Jason Sheets

This weekend was the anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, one of the most horrifying episodes of organized violence against African-Americans after emancipation.

Linda Christensen, a high school teacher in Portland, has some excellent thoughts on the importance of this event and the potentials of teaching it, especially to her group of mostly African-American students.

Like pearls on a string, we can finger the beads of violent and “legal” expulsions of people of color from their land in the nation: The Cherokee Removal and multiple wars against indigenous people, the 1846-48 U.S. war against Mexico, the Dawes Act, government-sanctioned attacks on Chinese throughout the West, the “race riots” that swept the country starting in 1919, Japanese American internment, and the later use of eminent domain for “urban removal.” The list is long.

…

This year, Tulsa was one of the instances we studied to probe the legacy of racism and wealth inequality. To stimulate students’ interest in resurrecting this silenced history, I created a mystery about the night of the invasion of Greenwood. I wrote roles for students based on the work of scholars like John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth that gave them each a slice of what happened the night of the “Tulsa Race Riot.” There’s a jumble of events they learn: the arrest of Dick Rowland, a young African American shoe shiner, who allegedly raped Sarah Page, a white elevator operator (later, students learn that authorities dropped all charges); the newspaper article that incited whites and blacks to gather at the courthouse; the assembly of armed black WWI veterans to stop any lynching attempt—26 black men had been lynched in Oklahoma in the previous two decades; the deputizing and arming of whites, many of them KKK members; the internment of blacks; the death of more than 300 African American men, women, and children; the burning and looting of homes and businesses.

Because not all white Tulsans shared the racial views of the white rioters, I included roles of a few whites and a recent immigrant from Mexico who provided refuge in the midst of death and chaos. I wanted students to understand that even in moments of violence, people stood up and reached across race and class borders to help.

That’s some good teaching there. But this is even more important:

Sarah feared that bringing up the past would open old wounds and reignite the racism that initiated the riots. Vince and others disagreed: “This is not just the past. Racial inequality is still a problem. Forgetting about what happened and burying it without dealing with it is why we still have problems today.”

And this was exactly what we wanted kids to see: The past is not dead. We didn’t want students to get lost in the history of Tulsa, though it needs to be remembered; we wanted them to recognize the historical patterns of stolen wealth in black, brown, and poor communities. We wanted them to connect the current economic struggles of people of color by staying alert to these dynamics from the past. We wanted them to see that in many ways that historical black communities like Tulsa are still burning, still being looted.

For most of you, I don’t need to make the case why history is important, but I do get not infrequent comments from random people here on the irrelevancy of studying the past. The work I do on the history of organized labor and environmental history has important implications of understanding these issues in the present; in fact, I’d argue that an argument about what to do going into the future about the present without a grounding in the past is an argument likely to fail. Similarly, not understanding the history of discrimination and violence toward people of color in our nation founded on white supremacy allows people to blame current inequality on people’s laziness, bad morals, or racial characteristics.

As you may have heard:

El Salvador’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday against allowing a young woman to have an abortion, which her doctors and lawyers argue is necessary to save her life.

“We cannot appeal the case because this was the last step, the Supreme Court,” said Victor Hugo Mata, Beatriz’s lawyer, in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com, after the decision was taken at 5 p.m. ET.

The mother of one, who goes by the name Beatriz to protect her identity, risks losing her life and that of her unborn baby, because of El Salvador’s strict anti-abortion laws.

The 22-year-old woman suffers from severe and complicated illnesses. Her doctors have told her that she will likely die giving birth, and the unborn child will most likely live only a few hours, but she is prevented by law from having an abortion.

“They [the Supreme Court] were not convinced this is the way… they are saying Beatriz is not in danger and she must pursue the natural way of delivery and we must see what happens,” said Mata.

“It isn’t just an abortion, it is a necessity,” said Mata, in an earlier interview with CBSNews.com.

[...]

The 22-year-old woman suffers from severe and complicated illnesses. Her doctors have told her that she will likely die giving birth, and the unborn child will most likely live only a few hours, but she is prevented by law from having an abortion.

“They [the Supreme Court] were not convinced this is the way… they are saying Beatriz is not in danger and she must pursue the natural way of delivery and we must see what happens,” said Mata.

“It isn’t just an abortion, it is a necessity,” said Mata, in an earlier interview with CBSNews.com.

I should add that Beatriz has a fourteen month-old son whom she will be leaving behind.

So what does anti-woman Glamour Shot model Lila Grace Rose think about this?

Oh, as you might expect:

And that  is the face of the PRO-LIFE movement, folks…

 

The conservative media isn’t what it used to be. The height in power of the right wing press in the modern era probably encompasses the years 1998-2004, which include four of the movement’s major victories: the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the election of George W. Bush , the launch of the Iraq War, and the re-election of George W. Bush.

Having observed and commented on this world for about 13 years, I have seen its influence grow and dominate the conservative movement, but also become a hindrance to conservative success in the mainstream of politics. Where NBC News once saw the upside in inviting Rush Limbaugh on-air to comment on electoral politics, it is less likely that we would see that today. This is not to say that conservative media, unfortunately, is without influence. In reality the dumbest memes and themes of the movement still have a path to the mainstream press, time and time again.

Rush (Still) Rules The Right

The most dominant voice in conservative media is also one of its oldest, with an audience that is dying. Limbaugh still acts as the fireside chat voice of the right, chewing up the news of the day and regurgitating it with a conservative spin for his willing audience. This is both a boon to conservatism and a liability.

There’s no Limbaugh equivalent on the left, but instead a group of people and information sources (Maddow, MSNBC, Huffington Post, etc.) that are influential in stature to his position on the right. Limbaugh tells many on the right how to think. Having been on the receiving end (indirectly) of more than one of his attacks, I can tell you that the hivemind is strong with his supporters. When Rush tells them to jump, they don’t even bother asking how high. They just jump.

The problem for the right with Rush is simple. He’s old, and his audience is older. An example of this: when Limbaugh decided to attack Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and it created a backlash among his advertisers, he – well, his PR agency really – took to Twitter. But that Twitter account is now more dormant than it is active. While other radio shows, particularly conservative ones, have taken to social media to keep the conversation rolling, Rush’s core audience simply isn’t online. And if they are, they’re at best on email and probably have little to no idea what a social network is. Rush’s audience is old, getting older, and dying.

Limbaugh panders to this audience – who can blame him, they made him a multimillionaire – but it keeps his world view firmly stuck in the past. He cannot adapt, and there’s no incentive for him to adapt. For Rush, the glory years will always be the early to mid-nineties, the height of his power. If you listen to his show, he is constantly reliving that moment. It hinders him, and makes him incapable of seeing oncoming trends that elect people like President Obama, twice.

But conservative politicians still have to kiss his ring. He reprimands and receives apologies from RNC chairmen, Representatives, and Senators. Presidents and wannabe presidents like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush appear on his show and pucker up. The base of the Republican Party increasingly doesn’t look like America, but it looks a lot like the average Limbaugh listener, and conservative politicians are aware of that whether they like it or not.

Drudge, Beck, And Embracing The Fringe

Both Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck are doing well online, but again they are increasingly preaching to their own tinfoil-hat wearing choir.

Mainstream media organizations still pant heavily when they get a link from Drudge, but his habit of promoting conspiracy theories from 9/11 truthers and looking for the most race-baiting angle to his anti-Obama stories have diminished the ringmaster of the Clinton impeachment circus. The Romney campaign had a direct line to the Drudge Report, and they used it to good effect to trash their Republican rivals, but it was of limited effectiveness in the general election. At least in 2008, the McCain camp was able to use Drudge to launch absurd attacks like the entire “lipstick on a pig” episode, which played well in conservativeland but fell short of helping McCain to win the election.

