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Open Thread
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This week's open threads have been brought to you by celebrity album covers.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
OMFG has this been the longest week ever in the history of the universe? Maude on a merry-go-round, it felt like it would never end! I know that's partly a symptom of being SICK IN THE FACE, but, even taking that into consideration, this week has dragged like a draggy thing made of draggy parts with lots of little draggy bits all over it. All praise the end of this week!!!
Belly up to the bar,
and name your poison!
Number of the Day
Zero: The number of shits I give about what church any presidential candidate attends or does not attend.
Obviously, I am interested in their religious views, if and when those religious views intersect with their policy positions, but, beyond that, who cares.
It really doesn't tell us anything that Michele Bachmann is/was a Lutheran, even a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran.
I was raised a Lutheran, a Missouri Synod Lutheran, which is only slightly less conservative than the Wisconsin Synod, and, even though the god-belief didn't really stick, I still believe a lot of the stuff I learned there, like "Treat people the way you want to be treated," a message that doesn't seem to mean much to Rep. Bachmann.
I'm not even the only contributor here who was raised Lutheran and is still very culturally Lutheran in a lot of ways. See also: Eastsidekate and PortlyDyke.
So. Yeah.
What matters isn't what Lutheran church Bachmann does or doesn't attend, in determining her beliefs. People believe what they want to believe, irrespective of what their church doctrine is. Bachmann's behavior and policy positions inform us what her beliefs are.
Garbage.
News Corp-Owned Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton Steps Down
The News Corp phone-hacking scandal continues to unfold with Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, who has worked for Rupert Murdoch for nearly 50 years (!) and was chairman of News International when the allegations of phone-hacking were first made, resigning today.
Dow Jones & Co. is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which covers the story here with a bit more integrity than Murdoch's garbage news network.
Quote of the Day
"If they show me a serious plan, I'm ready to move, even if it requires some tough sacrifices on my part."—President Barack Obama, on the ongoing debt negotiations with Congressional Republicans.
It's good that he's classifying the Republican plans as unserious, which they are, but I really wish that he would stop pretending that choosing to spend his political capital for no good reason is a "sacrifice."
It's not.
And that sort of language is an insult to the millions of USians who have to make sacrifices like "giving up the blood pressure medication I pay for out of pocket to keep paying my mortgage" or "skipping dinner because I can't afford a meal for myself and my kids" or "working overtime again instead of spending any quality time with my spouse so I don't get shit-canned" or infinite variations thereof which have become the cacophonous death rattle of the American middle class.
Daily Dose of Cute
"I"m soooooooooo cute!"
"I"m soooooooooo cute!"
"I"m soooooooooo cute!"
"Do I look like a fucking clown to you?"
Obama Asks Court to Keep DADT a Little Longer
Ugh. Despite the Pentagon having suspended separation of LGB troops under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in compliance with a court order, the Obama administration is now asking the federal appeals court "to reconsider its order" because: "The Armed Forces are moving forward expeditiously to prepare for the repeal of [DADT] in a fashion that Congress and the President consider the most effective way possible, and consistent with the nation's military needs," but the court order "cuts that process short and overrides the judgments of Congress and the President on a complex and important question of military policy."
For fuck's sake.
The case has put the Obama administration in an unusual position of supporting a repeal, but at the same time filing court motions to prevent it from happening faster than planned. Military officials suggest the policy compliance changes eliminating "don't ask, don't tell" could be finished in a few weeks.More for fuck's sake.
There is conceivably a legitimate reason for the Obama administration trying to thread the needle to be simultaneously in support of the repeal of DADT while arguing to delay it: The military may be, as it does preparedness training, discovering that there's enough hostility toward LGB troops to warrant delaying the repeal for their protection until the hostility is neutralized, either through sensitivity training or discharges.
If that is the case, however, the Obama administration and the military need to say so. Because, if that is the reason for the delay, and they're refusing to articulate it out of some misguided attempt to protect the American people from evidence of the existence of homophobia in the military (lulz we are aware!), the silence is just serving to shield hatred and haters.
If that is the case, the Obama administration the the military really shouldn't concern itself with the delicate feelings of gay-hating dipfucks and tell some truth about the fact that it's violent bigotry which is holding up the process.
[H/T to Shaker cim.]
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround is brought to you by FRIDAY!
