The Plan B thing means blogging is on the back burner for this morning, at least, but I figured you guys might enjoy ripping into this stellar example of a tone deaf letter from a Nice Guy®:

Hi Lauren,

I’m disappointed in you. I’m disappointed that I haven’t gotten a response to my voicemail and text messages.

FYI, I suggest that you keep in mind that emails sound more impersonal, harsher, and are easier to misinterpret than in-person or phone communication. After all, people can't see someone's body language or tone of voice in an email. I'm not trying to be harsh, patronizing, or insulting in this email. I'm honest and direct by nature, and I'm going to be that way in this email. By the way, I did a google search, so that’s how I came across your email.

I assume that you no longer want to go out with me. (If you do want to go out with me, then you should let me know.) I suggest that you make a sincere apology to me for giving me mixed signals. I feel led on by you.

Things that happened during our date include, but are not limited to, the following:

-You played with your hair a lot. A woman playing with her hair is a common sign of flirtation. You can even do a google search on it. When a woman plays with her hair, she is preening. I've never had a date where a woman played with her hair as much as you did. In addition, it didn't look like you were playing with your hair out of nervousness.

-We had lots of eye contact during our date. On a per-minute basis, I've never had as much eye contact during a date as I did with you.

-You said, "It was nice to meet you." at the end of our date. A woman could say this statement as a way to show that she isn't interested in seeing a man again or she could mean what she said--that it was nice to meet you. The statement, by itself, is inconclusive.

-We had a nice conversation over dinner. I don't think I'm being delusional in saying this statement.

In my opinion, leading someone on (i.e., giving mixed signals) is impolite and immature. It’s bad to do that.

He goes on to explain that she basically owes him a date because, you guessed it, he's such a nice, sensitive guy who didn't spit in her food or anything like that. Also, they have two interests in common, which, in his mind, entitles him to an ongoing relationship.

Have fun, kids. 

I have a post up at XX Factor laying out why this is just the stupidest decision possible from Sebelius, both in terms of the adolescents who are being kept from preventing pregnancy and in terms of adults who will continue to be forced to beg for emergency contraception from pharmacists. From every medical, humanitarian, and scientific viewpoint, Sebelius's unprecedented decision to overrule the FDA on this is the wrong decision. I think she knows that. I think Obama knows that, if he had a hand in this. They are not stupid people, and so they can't not know that. 

So why on earth did this happen? Well, it has to be political, doesn't it? I think so, yes. The Obama administration has already caught a lot of flack for classifying contraception as "prevention", and making it free without a co-pay, and so they threw teenage girls and adult women seeking EC out as a sacrificial lamb to "pay" for that. That seems obvious enough to me and apparently to the entire world. But a lot of people seem to think that's a really stupid decision, assuming that the opposition to OTC Plan B is the same as the opposition to covering contraception fully, that is, a bunch of misogynist wingnuts that will  never vote for Obama anyway, and no one else. And really, that was my first inclination, too. But then I started to check out some non-wingnut reactions, and now I'm not so sure anymore. Turns out a lot of people---especially men---who think of themselves as "reasonable" or moderate or even liberal, quickly glommed on to the argument that this ruling was addressing a parent's right to know. They falsely assumed that putting Plan B out of reach of teenagers will force teenagers to talk to their parents, and didn't consider that for many to most teenagers who were already not talking to parents, it will actually cause them to shut up about it and hope that they just don't get pregnant. 

From a teenager's perspective, skipping Plan B and praying you don't get pregnant is the best choice. Here are the possibilities from the perspective of a teenager who is already not communicating about sex with her parents:

Option #1: Tell my parents and get Plan B.* Doing this means a 100% chance of your parents finding out that you're fucking.  That is what is wished to be avoided. The teenager already not communicating with her parents knows that the consequences will be anything from a lecture that won't change her mind about fucking to, worst case scenario, a beating that won't change her mind about fucking. There is no value in this for the teenager. The parent will be upset, and she will be resolved in her decision to fuck. Remember being a teenager? Remember how much your parents disapproval of you growing up and trying new adult behaviors had no impact on your choices? Yeah, that hasn't changed. 

Option #2: Don't tell my parents and take my chances with getting pregnant. This reduces the odds of eventually coming clean to your folks to about 1 in 4, maybe even lower. If you do get pregnant, then you're just in the same boat you were with Option #1, so nothing is lost. But if you don't get pregnant, you never have to deal with it. If you do get pregnant and want an abortion, parents who are going to block that would have blocked Plan B, too, so again, you are in the same position as if you hadn't waited. 

Nothing to lose, and everything to gain, logically speaking, for a teenager who avoids asking for Plan B from a parent. So the "parent excuse" is illogical. Unfortuantely, a lot of people have completely forgotten about what it's like to be a teenager and are so self-absorbed, they can't get past thinking about how they don't want their own daughter to make a decision without asking for permission. And unfortunately, a lot of people in that position are likely Obama voters, so I can see how the administration decided not to cross them. It's still immoral and wrong to make such a political calculation, but in terms of a political calculatioon, it's not wrong. Sadly, many liberals and quite a few moderates believe teenage sexuality is immoral, even though they themselves were sexually active as teenagers. 

So this is who I blame: all of us. Anti-choicers are going to be anti-choicers. They don't want anyone fucking, and they want those who do to pay for it dearly with the loss of their health, their freedom, and even their lives. We can't change that. What we can change is  our reaction to it. And when it comes to teenage sexuality, liberals have unfortunately been unable to offer a strong defense of teenagers' rights and teenagers' desires, allowing anti-choice rhetoric to gain more of a hold than it should have.

The problem comes back to the phrase, "They're going to do it whether we like it or not." 

