The market went ka-boom

..and they laughed and laughed and laughed.

Now it’s our turn.

Fascism on the march — more states consider “Papers Please” law

What the hey is going on south of the border?  Land of the Free?  Maybe not so much:  Arizona’s racist new anti-illegal immigrant law seems to be catching on.

The law MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow dubbed the “Papers Please” law would allow cops to detain anyone they have “reasonable suspicion” might be an illegal immigrant.  “Reasonable suspicion” being relative to the officer’s mood and thuggishness, I suppose.  The law is so draconian that even legal immigrants could face jail time if they’re detained and found not to be carrying Their Papers.  It’s a pretty obvious mandate for racial profiling of Hispanics and probably the result of utter frustration with a porous border, but that doesn’t make it any less odious, intrusive or wrong.  Accordingly, the law has provoked a shitstorm of controversy, but guess what:  other states are considering similar laws.

Noooo… really?

Yes, really.  Maryland:

At least two state delegates are considering sponsoring anti-illegal immigration legislation in Maryland which replicates a new Arizona law that has drawn criticism from Hispanics, the ACLU and President Barack Obama.

South Carolina:

A handful of South Carolina legislators want an illegal immigration law as tough as Arizona’s new rules.

A group of House Republicans introduced a bill on Thursday requiring police to check immigration status of people they stop and have reasonable suspicion the person is in the country illegally.

Oklahoma:

Not to be outdone by Arizona, some conservative lawmakers in Oklahoma say they plan to introduce a bill similar to that state’s controversial new immigration law.

(I can’t say I’m surprised to see Oklahoma among those states enthusiastically endorsing such state intrusion.  After all, this is a government that recently ruled that women having abortions must be punished during the procedure by getting pointy objects jabbed into their private parts.  But I digress.)

All the enthusiasm for “Papers Please”-type legislation is coming from Republicans:  apparently GOP lawmakers in 10 states are considering such a law.  This is amazing to me:  conservatives should be the last people getting on board with a law that allows such aggressive government overreach.  Shouldn’t they?

Unless conservatism as we once knew it has officially lost all meaning.

Have teabaggers commandeered the Washington Post?

BaracX!

You were expecting civility?

When a recent episode of the cheeky South Park depicted the prophet Mohammed in a bear suit, its creators were probably well aware of what they were setting in motion.  Some fundamentalist nutjob would take exception and threaten them on a website, the episode would be dumbly censored, fans would get pissed and retribution against the offending site would be swift and terrible:

Then the unexpected: Dan Savage posted a cartoon which, in solidarity with South Park and free speech in general, jokingly proclaimed  May 20th as “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”:

…and outrage went viral.

The cartoonist wasn’t expecting her whimsical tongue-in-cheek proposal to go viral, much less turn into a competition to come up with the most offensive images possible.   As a result, she’s distanced herself from the whole idea:

The Seattle artist whose anti-censorship cartoon has helped spawn “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” says she wants no part of the May 20 event, which is gaining momentum online.

“I made a cartoon that went viral but [this campaign] isn’t really my thing,” cartoonist Molly Norris tells Comic Riffs, characterizing her cartoon as merely a personal response to Comedy Central‘s censorship of a “South Park” episode last week. “Other folks have taken it over” — an appropriation she says she is distancing herself from.

Not only the cartoonist, but the creator of the inevitable “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” Facebook page has also opted out.    After a couple of days of spittle-flecked comments and grotesque images being furiously uploaded, the creators of these benign little free speech demonstrations apparently realized things were going sideways.   They were expecting maybe… civility?  Haha.  New to the internet, I see.

Images of Mohammed might be proscribed by Islam, but there shouldn’t be anything to prevent a non-Muslim from drawing one.  And as a free speech exercise, there was a point to be made about the whackjobs who consider threats of violence an appropriate response to perceived slights to their religion:  something like, grow a pair.

On the other hand, setting aside a day for the express purpose of insulting one specific religion seems like a proposition destined to devolve into a shit-slinging competition of Olympic proportions.  Too many people don’t understand that while the right to be an asshole is an important part of free speech, it’s not a requirement.

Hear that?

I admit I was initially unimpressed by the fuss Liberal leader Iggy raised over the lack of abortion funding in Harper’s “maternal and child health” initiative for developing countries.  It just seemed like more hypocritical gasbaggery from a party so infested with anti-choicers and lacking in testicular fortitude that it couldn’t even pass a motion on the issue.

