That’s what Bill Nye has to say in his latest educational video, “Can We Stop Telling Women What to Do With Their Bodies?” In the video, which you can watch above, Nye explains how the idea of “life at conception” simply doesn’t make sense – because many more eggs are fertilized than become humans, due to factors like failure to attach to a woman’s uterine wall.
In this TED talk, Michael Kimmel, sociologist and author of Angry White Men, makes the case for supporting gender equality: Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because everyone benefits.
“The Senate on Thursday rejected a short-term spending bill that would defund Planned Parenthood, thwarting the opening move by Republican leaders to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1.
Senators voted 47-52 on ending debate on the short-term continuing resolution, well short of the 60 votes needed. The legislation would have funded the government through Dec. 11.
The vote divided Republicans, with eight of them breaking ranks. Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Susan Collins (Maine), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Dean Heller (Nev.) Mark Kirk (Ill.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.) all voted against moving forward.
The White House, meanwhile, reiterated its pledge to veto any spending bill that reaches President Obama’s desk without funding for Planned Parenthood.
“By eliminating Federal funding for a major provider of health care, the Senate amendment to H.J.Res. 61 would limit access to health care for women, men, and families across the Nation, and disproportionately impact low-income individuals,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.”
“the customer is always right” is capitalist propaganda that tells the worker under no circumstance should they retaliate during verbal or physical abuse because its not worth potential losses
OK, 44 year old white dude, DO NOT ruin it for me. TRUST me. This is not a slur. A slur is saying that someone is stupid or promiscuous because of their skin color. This is saying that, because you come from a place where the temperature is cooler, your ancestors haven't had to develop an tolerance for capsaicin so that they can tell which foods are safe to eat. I have lived in Pakistan for a year, and yes I know to indicate that I want my food "white people mild." Again, and I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT RUIN THIS FOR ME.
Oh, look: sanity. A bill tying Planned Parenthood defunding to keeping the federal government open failed in the Senate Thursday afternoon—and in a bipartisan vote, no less, though some of the Republicans weren't exactly standing up for Planned Parenthood:
... 42 Democrats, two independents and eight Republicans banded together to stop the anti-abortion effort on a procedural vote, 11 more than the 41 needed to block the legislation.
At least one of the Republicans, Tom Cotton of Arkanas, said he cast his vote against the bill to protest inadequate military funding.
The Senate's next move is to take up a short-term bill keeping the government open without Planned Parenthood-related strings. As always, though, the House is likely to be problematic, so the government staying open is no sure thing.
On Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert hosted yetanotherpolitical star on his new CBS show, this time chatting with Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Colbert used the opportunity to push Warren about why she isn't running for president, as seemingly every other politician with even the slightest bit of name recognition is giving it a go for 2016. "Are you sure you're not running for president of the United States?" Colbert asked. "Have you checked the newspapers lately, because a lot of people have jumped in, you might have done it in your sleep." Warren confirmed, yet again, that she's happy in the Senate, fighting for the middle class because the "game is rigged."
As usual, Warren wanted to talk less about electoral politics and instead squeeze in a bit of policy wonkery. The Massachusetts senator spent the bulk of the interview focused on one of her favorite topics: attacking trickle-down economics as conservative hocus-pocus that's robbed the country of the resources needed to invest in the future. "One hundred percent of income growth in this country since the 1980s," Warren said, "has gone to the top 10 percent, and that’s not only wrong, that is going to destroy our country unless we take our government back."
Watch a brief clip of Warren's interview below, or see the full episode here.
honestly though I’ve never understood how people are able to convince themselves that media being more socially aware or having a cast with a wider spectrum of race and identity is somehow “pandering” as if media being 90% white, straight, able-bodied, neurotypical and cis is some sort of natural order that’s not at all influenced by pandering to a specific audience and must be preserved at all costs to assure the safety of creativity itself. I mean, are they seriously not able to identify that enforcing a rigid status quo is the literal opposite of encouraging creativity or what
Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager (r) shooting and killing Walter Scott (l).
As of September 24, 872 Americans have been killed by police in 2015. A mere 1.3 percent of those officers have been charged in the deaths, ranging from manslaughter to murder. As wild as it sounds, the 12 officers who've been charged so far in 2015 represent the single largest number of officers charged in any year over the past ten years.
According to The Wall Street Journal, more police officers in America have been prosecuted over fatal on-duty shootings in 2015 than in any year going back a decade.
Citing research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson, the Journal reports that 12 officers have been charged with manslaughter or murder for on-duty shooting deaths in 2015 so far, more than twice the annual average of five officers a year since 2005.
This, on its face, absolutely feels like progress. In some ways, it is. More than any year in recent memory, the public is demanding that police officers be held accountable for police brutality, so having more officers charged this year than any recent year (with more than 3 months still remaining) is not coincidental.
However, what we really have here is something that doesn't merit much celebration.
Not one single officer who has been charged with manslaughter or murder in 2015 has actually been convicted. Not one. While a few convictions are still up in the air, we are actually left with the very real possibility that not a single officer will be convicted. It has happened hundreds of times before, in some of the most egregious cases imaginable.