Glenn Beck was too crazy for Fox News. I repeat: Glenn Beck was too crazy for Fox News. While his show was the right-wing hotspot from Obama’s inauguration until the 2010 election, Beck went so far off the rails that Fox boss Roger Ailes – who’s top goal in life is making money and crushing the left – sent him away.

Online, Beck can be as nutty as he wants to be, which inspires a devoted audience, but a smaller and less influential one. Beck adds the religiosity that the more secular Limbaugh won’t, but Limbaugh knows that not going into God talk helps him appeal to more people.

Beck’s show is designed around the slow-rolling reveal. He teases his audience with a tale, and then at the end of the show he makes a huge promise about the next episode, usually along the lines of “it will blow your mind.” In the short term this can work, but I imagine there are a few ex-Beck fans out there who just got tired of the tease followed by a tease.

Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy, Breitbart.com, And Why Liberals Have Hope

The new generation of conservative media could be the best thing to happen to the left. They make the attacks of Limbaugh, Fox, and company look coherent and solid by comparison. They are a gaggle of clowns and they are the future of the right.

Twitchy is Michelle Malkin’s site for complaining about people she doesn’t like. It is as if they took her perpetual rage and made it into website form. Twitchy connects tweets conservatives don’t like with conservatives complaining about those tweets. That’s it. The future!

On the other hand, Breitbart.com actually seemed like a decent idea under Andrew Breitbart’s leadership. Evil, but a good idea. Since his death, it has become clear he was the only one on that site that knew what the hell he was doing. The people running it, like John Nolte, Larry O’Connor and Ben Shapiro, are about the worst possible people to put in charge of a serious or semi-serious website. They act with the world view of people who grew up on Limbaugh, in a world of conservative dominance under Bush. In the world of Obama and Democrats who can win elections, this is a liability.

You end up with things like “Friends of Hamas” which sounds dumb on paper, but even worse when you realize that they talked about it like it was a serious thing. They really thought some throw away name some Hill staffer joked about with them was enough to derail the nomination of a defense secretary. REALLY.

As a liberal who wants conservatism to fail, I thank God for sites like Breitbart.com and Twitchy. They are frustrated conservative rage hubs with little to no application in practical politics or movement advancement. They aren’t serious journals of policy, but rather impotent scribbling on a bathroom wall in a movement so lacking in intellectual depth that this is the best it can muster.

New conservative media is a clown show.

Conservative Media Forever

Conservative media is a feedback loop, now almost completely sealed off from reality. It is insulated from the real world, and is unable and disinterested in responding to real things. It creates its own controversies, which are non-troversies in the real world, but it just goes ahead with them and furiously feeds the rage lust of its audience base.

Example: We spent multiple weeks during the 2012 election with conservatives insisting that the polls were “skewed.” Much of this analysis was based on some random crackpot with a website who is now claiming that President Obama was on crack during the Benghazi incident.

It is still among the more potent weapons the right has, and an entire party of politicians unfortunately uses it as their lodestone to obstruct needed legislation while promoting its own crackpot, impractical ideas.

But while it remains a threat to a functioning, modern democracy because of its ability to feast on its own nonsense, it isn’t quite the monster it once was. And that’s a good thing.

The thing about tone policing that is so galling to liberals particularly is it only goes one way. Even while the tone police cluck their tongues and accuse “both sides” of lowering the level of discourse, the only examples they ever give a crap about are the ones—often straw examples, of course–coming from the left. We saw this in Ron Lindsay’s speech at CFI, where he devoted time to the apparently world-shaking phenonemon of college-age anonymous blog commenters abusing the concept of privilege in arguments with trolls, but gave nary a nod to denouncing the bad faith arguments, stalking, and harassment that characterize the anti-feminists in the “debate”. (I use the scare quotes, because as demonstrated in the comment section, feminist detractors whine endlessly about being “silenced”, but refuse to actually produce the killer anti-feminist arguments they claim to have that they devote years and years to defending from imaginary oppressors without ever articulating them.)  I call it the Grandpa’s Making Racist Jokes Againg problem. Nine times out of 10, if someone is saying something horribly offensive, and someone else calls them out for it, everyone will turn on the person calling them out for it. You see this every time people get more up in arms because someone used the term “racist” or “sexist”, but not so much over the racist or sexist shit that caused the word to be articulated.

You see this problem with the Facebook wars over content, where breastfeeding pictures, artistic shots, and breast cancer stuff are routinely removed, but this was allowed to stay up:

This was the least horrible example, by the way, but the rest are too disgusting to put up here.

Basically, I think the problem is everyone knows that progressives are the good guys and reactionaries are the bad guys, and so the onus to take the high road is always and forever on progressives. The problem, of course, is the “high road” is a constantly shifting target. If you refrain from overt jokes about conservatives, the next thing you’re told is too far is sarcasm. If you cave into the intense pressure to stop using terms like “racist” and “sexist” accurately, as we’ve witnessed, even talking about the concept of privilege is considered a bridge too far. You begin to realize that speaking at all from the position of moral authority as a progressive is what is offensive, because you make people feel bad for, well, being bad people.

Indeed, the entire term “political correctness” relies on this unarticulated understanding that the only person who can ever be rude rendering judgment of the opinions of the other side is progressives. Conservatives bitch about liberals constantly, usually in much nastier fashions, but are pretty much never accused of trying to enforce their political correctness on liberals. Refraining from having an opinion about the other side’s opinions is strictly a moral obligation of the left in mainstream discourse.

This knee-jerk assumption that progressives are being rude for simply speaking, coupled with a permissive attitude towards overt nastiness from conservatives is all over Michael Kinsley’s piece in The New Republic where he complains that pro-gay marriage people are, to be blunt, partying too hard in the end zone. (Which they haven’t actually reached.) Sure, gays are being bashed and denied their rights in this country every day, but the real problem is that pro-gay people make anti-gay people feel bad for being bad people. He talks about Ben Carson, who is a homobigot who runs around on TV advocating that gay people be denied their basic human rights, and whose fear of having to face down the people who aren’t as awful as him caused him to withdraw from speaking at Johns Hopkins. Kinsley openly characterizes progressive discourse about conservative opinions as an affront to free speech rights.

But it was wrong for the university, once the invitation had been extended, to make Carson feel unwanted to the point of withdrawing. (In fact, it was wrong of Carson to let Hopkins off the hook in this way.) Behind the First Amendment is the notion that good ideas have a natural buoyancy that bad ideas do not. In fact, the very short (as these things go) debate about marriage equality demonstrates this. Denying Carson the right to speak was not just unprincipled. It was unnecessary. The proponents of marriage equality have not just won. They have routed the opposition. It’s a moment to be gracious, not vindictive.

It is worth noting that Carson routinely criticizes pro-gay people in ways that would probably make them feel uncomfortable speaking, say, in front of his church’s congregation. But only one kind of criticism of ideas is an assault on “free speech”: Liberals criticizing conservative ideas. Conservative ideas are so delicate that to criticize them is the same thing as banning them from being uttered allowed, and the fact that Carson seems to be able to go on TV routinely and share his point of view shouldn’t distract us from the fact that it’s a big meanie-head meanie thing to do to point out that the wrong people are wrong. Needless to say, his claim that pro-gay people have won is ludcrious in a country where anti-marriage states outnumber pro-marriage ones.

