! Poor Gimli is charged not only with protecting the ringbearer, but also with providing much of the comic relief in the trilogy. By contrast, “The Hobbit” features a dozen dwarves and is the richer for it. Who can’t sympathize with a group of grumpy, bearded refugees who have been evicted from their homeland by a greedy despot? The fact that they squabble, refuse to listen to directions, and end up starting a war only makes them more fun to read about.
Doonesbury — Then what?
Operation Lemonade — Dave Weigel at Slate on how the GOP’s voter suppression laws may have inadvertently cost them Florida.
MIAMI— [On Saturday], as the sun rises, Bishop Victor Curry of New Birth Baptist Church will wake up and race to the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in downtown. At 7 a.m., he will help lead south Florida’s first early-vote rally. As soon as he can, he will hotfoot it to the South Dade Regional Library, 30-odd minutes away, for the day’s second early-vote rally. He will find some way to flee in time to make the start of the EBA Higher Education Awareness and Dropout Prevention Initiative in Miami Gardens, the heart of black south Florida, and take the stage next to Rev. Al Sharpton. Then back on the road, north to Broward County.
The plan, coordinated by at least 150 black pastors, is called “Operation Lemonade.” On Wednesday, I visited New Birth, parking near the van that promotes his radio talk show, and finding Curry’s office in the sprawling, 10-year-old gated complex. Outside the chapel, there’s a signed message from President Obama congratulating Curry on the church’s anniversary. Inside Curry’s office, there are multiple pictures commemorating his meetings with Sharpton and with Bill Clinton, next to his lifetime membership plaque from the NAACP, and a picture from election night 2008. That year, churches got two whole weeks to turn out the early vote. This year they get one.
“When the Republicans in the state passed the new voting laws, we discovered that they took away that Sunday right before the election,” says Curry. “What we decided to do was view that as them giving us a lemon. We can be sour, we can moan and groan about it, or we can do something. We can make lemonade. The first thrust is this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, and then we’re going to encourage people the entire next week.”
Democrats are proud to say it: If they win this election, it’ll be because a superior ground game turned out their base and overcame a Mitt Romney comeback. In Florida, they have twice as many campaign offices as Romney-Ryan. “With absentee ballot requests, usually the Republicans have a pretty significant advantage on us,” says Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chairwoman who represents a liberal slice of the Miami sprawl. “We’ve cut the advantage by 85 percent.” This is true.
And they had to battle to get there. From the moment Republicans took office in 2011, controlling gubernatorial and election offices in swing states, they started tightening voting laws. In Pennsylvania, the state passed its first-ever requirement for voter ID at the polls. In Ohio, the state attempted to eliminate early-voting days for anyone not serving in the military. In Florida, it took only two months to pass a comprehensive bill that scaled back early-voting days, prevented voters from changing their addresses when they got to the polls, and started a 48-hour countdown that required voter-registration campaigns to turn in their forms within two days or pay fines—a de jure response to ACORN paranoia. That bill was filed on March 7 and become law two months later.
The Florida law became infamous. After the League of Women Voters gave up on registering voters, The Daily Show sent a reporter down to make fun of the 48-hour rule. According to a summer report by the Third Way think tank, Democrats lost 246,934 Florida voters after November 2008, and Republicans had lost only 71,829. But after November 2011, when the 48-hour law went into effect, Democrats lost 8,044 registrants; Republicans gained 18,303.
And then the Democrats got the rules reversed. In June, a Florida court struck down the 48-hour rule. In September, the state gave up on an error-filled purge of voter registrations. October was a sloppy rout for voter restrictions, as the Pennsylvania and Ohio laws were halted. “We won in court just when we were ramping up registration,” says Wasserman Schultz. “In Florida, we have 520,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. If you look at the registration of Hispanic voters, since November of 2008, 195,000 Hispanic voters have registered as Democrats or independents.”
Rape Is Rape — Garance Franke-Ruta on the GOP’s defense of coerced mating.
The idea that coerced reproduction is God’s will is of a piece with the belief that the subjection of women is God’s will. The two ideas are inextricably intertwined historically, and the former is stubbornly resilient relic of the latter. To unpack this a bit more: According to Mourdock’s thinking, a man who forces a woman to have sex with him against her will is a criminal, but a man who forces a woman to bear his child through forced sex should be permitted to do so, because abortion is murder and every conceived child is a gift from God.
Do we want to live in a country where any man at any time can decide he wants to bear children with any woman and she has no right to stop that from happening if he can overpower her by force? If we do — and that’s the society Mourdock is advocating — then we have immediately left the society the feminists constructed and re-entered one where coerced mating is rewarded reproductively.
Closing Arguments — Andy Borowitz takes a satirical look at the final push for votes from the GOP.
NEW HAMPSHIRE (The Borowitz Report)—With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, there is a deep divide among Republican leaders over whether to emphasize misogyny or racism as the campaign’s closing theme.
