Komen has fallen to their knees and begged for mercy, and Planned Parenthood is doing a victory lap. So am I: I wrote a piece for The Guardian about what Planned Parenthood did right, and what it will take to replicate their success in the future. But not so fast!, say some on the left. If you read Komen's statement, it's clear that they're just retreating for now and will probably kill off the $700,000 in grants to Planned Parenthood in the near future, when they create a better excuse. This is true, and they should be called out for it. There's no reason to return to supporting Komen; they were already an iffy organization that crossed a line they can't uncross. It's clear their management is awash in anti-choice nuts who really do think there's something dirty about Planned Parenthood, and that this wasn't just a cave. No reason to support them.
But that doesn't mean those of us who are declaring victory and doing a victory lap are wrong. Even if the grants are eventually cut, we can safely say we won this one. Because this wasn't really about the money. Planned Parenthood is a billion dollar organization; cutting this extra service from some clinics, while horrible and regrettable, wasn't going to tank them. This was a proxy fight, and it was standing in for the larger fight over women's rights and women's health care. Shelby Knox had an awesome tweet explaining this:
This was a battle about values. Specifically, whether or not we value women as human beings or not. Anti-choicers are trying to marginalize comprehensive health care for women basically to put us in our place, to demote us from the status of people and return us to the status of objects. Saving breasts is all good and well---they are decorative, after all!---but health care for dirty sluts who go around having sex as if they have a right? I think, and said in my Alternet piece, that one reason this really hit home is anti-choice objectification of women had gotten to the point where they were pitting our own body parts against each other, creating a war between wholesome, all-American boobies and evil vaginas. A couple of astute writers put it really well.
In American politics, women’s bodies are not bodies, but parts. People like to talk about some parts more than others. Embryos and fetuses are the most charged subject in American political discourse. Saying the word “cervix” was the beginning of Rick Perry’s end. In politics, breasts are easier to talk about. I first understood this a few years ago, when I was offered, at an otherwise very ordinary restaurant, a cupcake frosted to look like a breast, with a nipple made of piped pink icing. It was called a “breast-cancer cupcake,” and proceeds went to the Race for the Cure.
I don't know if some people can understand how dehumanizing this is. Obviously, there are a fair number of both sexes who don't see it that way. But to me, this gets to the real gist of the issue, one I've only vaguely been able to grapple with by using hyperbolic phrases like "gestation vessel." But it's more than abortion or childbirth, although the desire to control that vital human function lies at the heart of this. It's about reducing women to their various body parts. "You get to control this bit, but we'll control that bit, and we like this part but don't want to talk about that part and ... are you complaining again?"
The obsession with fetuses and uteruses and birth control, the fetishization of breasts (in all ways, not just Komen's breast cancer branding) and the ongoing double standards in political and public spaces like this commonly forgets the human being who happens to own those body parts. I think that's what women commonly feel --- and one reason many of us are so adamant about this. It's not just about a discrete set of issues. It's about women being treated as fully human.
The debate over health care is basically about this ultimate fight over whether or not women are people. Conservatives see women as objects. Sex and reproduction the way the objects are used, and like with any other property, how and who uses it is the whole point. That's why abstinence-only classes compare sexually active women to lollipops that have been opened and licked, or toothbrushes that someone else has used. Taken to its extreme---and anti-choicers are nothing if not extreme---this view means that a woman who has sex before marriage is broken and useless, and providing her contraception and STD prevention/treatment is like putting a new paint job on a totaled car. But even for less extreme conservatives, they tend to see sexual health care as "condoning" sex, and just as you don't keep buying your kid a toy if he keeps breaking it, they think taking it away will cause women to stop "damaging" themselves by using those vaginas as we please instead of keeping them nicely wrapped for the true owner---a hypothetical future husband---to have. That married women also need these services is an inconvenient fact that tends to get brushed off. Some times, when you squeeze anti-choicers, they'll say that married women have no need for these services because as long as no one never has sex outside of marriage, STDs and unintended pregnancy just go away. Mostly, however, it's not a well-thought-out position, just a frantic panic attack at the idea that women---these objects---are making decisions for themselves like they're real people. More importantly, they're afraid that if this trend continues, it's going to occur to the public at large that women are people, and things will shift accordingly.
That's what this fight was about. By pressuring Komen, anti-choicers were basically trying to make "women are people" the pariah position, and trying to make anyone who holds the "women are people" position without apology seem like they were out of the mainstream. Having people scrambling to disassociate themselves from you is a really great way to discredit you and your ideas, and that's why so many people with what I consider poor morals really love a witchhunt. So the fight was over who basically owns the mainstream: anti-feminists or feminists, people who think of women as expensive sex toys/gestation machines or people who think of women as people? That's why everyone was so upset. And that's why the feminist win was so meaningful.
The reason that emotions were high around Komen is they position themselves as an organization that exists to save women's lives. Claiming to be pro-woman (or pro-black people or pro-poor people or even increasingly pro-gay people) while objectifying and dehumanizing women is a common tactic on the right. By making Komen squeal for mercy on this, we won a major moral victory. We said loud and clear that being pro-woman is about more than a bunch of empty homilies. You have to believe women are people, and like people, they have a right to have sex and have a right to full health care and a right to make their own damn choices. Anything less isn't pro-woman. It simply isn't.