This is a favorite phrase of liberals defending everything from sex education to condom access for teenagers. It buys into the assumption that teenage sexuality is automatically illicit, and that the ideal would be retaining your virgnity until some non-disclosed point in the future. It treats teenagers having sex with each other as an unavoidable tragedy, like a hurricane. We argue that sex education is a matter of harm reduction, instead of viewing it as a baseline for one of the best parts of life. It's in direct opposition to how we teach driving. We frame driving as an exciting new development that demonstrates that a teenager is getting closer to adulthood. Yes, it's about responsibility, but everyone involved is happy because we know that it's really cool getting to the point where you can start going where you what when you want, and the fun and freedom that affords you. On the contrary, most adults imagine the discovery that an adolescent is sexually active as a tragic event for the family that requires recriminations and possibly even punishment. In this environment, the idea that the government policy should be about forcing this discovery instead of protecting adolescent health makes all too much sense.

Some liberals offer support for this more progressive view of teenage sexuality, pointing out that we all were doing it as teenagers, and it turned out pretty well on the whole. And would have been even better if there hadn't been so much shame and fear. But mostly liberals buy the idea that teenage sexuality should be treated like a form of acting out and misbehaving, and that when you turn 18 or 21 or 25, you should be able to flip a switch that makes it about pleasure and bonding. Until liberals as a group are willing to be outspoken in our support of teenagers' right to grow  into their sexuality at their own pace---and that we did so ourselves, and it was fine---we can expect Democrats to take a punitive approach to teenage sexuality instead of a sex-positive, health-centric view. 

*Even for the minority of kids who take this road, it's still less ideal than letting them buy Plan B OTC, because going to a parent, going to a doctor, and going to the pharmacy takes up a lot of precious time. You want to take Plan B with speed, because it prevents ovulation and if you ovulate before you take it, you're shit out of luck. Speed is of essence.

Via Whiskey Fire comes this illuminating piece from Jeff Carter at Townhall explaining why the sole blame for high unemployment is that people are too stupid and lazy to get jobs, coupled with "advice" on how to get one. Carter appears to believe that since a talentless moron like him can get work, so can you, though he's reluctant to offer wingnut welfare as an option, fearing the competition that arises when literally any moron could do your evil job. But what makes this piece special in the growing pile of hateful nonsense wingnuts are churning out to rationalize our terrible economy? Carter's amazing talents at literary interpretation:

If you are an unskilled laborer, it may seem like there are no opportunities. But, there are if you move to where the jobs are. In the 1930's and 1940's, there were several great migrations in the United States. The migration from the Great Plains to California was captured in the John Steinbeck novel about the Joad family. Many families moved from the rural south to the industrialized north for work. Just because you have lived your whole life in one area of the country doesn’t mean you are stuck there.

I'm surprised he didn't take it to the next level, and argue that you should avoid going on food stamps by pressing women with newborns into sharing their breast milk with you in lieu of purchased food. Maybe mow their lawn or something in exchange. My guess is that he didn't think of it, because he probably hasn't read the book, because even someone as dumb as Carter would grasp, upon reading The Grapes of Wrath, that Steinbeck has a fairly low opinion of people like the entire staff of Townhall. 

Which made me think about other classic works of literature and how they could be interpreted by conservatives, with or without actually reading the books in question. So I thought I'd make a list:

Oliver Twist: This story clearly demonstrates that putting bastard children into workhouses puts them on the path to peace and prosperity.

To Kill a Mockingbird: Innocent men can be convicted of rape just on a woman's word, so we should dismiss rape cases unless the crime happened in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses, and the victim was a virgin on her way to church. Additionally, growing up in racist communities brings out the best in little girls.

Angels in America: The key is getting religion before you let dudes put it in your butt, and then you wouldn't get AIDS.

Moby Dick: The endangered species list is wrong, because it prevents good men from fulfilling their dreams.

A Christmas Carol: The ending demonstrates that we need  no government regulation, because our capitalist leaders are so naturally generous and fair.

The Handmaid's Tale: Women should simply give up on this feminism thing so that men aren't forced to take drastic action.

The Lottery: When your number's up, it's better for everyone if you don't whine about it so much. 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Women who don't accept that men prefer to marry virgins are pathetic lost causes.

The House of Mirth: Women should spend their youth trying to get married as quickly as possible to the first man that will have them. 

Slaughterhouse-Five: WWII truly produced the greatest generation.

Come up with your own!

I know this is a topic that's done to death, but man, it's still a serious issue and I have to rant. Via Salon comes this story of a teenaged girl whose purse created a massive fuss at airport security because it looked like this: 

Yep. It had a picture of a gun on it. Not a gun, but a picture of it. The fuss caused the girl to miss her flight, and even though the TSA officials could see what is blatantly obvious---which is you cannot shoot or even threaten to shoot someone with a picture of a gun---they refused to let her have her purse, insisting she either check it or relinquish it. Security theater has literally become superstitious, as if merely thinking about guns behind the holy TSA security line is going to conjure them into being, along with terrorists to use them against people. 

I'm also mad because this is so stupid that any joke I can think of to make about it fails to live up to the absurdity of the situation. 

I don't fly all the time, but I fly pretty frequently, and I've gotten to the point where I can predict with about 90% certainty whether or not they're going to tear up my bag in security. I refuse to check bags if I can help it, not just because of the cost, but because it's such a pain picking them up at the baggage carousel. That means that I have basically everything in my carry-on suitcase, and it's pretty much impossible to have everything you travel with, especially if you're female, not be a beacon to overzealous TSA agents. You probably have a bottle that has 3.2 ounces of fluid, or maybe today they feel your zipper bag isn't clear enough. Or, in one case, I was yelled at for having a zipper bag---a clear one, mind you, which the TSA says is fine---because the agent got it into his head that it has to be a Ziploc bag. Sorry I try to avoid generating unnecessary trash, America! Anyway, it means if they're going to tear up someone's shit, I'm going to get it. So it depends on if they're in the mood for tearing up people's shit. 

