George Will writes a column arguing for the importance of fathers in people's lives.

Actually, let me put it another way. George Will uses a man whose father was his mother's rapist (and also her father) to prove the importance of fathers in people's lives. 

Jesus Christ, I need to boil my brain right now.

As you know, House Republicans are flipping out and screaming about Obama and the HHS wanting to mandate contraception coverage for those dirty, dirty sluts that use contraception, the ones that constitute over 99% of women. This isn't about "religious freedom", no matter how much that's being used as a distraction. As Mother Jones reports, the USCCB has made it clear that they want a repeal of the entire mandate, because they think women having sex for pleasure is wrong, full stop. Before they were screeching about "religious freedom", the USCCB was clear that they just really want to punish women for fucking. Dana Goldstein reported on this in 2010, and got this delicious quote:

"I don't want to overstate or understate our level of concern," said McQuade, the Catholic bishops' spokesperson. "We consider [birth control] an elective drug. Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn't make you sick."

This is a full-blown war on women's sexuality. Always has been. Republicans are rallying around the idea that women who have sex are sinful and dirty and that therefore their basic health care needs aren't "real" health care. That's what's behind this battle, and was behind the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, and the pushing of abstinence-only education before that. 

I'm reminding you of all this, because this is what happened at CPAC today:

“‘I was thinking about how sexy it would be to kiss you,’” world renowned pickup artist Wayne Elise told a group of young Rick Santorum fans. “You can say that [to a girl], it’s a cool.”

Elise, better known by his handle “Juggler” from Neil Strauss’ notorious pickup memoir The Game, was offering advice to attendees at conservative mega-conference CPAC on how to improve their dating game. Remember that old VH1 reality show The Pickup Artist with that lanky host with a Slash hat and goggles teaching people how to insult girls then hit on them when their self esteem is shattered? This is one of his top rivals, charging upwards of $5,000 for a one-day private session.....

But on Thursday, young socially conservative activists got it for free. One tip, he noted, was to introduce sensuality into early conversations with girls — like the above quote — to keep from falling into the platonic zone with your target.

“Most guys fall into the category of not being sexual enough, so that girls will easily see them as friend material and the guys have a hard time getting out of that,” he said. “I think one of my ideas that connects to conservatives is that it’s OK to wait but you definitely want to show the person you’re sexual and sensual.”

Emphasis mine. This goes on for awhile, but the short version of it is that while simultaneously screeching about the evils of feminism and how terrible it is that women want to have their contraception covered like common slatterns, conservative activists are also encouraging young men to be more sexual, more sexually aggressive, and to even seek casual sex with women. Women who then can be condemned by the Catholic bishops, House Republicans, anti-choice activists, and whoever else wants a potshot for offending their delicate sensibilities with their desire not to get pregnant. The double standard always lurks in these discussions about sex, but man, it's just getting blatant. Being a perverted liberal, I've been to lots of conferences where groups like Planned Parenthood and the like handed out condoms, precisely because they know people hook up at these things. But I'm guessing they're not welcome at CPAC. Because while men apparently need to be more sexual, women being sexual at all is a national tragedy that moaning and wailing about it  has to dominate the cable news and the halls of Congress.

Update: I also want to point out that "pick-up artistry" is sexist, in that it promotes a "men are hunters/women are prey" approach to sex, as opposed to the enthusiastic consent model of femihism. But it's also just bullshit. If anything, some of their pointers, such as being rude and insulting to women, probably make it less likely you'll get laid. You're better off honing your overall social skills, because women are people, and being people, they act like people.

Introducing this video, Atrios says:

And bring back New Coke!!! Of all of the recent mostly pointless wingnuttery, the lightbulb fixation has been the most amusing/bemusing.

What makes the lightbulb thing the bestest of current wingnut obsessions is that it's a perfect summation of what makes up the modern wingnut. Should you need to craft a future panic to gin up a bunch of wingnuts, I suggest carefully studying this list, because it's a pretty great blueprint.

1) Bullshit. This is one of the most important aspects. For some reason, they can't get quite as whipped up over something that's true. In some cases, that's beause reality is boring, but clearly that doesn't explain all of it, because even if their claim was true---that the government is banning incandescent light bulbs---that would still be roughly the stupidest thing to get upset about, possibly ever. No, I believe they get more excited over lies than the truth is that believing something that's not true makes them feel like they're in a secret, special club. That other people disagree with them because of our tedious adherence to facts and reality increases their sense of specialness. It also helps feed their sense of victimization. They're oppressed by the facts and all those stupid liberal fascists who insist on them. Because of all this, bullshit is way more interesting to the average wingnut than facts. 

2) Pettiness. What's weird is that even if it were true, and the entire country was being forced to move to CFLs for daily use, the rational response would be, "So what?" The wailing from wingnuts on this is that CFLs are "ugly", but what's interesting about this is that they're really not. I have nothing but CFLs in my house, and they work great. You could probably even do some empirical research showing that your ordinary American can't tell the difference between a new incandescent and new CFL. They flicker a bit more when being turned on, and that's it. Small price to pay to reduce our nation's energy usage and forstall global warming, right? But pettiness is where wingnuts find their home. They love turning a molehill into a mountain, because that means that every time they flip on a light, they can burn with rage at the evil liberals who are controlling their lives through light bulbs.