In one camp is the Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who says that his view that God is sometimes O.K. with rape is “gaining real traction with a key demographic: men who don’t like women very much.”
“I can’t tell you how many misogynists have come up to me at my rallies and said, ‘Thank you for saying what you said,’ ” he told reporters today. “I think they’re like, finally, someone’s taking a more nuanced position on rape.”
But in the other camp is the former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, who worries that the Republican Party’s emphasis on misogyny is threatening to drown out its “winning message of racism.”
“I understand the appeal of Mourdock’s anti-woman theme, but I worry that it’s going to overshadow our core value of racism, which is still our best shot at winning this thing,” he said. “In politics, you’ve got to dance with the one who brung you.”
Hoping to heal a possible rift with so little time left until Election Day, the R.N.C. chairman Reince Priebus said today that there is room for both views in today’s Republican Party: “Our ‘big tent’ message to voters should be this: come for the misogyny, stay for the racism.”
Doonesbury — Be Prepared.
Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin (R), who has already proven his encyclopaedic knowledge of feminine ways with his insight into the magical quality of the womb in times of crisis, now holds himself up as the arbiter of good taste and manners.
More than a month after his comments about “legitimate rape” nearly derailed his campaign for U.S. Senate, Republican Todd Akin said Thursday that it has become clear to him that he will triumph over Democratic incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill this fall.
Part of his confidence, he said, comes from McCaskill’s demeanor during their debate last week, which he said was not as “ladylike” as it was when she faced off with Republican Jim Talent in 2006.
“I think we have a very clear path to victory, and apparently Claire McCaskill thinks we do, too, because she was very aggressive at the debate, which was quite different than it was when she ran against Jim Talent,” Akin said. “She had a confidence and was much more ladylike (in 2006), but in the debate on Friday she came out swinging, and I think that’s because she feels threatened.”
Why, that brazen hussy! How dare she stand up for herself in the face of male superiority! I’ve a good mind to give her a good talking-to and let her know just where her place is in this world. See what happens when you let women out of the house and give them the right to vote? They become utterly shameless.
I hope she kicks his ass.
HT to ABL.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the prospects for the Republicans:
We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.
So I guess their plan is to reach out to women, minorities, newly-arrived immigrants, and even the LGBT community (as long as they don’t get icky). Good luck with that.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the prospects for the Republicans:
We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.
So I guess their plan is to reach out to women, minorities, newly-arrived immigrants, and even the LGBT community (as long as they don’t get icky). Good luck with that.
Any time a man starts an article with “What do women want,” you know you’re in for good laugh — as in hollow and sardonic. For example, check out this by Kevin D. Williamson at National Review.
What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.[...]
Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
Wow, I can smell the Viagra-enhanced testosterone from here.
It doesn’t take Psychology 101 to figure out that this dude has real issues with feelings of gender inferiority when he cranks out a defensive — and offensive — primal scream like this. I don’t know him from Adam, but given the topic of the last week and the larger topic of women having control of their uterus, you have to wonder why it is that conservatives are so threatened by other peoples’ self-confidence and sense of autonomy. Why does Mr. Williamson get all bonered up about Mitt Romney siring five sons who turn out male grandsons and diss President Obama for having daughters? (By the way, all of Mitt’s boys are straight? C’mon. The simple law of averages predicts that at least one of them has Latter Days in his Netflix queue.) Simply put, what is so threatening about women to him and to a lot of men in the Republican party?
He will have to answer that on his own, but I’m pretty sure it explains why the GOP isn’t doing so well with women voters.
Any time a man starts an article with “What do women want,” you know you’re in for good laugh — as in hollow and sardonic. For example, check out this by Kevin D. Williamson at National Review.
What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.[...]
Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
Wow, I can smell the Viagra-enhanced testosterone from here.
It doesn’t take Psychology 101 to figure out that this dude has real issues with feelings of gender inferiority when he cranks out a defensive — and offensive — primal scream like this. I don’t know him from Adam, but given the topic of the last week and the larger topic of women having control of their uterus, you have to wonder why it is that conservatives are so threatened by other peoples’ self-confidence and sense of autonomy. Why does Mr. Williamson get all bonered up about Mitt Romney siring five sons who turn out male grandsons and diss President Obama for having daughters? (By the way, all of Mitt’s boys are straight? C’mon. The simple law of averages predicts that at least one of them has Latter Days in his Netflix queue.) Simply put, what is so threatening about women to him and to a lot of men in the Republican party?
He will have to answer that on his own, but I’m pretty sure it explains why the GOP isn’t doing so well with women voters.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) is a rising star among the Tea Party folk. And to prove it, she does things like this:
Late last week, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) vetoed nearly half a million dollars that was slated to go toward domestic violence and sexual assault prevention.Haley defended the veto, according to the Charleston City Paper, saying that rape and sexual assault prevention programs “distract from” the Department of Health’s mission, and that sexual assault victims are “only a small portion” of South Carolinians who need help:
Haley explained these vetoes in the Department of Health and Environmental Control budget by writing, “Each of these lines attempts to serve a portion of our population for which we extend our sympathy and encouragement, but nevertheless, it is only a small portion of South Carolina’s chronically ill or abused. Overall, these special add-on lines distract from the agency’s broader mission of protecting South Carolina’s public health.”