We won a major public battle over values. We sent the message loud and clear that feminist values are mainstream values. We should be proud.
Komen for the Cure's decision to break with Planned Parenthood over a Congressional investigation based on doctored videos was, all things being told, a bad one. Bad for women, bad for Komen's credibility, and, as TBogg points out, bad for Komen's future viability.
TBogg points out that Komen's new fellow travelers are about as concerned with women's health as I am with NASCAR standings, which is part of the problem. But Komen has a deeper issue here: the impetus for those anti-choice conservatives flocking to their side in the first place.
Komen brings in substantially north of $300 million in revenue. Its grants to Planned Parenthood totalled roughly $600,000. This means that Komen's new friends were withholding support over .2% of its funding going to an organization that performed abortions with entirely separate money. Now that they've made the political decision to side with people whose main source of political knowledge is the archive of false e-mails at Snopes, there's a larger and far more precarious issue: anti-choicers' invariable tendency toward rubedom.
Within a month, there will be an e-mail or a WorldNetDaily article or a Washington Examiner column. And the column will allege, through a vastly simplified chain of events, that Komen is once again engaged in the perfidy of tangential liberalism. People for the American Way once co-sponsored a 5K, Komen let halal companies use the pink ribbon, Hillary Clinton gets mammograms; something is going to set them off.
Eventually, Komen's not going to be able to placate them, probably because the actual controversy will make no sense whatsoever. After a few weeks of trying to understand why it can't partner with Campbell's Soup, the donations rewarding this week's decision will dry up. The Planned Parenthood investigation will go away. All Komen will be left with is a vastly reduced donor pool, and a large group of former donors that either remember Komen's actual betrayal, or will spend every minute looking to manufacture betrayals.
The internet is awash in memories of "Soul Train" this week, because of the loss of Don Cornelius, the host, who died from an apparent suicide. A little-discussed fact of the internet is that watching YouTube clips of "Soul Train" is a surprisingly effective form of stress relief.
And so is partying down at the Panda Party! So come join us and spin some tunes. Sadly, we can't create a "Soul Train"-style line with our cute avatars, but you can play at home.
RIP, Don Cornelius. My memories of that era are really dim, since I was a little kid, but I remember that well into the 90s, every dance party occasion would burst, at some point, into a "Soul Train" line. Now it's more like a circle thing, where people are pushed into the middle to show off their moves. I am fine with both methods, though feel the line version was less pressure-intensive. Share your memories in comments! Or come into Panda Party and share them there.
Or, to be more thorough, this is something I've been thinking about ever since anti-choicers managed to get Komen to join in their crusade of shunning Planned Parenthood for what I've deemed below-the-belt health care.* The "breasts good/vaginas icky" divide that rules a lot of wingnut thinking on this is typical of why they obsess over sex. Sex and gender provide lots of opportunities to label people and divide them into categories. This in and of itself isn't bad. Labels are useful things that can clarify, as long as they're kept in their place. But conservatives---being black and white thinkers---see different groups labeled and imagine they must be total opposites. And that they therefore must be constantly at war with each other.
And boy do they like that! Nothing works better for conservatism than encouraging people to exaggerate their differences, minimize their similiarities and then imagine themselves as in constant struggle with each other. While we ordinary people are fighting each other over our supposed differences, we're not looking working together on issues that matter to all of us. There are a lot of places where differences to fight over can be found, but sex and gender strike so close to home for people that it's a well of opportunities for divide-and-conquer the right just drinks from constantly and frankly instinctually. You can probably think of the most prominent examples. There's the What's the Matter with Kansas? issue, where working class white people are encouraged to obsess over the dirty sluts that are supposed so different from them, and to bring us back in line, and this obsession keeps them voting Republican even as doing so hurts their pocketbook. Of course, the attempts to make straight people think LBGTQ people are foreign and subversive and strange is another example, and luckily one where the public is slowly beginning to stop buying what conservatives are selling.
Of course, the most consistently important artificial divide conservatives want to stoke, at least when it comes to sex, is between men and women. The idea that men and women might realize that we're not, in fact, complete opposites and that in fact our interests overlap the vast majority of the time terrifies conservatives. They need men and women to see ourselves as enemies who constantly struggle over power and sex, and definitely don't want us to look at each other as friends. That's one reason there's so much hostility with regards to reproductive rights. It's critical to conservatives ideology to imagine sex as a source of power struggle between men and women that prevents equality and friendship. They want a world where men are always trying to get it, and women are always trying to avoid having to have it, which makes platonic friendship impossible (because of suspicions that he's trying to get one over on you) and makes sexual relationships fraught. Reproductive health care changes that completely, giving women an opportunity to explore our desires without worrying too much about unwanted childbirth or disease, and when we do so, we realize that actually, we're just like men. And now instead of sex being the source of friction between men and women, it can bring people together. (Also, platonic friendships are a lot easier because people who are sexually satisfied aren't injecting sex into every interaction.) There's a reason that the same people who violently insist that men and women are complete opposites cringe at the idea of women having full reproductive health care; they fear men and women learning that in fact, we're basically the same. Nothing distracts from how alike men and women are like making women subservient to our biology while men are allowed to be free.