I’d assumed the government might just be trying to use scarce foreign aid dollars as efficiently as possible, as in “post-natal” maternal care rather than reproductive health in general.  Why would Harper invite a confrontation over abortion?  In spite of the mewling and puling of his socon base, it’s not like Harper welcomes the opportunity to debate the issue: he typically reacts to it as though he’s stepped on a poison snake.

But hey — even I am wrong (sometimes).  Today the government confirmed that abortion won’t be included in the maternal health initiative, which will cover just about everything else including contraception:

The federal Conservatives say they will not provide funding for abortions as part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s centrepiece initiative for the G8 this year to improve maternal and child health in developing countries around the world.

It is the clearest statement yet on the government’s position on the issue — a position which the government has appeared to modify several times in the face of opposition from domestic political opponents, as well as international allies.  [...]

In a parliamentary debate on the issue last month, (International  Co-operation Minister Bev) Oda said, “what we have said is that we are open to considering all options, including contraception, and addressing them.“

Well… contraception is birth control, and abortion is also birth control — yeah yeah, SHRIEEEEK! — albeit the birth control of last resort.   So that puts the boots to my little theory about fiscal efficiency, and strongly suggests  there are ideological motivations behind the way this initiative is shaking out.   And why not?  It’s not often you get to dog whistle your base without fucking with any actual voters.

Sinead OConnor on Catholic Church abuse scandal

Interesting interview last night as Rachel Maddow got Sinead O’Connor’s thoughts on the continually-mushrooming Catholic church child abuse scandals:

(The Washington Post ran an article by O’Connor on this topic a few weeks ago.)

Papers please.

How can people who bitch constantly about “big government” (and I readily admit I’m sometimes one of them) possibly be okay with a law that basically enacts a  Police State?:

Arizona’s governor has signed into law an immigration bill seen as one of the toughest in the US, despite strong criticism by President Barack Obama.

The bill signed by Governor Jan Brewer will require state police to question people about their immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion”.

And yet it’s a Republican law and conservatives have “embraced” it.  I don’t get it — just add it to the long list of other phenomena that leave me blinking with unfathoming dumbness.

So “reasonable suspicion”, eh?  And what might make a cop reasonably suspicious of someone’s immigration status?  Probably not their shoes.

There’s no doubt that US immigration reform is needed yesterday if not sooner.  But a law that codifies racial profiling and expands police power to the “Papers Please” extent should be unacceptable to anyone regardless of political stripe — particularly those who supposedly want the government out of everyone’s face.

Or is it okay for the government to get in some peoples’ faces?  Well guess what — apart from the odious inherent racism in this new law, once the state is empowered to get in anyone’s face they seldom decide it’s a bad idea.  What usually happens is they decide it’s a pretty good idea, and might be helpful in other circumstances as well.  Does wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt provide “reasonable suspicion” that your house should be searched for drugs?

Why am I not surprised

… that anti-abortion terrorist Scott Roeder isn’t exactly doing his sentence for the murder of Dr. George Tiller “standing on his head” (to use the vernacular of the incarcerated)?

Boohoohoo.  Well, what the hell, eh?  I wonder what he expected, after committing a murder and following it up by demonstrating a complete lack of remorse, and even self-righteousness, in court.  This is the drool-spattered depravity of the mental defectives who believe that something they call “God’s Law” supercedes the “laws of man”:  the Psychology of Theocracy.  And they walk among us.  I’m not necessarily saying Be Afraid, but definitely Be Aware.

Old enough to bleed

Is there no end to the rotten, shit-eating scum?  I can’t believe I’m reading yet another story about fetus-worshipping vermin of the “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed” school — another nauseating tale of Catholic Fetus Cultists celebrating a 10-year-old child-mother:

Despite protests and pressure from feminists and pro-abortion groups, an 11-year-old girl in the Mexican city of Chetumal has refused to undergo an abortion.  The young girl explained her decision saying that she understands, “a life is growing in her womb.”

It’s weird that the Catholic News Agency says the little girl is eleven(11), when all other news sources report that she is in fact ten(10) (like 11 makes it okay).  But wait: it’s probably because that’s how old she’ll be by the time her pregnancy comes to term, which as we all know is the only thing that really matters.

CNN gives us a little more information:

A pregnant 10-year-old, allegedly raped by her stepfather, has become the latest lightning rod in the country’s heated abortion debate.  [...]

