Marc and I have been traveling, and so the next episode of The Orange Couch will be out tomorrow morning.  In the meantime, enjoy the song that Don just couldn't really understand:

Yep, traveling again, this time for a wedding. It's that time of year!

But that doesn't mean you can't Panda Party with me for a couple of hours, and all day if you like!

Joshua Holland has an important piece at Salon (originally Alternet) about the way that paranoid conspiracy theories constantly pumped out by right wing media rule the right wing imagination, and how important it is to understand this about conservatives. He describes what the country looks like for a loyal consumer of right wing media:

The White House has been usurped by a Kenyan socialist named Barry Soetero, who hatched an elaborate plot to pass himself off as a citizen of the United States – a plot the media refuse to even investigate. This president doesn’t just claim the right to assassinate suspected terrorists who are beyond the reach of law enforcement – he may be planning on rounding up his ideological opponents and putting them into concentration camps if he is reelected. He may have murdered a blogger who was critical of his administration, but authorities refuse to investigate. At the very least, he is plotting on disarming the American public after the election, in accordance with a secret deal cut with the UN and possibly with the assistance of foreign troops......

For the true believers, Latin American immigration isn’t a phenomenon to be managed, but a grave existential threat. A plot to “take back” large swaths of the Southwest is a theory that has aired not only on obscure right-wing blogs, but on Fox and CNN. On CNN, Lou Dobbs claimed immigrants were spreading leprosy; Rick Perry, Rep. Louie Gohmert and other “mainstream” voices on the right (that is, people with platforms) agree that Hezbollah and Hamas “are using Mexico as a way to penetrate into the southern part of the United States,” possibly with the aid of “terror babies” carried in pregnant women’s wombs.

I'll add that they also believe that feminists and Planned Parenthood are part of an elaborate conspiracy to abort every pregnancy in the country, for no other reason than we hate fetuses. From their rhetoric, it's clear they believe the abortion rate is many times higher than it is, and that the fact that women have 1 or 2 children instead of 9 or 10 on average is strictly because of secret abortions. For instance, Jon Kyle's famous "90%" number when talking about Planned Parenthood's services puts their abortion rate at about 30 times what it is. Since there are about 1.2 milllion abortions a year, going off that kind of rough estimating done on the right, you're left with realizing they believe there's something like 15 to 30 million abortions a year. I've never seen that number bandied about, but right wing rhetoric points to this belief that Kyle's belief that Planned Parenthood is doing 30 times the abortions there are, and that abortion is the main, and possibly only reason, for the current American birth rate.  A lot of conservatives have taunted me personally with assumptions that I'm constantly getting abortions with my slutty slut self, so you can see why people who also believe that Obama is a covert agent might think there's some secret underground conspiracy of feminists to emasculate men by secretly stealing away the womb fruit that proves their American seed works. The 4 million proof-their-fathers-had-sex-things we call babies born a year are seen as the rare escapees from the pro-choice conspiracy to wipe out all proof of American virility. 

When you think about stuff like this, you have to wonder. Do they really believe this shit? 

I'm not so sure. I've said it before, but I think it's worth repeating: I think they only "believe" it. Which is to say, there are two kinds of ways people believe something. They have things they believe because they're factually accurate: That it's raining outside, that items dropped will fall, that Barack Obama is President. Then there's stuff that isn't real that people believe: that there's a God in heaven and an afterlife, that miracles happen, ghosts exist. These are things you don't really believe in the same way you believe in truths. It's more that these beliefs are convenient to apply a belief-like approach to, because the stories make you feel good or, more commonly, because joining in the belief connects you to your community. Everyone comes together under a common delusion: That might be the best way to describe religion. The confusion between these two kinds of beliefs is such that some skeptics, including myself, are beginning to prefer the terms "know" and "accept" to describe accuracy-based beliefs, and leave "belief" to describe mythical beliefs. 