Feminism is dangerous not just because it can bring men and women together as allies. If anything, conservatives are just as terrified at how feminists have indicated that women are oppressed as a group and has encouraged women to stand together to resist that oppression. Turning women on each other is a major part of reactionary politics, and sex is a great weapon to use for that purpose. Women are still treated like the sex class, and that creates a lot of opportunities to divide women in various ways according to perceived sexual behaviors and desirability. There's a reason that conservatives are starting a "OMG GIRL SCOUTS ARE DIRTY SLUTS" campaign; it's about dividing women into "good girls" and "bad girls" and pitting them against each other, even before they even really have any kind of sexual urges at all. I think that's one reason they went after Komen so doggedly. Breast cancer is considered, inaccurately, as more of an older woman's concern. You start your mammograms just as your fertile years are winding down. Below-the-belt health care is considered, inaccurately, more of a younger woman's concern.** It's clear to me that they see this as another divide-and-conquer strategy, trying pit these two groups against each other. For antis, especially, they want to get more older women to snarl at younger ones that we shouldn't be clamoring for health care resources, but instead should just keep our legs shut.
This is bullshit, and I suspect won't work as well on older women as anti-choicers might think. My experience tells me that very few women go through menopause and then turn on their younger sisters who still have the needs of fertile women. On the contrary, I tend to find that older women are often more thoughtful and nuanced, having had enough experience to see that the division between "good girls" and "bad girls" is a lie, and that we're all bad girls. Sure, there are plenty of middle-aged and eldery church ladies, wagging their fingers at the sluts, but I suspect most of those women have been church ladies their entire lives, and have always preferred to throw stones at other women than see that we're all in this together. But since finger-wagging church ladies are a huge portion of the anti-choice movement, I could see how they'd see this as a way to beef up the divide between younger and older women. But even though I don't think this will work as well as they might hope, it's good to be mindful of it. And ask ourselves when we're getting all bent out of shape about the nerve of some people being at a different place in life and having different sexual and health needs, we have to ask why are we letting ourselves get riled up like that?
*Seriously, how long is it before fundie women start bragging about how they don't go to filthy gynecologists at all? On the fringes, you already have Christian fundies who believe that god wants women to give birth at home with a midwife, so I guess they're already there, looking for a way for women to go their whole lives without having a doctor address below-the-belt care. With the extremist turn as of late, I won't be surprised to see these sentiments spreading. Anyway, you can read my piece about the above/below divide wingnuts are carving out, and how to hold corporations who are coddling this accountable.
**I'm not an expert by any means on breast cancer, but I do know that the assumption that you don't need protection after you go through menopause means a lot of people being diagnosed with STDs when they thought they were too old for that.
As I noted last night, I have a blog post up at Slate about Susan G. Komen---who purports to be a women's health charity---abandoning their alliance with Planned Parenthood, even though 17% of Planned Parenthood's services are cancer screening and prevention. They claim that it's because Planned Parenthood is under investigation, but it seems that excuse was ginned up because it was easy cover for caving into anti-choice nuts. The investigation has been launched as a nuisance investigation by an anti-choice congressman, and is not compelled by any sincere concern that Planned Parenthood is violating the law with its funds. It's completely obvious that they're caving into anti-choice activists, and specifically, as I noted at Slate, into the ridiculous idea that you can separate "good girl" health care from "bad girl" health care, the latter being everything from cervical cancer prevention and treatment to abortion. And yes, before we forget, it's all lumped together with the anti-choice movement now. That's how they made the HPV vaccine an issue in the Republican primary, because it's widely believed that preventing cervical cancer gives girls "license" to be sluts.
In other words, a supposedly anti-cancer charity just threw their lot in with people who believe that cancer shouldn't be prevented if it's linked to sexually transmitted diseases. Objectively pro-cancer, at least for women they deem slutty, i.e. about 95% of us.
Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, doesn’t buy the foundation’s explanation, either. “That’s specious,” she said. Instead, Pearson says, “Komen’s chicken. Komen’s caving to pressure.” This is what antiabortion activists do so well: “They will target the providers and the people who relate to the providers,” she says. That’s because “they can’t make Planned Parenthood stop providing abortions” and “they can’t find any evidence that Planned Parenthood is inappropriately using federal funds.”
That's when I realized that anti-choicers do this so well because the war on reproductive health care is basically a witchhunt, and the religious fundamentalists behind it are the modern day version of medieval paranoids of old who believed that women who didn't conform to their exacting standards were consorting with Satan. In fact, considering the span of time and cultural change, the fact that the argument hasn't changed at all---they really do believe pro-choice health care providers are consorting with Satan---is almost startling. It's like they lifted it directly from their medieval ancestors. Except, instead of condemning witches to the stake, they simply want to keep them from doing their jobs, and allowing the other witches, i.e. women whose sexual choices they disapprove of, suffer from various afflications ranging from forced childbirth to death from cervical cancer as a warning to others to stay away from the devil's playground of sexual pleasure. And like traditional witch hunters, they have lurid imaginations, and project all their strange fantasies onto their targets, which is why abortion providers or even just pro-choice clinics have been accused of everything from running sex trafficking rings to instigating genocide to putting fetuses in food. And that's on top of the lurid accusations flung at the kinds of women who might visit a Planned Parenthood, especially unmarried young women. Those women are accused of creating sex cults around Plan B, organizing orgies for the strange purpose of getting really colorful penises in the room, and of using abortion as "birth control", i.e. preferring the no-doubt unequalled pleasures of a good uterus scraping to boring old pill use. I've definitely seen some medieval-style flights of fancy aimed at me personally, including a blogger putitng up a picture of me in a red sweater to make insinuations about the kind of woman who wears red. No, I'm serious.