3) Selfishness. They really do find it mildly arousing to say, "Screw the planet, I like my light bulbs the way they are." Sure, they rationalize this by pretending not to believe in global warming, but feigned disbelief is just an extension of the larger selfishness problem.

4) Near-psychotic fear of change. They like the world the way it is, and any change is taken as a personal affront, no matter how inconsequential to their personal comfort.

5) Paranoia. This goes back to pettiness. They love to sweat the small stuff, because it makes the grand conspiracy of liberal fascism they believe in seem omnipresent. This is why wingnuts in the past got so attached to fears about fluoride in the drinking water, and now are crapping their pants over fears of mandatory CFLs. They like to feel that the Illlumnati even have their fingers in how you light a room. 

But most importantly of all:

6) It pisses off the liberals. It honestly should. This petty, selfish, idiotic, childish, paranoid behavior should piss off anyone with an ounce of decency. But what's funny is that they've been crying wolf so long that it fails to anger anymore, and instead causes mockery. I mean, they're willing to act like paranoid idiots just to get a rise out of us. Don't they have anything better to do with their time? Get a hobby, like replacing all your incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, and then starting a photoblog showing how nice the light is. But Wingnut America is so committed to the "pissing off the liberals" mentality that they'll try to pretend the peals of laughter aimed in their direction are wails of anger. It's sad, really. 

Irin Carmon has a great rundown of Mitt Romney's botchtastic answer on the constitutional right to contraception at Saturday's GOP debate, which can be fairly summarized as such:

"It is silly that you would ask me about whether something is constitutionally protected. After all, nobody is threatening it. It's constitutionally protected!"

Ignoring that personhood amendments by and large do exactly that (as do the initiatives of any number of other conservative religious groups focused on the alleged sexifying effects of latex tubes and daily prescriptions), the question was important for another reason.

Romney (Harvard Law, when he admits it) replied with an ethic of constitutional interpretation that boils down to not thinking about it unless you have to, even when your main legal advisor is a guy who was denied a seat on the Supreme Court in part because of his stance on Griswold. Ron Paul chimed in by saying that the Commerce Clause would prevent the banning of birth control sales by states or localities, which would make a lot of sense if that was in any way what the Commerce Clause did. Earlier in the week, Rick Santorum declared that marriage was a privilege rather than a right, meaning that he's against the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, legalizing interracial marriage.

Add in Santorum and Gingrich's desire to abolish part or all of the Ninth Circuit (which would almost certainly lead to a massive due process and equal protection suit after a third of the nation loses access to federal courts), and the GOP has a widespread problem: their concern now is not stopping "activist judges". It's reliving a glorified costume party from the late 1780s, where we presume that the Founders sat down, calmly discussed every issue that could ever possibly pop up, wrote a document to cover it - except for the part about slavery, which would work itself out after a bit - and then got back to discussing what a pompous dick Ben Franklin was.

Conservatives increasingly aren't having problems with judges. Conservatives are having a problem with courts.

Courts get in the way of the executive and the legislature. They're supposed to. They constitute a deliberative branch whose purpose is to analyze the actions of the other two branches and determine whether those actions comport with the law. Are they always right? No. But neither are the other two branches.

The GOP field's hostility to courts comes, largely, from the fact that courts are able to say and do things the other two branches can't, without the sort of rapid political changes that have led to Congress' position as a well-respected institution and the foundation of public life. Courts interpret and, yes, enshrine rules that the other two branches missed entirely. No matter how strong an executive is, after he has appointed a judge, his ability to constrain a federal court's discretion is limited mainly to the laws he or she signs. 

By threatening the dissolution of courts and even entire circuits, or by deciding that entire swaths of Supreme Court precedents are wrongly decided because of stuff and things despite having almost zero familiarity with the underlying law or facts, the message is not that rogue judges can be constrained. It's that courts are no longer as untouchable as they thought they were, and if they don't step in line and rule along a particular ideological zeitgeist, they'll find themselves subject to the same punishment as a rogue legislator or insufficiently lockstep presidential candidate.

The Founders, of course, put in safeguards for just that purpose. Not that it matters, of course; should those Founders fight too hard for their beloved "Third Article", they're gonna find themselves the Founders of Finland, and we'll replace them with proper historical heroes, like Von Mises and Margaret Thatcher. Check yourself before you wreck yourself, oldheads.

Irin Carmon at Salon* has an interview up with Merle Hoffman, abortion service pioneer and author of a new and quite interesting memoir Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room. This is the sort of article that many a political geek will glaze over, thinking it has nothing whatsoever to do with the horse race that's going on today in Iowa. (Which is wrong in and of itself, as I argue at RH Reality Check.) But once again, I have to point out that dealing directly with anti-choice fanatics is the best lesson imaginable in understanding how the right wing mind works, since their image of themselves as righteous holy warriors causes the filters to come off. Right off the bat in this article, Merle recounts a story to Irin that sums up beautifully the forces that are at play in the Iowa caucus right now.