In my experience, the healthiest people (besides those who largely avoid the habit of "belief") are those who have a strict divide between accuracy-beliefs and myth-beliefs. God stays in church where he belongs, etc. But some people struggle a lot and confuse the two kinds of believing. They're overly literal in their belief in the supernatural, for one thing. But I think it clearly goes the other way, too, which is that they start to structure their understanding of the reality-based world on the same kinds of myth-making that denotes religion. So, for instance, you have this right wing worship of Sperm Magic and this conflation of male dominance with virility, a magical belief that causes them to make the fetus a symbol of masculine power and see abortion as a ritualistic rejection of it. That, in turn, spurs a belief that feminists are literally trying to abort as many pregnancies as possible, because we supposedly hate men, the only reason they allow for why we might not want men to rule us. This, in turn, creates elaborate conspiracy theories about how Planned Parenthood is trying to subvert the nation and how they secretly are doing 30 times as many abortions as they are, etc. They struggle to understand where accuracy-belief and myth-belief differ.

Look, for instance, at the right wing attempts to make a thing out of President Obama having dated in his 20s before he met Michelle. The way that the story is playing out, you'd think it was scandalous that a man in his 20s has girlfriends and likely has, you know, sex. They aren't getting this belief from reality. In reality, most people sex, and what's unusual is if you didn't have a few sexual relationships that fizzled out before you had one that stuck. But right wingers cling to this myth that abstinence until marriage is the right and proper thing to do, and that myth-belief gets all tangled up with their ability to understand reality. No wonder they think that abstinence-until-marriage is a reasonable thing to teach in schools, even though nearly everyone pushing that had sex themselves before marriage. The observable reality, that most people (including themselves) have sex, is trumped and confused by the myth-reality, where abstinence is the ideal and vanilla sex sounds way more filthy and perverse than it really is. It's one reason they worked themselves into a frenzy "believing" that Sandra Fluke spends her days and nights at Georgetown pulling trains, instead of being a rather ordinary law student with a fiance. 

So no, I don't think they believe-believe this stuff. I think they're just confused about the difference between fake belief and real belief, though I think they're highly motivated to be confused about it. After all, that confusion helps generate right wing identity. They may even mistakenly believe it's politically beneficial, though the available evidence shows that it instead causes everyone else to think they're nut jobs. 

Yesterday, I talked about how the problem of "choice" feminism---trying to assert that because a woman decided between available options, that means that no one should engage in critical analysis of that process---is giving cover to Republicans denying that the wage gap is a problem. Of course, that in no way means the wage gap is attributable mainly to women making choices that are considered off-limits for analysis, such as the entirely coincidental fact that women are something like ten times as likely to be a full-time homemaker than men. Direct discrimination is a real problem, as this incredibly important segment of Maddow's show demonstrates.

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Because of the silencing power of the word "choice", the discourse is limited to discussions of direct discrimination, which is employers paying women less simply because they can get away with it. As Heidi Hartmann asserts, this is 20-50% of the wage gap, and possibly more. Then there's systemic discrimination in job opportunities, with women being channeled into developing job skills that put them in jobs that pay less money. That's a bit harder to measure, but addressing it with policy is easy to imagine.

But like Hartmann said, this kind of slicing and dicing assumes that some kinds of sexist discrimination don't count, because CHOICES. She notes that Canada's bean counters don't see it that way, and include interpersonal sexism as part of the discriminatory patterns that cause women to earn less, both pressure to be less competitive because it's icky for ladies and home pressure to take on more than their fair share of the domestic work. Women are subtly told in many different ways that our economic independence and our ambitions simply aren't as valuable as that of men's. It's in everything: The way that women are expected to name themselves after their spouses, symbolically embracing their secondary role in marriage. The way female sexuality is policed in a way male sexuality isn't, sending the signal that women's very bodies are the property of eventual spouses, which has all sorts of implications for who is more important in the marriage. It's in the fact that child care is considered a "women's" issue, but in terms of policy but also at home, since many couples only compare the costs of child care to her salary, instead of both of them. Needless to say, the way single mothers are treated also feeds into this.

It's a self-perpetuating thing. Because women know they make less and are valued less for their paid labor, and because women are under a deluge of wedding propaganda that suggests our real value in this world is determined by someone wanting to marry us, of course we're going to make all-holy CHOICES that reflect our circumstances but don't get us any closer to equality. Which would be all well and good, I suppose, except women pay the price every day for our lack of equality. We're more likely to live in poverty and more likely to struggle to get by. We're more dependent on men, which is something that's often used against us in interpersonal relationships. If men and women were truly valued equally in this society, women would be better off, emotionally and materially. So I'm not just trying to be a meanie-bear making people uncomfortable with these observations. There's real stakes here. 