But the most salient feature of a witch hunt is that the witch hunters, in their paranoia, are always looking to expand the circle of "guilt". They imagine demons in every corner, and vast conspiracies promoting what they believe is evil that need to be rooted out. In medieval witch hunts, if someone who didn't like you remembered you buying a chicken from the accused witch, you better fall to your knees and start accusing the accused of putting a curse on your family, or you might be assumed to be guilty, too. That's basically what's going on here. Because of the witch hunt logic, it does seem to be that more and more of women's health care is being rolled up under the word "abortion", which is why anti-choicers blithely claims that's all Planned Parenthood does. You can point out repeatedly that 97% of its services are not abortion, but in their mind, that's like saying that the accused witch spent some of her time not doing witchcraft. In their minds, while she slept she was consorting with Satan, and time spent with her pet cat now is her consorting with a familiar. I can't tell you how many times I've been called a "baby killer". Even if you are stupid enough to believe that abortion is killing babies, that accusation doesn't make sense; I've never had nor performed an abortion. But that's the point. The word "abortion" for anti-choicers long ago ceased to mean "terminating a pregnancy". Now it's just a catch-all scare term to be flung around whenever you want to whip people into a frenzy of hatred over women's liberation, especially women's sexual liberation.
Anyone who thinks breast cancer can be neatly cordoned off from this growing circle of hate for all things women's health care is fooling themselves. That's not how witch hunts work. The fear here is not about fetuses or babies per se, but a deep-set fear of female sexuality. Already anti-choicers have scooped breast cancer under the umbrella "abortion", claiming that abortion causes breast cancer. (It doesn't.) Komen would rather side with people who see breast cancer as god's judgment on you for having an abortion rather than side with people support comprehensive health care for women. That tells you all you need to know about their organization. I'm all for picking up your sneakers and taking up running as a hobby, but recommend now you do it for you, and not for the ever-elusive cure for cancer.
As usual, Jesse and I will be tweeting coverage of the Florida primary tonight, which you can check out here for me and here for Jesse. If you're not watching Twitter already, however, I highly recommend it. People are freaking out about the decision of Susan G. Komen to drop their support for Planned Parenthood. I'll be dumping links as fast as they're being created on this breaking story. It may seem like a small thing, but today was a big loss for women's health and a big loss for science.
At XX Factor yesterday, I joked that Gingrich and other anti-choice nuts are going to rethink their opposition to stem cell research in record time if, as hoped, a cure for a certain form of erectile dysfunction is created. Really, it was only half a joke. The ugly truth of the matter is right wingers' utterly different approach to women's reproductive health care and men's access to ED drugs demonstrates that contrary to their claims of simply acting on devotion to Jesus, these folks are using religion as a cover for a deep-set misogyny. From the Catholic Church to most info you can find on religious websites to the anti-choice members of Congress, when asked about Viagra, they are supportive. Republicans like John McCain have routinely voted against bills that would require insurance companies that cover Viagra to cover contraception. The reason for this is simple: plain misogyny. Anti-choicers tend to see contraception as a "party drug" that allows dirty sluts to go slut it up. But they see Viagra as allowing men their god-given erections. That this is a hypocrisy is glossed over with an argument I've seen all over religious websites, but is best voiced by Bill O'Reilly:
The argument is that erectile dysfunction is a condition that needs to be cured, but since pregnancy is "natural" (actually, so is erectile dysfunction, as it's often just part of aging), preventing it is dirty slutdom. It's the thinnest of excuses for naked misogyny, especially if you consider that the worst that will happen physically to a man who doesn't get an erection is that he doesn't get an erection, but a pregnant woman is going to suffer weight gain and severe pain no matter what, and some of the more serious side effects of pregnancy are diabetes, stroke, and even death.
Since anti-choicers by and large present themselves as devout Christians who are only doing god's will, however, that makes this misogynist bullshit even worse. Right now, the Catholic bishops are screeching because the HHS is going to require them to cover birth control prescriptions for organizations they control that hire from and serve the general public. What's nakedly sexist about this is the Biblical justifications for banning abortion and contraception are extremely thin, but the Biblical justification for denying access to Viagra is really sound. Anti-choicers have cast around wildly in the Bible looking for verses that mention abortion or contraception---which have been around in one form or another since roughly forever---and haven't found much. A little poetic language about the womb doesn't mean banning abortion, nor does a strange story about a man defying god's direct orders to impregnate his dead brother's wife say much about contraception so much as the importance of taking direct god-orders seriously.
But Paul's writings in the New Testament are pretty clear on this: he thinks while married sex is better than fornication, no sex at all is the best of all possible worlds. He reluctantly allows that married people, having already gone ahead and been dirty sex-havers, should continue to do that, but it's definitely less than ideal. With this worldview in mind, the Christian seems obligated not to see erectile dysfunction as a tragedy, but as god sending a hint to you that your days of being distracted from your worship by sexual concerns are being called to an end. Paul seems very clear on the point that people have sex for fun and not really for procreation, so the use of birth control strikes me as no more sinful by this measure than simply marrying in the first place. But trying to reverse god-given celibacy with modern medicine seems like directly defying god's obvious will when he struck you with ED. That is, if you read the Bible with an intention to actually doing what it says. Most Christians---even the good ones---come to the Bible with a predetermined belief in what's right and look for rationalizations in the verses. It's clear with anti-choicers that they just don't like women and seek verses that reinforce that, ignoring the fact that Paul is probably just as concerned with how filthy male sexuality is as female.
