I'm helping fill in over at Ezra's place while he's on vacation. So are many other interesting people. Go read!
Also, you can sign up to be the "first to know" about Obama's VP selection. If nothing else, it's a really smart way to build the cell phone and text message network for the Democratic Party going forward.
An enormous part of McCain's appeal to moderates is the perception that he's not a raving wingnut on reproductive rights, that he's actually a reasonable person. Most of that perception is just the stupid "maverick" thing---people assume that if you break with the party, it's going to be on an issue like abortion, where the party's stance is contrary to what the public wants in a really obvious way. But, as Sarah Blustain argues, it's also because McCain made a few pro-choice noises in 2000, when he was trying to distinguish himself from Bush in the primaries. So which McCain is the pandering one and which one is the real one? The 2000 one, who pretended to be sympathetic to the pro-choice opinion, is the liar.
To many voters, the McCain of 2000 is the true McCain, with his latest statements constituting an understandable, if undignified, pander to the GOP's right-wing base. They simply cannot believe that the maverick who defied the party's hard-core social conservatives on embryonic stem cell research and campaign finance reform would toe the conservative line on abortion. But, in truth, it was his 2000 position on abortion that was the outlier--a short-lived attempt to court the center after George W. Bush had locked up the religious right's support. McCain is not, and never was, a moderate.
The article is a devastating expose, putting to rest any notion that McCain is only "pro-life" for political reasons. I'm not surprised. The guy doesn't conceal his misogyny well at all, with the calling his wife a "cunt" and offering her up as entertainment in a sex show, and of course his track record of standing against women's interests in all sorts of areas. He votes with the hard right in Congress on reproductive rights issues that regular "pro-lifers" won't touch, with the exception of funding stem cell research. That doesn't surprise me at all---outside of bolstering the phony claim that the anti-choice movement is about fetuses, and not sex, stem cell research doesn't really have anything to do with limiting women's rights. Why vote against it when it doesn't materially affect women's rights? His positions are consistently anti-woman on this issue.
McCain may or may not truly understand the broader definition of "pro-life," which these days also includes opposition to traditional and emergency contraception, family-planning, euthanasia, and related federal funding both here and abroad. (Playing the bumbling fool and satisfying no one is certainly an easier escape than trying to satisfy all.) But, as on abortion, both data and anecdote show there is little latitude in his positions. He has voted to end the Title X family-planning program, which pays for everything from birth control to breast cancer screenings and which is a target for the right because the recipients of these dollars also tend to be clinics that offer contraception to unwed and underage women and that offer abortions. He has backed largely discredited abstinence-only education, voting in 1996 to take $75 million from the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant to establish such a program; ten years later, he voted against teen-pregnancyprevention programs. He has supported parental notification laws governing not only abortion but contraception for teens, and, though he didn't want to talk to the press about it, he's voted against requiring insurance companies to cover birth control. In international family affairs, McCain has voted not only in favor of the global gag rule, but also to defund the United Nations group that provides family-planning services (not abortions) for poor women, and to spend a third of overseas HIV/AIDS prevention funds on abstinence education.
In other words, he voted to increase the abortion rate by decreasing access to contraception. Saving fetal life is always secondary, for hard right wingers like McCain, to screwing women over.
The article opens with a really interesting story that really gets to the heart of McCain's attitudes about women's rights and also, for those of us who cannot believe how well he conceals this in the mainstream media, what a massive asshole McCain is personally.
John McCain was mad. Fuming mad. It was then the early days of his political career, and he had paid an unscheduled visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Mesa, which was within his Arizona congressional district. That's when Gloria Feldt, then the CEO of the group's local chapter, got a phone call. "Congressman McCain is here," a staffer told her, "and he is screaming and it is upsetting the patients."
Feldt says McCain had always refused her offers to visit a clinic, but had apparently decided to make a spot visit of his own. What had raised his ire was a shelf containing information about Title X federal funding, which some clinics receive to support non-abortion-related reproductive health care for low-income women. McCain was upset that the clinic provided paper for people to write their representatives in support of the legislation, which requires constant advocacy because Congress must reauthorize it every year. "His immediate and incorrect assumption," says Feldt, "was that we were using federal funds to pay for lobbying." Feldt got on the phone. "He was screaming, 'I am going to defund her, I am going to get the federal government to defund you.'... [H]e rants and he raves and finally he hangs up on me."