In The Guardian (H/T The Faculty Lounge), A. L. Kennedy finally gets around to the subject of procrastination in Off-putting behaviour:
I am aware that there are writers who successfully avoid ever having to write at all. Whatever creative energies they may possess have been completely absorbed by displacement activities. These activities often include dressing, sounding and standing (if not drinking – in fact, usually drinking) like an author and so these individuals can seem far more convincing as artists of the well-turned phrase than many people who actually have been published. When I was starting to write, I found this type very confusing. Indoors, I was bewildered by both writing and not writing. I didn't know how to say what I wanted to, or if I really wanted me to, or if anyone else wanted me to. Out in the world, here were these amazing excuses to never bother about such things again. They were a temptation. But I did realise that they were also a horrible, horrible dead end.
PalMD: [TW diet talk] The "hCG diet": a fraud literally without substance
Janet D. Stemwedel: A small happy parenting moment
Maud Newton: [TW discussion of mental illness] Joan Didion on psychiatric trends and diagnoses
Ed Yong: Hacking the genome with a MAGE and a CAGE
Ideas in Food: Watermelon Cocktail Sauce
echidne: Got Milk? On Cows and Bitches. (Hat tips on this topic go to JadeNSC in Wednesday's blogaround and to Scott Madin, who alerted me to a Google Plus discussion led by Jillian C. York about the ad campaign and to a subsequent post at the WaPo which quotes that discussion. N.B.: Jillian York is with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, not the "Electronic Freedom Foundation", as it says in the WaPo blog post.)
angry asian man: the bruce lee stamp: help bring it to reality
And, in Websites I Can't Stop Visiting: Open Yale Courses. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Share your links in comments.
Photo of the Day
[Trigger warning for rape culture.]
So there's this new Marilyn Monroe sculpture in Chicago, which was finally unveiled in all its dubious glory today after spending about a week with a bag over its head. (Seriously.)
I find this sculpture suuuuuuuuuper depressing not only for the reasons elucidated here by Mary Schmich:
Chicago, a city that has almost as many statues as it has potholes, is notoriously short on statues of women. Mile after magnificent mile, our city teems with large reproductions of presidents, philosophers, sports stars, warriors and saints, almost every one a man.—and by ChicagoNow blogger Abraham Ritchie:
Finally, we get a highly visible statue of a woman. Twenty-six-feet tall. Looming next to North Michigan Avenue at the Chicago River. As obvious as a skyscraper.
...Its only distinguishing feature is its size, which brings to mind some 1950s B movie about giant women.
What's most disturbing about the sculpture, though, is not that it's mediocre. It's the fact that Marilyn Monroe was real. She wasn't a sci-fi amazon. She was more than an image. She was a real woman who died at the age of 36 of a drug overdose, perhaps by suicide. Inviting people to leer at her giant underpants is just icky.
"This work is totally objectifying," said Ritchie when I called him Thursday, curious about his perspective as a young male art critic. "It's not even the subtle eroticism of a pinup of the 1950s or of the original photo. It's a stiff representation of sexual voyeurism."—but also because this gargantuan mockery of Marilyn Monroe, a real woman whose untimely death froze her as an icon of perpetual youth and sexuality in spite of, because of, her documented struggles with being objectified and exploited, is an invitation for "hilarious" displays of male sexual aggression. The link goes to a photo gallery in which men and boys are pictured standing between her legs giving the thumbs up, standing in a way to be photographed to appear to be grabbing her ass, turning their faces up and pretending to lick her, etc.
She is a a giant, silent avatar of non-consent, posed forever to be a sexual object for the pleasure of passers-by.
Sob.
[H/Ts to Shakers Daniel and @knitmeapony.]
Marcus Bachmann Defends His Clinics
[Trigger warning for homophobia, classism.]
This Star-Tribune article in which Rep. Michele Bachmann's husband defends the clinics they co-own, at which patients can receive "reparative therapy" to degayify them, is getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so, because Marcus Bachmann's explanation—"Is it a remedy form that I typically would use? ... It is at the client's discretion. ... We don't have an agenda or a philosophy of trying to change someone."—is manifest horseshit.
It's hardly worth comment that someone who would even consider "reparative therapy," whether as a standard procedure or only at the client's request, is a bigoted dipfuck without any decency. The noest of all the doys.