The good news is I'm not Christian, so I'm free to see all this hostility to sexuality as perverse, and believe instead that sex is up there with chocolate and warm days in reasons to be thankful to be alive, and that medical science should make it their business to make the enjoyment of life safer and less stressful. Thus, Viagra and birth control for all!
On that note, enjoy this story of a legislator in Virginia who has introduced a bill requiring that men who want Viagra undergo a rectal exam in order to do so. For their own health, you know. Just like those mandatory vaginal probes fro women seeking abortion.
Republican appeals to the white working class have always been fraught, and not just because Republicans are trying to hoodwink this group with talk of abortion and gays in order to get them to vote against their own economic interests. It's also because it's always been illogical. On top of race-baiting and sexism, one of the big rhetorical strategies has been to pit the white working class against well-paid professionals (who are in fact becoming more liberal, though that's a recent shift) they deem the "liberal elite", with the hopes of distracting the white working class from the independently wealthy. It's illogical, since the argument is that rich fat cats who make a lot of money off other people's work are somehow a less appropriate target for class resentments than doctors, college professors and laywers who make a lot of money, but do so clocking in to a productive job every day like their working class brethern. But it's been somewhat effective, in no small part because your average working class white person probably knows someone of the working upper middle class, and they probably don't know any of the obscenely wealthy. Most of us are more likely, in other words, to know someone like the Obamas than the Romneys. So they're an easier target to describe meaningfully while dredging up resentments against them.
But another reason a lot of conservative thought leaders are so good at painting a picture of a snooty professional elite who wouldn't deign to rub shoulders with ordinary working Americans is that they are those people. In fact, far more so than the liberal versions of themselves much of the time. And really, while they're good at setting up people of their own class as hate-objects, they can barely conceal their disdain for working class whites. They just project it on liberals, and hope that their target audience doesn't notice what's going on.
Well, Charles Murray has blown their cover. That's all I can say about his latest book where he simulataneously plays the same cards that conservatives have for a long time, accusing the professional elite of being out of touch with "real" Americans, i.e. the white working class, and then proceeding to tell professional elites that their duty is to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the white working class and scold them to keep it in their pants. As part of the marketing for his book, he's released a quiz where you can rate how "in touch" you are with the working man by counting your visits to Applebee's, which is a typical exercise in claiming that a certain kind of American is the ony real one, a standard issue strategy for conservatives. But most of the book is about how people who would presumably rate high on his Quiz de Vicious White Trash Stereotypes are intellectually and morally inferior to the professional class, and thus need a good talking-to.
Frankly, I think Murray needs to be forced to choose. Are white working class Americans the only Real Americans, and anyone who is less than keen on drinking a Miller Lite in a Chili's is an evil snob? Or are the evil snobs the superior people here, and Real Americans are an unwashed mass of perverts who need to straighten up and fly right?
See, what's nice about being an evil liberal is that I don't have to deal with these problems. I don't think that conservative working class white culture is either the One True Culture, nor do I think that it's the business of upper class or upper middle class folks to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the rest of the country, bleating about how everything is going to hell because someone somewhere is fucking without a marriage license. The beauty of the "We Are the 99%" slogan is that it gets to the heart of this: the real elite in this country has, by treating our markets like a big casino, laid waste to our economy and screwed over everyone else. What's interesting to me is that idiots like Murray can never get past unbelievably superficial anger about sex and getting conservative haircuts (which is presumably what he means by "work ethic", because it's ludicruous to think any actual working Americans have been slacking off when it comes to actual working, which we do too much of) to ever stop and think that perhaps different people make different choices about marriage and haircuts for good reasons. Of course, deeper analysis would reveal that in fact, it's not that Americans collectively got immoral and stupid so much as that the very elite who control this country economically have been gobbling up a larger and larger slice of the pie, leaving the rest of us fighting over scraps. And Murray can't have that.
By the way, I did start to take the quiz and got really bored, but unsurprisingly, considering my family background, I was scoring a lot of points on it. But I have to point out that the fishing question is a little geographical-ist, since people who live in the desert really have to travel far to go fishing much of the time. Also, my long-standing defense of the deliciousness of many American piss beers is, in my experience, has proven to be generally useless in getting the liberal elite to care or conservative America to be less wary of me. But perhaps my dedication to not doing something so bourgeois as get married is good for giving Murray the vapors.
Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.
He spends a lot of time in this interview lying, claiming that things that the Republicans caused are Obama's fault (such as the "not working together" whine), but the boldness of this is breath-taking. But I'm glad he said it, because a lot of Beltway media is happy to convince themselves that the 1998 impeachment was an anomaly that was unique to the Clinton White House. Instead, I'd say that we're better off assuming that Republicans feel that it's always an option they're eager to take when an "illegitimate", i.e. Democratic, President is in the White House. That his race and family background causes conservatives to panic only makes the whole situation worse.