Child protective services officials in Quintana Roo said in a statement last week that the girl and the fetus were in good health.

But Quintana Roo state legislator Maria Hadad said the girl’s doctors aren’t telling the whole story. She said continuing the pregnancy could cause severe mental and physical health problems for the girl.

“It’s not just a high-risk pregnancy. It’s a pregnancy that puts the girl at risk,” Hadad told Mexican broadcaster Channel 10 in Chetumal, Mexico.

Wow:  it’s hard not to notice the contrast in the way the story was reported by these two sources.  The CNA neglects to say Word One about the rape, or how  the girl wasn’t informed of her abortion rights, or the potential danger the pregnancy poses to her, or what’s being done to help her cope with the trauma of both rape and coerced childbirth.

I think that’s all we need to know about these people.

“No comments have been posted”

Maybe that should be “99% Full Comment”, or “Full Until the Comments get Embarassing Comment”.

Last night I noticed that the comments (34 of them at last count) with Jonathan Kay’s snarly little bitchfest about the shrieking voices of “The Left”  seemed to have gotten lost in a series of tubes or something.  I considered that the problem might not be douchebaggery, but rather comment software run amok — until I looked at a few of Kay’s older entries, and then some from other contributors, which were all fine.   The tip-off that there might be fuckery afoot was below the text of the articles, which all have something like this:

Or almost all.  Kay’s “shrieky lefties” post not only has 34 comments lost in cyberspace, now it’s missing that friendly little linkie where readers “Click here to post a comment”:

As you can see by CC’s screenshot here, this is sort of a recent development.

Maybe it’s just me, but “No comments have been posted” seems a little dishonest considering there’s no way anyone can post a comment.   Shouldn’t that be “Comments are Closed”?   (And does anyone want to put money on how long before the entire post goes away?  Wingnuts:  why screen shots were invented.)

FIFY

The NatPo’s Jonathan Kay salivates like a wolverine gnawing on a live sheep in today’s unfortunate screed about the demise of the Canadian left, starting with Antonia Z’s column:

There, fixed it for ya.

UPDATE: Okay, about 15 minutes ago there were 34 comments with that article, some of which informed Kay that AZ had been promoted.  Now:

What’s up with that?

UPDATE (Thursday):  Still no comments!?

Even if they dumped the first 34 comments, why haven’t there been any more since?  Normally a hysterical post about Zerb and the “death of the left” would have accrued at least 50 brain-damaged, spittle-flecked snarls from the NatPo’s “regulars” by now.

Wingnuts:  why screen shots were invented.

(h/t CC)

Desperate Mactards rip guy’s finger off to get his iPad

Worth half a baby finger?

I love Apple stuff too, but not this much:

Bill Jordan had barely left the Apple store when a man grabbed the bag he was carrying the device in. Jordan, who had the bag tied around his hand, told Denver’s CBS4:

“He was almost sitting on the ground he was pulling so hard and it was still tied around my fingers; and it wouldn’t come off and then finally he gave it one big jerk; and that’s when he stripped the skin off my pinky and it went right down to the bone.”

“I saw just a bone, all the skin and tendons and everything were off”

Yecccch!!!  And all because of those killer cords that Apple puts in its little drawstring bags.  (The good news is that it was his baby finger so the poor guy is still up to the task of using a touch screen.   Hopefully when he gets his replacement iPad, the Apple Store puts everything in a box for him.)

As the snowball grows…

The imperfect storm of Order of Canada medals returned in protest of the Morgentaler award expands by one more flake:

Frank Chauvin has become only the sixth person to return the Order of Canada medal since the federal government started handing them out in 1967.  [...]

SIX(6)!!!

All six people who have resigned their membership in the Order of Canada have done so to protest the inclusion of Morgentaler, who began performing abortions in 1968, a year before they became legal in Canada, if performed at a hospital.

Six for 6500… that’s almost 1/10 of 1%, baby!  An exclusive club to say the least.

But isn’t this guy recycled?  He already claimed he was returning his medal almost 2 years ago (July 11, 2008 to be exact), when he said:

“Yes, it’s definitely going,” Chauvin said Thursday from his Windsor home. “I don’t want to be painted with the same brush as Morgentaler. It’s definitely going back.”

… and somehow never got around to it.  But give him a break:  he’s an old guy and he runs on Old Guy Time.