So I'm going to highlight this other piece of the article, in which Marcus Bachmann also defends the clinics having accepted federal funds:
In Michele Bachmann's campaign appearances, the Sixth District congresswoman has touted the family's counseling business in references to job creation and entrepreneurship.Setting aside the pathetic awfulness of that rejoinder which suggests David Brent has found a new gig as Marcus Bachmann's PR adviser, I'd like to note the dichotomy Bachmann sets up here: Their clinics can either take federal money, or turn low-income patients away. There is, of course, a third option, which is to treat low-income patients on a sliding scale of what they can afford, without any government subsidies.
Critics say her harsh words about government spending are hypocritical given the state and federal payments that go to Bachmann & Associates.
The Associated Press has reported that the clinics have accepted at least $30,000 in state payments and $137,000 in federal payments. Much of the money was for services to people in Medicaid-backed programs.
Bachmann said federal and state subsidies flow to his business because it doesn't discriminate against patients in subsidized health-care programs.
"It's low income. It's people who are on limited income," Bachmann said. "It is a lower-paying insurance. It's not a money maker. ... So, gee, we get criticized because we take it. And somehow they tie it all in, into my wife because she's the big proponent of less taxes and less programs and so forth.
"So, over and over the bell rings about how we take this federal money," he continued. "Oooh, how evil that is. And I say to you: 'No. It would be evil not to.'"
But that, naturally, requires cutting into profits.
Now, it's fair enough if the Bachmanns don't want to give away their services for free, or for lower cost. The clinics aren't being run as a charity. But it's mendacious in the extreme to pretend that option doesn't even exist so that you can imply it would be "evil" to not accept government funds because you'd have to turn patients away without it.
And once again, the conservative theory of governance is undermined by conservatives.
The conservative philosophy of limited government (i.e. no social safety net) asserts that charity, philanthropy, faith-based orgs, and business should take care of people in need rather than the government. There are a lot of problems with this idea (starting with the fact that conservatives frequently determine that certain people aren't deserving of charity), but the biggest problem is that the very people who espouse this idea in theory tend to be unwilling to support it in practice.
The Bachmanns' religious ideology prescribes compassion over profits, and their political ideology prescribes bootstraps or charity over accepting government subsidies, but, when it came right down to brass books, the Bachmanns were downright secular socialists in order to protect their profits.
"Deficits are a Grrrl’s Best Friend"
This is a very good primer on deficit spending vs. austerity and the "fictional symmetry between private sector (household and corporate) bookkeeping and the U.S. federal debt," care of professor of economics and of women and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine Susan F. Feiner.
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
[Trigger warning for rape culture.]
On Monday, I mentioned that Jamie Leigh Jones, the Halliburton/KBR employee who reported being gang-raped by her co-workers, only to then be held hostage by her employer, and who had to fight through an absurd stipulation in her employment contract that required sexual assault allegations be addressed by private arbitration in order to take the case to court, lost her civil rape case against Charles Boartz and KBR.
As you may recall, one of the good things to come out of this nightmare was the passage of Senator Al Franken's anti-rape amendment to last year's Defense Appropriation bill, which stipulates that the US Defense Department must withhold defense contracts from private contractors "if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court."
When Franken first introduced the amendment, Jones said: "It means the world to me. It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it."
Cue Mother Jones with an extraordinarily absurd article headlined: "How the KBR Rape Verdict Undermines Al Franken's Contracting Law."
According to author Stephanie Mencimer, Jones having lost her case threatens the law because Franken's amendment must be renewed annually as an amendment to the defense budget. And now that Jones' case was lost, there's less incentive to support the law.
Huh? So because one woman lost her case, legislators should/will decide that no woman should have the right to have her day in court? Does not compute.
Of course, I don't think that logic is the point here. The concern trolling about the safety of Franken's law seems like a contrived justification for Mencimer's real objective, which is to deliver some thinly veiled contempt for Jones ostensibly on behalf of survivors: "[I]t's hard to see how bringing—and then losing—a dubious rape case in civil court is a win for victims of sexual assault. If anything, Jones' case, in which she asked the jury to award her $145 million, will make it even more difficult for sexual assault victims to have their claims taken seriously."
So Jones is just a gold-digging opportunist with a "dubious" rape case whose unmitigated temerity to lose her civil rape case has now made it "even more difficult" for survivors to be believed.
And this is about concern for Franken's law. Sure.
You know, I don't believe that a complainant losing a case in a culture so steeped in rape culture narratives that winning is nigh impossible makes things more difficult for survivors.
I do, however, believe that reporters sneering at survivors who lost and making thinly veiled accusations that they're lying, money-hungry whores is precisely the sort of thing that renders justice elusive for most survivors of sexual violence.