Republicans simply believe the White House belongs to them, and one party should hold it in perpetuity. Unfortunately, this idea that a Democrat holding that office is somehow an interloper has subtly seeped into the unconscious of people who would probably even voted for Obama. I've noticed a maddening habit in the mainstream media of claiming that Republicans are seeking to "reclaim" the White House, as if it was theirs to begin with. I haven't heard that verb used with relation to Democrats, who tend to merely "win" that election. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I do listen carefully for these things. Subtle things like that end up reinforcing conservatives' belief that they're the only "real" Americans, and that therefore the White House is their property.
What's funny, of course, is that they just get more shrill about how they're the only "real" Americans when the people who have the markers of the tribe---white, Christian suburbanites who adhere to more traditional gender roles---are dwindling in numbers compared to the rest of us. Unfortunately, we need to realize that their panic over this is only going to make them more determined to impeach Obama the first chance they get on the thinnest of made-up charges. It's not like Republicans in Congress have anything better to do with their time. All they ever do is try to get more tax cuts for the wealthy and push anti-choice legislation. That's not really a full time job, giving congressional Republicans lots of time to concoct ways to impeach the President.
My secret theory about the wacky Republican primary season is that they're jealous (as usual) of liberals and Democrats, who got to have a long, drawn-out primary last year. I mean, it wasn't actually that fun for us, and some people will never be friends again, but it sure got us a lot of attention! So, they're trying to repeat it, but as usual when conservatives try to act like liberals, it ends up being a weak and pathetic imitation. Just a theory.
Anyway, to recover from the shitshow that was last night's debate: Panda Party! And a song for the Republican primary:
Updated to add: Jesse and I will both be tweeting the Florida debate tonight. Please tune in! To us, that is. If you don't want to listen to Gingrich go off on a lecture about how 8-year-olds aren't earning their keep, I can't blame you.
If this was a Tumblr, these would be two separate posts, but since it's an old-fashioned blog, I'm cramming them into one.
First thing: My immediate response to Newt Gingrich whipping out his weird moon man fantasies again is that I've finally determined what sitcom character I believe Gingrich is. I've already dubbed Ron Paul to be the Dale Gribble of the contest, but Gingrich may be an even better character:
You could really play a "Newt or Dr. Spacemen" game with some of these quotes:
"Science is whatever we want it to be."
And isn't it easy to imagine this coming out of the mouth of Newt, the so-called historian: "Boy, it's crazy to think we used to determine questions of paternity by dunking a woman in water until she admitted she made it all up. Different times, the 60s."
And this is completely unrelated, but awesome. Samhita Mukhopadhyay----author, feminist, friend, and all-around excellent person---has put up a Tumblr to protest Valentine's Day called Occupy Valentine's Day. It's a great place for all you radical perverts to explain that you're too busy having butt sex to worry about buying no-doubt non-sustainable flowers in a scripted act of relationship maintenance. There's a submit button at the top where you can submit pictures of yourself holding signs, videos, cartoons, "bitch, please" gifs....
Whatever your heart desires. Marc and I did one together, and let me tell you, it wasn't easy coming up with this idea. The first 30 we came up with were schmoopy, and my lifelong rejection of public acts of schmoopiness is one of the top ten reasons I don't like Valentine's Day in the first place. We eventually decided nothing is less schmoopy than an animated gif that has lots of curse words.
He was much easier to work with than the cat when I'm trying to get her to do something cute so I can take a picture of it. Seriously, read the whole blog and submit your own. There are some truly inspiring entries on there, and some faces you may recognize.
A bill introduced in the Oklahoma Legislature has some folks scratching their heads, as it prohibits "the manufacture or sale of food or products which use aborted human fetuses."
Since the bill was introduced late last week by State Sen. Ralph Shortey, a Republican from Oklahoma City, corners of the Internet have been buzzing with the news, as people try to figure out two things: 1) is this real; and 2) is there any reason the bill might be needed?
1) Yes. This guy really did introduce this bill. 2) No, and how stupid do you have to be?
Shortey is now in full blown wingnut deflection mode, giving weird and obtuse answers when asked about why he wrote this bill. But I have no doubt that he literally thinks fetuses are going into food. Anti-choicers have a lot of weird theories about what abortion providers do with the fetuses they remove. The answer, in the real world, is they dispose of it like you do all biowaste removed during surgeries. In most abortions, the embryo is just a teeny portion of everything removed during the procedure, after all. But there's a ton of lurid urban legends in Christian right circles about fetus-eating, and claims that abortion providers keep fetuses in their refrigerator in order to eat them, I suppose on their lunch break or something. It's a little hard to understand how people can be so delusional, but you have to remember, these are people who believe in angels and demon possession and that Tim Tebow is blessed by god. They have a lot of practice believing impossible things.
The fetus now measures about 2.5 inches from crown to rump and weighs between three-tenths of an ounce and half an ounce.
Let's face it: it would take a lot of fetuses to get even your bare minimum of protein requirements in a day. An adult man needs about 2 ounces of protein a day, so you'd need something like 4-6 abortions per day to reach just that. It's not something the fast food industry could really rely on. Mathematically, it's implausible, and of course, real world-style, it's just ridiculous to believe this.