So how do I predict with 90% certainty if I'm going to get my shit torn up that day? Is it because there's a whiff of terror in the air? Does it have to do with the likelihood of a terrorist attack starting in the airport I'm in? Does it reflect some orders from on high?

No. None of that. My nearly-foolproof system is to look at the TSA agents. If they are busy and/or having a good time joshing each other, then you won't get searched. If they're bored or in a bad mood, you're getting searched. Works, like I said, 9 out of 10 times. It's so predictable that I can guess often before I even see security lines if I'm going to get searched by looking at how big and busy the airport is. Slow or small airports usually mean bored and grumpy TSA agents, making the risk of searching high. With this excellent system, I have accurately predicted getting heavily searched in the following cities with small, slow airports: El Paso, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Midland. I got spared in Lubbock, which genuinely surprised me. In Midland, they didn't tear up my bag. No, what they did was even sillier. I had already taken my laptop, per TSA instructions, and they got it in their heads that this wasn't good enough and put it in the bomb detection machine. Of course, about 4 people came through security in about 15 minutes, so they were really bored, and they had that bomb detecting machine on hand, so it's almost hard to blame them for their boredom-relieving techniques. In St. Louis, they made a solid 5-6 minute fuss over my portable iPod player, which was treated like an inscrutable device that required at least three passes through the machine and a complete rearranging of my suitcase that I had carefully packed that morning.

The one city I've never been searched in? New York City. Even though, statistically speaking, half of my flights go through a busy, New York area airport. 

It's theater, pure and simple. The message is: be afraid. Not of terrorists, of course. Those are protected against much more by secured pilot doors and passengers who now know to fight back. The message is to be afraid of the TSA. Make sure not to laugh too loudly while in line or look too peeved when they search your shit, or they may decide you really look dangerous and need extra searching. They have the power to make you miss your flight, and that danger is immediate and very real, unlike the vague threats of terrorism that all this security is supposedly there to prevent. 

Notable Christian (and unnotable quarterback) Tim Tebow is everyone's favorite topic of sports conversation, and, more importantly, the topic of this exact conversation over and over again:

GUY: "God, Tim Tebow is shitty."

OTHER GUY: "He keeps winning!"

GUY: "He throw ten passes a game, connects on four of them, and the Broncos' defense does all the work to keep them in the game so that he can 'drive them to victory.' He's such a sanctimonious toolbox."

OTHER GUY: "Oh, so you hate him for being Christian!"

GUY: "No, I hate him for being bad at his job and still having thousands upon thousands of people who cheer for him because he bows down in reflective prayer every time a camera's around. I hate him because he's played awful team after awful team, barely beat them with help from a defense that has to work its ass off every week, and he's still supposed to be a star despite being Mark Sanchez with a Jesus piece."

OTHER GUY: "I think that says more about you than about him."

It's that last line that's utterly infuriating. The NFL is rife with quarterbacks who've won despite not adding much to their teams - they're competent guys who aren't asked to do much and deliver exactly that. Trent Dilfer won Super Bowl XXXV as the 31st-ranked quarterback in the league, because he had a great defense.  Terry Bradshaw is a hall of famer whose career QB rating is 70.9 - he was basically just good enough to not screw up his team's amazing defense. Brad Johnson won a championship with the Buccaneers, mainly because of (you guessed it) his team's stellar defense.

The phenomenon of mediocre game managers steering teams to victory is nothing new. But in the case of Tebow, it is. You placing him in that category says more about you than about him...as Jen Floyd Engel is happy to remind us.

What if Tim Tebow were a Muslim?

Imagine for a second, the Denver Broncos quarterback is a devout follower of Islam, sincere and principled in his beliefs and thus bowed toward Mecca to celebrate touchdowns. Now imagine if Detroit Lions players Stephen Tulloch and Tony Scheffler mockingly bowed toward Mecca, too, after tackling him for a loss or scoring a touchdown, just like what happened Sunday.

I know what would happen. All hell would break loose.

Stinging indictments issued by sports columnists. At least a few outraged religious leaders chiming in on his behalf. Depending on what else had happened that day, they might have a chance at becoming Keith Olbermann's Worst Person In The World.

And there would be apologies. Oh, Lord, would there be apologies — by players, by coaches, possibly by ownership with a tiny chance of a statement from NFL commish Roger Goodell.

You cannot mock Muslim faith, not in this country, not anywhere really.

Awww...she has a sad because Muslims don't get mocked for being kind of crappy athletes whose popularity is due entirely to their preening displays of faith. Here's a list of famous Muslim athletes. In case you were wondering, not a one of them followed up scoring a basket or having a good round by pulling out a mat and praying to Mecca, because to do such a thing would have been kind of dickish. 

His religious fervor is an easy target for the vitriol spewed from those who dislike him, but the reasons are much deeper than that. From his advocacy of abstinence to his infamous “You will never see another team play this hard” speech at Florida, it is like he is too good to be true. He is too nice, and thereby we want him to trip up so we can feel better. We want him to be revealed as a hypocrite, and when that fails to happen, we settle for gleefully celebrating his failures on the football field. And why? Because he dares to say thanks?

No. It's because he's not that good. And, more importantly, it's because he's built up this cult of personality that tells us we must root for his success because he's such a good person and, by extension, such a better person than us. It's not the negative reaction to Tebow that's an indication of moral weakness or a character flaw; it's the breathless worship and reflexive moral superiority that we're supposed to imbue to the 47.5% of passes he completes. 