A Slight Consistency
[Trigger warning for slavery and other dehumanization]
I recently finished reading Barry Estabrook's excellent book, Tomatoland. I won't spend much time promoting it, because holy cow the folks at Andrews McMeel have [TW] gotten the word out.
I've also been thinking a lot about abortion rights, because that's been in the news once or twice lately. That's unfortunate, because holy cow given the war that powerful people are waging against reproductive health, it should be in the news a helluva lot more frequently.
That was pretty much my vacation: tomatoes and abortion.
Stay with me here.
Estabrook's book explores Florida's industrial tomato industry. Early on, he explores the conditions under which many tomato workers labor. There's a chapter on poisons, and a chapter on slavery. I'm not sure I recommend taking Tomatoland to the beach.
As an occasional entomologist, the discussion of pesticides caught my eye. It turns out that the EPA allows growers to use methyl bromide on tomato crops (they're one of four crops the EPA has carved out exemptions for). Methyl bromide is the stuff of legend. If you're ever at a party with an entomologist (I recommend this), buy hir a drink and start talking about methyl bromide. That shit kills everything. Needless to say, bathing in the stuff can be "problematic" (you can thank Wikipedia for that phrasing).
In the case of three women Estabrook profiles who gave birth over a two month period in 2004 and 2005, "problematic" included giving birth to children with tetra-amelia syndrome, Pierre Robin syndrome, and in another case, a lethal combination of anatomical conditions. Medical professionals testified that this cluster of cases was very likely a result of exposure to multiple dangerous pesticides, including methyl bromide.
An international treaty largely forbids the production and use of methyl bromide. It is bad for the ozone layer.
Here's what prompted this post:
It appears that Florida growers are showing more interest in an alternative to methyl bromide that many scientists view as one of the most toxic compounds employed in chemical manufacturing-- so carcinogenic it has been used to induce cancers in laboratory cell cultures. Called methyl iodide, or iodomethane, the fumigant was approved in 2007 by the George W. Bush-era U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, despite a letter of warning signed by fifty-four of the world's most prominent chemists and physicians, including five Nobel Prize-winning researchers. In their letter, the scientists noted that agents like methyl iodide are "extremely well-known cancer hazards" and that "their high-volatility and water solubility" would "guarantee substantial releases to air, surface waters, and ground water." Although methyl iodide does not punch gaping holes in the ozone layer, the scientists reminded the agency that its own research had shown methyl iodide to cause "thyroid toxicity, permanent neurological damage, and fetal losses in experimental animals." [Emphasis mine]
While the administration of George W. Bush was working to restrict (or eliminate) access to abortions for women who wanted them, it had no problem approving the use of a chemical that research suggests could cause abortions (among other things) in women who didn't.
I don't buy for a second the absurd proposition that anti-abortion activists are "pro-life." Movements to restrict women's control over their bodies are precisely that.
The right to exert control over one's own body is a key, indeed typically the key principle behind reproductive rights activism. I don't need to tell you that we've got our hands full fighting for our rights on this front. However, reproductive rights don't exist within a vacuum. The fight for bodily autonomy includes the fight for labor justice, for economic justice, for environmental justice, and in short, for justice.
Those of us who fight for reproductive rights are not a "special interest" group, as we'll undoubtedly be repeated reminded between now and next November. We are, and must be, focused on human rights, an umbrella under which every other supposedly isolated issue resides.
Crossposted.
Rebekah Brooks Resigns
The Guardian: "Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive, has resigned after 11 days of mounting political pressure over the phone-hacking scandal. Brooks announced her decision to News International staff in Wapping just before 10am on Friday, saying her resignation had been accepted by Rupert and James Murdoch. She said she no longer wanted to be a 'focal point of the debate' surrounding the company's future and reputation."
The UK and US Attorneys General held a joint press conference this morning in Australia, where they are attending a conference on cyber crime, to confirm that both countries are continuing investigations into News Corp's activities.
Which we knew, but it's still sort of amazing to watch two different governments say they're coming for Rupert Murdoch.
Question of the Day
Who is your favorite funny man?
I'm not necessarily suggesting that the funny man in question has to be famously funny, or even famous at all. You can interpret the question however you like, and if that means your answer is your best friend, or an author, or an actor, those are just as legitimate answers as a comedian.
[Related: Who is your favorite funny woman?]
