The War on (Cardboard) Women

As a woman, I’ve found the GOP’s eagerness to piss us off with all-male sperm-death panels, state-rape ultrasound-wand legislation, FCC-sponsored slut-shaming, etc., kind of puzzling. Not because the modern GOP has ever given a damn about women, but because it seems dumb for a party to go out of its way to alienate more than half of US voters in an election year.

But a post yesterday by Perfesser Heh Indeedy may reveal the real reason behind this disconnect: Conservatives still can’t tell an actual woman from a cardboard cutout:

WAR AGAINST WOMEN: Woman Raped At Occupy New Haven. #Occupyfail.

UPDATE: I suppose that this should come as no surprise considering the signals that have come from the very top of the Democratic establishment:

At the exact moment Jon Favreau is receiving high praise in pre-inaugural media puff pieces, the 27-year-old chief speechwriter for President-elect Barack Obama (not Jon Favreau, the Hollywood actor/ director) finds himself in a minor mess over a photo from a recent private party showing him groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Rodham Clinton as an unnamed pal wearing an “Obama staff” T-shirt kisses and feeds her beer.
If you haven’t seen it, imagine the early stages of the barroom rape scene of “The Accused” with Jodie Foster. Or think prosecutor Mike Nifong’s graphic (though false) descriptions of the Duke lacrosse party. Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson danced to a similar tune at the 2004 Super Bowl. Fraternities have been closed for less.

Here’s the pic, in case you’ve forgotten. No word on whether Favreau was involved in helping accuse Republicans of running a “war against women.”

For my money, one of the best troll smack-downs in the history of the internet occurred right here on Balloon Juice when the Favreau controversy first erupted. I don’t think I can improve on the words our host used then to squash a nincompoop who was confused about the difference between an actual woman and a cardboard cutout, a brainless frat-boy prank and a hideous crime. So I will paraphrase Mr. Cole to address another nincompoop: Do you want to know what is like rape, Perfesser Heh Indeedy? Rape, you stupid fuck.

I’ll only add that every rape is a tragedy, and the wingnut obsession with any sexual assault that occurs in the same ZIP code as an Occupy encampment is creepy. But while Perfesser Heh Indeedy’s willingness to make political hay out of that particular woman’s personal tragedy is breathtakingly craven, it may shed light on a root cause of the gender gap in US politics. Therefore, it cannot be said that the Perfesser is altogether useless as a teacher.

[H/T: Alicublog; x-posted at Rumproast]

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Stupider than fiction

Jayne Cobb, fictional sociopath.

Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight… or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight, or if he bothers me, or if there’s a woman, or if I’m gettin’ paid – mostly only when I’m gettin’ paid.

Some idiot in Florida, via TNC.

Police say [George] Zimmerman called police around 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 26 to report a suspicious person. The dispatcher told him to wait for patrol officers. At one point, Zimmerman followed the teen, stepped out of the car and they began to fight, Lee said.

“When dispatchers told him not to do anything, it was just a recommendation,” Lee said. “There is evidence that George Zimmerman acted in self-defense.”

He would not say what the evidence was.

Why Zimmerman got out of the car and what led to the altercation are still unknown. Zimmerman, who had a concealed weapons permit, carried a black Kel Tek 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

Martin’s pockets contained $22, Skittles candy and a can of iced tea when he died, police said. The family filed a lawsuit to demand recordings of the conversation between Zimmerman and the police dispatcher.

No charges though, because following a kid with your car, then getting out and shooting him qualifies as self-defense in Florida. Also, too, completely unrelated to anything in the story, guess who was white and who was black, and which of the two has a history of arrest for violent behavior.

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She’s All Yours

After viewing the movie version of “Game Change,” WaPo putz Richard Cohen channels the late David Broder to draw this curious conclusion about “the Palin effect” on US politics:

So far, the Palin effect has been limited to the GOP. Surely, though, there lurks in the Democratic Party potential candidates who have seen Palin and taken note. Experience, knowledge, accomplishment — these no longer may matter. They will come roaring out of the left proclaiming a hatred of all things Washington, including compromise. The movie had it right. Sarah Palin changed the game.

