For an Angry Black Lady, she sure smiles and laughs a lot:
I’ve been informed that I am cranky.
This post is in: Open Threads
For an Angry Black Lady, she sure smiles and laughs a lot:
I’ve been informed that I am cranky.
This post is in: Election 2012, Republican Venality, Ryan Lyin' Weasel, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
… Who concisely describes the Republican Party Platform, aka, “Only the Good Get Rich”“:
… The big, if-not-quite-articulated, message in Tampa was that in a free economy, everybody will get what they deserve. There is no need to worry about the vast, growing gap between the richest and the rest, or the shrinking middle class, or the fact that America currently has one of the worst rates of social mobility in the developed world.
Untrammeled, the business sector will create plenty of jobs, and the hard-working big-dreamers will jump in, amass wealth and achieve success. You cut taxes, reduce regulation and let the magic happen. It’s that or what Paul Ryan called “a dull adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”
Listening to the convention speeches, it was easy to get the impression that every high-ranking Republican in the country had parents who were truck drivers or convenience store workers who moved up entirely through their own efforts. Also, there were a lot of grandfathers who worked in the mines. Republicans love mines, particularly coal mines. This is partly because of their big donors, but the fact that environmentalists hate coal makes coal mines even more adorable.
And the miners themselves are always sympathetic figures because they work hard and play by the rules. As a result, their biggest dreams have been realized, and they are able to spend their lives underground developing chronic pulmonary disease.
Shortly before the convention, Mitt Romney had pressed the coal theme with an appearance in Ohio, where he stood with a group of sooty miners whose sad, solemn faces seemed to underscore their concern about big government. Also, some of them later told the news media that they had been required to show up and weren’t paid for the day…
She’s a real reporter, even if contractually obliged to baby-sit the unspeakable BoBo Brooks.
This post is in: Excellent Links, The War On Women, Rare Sincerity
I agree with Kathleen Geier at the Washington Monthly — this is a must read, but probably not in public if you’re easily upset. Andrew Solomon, in the New Yorker, on the pregnancies, and children, resulting from rape:
Writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Felicia H. Stewart and Dr. James Trussell have estimated that there are twenty-five thousand rape-related pregnancies each year in the United States. While these numbers make up only a small part of this country’s annual three million unwanted pregnancies, the numbers are still extremely high…
I have been researching a book, “Far from the Tree,” that deals in part with women raising children conceived in rape, and have therefore met the living reproof to Akin’s remark. Life for these children may be extremely difficult. One of the few groups founded to address this population, Stigma Inc., took as its motto, “Rape survivors are the victims … their children are the forgotten victims.”…
For several of the women I interviewed, the crisis was exacerbated by the question of what rape means, by the idea that some rape is not forcible or legitimate. Men who have gotten away with rape seldom retreat in shame or repentance; they often play out their ghoulish exuberance by claiming their reproductive successes. Among the women I interviewed, such men’s bids for custody or visitation rights felt far more like acts of further aggression than expressions of care. Nevertheless, in instances where rape cannot be proven or charges were never filed, the threat of joint custody is real. Many women who cannot cope with prosecuting their assailant are then left without any proof of assault. In a time when DNA evidence can establish biological ties scientifically, this lack of evidence as to the social circumstances of conception can be a serious problem…
The aftermath of rape is always complicated. Many victims are simply in denial that they are pregnant in the first place: a full third of the pregnancies resulting from rape are not discovered until the second trimester. Any delay in detection reduces women’s options, especially outside major urban centers, but many women struggle with the speed of the decision; they are still recovering from being raped when they are called on to make up their minds about an abortion. The decision of whether or not to carry through with such a pregnancy is nearly always an ordeal that can lead, no matter which choice is ultimately made, to depression, anxiety, insomnia, and P.T.S.D. Rape is a permanent damage; it leaves not scars, but open wounds. As one woman I saw said, “You can abort the child, but not the experience.”…
There can be no question that, for some women, an abortion would be far more traumatic than having a rape-conceived child… But ready access to a safe abortion facility allows a woman who keeps a child conceived in rape to feel that she is making a conscious decision, while having the baby because she has no choice perpetuates the trauma and is bad for the child. Rape is, above all other things, non-volitional for the victim, and the first thing to provide a victim is control. Raped women require unfettered choice in this arena: to abort or to carry to term, and, if they do carry to term, to keep the children so conceived or to give them up for adoption. These women, like the parents of disabled children, are choosing the child over the challenging identity attached to that child. The key word in that sentence is “choosing.”…
Seriously: You should read the whole thing. And then maybe forward or facebook or otherwise bring it to the attenton of the Todd Akin defenders among your acquaintance.
by Tim F| 200 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Republican Stupidity
So your New Orleans House is flooded. Big deal! Just go to your lake house or your house on the shore and call 211 from there. Who has only one?
by $8 blue check mistermix| 196 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Miss Peggy Lee for an open thread, via Dennis SGMM.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 38 Comments
This post is in: Good News For Conservatives
The US Attorney in Phoenix says that Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in the clear, and of course they dumped it at 5 PM on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. I hadn’t been following the case closely, but that’s a good article from the Arizona Republic listing the different accusations against Arpaio. The whole thing stems from an apparently overreaching and harassing government corruption probe by Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas.