In honor of May Day, I'll be fortunate enough to be attending the Hillman Awards, an annual group of awards from the Hillman Foundation for excellence in progressive journalism. As part of the blogger committee, I will be tweeting from the awards tonight starting at 6PM, so follow along on Twitter. You can also follow the Hillman Foundation's feed here. 

Progressive journalism is a critical part of advancing liberalism, human dignity, and equality, so I ask that you spend this May Day getting to know the work of this year's winners:

Hillman Prize in Book Journalism
Frank Bardacke
Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, Verso Books

Hillman Prize in Opinion & Analysis Journalism
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

Hillman Prize in Newspaper Journalism
Heather Vogell, Alan Judd, John Perry
"The Atlanta Schools Cheating Scandal," The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Honorable Mention: Danny Hakim and Russell Buettner, "Abused and Used: At State
Run Homes Abuse and Impunity," The New York Times

Hillman Prize in Magazine Journalism
Sarah Stillman
"The Invisible Army," The New Yorker

Hillman Prize in Broadcast Journalism
Yoav Potash
"Crime After Crime," The Oprah Winfrey Network

Honorable Mention: Anderson Cooper, "Sissy Boy Experiments," CNN

Hillman Prize in Photojournalism
Katie Falkenberg
"A Lasting Toll," Los Angeles Times

Honorable mention: Lara Solt, "Unending Battle," The Dallas Morning News

Hillman Prize in Web Journalism
Seth Freed Wessler
"Thousands of Kids Lost From Parents In U.S. Deportation System," Colorlines.com

Sol Stetin Award for Labor History
Nelson Lichtenstein
MacArthur Foundation Chair in History
Director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy
University of California, Santa Barbara
Central and influential in the field of labor history. Books include: Walter Reuther: the Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (1996) and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002).

The Foundation also announced a special Officers' Award given to activist, songwriter, and musician Tom Morello for his commitment to workers' rights.

In addition, I want to point out that American Prospect is in a dire situation. They're one of the few consistent sources of in-depth reporting on policy and politics from a liberal point of view, and they have a strong history of developing young and upcoming voices in progressive journalism. If they were to go under, it would be a terrible shame, so please, help if you can. They've been home to some of my pop culture writing as of late, which has been a real pleasure. My latest piece looks at Karl Rove's attempt to go "Animal House" on Obama, and why it's bound to fail. You can read my entire stint as a pop culture writer for them here. 

I'm guessing most of you have seen the video of Alex Castellanos trying to win an argument on "Meet the Press" with Rachel Maddow by all but saying, "It's so cute when you ladies have opinions like you were people. Now go make me a sandwich." No, seriously, he said, "I love how passionate you are. I wish you were as right about what you're saying as you are passionate about it. I really do." But that hardly captures the "women are so cute when theyr'e mad!" tones he took in a bid to put her in her place before she did that thing she does, that unfortunate thing where she reminds you that you're entitled to your opinions but not to your facts. 

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The whole thing is kind of mind-boggling. If Romney's people want to kill this "war on women" narrative, they should probably stop acting like outrageous sexists every chance they get. You know, it might help. In addition, Castellanos tries to argue that if you could pay women 25% less, employers would only hire women and make huge profits, an argument that suggests he believes the only real cost of business is labor. (Considering how much effort conservatives put into fighting labor, you can see why this myth might arise, but in reality, the war on labor is less about actual cost-saving and more about an ideological commitment to keeping the little guy down.) But mainly I want to point out that this entire exchange, and the entire approach of Republicans to the wage gap issue, shows why there's so much danger is women using I CHOOSE MY CHOICE to shut down any uncomfortable analysis regarding things like women's exponentially higher rates of quitting work to stay home with children. Or even when they make seemingly just symbolic gestures towards the idea that a woman is more subservient to family demands than a man, such as changing your name upon marriage. 

