Childbirth is dangerous; abortion is not

By Frank Moraes 

There is a great deal of pretending in public life. For example, people pretend to care about children who float away in balloons. But they don't really. They like the drama. But they don't know the kid or the parents. The kid is probably a brat and the parents, as we now know, are assholes. This situation is so much worse in politics. The Onion made fun of this recently in an article, "Romney Drops By To See How Down-And-Out Family He Met On Campaign Trail Doing." As we all know, "humanizing" campaign stops are about as real as the Tooth Fairy. Think: Paul Ryan cleaning pots at a soup kitchen.

But the fakery goes much deeper than that. What I most hate are claims by politicians that they are helping rather than hurting. The common argument is that we need to gut welfare programs to protect the poor from the horrors of government dependence. You see, it is those meanie liberals who want to help the poor who are really hurting them. Of course, if conservatives really wanted to help the poor, they would provide universal healthcare for the poor; they would provide good (equalized) schools; they would provide free college. Think about it on the most basic level: if conservatives wanted to help the poor, they would at least provide good food for their children. But what did the conservatives in the House of Representatives just do? The moderates voted to cut nutritional assistance. The extremists voted against this because it didn't cut enough. So I think we can reasonably conclude that when it comes to the poor, conservatives are only using claims of helping as an excuse for taking money away from them.


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Joe Walsh is a misogynistic asshole

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You know Joe Walsh, right? No, not the guitarist. Not that one.

I'm talking about the right-wing Republican congressman from Illinois who in July said his challenger, Tammy Duckworth, a double amputee Iraq War vet, wasn't a "true hero," and who in August said the political winds were going to "pick this president up and pat him on the head and say, son, son, son, Mr. President, you were never ready to be president, now go home and work for somebody and find out how the real world works," disrespectful and racially inflammatory rhetoric, to be sure.

And those are just two examples.

Well, he's at it again, as ugly as ever, this time going after Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student whom Dear Leader Rush called a "slut," among other horrible things, simply because she argued that contraception (that she needs for health reasons) should be covered by insurance: 

At a campaign stop Saturday in Addison, IL, Walsh, who faces a tough reelection battle, went on a self-described rant about Fluke, attacking her support for contraception coverage and telling the law student to "get a job."

"So at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night their first prime time speaker was Sandra Fluke, whatever her name is," Walsh said. "Think about this, a 31-32 year old law student who has been a student for life, who gets up there in front of a national audience and tells the American people, 'I want America to pay for my contraceptives.' You're kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job Sandra Fluke."

"This a woman who feels entitled that we all should pay for her contraceptives," he said. "This is what we are teaching Americans? That was embarrassing. That was embarrassing."

Um, no. Fluke is a law student at a prestigious school. She's getting an education. She doesn't need to get a job right now. 

Furthermore, it's not like Fluke, along with so many others, wants the government to subsidize some sort of depraved lifestyle (if you think that sort of thing is depraved). Many women need contraception (the pill, specifically) for serious health reasons. More than that, though, women want to be in control of their own bodies, to be able to make choices about their health, not to have a bunch of misogynistic men tell them what they can and cannot do. And what's more, if you want to reduce the number of abortions that are performed in the U.S., which is what almost all of us who are pro-choice want, the best way to do that is to make contraception widely available and accessible, and specifically to those who lack the resources to purchase it.

What Fluke said wasn't meant to be solely about Sandra Fluke. It was meant to be about all women -- and that's exactly the case Fluke made at the Democratic convention a few days ago. Maybe Fluke can afford contraception, maybe she can't. But what about the millions of women who can't?

Not that Walsh cares. This is a guy who didn't pay child support -- to the tune of more than $100,000. He disrespects education and obviously disrespects women. Actually, that's an understatment. It would seem he's a vindictive misogynist who thinks women should just shut the fuck up and do what they're told, much like what he thinks America's black president should do.

We all know Republicans are waging a war on women. With Walsh, it's personal.

Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention

By Michael J.W. Stickings

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(For my comments about Tuesday, see here.)

