Month: February 2012

Yapping Ladies and young male dolts

by digby

One reason you know that sexist stereotypes are still alive and well (and barely changed since the days of Ralph and Alice Cramden) is the casual way in which this adorable little fella just drops one into the conversation:

This is a young guy, not some old codger who hasn’t kept up with the times. It’s still so common that he doesn’t even skip a beat — and neither does the woman who’s sitting there with him.

I have to say that this is one of the more surprising revelations to me in the past few years. I really thought that we’d at least gotten to the point at which younger men had an instinctive inkling that this sort of thing was not quite right. But I’ve been schooled — and realized that it’s not even a matter of ideology or traditional values. It pops out even among liberals who are very enlightened in other ways — especially when they’re on the defensive about something.

I’m told that we shouldn’t “hector” or “scold” men on this because it just makes them mad and then they’ll just reject feminism completely. Better to try to get them to understand that we’re all in this together and that our fight is their fight. You know, a gentle persuasion, you get more flies with honey kinda deal. But I don’t think that’s working out. At some point, you just get tired of putting up with this shit.

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Pole dancing

by digby

Why liberals are frustrated:

Our findings here echo those discussed in a prior post that Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats to the left in the contemporary period. Indeed, as seen below, President Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since the end of World War II, while President George W. Bush was the most conservative president in the post-war era.

Honest rape

by digby

Yeah, I want this guy running the world. Because he’s so principled:

I don’t even begin to understand the moral position he’s taking. But I think his definition of “honest rape” probably tracks with this:

LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Via Raw Story

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Newt Gingrich’s Epic Flameout

by David Atkins

If you missed Gingrich’s bizarre, rambling press conference-in-lieu-of-concession-speech last night, here’s your chance at redemption.

Just a few comments here.

1) Romney has really gotten under Gingrich’s skin. It’s almost endearing to hear Gingrich fly off the cuff about the awfulness of the American political system and how Romney is basically able to buy his way to victory while telling lies with a straight face even as the Press largely fails to call him on it.

Sorry, Newt. You and your Republican pals made this bed for your corporate fat cat contributors. Now Romney, the pinnacle masterwork of corporatist machine politics, is using the world Reagan and Newt created to buy himself a nomination with lots of money, coiffed sideburns, lots of cash, packaged lies, lots of money, a complacent stenographic media, lots of corporate moolah, and a gleaming smile. Oh, and did I mention the corporate cash? Well, now Newt and Reagan’s moaning ghost get to lie in that resplendently furnished bed.

2) Gingrich keeps hammering on about the Obama Administration’s “anti-religious bigotry” for daring to insist that Catholic hospitals receiving federal tax money have to provide contraceptive services. Gingrich views this as discriminatory against conscience of faith.

But one wonders how Gingrich and his followers would feel about Muslim hospitals getting tax money while adhering solely to the practices of Sharia law. One thinks they wouldn’t appreciate it too much. These people don’t really have ethical principles outside of “my tribe good, your tribe bad.” They know that that doesn’t play well with normal voters, so they goose it up in pretty language and thinly veiled situational ethics. But it really comes down to the idea that straight white Christians should be able to do whatever they want, and everyone else can put up with it or get out of “their” country. It’s that ugly. And no, there’s no reasoning with them, nor any decent rationale for giving their opinion even the scantest respect.

3) It’s going to be very difficult for Gingrich to walk this feud with Romney back. Some have compared this press conference to Howard Dean’s famous scream. But the difference is that when Dean screamed, he didn’t give the Republicans a boatload of ammunition to use against John Kerry. Newt Gingrich is so incensed at Romney’s transparent phoniness that he isn’t mincing words about the GOP frontrunner. Usually politicians will couch and soften their negative statements about one another in a primary, because they know that when push comes to shove, one of them will have to support the other when the primary is over. But it’s hard to see Newt endorsing and campaigning for Romney after this. It’s pretty late in the game to be saying that there’s no difference and “no choice” between one’s primary opponent and the opposition candidate. Those are strong words.

If Newt keeps throwing these bombs for the next several months, makes a play to win Texas and tries to cause a brokered convention, and if Ron Paul goes for a 3rd party run, then November 2012 could turn into a landslide of dramatic proportions.

Unfortunately, that will only lead to five more years of crazy as the red-blooded conservatives insist that their disastrous fortune can be blamed on an inadequately aggressive, intransigent conservative opposition to President Obama.

Should be good times.

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Mitt Romney is an egomaniac

Saturday fun with Bach and Beethoven

David Atkins

Classical music fans who haven’t seen this yet should get a kick out of it:

This one is the famous Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th (played a little fast for my taste, but it’s still gorgeous.) There are many like it, allowing the viewer to follow along all the complexities happening above and below the melody line. Watching these videos is a great way to introduce a loved one to the beautiful complexities of classical music in an accessible way, even if they can’t read a note of actual music.

Even experienced fans of these works will likely notice nuances they never paid attention to before while watching the notes play out in real time.