The problem with presenting "choice" as some abstract concept unmoored to social pressures and therefore as beyond critical analysis as the preference of the color of red over blue is that conservatives are happy to exploit that to continue supporting a system where women are systemically underpaid. As this exchange shows, it gives them cover even to push their favorite argument for continuing inequality, which is that the people who aren't doing as well simply aren't as worthy. Rachel calls it the "math is  hard" argument, and Castellanos basically says, "Yep, that's my argument." To unpack that, what's going on here is the argument from conservatives is that since women are mentally inferior, work outside the home is just harder for their wee female brains, and so they "choose" supposedly easier work that taxes their tender lady nervous systems less. Because of the "I choose my choice" rhetoric, they can bury this essentialist argument about inferior women in the language of "choice", and it sounds nearly feminist-ish. Mostly, they want it to be clear there's nothing to be done about it. They may even pretend to be stating this more in sorrow than joy, but at the end of the day, the strategy is clear: Bandy around the word "choice" to advance the argument that women are the natural inferiors of men, and that's why they get paid less, something policy cannot address. 

There's actually a lot of reasons for the wage gap, and it's actually not strictly due to things that get defensively fenced in as "choice", such as women feeling more pressure to scale back on career ambitions in order to care for family. But the problem is, with feminist help, we've somehow managed to get to a point where sexist pressures on women to take on more unpaid domestic labor than men are considered off-limits and certainly not available for analysis, lest you make anyone feel you're questioning their "choice". A lot of it is rooted in not-my-Nigelism, i.e. women's concern that noticing their partner's often-unintentional sexism will cause rifts in the relationship that will end it, and so they do things like make completely silly excuses for why it's not sexist that he thinks marriage means changing your name or he didn't offer enough help around the house after the kids were born to make your continued employment possible. It's an understandable defensive manuever, but the problem here is that by not having to deal with minor discomfort at home, we're perpetuating a dialogue that allows overt sexist discrimination and systemic abuses of women's rights to continue. 

Amanda Hess and I will be chatting live for an hour about HBO's Girls, starting at 2PM, and I'd be obliged if you could drop in and ask questions. They've had a number of chats like this, so if you could keep it specific to the latest episode or ask interesting questions that haven't been asked a thousand times, I'd be ever so grateful.

Weird as it may be to say this, but this was a relatively light episode of "Mad Men". I realize the image of poor Sally Draper getting an eyeful of blow job is a shocker. Learning that Megan's parents are awful is no fun, either. But this was probably the most optimistic episode of the season so far. Of course, it ends with everyone sad, so that's not saying a whole lot, I guess. But despite the disappointments and terrors, things were not a complete shit storm. I think we're meant to believe that while Sally's none too happy with what she saw, she's also going to be just fine. Most kids have some kind of traumatic experience when they first get a glimpse of adult sexuality, and when they grow up and become adults, they're better able to make sense of it. It's probably a good thing that Sally has a reason to slow her roll when it comes to wanting to be a grown-up, anyway. Also, while Peggy and Don both got disappointed in this episode, they also have a better idea of where they stand in the world. Better to know than working in ignorance.

Beyond what's in the latest episode of "The Orange Couch", I just want to say this: I'm curious what it means for Don to learn that Megan also has wretched parents. Like all other things about Megan, I suspect Don had her family life built up in his mind as some kind of fantasyland. He complains constantly about her closeness to her mother, something she regrettably threw in his face. Now he knows that actually, it's not so great for her. While he still had it much worse, they have this in common. Not that I think it's going to change his hot/cold problem with her---he has this problem with all women---but maybe it's going to complicate things. 

What did you think of the episode?

Update: Some of you have been asking my opinion of HBO's new show "Girls". I've been waiting to see a few episodes, but I'll be discussing it with Amanda Hess at the Guardian on live chat at 2PM today. 

Anna Holmes and Alyssa Rosenberg are in disagreement about the aggressive nudity on "Game of Thrones". I agree with both of their points, to an extent. Alyssa defends it, arguing that it's rarely just prurient, especially in the second season. 

I’d say I think they’re being somewhat more thoughtful in season 2. There are scenes in season 1 that are just ludicrous—Littlefinger’s yammering around his prostitutes, the Dothraki wedding sequences. That said, I feel nudity is a driver of personality more the show gets credit for in Season 1. I really like the good cheer of the prostitutes bursting in on Tyrion in our introduction to the character. I rarely feel like it’s okay to use female nudity solely to advance our impression of a male character, but given the show’s very impressive investment in Peter Dinklage as a sex symbol, I thought that scene was kind of remarkable. I also liked the scene of Ros flashing Theon as she leaves for King’s Landing, a moment that showed her comfort with her body as a commodity while also reinforcing Theon as kind of a randy idiot. And Dany’s nudity at the end of the finale felt powerful to me for the same reason Margaery’s does: her femininity is as exposed as it can get, which should make her vulnerable, and instead it’s a moment of triumph and dignity for her.

