I've got some more family/personal stuff to attend to this morning, but I expect to be back this afternoon. See you later.
(Requisite reminder we're down a mod when I'm not here, so play nice!)
Blog Note
Prop 8 Update
Shit:
A federal appeals court has extended a stay on same-sex marriages in California until it decides whether a ban on such unions is constitutional.The Ninth Circuit panel, comprised of Judges Edward Leavy, Michael Hawkins, and Sidney Thomas, has requested briefs to filed next month, with the appeal to be heard in December. It will likely be a different panel who judges the appeal than these three.
It is just the latest turn in a protracted legal battle over Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban.
The ruling, issued by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, came less than a week after a federal district judge, Vaughn R. Walker, lifted a stay he had imposed to allow proponents of the ban to argue why same-sex marriages should not proceed. On Aug. 4, Judge Walker ruled that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.
Even when lifting his stay on Thursday, Judge Walker allowed six days for the Ninth Circuit to review his ruling. That left many gay and lesbian couples and their supporters hopeful that same-sex marriages would resume Wednesday at 5 p.m., when Judge Walker’s stay would have expired.
That will not happen. Now, such weddings will not resume until, at least, the appeals court decides the case. And perhaps not until it is decided by the United States Supreme Court, where it seems to be headed.
Actual Headline
Police: Mel Gibson was 'a gentleman' after Malibu crash.
Don't worry: He's fine!
But you know you're a world-class a-hole when your being a decent person to emergency responders after you crash your Maserati is headline news.
"Police were shocked to discover Gibson in a vaguely reasonable mood, not screaming racist and misogynist epithets at everyone within earshot."
Hmmm.
"Kids love the pole,” studio owner Tammy Morris told the Ottawa Citizen. “If anything, it's hard to get them off it because they're such naturals." Morris says the focus of their pole dance instruction is fitness and technique, not stripping. Though the studio’s Exotic Dance and Lap Dance classes have strict age requirements, kids can sign up for the rest of Tantra’s classes as long as they have signed permission from a parent.
What are your totally-not-about-sexiness-all-about-fitness classes open to children (as young as five) called again? Oh, that's right: Bellylicious, Sexy Flexy, Pussycat Dawls, and Promiscuous Girls.
Yeah. No.
Here's What You Need To Do
Waste hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on gas, take a month out of your life, and write a message that can only be "read" on google earth urging people towards a mediocre writer. Puzzle people questioning this action by stating that reading Ayn Rand’s writing would give the world a "more optimistic" view of the future. Because Rand is totes known for her optimism.
Add this note at the bottom of your half-finished page:
"If you click on the above link(s) and buy a product(s) at Amazon.com, the owner of this site will earn a commission."
Huh. Teabaggers have way too much time on their hands.
OMGWTFLOL WHUT?!
Under the truly absurd headline "Keeping up with the girls," LA Times columnist Meghan Daum laments "the notion that girls are entering puberty at earlier ages than in the past," only to use it as a launching pad for one of the most hilarious "what about the menz?!" of all time.
Let's consider for a moment the effect on boys. It can't possibly be good. As if boys in elementary and middle school didn't already have enough ways to compare themselves unfavorably to girls — scholastic achievement, verbal skills and social prowess, not to mention handwriting and knowledge about horses — this trend toward precocious sexual development just may be the final nail in the coffin of male domination.Yes, I absolutely agree. While addressing girls' precocious sexual development—and the inextricably linked sexualization and objectification that comes with the developing female body in this culture, not to mention the potential medical issues that are associated with early onset puberty and the psychological trauma of bullying to which many girls who develop early are subjected by siblings and peers—let us take a moment to centralize boys' self-esteem.
Or so it may seem to an ordinary 8-year-old boy, who may view these girls not only in the way boys traditionally have — as bossy, slightly alien carriers of cooties — but as something even more terrifying: women.
...[A]s we go about the essential business of dealing with this situation for girls, and how to stop it, perhaps it's worth extending some sympathy toward boys. In a world in which it's already so easy to feel diminished by the achievements of girls, this widening gulf in physical maturity just might have the effect of kicking them while they're down.