Between prosecutors who don't truly want convictions of police officers and laws which seem to protect police at all costs, it's a bit futile to get your hopes up.
“When I hear the imperative to “learn from your mistakes,” I also hear echoes of the “good girl” messaging that permeates our culture. Starting in elementary school, girls feel “pressure to be perfect, accomplished, thin, and accommodating,” according to a 2006 Girls Inc. report. This sounds exhausting—and it can also be damaging, keeping girls from stepping outside of their comfort zones. In 2007, psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues found that when learning new material, bright girls did not cope well with confusion. In fact, “the higher the girl’s IQ, the worse she did.” Girls were more likely than boys to become demoralized by a challenge, as if it called their ability into question. The pressure that those girls felt to “have it together” often follows young women to college and beyond. A well-known study at Duke University found that female students experienced a mandate of “effortless perfection.” A 2013 New York Times article about Harvard Business School reported that women there participated in class less than men because—according to faculty and administrators—they “often felt they had to choose between academic and social success.” It’s as if even these high-powered go-getters didn’t want to risk seeming too aggressive or giving a wrong answer. Clearly from girlhood through graduate school, we are absorbing unhelpful messages about the many ways in which we’re supposed to do things “right”—and vague advice about “learning from mistakes” can blur unhelpfully into all of that.”
- Jessica Bacal’s Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out from Getting It Wrong (via most-current-reality)
You cannot buy electronics with food stamps. You cannot buy cigarettes with food stamps. You cannot buy pet food with food stamps. You cannot withdraw money with an EBT card (food stamps).
Do you know what else you can’t buy with food stamps? Shampoo, soap, laundry detergent, toilet paper, paper towels, tissues, tinfoil, plastic sandwich bags, toothpaste, cleaning products, tampons, pads, over the counter medications (such as Tylenol, Ibuprofen, etc.), and anything else you can think of that you cannot physically ingest for nutritional purposes.
Do you know what you can buy with food stamps?Food.
Do you know what it’s like to scrounge for change to buy non-edible necessities, use a credit card and EBT card (food stamps) during the same transaction, and then have the person in line behind you judge you for buying the ingredients to make a birthday cake?
People who disseminate false information about food stamps have never had to use food stamps.
Okay, but let’s talk for a second about how that one lady called turkey “big chicken”
You can’t even buy all food with food stamps. You just… you flat-out can’t buy “food that will be eaten in the store/any food sold for on-premises consumption” or any “hot foods” with food stamps—meaning you can’t buy anything hot, you can’t buy anything that gets blended together, you can’t buy anything “pre-prepared,” in most cases you can’t use your EBT card at restaurants. You literally CANNOT purchase a milkshake with food stamps, because it’s considered “sold for on-premises consumption” (which was ridiculous at the place I worked, because the customer had to mix their own milkshake themself with a little machine we provided them, and several people got upset—rightfully so, I think—that it wasn’t covered under food stamps, because they often only found out at the register after already mixing it, often as a treat for their kids). You literally can’t walk into a gas station, grab one of those hot dogs off their grills/out of the little heated food area, and buy it with food stamps, because it’s hot.
And when I say “can’t,” I don’t mean “if the cashier notices you trying and cares enough to stop you, they’ll refuse to do it for you.” I mean “it is actually impossible to do this.” I’m not even sure these people who disseminate false information about food stamps have paid any attention at all when buying things at the store, because what happens is: We scan in the customer’s items, into our computer. The computer has specific codes for the items and rules for what it will let you pay for things with. We scan the customer’s EBT card, and it tells us exactly how much of that price total can be paid for via EBT, and it will not include anything that isn’t food, and it will not include anything considered “pre-prepared” food. It does this automatically AND THERE IS NO OVERRIDE FOR IT. If our machines say that you can’t use the EBT card to pay for something, there is literally nothing we can do to change that, even if we WANTED to.
So no. You can’t buy iPads or cigarettes with food stamps. You can’t withdraw money from casinos or anywhere else with food stamps. You can’t buy dog food with food stamps; sometimes you can’t even buy people food with food stamps. I’m not even sure if you can buy “the big chicken legs” at Disney with food stamps; remember, you can’t buy “any food sold for on-premises consumption” OR any hot foods, and that’s both.
Literally the only thing these fearmongers listed that you can actually purchase with food stamps even if you are in goddamn cahoots with the evil liberal cashier or store manager is soda, and the judgement against people buying that with food stamps is classist fuckwittery at its finest.
So, as always, Fox News is actually flat-out lying, and hateful conservatives both don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t give a fuck about people going through shit that they will never have to go through themselves, and that they in fact don’t have even the tiniest clue about (not even via five seconds’ research; a list of things that can’t be purchased with food stamps is on the Food and Nutrition Services website) but still think they should spout off about to their TV audience anyway.
Reblogged for flawless commentary and explanation.