Recently, Merle Hoffman gave a copy of her forthcoming memoir, “Intimate Wars,” to Sister Dorothy, a regular protester stationed outside Choices, the Queens, N.Y., abortion clinic that Hoffman founded.

“You know, it’s so honest,” Sister Dorothy told Hoffman after reading it, “but sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth.”

"Satan cloaks himself in the truth." I can't think of a better summation of right wing attitudes about basically everything. No matter if truth conflicts with their ideology, because Satan is behind that truth. If you see how the candidates are campaigning, you'll see that "Satan cloaks himself in truth" is basically their mantra. Everyone is clawing past each other to see who can demonstrate their fealty to right wing myth over truth.

In fact, the more outrageous your myth-making, the better. One reason that Romney bores the right and causes them to dislike him so strongly is that he's not very good at spinning fantastical bullshit. Like I note at RH Reality Check, it's hard to imagine Romney busting out a whopper about doctors throwing a live baby in a bucket and leaving it there to die. Romney is mealy-mouthed about global warming, claiming (falsely) that we don't know what causes it,** which conservatives feel is a bare minimum requirement. But it's not exciting, like suggesting that there's an international conspiracy to invent global warming that scientists perpetuate because they're all secretly communists. 

You know how it is when someone is telling a really juicy urban legend---perhaps that P&G is in league with Satan?---and you correct the record, telling them that didn't happen? You know how, as often as not, they respond with resentment that you're a dreamkiller, what with your facts and truths? Well, being a right winger is basically like spending all your time telling urban legends, putting anyone you suspect knows the truth into a bucket of people you dislike for ruining all the fun. The fear that Romney is only pretending to play along is driving a lot of resentment against him. He plays the record backwards, claims he hears Freddie Mercury say, "It's fun to smoke marijuana"***, but you suspect that he doesn't really care, and he's probably not going to burn his Queen records when he goes home, no matter what he says. 

*Irin has been kicking ass at her new gig at Salon. I interviewed her for the last podcast of 2011 about the year in reproductive rights, which you can listen to here. There's also some mockery of the sexting panic.  

**Not knowing something with 100% certainty isn't a qualification for knowing something, or else people would be unable to function. We know better that emissions are causing global warming than say, that you know your spouse is faithful or that your children love you. 

***The link is totally worth it. You'll be writing love letters to that link if you click it. 

I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving  family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold. 

If this theory seems a little far-fetched, I invite you to read Media Matters' end-of-year round-up on the right wing war on health. Health is a thing those elitist liberals like, with their jogging and their fiber. The liberal associations with health grew stronger because of the health care reform battle. Now healthiness itself is suspect. Some of my favorite highlights:

Fox & Friends Attacked HPV Vaccine Law While Promoting Teenage Tanning. During the October 11 edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts attacked a California law that will allow adolescents as young as 12 to receive the HPV vaccine, which can protect against cervical cancer, without parental consent. They also juxtaposed this law with a California provision that restricts those younger than 18 from using tanning salons, but failed to note that tanning beds increase the risk of skin cancer by 75 percent.

I liked this one, because it not only touches on the hostility to health, but also encompasses the creepy right wing obsession with the sexy virgin. Jessica Valenti wrote about this in The Purity Myth, but to recap: the right doesn't just want young women to be virgins. They want them to be sex object virgins: slender, beautiful, preferably buxom, apparently super-tan, and compliant. The virgin's value is ratcheted up dramatically by how sexy (by the most conventional standards) she is. It's like objectification on steroids. Thus, the constant churning out of one blonde sex symbol after another who puts on a faux-modest look while bragging about her virginity. And, of course, the inevitable fall.....

Fox's Gutfeld: "Why Are Health Food Freaks Always So Sickly Looking?" On the August 23 broadcast of The Five, Gutfeld said, "Why are health food freaks always so sickly-looking?" Co-host Andrea Tantaros replied, "They're unhappy, because they're not eating any fat."

Projection is the favoritest of all right wing neuroses. This is the war on health equivalent of when a guy hits on you, and when you shoot him down, he calls you ugly and denies that he had any interest, due to the ugliness.

Right-Wing Media Freaked Out Over Red Lobster, Olive Garden Decision To Shrink Portion Sizes. In September, after Darden Restaurants Inc., the parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden, announced it would shrink portion sizes and reduce sodium in its meals, right-wing media responded by attacking the decision and claiming the company was "bending to the whims of Michelle Obama." In a blog post, Malkin claimed that Darden was "strong-armed" into "re-designing meals" by Michelle Obama, while the Drudge Report linked to the story with a picture of Michelle Obama and the words, "Adult Supervision for fries."