What a steaming load of horseshit. While the left has its share of dunderheads, I’m afraid the Republicans have pretty much cornered the market on prideful ignorance. When was the last time a Democrat on the national stage appealed to the base via anti-intellectualism? William Jennings Bryant maybe? We ceded the Know-Nothing vote for good when the Dixiecrats finally got over Reconstruction and switched party allegiance to the GOP a few generations ago.

As for “a hatred of all things Washington,” all politicians rail against Washington because of its dysfunction, but Democrats aren’t the ones peddling the notion that “government” in the abstract is an evil thing. We have tedious purity ponies who’d rather go hungry than take half a loaf, but they don’t run the party. And Democrats have to compromise because our liberal base is smaller than the GOP’s conservative base; most people in positions of actual power get that.

The Democrats are an exasperating, contentious lot who push me past my patience a hundred times a day. But one of the reasons I stick with them is because the Democratic Party, at least in its current incarnation, is incapable of producing a Sarah Palin.

Former McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt has been making the rounds since “Game Change” debuted, frankly admitting his own complicity in putting forth a “manifestly unprepared” candidate. Schmidt claims the Democrats did something similar when John Edwards became John Kerry’s running mate in 2004.

Edwards certainly was a lightweight and a smarmy, shape-shifting asshole to boot. But if you put aside the sex scandal (and lord knows that’s a bipartisan failing), Edwards belongs in the Romney class of entitled, ambitious jerks rather than in the Palin category of frighteningly ignorant dangers to the republic. Sorry, Republicans: you own Palinism.

[X-Posted at Rumproast]

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The Smoking Gun

This was the headline at The Drudge Report all morning—all weekend, for all I know:

If you happened on the Drudge site by accident, knowing that it drives mainstream media coverage without also knowing that it is a wingnut propaganda outfit run by an inveterate liar and fraud, it would be easy to conclude from that screaming headline that Tel Aviv had been reduced to rubble. The misleading headline is more disingenuous—even by subterranean Drudge standards—if you bother to click through.

The link leads to a Lesley Stahl interview with a former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, who is speaking out publicly against the drumbeat of preemptive war with Iran. Perhaps the Drudge intern in charge of neo-con propaganda failed to read the whole piece, or at least this part:

Lesley Stahl: You have said publicly that bombing Iran now is the stupidest idea you’ve ever heard. That’s a direct quote.

Dagan: An attack on Iran before you are exploring all other approaches is not the right way how to do it.

Republican candidates and pundits are calling President Obama a naive appeaser for not jumping on the Bomb Iran bandwagon, and the same people who promoted hysteria during the run-up to the disastrous war with Iraq are shouting from the rooftops that we must bomb early and often. It’s interesting that the dude who was charged with degrading Iran’s nuclear program for eight years takes a more nuanced view.

The right’s capacity for lies, recklessness and stupidity should surprise exactly no one who remembers the George W. Bush administration. Still, I’m occasionally caught off guard by just how brazen the bastards are. And it’s disheartening to realize that no matter which saber-rattling idiot eventually gets the GOP nomination, north of 50 million people will vote for the lying prick, no matter how eager he is to jump into another Middle Eastern war. The rest of the planet must think we’re as dumb as dirt. They would be about half right.

[X-posted at Rumproast]

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It is such a puzzle

Via Aravosis.

“Southern people are conservative by need. You know, if you lived in the South 40 years ago, you’d know what I’m talking about,” said Donald Crocker, who has cut hair in tiny Leakesville since 1966. He meant that Southerners had learned to live poor, relying on their churches and their neighbors and not expecting government help. Even when their forebears received government handouts — cheese and powdered milk — they scrimped and saved and used it all. He still tries to live that way, charging just $9 per haircut and $10 for a flattop.

Clearly anyone who lived outside of the southeastern United States at that time must have no idea what he is talking about. If only I could think of something that happened in the South in the late sixties and the early seventies that had such an impact. Anyone?

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The Sad But Humorous Story Of Malcolm the 11th

On twitter tonight:

And you thought epistemic closure was a thing of the right? The notion that Jon Hamm, because of his role in Mad Men, can not talk about injustice is as stupid as assuming the actors who played SS soldiers in Schindler’s List are anti-Semitic.

For fuck’s sake.

