Komen-tastrophe: Beating a Dead McHorse [updated]

Downstairs, Zandar linked McMegan’s latest mind-yammerings in The Atlantic, and like some unstoppable idiot, I got out of the boat and read her article. Ostensibly the article is supposed to be a response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s article.  In actuality, it’s her traditional steaming pile of brain-shit.

I know it’s been All Komen All Day over here, but with apologies to Monsieur Levenson, I want to highlight one of her “arguments” (such as they are):

Nor do I think that this [Komen defunding Planned Parenthood] is somehow fatal—indeed, the news of the Komen foundation’s funding withdrawal was met by an outpouring of donations that, as of this writing, has nearly replaced the lost funds. And I don’t think that’s an accident. If Planned Parenthood didn’t provide abortions—if it had decided, post-Roe, to continue doing all the contraception provision and pelvic exams, but to stay out of the abortion side of the business—many of the people who now send them large checks probably wouldn’t bother. I’d guess that a considerable portion of their donor base is making an expressive commitment to abortion rights, but of course, the flip side of that is people who make an expressive decision not to give them money.

What would make Miss 1500 Dollar Food Processor think that those who are donating money to Planned Parenthood are making an expressive commitment to abortion rights, as opposed to making an expressive commitment to women’s health for low-income women? I donate to Planned Parenthood because I appreciate the fact that when I was broke and had no health insurance in the early 90s, I was able to go to Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services. I’ve never had an abortion (not that there’s anything wrong with it). I suspect thousands of women have availed themselves of Planned Parenthood’s services without getting abortions.  I am certainly pleased that an organization like Planned Parenthood champions the reproductive rights of women, and has not given in to Forced Birth Propaganda (the sort of propaganda to which Karen Handel, Nancy Brinker, and others have  fallen prey.) Women have a right to decide for themselves what goes in and out of their bodies.  The government has no right to force women to quarter fetuses in their wombs.  Isn’t it against, like, the Third Amendment or something?  No? Well it should be!

But, more important than offering abortion services (THREE PERCENT, folks!), Planned Parenthood is often the only option available for low-income women to obtain healthcare related to their lady-business. As asiangrrlMN noted in her post, 76% of their clients have incomes at or below 150% of the federal poverty level.

So fuck you very much, Megan McArdle.

UPDATE: Oh and there’s this too (not McMegan-related) from Daily Kos:

In 2000, when I first became a breast cancer activist, one of my first assignments was contacting the senators and members of Congress in my area to encourage their support for the Breast & Cervical Cancer Prevention & Treatment Act. The bill was to provide Medicaid coverage for uninsured women diagnosed through the Breast & Cervical Cancer Prevention & Screening Act, which had been passed several years earlier. IOW, the Treatment Act was necessary because uninsured women were getting no-cost breast cancer diagnosis, but still had no means to pay for treatment.

Sounds easy, right? You screen and diagnose them, you have to help them get treatment. Except one of my GOP senators didn’t see it that way, and he had another breast cancer group who agreed with him….

Upon calling my GOP senator and speaking with his aide, I was shocked to hear her tell me “Sen.__ can’t sign on as a co-sponsor to the bill because all the breast cancer groups aren’t in agreement on it.” Shocked, I asked her who was opposing it. She told me that Komen opposed the bill. When I asked her why, she explained that Komen felt that treatment for uninsured breast cancer patients should be funded through private donations, like the pink ribbon race. I was speechless, in shock. A phone call to another activist confirmed it was true – Komen was lobbying behind the scenes to kill the bill. A moment later, Sen.__’s aide called me back and begged me not to repeat our conversation to anyone, that she had given me the information by mistake.

Thus my lesson about Komen began in 2000. They spend a lot of money lobbying for a very different agenda.

Skeletons are tumbling out of the Komen Kloset.

[somewhat cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]

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Divorced From Reality

It’s finally happened:  somebody’s managed to penetrate David Brooks’s neutronium denial shield and impress upon him that the American economy isn’t so hot for the proles at the Applebee’s salad bar, and all that manages to come tumbling out is that Both Sides Do It.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

It’s like Brooks is some sort of Sisyphean device that has one purpose:  to take any possible social paradigm observation, smash it with a sledgehammer, and reconstruct the bits in order to fit his god-awful worldview of bipartisanship, even if the pieces don’t fit and had nothing to do with the original observation in the first place, and he has to repeat that until the end of time.  There are people that just don’t get it, people that don’t get it on purpose as satire, and then there’s David Brooks (who should be regularly harvested for the rich oil of contempt for anyone who makes less than six figures that he drips with) who somehow manages to make “not getting it” into an exciting new field of scientific endeavor.  I’ve got a fiver that says if Brooks was jammed together with any actual American middle-class salt-of-the-earth family for more than 3 hours, there would be blood all over the carport and a Garden Weasel shoved in a very uncomfortable place upon his person.