Because I am a massive nerd, I love Wired. But the cover story in the latest issue left me pretty frustrated. Don't get me wrong; it's super interesting. The writer, Tom Vanderbilt, looks at the various ways that Google and car companies are closing in on cars that will drive themselves, using robotics technology that can basically learn how to operate a car like a person. Besides describing the technology, Vanderbilt examined the question of whether people would even want that. After all, Americans love the freedom and control that a car represents. But as one Google researcher pointed out, that's not really how the daily experience of a car is for most people:
“Most of driving is not a car commercial,” he says. “The average American commutes 52 minutes a day, with the purpose of getting from point A to point B, not with the purpose of winding through the mountains and enjoying The Sound of Music.”
I agree with this sentiment. Owning a self-driving car doesn't mean that it always has to be on autopilot; on those occasions when you're driving through the mountains, car commercial-style, you can turn it off. But most time spent in the car is a drag: going to work, going to store, trying to find a parking space, boring crap like that. I bet a lot of people would love to pass the responsibility on to a robot, so they can then, as Vanderbilt admits, use the time for texting or looking at Facebook on their phones.
Which brings me to why I was frustrated. These companies are spending a lot of money on researching self-driving cars to address the desire of people to be able to commute without having to drive. But there's already a superior solution to that problem, one that addresses both the desire to not drive and it's better for the environment: public transportation. People don't need self-driving cars! They need better trains and buses, and more accessible trains and buses. Imagine if the resources being devoted to self-driving cars were instead aimed at expanding the public transportation infrastructure and making in more comfortable. For instance, Vanderbilt is right that people's desire to surf the net instead of watch the road could incline them to want to avoid driving to work, if that were an option. Well, why not put high-speed wi-fi internet on all public transportation, and then advertise the shit out of it? Instead of spending money on developing self-driving cars, what about high-speed trains? What about more subway systems? There's a serious "reinventing the wheel" problem here.
But Vanderbilt addresses none of that, even though that question hangs in the mind of any halfway intelligent reader. I did a Ctrl-F search for the word "train", to make sure I didn't accidentally miss mention of the competition. The first time the word appears on the page, it's in the comment section. Actually, the first comment:
I'd love to live in a city where I could walk or bike safely to nearly all of my regular destinations and take a train or bus to the other ones.
Self-driving cars are a bad solution to a problem caused by automobile-centric urban planning and design that demands the need for cars.
Exactly. For all I know, the price of getting access to the prototypes was to not mention the obvious---that self-driving cars are a distraction from the real transportation needs of our country---but it's a weird oversight. If Google really is interested in not being evil, they should redirect their brain trust away from self-driving cars and more towards better and more extensive public transportation. Even something as simple as making Amtrak more comfortable and appealing would be an interesting and more useful project.
Taxes are confusing. No, not because of our insanely complex tax code, or because of the various forms we have to fill out every April. No, taxes are confusing because we've spent the past thirty-two years hearing from the modern Republican Party that taxes are too high on high earners and too low on low earners and that corporate tax rates are simultaneously too high and there are too many handouts for industries. You may think you're taxed one way, but the GOP is here to tell you that you can't trust your paycheck or your tax return or anyone else's tax return, because there's an economist at the Heritage Foundation who woke up in an opium den and figured out how you're being double taxed.
With this in mind, I'd like to share with you the Republican Guide to Taxation, a handy guide to figuring out how the GOP thinks about taxes. Don't blame me, I'm just the messenger.
Topic 1: How Much Do People Pay In Taxes?
Well, it depends how you look at it. From an income perspective, most people pay very little to nothing. All of those people who work pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, but those don't count because they're benefits that people in lower income brackets may one day receive. People who earn a lot of money, however, pay a criminal amount of taxes.
From a consumption perspective, you pay around, say, 30 to 35% in "embedded taxes". This calculation comes from a top secret formula that can best be summarized as follows:
What's a good, round number that people will buy? + What's higher than the consumption tax we want to put in place? = Embedded tax rate.
Simple enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
But...wait. If you're poor, virtually all of your income goes toward consumption. So doesn't that mean that poor people actually pay a 30 to 35% tax rate?
Technically, yes.
Then poor people would seem to have a really high tax rate according to this math.
That's until you realize that the poor pay for all of their food with food stamps. Food stamps come from tax dollars. Basically, hard working job creators pay taxes to produce food that poor people buy with the very tax dollars job creators paid in the first place.
Then...hold on, what?
Don't worry about it. All you need to know is that thanks to Obama's oppressive tax system, the minority of Americans pay for the majority.
Isn't our tax system basically Bush's tax system with a payroll tax cut added in?
Barack Obama has been president of taxes since 2001.
Topic 2: Double Taxation
As you may know, Mitt Romney has a tax burden under 15%. You know this because you're dumb and you believe the liberal media spin that comes from using arithmetic on numbers to arrive on figures. Taxes are not calculated using math. Taxes, at least for the richest Americans, are calculated using inferential accumulation.
Here's how it works. A corporation is a distinct legal entity designed to acheive certain business goals and absorb certain legal liabilities from its owners and operators. Corporations pay a corporate income tax in America that is the highest in the developed world, except for corporations who have accountants, in which case it's usually really low.
Corporations earn money, and pay taxes on their profits. Individuals are allowed to invest in companies by purchasing stock in them. Stock is a capital asset. If the individual holds on to that asset for more than a year and then sells it or receives a dividend from it, their profit is considered a long-term capital gain. Capital gains are taxed, and long-term capital gains are taxed at lower rates than regular income.
