Pandagon

Time Magazine surveys women's rights and declares them a failure

I'm quite possibly the last person who cares to in the blogosphere to write about this appalling Time magazine celebration of purity balls, but I have to say that I'm not as surprised as I should be. Time has decided to embrace a retrograde patriarchal agenda, and not of the soft patriarchal sense of assuming that women just name themselves after their husbands and hand-wringing articles about the horror of women who draw their own income, as bad as those things are. No, we're talking the patriarchy of the anti-choice movement, the adulteress-stoning kind. The kind that treats the literal male ownership of women's bodies as a cute, sentimental way to organize society. That's far to the right of even mainstream sexist society. That's to the right of guys who like to go to Hooters, and assholes who argue that women get paid less because they don't work hard enough, what with the babies and all. This is the third example in very recent memory of Time shilling for the idea that women should be treated like male property and severely punished if they stray from patriarchal sexual norms, which is enough to start getting past "sloppy journalism" into the "open agenda" territory.

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Nevada GOP throws in the convention towel

How sad is the state of the GOP in Nevada that its party cancels its own convention? So sad...NOT.

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Black Blogging: Beyond Obama

Black Blogging Beyond Obama was a provocative session that I attended on Saturday at Netroots Nation. Brandon Q. White of The Super Spade was the moderator, with panelists Gina McCauley (of What About Our Daughters? and the organizer of this upcoming weekend's Blogging While Brown conference), Leutisha Stills (Jack & Jill Politics, and the Black Agenda Report), and Andre Banks from Color of Change. There was a serious throw down on the impotence of establishment black orgs (e.g., the NAACP's cluelessness and antipathy toward the blogosphere), and the meltdown of Jesse Jackson, who is clear that he's not ready to turn over the reins of the civil rights leadership to the next generation.

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Things You Forgot To Mention On The Honeymoon

Not that I'm saying that we should judge John McCain's ability to govern based on his relationship with his wife, but if we were, they sure are a couple of creepy liars.

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McCain: Ready To Concede

imageIt's got to be hard to be John McCain. Your opponent raises as much in one month as you do in three. You've managed to take the single constant partisan issue advantage you have, national security, and squander it away because of an ill-conceived war. You appear to know less about your platform than Michelle Malkin does about controlling her facial expressions. You can look forward to depending on the RNC, a well-funded but largely clueless organization with several dozen races to lose, for a significant portion of your crunch-time support.

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Bumper crop of idiocy in SC

After the anti-gay debacle of the "South Carolina is so gay" ad, you'd think the bumf*ck politicians would want to stay beneath the radar, but no...

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Everything's abortion

Kudos to Hillary Clinton for putting her name to this article and distributing it on the internet. As I've said a million times before, the hardest part about talking to people about the anti-choice agenda is convincing them that the Fetus People are also out to get contraception banned---or at least severely limited---as well. Which is pretty stellar evidence that contrary to the mainstream media portrayal of the reproductive rights debate, this is not about whether or not the fetus is a person who deserves protection, but about sex and making sure that people, especially women, suffer for having a sexuality and making wingnuts uncomfortable. Obviously, anti-choicers prefer to wax poetic about the fetus because that makes them seem, while nutty, at least a little sympathetic, whereas the reality of their nature makes them seem like sadists and killjoys. It's no wonder they'd like to define everything they don't like as "abortion" to get more people to be wary of it. I suspect, if she could get away with it, Leslee Unruh would define speaking the word "condom" out loud as a form of abortion.

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Michael Savage: no apologies for autism remarks

It's hard to imagine a lower life form than Michael Savage.

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Family Reseach Council honored with 'Cameronesque' Award

Tony Perkins and his crew at the professional "Christian" homo-hate machine, the Family Research Council, has earned the prestigious Box Turtle Bulletin Cameronesque Award for its production of the mind-boggling brochure, “The Slippery Slope of Same-Sex ‘Marriage’.”. That's the organization's entry into the battle to pass Prop 8 in California.

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Put me to shame

I left the Defending the American Dream Summit at about 11:35. According to the Rude Pundit, he, David Neiwert, and Mike Stark arrived at 11:45.

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Travesty!

Sorry to come from an on-and-off Netroots Nation plus moving-inspired break to write about vaccinations again, but seriously, there is something screwy going on with the anti-vaccination crankery out there. At Netroots Nation, the most expensive booth---easily the most expensive booth---in the exhibit hall was an anti-vaccination booth. It was tall, and they had a set of volunteers in matching uniforms, and the booth had a number of widescreen HD TVs blasting anti-vaccination crankery about how mercury in vaccinations causes autism. It doesn't. I'm sure other baseless assertions were being tossed around, because the first sign of crankery is that when the argument is proven completely false, hang onto your conclusions (in this case, vaccines cause autism) and change the arguments. Lawrence Lessig called out the anti-vaccination cranks during his speech, and castigated them for exploiting the vulnerability of the parents of autistic children, so I'm glad they were confronted in some way. I thought about it, but couldn't for the life of me think of what such a confrontation would look like, or what results it would produce.

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