Tom Scocca said it best:

 It is a little odd that a person who has spent his career disagreeing with other people’s ideas in print (and, for a while, arguing with other people on television) should be confused about the difference between the “right to speak” and the right to speak without being criticized, the latter of which is what the jackbooted Gay Thought Police were actually denying Carson. How do good ideas float up above bad ideas, in Kinsley’s formulation, if not through people speaking in favor of the good and against the bad?

He then points to gay people who have been murdered and beat up in just this month alone as contrast. Those are actual assaults on your right to exist, much less speak. Being too embarrassed about what an asshole you are to speak up amongst people who see you for what you are is not actually an assault on your freedom of speech. Liberals don’t owe it to conservatives to feign approval of their ideas. But Kinsley is completely up in arms about liberals supposed denial of conservatives their sacred right to be complete dickheads without anyone arguing back. Of course he is! That double standard is shot through our society, so much a part of the water that various people have complete meltdowns the first time anyone challenges it.

Note: As with previous comment threads, I will not allow this comment thread to be taken over by inarticulate assholes trying to tone police while refraining from making substantive arguments against liberal ideas. If you don’t have a specific liberal/feminist idea (examples include the right to choose, the right to go to conferences without being harassed, the right to live without violence) to argue against, but are only here to whine about your belief that liberals/feminists are too critical of conservatives, please go somewhere else with that.

Appreciate the Little Things: Eric Holder Pushes Louie Gohmert Into a Crazy Idiot Rage:
In this degrading time of overhyped wannabe scandals and fictional impeachable offenses, you gotta learn to appreciate the little things when they come along. So, yes, angry as many on the left are at Attorney General Eric Holder for the Justice Department's way-too-broad subpoena of AP reporters' phone records, a seemingly and disturbingly legal action, it was gratifying to see him bitch slap arrogant numbnuts Rep. Darrell Issa at yesterday's House Judiciary Committee hearing. But one other confrontation from the bizarro hearing, which covered everything from pot legalization to Kermit Gosnell's crimes, will give you a little warmth on this cold fish of a week.

So it was that Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, a shitkicker from one of the shitkickingest districts in Texas, started to question Holder. In case you are unaware of what a hilarious public figure he is, Gohmert looks like Jim Nabors' inbred cousin and sounds like Foghorn Leghorn trying to cough up a stray pubic hair. He also is one of the craziest sumbitches in the crazy-ass House Republican caucus, ready to believe anything Glenn Beck vomits into his brain.

Gohmert opened by saying that Holder never gave Congress records on a particular closed case, as Gohmert had requested. Gohmert went as far as to threaten a subpoena of the documents. Holder responded, "[W]hat my people tell me is that we never heard from your staff to make those arrangements. We'll promise to make them available to you. What I would just ask is to have your staff contact mine and--" At which point, looking like an incompetent boob, Gohmert cut him off.

Then he moved on to his main issue: that he thinks the FBI is a bunch of fuck-ups who "blew the opportunity" to stop Tamerlan Tsarnaev from bombing Boston because the FBI didn't fully investigate the information Russia was giving it. Holder demurred on much of what he was asked because it is an ongoing investigation. Gohmert insisted that he knew all about the FBI's refusal to go after Tsarnaev and then he played to his base of evangelical dumb fucks when he said to Holder, "Look, the FBI got a heads-up from Russia that you have a radicalized terrorist on your hands. They should not have had to give anything else whatsoever. That should have been enough. But because of political correctness, there was not a thorough enough examination of Tamerlan to determine this kid had been radicalized. And that is the concern I have. On the one hand, we go after Christian groups like Billy Graham's group. We go after Franklin Graham's group. But then we're hands off when it comes to possibly offending someone who has been radicalized as a terrorist." Having tickled Franklin Graham's prostate but good, Gohmert's time expired.

Holder started to speak to say that Gohmert was wrong when, his blood all het up by gettin' backsassed by a Negro, Gohmert jumped in, "You point out one thing that I pointed -- that I said that was not true." Gohmert had to have his cross-burning ass smacked down by committee chair Bob Goodlatte (which is just the most awesome name for a Republican), who told Gohmert to shut the fuck up and let Holder answer.

And then Holder pantsed Gohmert in front of everyone and pointed out what a tiny little dick and balls the Texan has: "The only observation I was going to make is that you state as a matter of fact what the FBI did and did not do. And unless somebody has done something inappropriate, you don't have access to the FBI files. You don't know what the FBI did. You don't know what the FBI's interaction was with the Russians. You don't know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to. You simply do not know that. And you have characterized the FBI as being not thorough or taking exception to my characterization of them as being thorough. I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know. That's all."

What followed can best be described as Gohmert going into an insulted idiot rage, screaming and slapping himself, crying that the Negro had gotten so uppity as to tell him he's wrong, while the other Republicans, including Issa, realized they had let him out of the cellar for too long and tried desperately to shut him up and get him back into the basement to sit in his rocker next to the radio that plays Rush Limbaugh's show. Holder's look of barely contained amusement is pretty fuckin' sweet. It climaxed with Gohmert saying, and this is as clear as can be in the video, "The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus." No, really. And so, his asparagus defended, he was done.

Then Holder kicked Gohmert in the stalk, stating for the record that Louie Gohmert is not nearly as important as Louie Gohmert thinks he is: "He could not know the answer -- he could not know -- there couldn't be a basis for the assertions he's making, not the questions, but the assertions that he made unless he was provided information, and I would say inappropriately, from members of the FBI or people who were involved in the very things that he questioned me about. And I do not think that that happened."

The punchline? Gohmert has posted the exchange on the front of his House website. He's proud of what he did. And you can bet his constituents are, too.

We talked about how Louisiana is a school reform success story, earning a high grade from both reform industry insider Michelle Rhee and the voter suppression law lobby-shop, ALEC.

We also talked about this innovative reform industry plan for Excellence in Profiteering. It’s called Course Choice in Louisiana (but was recently revealed as Value Vouchers in Michigan). Innovation is like lightening. It can strike in two places at exactly the same time, as it obviously did in the case of Course Choice/Value Vouchers/Whatever They Will Call It In Your State.

We talked about the exciting 21st century career opportunities Course Choice is already creating in Louisiana in the vital door-to-door-sales sector of the economy:

“Help change the landscape of public education in Louisiana!
On your own time! With the potential to make $75k+ in 6 months or less!
Company Description: SmartStart Virtual Academy (“SVA”) (a division of SmartStart Education) is a state-approved Course Choice provider. This means that SVA has been authorized to offer FREE courses to high-school students in the state of Louisiana for graduation credit. SVA is offering 22 approved courses — both core-classes (such as reading, math and science) and career-ready courses (such as web-design and publishing).”

In the interest of accountability, let’s see how this reform industry experiment is going so far:

Southwood High School junior Randall Gunn is a straight-A student.
So when the school’s principal saw his name come up as registering to retake several courses online, it immediately raised a red flag. Gunn was called into a counselor’s office and told he was enrolled in three Course Choice classes — all of which he already had passed standardized tests with exceptional scores.
“I had no clue what was going on,” Gunn said. “I have no reason to take these classes and still don’t know who signed me up.”
More than 1,100 Caddo and Webster students have signed up to participate in what some say are questionable Course Choice programs. According to parents, students, and Webster and Caddo education officials, FastPath Learning is signing up some students it shouldn’t — in many cases without parent or student knowledge. A free tablet computer is offered to those who enroll, and some educators believe that’s all the potential enrollees hear. Money to pay for the courses comes from each school district’s state-provided Minimum Foundation Program funding.
Half of the money — courses range from $700 to $1,275 each — must be paid to FastPath and other providers up front. Neither students nor their parents are responsible for the tablet devices if they are lost or stolen. And they can keep them even if they don’t pass the course.
“This all goes back to all of the education reforms that were passed within eight days during last year’s session. This is what you get,” state Rep. Gene Reynolds, D-Dubberly, said of the apparent lack of oversight.
“I have graduating seniors signed up for math classes,” Roberts said. “I have even seen kids, sophomores, enrolled in second-grade math and reading classes. There’s no rhyme or reason to who these companies are signing up or for what classes.”
One example is freshman Shakelvin Calhoun. Calhoun was signed up for junior- and senior-level classes, and said he still is unsure how he was enrolled.“ It was a complete surprise to me,” he said. “We still can’t figure out how I was signed up or why I was put in those classes, but I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

At least 104 Webster Parish students, mostly elementary age, were signed up for 208 classes when the company’s representatives went door to door over a 10-day period last month in Minden’s housing projects and densely populated neighborhoods.