Here’s one of my personal and less trite favorites, Bach’s extroardinary Passacaglia in C Minor (listen and watch for the endlessly repeatedly hypnotic base line characteristic of the passacaglia form):

Or just enjoy perhaps the most overused of all classical themes, the 1st movement of Beehoven’s 5th. It’s played too fast again here, but who’s complaining when you can watch it in all its textual richness?:

Enjoy your Saturday, everyone.

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It’s always there:

Read the whole interesting interview.

Probably what’s most interesting about this phenomenon is the extent to which it’s become central to the Republican party. This is always with us — and there’s a deep strain in Southern conservative politics in particular that responds to certain aspects of it. But it’s not all that common for it to be so close to power.

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“We are already in new great depression”

It’s a short interview, well worth watching.

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The Conscience of an Institution

by digby

So last night Mark Shields and David Brooks clucked and sobbed and rended their garments over the Obama administration’s decision to require most Catholic institutions to offer health care coverage that includes birth control. According to them, this is going to cost the Democrats the election as Catholics around the country will now vote for the Republicans — even though 98% of Catholic women have used birth control and 70% use the highly effective methods of sterilization, the pill and the IUD. Evidently, it’s some sort of hypocritical pride thing (or it’s just something made up in the heads of some male elites who are invested in the idea of the “Catholic vote” being contingent on birth control for some reason.)

Here’s Mark Shields, very confused and depressed about the whole thing:

MARK SHIELDS: I honestly don’t know. I think there was a tone-deafness. I think maybe the Mitt Romney thing is contagious.

I mean, there just really was. This was after the president in private conversations and in public speeches at the commencement address at Notre Dame had said, we’re going to work out a compromise. We will work this out. We will have a solution that respects the conscience.

The conscience clause is deep in our tradition. It’s Quakers at time of war. It’s Seventh-day Adventist not being forced to work on the Sabbath. It’s Orthodox Jews being given kosher food. You know, it just really, to me — I don’t know. You can make a political calculation, but I honestly don’t know why they did it.

First, they did it so that women will have their birth control covered even though they happen to work as a file clerk in a Catholic University or an x-ray technician at a Catholic Hospital. I can understand why they didn’t think about that. After all, in the entire discussion “women” didn’t even come up. Why should they? This isn’t about them. It’s about the important men who make decisions for them.

Secondly, Mark Shields and everyone else who is shrieking about conscience clauses fail to see a very important distinction. A Quaker individual is not required to join in combat. A Seventh Day Adventist individual is not forced to work on the sabbath. An Orthodox Jewish individual is provided kosher food. A Catholic individual is allowed to exercise her conscience and not use birth control. These are what is known in common parlance as “people” as opposed to institutions.

After all, as Katha Pollit points out in this piece:

Are [individual] Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other pacifists exempt from taxes that pay for war and weapons? Can Scientologists, who abhor psychiatry, deduct the costs of the National Institute of Mental Health? As an atheist, a feminist, a progressive, I ante up for so much stuff that violates my conscience, the government should probably pay me damages. Why should the bishops be exempt from the costs of living in a pluralistic society?

Indeed. After all, the religious institutions have one very special privilege: they pay no taxes, unlike their followers, who are required to pay for many things they disagree with. Apparently, that isn’t enough, however. The Church wants to pay no taxes and be exempt from the costs of living in a pluralistic society. Sweet deal.

People are getting very confused on this issue. We ostensibly believe in rights and liberties in America and have a set of rules in our constitution guaranteeing them. But lately, we’ve decided that these phony constructs of institutional rights and liberties — “corporate personhood”,”conscience of the church” — actually supercede individual rights and liberties. I don’t mean to evoke the sacred founders here, but I’m afraid they would say that idea is, in their words, total bullshit. They knew very well that the government wasn’t the only possible oppressor. 500 years of bloody European religious history had taught them that.

If the Catholic bishops don’t want people to use birth control it needs to convince people not to use birth control. That’s how we exercise “conscience” in a free society. No Catholic employees anywhere, including a Catholic bishop, will be forced to use birth control, I guarantee it. Their individual consciences will be respected.

Beyond that, this is a matter between the Church and the congregant to work out for themselves. There is no reason for the government to discriminate against citizens who happen to work for Catholic institutions simply because the hierarchy of that institution doesn’t want them to behave a certain way in their private lives. We don’t do that here. At least, we didn’t used to.

Update: And then there’s this little bit of tittilating gossip, delivered in a hushed, conspiratorial tone:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you have a sense of why?

DAVID BROOKS: No, and it is a great mystery.

I hear conspiracy theories. Who switched the president’s mind? Who would have the power to change his mind after he had made these vows? I don’t know. I really think they should come out and address it a little more, because not getting some of the front -page covers that I think it deserves. But it is out there.

Well who would that be, do you suppose? Would it be the shrieking harpy Michelle Obama who forced poor old henpecked Barack to make a bad decision against his will? Yes, I’m afraid so. And this isn’t just coming from the depths of the wingnut fever swamps. That’s on the PBS News Hour.

I’m telling you, you let these liberal bitches near a president and the next thing you know they’re running the damn country.