Tens of millions of vulnerable Americans would lose their food stamps
benefits if Republicans bent on defunding Planned Parenthood force the
second government shutdown of the Obama era next week, the United States
Department of Agriculture (USDA) warned on Tuesday.
Unlike the 2013 shutdown when cash reserves allowed Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to be disbursed as normal,
“USDA will not have the funding necessary for SNAP benefits in October
and will be forced to stop providing benefits within the first several
days of October,” a spokeswoman told the Associated Press.
The agency notified state SNAP administrators on Friday that they
should not begin the process of doling out October’s food stamps dollars
this week as they normally would.
Let’s put this in perspective everyone: Republicans would rather STARVE CHILDREN than allow a public health provider to continue providing needed services to vulnerable communities.
Republicans want babies to starve. Period the end.
Dude, I remember 2008. No, Hillary didn't go there. And, honestly, aside from the fact that I am a rational human being who actually does believe that brown skinned human beings with foreign sounding names can be born in America; Hillary wasn't going to touch that crap unless it was true, and if it had been true, she would have completely destroyed Obama.
That is so ludicrous, Don.
Trust Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon to provide big-time traditional media cover for the latest load of bull coming from the right: in this case, that Hillary Clinton started birtherism. Donald Trump made that accusation in a tweet on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning, Lemon was directly asking Clinton about it:
"People have been saying on-air here, and I've been reporting it on CNN and I've been reporting it here, that you were the person behind the whole birther thing and that the senator at the time, the President-elect, actually confronted you about that. Do you care to respond?" Lemon asked, according to audio posted by Mediaite. "Did you or your campaign start the whole birther thing? And did you have a confrontation with the President?”
“That is so—no,” Clinton responded. “That is so ludicrous, Don. You know, honestly, I just believe that—first of all, it’s totally untrue. Secondly, the President and I have never had any kind of confrontation like that."
Lemon was also following on an intense Morning Joe discussion that concluded Clinton was indeed the source of the original birther rumors because, when asked back then if she believed Barack Obama was a Muslim, after saying "Of course not" and "There is no basis for that" and "There isn't any reason to doubt" what Obama said about his own faith and "No, there is nothing to base that on," she also said "As far as I know." Aside from the fact that the "as far as I know" came after four solid denials, that's not even a question about whether Obama was born in the United States!
Birther rumors do seem to have been circulated by embittered PUMAs (remember them? and how much they sucked?) in the waning days of the 2008 primaries, but that's a far cry from Hillary Clinton or her campaign having been responsible for them. Over the summer, when Ted Cruz made similar accusations against Clinton, his campaign pointed to a 2011 Politico story that said Clinton supporters had spread an early birther rumor. But:
One of the authors of the Politico story, Byron Tau, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told FactCheck.org via email that “we never found any links between the Clinton campaign and the rumors in 2008.”
The other coauthor of the Politico story, Ben Smith, now the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, said in a May 2013 interview on MSNBC that the conspiracy theories traced back to “some of [Hillary Clinton’s] passionate supporters,” during the final throes of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. But he said they did not come from “Clinton herself or her staff.”
Is the new standard that candidates should be held accountable for everything their supporters did in the past eight years, or is that just a rule for Hillary Clinton? Because I'd love to watch Don Lemon and Joe Scarborough get Donald Trump in an interview and start accusing him of personally having said and done even a few of the things his supporters have in the past few months alone.
Five years after Breitbart ran a fraudulently-edited hit piece on USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, she finally reached a settlement in her lawsuit.
A federal judge says former Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod has reached a tentative settlement with the widow of a conservative blogger over a video of Sherrod supposedly making racist remarks.
Sherrod sued blogger Andrew Breitbart and his colleague Larry O'Connor in 2011, a year after Breitbart posted an edited video of Sherrod making the remarks. She sued for defamation and emotional distress after she was asked to resign, and the video ignited a racial firestorm.
The full video showed that Sherrod's words were an attempt at racial reconciliation, not racism.
While this is certainly progress, it does not appear that the Breitbart platform has learned any lessons whatsoever from this. The site's writers continue to post lies and false information about African-American leaders every chance they get. Having experienced this myself, I have no faith that they have any true motivation to change their fraudulent ways. It appears this isn't just a conservative smut site, but a cover for racism and white supremacy of the worst kind.
Oh, look: sanity. A bill tying Planned Parenthood defunding to keeping the federal government open failed in the Senate Thursday afternoon—and in a bipartisan vote, no less, though some of the Republicans weren't exactly standing up for Planned Parenthood:
As of September 24, 872 Americans have been killed by police in 2015. A mere 1.3 percent of those officers have been charged in the deaths, ranging from manslaughter to murder. As wild as it sounds, the 12 officers who've been charged so far in 2015 represent the single largest number of officers charged in any year over the past ten years.
Trust Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon to provide big-time traditional media cover for the latest load of bull coming from the right: in this case, that Hillary Clinton started birtherism. Donald Trump made that accusation in a tweet on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning, Lemon was directly asking Clinton about it:
Five years after Breitbart ran a fraudulently-edited hit piece on USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, she finally reached a settlement in her lawsuit.