*** Update ***

The saddest thing about this is it was someone I liked to read, someone who made me think out my very sheltered white box- someone who said shit like this:

He’s right. He’s fucking right. Yes, what Limbaugh did to Fluke was horrible and unprecedented, but it is nothing compared to the three year assault Limbaugh and his boys have done on Michelle Obama. I may not have agreed with everything he said, but he made me think. But the moment he was challenged, he reverted to douchebag. That’s pretty sad for a brave truth-teller.

Hell, I’d give him front page status if he could get his shit together. I like a fight. I like an argument. I like different viewpoints.

But I have no respect for people who cut and run or people who throw bombs and then at the slightest returned fire wet themselves and scream “game over.”

Fucking pathetic.

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Hot Speech-on-Speech Action

This is dumb, even by Doughy Pantload standards:

Neither man is noted for his speaking abilities, so why would anyone want to “marry Rick Santorum’s and Mitt Romney’s speeches into a single address,” knowing that the result of that unholy alliance would either be pablum delivered in angry tones or grievances recited robotically?

What Goldberg actually longs for is a candidate who combines Santorum’s Torquemadan zeal to root out and reprove wickedness with Romney’s droid-like mien. But Goldberg begins with the reference to the speeches because suggesting a marriage of the men would be so, well, gay.

However, with typical sloth, Goldberg goes ahead and screws that metaphorical pooch anyway: “If you married the best parts of both men, you’d have something pretty impressive.” Married man parts—on NRO! Heckuva job, Goldy.

[X-POSTED on Rumproast]

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Little did I know…

My daughter has played little league softball for years, and somehow, I’ve avoided volunteering for anything all this time. I’ve never been a “team mom.” I’ve never raked an infield or created chalk lines. I’ve paid teenagers a pittance to take on my concession stand duties. I’ve bought the whole damn box of fundraising candy bars and distributed them free to beggars. (Well, the ones I didn’t personally eat. The candy bars, not the beggars. And where “beggars” are defined as trick-or-treaters or anyone else I can pawn the damned things off on.)

In an inexplicable and unprecedented paroxysm of guilt and stupidity during the most recent call for volunteers, I raised my hand when no one else volunteered to fill the position of team scorekeeper. “How hard can it be?” I thought. I can count the damned kids when they cross the plate. I should have realized by the surprised reaction of several people—including the team manager and my daughter—that this was a huge mistake while there was still time to back out.

My MLB-loving, baseball stat-encyclopedia husband wasn’t there to stop me, but when I told him I was going to be the scorekeeper, this is what he said: “Hahahahahahaha!” As it turns out, there’s a lot more to it than counting runs and calculating simple sums. For example, the image below is not the Mars Rover schematics I first took it for but rather the scorekeeper’s sheet:

Fuck! Also, you have to know what things like “Fielder’s Choice” and “Pass Ball” are. And when things are “errors” and “assists” and the code to record who did what. And you have to keep track of rosters and substitutions for both teams. And you have to politely repel angry grandmas who insist you’re fucking up the error assignment, even though it’s only a goddamn scrimmage game, so she should shut the fuck up or volunteer to do it herself. And you can’t enjoy watching your own kid play because every second you have to track every fucking activity occurring on the field, with no breaks to pee or get a drink, which you’ll dearly wish was vodka instead of tepid water.

Man, this sucks! I found a tablet app for scorekeeping, but the league officials shot that idea down because they want their precious stats in their precious spiral notebooks. I have to keep score this afternoon for reals this time. Please keep me in your thoughts.

[X-POSTED at Rumproast]

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Hair, no. Pants, yes.

Of course, we know that Romney would strap all five sons to the top of his campaign bus and run them through the carwash when the resulting terror-induced diarrhea streamed down the back window if there were a few votes in it, so this is a lie:

It’s very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments. We’ve seen throughout the campaign if you’re willing to say really outrageous things that are accusative, attacking of President Obama, that you’re going to jump up in the polls. I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support. I am who I am. I’m a person with extensive experience in the private sector, in the economy.

Even if his internal polling tells Romney that Michigan is in the bag, isn’t it kinda stupid to dis the base on Michigan’s election day like that, especially with Super Tuesday looming? All the Bobo paeans in the world will mean little if Little Ricky wrests Romney’s nomination out from under him.

[H/T: TPM; X-POSTED at Rumproast.]

