Pandagon

There were many, many odious things about this Stephen Marche piece in Esquire (linked Jezebel's riffing because don't want to reward Esquire for trolling), especially his sadface that rape rates are down, because that clearly means women aren't kept properly afraid of men as we should be. But one quote in this baffling rant that belongs on a half-literate MRA site instead of a real magazine really shows how intellectually empty the entire piece is:

Erik Loomis writes a post observing how British films still often concern themselves with the stories of working class people, but that everyone who falls outside of the realm of the wealthy and the white collar middle class has disappeared from American cinema.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus is deeply concerned about your grocery bill. Prices, you see, have gone up, and he is very, very sad about the whole thing. It's unfair that a typical American grocery bill has gone up nearly fifteen percent since Barack Obama began seizing all of our goats and fields to feed his junta.

Look, everyone. I understand that Jonah Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism lo those many years ago, and it forever changed the way we lie about fascism not being a right-wing philosophy. It is, however, still utterly hilarious to see conservatives get their dander up because someone dare links a nativist, racist, fundamentalist ideology to the right instead of directly to Barack Obama, our foremost white supremacist.

Jordan Michael Smith at Salon has an excellent article up making it clear that federal law enforcement has not, as you might fear after the white supremacist rampage, been ignoring the issue of domestic right wing terrorism. In fact, if you'll recall, conservatives threw a fit in 2009 with the DHS released a report detailing the threat of right wing terrorism in what seemed a naked attempt to get federal law enforcement to leave right wing extremists alone. I doubt that they did. While every suspected terrorist attack from Muslims, no matter how inept, is breathlessly covered for hours on cable news, the FBI has busted quite a number of would-be right wing terrorists through undercover work and other methods. But as Smith's article makes clear, they can do that in cases where there's a conspiracy. Lone nuts are harder to stop. That's why the anti-choice movement has relied so heavily on them in their terrorist actions; not only can everyone who helped the terrorist disavow knowledge of the crime, but since there's no conspiracy for the feds to track, it's that much harder to stop them. Whipping everyone into a frenzy of believing that violence is justifiable, keeping guns and other weapons easy to access, and providing "helpful" information about where abortion providers live has been enough for the anti-choice movement. I'm not surprised there's concerns about the same thing in white supremacist circles.

Like SEK, I'm a little confused about the hesitation that the media is showing observing what's super-obvious, which is that the shooter at the Sikh temple this weekend was a neo-Nazi white supremacist punk idiot. Maybe it's because they're afraid of---god forbid---offending the workaday idiots who just have one or two Confederate flags but draw the line at Nazi symbology. Maybe it's because they've been lucky enough not to have met these morons before. Either way, it's time to just call the shooter out for what he is, and get away from the misleading misnomer "Sikh shooter" that makes it sound like the victims are the source of the violence.

Of course, I can't think of anything that has less overlap than the world of sports and that of pop music. Some musicians work out a lot, and obviously, athletes listen to music. But there's not many songs about sports (except maybe surfing), and the ones that there are suck. (Even New Order was brought down trying to write a song about the World Cup.) So I imagine we won't be doing a sports theme for my own sanity at Panda Party, but you should come over and hang out anyway. Meanwhile, here's one of the few good songs that's kind of about sports I could think of.

Via ThinkProgress, 170 law professors have written a letter to the Obama Administration explaining that "religious freedom" is not a catch-all for whoever most vocally claims it, but instead is an actual thing that requires consideration and balancing and thought.

So apparently there were lines out the door of bigots at Chick-Fil-A yesterday for No Homo Day, or whatever they call it, so that bitter wingnuts can eat bland fast food in the general direction of the queers and their supporters. In a sense, this is progress. The bigots used to line up at spit on school children trying to enter newly integrated schools, but now they don't even have courage enough for that, so instead they passive-aggressively eat fried chicken at the liberals in hopes that pisses us off. Meanwhile, we're taking our fancy new Affordable Care Act benefits and throwing in some extra bouts of sexual intercourse in defiance of them. As the two camps divide further into Team Stuff Your Face With Crap and Team Fucking Is Fun, I have to imagine the gulf between high divorce rate red states and low divorce blue states will only increase.

Yesterday, I put up a blog post at Slate announcing the great news that the contraception mandate officially kicks in on August 1st, which is today. I personally got a notice in the mail letting me know my pills will now be available without a co-pay, so that's pretty rad. Naturally, the comments filled up with dudes who were looking for any argument, no matter how tenuous, to make the claim that women shouldn't get this benefit. Actually, that shouldn't be "naturally", because the only people who benefit as much as women from affordable birth control are men. It's really weird to have men screaming bloody murder at the horrors of having sex be less fraught from fears of unwanted pregnancy. Unless, of course, you're a dude who is more upset at all the women fucking someone other than you to tend to your own business, which is a possibility I'm not ruling out as the motivation.

We didn't forget the latest episode of The Orange Couch! We try and are usually good about getting it up the next day, but some times it doesn't quite work out. But I think you'll like the way we broke down this latest episode of Breaking Bad. We're approaching the episode like a whodunnit, except in this case, it's a who'll-do-it. We run down the list of possible suspects and make a case for them, one at a time.

Within seconds of learning about the mass shooting in Aurora, CO, conservatives sprung into action to make sure that everyone knew that the problem isn't mass murders shooting up crowded places so much as people who would prevent such crimes by passing sensible gun control legislation. At this point, they've dispensed with even spending a few moments, much less a few hours, joining the rest of us in seeing the murderer as the bad guy. The only bad guys they can really get into a frenzy about are the people who suggest limiting  the Jesus-Prince-of-Peace-given right to be able to kill dozens of people in a few minutes.