None of this will stop Liesite from feverishly tooting its horn, even though it’s already “reported” on this guy as a returnee five(5) times.  But at least they’re no longer including medals that have been returned twice, or from beyond the grave.  And so it appears that the snowball of returned Order of Canada medals has succumbed to… shrinkage!

The “not-about-abortion” abortion bill

Judging by the enthusiasm it was met with last week from the MSM, MP Rod Bruinooge’s private member’s bill against “coerced abortion” is almost certainly dead in the water.  Recall the Unborn Victims bill which was initially greeted with optimism by many until it became apparent that it was a backdoor attack on abortion rights.  It’s a bad sign when the media starts mocking a bill right out of the gate:

Let me make sure I have this right; Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge is chair of the House pro-life caucus. Despite this fact, he really, really doesn’t want to reopen the abortion debate in Canada. Please believe him – he doesn’t want to discuss abortion in any way. Not sure what they discuss at their pro-life caucus meetings but no matter.

Bruinooge himself almost certainly knows the bill is unpassable — he no sooner tabled it than he admitted it would present an enforcement challenge:

Mr. Bruinooge, who leads Parliament’s “pro-life caucus,” agreed that so called “he said she said” scenarios would be difficult to deal with but not impossible.

Just what the doctor ordered:  another intrusive, redundant, administrative nightmare of a law that would be next to impossible to enforce, terrorize doctors and allow anti-choicers to waste the courts’ time with gibberish law suits.

Clearly it’s little more than an election year dog whistle meant to raise an urgent little hardon in the disgruntled, sex-obsessed socon vote.   Bruinooge might have even had Harper’s secret blessing on this thing — with the caveat that it be so unpassable that it wouldn’t survive its second reading.  But the message about the abortion bill that’s not really about abortion except that it is has been sent.  And received.

UPDATE: From the comments with a thread on this topic at BigCityLib, Buckets nails what could be behind the bizarre theory that “coerced abortion” is such a big problem as to require punitive legislation:

buckets said…

There are several interesting contrasts here. First, it’s interesting that roughly the same people who demand that there be no limits (or almost none) on speech seem to want to regulate private arguments about reproduction.

Also, it is (roughly) the same people too who are willing themselves to resort to coercive speech to dissuade women from having abortions. Indeed, I wonder here whether we don’t have an interesting example of transference — because their own ideology invites them to coerce women out of abortions, they imagine that their opposites must be true.

Goldman Sachs: the Big Short

I’ve been studying this Goldman Sachs thing all weekend, and wow: it looks like the Dreaded Shit Hammer of Accountability might finally be falling on the herd of venal Wall Street swine that engineered and profited from the catastrophic economic collapse of 2008:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was sued by U.S. regulators for fraud tied to collateralized debt obligations that contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The firm’s shares tumbled 13 percent and financial stocks slumped.

Goldman Sachs created and sold CDOs linked to subprime mortgages in early 2007, as the U.S. housing market faltered, without disclosing that hedge fund Paulson & Co. helped pick the underlying securities and bet against the vehicles, the Securities and Exchange Commission said today. Billionaire John Paulson’s firm earned $1 billion on the trade and wasn’t accused of wrongdoing. The SEC also sued Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs vice president who helped create the CDOs, known as Abacus.

Without delving into the mechanics of CDOs, credit default swaps and other investment scams that make my eyes glaze over with incomprehension, my understanding of what these greed-crazed douchebags were up to can be analogized as follows:

Imagine a building contractor who builds a beautiful new home in which he’s purposely installed faulty wiring, and for insulation he’s used some explosively flammable substance like shredded cedar.  He then takes out fire insurance on it — facilitated by the insurance company’s home inspector, who knows the house doesn’t make the cut but gets a few bucks from the contractor to give it a passing grade anyway.  Then the house is sold to some unsuspecting home buyer. After the inevitable fire, the insurance company pays out the contractor’s claim — so he’s been paid twice, once when he sold the house and once from the insurance. The poor suckers who bought the house?  They die in the blaze.

Goldman Sachs is the building contractor, AIG is the insurance company, and the pension funds of millions of ordinary people are the home buyers who perished in the inferno.  Goldman Sachs was betting on the collapse of properties it sold as good investments — “shorting”, which is a perfectly legitimate trading practice, unless you’re the one who’s engineered the collapse.  In that case I’m pretty sure it’s a crime.