The one small glimmer of hope for people who want to believe that McCain is secretly pro-choice is a comment he made in 2000, where he implied that he would support his own daughter should she need an abortion. (She was 15 at the time.) And you know, I don't doubt that there was truth to that. This story really shows how McCain, and really how the larger anti-choice movement, holds poor women to a much different standard than rich women. Most people think of reproductive rights, but a lot of conservatives, McCain included, think of these things as privileges that should be reserved for the deserving wealthy. McCain runs around trying to slash funding for pretty much all women's health care, but especially for family planning, but I'm sure that he doesn't get bent out of shape over women in his family and social class using birth control. Having sex without consequences is a luxury item, and you'd no more fund it than you would start a food stamp program to purchase fine steaks and wine for the poor. The poor have to make do with hamburgers and wine coolers, and having to resort to pull-and-pray.
Bernie Mac died yesterday. Ergo, he was a conservative hero. I mean, he owned guns and acted like a grown-ass man! It's becoming a routine part of being black and semi-respectable to conservatives - you must be one of them. You don't have dreadlocks, you don't hang out with Jesse Jackson and they can't blame "hip hop culture" on you. Here's your Reagan kufi! Go get the luggage!
My favorite comment from the Hot Air thread:
LOL, that was one of my favorite lines of his. This is so sad. He was one of the few good things to come out of the ’south side’ of Chicago. May God rest his soul.
macblanegirl on August 9, 2008 at 12:06 PM
I'll let Bernie Mac comment:
Stupid ABC News. Smash ABC News!
The Democratic Party is engaged in a political high-wire act -- trying to bring in pro-life supporters without offending its pro-choice base.
This is a tight rope Democrats have been walking since 1992, when the party took a risky step by barring popular Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey Sr. from speaking at its convention because of his stance on the abortion issue.
It's really not even worth saying this again, because it never sinks in, but Casey was barred because he refused to endorse the Clinton/Gore ticket. There's also the small problem that one of the most powerful people in the Democratic Party is Harry Reid, a pro-lifer.
But none of this ever matters, because Democrats always need to moderate themselves on choice. Always.
During the 1992 convention Casey, along with over 30 other prominent figures in politics, commerce, academics and religion, endorsed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times which set forth their desire for "communities and policies that help women to deal with crisis pregnancies by eliminating the crisis, not the child."
Today that position still doesn't wash with dyed-in-the-wool pro-choice Democrats. But in a close election year, the party and its presumptive nominee, Barack Obama, are rethinking how they talk about the issue.
Actually, for the most part, that language would wash with most pro-choice Democrats. They would still want the woman to have the option of abortion, but the idea that we have to pursue policies that, from contraception to pregnancy planning to prenatal care to early childhood care and education, make pregnancy something society helps with rather than simply expects of women as a part of the deal of containing a womb. Oh, and the rainbow parties. God, the rainbow parties.
Alas, our party containing naught but slavering abortionists, we find ourselves again chasing after moderate white Catholics, the majority of whom actually still consider themselves pro-choice. Democrats have had a consistent message on choice and pregnancy for decades - that the best way to prevent abortion is to provide the tools to prevent pregnancy and to deal with the economic, psychological and medical impact of pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing to any woman who needs it.
There are really only three stories that the media can tell about Democrats and abortion - Bob Casey, the impending loss of white Catholics and the intemperate pro-choice base blocking the Democratic message that the pro-choice base is actually promoting. As much as I appreciate the Amy Sullivan Full Employment Act, maybe we could fill the interminably gaping maw of news coverage with something, anything else?
What are these people thinking, given the evidence out there that grown adults are getting Tased to death by trigger-happy, poorly trained law enforcement who electrocute first and ask questions later?
Uniontown school officials intend to draft a Taser policy for their school police officers that might be discussed as soon as the school board's Aug. 18 meeting and could be considered for adoption next month.The school's director of security says giving the district's three officers the option of using a Taser is more about providing the safest possible conditions for children, staff and visitors than as a weapon "directed at the students."
Concerned parents and residents questioned the necessity of the devices at a public meeting Wednesday night, but a Cleveland consultant said in an interview Thursday that a Taser can be a "useful extra tool" for authorities as an alternative to a firearm in gaining control in a tense situation.