Call me zany, but I don't think eight-year-old boys are owed the right to feel secure about maintaining "male domination," anyway.
Bonus points to Ms. Daum for OH NOES OBESITY CRISIS! fearmongering, too.
[H/T to Shaker trishka.]
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Today in FAIL
Back in January NPR earned the FAIL Award for All Around Bullshittery in Reporting (retroactive...since I just made it up) with their failtastic piece about relationships in which the woman in the breadwinner and the man is not that they called "Modern Marriages: The Rise Of The Sugar Mama".
Just a bit ago I caught a tweeted headline that made me go all "ORLY?":
Though not an intentional follow-up, it may as well be.
In short:
About 7 percent of men and 3 percent of women cheated in the study's six-year period.It's speculated in the article and study that perhaps men cheat more because it makes them feel more "manly" because they feel emasculated by being the lesser-earning partner.
[...]
In her research, Munsch [Christin, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Cornell University and author of study] looked at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth taken from 2002 to 2007. She focused on married and cohabitating 18- to 28-year-olds who were together for longer than a year.
However, I'd like to call your attention to this gem of reporting right here:
Freeloading men aren't the only troublemakers. [...]That's right: "freeloading". Men (and presumably women) who earn less (per headline)--which would mean they are, in fact, employed--or are not earning money at all (hello, stay-at-home parent) are freeloaders. FAIL x10000 there, NPR.
And so we meet again, Patriarchy. I saw your rather obvious hand in writing that January article that called women who earned more than their partners "Sugar Mamas" and intoned DOOOOOM!™ to those relationships. I see you here saying men who earn less than their partners are "freeloaders" and "losers" or of "lower moral character" (per comments on article) and intoning more DOOOOOM!™. Insulting women, insulting men, threatening relationships with prophesies of shite...STFU already, seriously. And NPR? WTF? Just stop.
Two Facts
1. Ross Douthat has crumpled-up newspapers, beard trimmings, and coffee grounds where his thinking parts should be.
2. The New York Times continues to publish the nonsensical scribblings of a man who has detritus occupying his brainpan.
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, proud distributors of Potter's Black and White Formal Wear for Gentleman Kittehs.
Recommended Reading:
Fannie: Prop 8: We Won, Now What?
[TW for misogyny] Jaded16: This Is Why I Gave Up On Newspapers — A Rant To Ad Nauseum
Mike: 'Scott Pilgrim' Versus Itself
Adrienne: Random Appropriation of the Day: Totem Cups
[TW for gender-normative fuckery] Cover Awards: Drink, Play, Fuck
Andy: World's Only Documented Albino Humpback Whale Reappears
Leave your links in comments...
Texting! With Liss and Deeky!
Deeky: Oy. Why am I in a meeting?
Liss: Because meetings are funtimes.
Deeky: No. They are not. Playing with my b-hole is funtimes. Meetings, not so much.
Liss: LOL!
Deeky: This just sucks. I need an escape chute.
Liss: Can you use your own butthole as a wormhole to another dimension?
Deeky: I have no idea. But I sure as fuck would be willing to try it. Do I need a crystal buttplug or something?
Liss: Try to wriggle into your own b-hole and zip yourself over to my place, Dr. Who-style.
Deeky: LOL! p.s. How hilarious is it that everyone is having an in-depth and serious conversation about SFA, and I'm talking with you about my butthole?
Liss: I don't even know what SFA is, and I can guarantee with absolute certainty I'd rather talk about your butthole than whatever it is.
Also Seen
While Deeky was busily spotting this beauty near him, I snapped the below shot of new welcoming banners hung in a neighboring town.
[The image is of an American flag, billowing behind the stern-looking bust of a bald eagle, with a note saying: "Welcome to [redacted]."]
"I don't know about you sniveling wussies, but we're PATRIOTS in this here town!"