The original rationale for this was that long-term capital gains, if taxed as income, would almost always be taxed at the highest marginal income tax rate because people who get long-term capital gains tend to be really rich. Really rich people would be less likely to invest if they had to pay regular taxes on the money they earned for putting their money at risk to get more money back by letting other people do things with it. This is in stark contrast to rich people who put their money at risk by owning and operating businesses that do actual things and produce goods and services, who pay higher tax rates because they're chumps.
So, the corporation pays corporate taxes, and then when it pays out dividends to stockholders, the stockholders pay taxes on the money they receive. This happens because the government taxes realization events - when a person actually receives money they didn't have before. The corporation pays 35%, at least technically, and then the stockholder pays 15%. Most people, when confronted with this, would think that the stockholder pays 15%. This is because most people are subliterate, thanks to government schools.
In reality, the stockholder pays 50%, because corporations aren't people and only people pay taxes. The stockholder is thus double taxed, because the legally distinct entity that paid taxes on its profits and wasn't necessarily obligated to pay the stockholder anything when it earned those profits could have paid the tax money out to stockholders and didn't, because, again, the food stamps.
Frequently Asked Questions
Didn't Mitt Romney say that corporations are people?
Corporations are only people in terms of buying political ads. At all other times, they are simply legal fictions necessary because the government won't absolve participants in capitalism of legal responsibility for killing people.
If double taxation exists, then what's Mitt Romney's actual tax burden?
Romney pays 35% in corporate taxes, plus 15% in capital gains taxes. He donates about 13% to charity, which also counts as taxes because...well, I don't have an explanation for that one. He pays about 10% in state and local taxes, let's say. He pays the 30 to 35% embedded tax on everything he consumes. He will be leaving an estate worth hundreds of millions to his family, so let's put in the 35% estate tax rate that he'll pay even though he'll be dead and his children will be the people actually writing the check for the property they inherited.
Most mornings, except weekends, at Casa del Marcotte, we get up in the morning. The first thing on our minds is work. I make coffee and get right to it on my computer, since I work at home. My dude gets dressed, walks to the subway, and takes the train to his office. Often we both work late---really often. Like most Americans, our lives are basically consumed by work. Unlike a lot of Americans, we're lucky because we have fulfilling jobs, for sure, but they are still work. Like most Americans, 100% of our income is from work, except maybe like the occasional birthday or Christmas card from relatives with a check instead of a present in it. Americans work more hours than our counterparts in Western Europe and have fewer vacations. (Being a freelancer, I haven't really taken a vacation-vacation where I completely unplug, I think, ever, actually. But being unable to unplug is increasingly a part of even salaried and hourly employees' lives.) Because most non-retired Americans are dependent on work for 100% of their income, losing a job is devastating, often worse that a divorce. Because most of us derive 100% of our income from working, taxes are a legitimate burden, though one most of us---except a few extremist wingnuts---believe is part of the responsibilities of being an American.
Contrast that with what we've learned about Mitt Romney from his tax returns: 1) He pays a low rate in taxes, lower than many of us who derive our income from working 2) His work income is pocket change compared to the money he makes sitting on his ass paying other people to make money for him and 3) He makes more in a day doing nothing than your average American makes in a year of life being consumed by work.
The critical words here are DOING NOTHING. Romney jokes that he's "unemployed", when in fact the proper term is the "idle rich". He was employed at one point, sure, but it's laughable to say that his wealth is the result of "hard work", as every wingnut apologist mindlessly says. Most Americans don't have the option of making more money sitting on their ass than working. Retirement is usually associated with terms like "fixed income", not "exploding amounts of wealth". But the claim from Republicans is that by taxing money you make by not working, you're somehow discouraging productivity, so we need to lower taxes on money made from not working, and shift the burden to those who actually work for their money. I hope it's clear what a giant pile of bullshit that is. If we actually want to adjust taxes to encourage productivity and discourage idleness, we need to jack the rates up on people like Mitt Romney and possibly even lower them on those of us whose lives are occupied by work from the time we get up in the morning to, if we're lucky, sometime after dinner. (And many of us work harder than that.) You know, those of us who contribute something.
Romney has said he was unemployed. He's right. He actually does nothing to earn most of his income. He's just in possession of a giant pile of cash. He pays some people to do stuff with that giant pile of cash so it earns a rate of return. And because we are ruled by horrible people who think the lives of the 1% are more important than everyone else, the tax rate on any money that pile of cash earns is much lower than it is on the money earned by people who actually work.
He snipes that those of us who work and want those---like him---who don't because they can just live like kings off investments to pay more taxes.....well, we're consumed with "envy". Perhaps. Or perhaps it's just that we actually believe, unlike Republicans who just pay lip service, to the concept of work, and we want the people who actually do it to get their fair share of the pie, instead of feeding it all to those who just feed off the money others actually make.
Taxes are confusing. No, not because of our insanely complex tax code, or because of the various forms we have to fill out every April. No, taxes are confusing because we've spent the past thirty-two years hearing from the modern Republican Party that taxes are too high on high earners and too low on low earners and that corporate tax rates are simultaneously too high and there are too many handouts for industries. You may think you're taxed one way, but the GOP is here to tell you that you can't trust your paycheck or your tax return or anyone else's tax return, because there's an economist at the Heritage Foundation who woke up in an opium den and figured out how you're being double taxed.