What this whole repeating cycle of Tebow — rip his game, mock his faith, rise to his defense, repeat — has revealed about religious discourse in America is ugly. We have become so enamored of politically correct dogma that we protect every minority from even the slightest blush of insensitivity while letting the very institutions that the majority holds dear to be ridiculed. And this defense that Tebow invites such scrutiny with his willingness to publicly live as he privately believes calls into question what exactly it is we value.

And herein lies the problem. Tim Tebow's value to people like Engel isn't the charity work he does. It isn't to the teammates he supports, or the fans he sends his love to. Tebow's value is that he lets people like Engel feel like enlightened victims of a society that doesn't see how good and pure she is. Tebow is the newest scapegoat in an old saga: the besiegement of true believers (or those who want to be true believers) by society at large. 

If there is a problem with mocking Tim Tebow, it's that he makes it too easy. He wants the slings and arrows of the world trained on him when he does Super Bowl commercials for Focus on the Family; he is the victim whenever someone makes fun of his signature kneel. That victimization feeds into the legend of Tebow and his flock, and makes him all the stronger even as he continues to be a poor man's Donovan McNabb (who is, at this point, his own poor man's Donovan McNabb). It doesn't matter what he does on the field, it just matters that he's morally superior while he does it.

Tim Tebow, as far as I can tell, isn't a bad guy. He's just a sanctimonious pseudo-dick whom a great number of people think can do no wrong because Ephesians is rattling around his head instead of his receiver's route. His sin isn't bowing to God on the field; it's empowering religious and cultural forces who've spent decades mercilessly mocking others to, once again, claim they're the victims in all of this.

I was recently alerted to the fact that this is what ABC considers an edgy, "high-concept" sitcom:

Yep, two men who, facing a horrible world of anti-male oppression that prevents an ordinary guy from getting jobs that are solely reserved for women by employers who blatantly discriminate in direct violation of federal law, decide to dress up like women in order to get those cush, high-paying jobs, presumably instead of being relegated to low-paid work like child care or working as hotel maids. Which are jobs that are dominated by men, you know, because getting a job while male is so hard. Sure, these guys provoke people to wonder if they're "really" women, but that's no big deal, because hey, the only people who have better access to high-paying employment than cis-women are trans-women, amirite?

This is all irritating shit, but honestly, my first thought was, "Uh, lazy ripoff much?"

But upon reviewing the evidence, I realized that "Bosom Buddies", while still sexist and transphobic, was actually less sexist and transphobic than "Work It" appears to be. The assumption underpinning "Work It" is that men are so heavily discriminated against in the job market that they have to dress as women to get jobs. On "Bosom Buddies", the rationale was more plausible: they wanted housing in a women's hotel. Affordable women's temporary housing has a long history in NYC and apparently, these places still exist. They have a long history that has nothing to do with anti-male discrimination, but are more properly understood as a response to some of the economic and social constraints put on women, as well as the expectation that single women are in a holding pattern until someone marries them. So that's interesting.

But beside the larger point. The larger point is that there's continuous hunger for mass entertainment that is predicated on the outrageous and utterly false claim that men have to endure living in a matriarchy where the mere fact of being male means they constantly suffer from domineering women and, now, employment discrimination. "Work It" is just the most obvious example, of course, but there's also the new Tim Allen sitcom "Last Man Standing", which is about a man whose life is constrained by a cadre of oppressive female forces. You know, to follow up "Home Improvement",, which was predicated on the idea that there's intense pressures for men to give up being "manly" and that power tools were a form of resistance. And that's not even touching the long list of domineering and ever-competent wives pushing their childlike husbands around on pretty much every other sitcom on television. 

In real life, while cis-women have made great strides (and trans-women are actively fighting for equal rights), men still dominate at home and in the workplace, and any responsible social science will attest to that. Women, not men, are expected to change their names upon marriage and expected to roll back their presence at work in order to care for children. Women make only 77% of what men do, and that's after you control for work hours. (In other words, full-time female workers make 77% of what full-time male workers do, and so claims that women "choose" to work less are irrelevant.) Men who transition to women make 32% less on average than they did while still publicly identifying as men, which means that the men on "Work It" would, in real life, be rewarded for moving from publicly male to female with a paycheck that's only 2/3 of what they had before. 

It's just a stupid sitcom, blah blah, but the reality is that shows like this that present the world as if it were completely opposite of how it actually is do a great deal of damage. People do turn to fiction to ponder what real life is like, and good fiction responds by showing characters who behave like actual human beings do. Unfortunately, bad fiction can legitimately confuse people and give audiences the sense that there's "evidence" for conservative claims that women are not only not discriminated against, but that it's men who are. 

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.

Politifact bills itself as a site dedicated to correcting the lies that come out of the mouth of politicians and political operatives. It's a great and necessary service. The problem with it, as you can imagine, is that the field of liars is so tilted to the right that if Politfact did an honest and thorough job, they would basically read like Media Matters, except focused on politicians and not media. This shouldn't be a problem, I would think. The right does the vast majority of the lying, and if you want to do a good job at being a non-partisan fact checker, you have to grow up and accept that. But Politifact, for whatever reason, is infected with a strong case of Bothsidesdoit. I don't know if it's a matter of avoiding a tax situation or if it's just that they've bought into the mainstream media fear that accepting reality will make them look "partisan", but either way, they have an ugly habit of dishonestly exaggerating the extent to which Democrats lie to make things look more "even". This is really evident in their contest for the 2011 Lie of the Year. The Republican lies all deserve to be runaway winners: that Planned Parenthood basically does nothing but abortions, that the HPV vaccine will make your kids retarded, that global warming isn't real and doesn't have scientific consensus behind it, that the economic stimulus created no jobs. 