It’s worth remembering that Goldman Sachs isn’t some scammy little fly-by-night online trading company — they were supposedly the “gold standard” for investment banks.  So imagine what the SEC is finding under all the other rocks it’s presumably turning over.  If a gang of greedhead pigs is finally held accountable for their contribution to an economic cataclysm, that’s great, but I wonder what the uncertainty might do to a fragile market that’s been crippling its way towards recovery since the crash.  I have the queasy feeling that the other shoe is about to drop, and it could be heavy.

Palin requests Prayer Shield

… to protect her against the LameStream Media:

“This nation needs you,” Palin told the women. “Know the facts. Stand for what’s right. Don’t be discouraged by the mocking of those who want to claim we just cling to our religion. I’m the first to admit — yeah, I do cling to my faith. That’s all I’ve got.” [...]

(Well, that and the $12million God-given dollars you’ve liberated from these poor suckers.  But do go on…)

She asked for the women — who greeted her with an enthusiastic standing ovation — to provide a “prayer shield” to strengthen her against what she said was “deception” in the media.

A Prayer Shield — and there are 388 Prayer Warriors who are up to the task.  Too bad they weren’t around to pray away the satanic Katie Couric.

So much for that

Other than the Usual Suspects, it looks like Rod Bruinooge’s “coerced abortion” bill isn’t getting much traction.  The prevailing opinion seems to be that this is at best weird and unnecessary, and a pretty transparent attempt to curtail abortion rights.  Surprisingly, people seem to have caught the play pretty quickly:

While abortion is something Bruinooge has no interest in discussing, he does think there is a big problem in Canada of women being coerced into having abortions against their will.

This of course has nothing to do with abortion per se but rather women being threatened to have abortions against their will something we can all agree is wrong. It is equally wrong for women to have their tonsils out against their will but that private members bill will have to wait for another day.

Heh. And it is equally wrong for women to be forced to bear children against their will, but I don’t see any private members’ bills about that being tabled anytime soon either.

So to summarize, the chair of the pro-life caucus doesn’t want to talk about abortion but does think there’s a menace of women being coerced into having abortions against their will. This is both a questionable assertion (that there are many women being coerced into having abortions – I’m not saying it isn’t an issue, it just strikes me as one of those solutions seeking a problem) and one that is almost certainly already covered under the criminal code.

Exactly.  As I pointed out a few days ago, coercion, bullying, intimidation and threats — for any reason — are already against the law.   There’s no  legitimate rationale for amending the existing law to address so rare a circumstance as “coerced abortion”, especially within the hazy parameters defined by Bill C-510 (“Withdrawal of financial resources or a place to live”?  Just imagine everyone who could get swept up in that little scenario.).

As much as Bruinooge and his fellow travellers might get off on the fantasy that “coerced” abortion is such a rampant occurance as to require its own specific legislation, reality just doesn’t bear it out.  And that’s something I’m pretty sure Bruinooge and everyone else who supports this bill knows full well.

But, we will keep our eye on it.

I’ve stopped counting

Is anyone still keeping track of the Catholic church’s incredible expanding Cornucopia of Excuses for the child abuse scandals and the institutional coverups of same?   For those still counting, here’s another one for you:

A prominent Roman Catholic bishop in Mexico blamed eroticism on television and Internet pornography for child abuse by priests, in the latest incendiary comments on sex scandals in the church.

“With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it’s not easy to stay celibate or to respect children,” Bishop Felipe Arizmendi said during an annual meeting of Mexican bishops near Mexico City on Thursday.

Porn, the Internets and the Invasion of Eroticism, the triumverate of titillation.  (Even if this was true, and I have a hard time believing that it is, what are the priests doing surfing internet porn sites anyway?  Those cloistered cathedrals are starting to sound more like dens of debauchery.)

Tough week?

In today’s Calgary Herald, Susan Martinuk highlights a couple of recent womens’ healthcare-related stories that she says add up to a “tough week for pro-choicers”.   One item caught my interest — the revelation that Canadian doctors have begun recommending and following guidelines that would limit “sex-selective” abortion:

Second, a current article in the Journal of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada has issued a call for new guidelines regarding sex selective abortions. The preferential abortion of girls is a hush-hush practice that is officially condemned by Canada’s Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, yet still occurs among cultural groups (from countries such as China and India) that value boys more than girls.

The article suggests that physicians delay providing any information on an unborn child’s sex until after 20 weeks, when it is supposedly more difficult to attain an abortion. Apparently, doctors in British Columbia have practised this policy for the past few years.