And he would not get invited to Applebee’s.  No sir.  No riblets for him.

[UPDATE]  Seriously, is this blame the victims week at the Village or what?

[UPDATE THE SECOND]  Charles Pierce in the center square for the win.

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Someone call B. A. Baracus

Rich Lowry at K-Lo’s Christmas Crib of Despair:

Speaking of discontent with the Republican field, I talked the other day to a pretty prominent conservative officeholder who’s constantly been discussing with people around the country the possibility of a new entrant or a push to draft someone. But who? One name he mentioned is Bobby Jindal, who is extremely knowledge, a favorite of conservatives, and has executive experience. One big problem: Jindal is with Perry–literally. Not only has he endorsed him, he’s been campaigning with him. For a Jindal scenario to work, Perry would have to collapse and Jindal turn around and immediately express interest in rising from his friend’s ashes. This officeholder also says that the deadline for ballot access in a lot of states is about two weeks after Iowa, meaning that a drafted candidate would probably have to use some other candidate’s ballot line as a proxy or go with a write-in. All of this sounds quite far-fetched. The other alternative for a new candidate is a convention where no one has a majority of delegates. That also is far-fetched, but not impossible as Brian demonstrated in his “Getting to Brokered” piece. It’s hard to argue, though, with the bottom line of this conservative: In an election with enormous consequences for the future of our country, “we don’t have our A team on the field.”

Apparently all the Republicans need is their own dark-skinned person who is extremely knowledge, and the next election is in the bag.

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What I learned from The Corner today…

Warning: All links are to Kathryn-Jean’s Bedsit of Solitude.

Maggie Gallagher thinks Ron Paul is an evil supporter of gay incest, but she would quite like to be the fourth Mrs Gingrich when Callista gets cancer or wrinkles or otherwise wears out her welcome.

Rudolph Giuliani quite likes Newt, because Newt has consistently acted like a suppurating arsehole, just like Rudy and the sainted Ronnie.

Christopher Hitchens is going to be royally pissed off when he gets to heaven and finds out just how wrong he was.

The Iowa debate was a sexy conserva-love-in where all the candidates did a naked liturgical dance and rubbed up against each other while shouting “Obama is the suxxors”.

Bono may be an enormous tosser, but conservatives who write about U2 wank so hard they take off several layers of skin:

Still, I submit that the songs of U2 betray a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order that is undeniably conservative.

Santorum and Bachmann would be winning if only people didn’t have to listen to them or see them:

If we were to read transcripts of the debate and not watch or listen to TV, both would be at or near the top.

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The Iowa Debate Comedy Show

In case you had the sense not to watch last night’s debate, you can read my Chirpstory of the live-tweeting snarkathon on my blog.

(I can’t post the script here because FYWP that’s why.)

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Obsession, Your Obsession

What is it with conservatives and the USPS? George Will:

The fact that delivering the mail is one of the very few things the federal government does that the Constitution specifically authorizes (Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power to . . . establish post offices and post roads”) does not mean it must do it. Surely the government could cede this function to the private sector, which probably could have a satisfactory substitute system functioning quicker than you can say “FedEx,” “UPS” and “Wal-Mart.”

The first two are good at delivering things; the third, supplemented by other ubiquitous retailers, could house post offices. All three are for-profit enterprises, so they have an incentive to practice bourgeois civility — to be helpful, even polite. These attributes are not always found at post offices.

Unfortunately, privatization collides with a belief sometimes deemed reactionary but nowadays characteristic of progressives. The belief is: In government, whatever is should forever be. [...]

George Will was always the low-rent William F. Buckley, but apparently he’s reached the point where even the mildest acquaintance with the facts needn’t intrude when he hits his Underwood manual to pound out a column. I went to the UPS website, and quicker than you can say “free market wanker”, found what UPS wants to charge me to send a letter to the neighboring town by Monday, something the USPS will do for 44 cents:

The “ubiquitous” Wal-Mart has 8,500 stores in the world. The Post Office has 36,000 locations in the US. You have to live in a double-reinforced titanium echo chamber not to see the difference between the USPS and UPS, FedEx and Wal-Mart.