Quote of the Day
"An aging population will eventually (over the course of the next 20 years) cause the cost of paying Social Security benefits to rise from its current 4.8 percent of G.D.P. to about 6 percent of G.D.P. To give you some perspective, that's a significantly smaller increase than the rise in defense spending since 2001, which Washington certainly didn't consider a crisis, or even a reason to rethink some of the Bush tax cuts."—Paul Krugman, with some much-needed, and sure to be ignored, perspective on the OH NOES! SOCIAL SECURITY CRISIS!!!!eleventy!!!1!!, a horrible little bit of alarmism that will almost certainly result in terrible policy, because even lots of Democrats are too craven to stand in defense of the US' most successful social program these days.
Constabulary Notes
From the Miami Herald:
A central Florida man has been charged with DUI for driving a lawn mower drunk.It's a good thing he didn't hit a Deere.
Marion County Sheriff's Office spotted Richard Paschen driving the red lawn mower with a cup of beer sitting in the cup holder Friday night. He told Deputy Gary Miller he'd had "a pretty good bit" to drink and had gotten lost on his way home. Paschen refused a breath test.
Paschen has had several DUIs and his driver's license has been suspended.
(Cross-posted.)
Criminally Irresponsible. Again.
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
A CNN investigation has found that a man accused of raping a colleague, both of whom were hired by BP to assist in the Gulf clean-up, was a convicted sex offender who had failed to register for the sex offender registry. Which would have shown up in a background check. If BP had done them.
Jackson County Sheriff Mike Byrd told CNN he was shocked when he met with the head of BP security for the area several weeks before the alleged rape took place. He said the BP representative told him that only drug screenings, not background checks, were being conducted on the cleanup workers.The woman who reported the rape has since been laid off. Her attorney, Adam Miller, says: "She gave up her housing where she was living to come here. Now she's been raped, she doesn't have a job, and everybody walked away."
"I said, 'You're kidding me.' He said, 'No.' He said, 'There's so many of them, we were told to do drug screens and that was it.' And I said, 'Well, that's not good at all.' "
Byrd said he told the BP official that "you're going to have every type of person coming in here looking for a job, and you're going to have the criminal element in here, and we're not going to know who we're dealing with if we don't do background checks on these people."
"It's sad because you got a victim now by a sex offender, and he's in our jail. Had we have known this, he would have been arrested before the crime could have been committed," said Byrd, who also said that if asked, his department would have done the background checks for free.
BP issued a statement blaming the subcontractor who failed to do the background check, despite the fact that BP did not make criminal background checks a requirement of the contract.
Hard to believe such a corporation could be so criminally negligent during the clean-up of a massive environmental disaster caused by their criminal negligence.
I wish the survivor at the center of this story peace and justice.
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
CNN: Still single? What's the matter with you?
As ever, it's difficult to choose what my favorite part of this masterpiece is, because there are so many priceless, sparkling gems from which to choose.
In the What's Not Said category, I'll vote for the glaring omission of even a cursory mention that many women are single by choice.
In the What's Said category, I'll vote for the requisite "all women suck (and married women are even worse)" passage:
Myriad messages from sundry sources proclaim that, yes, I'm doing it all wrong. ...I feel myself beginning to cave -- who am I kidding? I can't refute this arsenal of why-I'm-dateless data. I guess they're right. It is my fault I'm still single! ... All I have to do is identify and correct the character flaw (or two or three) that repels the good ones, and then I, too, will find Mr. Right, just like all my married friends!Wow.
Which is precisely where the logic breaks down.
Think about it. If single women possess imperfections and eccentricities which prevent us from snagging a man, then such personality shortcomings would appear much less frequently in the population of happily married women, right? Sure. Ask any husband -- he'll tell you. Wives show a full range of kinks and idiosyncrasies, just like the rest of us.
Furthermore, many of my happily married girlfriends exhibit extreme versions of the very traits that supposedly stymie my success. If my neurotic nature so utterly repels the fellas, how is it my Xanax-popping neighbor has a husband, 3 children, a garage full of anti-bacterial gel to pacify her OCD? If I'm so horribly controlling, how did my bossy, domineering sorority sister badger her man down the aisle before the age of 24?