Fox Promotes Hypothetical Junk Food Tax, Responds With A "Cultur[al]" Defense Of Macaroni And Cheese. On the July 26 edition of Fox & Friends, Carlson discussed a hypothetical junk food tax, beginning the segment by saying, "Do we really need the government ... policing this?" Her guest, Robert Ferguson, then claimed that "[n]o one has ever really talked about" "what makes foods healthy." He also said that a person needs to "tak[e] into account different cultures" in order to calculate nutritional value, then concluded: "In my world, I like mac and cheese. ... I'm going to eat it."

Right wing media has quite literally cast its audience as belligerent, picky children and Michelle Obama as Mom standing over them telling they they can't have any dessert if they don't eat their vegetables. One could argue the facts on this until the end of time---do they seriously believe the First Lady has such all-encompassing powers that Olive Garden would rather cater to her than make money?----but I'm more interested in the psychology of this. Why are so many conservatives eager to imagine themselves not just as children, but as annoying, picky children? You'd think a bunch of authoritarians would at least prefer the image of well-behaved children who politely eat what's served, but their hatred of the Obamas runs so deep that they are willing to cast themselves in the role of the pointlessly petulant child.

Of course, it probably runs deeper than that. The truth may be that they don't realize that they are casting themselves in that role, but are just naturally drawn to it, because they are petulant and childish. That's probably the better explanation, since it also goes a long way towards explaining "Wah! I don't want to play nice with others!", the lavish worship of the bullies who steal other kids' lunch money, and seeing people in distress, such as the unemployed, and wanting to give them wedgies instead of help them out. 

Every year in June in Austin, a sea of bikers converges on the city for the weekend, parking their expensive Harleys and chopped-up cruising motorcycles 5 deep on each side of 6th St. They prance around wearing leather jackets, bandanas, and various combinations of the U.S. flag and the Confederate flag. There's beer-drinking and loud noises and bikinis. It's called the Republic of Texas Rally, and it's both amusing and annoying, all at once. And, when Monday comes around, all those tough-looking bikers return to their suburban homes, put on their khaki pants and return to their jobs as accountants and dentists. After all, it costs a lot of money to buy just a basic Harley off the lot, much less one of the chopped bikes that draws so much attention at the ROT Rally. My sister called them "rubbers", for Rich Urban Bikers, but while that has a nice ring to it, they're really Rich Suburban Bikers. Good luck finding a pleasant acronym for that. There's a reason there's yawningly huge Harley dealerships in the suburban areas of Texas.

These rubbers are, as you can imagine, largely Republican. They are definitely the sort of people who find the Tea Party compelling; I'm guessing that many motorcycles since I've moved have been updated with "Don't Tread on Me" logos, as well as more Confederate flags, as a talisman to keep the reality that we elected a black President from penetrating their consciousness. (Don't worry; the realization sneaks up on them in their sleep, and they wake up screaming.) 

I bring this up, because the entirely predictable thing is happening in the primary polls: Newt Gingrich is losing his allure. I realize it was SOP in pundit circles to think he ever had a chance against Romney, because it is true that your average Republican voter likes him way more than they like Romney. After all, they believe he pisses off the liberals, since that's what they remember happening last time they tuned in to what liberals were actually thinking in 1995. Pissing off the liberals is the fundamental urge of the wingnut, after all. It's a primal urge that fills in the holes where your sex drive used to be. But just as even the horniest person knows that they have to keep their pants on in public, wingnuts know that there's a time and a place for supporting exciting so-called leaders who seamlessly blend the concepts of "nutty" and "asshole". And that time and place is not the Republican primary.

(Anti-choice nuts are excluded from this, of course. They are like subway masturbators. They know they're inappropriate, and that's what gets them off.)

That's what Newt Gingrich was. And Herman Cain before him. And Michele Bachmann before them: the ROT Rally. It was taking a weekend and fantasizing about What If, before returning to your normal life selling mutual funds. Rick Perry was a little like imagining what'll be like when you retire and can finally live the biker lifestyle on the road, before you realize that actually, now that your bones are starting to ache a little, it's probably not wise to sell the house just yet. These candidates were all the fantasy of rebellion against some imagined liberal power monopoly, a temporary finger thrown in the face of the people who thought it was A-OK to vote for someone with a weird  name like "Barack Obama". But Monday comes around, and you need those people as customers/voters, and out goes the eagle-emblazoned leather jacket and your wife in a halter top, and on with the tie and a nice family picture on your desk of everyone in Christmas sweaters. Mitt Romney is a tie and a picture of you in your Christmas sweater. Not as fun, but gets the job done. 

All of which is to say that I have nothing against motorcycles, per se. I find them a lot of fun. Just so long as you're not riding with someone with an American flag bandana and "questions" about Obama's birth certificate. 