Well I’ll be damned: doctors policing themselves — making their own recommendations for policy guidelines and putting them into practice without the “helpful” interference of government and regressive laws.  Now where oh where have we heard that one before?

Bruinooge’s coerced abortion bill

When I read about the latest bit of proposed legislative flatulence blatted out by anti-abortion MP Rod Bruinooge, my initial feeling was that it had to be an election year dog whistle to the base.  A bill banning “coerced” abortion is about as likely to pass as a bill banning coerced pregnancy (even though the latter probably occurs with greater frequency).  But regardless of how transparent the bill’s real purpose might be and how imminently unlikely it is to pass, the Glurge Index suggests that Bruinooge is serious about trying to make it happen:

If this scenario looks familiar, there’s good reason.

The terrible story of a young woman’s murder, re-purposed to sell a bill meant to curtail womens’ rights, will be a pretty familiar theme to anyone who’s followed anti-choice activism and subterfuge in our parliament over the last few years.   Exhibit A:  the doomed Bill C-484, the “Unborn Victims of Crime/Kicking Abortion’s Ass” bill, and the extended battle that raged over it two years ago.  Ultimately the bill was aborted by an election call, but wow: thanks to the Glurge Factor, that was one Late Term abortion.

This new bill is even worse, a potential nightmare of slippery slopes — one person’s “friendly advice” might be another’s “coercion”.   This CTV-Winnipeg poll seems to indicate that about half of Canadians get that already…

…so hopefully this one will be put to sleep a little more expeditiously than C-484 was.

UPDATE: It seems that truth is, well, truthier than the fetus fetishists’ melodramatic fiction.  Fern Hill explains.

Y’all got Cocaine Eyes

Giving new meaning to the term "Dummy Dust"

Behind the eight ball…?

Spring has sprung

…and it’s that time of year when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… fetuses!!!

Yes:  the anti-abortion gibberish that perpetually rattles around in the brains of our Parliament’s infamous “Pro-Life Caucus” has once again gelled and been squeezed out in the form of another sleazy little initiative meant to roll back womens’ rights in the guise of “protecting” us.  Leading anti-choice MP Rod Bruinooge, feeling “inspired” by the awful story of a murdered woman from his home town, has tabled yet another fetus-focused private member’s bill, this time to ban “coerced abortion”:

This afternoon Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge, the chair of the pro-life caucus in the Canadian Parliament, introduced a private members bill seeking to stop intimidation and pressure on women to have abortions against their will.  Bruinooge said he was inspired to draw up the bill based on the case of a woman from his home town whose boyfriend attempted to coerce her into an abortion.

Because who could possibly support the idea of women being forced to have abortions against their will?  Not me, and probably not anyone who is pro-choice, since coercion is the antithesis of choice.  Forcing women to not have children they want is as bad as forcing them to have children they don’t want.

The backstory behind Bruinooge’s latest salvo against abortion rights is certainly compelling:

“In early 2007, Roxanne Fernando’s boyfriend attempted to coerce her into having an abortion.  After backing out on the decision to abort her baby, Roxanne’s boyfriend then chose to have her killed.  When someone uses coercion, it can lead to violence.  Roxanne’s Law will communicate to all Canadians that coercing a pregnant woman to have an abortion against her will is unacceptable in a nation that values human rights.”

Although this particular case is clearly a loathsome tale of intimidation and violence against women, “coercion” is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.  Anti-abortion whackjobs like Bruinooge would like to think that most women are in some way “coerced” into having abortions — that the practice is so widespread, it calls for legislative correction.  The coercion of women to have abortions is apparently rampant:  if not by abusive partners or aggressively overprotective parents, then by hostile economic circumstances, or maybe just their own estrogen-driven insanity.  Yes, I keed, but I seriously shudder to imagine the kind of cases that would start winding their way through the courts as the overzealous launched their War Against Coerced Abortion in the hope of incrementally banning it altogether.

Besides, isn’t bullying, intimidation and the act of coercion — to abort or do anything else one is desperately opposed to doing — already against the law? Why would abortion need its own coercion law, unless…

You got that right, baby.

“That’s it, Steve…

…you’re grounded!”

"And no internet for a week!"

“Now Stephen, I said I wanted ALL your highly-enriched uranium.  You have a guilty look on your face… do I have to check your pockets?”