But the "lies" they grabbed from Democrats to make it look more even and avoid accusations of partisanship? Well, the problem is that they mostly aren't lies. They may be hyperbole or over-simplifying, but nothing---not one---comes even within spitting distance of even the most mild Republican lie. They stretch so hard to find Democratic "lies" that they literally cite people blathering on Facebook and try to equate that with Rick Perry telling people that scientists are abandoning the theory of climate change. I'm not kidding. The most mild Republican lie they cite is that President Obama "went around the world and apologized for America," which was dropped by Romney, and I deem the most mild because it's vague enough that you could really stretch and find a way to rationalize it. Not a single Democratic "lie" uttered by a politician even comes close, and in fact most of them aren't even really "lies" by any normal sense of the word.

*Obama's claim to be the first administration that has done a comprehensive review of regulations and cut them. This is by far the biggest lie they dig up on the Democrats. And that's fine; Obama lied. Or at least didn't bother to look up the history before making claims about his bureaucratic prowess. They get to use it. But here's my question: is this really a competitive-level lie? By putting this lie into the finalist list, many others have missed the cut, from Perry saying that he hasn't seen Obama's real birth certificate (i.e. claiming that what Obama released in May is suspect, when it's not) to Herman Cain claiming China doesn't have nuclear weapons.

*The Democrats' claim that Republicans want to end Medicare. This isn't a lie. Politifact really streeeeeetches by using the fact that Republicans merely want to end Medicare gradually by cutting off anyone under 55 from ever receiving Medicare coverage. If Democrats said, "Republicans want to end all Medicare starting tomorrow," then that's a lie. But the fact of the matter is Republicans offered a plan to end Medicare, and saying so is not a lie. Politifact also tries to suggest that pushing people off Medicare and requiring them to buy private insurance with government vouchers isn't ending Medicare. That's like saying kicking kids out of school but giving them a few free textbooks isn't ending public education. You don't get this one on a technicality; you're lying to cover up the radical nature of the Republican plan. 

*Debbie Wasserman Schultz claiming that voter ID laws are a return to Jim Crow laws. Basically, Politifact's argument against this could be used if you brought back any kind of Jim Crow law without bringing them all back, which is, sure, it's basically Jim Crow, but it's not as bad. I'm not kidding! They basically argue that since a smaller percentage of minority voters will be disenfranchised, we all have to pretend the intent and the methods are not the same. They straight up claim that new voter ID laws aren't racist, which is a judgment call and not a matter of fact. And one that's very easy to argue down, since the naked racism behind many voter ID laws is not that hard to see. Many Jim Crow laws also pretended to be race-neutral, but history has judged them correctly as racist. C'mon, Politifact. Even bringing back a percentage of Jim Crow laws is unacceptable. Certainly it's not true that it's a lie to characterize something as "Jim Crow" when it is, in fact, a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise minority voters. At best, you get to whine about "tone", but being forthright in your speech is not lying. In many ways, it's the opposite of lying. They're dinging Wasserman Schultz for being blunt, and that's a much different thing.

*They claim that Obama's claim to not have raised taxes as President is a lie. This one is just sad, it's stretching so hard. The claim is that Obama lied when he said, "I didn't raise taxes once. I lowered taxes over the last two years." They just plain ignore the last one, because admitting the tax holiday that Obama gave on payroll taxes and admitting that he extended the Bush tax cuts makes this claim sound incredibly solid, and they want to make him sound like a liar, in order to appear non-partisan. So they focus strictly on the first part, even pathetically going so far as to claim that a new cigarette tax and a tax on tanning bed is "raising taxes", as if anyone really gives a shit about that. They also do some three card monte with health care reform, trying to claim that the tax penalty for not buying insurance is "raising taxes", when what it is would be better described as a tax penalty. The only thing they got on him for real is the slight tax raise on the wealthiest Americans to pay for health care reform---an additional .9% tax raise on people who make over $200,000 on their Medicare taxes. That's a legit tax raise, but it's inconsequential enough that I really don't think this lie rises to the level of biggest lie of 2011. It's not even in spitting distance of claims that Obama wasn't born here---which again, weren't even nominated---or claims that global warming isn't real or many of the various accusations leveled at immigrants that are simply untrue. 

Shame on Politifact for pandering so much. If they want to be considered a beacon of honesty and truth, they need to start at home.  Right now, they're basically saying that if a Democrat claims to have $2 when he really just has $1.99, that's the same lie as if a Republican says he has $2 and in fact he's got two nickels and a penny. That's some shameful shit right there. 

Well, the CSA (for those who don't know, that stands for community-supported agriculture) ended last week (sorry I forgot to mention that in the post), and I'm a little bereft. It's funny. A lot of people fear getting into a CSA because they worry about getting "weird" vegetables they don't know how to cook, and fear they'll fail at meal planning. But once you get into the swing of it, a CSA actually makes meal-planning easier, because it narrows your options down. You're standing there saying, "Well, whatever I do, I have to make something with this kohlrabi." When it ends is the hard part. Now you're standing there having to plan meals and you have no guidance whatsoever. Sometimes I go to the farmer's market and buy up a bunch of random stuff, but it's not the same. Part of it is that I'm trying hard to strike a balance between eating the seasons/eating locally and not spending way too much time on meal planning, and that can get hard. 