Here’s the best part:

If Course Choice moves forward and all of the 104 students participate, that would take more than $250,000 from the district’s MFP funding. Continuing to deduct from the district’s allocation ultimately will put a strain on the ability to keep teachers in the classrooms, Busby said.

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On Monday, a West Virginia gas facility exploded, injuring two workers. Luckily, neither have life-threatening injuries. So this story will fade into oblivion even faster than a fatal coal mine or fertilizer plant explosion. However, it should rivet our attention because it seems that OSHA has never inspected this plant. There are 8 OSHA inspectors in the state of West Virginia. It would take them over 100 years to inspect every worksite in the state. Amazingly, that’s actually better than average.

Then We Came to the End (A Preemptive Eulogy for the Obama Presidency):
So it was a fun dream while it lasted, this election of the first black president, the man who would make us heal in the wake of the destruction wrought by the administration of George W. Bush, our complicity in that disaster notwithstanding. You remember those hopeful few weeks, post-2008 election, pre-inauguration? You remember how we were gearing up for greatness, for transformation of our national identity, of our politics, of ourselves? Even those of us who don't believe in divine things had an inkling of what it was like to be born again.

But we knew, those of us who were adults in the 1990s, we knew that there was also an entire industry devoted to crushing dreamers into stark realists, a machine whose sole purpose is to shred your hope and make you feel foolish for ever having believed that change was possible. That machine was ready to go the moment that Obama was elected. And too many of us were allowing our optimism to get the better of us, too many of us believed that, based on the prima facie evidence, Republicans would want to put the presidency of George W. Bush behind them and work to unify the nation. This blog maintained its steady stream of cynicism, but even as he waved his hands and said, "They're coming," the Rude Pundit allowed the soothing heat of hope to be pumped into the femoral artery of his political thinking. He thought there was a chance to evolve. He just bet on the wrong horse.

We needed someone who would lay waste to the political enemies of progress, not try to bring them into the fold. We can't say whether Hillary Clinton would have reached out her hand so much, no matter how many times it was bitten and slapped. We don't know if that would have been her approach, but we know that it was Barack Obama's, and we know that it failed and we know that he stuck to it for too long.

You feel it, don't you? This week marked the end of the Obama presidency. No, he won't be forced out of office, but he will be forced to make do with whatever he can accomplish alone, which, at this point, is extraordinarily little. The Benghazi investigation was worthless to anyone not on Rand Paul's mailing list. But the IRS's questioning of Tea Party groups is mildly disconcerting, even if it doesn't rise to full-blown "scandal" proportions, and the Justice Department's subpoena of the phone records of AP reporters is genuinely scary, perhaps because chances are that it was perfectly legal. Still, what is true, what is legal, and what is real don't matter anymore at this point.

The reason why the Rude Pundit is declaring the Obama presidency done is not merely because the IRS story confirms everything that paranoid right-wingers believe about Obama, as The Daily Show discussed last night. No, it's done because the AP story confirms everything that liberals and libertarians feared about Obama's embrace and expansion of the surveillance state established under Bush and Cheney and his immensely troubling silencing of whistleblowers. The press is gleefully, grotesquely feeding on the outrage.

One of the stark differences between Republicans and Democrats is that, no matter what, Republicans, on the whole, will stand by a Republican president. They will prevent investigations (like they tried to do with 9/11). They will dismiss any allegations. They will go down with the ship. Democrats will turn on a Democratic president, especially when that president is weak. They will demand investigations. They will be outraged. They will run away like rats (like keeping Bill Clinton sidelined during the 2000 election). Neither approach is honorable, but at least the Democratic way is a bit more, you know, democratic.

Now that Democrats are joining Republicans in demanding investigations into the AP and IRS stories, now that writers on the left are calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to resign, just like writers on the right did during the fake Fast and Furious nonsense, we know what's going to go down: Committee hearings that play out like trials, the White House being tied in knots over testifying, demands for more and more information, showdowns with Congress over access, blah, blah, blah. And every speech, every call for compassion, everything Obama does now will be overshadowed, will be tainted, every effort will be stymied by suspicion. This is not to mention the effect of the Senate minority's traitorous war on the functioning of government.

The sad aspect is that it never had to be this way. Obama could have...well, hell, there's all kinds of things he could have done. The sadder aspect is that of course it had to be this way. Republicans were going to have their way no matter what. The saddest aspect is that Obama should have walked away from the forest Republicans created. Instead, he fell right into their trap. They won. Again.

Yes, yes, there will be many things in the next three plus years that we will support Obama on. He's still the president, after all. There will be many times when we will attack at the GOP. And when the increasingly inevitable impeachment hearings happen, we will shout and rend our garments in anger.  But we know that the end is in sight.

Hope dies the death of a thousand cuts.

(Note: The Rude Pundit hopes he's wrong and that he can take this whole thing back at some point soon.)

Okay, Two Can Play That Game: Let's Nullify Kansas:
Look at how bwave and stwong the wittle state of Kansas has been. Standing there on its two feet like big gwown-up boy. It's adorable. You're adorable, Kansas. C'mere so we can pinch your pudgy cheeks, woogums. Your tough ol' governor, Sam Brownback, signed a bill into law that says, "[A]ny act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas." You made it a felony for federal government official to enforce a federal firearms law. Aww. That's just...so cute that the rest of us just can't stand it, like a baby sloth on Buzzfeed. Just look at you, acting like you're not part of the United States and pretending that if the United States abandoned you, you wouldn't fall quickly into a pretty dark nightmare of debt, wrecked schools, worse roads, and no jobs. And we just don't want that to happen to you, cutie-wootie.

Yeah, see, Kansas is one of the many, many red states that gets more federal tax money than the state sends to Washington. At $1.10 received for every $1 paid, it's nowhere near the worst freeloader, but it'd be a pretty big hit if Uncle Sam said, "Ooh, don't like our laws? Then kiss our cash's ass as it walks out of your state."

Far worse is South Carolina, which gets $1.92 for every $1 its inhabitants toss in the kitty. Yet here come the ungrateful fuckbags in the government of the Gamecock State, ready to pass a bill that would ban implementation of the Affordable Care Act. And let's not leave out Alabama, which gets $2.03 for every federal tax dollar paid. The senate there just passed a bill that says that "all federal acts, laws, orders, rules, or regulations regarding firearms are a violation of the Second Amendment" and will not be enforced in Alabama.

So here's the charge for the states that seek to stand up to mean ol' Washington daring to pass laws and expecting them to be followed like, you know, the Constitution that we all live under says they're supposed to do: If you want to nullify federal laws, then nullify the funding you receive from the federal government.