LOL UPDATE: FD wingnuts weigh in, and the initial response to the picture is that Obama is insulting Harper.  Not everyone agrees:

Hmm, maybe.  But then, maybe not:

There it is again.  To return to an earlier theme, the commenter above points out the “typical posture” of a (presumably snobby) “leftist” and the pointing of the elitist finger.  Maybe it’s time to work on our delivery.

(h/t impolitical)

Palin: a class issue?

I have occasionally pondered what it is about Sarah Palin that provokes an almost universal gag reflex among progressives (and more than a few conservatives).  For myself, it’s the fact that she panders to the worst side of conservatism, and pretends (probably) to be a lot stupider than she really is (hopefully) in order to do so.

The whole “ignorance as a virtue” thing turns me off.  By playing it up, Palin’s connected with resentful, low-information types who are pissed off that their team is no longer in charge, terrified by the changing world around them, and loathe to be dragged, kicking and screaming or otherwise, into it. Palin reassures them that it’s okay, even “patriotic”, to resist progress, which is characterized in all kinds of bizarre ways: socialism, fascism, kill-granny-ism, etc.  That’s what does it for me: that she plays on the worst fears of conservatives and whips them into the brainless paranoid hysteria evident at teabagger rallies.

About the teabaggers:  in spite of all the outrage and comedy gold that’s mined from their more extreme element,  I suspect that not all of them are spittle-flecked racist cretins.  Some of them are your next door neighbour, the cashier at your local Safeway, the guy who tunes up your Volvo, the accountant who does your taxes.  Nice, normal, fairly apolitical working-class people who just happen to lean conservative, and they’re worried about what they’ve been told is going on around them.  Significantly, Palin connects with them, too.

In Saturday’s NatPo, Rex Murphy deconstructs “the Palin effect”, and Palin’s detractors — yes yes, he’s a bit of a wingnut, but that doesn’t render him incapable of touching on a couple of interesting points:

She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life– these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman.

I side with those who venture that the nerves Palin hits have more to do with class — where she’s from, how she speaks, where she was educated, what she likes (the moose-hunting), than her politics or her gender. She’s rural, she came into national politics from (ugh) Alaska. She and her husband have the unerasable stigmata of the modern working class. She would not be embarrassed to be seen walking into Wal-Mart.

If Palin was pro-choice, her feminist cred would be almost immaculate. Feminism has grown from its socialist roots — there are libertarian feminists, so why not fiscally conservative feminists?  (If indeed Palin really is a fiscal conservative, which is arguable.)  But reproductive rights are a major feminist issue, and being an anti-choice feminist is like being a meat-eating vegetarian.   Also, by pandering to the side of conservatism that is conventionally anti-feminist, some feel that Palin has set women in politics back.  I used to feel that way myself, but I’m not so sure anymore:  not long ago, even the thought of the GOP running a woman at the top of a presidential ticket was inconceivable.   Talk about your 18 million cracks.  (Or maybe in this case, 18 million crackpots.)

But more troubling is Murphy’s second point.  It’s true that Palin’s routine seems to have connected with working class conservatives in a way that more cerebral progressivism hasn’t, but if this trend continues it could be a real problem for progressives.  Granted, most of the people who flock to the “tea parties”, and Palin’s fans, are at least right-leaning, but it’s still a worrying political progression.   Traditionally, the left has been solidly on the side of the working class, but that perception seems to be changing.

What happened?

Retirement Day

for Blue Dog Dem anti-abortion crusader Bart Stupak

Rep. Bart Stupak, an anti-abortion Democrat targeted for defeat by tea party activists for his role in securing House approval of the health care overhaul, said Friday he’s retiring after 18 years in Congress now that his main legislative goal has been accomplished.

Stupak said at a news conference that he decided within the last 36 hours not to seek a 10th term. He said he had considered retirement for years but was persuaded to stay because of the prospect of serving with a Democratic majority and helping win approval of the health care overhaul.

So the ‘baggers carve a notch in their “not-retreated-reloaded” gun stocks.

In spite of Stupak’s recalcitrant assholishness over abortion during the health care reform debate, I almost feel sorry for the guy… this obviously isn’t an immediate career move he was considering before the passage of the bill resulted in a deluge of spittle-flecked death threats to him and his family from his so-called “pro-life” cohorts.

You lie down with dogs…

UPDATE: When I said I “almost” feel sorry for Stupak, the key word of course was “almost”.  But what little sympathy I had for this attention-seeking anti-choice drama queen evaporated when I read this.

It’s like the old fable of the woman and the snake… you knew what they were when you picked them up, Bart.