There were some great moments today, along with a bit of overblown controversy over "God" and Jerusalem, and some great speeches. Let's focus briefly on the most prominent ones of the evening:

-- Sandra Fluke. She's hardly a political pro, but that made her speech all the more remarkable. She spoke with confidence and conviction as one of the most prominent targets of the Republican war on women. Ann Romney says women should "wake up." Really? It seems to me that women are already awake to the Taliban Republicans who seek to control them. Just look what happened to Fluke, whom Dear Leader Rush called a slut simply for wanting to be able to make her own choices. The convention is dominated by politicians, of course, but sometimes you need to hear from the non-politicians to get a sense of the human implications of the ugliness and brutality of Republican ideology. And Fluke did an impressive job, to say the least.

-- Elizabeth Warren may not be the most dynamic figure ever to grace the national stage, but she's a powerful voice for liberalism, particularly when it comes to financial regulation. Her speech doesn't stand out the way Julian Castro's did last night, but it was nonetheless effective at drawing the clear distinctions between the two parties and the two presidential candidates. And hopefully it will give her a boost back home in Massachusetts, where she's in a tough race with incumbent Scott Brown, who alternately presents himself as a moderate or a right-wing hardliner depending on the audience to which he's sucking up. In stark contast, Warren is a woman of genuine principle, and that came through in abundance tonight.

-- How awesome is Bill Clinton? Seriously, what an amazing speech. It was long, and it meandered at times, occasionally feeling like one of his own State of the Union addresses, occasionally going into a bit too much detail perhaps, but he was as commanding as ever -- folksy and authoritative, persuasive and inspiring, funny and enlightening. If Michelle Obama spoke about Barack the man, the personality and character, Bill Clinton spoke about Barack the leader, the policies and politics, and he was just as much a champion of the president. (He's just wrapping up as I write this.) He held the room and those present, and those watching on TV, in his hand, speaking with compassion and respect, understanding and conviction, drawing the contrasts just like other speakers have done but also compellingly making the case for coming together -- because, as he said, we're all in this together, this historical quest for a more perfect union. A formidable man. A brilliant speech. 

Wolf Blitzer says it just might have been the best speech he's ever heard Clinton give. That's high praise.

And there he is, President Obama coming out on stage to greet President Clinton and to give a wave to the crowd. You knew it was coming, but it was stirring nonetheless, a prelude to tomorrow, when he will accept the nomination. The energy in the arena is palpable. I can feel it here, a long way away. (If only I was there. Alas.)

Paul Begala on Clinton's speech: substantive and riveting. Yes, that's it. He knows his stuff, for sure, and can speak so intelligently on so much, but he's also so engaging, so compelling, and, yes, he does it without talking down to anyone, and quite the reverse by lifting everyone up along with him (which of course is so unlike the Republicans, including Romney and Ryan, who are arrogant and dismissive and utterly contemptuous of anyone other than themselves and those just like them).

For all the tension that may have been there during the '08 Democratic primaries, there is a close and it would seem completely genuine connection between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. That was on full display tonight, and it was just what was needed as we head into the final day of the convention, and then into the last two months of the campaign.

Another great day for the Democrats.

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The smallness and pettiness of Ann Romney

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I realize this isn't a race for First Lady, that it's not Ann Romney challenging Michelle Obama, but the fact is, the first lady and the would-be first lady are prominent surrogates for their husbands, not least at the conventions, and are very much a part of the race. We may not like it, how spouses have more and more become political actors, and have more and more been treated as such, and how they're put in the difficult position of being both submissively supportive and willfully assertive as individuals, but it's just the way it is, and that means, alas, that they're fair game, that they're deserving of the sort of praise and criticism usually reserved for the candidates themselves and for their partisan surrogates.

And the fact is, compared to Michelle Obama, who last night gave a magnificent speech, the best I've ever seen or heard by a first lady or would-be first lady, Ann Romney, while seemingly quite pleasant, has appeared small and petty in contrast, and utterly phony when she's tried to connect.

Of course, it's a tough job trying to humanize Mitt Romney, and to persuade people that you and your husband aren't just an out-of-touch rich douchebag couple living a life of extreme privilege -- perhaps an impossible one. But hasn't just been Ann's attempted humanizing of Mitt. She'd waded into politics as well, and when she has, she's proven to be as out-of-touch, as arrogant, and as condescending as her husband.

Like when she referred to "you people" when defending Mitt's decision to release any more of his tax returns.

Like when she told Latino voters to get over their "biases" and spoke to them as if they're just a bunch of selfish small-business owners.