Your despicable asses survive on the backs of the very states you despise for being liberal: New York gets only 72 cents in federal spending for every federal tax buck. New Jersey? 49 cents. Taxachusetts? 83 cents. You're living on our dime, Kansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Missouri, Alaska, North Carolina, Montana, and Alaska, all states attempting to nullify federal laws. Fuck, if we just got a buck for a buck up here, our infrastructure could be strengthened and more people would have jobs. California gets 87 cents for each dollar. That state would love to get South Carolina's level of federal spending. You got that, motherfuckers? You are fucked without us, without block grants and military bases and highway construction contracts and so very much more that our tax dollars at least partially pay for in your state. We could nullify you. So howzabout abiding by the laws of the nation we're all a part of?

Yeah, sometimes the adults need to stop coddling the kids and tell them to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.

This is like CSI for geography dorks: you're plopped into a random location on Google Street View and you have to guess where in the world you are. So much fun...you get to say "wait, zoom in, enhance, whoa, back up" to yourself while playing. My top score is 14103...what'd you get? p.s. Using Google in another tab is cheating! (thx, nick)

Tags: games   geography   Google Maps   Google Street View

Hiding that wedding ring in between bouts of restricting birth control access is a straight man’s god-given right.

Via Roy, who reads National Review Online so the rest of us don’t have to, has an amusing post up about their reaction to Mark Sanford winning in South Carolina. Times like these tend to reveal the deep insecurity at the heart of modern conservatism. Stronger assholes would blow right past liberal accusations of hypocrisy aimed at those who want to pass laws controlling the sexual behavior of the rest of us while rewarding an obnoxious adulterer with a congressional seat. But no, they have to come up with a bunch of rationalizations that are rather boring in their transparency.

Or, that’s Jonah Goldberg’s role, anyway. What I thought was interesting about Roy’s post is that he found in the mix a true believer, some poor woman who actually seems to think that “family values” is a meaningful phrase and not just a dog whistle for endorsing straight male dominance. Hilary Towers writes:

Once upon a time in this country

Right off the bat you know that she’s not actually referring to the real past, but telling a fairy tale about an imagined past that never was.

Once upon a time in this country, moral integrity, emotional (and even spiritual) maturity, and a servant’s heart were considered important characteristics of public leaders. In Mark Sanford we find a case study in how far removed we’re becoming from that standard. When did abandoning one’s spouse and children for an extramarital affair become compatible with conservativism? Apologies are meaningless when they are followed by more of the same. Sanford describes himself as “one imperfect man saved by God’s grace.” But the problem with this win (and here is who South Carolina voters could have elected if they had put values first) isn’t that Sanford isn’t perfect. Marriage is hard, and every spouse has virtues and vices — defects of character with which they will struggle throughout their married lives. But marriages don’t “fall apart” as a result of falling in love with another person; they are all too often destroyed from within by a self-love that transcends marital bonds and spills over into every aspect of one’s existence. It is time for conservatives to publicly recognize the widespread phenomenon of spousal abandonment, and the system of “family law” that supports it, for what they both are — a national scandal.

She seems to actually believe this “family values” and “traditional marriage” horseshit conservatives pump out!

No, seriously, she is really concerned about this crap.

Look, I’ll give it to you straight: Republicans are absolutely, 100% hypocrites if you take their blather about marriage and family at face value. But you’re not supposed to take it at face value. We all understand, or most of us not named “Hilary Towers” do, that “marriage” and “family” are all code words the right uses to mean good, old-fashioned gay-bashing, lady-controlling, child-abusing patriarchy. Straight white men get a behavior exemption from their moralism and god-bothering, as long as they make sure to repeat the pious bullshit that is used strictly to justify stripping women of reproductive rights, stifling gay rights, and treating children like property instead of full human beings in their own right. Taking a mistress is not in violation of their actual, pro-patriarchy values. In fact, nothing says you’re a powerful man who runs things like being able to fuck whoever you want, regardless of who it hurts, while making other people’s lives miserable for their own private sexual choices. Even those that are made by us boring people who aren’t causing personal pain and suffering with our choices.

That’s why it’s hilarious to see Republicans try to pull out the various Democratic adulterers to make it “even” somehow. By and large, the Democrats aren’t trying to legally punish everyone else for fucking while reserving the right of hanky-panky for themselves. (There are always exceptions, sadly, but the overall theme of the Democratic party’s policies on sexual rights is, “You kids have fun.”) Liberals toss the word “hypocrite” around a lot regarding these cheatin’ conservatives, because it seems to be the only thing most of the media gives a shit about. But the real issue here is not that conservatives are hypocrites so much as they are trying to reinstall a system where rich straight white guys get to do whatever they want, and everyone else is fucked. Sadly, that’s a conversation people get all bunched up over discussing honestly, so I guess pointing out formal hypocrisy is what we’ve got to go with.

There’s no question that one lesson from the fertilizer explosion in West, Texas is that we need much harsher fines and criminal statutes against corporations when workers die, as well as the regulatory structure to prosecute the owners of these corporations. The latest AFL-CIO Death on the Job Report, released this week, shows that according to data complied by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2011, 4,693 workers died on the job. That’s 13 workers every day. 50,000 workers died from occupational disease. Workers suffered between 7.6 and 11.4 million job injuries and illnesses.

This might just be an inconvenience for the corporations who employ these workers, but it is devastating to the workers and their families. They need real compensation for their pain and it needs to come out of corporate profits.

Meanwhile in Bangladesh, the factory collapse has now claimed the lives of at least 912 people, making it by far the greatest workplace accident in human history. And another factory fire has killed 8 people in that country, including, ironically, one of the biggest defenders of the nation’s unsafe factory system. The multinational clothing corporations responsible for this system will not suffer at all for all these deaths.

The Peregrine Falcon is the world's fastest animal¹; it can reach speeds of more than 240 mph during dives. It uses that speed to kill other birds in mid-air. Here's a video of a Peregrine diving and killing a duck, shot with a camera mounted on the falcon's back.

It's cool watching her fly around, but the exciting part starts right around 2:45. The acceleration is incredible. The same bird does a longer and faster dive in this video (at ~0:55):

Here's what the Peregrine's dive looks like from an observer's point-of-view:

Our family had a lively discussion about Peregrine Falcons around the dinner table a couple of weeks ago...I can't wait to show the kids these videos when I get home tonight. (via @DavidGrann)

[1] Although Joseph Kittinger and Felix Baumgartner might quibble with that. ↩

Tags: video

Kirsten Powers attempts to advance the argument that the Gosnell case means that we should shut down abortion clinics that don’t act illegally. She inevitably fails miserably:

Abortion rights advocates have argued that there is nothing to see here. Move along. This is what illegal abortion looks like, they say.

But Gosnell’s clinic was not illegal. It was a licensed medical facility.

Uh, what? The fact that Gosnell worked in a “licensed medical facility” doesn’t mean that everything he did in the clinic is therefore legal, or that he was in compliance with his license. By the same logic, the dentist who exposed his patients to AIDS and hepatitis couldn’t have violated the law, because after all he had a license. If Gosnell performed medically unnecessary third-trimester abortions, or committed infanticide, or put his patients at risk by not properly maintaining his facilities, these things all violate Pennsylvania law even if he had a license.

And from this non-sequitur to another:

Gosnell was not forced to operate in the dark because of anti–abortion rights regulations. It’s the opposite: he was able to flourish—pulling in $1.8 million a year—because multiple abortion rights administrations decided that to inspect his clinic might mean limiting access to abortion

This is all nonsense. First of all, one of the administrations in question was famously opposed to abortion rights. (Who can forget when the Democratic Party did the worst thing in American history by denying Saint Robert Casey the chance to denounce a core party principle without even supporting the party’s candidate for president at the party’s convention? His son, of course, didn’t and doesn’t favor abortion rights either.) And while the Ridge administration was nominally pro-choice, its failure to inspect abortion clinics was a result of its Republicanism, not its pro-choice principles.