Anna has a different take:

These scenes seem not only forced but exploitative. As Huffington Post television critic Mo Ryan put it in a review: “Sometimes ‘Game of Thrones’ uses sexual scenes to shed light on character. But quite often, it shows naked women because it can.” It is telling that few, if any, of the series’ most fully realized and complex female characters — and there are many — are ever shown naked, with the exception of Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen and the just-introduced Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer). And it’s probably no coincidence that as the character of Ros — a titian-haired prostitute played by Esme Bianco — becomes more nuanced the less the series requires her to disrobe.

She adds:

Like the writers of “SNL,” I’m trying to have a sense of humor about “Game of Thrones” — or, at the very least, look on the bright side of all the breast-baring. It’s a great source of unintentional humor, for starters. I can often tell by the sort of dress a female character is wearing whether she is likely to disrobe. (If it has buttons, they will come undone.) I marvel at the semi-medieval society’s standards for personal grooming, which seem to anticipate the Brazilian waxes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: I call the pubic hair pattern so often seen on Westerosi women “the King’s Landing Strip.”

The fact that no one has a medieval-style bush does suggest that Anna wins this one on the evidence. But I agree with both of them, to an extent. Anna is right that it's basically there for gratuitous reasons, and you could cut it in half, easily, without missing a beat. But I also don't mind it, albeit for a slightly different reason than Alyssa. I remember what John Waters wrote about Russ Meyer in his book Shock Value:

Russ Meyer is the Eisenstein of sex films. He is single-handedly responsible for more hard-ons in movie audiences than any other director, despite the fact that he has refused ever to make a  hard-core feature. Married couples have flocked to his films for twenty years because they know Russ delivers and feel that the erotic images he is so famous for give them fodder for fantasies and actually add a little zing to their dull sex lives. 

So there you have it: HBO can be congratulated for saving marriages. Isn't that more important, strictly speaking, than whether or not all this sex can be justified as non-gratuitous? It's downright pro-marriage to have so much bumping and grinding on TV. That said, there are shows that absolutely make the sex stupid and tedious, but I don't think "Game of Thrones" is one of them. "Game of Thrones" usually stays inside the line by, as Alyssa says, combining the gratuitous nature of it with attempts to advance the plot and characterization. "True Blood" also gets a pass, because they aren't pretending to be anything but a really strange soft core porn.

I'm actually happy that Americans have an appetite for titillation in fiction. The accessibility of porn online does carry the threat of dulling our national erotic imagination. Porn has its place, don't get me wrong! But if that's where our entire erotic imagination is housed, then it becomes kind of soulless and mechanical. What's awesome about putting hot sex in shows that have pre-existing characters and plots is that it explores another angle of eroticism, the kind that is a tad more whole-person oriented, instead of the nameless people that populate porn. (I mean, I realize they play characters and have names, but basically the only people who care are those who are kind of obsessed with porn.) The reason the sex doesn't seem that out of place to me on "Game of Thrones" is that the show is so much about how these people live on a day to day basis, and sex is a major and important part of that. In life, people spend a lot of time naked, so why not on TV? I actually am more distracted when shows have scenes where people in real life would be naked, but characters are wearing clothes because they don't want "too much" nudity. For instance, TV characters have a lot more sex with clothes on than people in real life do. "Game of Thrones" manages to avoid that problem. 

Well, sort of. They do need to show more dudes naked. They really need to take a hint from "True Blood" on this front. 

Was it just me, or was this past week kinda boring? The only even remotely amusing thing was Monica Crowley calling Sandra Fluke a lesbian, after the right bashed her for weeks for all the cock she's supposedly riding. But I'm going into this week's Panda Party with a spacesuit, because I finally crossed the 10,000 mark!

Hey, get your yuks where you can. Which is in Panda Party, so come play with us!

When the Catholic Church and organizations are trying to exert influence over our laws, making abortion and contraception harder to access, they tend to portray their religious teachings against contraception as if they have nothing to do with misogyny. Instead, it's talked about as if it were one of those harmless religious laws governing behavior that's arbitrary, like eating kosher or praying before meals. In fact, the kosher analogy came up a lot during the debate over health care coverage of contraception, even though under that analogy, the benefit should be offered. After all, Jewish business owners aren't allowed to forbid their employees from using their compensation for non-kosher food. 