Well-known forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht gave a thumbs-up to sizzling teens into submission:
"Once you have the Taser and it's been accepted and legitimized ... I see nothing wrong with officers being able to use it on teenager."
The problem here is that over and over as we've seen in so many posts on the matter, is that situations that used to be contained by deft negotiation now result in a Tasing; officers simply whip out the stun gun to order compliance, not to stop a truly dangerous situation where a gun might have been used. Imagine school police responding to anti-LGBT bullying in the halls of a school out in Red State America; who do you think is going to be on the receiving end of the electro-shock?
Let's go to the videotape of one of the latest egregious situations, a teen with a broken back Tased 19 times by police:
Related:
* Cops taser bride and groom at wedding
* NC: More freestyle law enforcement death-by-Taser
* 17-year-old killed by Taser over shoplifted Hot Pockets
* Florida: Wheelchair-bound woman Tased to death; Vermont: man Tased during seizure
The very basis of modern fundamentalist eschatology is that a politician of great stature will come and unify the world's governments, fooling the world into accepting oppression through enlightenment. The Antichrist is pretty much what the word sounds like - a false Messiah who offers the exact opposite of Jesus' message, a charismatic leader whose words mislead us to the brink of oblivion. It's a fairly common exercise in fundamentalist circles, theorizing that any charismatic leader is or could be the Antichrist.
Varied theories abound as to the background of the Antichrist, but they all rest on the idea of a charismatic leader arising from murky backgrounds to fool and dominate the world. Portraying Muslim supremacist multinational citizen Barack Obama as the Messiah of a new age plays right into the idea of fundamentalist worries about the Antichrist or his harbingers. It's yet another reason the "popular = bad" meme is being pushed by the right. The conservative Christian base is intrinsically wary of anyone who's popular with the "wrong" people (i.e., not them), and entirely willing to brand them as party to evil. It's a model of fundamentalist action as old as fundamentalism itself, and particularly relevant in light of modern Christianity's interaction with popular culture and mass communication.
I may be being a massive anti-Christian bigot here...except having read a lot of apocalyptic material from the Christian Right, I'm not.
Although I have no idea if it's live - NBC is even more confusing on the West Coast than on the East - Henry Kissinger is currently sleeping in the stands of the USA-China basketball game.
While I assume that China is one of the few countries in which Kissinger is not a wanted war criminal (since, you know, he was able to enter it), they could probably gain some international goodwill if they went ahead and grabbed him anyway.
Update: Other Olympics thought: I hereby predict that Michael Phelps will not finish lower than first in any individual swim - heat, semifinal, or final.
The cavalcade of stupid continues unabated:
Obama has Kenyan citizenship as well as US citizenship.
[...]
Reader Bob R. wonders:
I wonder how the clingy, bible thumpin', shotgun pumpin', outhouse dumpin', crowd in flyover country would respond to this gem. And, wouldn't it be "special" to hear the "Wizard of Uhhs" stumble through an explanation of this fact, and why it hasn't been aired out earlier?
And, I'm not sure, but I believe that Kenya doesn't allow dual citizenships. Mightn't this be among the reasons that Glibama, the most transparent candidate with the most transparent campaign, won't release his actual birth certificate?
Bob R. is correct in one respect: Kenya doesn't allow dual citizenship. Unfortunately, commenting from the outhouse (the rest of America has indoor plumbing, but hey) leads you to say some stupid things. Obama wouldn't comment on his "Kenyan citizenship" because dual citizens (if Obama was ever one) eventually have their Kenyan citizenship stripped:
A person who, upon the attainment of the age of twenty-one years, is a citizen of Kenya and also a citizen of some country other than Kenya shall, subject to subsection (7), cease to be a citizen of Kenya upon the specified date unless he has renounced his citizenship of that other country, taken the oath of allegiance and, in the case of a person who was born outside Kenya. made and registered such declaration of his intentions concerning residence as may be prescribed by or under an Act of Parliament.
Obama, being an American citizen, is legally prevented from having Kenyan citizenship and has been for 26 years. You don't renounce citizenship, you don't apply to have it taken away - it just goes after you turn 21, unless you renounce your citizenship for the other country. Of course, Obama must now prove that he didn't renounce his American citizenship with a Certificate of Still Being a Citizen and Christian.