Okay, so how many women have to be abused or killed before it’s no longer just a distraction? Ten? A hundred? The bar must be pretty high in a state that ranks seventh in the nation for women killed by men.
You’re doing great, Ms. Haley.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) is a rising star among the Tea Party folk. And to prove it, she does things like this:
Late last week, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) vetoed nearly half a million dollars that was slated to go toward domestic violence and sexual assault prevention.Haley defended the veto, according to the Charleston City Paper, saying that rape and sexual assault prevention programs “distract from” the Department of Health’s mission, and that sexual assault victims are “only a small portion” of South Carolinians who need help:
Haley explained these vetoes in the Department of Health and Environmental Control budget by writing, “Each of these lines attempts to serve a portion of our population for which we extend our sympathy and encouragement, but nevertheless, it is only a small portion of South Carolina’s chronically ill or abused. Overall, these special add-on lines distract from the agency’s broader mission of protecting South Carolina’s public health.”
Okay, so how many women have to be abused or killed before it’s no longer just a distraction? Ten? A hundred? The bar must be pretty high in a state that ranks seventh in the nation for women killed by men.
You’re doing great, Ms. Haley.
Speaking of being dicks, it’s a toss-up between these two sterling examples:
Thousands of women protested when Michigan State Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was banned from speaking on the House Floor for a day after she used the word “vagina” during a debate over anti-abortion bill.But her colleague, State Rep. Wayne Schmidt (R-Traverse City), said Republican leadership’s decision to silence Brown was no different than putting a child in timeout.
“It’s like giving a kid a timeout for a day,” he told Lansing radio host Patrick Shiels. “You know, hey, timeout, you wanna comment too far, you spoke your piece. We’re gonna let these other people have their dissenting comments, and then we’ll get back to business.”
Yeah, those silly womenfolk and their childish behavior to protect their precious ladybits. Don’t they know that men rule? Get back in the kitchen, bitches.
And then there’s Bill Donohue, the one-man self-appointed scold for the Roman Catholic church:
Catholic League president Bill Donohue, a vocal conservative voice who recently warred with The Daily Show over a “vagina manger,” has infuriated prominent Jewish leaders with a private email last week to Philadelphia Rabbi Arthur Waskow. Waskow, a progressive rabbi involved in the Jewish Renewal movement, had criticized the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in a Huffington Post op-ed for “attacking the religious freedom of millions of American women and the religious freedom of American nuns” over contraception. Donohue responded with a note to Waskow that launched an email exchange that ended with a warning, forwarded to BuzzFeed by a source close to the rabbi, that “Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them.” Donohue also includes a postscript saying, “I do not have a long nose.”
Mr. Donahue’s has made a living out of screaming about other people being anti-Catholic if they scratch their ass during the playing of Ave Maria. So a ration of antisemitism is perfectly okay. After all, they killed the Baby Jesus.
Speaking of being dicks, it’s a toss-up between these two sterling examples:
Thousands of women protested when Michigan State Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was banned from speaking on the House Floor for a day after she used the word “vagina” during a debate over anti-abortion bill.But her colleague, State Rep. Wayne Schmidt (R-Traverse City), said Republican leadership’s decision to silence Brown was no different than putting a child in timeout.
“It’s like giving a kid a timeout for a day,” he told Lansing radio host Patrick Shiels. “You know, hey, timeout, you wanna comment too far, you spoke your piece. We’re gonna let these other people have their dissenting comments, and then we’ll get back to business.”
Yeah, those silly womenfolk and their childish behavior to protect their precious ladybits. Don’t they know that men rule? Get back in the kitchen, bitches.
And then there’s Bill Donohue, the one-man self-appointed scold for the Roman Catholic church:
Catholic League president Bill Donohue, a vocal conservative voice who recently warred with The Daily Show over a “vagina manger,” has infuriated prominent Jewish leaders with a private email last week to Philadelphia Rabbi Arthur Waskow. Waskow, a progressive rabbi involved in the Jewish Renewal movement, had criticized the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in a Huffington Post op-ed for “attacking the religious freedom of millions of American women and the religious freedom of American nuns” over contraception. Donohue responded with a note to Waskow that launched an email exchange that ended with a warning, forwarded to BuzzFeed by a source close to the rabbi, that “Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them.” Donohue also includes a postscript saying, “I do not have a long nose.”
Mr. Donahue’s has made a living out of screaming about other people being anti-Catholic if they scratch their ass during the playing of Ave Maria. So a ration of antisemitism is perfectly okay. After all, they killed the Baby Jesus.