How is this OK? Even liberal Europe gets this. In France, Germany, Italy, and Norway, abortion is illegal after 12 weeks. In addition to the life-of-mother exception, they provide narrow health exceptions that require approval from multiple doctors or in some cases going before a board. In the U.S., if you suggest such stringent regulation and oversight of later-term abortions, you are tarred within seconds by the abortion rights movement as a misogynist who doesn’t “trust women.”

First of all, you can’t just look at laws on the statute books and determine how accessible abortions are. The fact that permission is required from doctors after 12 weeks tells us very little about what standards are applied in practice, and as the Supreme Court of Canada explained in great detail 25 years ago the availability of abortion under such laws varies wildly. And, again, you can’t abstract these statutory requirements from the larger context of abortion politics that determines the general accessibility of abortion. I would gladly take French abortion policy over Pennsylvania’s, because inter alia this would mean repealing the Hyde Amendment and making abortions easily accessible at public hospitals, as well as doctors making decisions without being harassed by a lobby that opposes the availability of safe abortions (for the wrong kind of women.) Virtually no American anti-choicers (including, it’s safe to say, Powers) would agree, of course.

And finally:

Additionally, there is no upside in our media culture to challenging this sacred cow.

Yes, except for the fact that advancing these views mean there will pretty much always be room for you on our nation’s op-ed pages, or its virtual equivalents like The Daily Beast. Will people stop silencing Kirsten Powers already?

…see also McEwan and Digby.

Friday Reacharound: Four Rude Heroes Who Will Make Your Weekend Worth Living:
1. After building Orchard Gardens K-8 School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 2003, the district had high hopes for the place, with its music and art labs. But instead, the rooms were never used, the school descended into the chaos of "violence and disorder," and it turned into one of the worst performing schools in the state. In steps Andrew Bott, the sixth principal in seven years, and he makes one major change: he fires the security guards and invests in the arts programs the school was supposed to have.

Of course, the school is in the midst of a huge recovery, behavior problems have almost disappeared, and the students are engaged and interested in being there. There's even an after school program to keep the kids involved. Fucking amazing, isn't it? That what kids really crave is a chance to express themselves? And that if you don't allow them to do that in an organized, supervised, mentored way, they will express themselves in ways that are harmful? It seems like basic child psychology: nurture, not punish.

2. On Tuesday, April 30, at a town hall meeting in Auburn, Alabama, with the district's U.S. Representative, Mike Rogers, the typical bullshit happened. Some fuckin' yahoo got up and said, "Almost weekly or monthly we hear things...being done by this administration that [appear] to be clearly illegal."

Local resident John Mullins wasn't going to hear it. Sick to death of yammering ignoramuses bogarting the microphone, Mullins stepped up and said to the fuckin' yahoo, "You’re a crazy man. You are crazy. The president is not some person trying to take your rights away." This, in a district where Republican Rogers has been elected three out of five times with 60% of the vote.

Mullins, who owns one of the oldest comic book stores in the Southeast, wasn't done. He turned from the fuckin' yahoo and to his representative. He blamed the sequester for a 20% drop in his sales (the 3rd District is pretty reliant on military spending). And he added, "The House of Representatives has done more to hurt my business than anything government, state, local or federal, has ever done."  And then he dropped the mic.

By the way, Rogers has had two close races, so perhaps he might need to pay attention to more people than the fuckin' yahoos.

3. An unnamed female U.S. Navy sailor was on shore leave in Dubai. She had been shopping at the Mall of the Emirates and couldn't get a cab back to Khalid Port to get on her ship. So she got on a bus. The driver took her through side roads and stopped in a parking lot. The driver then attempted to rape the sailor, pulling a knife on her.

The emphasis should be on the word "attempted." Because the sailor then proceeded to show the punk-ass bus driver that U.S. military training teaches a girl how to take out dickheads with your bare hands. She broke the knife, beat the shit out of him, and strangled him into submission with her leg. The Rude Pundit would like to think she farted in his face and made him fellate the knife handle, telling him to let bus drivers all over know that she might be riding their bus the next time one of them tries to assault a woman, so they better watch their raping asses.

The bus driver was arrested the next day and said he didn't remember what had happened since he was drunk, although, you know, the bruises probably told a different story.

4. Yeah, yeah, it's a crime to rob a bank. Yeah, yeah, one shouldn't threaten innocent people with fake Mexican drug gang violence. But you know what? Sometimes you gotta admire the bad guys for not being so bad. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Australian Corey Donaldson walked into the US Bank and said that the gangs were gonna blow the place up if they didn't give him money. He got $140,000. He left and then he gave most of it away, including $8000 to a friend who was broke. Said Donaldson at his trial where he was acting as his own attorney, "I came up with the idea that since the banks had been bailed out, and the people had not, I was going to confiscate money from US Bank in Jackson and redistribute it to the poor and homeless in America. And that's what I did."

Of course, Donaldson was found guilty yesterday of bank robbery. After all, he robbed a bank. And, you know, he wasn't exactly living in poverty, staying at a hotel suite with $30,000 in cash on him when he was caught.

But Donaldson is on this list because he made explicit something: What was the difference between saying that he better get the money or he'll blow up the bank and the banks saying they better get the money from the government or they'll blow up the economy? Why is he the only one in jail?

Yesterday morning, a 747 cargo plane taking off from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan crashed soon after taking off. A dash cam caught the entire thing on video:

It is amazing how quickly a powerful and fast jet airplane turns into a leaden hunk of metal. (via @VictorGodinez)

Tags: flying   video

So there’s this weird little story being chewed over by the right wing media about a college girl who does some feminist activism and blogging at the University of Wyoming. An anonymous rape threat targeting her was posted on one of the unofficial university Facebook page, and now police are saying that she wrote the threat herself. Bad choice and she clearly has problems, but not the first time that someone has used a sockpuppet to drum up sympathy for herself and probably not the last time.

Unsurprisingly, right wingers are exploiting this situation to drum up paranoia about feminists. That will be what it will be, and I mostly blame the girl, Meg Lanker-Simons for that, because it was a wholly predictable reaction. The incidents where known liberals actually do something wrong are so few and far between that conservatives tend to get a little overexcited when something real actually happens. Indeed, Campus Reform is trying to spin Lanker-Simons as a “well-known” person, stretching the definition of “well-known” to its breaking point in an effort to make this a bigger deal than it is. Again, totally predictable.

Right now, it seems the eager beaver conservatives are limiting the “uses” of this story to drum up feigned outrage and paranoia and hint that feminism, to quote SEK, should be “officially cancelled”. That said, I think it’s important to pre-emptively point out that this says absolutely nothing about the widespread hysteria over “false rape accusations”, which anti-feminists are always on about and which they continually fail to prove are a real problem. For instance, there’s this image that has been floating around:

We’re all pretty aware of the claim being made in this image: That women routinely have consensual sex, and because they wake up and are so ashamed of their supposed sluttiness, decide that the best course of action is to call the police, have everyone accuse them of being a lying slut, be grilled about their entire sexual past, face ostracism from their community, and lose months and some times years to going through the justice system. Instead of, say, just forgetting about it and vowing not to do that again.