Digression aside, the reason that this framing of contraception rules in Catholicism misses the point is that the rules are rooted in a very misogynist ideology, one that holds that women exist for no other reason as to be appendages for men. Contraception threatens that ideology, because it suggests women showing overly high levels of independence, that they may feel they have other things to do in life but producing a man's babies. That men themselves often want contraception should disturb this viewpoint, but they kind of get around that problem by embracing the rhythm method*, which gives men a lot of control over reproduction. They're counting, I think correctly, on the fact that men will cajole women for sex---and in the sort of patriarchal relationships where contraception is shunned---women don't have a lot of right to say no. In fact, considering the taboo of women bothering men with their lady stuff, a taboo strongly reinforced by religion, a lot of women will go along with sex just to avoid upsetting their husbands with talk of periods and counting and ovulation and god forbid, mucus thickness. 

You can see this ideology about women in the choices that the Catholic hierarchy makes about their female followers, even when it's not about reproduction or sex at all. A couple of examples:

Exhibit #1: Via Feministe, there's been a crackdown on nuns for showing overly high levels of intellectual independence. 

A prominent U.S. Catholic nuns group said Thursday that it was “stunned” that the Vatican reprimanded it for spending too much time on poverty and social-justice concerns and not enough on condemning abortion and gay marriage.

In a stinging report on Wednesday, the Vatican said the Leadership Conference of Women Religious had been “silent on the right to life” and had failed to make the “Biblical view of family life and human sexuality” a central plank in its agenda.

Shorter Vatican: The role of ladies is to scold other ladies to know their place. But wait, it gets worse!

It also reprimanded American nuns for expressing positions on political issues that differed, at times, from views held by U.S. bishops. Public disagreement with the bishops — “who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals” — is unacceptable, the report said.

Needless to say, women can't be bishops, precisely because the Church teaches women simply cannot have that kind of moral authority. After all, their job is to obey, and to be appendages. Attempts to rise above their station---even to do something as mild as to work against poverty---will get slapped down. The idea that a handful of women are getting uppity is such a concern that the Vatican itself had to be the ones to make a fuss over this. I hope those nuns quit 

Exhibit #2: Via Skepchick, a story of how a high school girl learned that in the eyes of her church, she's nothing without a male presence to define her. 

The 17-year-old girl was all set to go to the prom, she was excited, but things took a turn for the worse this week when her date backed out. Then, the girl was shocked to learn that she is not allowed to go the prom by herself due to a rule by the Archdiocese.....

But when Amanda’s date cancelled on her earlier this week, she slammed right into a wall. She says she was told by school officials at Archbishop John Carroll High School she could not go to the junior prom next Friday without a date......

Amanda already paid the $95 for the prom tickets, add that to the cost of the dress, the shoes, flowers and she says it’s close to $1,000.

After the story came out, the girl did in fact get her invite to the prom restored. But not because the archdiocese changed their minds! Nope, it's because she finally got a date. And a very valuable lesson was taught: That without a man to validate you, you're nothing. Especially in the eyes of your god. 

To be clear, not all Catholic schools are this adamant about compulsory hetereosexuality. But with the Vatican crackdown, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw more of this sort of thing. 

*I don't like the "natural family planning" language, which indulges the naturalistic fallacy and is a non-subtle attempt to imply that it's superior to other methods that aren't described in loaded language. We don't call the pill the "maximum convenience family planning" or condoms the "dual action family planning". We stick to value-neutral terms.

Jamelle Bouie's review of Romney's Big Speech is palpably angry. It's actually pretty awesome, because it's easy to get jaded as a journalist and political writer, but once in awhile, someone lies so gleefully, with so little regard for reality, that it can return you to that state of rage at the sheer immorality of it all. Romney spoke pure Conservatese, and they've grown so used to lying that actual truths would sound strange in their mouths. Still, the audacity of Romney's bullshit was dazzling....and enraging. Jamelle explains the reality:

The other thing was less remarked upon at the time, but no less important: Congressional Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, pledged to make Obama a one-term president by any means necessary. Their plan was to use legislative rules like the filibuster to create a supermajority requirement for everything from confirming nominees to passing new legislation. Far from harming Republicans—who would be unified in their opposition—the blowback would tarnish Obama, who would be blamed by the public for gridlock and obstruction......