And like when, today, she told women to "wake up" and trust in Mitt:

"Women, you need to wake up," she told the largely female audience at a "Women For Mitt" rally in Findlay, Ohio. "Women have to ask themselves who is going to... be there for you. I can promise you, I know that Mitt will be there for you, he will stand up for you, he will hear your voices, he knows how to fix an economy, he's a can do kind of guy, he's a turnaround guy."

She can try, but this isn't going to work. Mitt is leading a party that is aggressively waging war on women -- I write this while listening to Sandra Fluke speak at the Democratic convention; how very fitting -- a party that has embraced an extemist anti-choice platform, that desires to disempower and humiliate women, that seeks to obliterate a women's right to be in control of her own body, indeed, to be in control of anything, a party that wants to silence women and suffocate their concerns altogether.

Romney and the Republicans won't be there for women. They won't stand up for them. They won't listen to them in any meaningful way. They've already proven, time and time again, that they won't.

No, I'm not saying that Mitt Romney hates women. I'm not saying he doesn't care at all. He's much more sensitive to women's issues, I think, than most in his party. But as he's moved further and ever further to the right, as he's embraced the right-wing mainstream of the Republican Party, and as he's run an ugly campaign based on a far-right agenda, selecting the anti-choice extremist Paul Ryan as his running mate and otherwise joining the Republican war on women, even if he usually prefers to remain silent and let others do the dirty work, refusing to condemn what his party is doing and what it stands for and therefore appearing to support and enable it, he has shown what he is really all about, or at least what he is willing to be about in his shameless quest for power.

Elizabeth Warren has just taken the stage in Charlotte. Now there's a strong, powerful woman.

Women don't need to "wake up." How fucking condescending. It's abundantly clear which candidate embraces them and stands up for them and which candidate pays lip service to women's issues while embracing an anti-woman agenda.

Ann may love her husband and think he's a great guy, and maybe even that he cares about women, politically and otherwise, but it's Barack Obama who is the one fighting for them against the forces that would keep them down.

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Tribal chieftains: Another primal scream from the Republican war on women

By Mustang Bobby

Any time a man starts an article with "What do women want," you know you're in for good laugh -- as in hollow and sardonic. For example, check out this by Kevin D. Williamson at National Review:

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women's pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn't going to change that.

[...]

Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

Wow, I can smell the Viagra-enhanced testosterone from here.

It doesn't take Psychology 101 to figure out that this dude has real issues with feelings of gender inferiority when he cranks out a defensive -- and offensive -- primal scream like this. I don't know him from Adam, but given the topic of the last week and the larger topic of women having control of their uterus, you have to wonder why it is that conservatives are so threatened by other peoples' self-confidence and sense of autonomy.

Why does Mr. Williamson get all bonered up about Mitt Romney siring five sons who turn out male grandsons and diss President Obama for having daughters? (By the way, all of Mitt's boys are straight? C'mon. The simple law of averages predicts that at least one of them has Latter Days in his Netflix queue.) Simply put, what is so threatening about women to him and to a lot of men in the Republican Party?

He will have to answer that on his own, but I'm pretty sure it explains why the GOP isn't doing so well with women voters. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Republican theocrats trying to control women's bodies tell women to shut the fuck up

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Another scene from the Republican war on women:

A male Republican House leader in Michigan silenced two female Democratic state legislators on Thursday after the pair tried to advance a measure that would have reduced access to vasectomies.

While discussing a bill that would erode the availability of abortion, Reps. Barb Byrum and Lisa Brown introduced an amendment to apply the same regulations to vasectomies that GOP lawmakers wanted to add to abortion services. The debate grew heated, as Republicans sought to gravel down the women. Byrum was not permitted to speak in favor of the measure and Brown was repeatedly interrupted. "I'm flattered that you want to get in my vagina, but no means no," she said. The next day both were silenced.

*****

Ari Adler, spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger (R), said the women "will not be recognized to speak on the House floor today after being gaveled down for their comments and actions yesterday that failed to maintain the decorum of the House of Representatives."

"Decorum," huh?

Translation: Women should just shut the fuck up and do what we say. They're lucky we even tolerate their presence outside the kitchen and bedroom. Who says we don't have a God-given right to Viagra and vasectomies? For fuck's sake, no one's telling us what we can or can't do with our penile instruments of patriarchy! Certainly not a couple of stupid bitches.

It's helpful when Republicans expose themselves for what they really are, isn't it?

And good for Byrum and Brown for fighting back.