This claim is incredibly useful for rapists and their apologists. It quite literally is the single most effective and popular defense that rapists use to get away with their crimes. They often don’t even have to state it out loud. The mere fear of being accused of being a lying slut makes more than half of rape victims decline to report their rapes. Should a report be made, this claim is often enough to prevent much in the way of follow-up or arrest. In the rare cases that it gets to court, this myth of the lying slut works super well as a defense. Because of this myth, should you wish to rape someone, you only run a 3% chance of doing time for it. For rapists, images like this and the myth behind it are the best fucking things that ever happened.

Of course, the evidence that lying sluts frequently accuse their consensual sex partners of rape is pretty thin on the ground, so there’s a tendency amongst rapists and their apologists to try to round other things up to this myth. Commonly, you’ll see the more generalized claim that “women DO lie about rape sometimes” thrown around, as if all lies are this particular one that justifies assuming every rape accuser is a lying slut until she can clear her name with four male witnesses and a video tape. I suspect this story will be rounded up as “evidence” of the regret-then-cry-rape-myth. But don’t fall for that trap, folks.

As I blogged at XX Factor recently, it’s very important to understand the difference between a false complaint of rape and a false accusation. Both are bad, but they tend to happen for different reasons. Both are bad, of course, but false complaints just look very different from the iconic and mythical false accusation. It’s usually someone with mental health issues that are driving them to attention-seeking behavior, and they usually just make up some vague stranger assailant. To quote the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women:

However, victims who fabricate a sexual assault report may not want anyone to actually be arrested for the fictional crime. Therefore, they may say that they were sexually assaulted by a stranger or an acquaintance who is only vaguely described and not identified by name.

Even the cases that anti-feminists love to obsess over the most as “proof” that women falsely accuse consensual sex partners of rape  hew more closely to this pattern. Both the Duke lacrosse case and the Tawana Brawley case did not involve consensual sex reported as rape, but were cases where the fake victim made very general claims and an overeager prosecutor pressured her into actually naming an assailant. Meg Lanker-Simons is even a step further: She just made up a fake rape threat and not a fake rape to get attention, but no one was accused.

Indeed, when I ask for proof that it’s common for women to have consensual sex and then phone the police with a rape accusation, anti-feminists never produce for me evidence of a woman doing just that. They instead give me things that they hope I’ll confuse with the regret-then-cry-rape narrative, but in actuality, have nothing to do with it at all. A list of unacceptable evidence:

• Women who made up rapists in the bushes (or rape threat issuers online) to get attention/sympathy, but didn’t actually accuse anyone.
• Women who made false accusations against men they didn’t actually have sex with, pretty much always after a prosecutor pushed them into identifying someone to accuse after a period of initial reluctance.
• Cases where there really was a rape—and often a murder—but because the victim struggled to remember the assailant’s face or because the victim is dead, the wrong person is accused of the crime.

So far, all “evidence” that women have sex, regret it, and accuse their partners of rape has been in one of these three categories, none of which involve women having sex, regretting it, and accusing their partners of rape. In two of these categories, they didn’t have sex at all, and in one, they really were raped and are definitely not lying about it. To demonstrate that women have sex, regret it, and accuse their partners of rape, you really should produce examples of women having sex, regretting it, and accusing their partners of rape.

Look, I am not saying that no woman has ever had consensual sex, regretted it, and accused her partner of rape to cover it up. The world is vast and weird things happen. But it’s interesting that it’s so incredibly rare that the most devoted believers of this myth that it’s common can’t come up with examples and instead resort to pretending other, irrelevant stories prove this claim. The chance of being falsely accused of rape by a partner is like being struck by lightening, whereas the chance of being raped  in your lifetime is closer to about 1 in 5.

Lanker-Simons did a bad thing, but don’t let anyone try to use the case to prove that women are out there doing something else entirely. And, needless to say, there’s not actually a real reason for men to fear women are having sex with them and then accusing them of rape later.

Expressing a desire to have a conversation about subject “X” probably seems eminently reasonable to most people. Conversing, discussing, debating– it’s how we challenge our own beliefs and the beliefs of others. Occasionally its how we come to a consensus. So, yay, conversation! I’m all for conversing. What I’m not for is asking to have a conversation as a cover for venting bigotry.

"Unfroze" by bspencer

To be clear, when people whine that they “just want to have a conversation,” what  they are–all too often– really saying is “I want to say horrible things about a group of people and not be challenged or pay any sort of price for doing so.” Well, I’m sorry, but conversation doesn’t work that way. If you say something disgusting–even if you do so under the veil of question-begging or dog whistling–people might then be prompted to say something back. And you may not like what they have to say.

Hey, I know you “just want to have a conversation about race.” That’s great. I want to have a conversation about how Rush Limbaugh fucks underage prostitutes while hopped up on Oxycontin and Monster energy drink. But if I do so, I can expect blowback.

Hey, I know you just want to just want to have a conversation about how buttsex makes Jesus cry impotent tears of rage. I want to discuss how I suspect that most gun-humpers are only slightly more emotionally stable than Buffalo Bill. But if I do so, I can expect blowback. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m talking about gun fetishists; I can probably expect death threats or worse.

But my point stands: Using “conversation” as a cover for your bigotry is not just obnoxiously disingenuous, it’s cowardly.

Besides, Jason Collins coming out is an unalloyed good. Conversation over.

UPDATE: I learned about the Philly Mag article from commenters here at LGM. If you provided a link to that article, please pipe up so I can credit you.

Steven Spielberg is doing a sequel to Lincoln called Obama and he got Daniel Day-Lewis to play the lead. I knew Day-Lewis was good, but this is bonkers.

Tags: Barack Obama   Daniel Day-Lewis   Lincoln   movies   politics   Steven Spielberg   video

Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Snort Meth Off a Dumpster Lid:



That's the apartment complex that was destroyed by the explosion at the West Fertilizer Company on Thursday, April 18. What happened in the redundantly named town of West, Texas, is far, far more important than anything to do with Boston bombs, Tsarnaevs old and young, and innocent Mishas. If we truly gave a shit about being safe in our homes in this America, we'd be talking endlessly about West, not Boston.

The Rude Pundit will have much more to say about this tomorrow, but he wanted you to see this image so you can understand that something truly awful happened in West, a story that has been buried with almost conspiratorial swiftness.

So far only 3 out of the 157 homes in the blast zone have been deemed habitable. You can imagine that these apartments were not among them.

Don’t worry, it’s not a video BY an MRA. It’s a video ABOUT MRAs. A little cartoon, to be specific, by Scott Benson, who has this to say about it on his Vimeo page:

A quick editorial cartoon about the intersection of self-pity, entitlement, rape, territoriality, misogyny and fear of women. You see it all over the place online in the form of Men’s Rights Activists (of whom there are a few reasonable non-misogynists), Men Going Their Own Way, Pick Up Artists, and dudes touting the “Red Pill”, because The Matrix is a good movie. Look any of these up if you have the stomach for it. These are extreme examples, but watered-down forms of these ideas are everywhere.

In lurking their blogs and youtube channels for a while, I’ve noticed that beyond the standard patriarchal chauvinism there is this deep fear of women – what they will do to me, how they will reject me, how they will use me, how they are changing society in a way that does not favor me, how they are making men into something I don’t like, how they are making themselves into something I don’t like, that they won’t give me what I want, and that they won’t give me what I think is rightfully mine. This goes beyond fear of feminism- this is fear of women at its purest. And that, to quote a puppet, leads to anger and hate. It’s sad.

Naturally, Benson had to close the comments to the video because of, you know, too much MRA.

He wrote more about it all on his Tumblr.