Worse, the sudden reversal of Republicans on the issue of fiscal stimulus—which they supported at both ends of the Bush administration—meant that the economy was stuck without further support, even as it stagnated with slow growth and high unemployment. Obama, as the president, received the lion's share of blame from the public. The only people who noticed Republican obstruction, by contrast, were assorted bloggers, journalists, and Washington insiders.

If you read this history and really think about it, it's hard to escape the creeping dread that it may be impossible to save this country with simple reforms. Progressives like to focus on campaign finance reform---which is an important issue, don't get me wrong---but I honestly don't think that the money is the most important issue when it comes to electoral politics. I know that's blasphemy to say, but hear me out. I think one reason it's intoxicating to focus on campaign finance reform is that as unlikely as it is to pass massive reforms that actually matter, it's still possible. And it's absolutely important, so it becomes this focal point. 

But at the end of the day, the real problem with this country is that one of our political parties not only doesn't give a shit about the stability of this country, and in fact has powerful incentives to dismantle it. It's both an ideological thing---stability is dependent on more equality, which they oppose above all other things---but it's also a political thing, which they've come to realize. Republicans have been kept in check in the past by fear that if they destroy this country, they have to pay a major price for it. But it seems what they've learned from the Bush debacle is that if they destroy this country, all they have to do is make sure the Democrats can't fix it properly, and then they can blame the Democrats and return to power to deliver more destruction. There's no incentive to behave, and many incentives to tear shit up. 

This strikes me as a problem that can't be fixed with gumption or policy reform. Campaign finance reform can only go so far, because Republicans just need to hold on to enough seats to be obstructionist when they're out of power to make the system work. And those seats they get because the voters have powerful fears regarding women's power and people of color making gains. The rest just works itself out. The only thing I see fixing all this is for the country itself to change enough that people stop voting for Republicans in sufficient numbers. Which may happen naturally, as demographic changes make the country more liberal, but I don't know that it can be fixed with the usual reformist approach. 

Still, the nice thing about politics is there's always some chaos afoot. For instance, Republicans put all this effort into creating the perfect situation for getting the country to blame Obama for their problems, and voting for the generic Republican candidate. And then they nominated a robot who scares people. Not a slick move, though I suppose we watched months of them trying to to bargain their way out of it. By no means am I saying this is over; I think Obama's campaign skills are formidable. But the long term situation is scary, since the dynamic isn't going to change. It's only going to be changed when the voters stop falling for the bait-and-switch. 

So far, it seems like a slow news day, but because of this, I had an opportunity to read this revealing story in the NY Times about a bunch of paranoids buying slightly less hideous pants. The pants are a pair of chinos that have hidden compartments for a concealed weapon, but unlike most pants that have these kinds of compartments, they aren't quite as baggy. Here are the pants:

So you can just imagine how miserable the previous options were. Not that it mattered that much, in my experience. The kind of douchenozzles who loved carrying everywhere also enjoyed the big, baggy pants that screamed "I conceal carry and I'm too much of a man for stupid girly stuff like looking like I try to look remotely attractive". I suppose there was a point where that was unsustainable, and the need to at least be occasional presentable, if still broadcasting that you're too manly to actually look good, had to come into play. Maybe for going to dinner on your wedding anniversary or something.

As you can tell, I'm not fond of this overbearing anxious masculinity that drives gun culture. It's the platonic ideal of trying too hard. 

This passage is rather important, I think:

Gun experts suggest that there are many reasons for the growth in the number of people with concealed-carry permits. They say it is partly due to a changing political and economic climate — gun owners are professing to want a feeling of control — and state laws certainly have made a difference.

I'm curious who these "gun experts" are, but not because I disagree with them. "Wanting a feeling of control" is a very nice way of describing "in a state of abject paranoia that manifests itself in fantasies that people are coming around every corner to kill you". So why is this feeling on the rise? It certainly has nothing to do with actual fear of crime, since crime rates are down, not up. Like way down. No, the predominantly conservative white men that are deep into gun culture are feeling out of control for another reason. They see women and people of color slowly making gains in society, and they fear that they are losing their unearned dominance and control over society. So they buy a gun and carry it around to regain that sense of control and dominance. Sure, your wife has more of a right to leave you if she wants and you may have to compete with a black person for a job, but you can comfort yourself by feeling like you could just up and kill someone if the opportunity arises. Which it won't, but you can fantasize about it all the time. Unfortunately for the rest of us, as the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin situaton demonstrates, for the occasional gun nut, merely fantasizing isn't enough. The desperation to make the fantasy come true can occasionally lead to extreme measures. 