P.S.: Yes, this is xenophobic and racist on Gateway Pundit's part. In case anyone was confused.
You may remember about a month ago I asked about whether or not I should go buy Metal Gear Solid 4. I loved the first one, enjoyed the second, avoided the third and now, rented the fourth.
There's a phenomenon that's popping up far too often in major game releases, especially anything that's got more than a threadbare plot. I first noticed it in Halo 2: there's a scene where Master Chief has to eject from a spaceship and guide himself through a raging battlefield of ships firing on each other, through a planet's atmosphere to the surface of the planet below. You walk Master Chief up to the lip of the ship you're jumping out of...and then a cutscene shows him doing all the cool things to survive, giving you control once the exciting part is over. You walk right up to the brink of something entertaining and enthralling, and then have it taken out of your hands so that the cinematics guys have something to do.
With MGS4, imagine that...but for about half an hour.
You start out the game in a war zone - no, wait, you start out by watching a jarringly live-action faux game show, followed by a commercial, followed by the war zone - where you literally walk around until you trigger the game showing you something exciting happening. Walk around, cinematic of you getting fired at. Walk around some more, cinematic of giant robots walking through the street. Run into a building, cinematic triggers showing you escaping from the robots. Another 5-10 minutes of cinematics and backstory later, and you're actually in a situation where you're allowed to, you know, do something.
It was at the "do something" point that I ran around, hid from some soldiers, and then realized that any will I had to play this game any further was totally sapped. How a game starts is a lot like how a novel or a movie starts: without a hook to grab on to, to hang your intrigue on, what you're ultimately left with is the overindulgence of the auteur, deciding that their vision is more important than your experience. What games like MGS4 teach you as a player is that your involvement is a necessary evil rather than a desired outcome, the game itself the imperfect vessel of a vision.
I may have missed a life-changing experience, a deeply revelatory reimagining of the way I play games. On the other hand, I have several hours of my life that I would have otherwise spent wondering when the hell that was going to happen. I'd say I came out ahead.
Look, I admit, I showed up at the wedding drunk. And I may have asked your 14-year-old niece to come play on the Slip N' Slide in my bedroom. And then called her a tease. But really, you invited me. Let's just call it even, okay?
This is also known as the Deborah Howell method of conflict resolution, on display at the Washington Post every Sunday. You see, after a reporter blatantly misquoted a presidential candidate and then mocked people who complained about it, it's her job to break down what happened and assigned blame. To everyone.
Several lessons can be learned here. For reporters: Anonymous quotes should be used sparingly; this one wasn't worth it. If you weren't there, be careful about judging the context. Treat readers well; we need them.
Lessons for sources: Stand up and be named. Be sure reporters understand the context if they weren't there. Lesson for Milbank's editors: Label his column commentary. Lesson for the Obama campaign: Let the press in when your candidate speaks to a large gathering of elected officials.
Jim Beam, stop making your whiskey so delicious, you square-bottled succubus.
That earlier thread on favorite products is a roaring success, here's the thread for your worst experiences with a product, food or service -- it simply didn't live up to the expectations as advertised in terms of performance, taste or competence.
The list may be just as long here. Obviously each person's experience varies with even the same product or service may differ.
Off of the top of my head...
*KaBoom Bowl Blaster Kit. What was I thinking? This is a foaming cleaner that's supposed to bubble up to lather the sides and rim of the bowl and make scrubbing minimal or unnecessary. So Kate and I put the blaster in, and instead of watching it foam up and fill the bowl, it fizzed up about an inch and then just stopped. The bubbles didn't even "scrub" for that matter.
* Neuton Cordless Hedge Trimmer. Boy, this was feeble. Kate and I are big fans of the Neuton Electric Cordless Mower, so we figured this addition to the lawn tools would be helpful. That didn't work out. It really couldn't cut shrubs unless they had really thin branches and the power drained so fast from the battery from the tool laboring so hard to cut that I went back to the manual hedge trimmer. Eventually I just got a corded one.
I'm sure you'll have more. Have at it.
Sometimes your ability to draw tons of comments comes from the fact that you've assembled a community of people that constitutes a giant oozing lesion on the basal ganglia of humanity.
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