So the fallout from Rick Perry's "Strong" ad has been, if anything, as delightfully strange, hateful and batty as the ad itself. In retaliaion for the bigotry on display in the ad, the gay Republican PAC GOProud decided to out one of Perry's advisors, Tony Fabrizio. This has so upset Andrew Breitbart, who I was surprised to find out is on the advisory council of GOProud, that he made a big public stink about resigning from said advisory council. In doing so, Breitbart demonstrated that he is quite possibly the most shameless liar in all of Conservative Land, which is much like being the stinkiest turd in a litterbox. His mother must be so proud. Seriously, read this shameless bullshit he wrote to explain his decision:

It is with sincere regret that I announce I must step down as a GOProud advisory member. On numerous occasions I have spoken with [GOProud leaders] Jimmy LaSalvia and Chris Barron of the significant impact the practice of “outing” had in my evolution from the political left to the right. I was under the absolute impression that both agreed. I have a zero tolerance attitude toward the intentional infliction of vocational and family harm by divulging the details of an individual’s sexual orientation as a weapon of political destruction. 

GOProud is saying that Fabrizio was already out, but that's neither here nor there. What I love is how Breitbart can't breathe in and out without involving shameless lying. Don't let the fact that he got lucky on the Anthony Weiner thing distract you. This statement is pure fabrication. First of all, is it just standard now for conservatives to make preposterous claims about how they used to be liberals? The way they carry on, you'd think there wasn't a conservative in this country prior to 1980. But more importantly, Breitbart puffing up about the evils of inflicting vocational and family harm on people with outing is just, yeah, no. Like Brandon Thorp at Towelroad writes:

Why does Breibart feel so keenly for the family and wallet of Mr. Fabrizio after displaying nothing but contempt for the families and wallets of the working-class ACORN staffers he and his pal James O'Keefe so willfully misrepresented back in 2009? And why didn't he feel any sympathy for Shirley Sherrod, whose career he attempted to destroy with baseless charges of racism? Those individuals actually lost their jobs, which so far Fabrizio has not, and the ACORN workers didn't even have any fancy beltway connections to help them land on their feet.

Perhaps in Breitbart's world, those cases don't count. After all, the accusations he leveled at those people were lies constructed with the magic of film editing. So maybe in Breitbart's mind, it's okay to destroy someone's life as long as you do so by saying a bunch of stuff about them that's not true. So, maybe if GOProud had claimed a straight man was gay, that would be okay by Breitbart? That's much closer to how he usually works. 

Oh wait, that can't be true, either. After all, Breitbart gleefuly rained "vocational and family harm" on Anthony Weiner by outing him as a guy who crudely flirts with young women online. In that case, the accusation was true, and Weiner lost his job and is apparently struggling to heal his marriage.

Hmmmm..... So it would seem there's no consistency or logic here. Breitbart is just a self-serving, dishonest sleazeball who mouths the kind of words that people who have morals might say, but he certainly doesn't mean them.

The irony here is that Breitbart's supposed moralistic stand is being taken on something that is far more murky, morally speaking, than lying about someone in order to get them fired, which is his usual M.O.  Plenty of people, including myself, support outing people who make a living exploiting homobigotry while having gay sex. It's about equality and justice, and especially about outing hypocrites. Maybe that's what Breitbart didn't like about GOProud's move; it smells too much like the right thing to do and he can't abide by that. 

In case anyone was unaware, Newt Gingrich is a professional historian.

Well, okay, not really - he's got a PhD and was denied tenure then went around Washington D.C. generally being the sort of haughty dick who misread an article on Cracked.com and is amused by your lack of knowledge concerning what really happened to Amelia Earhart. 

He's also an ideas man, a brilliant ideas man, and is willing to take this country forward into 1915...if only we'll let him. One of his recurring ideas is to seek vengeance on federal judges by abolishing their positions, and from that point sending the clear message that he has no idea how the Constitution works.

The Judicial Reform Act of 1802 abolishe[d] 18 out of 35 federal judges. That doesn’t impeach them, it just says this court no longer exists, we are no longer going to fund it, go home. That was over half of all federal judges at that time.

… take the most bizarre of judges and simply abolish their court. Tell them to go home. Those are the kind of steps. And I think they will lead to a very substantial national debate. There is nobody who has had the temerity now for almost 60 years to stand up and say that this is absurd.

Gingrich defends this idea as "Jeffersonian", because Jefferson was behind the JRA of 1802, and people like the way "Jeffersonian" sounds. It's mellifluent. Also, it abolished 16 positions, not 18, but history's not about accuracy. It's about ideas.

Here's the problem: Gingrich wants to abolish the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The JRA of 1802 abolished judgeships within each circuit, but still kept judges on each circuit. Gingrich's suggestion of abolition isn't just a foolhardy act of political vengeance; it's very likely unconstitutional as threatened.

A basic tenet of due process and equal protection is that all citizens have equal access to whatever form of judicial adjudication the federal government makes available. By abolishing the appellate arm of the Ninth Circuit, roughly 20% of America (the population of the Ninth Circuit states) would have no effective appellate rights in the federal system. Our current system of jurisdiction and venue laws bar the sort of circuit-hopping necessary to afford Ninth Circuit residents appellate rights in other circuits (and the closest states to the Ninth are the not exactly judge-heavy Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming and North and South Dakota). 

Gingrich is a poor student of history, and an even worse student of the Constitution. My suggestion: he should hire some poor ghetto children to do some research for him.