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I don’t like Mondays

There was a school shooting in Ohio today. One seventeen-year-old kid is dead. Four students are in the hospital with gunshot wounds. One kid is in custody for the shooting. And about 1,100 more Americans now know that sick feeling of being trapped in a building with an armed crazy person bent on murder. That’s just the kids who were at the school. I’m not even talking about the helpless, nauseated feeling their parents must have endured.

I know a little something about how the uninjured kids at that school felt today. Many years ago, an angry nut case walked into an office building where I was working and opened fire, killing three and wounding two more. I know what it’s like to hunker down in your “safe place,” the minutes crawling by while police conduct a room-to-room search for a madman. You whisper nervously with your scared-shitless colleagues about who is missing, who might be dead. You contemplate pissing in a trashcan because you’re afraid to leave the locked room you’re in. You watch that locked door with your heart in your throat, hoping you don’t see the handle turning or, worse yet, bullets flying through the flimsy wooden barrier.

And you know what? That kind of experience is just not so rare anymore. I bet at least a couple of you could recount similar incidents. More »

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All or Nothing At All

Via the Great Orange Satan, Cardinal Francis George has decided the Catholic church gets to dictate what happens to lady parts of they should just burn it all down:

What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down.

Actually, I quite like option #3. Sell it to a non-Catholic group, and use the proceeds to pay back the thousands upon thousands of the Church’s sexual abuse victims around the world.

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Bring On the Asteroid

Todd Palin’s Alleged Prostitute Releases “Tell All” book.

Boys Will Be Boys: Media, Morality and the Cover-up of the Todd Palin Shailey Tripp Sex Scandal is the true story of how Shailey Tripp (Wait, what?), a young single mother of two special needs children became sexually involved with Todd Palin, husband of former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.

This book explains the many factors that culminated in Shailey becoming not only the mistress of ” Alaska’s First Dude” but also a prostitute working for him which ultimately resulted in Shailey being arrested in March of 2010.

The end is officially fucking nigh.

I mean it.  We, the human race, deserve to die a fiery, pulverized death if so much as one tree is killed for this abomination.

Also too, open thread.

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Big Pink Inc., still smarting from that unfortunate Planned Parenthood rock-turning incident that exposed the wingnut creepy-crawlies running the joint, the inflated executive salaries, the breathtakingly large portion of donations funneled toward corporate whoring, etc., has hired Mark Penn’s flak organization to gauge PR fallout and presumably craft a communications strategy to repair the damage. Here’s a sample survey question statement to rate for accuracy from the survey:*

Penn, as you may recall, was the genius behind the twin ”caucuses, what caucuses?” and “hard-working white Americans” strategies in the Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign that nearly destroyed the Clinton brand and almost certainly cost the current Secretary of State the nomination while leaving her campaign on the hook for millions of dollars. Penn has since gone on to be wrong about just about everything else, making a serious play for Bill Kristol’s all-time wrong record. So he’ll no doubt be a terrific asset to the Komen peeps.

[X-POSTED at Rumproast; H/T: Rumproast commenter MikeJ]

*Edited for clarity since it’s a statement rather than a question, as pointed out in comments.

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Can PolitiFact Be Salvaged?

Rachel Maddow is fed up with PolitiFact. She’s not alone. PolitiFact’s galloping case of Broderitis seems to have worsened recently. Perhaps its most infamous foray into useful idiocy was its 2011 “Lie of the Year” award for Democrats who correctly characterized Paul Ryan’s “Coupons4Codgers” plan as the end of Medicare as we know it.

But PolitiFact routinely distorts the facts in ways large and small, as chronicled frequently at this blog and elsewhere. This morning brought a fresh example of PolitiFact’s moldy decay to my attention: It rated Florida Governor Rick Scott’s claim at CPAC that his administration is “poised to get rid of over 1,000 more regulations in 2012” MOSTLY TRUE despite the fact that the numbers simply don’t add up (by PolitiFact’s own account) and that they had to broaden the definition of “the Scott administration” to encompass the entire Florida legislature to even get within striking distance of TRUE. More »

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How it works

For anyone who does not read enough Chris Mooney, I strongly endorse this thorough outline of how the climate doubt industry works at Wonk Room.