One thing that helps is the internet. The internet helps when you're in a CSA, because you can just plug ingredients into a search engine---often just Google---and get tons of recipes back. It makes it fun to mix and match stuff, just to see if it'll work. (Do a "let's see, I have some apples and some sweet potatoes, now voila! I have a casserole.) But without the CSA, I find myself spending more time reading blogs and bookmarking stuff I can shop for. Since blogs are trying to be relevant, they often fall into seasonal recipes, even if they're not trying to do a local/seasonal thing. Because they're foodies, they can often push you towards cooking with unusual ingredients that you might not have tried on your own, just as a CSA does. 

Here's some of my regular go-to places for recipes:

Simply Recipes: the best for diversity, ease of use, and comprehensiveness. Elise Bauer also updates regularly, so you're never wondering if she's got something new to be inspired by. It's not vegetarian, but it has a lot of vegetarian recipes. At the top is a post praising fennel, so you know she's not screwing around.

A Veggie Venture: More sporadic, but when they do post, it's usually got tons of useful information. They are also just seasonal-esque by habit, like Simply Recipes. Right now, the top post is a list of sweet potato recipes, for instance. 

Chop Bouie: Friend of the blog Jamelle Bouie has a Tumblr where he records some stuff he cooks. It's less a traditional recipe blog, and more just a matter of inspiration, but I find it very inspiring. He's not a vegetarian, but he does the sometimes-vegan thing, so there's some ideas there.

101 Cookbooks: A vegetarian blog that updates infrequently, but when they do update, it's a doozy. The blogger loves offbeat recipes, and has been known to cull them from vintage cookbooks. Good times.

Recipes for Health: One of the NY Times food blogs, but don't let the mainstream nature of it cause you to back away. Martha Rose Shulman is an adventurous cook with an eye towards health, ease, and often the exclusion of meat. She tends to put up five or six recipes linked by a single ingredient at a time, and it's usually at the height of the season. So perfect for seasonal/local eating.

Smitten Kitchen: Being a some time vegetarian is all the rage now that foodie-ness is overlapping with environmental concerns about sustainability. It used to be hard for vegetarians to read recipes from non-vegetarian sources, but a lot of food blogs now will go weeks at a time just putting up vegetarian recipes (or ones that can be tweaked easily). Bloggers are taking to heart Michael Pollan's food rule: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." I find that's the case with this marvelous little blog. 

Post-Punk Vegan Kitchen: The world of vegan cooking and vegan products puts me off, because a lot of it violates the "eat food" rule. Since the principle is to avoid animal products, concerns about overly processed or junk food tend to rate second, if they register at all. Too many fake meats and sweets, for instance. While this blog falls into that trap on occasion, however, she's really been moving away from that and towards a form of cooking that emphasize ingredients and de-emphasizes trying to mimick the toxic standard American diet. I get a lot of ideas from here.

What are some of your favorite food blogs?

This is a small item, but really jumped out at me as a classic example of how all-out the war of the rich on everyone else is right now in this country. There's no attempt at improving your lot in life so small that imperious fuckwits like Bloomberg won't try to put a stop to it. The latest example? New York City is trying to keep people from using services like Airbnb to make a little scratch on the side. 

Bunking in other people’s apartments is a growth industry. There’s a whole (and growing) online universe of apartment-swapping, of sublets, of short-term rentals, promulgated by firms like Airbnb.com. And, as it turns out, nearly every such deal is illegal here. Last spring, a law went into effect that bans the rental of New York City apartments for fewer than 30 days, providing what the mayor’s office described as “a clear definition of what constitutes transient and permanent occupancy.”

Oh for fuck's sake. Home rental services save money for travelers and help offset the outrageous rents that New Yorkers have to pay. Outside of a few complaints from neighbors who really need to learn to mind their own damn business---believe me, most of the complaints stem from jealousy and not from actual concerns about renters' behavior, as the vast majority of people who use Airbnb behave decently---having people rent your space hurts no one and helps a lot of people. I have a friend who would rent out her apartment when she'd travel, which helped pay for the travel and saved her the expense of a cat sitter. Without it, I imagine she would have struggled to pay for such "luxorious" items such as actually attending friends' weddings. Plus, the more people who can rent space this way to come to New York, the more tourists we have. Who spend money! Lots of it! They have more of it to spend because they're getting a deal on their lodging. 

I suppose our economic overlords would say that if we can't afford hotel in NYC, we should consider vacationing in our summer homes. Marie Antoniette would be thrilled. 

This sort of tone-deaf hostility to ordinary people taking charge of their economic lives really does say a lot about how our economy got to be so shitty, and why we can't get it together to fix it. 

I didn't put up a Panda Party last week because of the holiday, but we're back!

Come by and shoot the shit, listen to some tunes and even play some. Good times on a Friday.

It's the only explanation. Because I refuse to believe someone could be this impervious to the joke implications of this. But in case she really doesn't get it, I made a list.

Top Five Things To Avoid Saying if You're a Famous Homophobes Whose Husband Has Been Accused of Being a Closeted Gay Man

1) “[Gays] can marry a man if they’re a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they’re a man.”

2-5) Rinse and repeat until you realize that Jon Stewart is peeing himself with delight right now about the possiblity of running more clips of the fat guy on "Modern Family" dancing. 

Look, I'm not interested in the debate over whether or not it is, in itself, homophobic to suggest that Marcus Bachmann "acts gay". I agree with the critics who point out, rightly, that a lot of straight men act in stereotypically feminine ways and lots of gay men don't. But I think that while folks like Dan Savage and Jon Stewart might be more cautious about flinging accusations of closeted queerness around based on flimsy evidence, they do mean well, and they aren't wrong that a lot of gay people in conservative environments spend their entire lives in the closet. They just should make that point in a more thoughtful, less opportunistic way. 