I was alerted to the video by various people, including Cloudiah, which reminds me to remind you all to go look at Cloudiah’s excellent Artistry for Feminism And Kittens blog.

We don’t hear too many stories anymore like last week’s fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, where the death toll has now risen to 15. This is because we have outsourced our industrial risk to Asia and Latin America.

An 8-story building containing a clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh has collapsed, killing at least 87 people. This is on top of the 112 burned to death 5 months ago in another Bangladesh clothing factory. How many people have to die making our clothes before we pay attention?

If this all sounds like the Triangle Fire in 1911, there’s a reason for that. Clothing corporations, manufacturers, and big box stores actively want the Triangle model to exist. If you are an American or European corporation, you don’t want to employ the people who make your clothes directly. You want to order out for what you need with no responsibility. You want low prices, so you pressure contractors to keep wages and conditions as low as possible. That probably actually goes unsaid but everyone knows what “keep costs low” means. You want to split workers up into a variety of workplaces so that they can be more easily controlled and can’t unionize. Putting them on an upper floor of a building, just like at Triangle, is a perfect way to control that labor with no supervision.

The question we must ask is to what extent the corporations demanding this labor model are responsible for the unsafe working conditions of the employees? We know at least that these workers made clothes for Benetton, Dress Barn, and The Children’s Place. Should these corporations be held accountable when workers die? Wal-Mart denied having any its clothes made in the factory that caught fire, but they were proved liars on the matter. It also seems that Wal-Mart had some contracts in this factory, according to this factory profile sent out by Stephen Greenhouse of the Times on his twitter account.

I argue that we should apply U.S. labor law to all American corporations, no matter where they site their factory. If a worker dies in a factory that makes clothing for your company, the company is responsible. In my mind, this is the only way to fight the outsourcing epidemic that provides a cover for irresponsible corporate policies. The injured workers and the families of the dead deserve financial compensation. The American corporations who buy the clothes produced by this factory should be required to pay American rates of workers compensation. Ultimately, we need international standards for factory safety, guaranteed through an international agency that includes vigorous inspections and real financial punishments. Of course, we are a long ways from any of this. But we have to begin at least talking in these terms, demanding accountability for workplace deaths, whether in the United States or in Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, building on yesterday’s discussion of media coverage of these events, only 2 of 63 cable news segments on the West Fertilizer explosion noted that the plant was in violation of federal standards for holding ammonium nitrate. Bad reporting on workplace conditions helps people see these events as accidents and not as the fault of specific choices corporate leaders make and for which they should be held criminally and civilly responsible.

Moreover, it’s not as if the state plays no role in allowing these violators to operate. Rather, the state actually helps them to do it. For instance, the Dallas Morning News has asked the state of Texas for a list of all factories, facilities, and dealers in the state holding ammonium nitrate (as there was also a massive fertilizer fire in Bryan in 2009 that luckily did not kill anyone because the fire fighters gave up on putting it out and instead put up a perimeter around the blaze). The state chemist’s office, which is at Texas A&M, is resisting this request and the state attorney general will decide if such information should be made public. Given that Rick Perry has said that his state’s lax regulations are fine and that further regulations would have made no difference in West, we can guess what the attorney general’s response will be.

We have a lot of work to do to make our workplaces and communities safe. Simply gathering information and publicizing what we can is the first step, one that faces significant resistance of its own.

Okay, so last week, a crazy, profanity laden letter sent by a board member of the Delta Gamma sorority at the University of Maryland made the Internet rounds. Even though it got traction as a viral meme, I really didn't think of it as nerd news. And then Michael Shannon got hold of it. Forget kneeling; I'm bowing before Zod. Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter from Michael Shannon

This video footage of metallic putty eating magnets is super freaky.

Tags: physics   science

While you were sleeping…

Barack Obama used a space laser to blow up the Texas fertilizer plant in an effort to suck the air out of the news that the gun control bill failed to pass which was specifically scheduled for a vote to draw attention away from the news about the ricin letters that Obama sent to himself to distract people so that they wouldn’t look too closely at his false flag operation in Boston where he personally set off the bombs from the Oval Office thereby enabling his TSA shock troops to confiscate all the guns (his back-up plan in case the gun bill didn’t pass) scheduled right before the food riots begin because he is also killing off all the bees (using the same drone technology that he used to kill Andrew Breitbart) in order to make the populace weak and compliant thus forestalling the race riots  in the FEMA camps - which are currently being built in Cuba with he help of Jay-Z – because of what Michelle Obama said on on the Whitey tape which was supposed to have been destroyed in Benghazi, but wasn’t, which is why Hillary Clinton had to resign…. all of which was all foretold in an episode of The Family Guy viewed in Bill Ayers living room in 1995 even though The Family Guy wasn’t on yet

I would have provided you with all of the appropriate  hyperlinks but, by clicking on them, “they” would know that you were onto “them” and then you’d wake up in a bathtub full of ice in a Panamanian motel room with one of your major organs missing.  Also: fake moon landing, autism is caused by vaccines, and Princess Diana was murdered because she found out about the shape-shifting reptilian aliens among us, but please don’t tell Tina Brown because she couldn’t handle the truth.

At least not like you can, which is why I’m telling only you…

 

 

Conor Freidersdorf is on the case of an awful man who performed late-term abortions in a dirty clinic and killed women with his incompetence and neglect, wondering why the media hasn’t been giving it the usual 24/7 coverage. Conor’s list of why this story is important is very telling:

But it isn’t even solely a story of a rogue clinic that’s awful in all sorts of sensational ways either. Multiple local and state agencies are implicated in an oversight failure that is epic in proportions! [...]
There is, finally, the fact that abortion, one of the most hotly contested, polarizing debates in the country, is at the center of this case. It arguably informs the abortion debate in any number of ways, and has numerous plausible implications for abortion policy, including the oversight and regulation of clinics, the appropriateness of late-term abortions, the penalties for failing to report abuses, the statute of limitations for killings like those with which Gosnell is charged, whether staff should be legally culpable for the bad behavior of doctors under whom they work…

Conor’s world view doesn’t allow him to state the obvious: all news about things that happen to poor people in poor neighborhoods is under-reported, and this is an example of that. That said, I agree with Conor. Bring it on, because this discussion cuts both ways, and it’s about time we discussed why it’s so fucking hard for women to have a legal medical procedure performed in this country.

Let’s review the bidding: The regulation of RU-486 makes it essentially impossible for their provider to prescribe it and then, if there were any complications, to be referred to an OB/GYN at their local hospital. And, in a nation where almost every hospital lives on Medicaid and Medicare patients, and are subject to an endless set of government rules, almost every hospital forbids this procedure. So, instead of seeing their family physician if they have one, and either getting a dose of a safe, effective abortifacient, or being referred to someone who can perform the procedure in a nearby hospital, women have to travel to the Planned Parenthood abortion bunker, where they will be harassed by a standing squad of protesters. Those bunkers are few and far between, so you’re much more likely to need to arrange transportation and child care to get there. In some states, they’ll have to make multiple trips to the bunker for state-mandated counseling, while the physician in charge reads them an awful set of words designed to shame them for their legal choice.

The barriers to abortion that are an inconvenience for middle-class women are like climbing mountains for poor and immigrant women. So it’s understandable that a back alley abortion provider would rise up in a poor neighborhood to provide late-term abortions for women who have missed the short window in which they could get a legal abortion. In the course of human history, when abortions have been difficult to get, desperate women resort to desperate measures, some of which are provided in a dangerous manner by awful people.

(Thanks to reader Jerry for pointing out that this is now a big deal on the right, thanks to Conor.)