The relatively good election results on Tuesday are mainly due to the hard work of organizing and educating of liberals supporting everything from labor to reproductive rights. But it's also true that Republicans are kicking ass in the art of burning out all your political capital by being complete and total assholes. At this point, if House Republicans put together a resolution to celebrate Kick A Puppy Day, no one would really be surprised. Republicans have completely forgotten that the meanness that turns on their base repulses everyone else. 

The most recent example is this whole situation in Michigan with an anti-bullying bill, which state senate Republicans amended at the last minute to create a "religious exemption". In other words, it's okay to harass and bully if you claim you're doing it in the name of that notorious gay-basher, Jesus Christ. (You didn't know that Jesus spent his adolescence pantsing kids for being queer? It says so right in the Bible, right between that teaching at the Temple story and the time Jesus started the first Christian rock band, whose name was shamelessly stolen in the 60s by The Zombies.) This, of course, was intended to make the bill toothless, especially with regards to sexualized and homophobic bullying, which are often the worst kinds that involve the least amount of recourse for victims. If anything, it turns the bill into an endorsement for gay-bashing and sexually harassing girls deemed "sluts".  Democrats are now saying they're going to be able to take the exemption out of the bill, which I believe because it's either that or it dies. 

But let's step back and think about what this basically comes down to: Republicans are willing, nay eager, to stand up for bullying. They went out of their way to legalize it. They love bullying so much they turned a bill intended to ban it into a bill that gave the gold stamp of approval to harassing kids, as long as you can pull a pious face and claim you're worried about them going to hell for being queers and weirdos. If you're like me, this story probablly made you think of the kids who roamed the halls, getting their jollies by making life a living hell for kids who didn't live up to their arbitrary standards, and come to the realization that most of those asswipes probably grew up to be Republicans. This whole situation is also blowing the doors off the claim that bullies have parents who are blissfully unaware of what evil asswipes their kids are. Seems that some adults eagerly support high school bullies, and that's where the support for rewriting this bill came from.

It's an intensely clarifying moment. We're so used to right wingers trotting out the piety act, claiming that they don't want to hurt anyone, just that their deep religious convictions cause them to have to bash women's reproductive rights and gay rights, amongst other things. But it turns out that they're just bullies. Well, I say that like I'm surprised, but obviously I'm not, since rarely does a day go by these days that I don't have some bullying tweets aimed at me from wingnuts who've been trained to see any woman who is opinionated and unashamed of her sexuality as a target. But I think a lot of people have yet to grasp how much the Christian blather is just a fig leaf for some ugly attitudes. You take this personhood amendment thing---for the people who came up with the idea and got it on the ballot, the idea that it would turn women of reproductive age into a criminal class under constant suspicion was a feature, not a bug. 

But since the 2010 election, the mask has really come off. The reasons why are complicated, but this bullying situation is a crystal clear example. They're losing their ability to deflect attention for the sadism. 

Every year around Halloween, it's important to have a post explaining the ridiculous and seemingly growing fundamentalist hostility to the holiday, which they consider too fun demonic. And then after waging actual war on Halloween, these fucktards then go on Fox News and cry that we're trying to kill Christmas with innocuous phrases like "Happy Holidays". That America allows this sort of thing to continue happening demonstrates why we don't deserve nice things. Oh sure, some of us bloggers out here make fun of it, but on the whole, the whole "fundies are trying to destroy Halloween" crap doesn't get the attention it deserves. I mean, just for sheer comedy value, their belief that trick-or-treating invites Satan into your home should be enough for coast-to-coast cackling until they retreat in shame. But mostly, anti-Halloween sentiment gets no coverage, even though it's a) real (unlike anti-Christmas sentiment) and b) surprisingly widespread. 

How widespread? Well, I think it's the primary reason behind this story:

Yale University researchers have looked into whether there are increases or decreases in cesarean section births on holidays. They found a 12 percent increase in "c-section" births on Valentine's Day and a nearly 17 percent drop on Halloween.

Emphasis mine. The first one can be explained by a combination of sentimentality and the stress of having to give birth during the coldest month of the year, I'm sure. Plus, you may have an eyeball towards making sure they get badass birthday gifts as a grown adult with a romantic life.* But the Halloween thing? What kind of horrible monster would deny their child the chance at being born on Halloween? I mean, think of the lifelong advantages of having your birthday fall on the best holiday of the year! You get to eat cake and candy. Your birthday party is always a costume party. No one ever forgets your birthday, plus they give you cool macabre stuff as presents. It's a popular holiday, but it's not a religious one or a present-oriented one, so it doesn't overwhelm your birthday. It's like hte opposite of having a Christmas birthday, which is the worst birthday to have, unless you have a family that doesn't celebrate Christmas at all. 

So what kind of monster are you to deprive your child? Well, you're probably a fundamentalist Christian who believes in demons, that's what kind of monster. Depending on your measurement, conservative evangelicals are 14% to 35% of the population, a solid enough chunk to completely explain this 17% drop in C-sections on Halloween. 