An absolutely devastating and amazing hour of television: That's the first thing I want to say. The show has been escalating the levels of dread and fear for three episodes now, to the point where I was genuinely afraid that someone out there had murdered Megan because Don abandoned her. As we discuss in this episode, the theme was about the tension between "home" and "far away". Peggy lays it out in her ad campaign: Home is safety, love, warmth. Out there is scary, cold, and dangerous. But the ad gets rejected, because, as we learn in this episode, it isn't that simple. Some times home is where you can't be, and some times going on journeys leads us to greater truths. Even if they're scary. Watch the video for more on that.

I just want to add one more thing about all this: Because of all the talk of "far away places" and danger---particularly how badly it shook Peggy, understandably so, to learn that in another place and time, goofball Michael was almost surely born in a concentration camp---I think it was entirely reasonable to think Megan was in great danger after Don abandoned her. "Mad Men" is rarely that straightforward, however. We discover instead that where Megan isn't safe is in her home. She tries to be safe in there; she barricades the door and refuses to answer the phone, creating a little bubble of seeming safety. But Don kicks the door down (in a disturbing echo of season three, where he kicks the door down in an act of sheer awesomeness), popping that bubble and any illusion that home is where safety lies. Realizing that, the rest of the episode really came together, and we realized that "trips" often seem scary but can be exactly what you need, and "home" is not always so great. After all, Michael's first home was a concentration camp, and in order to feel safe, he imagines that he's actually from somewhere very far away. Still, like all things, it's complicated. I think we're meant to find it good that Peggy has a home with Abe, that he provides an anchor and makes her feel safe. It's not that home is a bad thing or trips are good. Just that we need both, and that home needs to be more than just home to be safe. That home has to be stable, and while a lot of people are uneasy about Peggy's storyline, I think it's clear that one thing that's true about her relationship is that she is with a man who really is kind and stable. In this world, that counts for something. 

The historical context is important here, as well. It's important to know that "Mad Men" is a very New York show, and the city's decline is a major issue here. The larger "home" of all the characters---New York City---is increasingly unsafe and  unstable.

On a side note: I read some forums last night after the episode aired, because it was a dense episode and I struggled to sleep after watching it. I wanted to see if others were picking up on the themes Marc and I lay out in the video. Unfortunately, the ones I read all were about adjudicating the fight between Megan and Don. I wish I could say I was surprised to see that most people I was reading right after the episode were Team Don, even though Don puts Megan through unholy hell, for no other reason that he genuinely fears that on some level, she doesn't want him. That's some classic domestic violence shit, and it's telling how many people out there are unwilling to see that Don is a bad fucking guy.

What were your thoughts? Did this episode make you rethink the Megan character as much as it did for Marc and myself?

Reading this excerpt from Alex Pareene's new e-book The Rude Guide To Mitt, I was particularly struck by this passage:

Even the stories of Romney’s supposed temper are ridiculous. He was arrested, in June of 1981, for disorderly conduct while attempting to launch his family boat in Cochituate State Park. He got in a heated argument with a cop who noted that the boat was not displaying its registration. Romney was hauled in in his swim trunks. Charges were dropped when he threatened to sue for false arrest. At the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics Romney got in a public confrontation with a volunteer police officer directing traffic outside an Olympic venue. Police allege Romney said “fuck” multiple times while berating the cop. Romney declined to apologize to the cop, Shaun Knopp, and while the public berating did happen — he mentions it in his book — Romney made a big point of specifically denying that he used a bad word. (In fact, Romney insisted at the time that he specifically said “H-E double hockey sticks.” Like a child. A remarkably well-behaved child speaking in earshot of his second grade teacher.) He told the Boston Globe that he had two witnesses to corroborate his denial. “I have not used that word since college — all right? — or since high school,” he said.

It's worth noting that if he had been black, conservatives would be finding ways to defend the cops if they decided to up and shoot him during these interactions. But he's not, so I guess they're going to vote for him to be President.