Ten federal lawsuits have been filed against Maricopa County by the targets of that probe, and the county has spent $3.2 million to litigate and settle those. Some cases are still outstanding, including one case that will probably settle for over $1 million. So, Arpaio and Thomas’ conduct wasn’t criminal, just extremely damaging to the county. That would usually be enough for the target of those lawsuits to lose an election. Joe’s running this Fall, but apparently he’s still the favorite, because his bullshit plays to the white Republican majority in that county.
This post is in: Election 2012, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
(Mike Thompson via GoComics.com)
__
I know, I know, but it’s a long weekend and the post-con stories will be leaking out until Charlotte gets everyone pumped again. Also, The Stranger‘s Paul Constant is excellent:
The Tampa Bay Times Forum is basically one gigantic roach motel. You can get in, but you can’t get out. And once you’re inside, there is nothing intuitive about where you should go. One narrow escalator provides service to the whole sixth floor. The elevator banks are small and make strange connections between floors—you can go from the third level to the fifth level on one set of elevators, but you have to walk in circles to find an elevator that will take you the extra flight up to the sixth level, where the print journalists have been stashed, far away from the view of cameras and delegates. Some stairwells end in flat concrete expanses with no doors at all…
There are only a few avenues into and out of the RNC area, and those avenues are flooded with people. Almost entirely white. Mostly older. Mostly male. These delegates to the convention carry pockets full of pins exalting their home state, and a little magpie trading economy has broken out where people trade potato-shaped Idaho buttons for a pin in the shape of North Carolina. Some delegates make it their duty to try to collect every single state button by the end of the convention. Which is good, because it gives them something to do when they’re standing in line. Republicans really, really hate standing in line, and conventions provide nothing more than opportunity after opportunity to come together by standing in line.
Lines are tough when they’re full of self-entitled people who believe they and they alone should have the right to get ahead. I overhear several graying men grumble to their soothing wives that walking to their car has been a nightmare, they’ve had to walk a dozen blocks, and they’re going to make DAMN sure, they’re going to do EVERYTHING in their POWER, to ensure that Tampa never hosts another convention again. One Southern man on my left makes it a point to look every National Guardsman in the eyes and thank them for their service to the country. Impatient people grunt and sigh and cut around him; he’s between them and their after-party. A young man is telling his wife that he thought the speakers should have mentioned Hurricane Isaac more, to defuse the media’s inevitable comments. “Only like one person was killed” by Isaac, she whispered back. “Big deal.” His eyes search the crowd guiltily, trying to see if anyone heard her say that. Then he chuckles…
…[T]he messaging sounded inoffensive, but when you really think about what is being said at this convention, you realize that all the red, white, and blue bunting and clothing and video imagery is a put-on. All the talk about patriotism, about supporting the troops, is just lip service. This is the most unpatriotic crowd I have ever been a part of. What they are against is community. Every sentence is devoid of empathy. Every finger-wag is aimed directly at an American who can’t afford health insurance, who hasn’t had a raise on their minimum-wage job in four years. Even as they rail against a statement that the president never really made, they are talking about tearing America down and leaving something meaner and greedier in its place. They’re radicals—radicals who’ve gone over the edge and are trying to make their radicalism mainstream.
But is that really true? Are they the monsters I think they are when the lights are down and the demagogues are predictably spreading their demagoguery? They roar like monsters in the darkened halls of the Forum, but I look at the people around me, milling forward in the embrace of waist-high concrete barriers to their left and right, trying to get back to their cars, or their buses, or their hotels. They’re grumbling about the blisters caused by their good pair of shoes. They’re hungry. They’re tired. But they are unmistakably human beings. That bald man whose wattle hangs down over his shirt like a meaty necktie, that woman whose perm looks as arid and dry as a tumbleweed. These are peoples’ grandparents. Real human beings will weep when they die (and for most of this ancient crowd, the day that they die will probably be sometime soon). They’re scared of the imaginary world of the 1950s in their heads dying forever, and the problem is that scared people make dumb choices….
And one more entry for the “Great All-Time Post Title”: Tom Scocca’s The Assassination of Clint Eastwood by the Coward Mitt Romney
***********
Apart from bidding fare-not-well to the RNC’s hopes and dreams, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Saturday Morning Open Thread: “One Giant Roach Motel”Post + Comments (128)