But that debate is utterly irrelevant to the stupidity of this. The cat is out of the bag, the insinuations have been made, and Bachmann has to know that. So to suggest, literally, that gay people should simply set up sham marriages and hide in the closet their whole lives is not only mean, but profoundly stupid. It's crystal clear proof that she's too stupid to be put in charge of Baskin Robbins, much less the entire country. 

So I published a couple of quick pieces, one for Forbes and one for XX Factor, about how Siri is sexist. I got a lot of great responses, including Jill's at Feministe,  but I also got a lot of people talking to me like I'm stupid. Lots and lots of people, especially men, condescendingly explaining that Siri can't be sexist, because it's just a dumb program that uses pre-existing databases for its searches. And apparently, since "sexism" can only  be used to describe intentional, hateful behavior, things like neglecting to remember that women have needs or employing subconscious stereotypes about women simply can't count as sexism. Gosh, the stuff you have to explain to ladies! They are so dim. Seriously, I got crap like this:

Besides the fairly hateful stereotyping on display, this tells a story of software development that simply doesn't make any sense. Siri is not really a "program" in the sense that it is not something a group of programmers sit and make. Rather, Siri is a collection of many different services presented under a unified interface. This unification (sort of Apple's specialty) might give you the mistaken impression that it is sort of all one piece, but it is less like a "car" and more like a "mixed urban transportation system". 

There's a good chance that the people who wrote the corny jokes don't even know the people who operate the database Siri uses to search for abortion clinics.

He blathered on like this for awhile, but really this is just hand-waving. I'm fully aware that Siri uses other databases to gather information. In fact, two minutes with the software will make that incredibly obvious, which means that this dude quite literally thinks women are so dumb they can't apply common sense understanding to a product distributed by Apple. The thing is, they also tested their own software to make sure that it was working properly, and while they made sure that it knew how to translate "blow job" into an escort service or "Viagra" into a drugstore, it didn't do the same for "birth control" to drug store. That's a huge oversight. 

To the mansplainers of the world, I have one thing I want to ask you very, very nicely to do before you start telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. Just do me this one favor, please: Read my piece before you respond defensively.  If you could, toss in a little reading comprehension, because really, you'll find that you can take your mansplaining efforts and put them elsewhere. Of course, pompously assuming a woman is obviously too stupid to grasp basic information about how computers work is more fun, so I don't imagine this will help, but at least give it a try. Because if you actually read my piece, you'd realize I never said that the staff behind Siri was out to get women. Never. Not once. On the contrary, I said the opposite:

The problem here is one of neglect and not malice. The programmers behind Siri seem to be a bunch of gleefully juvenile dudes who took the time to teach Siri corny jokes, marijuana know-how and sci-fi references, along with teaching it about serious problems that can affect both men and women, such as suicidal thoughts. And even though they really like the idea of sex with women, they seem to have not thought much about the work that women have to put into being sexually accessible. Just as with the mind-boggling name fail of the iPad, the problem seems to be that there simply aren't enough women working in innovative, customer-driven technology services, and the ones who do have to adopt a bro-like attitude that makes them nearly as forgetful of the concerns of ordinary women as the men are.

Oh yeah and: 

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female. 

The defensiveness on display is due in large part to the idea that saying something is "sexist" means that it's deliberately and malciously hateful to women. Or that there's some sort of anti-choice agenda here. (There's not. If you ask Siri directly for Planned Parenthood, it's really helpful.) The thing is, sexism doesn't work that way. I mean, in some cases, sure. But mostly it's stuff like this: casual assumptions about women's abilities and desires, assuming the default is always male, overlooking women's needs, failing to understand that women are subjective people instead of merely objects for you to fuck. A lot of men---and women!---who do these things don't realize what's going on. That was the entire point. This isn't even really about Siri, except insofar as new gadgets and softwares are an interesting hook to get people talking. Like I said at Forbes, it's about "a sexism that’s so interwoven into the fabric of our society that it’s nearly invisible." I'm actually quite confident that Apple will fix the problem in short order; they've basically said that they will. My hope is that they'll go a step beyond that and realize that the dominance of straight white men in Silicon Valley means that certain blinders will be built into their products that limit their reach into larger markets. No one here is out to get anyone else. This is about just getting better, and working better for everyone. No need to be so ruffled by it.

I usually prefer to ignore Glenn Beck these days, but his response to the whole Herman Cain situation is actually pretty typical of the various ways that all sorts of people are failing miserably to address the situation with anything approaching decency or competence, so I figured I'd take a moment to comb over it. You see, Beck decided to write a letter of "dating advice" to Herman Cain, and it might pack more fail into a single document than has ever happened in the history of creating documents. 

A few double takes were done Tuesday night when Beck emailed his mailing list with this subject line: “Dating 101: Glenn tells Cain how to handle the ladies

The first word of this is utter failure. Cain is alleged to have done a lot of things, but none of them can really be called "dating", in the sense that we Americans use the word. Dating is understood in our culture as an ethically sound behavior that people therefore perform openly. If you're on a date with someone, for instance, you're generally not going to freak out if you randomly run into a friend. Cain is accused of having an affair with one woman, which is generally understood as different than boring old dating. He's also been accused, repeatedly, of sexual harassment. This isn't like dating or having an affair, and I'm deeply sick of people conflating the two. Cain doesn't need advice on how to "handle" the ladies. If he is, as he claims, in a monogamous marriage, then he shouldn't be handling ladies at all. And no one needs to handle non-consenting ladies.

“Another day, another Herman Cain sex scandal,” writes Beck’s email. “The truth is so hard to find amidst all the lies these days, it makes it hard to say with certitude whether or not all of these accusations piling up against former pizza tycoon Herman Cain are in any way legit. Are people just trying to gain their 15 minutes of fame, or is Herman Cain as prolific a scorer as Wilt Chamberlain?”