Of course, some fundies are going beyond just being scared assholes about Halloween, and openly trying to combat it. How? Well, apparently by locking people up in houses and showing them blatantly false representations of how abortions are performed. I know; that hardly seems like a good way to stomp out the practice of wearing costumes, being a little drunker and sexier (for adults) for a night/trick-or-treating (for kids), but with fundies, all roads lead back to the grave evil that is women being able to say what happens to their own bodies, no matter how not-sorry they are that they touched a penis. So it goes:

Ybarra tells KTRK that while the tickets came with a vague warning about graphic images, like you'd see at any event featuring wounds applied with spirit gum and buckets of fake blood, there was no indication that it was hosted by Potters House Christian Fellowship Church — or that it contained disturbing depictions of what the church considers evil acts. Ybarra says that inside Hell House,

"There was a young lady lying on a gurney, and two nurses. And one of the nurses was reaching into the lady and pulling out a bunch of gunk, and throwing it on the floor."

She felt the scenes were too "realistic" (though safe and legal abortions obviously don't involve guts being thrown about the room) and quickly asked to leave, but she was told she had to stay and go through the whole house due to safety concerns. Good thing she wasn't having a heart attack.

Hey, when you're dealing with people who want to control what women do with their uteruses, don't be surprised if they think it's acceptable to hold you against your will and be subjected to their hysterical attempts at proselytization.

Anyone ever notice how evangelicals and time share salesmen have the same M.O.? Lure you into an enclosed space under a false pretense, use social pressure and  a whiff of physical intimidation to keep you from leaving, hit you up with the hard sell? It's pretty despicable. Though I suppose if they'd done this to Ybarra in service of hitting her up for sex instead of hitting her up with some Bible-thumping, we could expect a hearty defense of this tactic from many in the dudelier sections of the atheist community. 

*This is not an endorsement of Valentine's Day, which I consider a foul holiday that I've come around to boycotting. You might as well call it Single Shaming Day or Our Love Can Never Measure Up Day. It functions in the same way photoshopping impossible proportions on fashion models does: to fill you with shame for not being good enough (which is impossible by the standards set) so you buy more shit. 

I wrote that long post about personhood amendments and the issues surrounding them yesterday for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s an important issue onto itself. The other is that it points a larger problem that we have in our political discourse now around facts and ideology.

The problem is when someone makes an argument that is wrong in two ways---it's factually incorrect and it's ideologically fucked up---and we live in a soundbite driven culture that has no respect for nuance whatsoever. Our political discourse has degraded to the point where compound and complex sentences are shunned. Thus, you're worried that if you say, "That's not true, but even if it were"....your audience will tune you out or your opponent will stomp all over your second clause, allowing the ideological point to stand.

The right has figured out that "a lie + a fucked up idea" is an excellent way to turn a liberal into someone who says "first of all," and for some reason, the "first of all" person has become a hated entity in our culture. (Which is why Mitt Romney is such a punchline.) We're a long way from a political discourse where nuance matters, so I suppose we may have to really start thinking strategically about the best way to counter "a lie + a fucked up idea": do we attack the lies or the fucked-up ideology?

I compiled a short list of right wing arguments that I think really exemplify how widespread this strategy is of theirs, to get a better picture of the problem.

Argument: The HPV vaccine will increase promiscuity by allowing girls believe it's okay to have sex.

Factual error: There is no evidence that the HPV influences number of sexual partners or age of first intercourse.

Ideological fuckwittery: They're actually arguing that, given the choice between women having more sex and women dying more often of preventable disease, sex is the worse tragedy. They are literally arguing sex is worse than death.

Argument: "Teach the controversy".

Factual error: That there’s a controversy over the theory of evolution. There’s not; that evolution happens and that it explains how life came to be has scientific consensus behind it.

Ideological fuckwittery: The notion that schools have any place passing off a very specific strain of religious dogma off as science.

Argument: Raising taxes on the richest Americans discourages productivity.

Factual error: There is no evidence for this assertion, and some counter-evidence that raising the marginal tax rate actually encourages business executives to make better decisions for their companies, because they can't drive them into the ground, grab a golden parachute, and leave others to clean up after them.

Ideological fuckwittery: The notion that the work of business executives is exponentially more valuable than that of say, schoolteachers and firefighters.

Argument: Nearly half of Americans don't pay taxes.

Factual error: This argument ignores that there are far more than income taxes that people pay. There are payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc. It all evens out, if you look at the numbers.

Ideological fuckwittery: The notion that the people who have benefitted the most from our society should pay no more than those who don't benefit much at all. 

These are just a few. I’m sure you can think of your own. The first step to fighting the problem is identifying it. 

Herman Cain's temporary surge in popularity baffles much of the press, but it honestly doesn't surprise me that much. There's always been a strain of conservatives---the ones who say, "I'm really more libertarian"---who missed out on the 60s and so want to reimagine themselves and dangerous rebels who are out to get The Man, except in this case The Man is ordinary working people who are oppressing the beleagured wealthy class. You don't know downtrodden until The Man, in his greedy grasping for health care and a humble pension, makes you downgrade to a smaller yacht and reduce your summer house options to a mere two or three. Luckily, the downtrodden rich have "libertarians" out there who imagine they're being radical and subversive by calling for regressive tax structures. These folks are Cain's base. Who else do you think is buying all those stupid Harleys?