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Ann Coulter on Cain: “Our Blacks Are Better Than Their Blacks” [updated w/ video]

Annie, are you okay?

Ann Coulter is leading the charge in defending Herman Cain from the librul sexual harassment allegations smear job, and hoo boy!  She’s really digging in.

Yesterday morning she popped over to Fox News to call the Cain Situation “another high-tech lynching.” (I thought Cain would be the one to make that comparison, but I guess it’s better when you get the nice white lady to do it for you.)

Then later in the day, she appeared on Sean Hannity to double down on her idiocy and whine that it’s hard out there for a black Republican because Democrats always pick on them—or something.

From Mediaite:

“They harangue blacks and tell them ‘you can’t be a Republican, you can’t be a Republican,’ it is so hard for a black to be a Republican,” and then complain when conservative events are mostly white-attended, Coulter argued. “Maybe you shouldn’t harangue them so much!” Coulter also told Hannity the source of why liberals “detest conservative blacks” is that “it is ironic in a cruel, vicious, horrible way… that civil rights laws were designed to protect blacks from Democrats,” and now there are “liberal wimen using laws to protest blacks in order to attack conservative blacks with these vicious, outrageous charges.”

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He just keeps trolling along

Remember when this blogger was our reside PUMA troll?

Any bets on how long before someone claims he (Cain) was dogwhistling to the white racists that “he knows his place” by singing an old negro spiritual?

Seriously though, he was dogwhistling – to black Americans. He was reminding the black community that he is one of them. If he can win over a big chunk of their votes he’s not just electable, he’s unbeatable. No other Republican candidate can do that.

I wonder how many hymns Barack Obama knows by heart?

So hard to tell if this is spoof or not. It’s such a fine line between clever and stupid.

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“Who is the worst science writer?” “Gregg Easterbrook” “Who is second?” “Ah, Your Majesty, there is no second.”*

[Fair warning:  this post is merely the scratching of a pet peeve.  No grand significance here.  You have been warned.]

I don’t know why, but I still, more or less as a reflex, skim Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column over at ESPN.  (No linky, ‘cause I’m kind—but it’s easy enough to find if you are so moved.) 

That Tuesday habit is one I really should break, not least because even a quick scan robs me of five minutes I’ll never get back.

But the real reason to give the column a miss is because it is depressingly often larded with nuggets like this:

A Cosmic Thought: Last week researchers announced they had found, in a South African cave, evidence of painting 100,000 years ago. The previous oldest evidence of painting was from 60,000 years in the past; the famous Lascaux cave paintings in France were made about 17,000 years ago. The latest find, in South Africa, shows both that our ancestors were experimenting with iron oxides to make permanent paint 50 millennia in the past: all that time ago, they painted inside caves, seeming to hope their work would last long enough to be seen by distant descendants.

Each time telescopes improve, the universe is revealed to be larger, older and grander. Each time anthropology makes an advance, the human experiment is shown to be older and more complex than thought. Who can say where the cosmic enterprise may be headed?

A bit of backstory.  Easterbrook has been around a long time, promoting a technological optimist’s view of a lot of problems facing us.  He’s been a climate change scoffer—Naomi Oreskes, (whom I interviewed this week— podcast available here) called him out for deeply misleading writing on global warming as far back as 1992, when he put professional denialist Fred Singer’s words in the mouth of the enormously distinguished climate researcher Roger Revelle—all in an attempt to paint Al Gore as a (not yet fat) environmental extremist.  (See p. 194 of her excellent book, Merchants of Doubt.)

Easterbrook is also one who pulls cards from the bottom of the deck when it comes to science and religion.  One tactic he’s used fairly often  is to chip away at the authority of science as a measure of the material world by stray snarking at all that science doesn’t know.  Things like dark matter (who knew!) and dark energy—what? 95.3 % of the mass-energy density of the universe is made of stuff we can’t see?—all add up (for Easterbrook) into a sly case that maybe scientists don’t know as much as they think they do…which leaves room for more supernatural speculation.