However, I have to point out that Wonk Room’s flow chart of how the business works, although accurate, also illustrates what makes the doubt business so pernicious. The graph (and the industry) is a forest of organizations, businesses, media outlets, scientists and pseudoscience institutes, political interest groups, thinktanks and so on. It dazzles you in the worst sense: the eyes defocus and your brain (at least my brain) freezes up trying to track what goes where. This is the magic of arbitrary complexity: anyone can bury a ridiculous idea in a maze of apparently credible but irrelevant stuff until it overwhelms the ability of an ordinary person to evaluate it critically. This is how the Big Mortgage Shitpile got so big – nobody would buy a mortgage written on toilet paper, so investment guys put hundreds into a box, wrote ‘mortgage’ on the side of the box with a Sharpie and shuffled around the boxes until nobody had any idea what was in each box except ‘mortgages’ in the vaguest possible sense. Yesterday Tom wrote an elegant post that showed how David Brooks stands out from less impressive conservatives like Douthat through the clever use of arbitrary complexity.

To simplify things, I tidied up the flow chart a bit:

All that complicated stuff – the organizations, the scientists, pseudoscientists and cranks, interest groups and their pet politicians – comes inevitably from the incomprehensible amount of money that fossil fuel interests have invested in us burning compressed algae and dinosaur poop. Cigarette firms held public health science at bay for something like fifty years, and the $380 billion global tobacco trade fits neatly inside the $405 billion market capitalization of a single oil company.

Look, unlike a lot of people I don’t see it as inherently evil for a company to serve its shareholders. Companies do not exist to save the Earth. They exist to make money. If something threatens their cash flow then they have a rather strong incentive to make it go away. Maybe the ostrich strategy will hurt them in the long run (also: the rest of us), but these are not omniscient beings making decisions. Few of them were hired for their science knowledge nor their sense of charity. Beyond that, as Upton Sinclair used to say, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. If we want them to behave differently then we need to either change the economic calculus (as public shaming campaigns try to do) or else do it through public policy.

Anyhow, denying climate has an enormous pile of money at its back. Want an easy $10,000 plus travel perks? Write an editorial that criticizes the IPCC. Campaign cash? Not a problem (there goes the public policy option…). Maybe you want to start a thinktank where Ivy League legacy cases can draw six-figure slaries and build a reputation doling out rephrased press releases in conservative journals, on broadcast networks and in discussion panels that need a douchebag for “balance”. Choose a name that evokes eagles shooting apple pie machine guns and the money’s there.

On the other hand maybe you want to make a serious contribution to climate science. Get ready for years of difficult graduate study* while living on ramen and cheap beer. Graduated with your degree? Have a tenure track job? Congratulations! Now you get to compete with some of the smartest people in the world for a shrinking pool of stingy grants, crappy pay, abuse, threats and bad-faith attacks from the most powerful people in the world. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it. Or maybe you want to end a very successful public career by speaking out too aggressively about the STUPID CLIMATE METEOR THAT IS ABOUT TO SCREW UP HUMAN CIVILIZATION, like Al Gore did.

As with tobacco the glorious moneygasm only works because of the long delay between cause and effect. You would never see a doubt campaign by the punching-guys-in-the-groin industry, for example, because punching dudes in the groin hurts right now. A tobacco habit might kill you later. Epidemiology and climate science are arcane enough that a determined troll can create all kinds of confusion, even while Marlboro Men kept dying of lung cancer. It takes a long time to build up carbon in the atmosphere. Even then the ocean absorbs both heat and carbon for a while longer. Only when that slows down does the bill really start to come due, and feedback effects kick in such as methane and open water absorbing vastly more solar energy than sea ice. Svante Arrhenius figured out how warming will work in 1906, yet my local dog park will only this year become a living mat of deer ticks thanks to the hot rods that his grandkids drove fifty years ago. The worst case scenario keeps getting worse, but it always gets worse twenty or more years in the future and is therefore easy to ignore or deny. Until it isn’t, of course. But by then it is too late.

(*) I have a relevant graduate degree, among other areas of science where I have worked. I can tell you that those climate credits are some of the most painful brainwork that I have experienced. No amount of drinking will help me forget a 50-page dissertation on the bloody g0%$@mn calcite cycle.

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