I think this explanation goes a long way towards explaining this new campaign ad from Cain:

It's gritty! There's smoking and insistent tones! And vaguely menacing pseudo-rock music! Cain is clearly a motherfucking badass. He wants to ban abortion, but he figures it's your choice if you break that law. I don't know how liberals don't see it! He's Mick Jagger mixed with Ronald Reagan. James Dean spouting strange tax theories. You may think it's a misfire for a man who has the same name as the Bible's first murderer and a tax plan that immediately invokes the number of the Beast to run for the nomination of a party that houses the majority of evangelical Christians, but it's all part of the plan. Herman Cain wants you to think he's dangerous, y'all. 

Personally, the whole thing reminds me of another dangerous rebel.

Been traveling and not-blogging as much as I'd like, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing. This morning, I have a piece up at the Guardian CIF about the conflict between Occupy Wall St. and the pathetic right wing response We Are the 53 Percent. I'm particularly proud of this piece because I address something I think has been under-addressed in liberal responses to the 53% nonsense: the fundamental incoherence of it. Most liberals have taken on their claims directly, which I think is important. We point out that there isn't a welfare state upholding the people who don't pay federal income tax. We point out that federal income tax is only a portion of federal income. We point out that a lot of people who don't pay federal income tax did so in the past or will so in the future. We point out that people who don't pay federal income tax still pay payroll taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. These are all good points and interesting. But they also play into the bizarro right wing assumption that Occupy Wall St. has anything to do with federal income tax, or at least the majority of people who pay it.

It doesn't. Thus the "99%" language. From my piece:

The whole point of Occupy Wall Street is that we should increases taxes on the wealthy to pay for programmes that would benefit the other 99% of us, including the half of us who aren't rich but do pay federal income taxes. Erickson and his supporters clearly realise that they can't argue against the points actually being made at Occupy Wall Street, so instead they're inventing phantoms demanding middle-class tax hikes and fighting imaginary battles with them.

One thing I found interesting when a bunch of right wingers ganged up on me on Twitter, screeching incoherent nonsense at me in response to this bit of satire, was how most of them assumed that I don't pay federal income taxes. They coughed up the same crap about how those of us who support Occupy Wall St. are lazy parasites who don't want to work, and are playing victim. And that we hate people who do work and pay taxes. 

But of course I pay federal income taxes. I'm a 34-year-old woman who makes a middle class living. That I don't throw a fit about it and act like it's the greatest injustice in the world doesn't mean I don't pay federal income taxes. That's because I'm a fucking grown-up. The ready assumption that everyone who pays federal income taxes is a big, screaming toddler about it is what probably galls me more than anything about the "53%" nonsense. Screeching about your taxes just makes me assume you are in a constant tantrum because of other things in life that are less than pleasant: that you have to work for a living, that food has calories, that not everyone you want will have sex with you. Of course, you see a lot of Americans, especially right wing Americans, whine about that crap, too. So maybe that's the problem here. 

But it is interesting how much they project onto the left. Liberals are protesting real problems: unemployment, the foreclosure crisis, the war. And conservatives respond by saying, "Quit whining about real problems and listen to me whine about having to be a fucking grown-up. Wah!" And then say that liberals are "playing the victim". It's just one of the worst cases of projection I've seen in all the years I've spent observing right wing projection. 

I definitely think that Rick Santorum's quote was (probably accidentally) revealing of conservative attitudes about sex. In an attempt to explain why he supports banning gays in the military but doesn't want this to be characterized as bigotry, Santorum said this:

I — I would say, any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to — to — and removing “don’t ask/don’t tell” I think tries to inject social policy into the military.

What made this comment so eye-rolling is that he's functionally trying to claim that people who have any kind of sexual activity with the opposite sex are already banned, and therefore letting gay people in is a "special" right.  That's literally the only way this makes sense.  But in a fucked-up way, I think he probably does believe a variation of that.  There's just a deep-set sense with the religious right that sex is just inherently perveted. This is a statement of a man who probably begs for forgivenness every time he ejaculates.  That's why they insist that contraception even within marriage is an iffy proposition---if you're going to be so dirty, you should at least pay for it somehow. 

Which isn't to say they see straight and gay sex the same. It's more like straight sex is the marijuana/alcohol of sex, and gay sex is the cocaine. It's more taboo in their minds, so it's somehow more sexual. So he's approaching it like you would if you were a big enough dip to say, "Drinking and drugging has no place in the military," with the full understanding that you'll look the other way when it comes to the drinking, but you'll boot someone immediately for cocaine.  So pointing out that Santorum has 4 kids with his wife sounds, to him, like someone doing a line claiming it's the same as someone who has a glass of wine with dinner.