That’s the old God of the gaps argument in defense of faith.  It’s a semi-regular source of fun in my science writing class to bring in a scientist to talk to our graduate students about what it’s like to be on the other side of the notebook—and in such sessions we’ve regularly found Easterbrook’s classic bad faith advance of this tired old trope in this Wired feature  serving as a “don’t-do-this” example. More »

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Real Americans Suffer In Silence

And if you thought Bill Keller’s take on OWS completely missed the point, we have David Brooks making Keller look like Nostradamus.

If, in the 1960s, you had tried to judge America by looking at the sit-ins and Woodstock, you would have had a very distorted picture of where the country was heading. You wouldn’t have been able to predict that Richard Nixon would win the youth vote in 1972, which he did. You wouldn’t have been able to predict that Republicans would go on to win four out of the next five presidential elections, a streak only interrupted by Jimmy Carter, who ran as a conservative Democrat.

Similarly, if you look only at the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements that have been getting so much coverage in the news media, you know very little about the wider America. Most Americans seem to understand this. According to data from the Pew Research Center, they are paying less attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement than any other major story — less than Afghanistan, Amanda Knox, the 2012 election, the death of Steve Jobs and far, far less than news about the economy.

While the cameras surround the flamboyant fringes, the rest of the country is on a different mission. Quietly and untelegenically, Americans are trying to repair their economic values.

The salt of the Earth, rock-ribbed masses are embracing austerity and reaffirming their role as doormats for the wealthy, apparently.  The meek shall inherit the Earth, well after the people with the money and the megaphones get done pillaging anything and everything of worth from it.  Not only does Brooks dismiss the Occupy Together protesters in cities across the country, he then assumes people are angry because government’s spending too much and that people want tax cuts for our precious tax creators and cuts to the social safety net that supports them.

How dare, Brooks says, do these Dirty Effing Hippies demand anything and seek to lift their noses from the grindstone that has eroded household income to 1996 levels.  Banks cutting credit limits and charging more fees, energy and food prices rising due to commodity speculation, the wealth gap growing yearly?  Tighten your belts like the Puritan strain you are and accept it.  Real Americans in Bobo’s world ignore OWS and get back to work.  Those with jobs, anyway.

Most of all, Real Americans fanatically embrace centrism and austerity to protect our nation’s greatest resource, the job creators.  Trickle-down serfdom is all the rage where Brooks is.  After all, we’ve been there for over three decades.  Why would the silly masses actually want anything more in a country where the wealthiest 400 individuals have more than the bottom 50% combined, and banks continue to report billions in profit this week after taking hundreds of billions in taxpayer loans?

The Divine Right of Job Creators, indeed.  Real Americans suffer in silence, apparently.

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Witless For The Defense, Your Honor

New guy gets to handle the “I Read These Morons So You Don’t Have To” category, right? And hey, this time it’s easy, it’s really pretty much all there in Bobo’s article title:

In Defense of Romney

And it goes precisely as you expect it would.

The central problem is that Mitt Romney doesn’t fit the mold of what many Republicans want in a presidential candidate. They don’t want a technocratic manager. They want a bold, blunt radical outsider who will take on the establishment, speak truth to power and offend the liberal news media.

They don’t want Organization Man. They want Braveheart.

The question is: Are they right to want this? Well, if they want an in-your-face media campaign that will produce delicious thrills for the true believers, they are absolutely right. But if they actually want to elect an effective executive who is right for this moment, they are probably not right.

If that sounds familiar, it should.  Please notice that Bobo’s recycling his own argument as to why he liked candidate Obama in 2008.

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he’s a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, ‘David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you’re only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.’ And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

He then goes on to praise Romney for just how much like President Obama he is: perceptive, organized, intelligent, possessed of political expertise, surrounded by competent people and adaptable to a changing political situation.  The funny thing is President Obama is still all of those things, still has gotten a hell of a lot done, still has a lot that he can do, but Bobo here seems to think that Romney’s good for America in the end because he’s dull (and of course the Tea Party would magically go away if President Obama weren’t around.)

It’s like watching paint dry.  Unexciting, nondescript, especially boring paint.

Now that I think about it, if there’s anyone in DC that will relentless push the idea of “Mitt Romney means we get to have a grown-up in the White House and no Tea Party!” fallacy for the next 13 months, it’s going to be Brooks.