Trying to set an Olympic record of wrong, Beck? First of all, sexually harassing women is not "scoring" with them, and anyone who convinces themselves of that is quite literally the most pathetic piece of shit ever to slither out of the gutter. You don't accuse someone of "scoring" with you. Please stop conflating grab-ass with the unwilling and sexual contact between consenting adults. Please. I beg you. 

But what really bothers me is the proliferation of Cain's preferred explanation for how all these women are coming out of the woodwork all at once, which is that it's a giant conspiracy against him. Or that he somehow has managed to meet more mentally ill women with attention-seeking disorders than roughly any other politician in history. In the first instance, you'd have to accept that the Democrats---or even the Republicans---have the means and desire to organize this elaborate conspiracy, but they chose to do so against someone who never really had a chance in hell of getting the nomination, much less winning the presidency. (Obama wishes he could go up against Cain, believe me.) In the second instance, well, all things are possible, of course, but the likelihood of that happening is incredibly low. It's telling how sexist our society is that we still have to allow for the extremely unlikely possibility that deceitful attention-seeking mental disorders are so common amongst women that they affect like 5% of women that Herman Cain seems to have met. 

This whole thing really has been a remarkable demonstration of how rape apologists and other sexists have really set the bar for believing women who complain of sexual harassment and abuse absurdly high. Beck is far from the only person carrying on like there's an equal probability between the possibility that a half dozen separate acquaintances of Cain's are lying, crazy bitches and that they may just be telling the honest truth. That's ridiculous. Especially since mentally ill people spinning stories tend to have a history of doing so and the stories they spin are often unbelievable. Nothing that Cain is said to have done is unbelievable, and in fact, the mundanity of it only adds to the believability.

Later in the email: “Dating 101: Glenn tells Cain how to handle the ladies. Herman Cain’s constant flow of sexual misconduct allegations against him sparked a heated debate on radio today. What are the types of situations at work that are acceptable to engage in and which are unacceptable?”

Simple: sexually harassing women is unacceptable. Stop pretending that you don't know this, assholes of the world. As any woman could tell you if you bothered to ask, when a man harasses you, watching you squirm with fear and discomfort is part of the pleasure he takes in doing it. 

“I’d be a fool as a CEO or a head of a company to have dinner with a good friend who is also an employee. I’d be foolish to do that. … There’s just no reason to put yourself in that situation. Why would I put myself in that situation?”

Beck is lying. He works in media, where socializing with colleagues is more common than not. But this is even more offensive than that. The problem is not men and women who work together being alone in the same way two male colleagues would be alone. The problem is the choice to sexually harass someone. Either Beck is implying that men can't behave properly if left alone with a woman for a moment, or he's falling back on the "lying bitches" paranoia that suggests that women will claim sexual harassment at the drop of a hat. Either way, he's wrong. 

“Women and men do not think the same way,” said Beck. “I’ve been trying to tell my daughters, who will tell me, ‘Dad, he’s just a friend.’ Is he? He’s 17 years old and he’s just a friend? Really? If he’s gay, I buy it. If he’s not, no, he’s not. No, he’s not. He wants sex. Period. Women and men think differently.”

Great lesson to teach your daughter, that the only value you have to men at all is sexual. Now, it may be true that a 17-year-old girl might consider if her friend is actually a Nice Guy® only pretending to be her friend to get her in the sack. But a blanket assertion that the only thing men want from women ever is sex, and that women have no value to men outside of that? Let me remind you, Beck is making this statement in the context of work life. He's quite literally saying that men cannot look at a colleague and see them as "good at accounting" or "an excellent graphic designer". If a man comes into your office and says, for instance, "Hey, would you be interested in working on this project together?", Beck is saying it's literally impossible---unless he's gay---to be asking you because he thinks you'd be good at the job. No, he just wants your vagina. Because that's all you are to men. 

Sad that guys like this are allowed to fucking raise daughters, isn't it?

Are Republicans for lower taxes, as a general principle? They would have you believe the answer is yes; in fact, getting the rubes to vote for them is a matter of promising to take control of the nation's uteruses away from their rightful owners plus a promise that you personally will see lower taxes. But are they in fact in support of lower taxes? Here's your answer:

At issue is the expiration of payroll tax cuts that Obama insisted on when he cut a deal with congressional Republicans last year to extend the Bush tax cuts. The 4.2 percent rate that workers have been paying will revert to the old level of 6.2 percent unless Congress and the White House can reach a deal before the end of the year. For most of this year, Republicans have been signaling strong opposition to extending the cuts. Over the summer, Rep. Paul Ryan belittled the payroll tax cut as “sugar-high economics,” while just this past Sunday Sen. Jon Kyl argued that it “has not stimulated job creation. We don’t think that is a good way to do it.”

So, if a tax squeezes the working class, they are all for it. They are for tax cuts, sure, but only if you're rich. Everyone else should pay more to make sure that our wealthiest class can afford a fourth summer home. According to this article, the average amount they want the 99% to pay in order to subsidize Ferrari maintenance for the 1% is about $1,000 a year: you should sacrifice a mortgage payment, your family's Christmas, or teeth cleanings for everyone so that rich people can better afford that $39,000 backpack. That's what Republicans stand for. Anything else they claim is just hand-waving. 

By the way, blather about job creation is part of that hand-waving. Average families will spend that $1,000 on stuff that stimulates the economy. Money going to your dentist or to pay your mortgage or buy presents for your kids does a lot more, economically, than money that goes from a rich person to another rich person to buy a fancy doo-dad.