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Things that make Grammy laugh and laugh

The following are the results of Hot Air’s Monthly Presidential Candidate Poll Results. If you want to sully your computer with the detailed “polling results”, then you can go over here, but frankly one of us giving them hits is probably more than enough. I spent thirty seconds looking at their front page and feel more soiled than the time Andy secretly filmed me doing a wee on Joe Dellasandro.

Anyhow, just in case you were wondering who the cream of wingnuttery* wants to be President this month, the winner, in an almost unprecedented (well, since two months ago) breakaway surge to the front, is – Herman Cain.

Yes, Rick Perry is dead and the new king of the dribble-stained is Herman Fucking Cain. Cain’s only real challenger (for the next ten minutes, until most of them change their mind again) is Sarah Palin, followed far behind by the sad assortment of boobs and god-botherers and was-popular-a-month-agos who make up the remainder of the pack. Interestingly Palin is the only one on the chart who shows any form of consistency, hanging around the magic 30% mark, which just goes to show that once you have managed to tear an acne-riddled virgin away from his semen-stained copy of The Fountainhead, and convinced him to vote for the pretty one with the sparkles, he can be remarkably loyal as long as he believes that there is the smallest possibility that he might get to see those sparkles up close and in person.

I also love this chart:

which appears to show that among the polling group, who have in the last year had Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Cain (twice!) in their top two front runners, whose poll results have gone up and down like Rick Perry eating a weiner-on-a-stick while riding on a roundabout, 60% are “very committed” to their chosen candidate (just like last month when 70% of them were “very committed”), which either means that the other 30-40% of them are changing their votes almost every month or they are all fucking stupid.

I realize that doesn’t need to be an either/or sentence, but I like the way it scans.

* “cream” in the sense that it’s thick, unctuous and if you leave it on its own for three weeks in a basement it begins to smell like old feet and socks that have been used for purposes that god did not intend. ▲

Everybody knows the things she does to please

Sometimes it really is just about pissing off liberals:

[A] lot of us fell in love with Sarah Palin because of her enemies and a lot of us have fallen out of love with Sarah Palin because of her fans.

This RedState piece is a threefer, because also too Ericksson admits he’s frightened by the Palinese Liberation Army and that she played him for a fool:

For the longest time I wanted Sarah Palin to run.

[....]

Governor Palin has teased us long enough. Most of us are tired of it. She has harmed her own entry into the race and now, even if she got in, would only see a modest rise in polling.

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ZOMG! ScheduleGate!! President Obama is a Cave-Dwelling Cave Meister!

This is Obama’s Katrina.

 For those of you who aren’t aware, Obama caved BIG-TIME yesterday… or something.

See, he wanted to address Congress about his jobs plan on September 7, which is Congress’s first day back from summer recess. (You remember jobs, right?  Most of you probably don’t have one because Congress refuses to do its job and come up with a plan to put Americans back to work.)

John Boehner, in an unprecedented yet unsurprising move, sent a letter to Administration saying, “No”—after initially offering no objection to the Obama administration’s chosen date:

[A]s the Majority Leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, September 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening. With the significant amount of time – typically more than three hours – that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House Chamber before receiving a President, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.

Despite the fact that the date was floated to the GOP and the GOP didn’t object, the White House pushed the address back a day because getting into a slapfight with Boehner would have only served to make everyone—not just the GOP, but also the Administration—look like asshats.

He pushed back the date by a whole day? The horror! The horror!

Delaying the address definitely proves that Obama caves on everything, and this is why he’s going to lose in 2012. Voters will remember the Day the Address Got Delayed By A Day, and voters will view it as Obama being a wimp (as Markos called him) or petty and incompetent (as Jon Walker of FDL called him) or so weak that he doesn’t even realize he’s being weak (as Cenk Ugyur called him).

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Every single Professional Left blog has front-page posts claiming that Obama is a wimp, a cavemeister, naive, petty, or incompetent:

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Centrist Orgasm

There needs to be some kind of name for the genre of centrist fantasy porn embodied by this latest “effort” from the Mustache of Understanding, in which he imagines Obama, Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell come to a “GRAND BARGAIN”:

At that point, all five leaders shook hands and retreated into the Oval Office. It was exactly 9:29 a.m. One minute later, the New York Stock Exchange opened. The Dow was up 1,223 points at the open — an all-time record.

What’s sad is how much this is a fantasy and how easily — with just a little political will — it could be a reality.

Friedmankakke?

For a man who has made a career publishing deeply, deeply silly things, this one takes the cake.

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