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Emily, I too have been reading the dribbles emerging from the soon-to-be-published Palin memoir.
You're right that we mine her for insight on sexual politics, and I was
particularly intrigued with the information that the AP published about
Palin's reaction to Bristol's pregnancy
and the McCain campaign's treatment of that pregnancy. According to the
AP article, Palin felt that the statement prepared by McCain's team
about Bristol "glamorized and endorsed her daughter's situation." As
opposed to what? Debasing and shaming her daughter's situation? Making
her into a cautionary tale? The attempt at making Bristol an abstinence spokeswoman
who appeared on multiple national morning shows was far more
glamorizing than any statements the McCain campaign made on her behalf ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX intern Jessica Dweck:
In an Onion-esque piece of news this week, the New York Times reported
that Justice Anthony Kennedy ordered a student newspaper to “tidy up”
its coverage of his recent appearance at a high school assembly.
Kennedy, an ardent protector of First Amendment rights—and apparently,
irony–allowed the young journalists to attend the event on the
condition that his office would pre-approve any articles written about
him.
Why would Justice Kennedy do such a thing? Two reasons. First, the
Bill of Rights protects speech in part to encourage transparency and
create a Millian
slurry of ideas in which the creamy globs of truth eventually float to
the top. An inaccurate or misleading quotation by reporters with
exclusive access to Kennedy's speech would be nearly impossible to
correct. Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, the Supreme Court has a deep-seated interest in practicing defensive PR ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Gina Kolata points out,
once again, that diet and exercise have not been shown to affect breast
cancer rates. Massive, well-run observational studies and randomized
controlled trials turn up nothing. This finding appears to be
unacceptable; popular culture rejects it utterly. Women’s magazines
continue to preach the holy gospel of five fruits and vegetables a day.
Doctors continue to tell patients at high risk of breast cancer that
diet matters. The director of one of the (fruitless?) studies tells
Kolata that doctors need to “rethink the studies.” Diet and exercise
“are likely quite important, but we just aren’t getting the answers” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX Staff:
This morning, I told my kids about the no complaining project, pledged
to try it—and then promptly launched into a description of an expense
form I had to fill out that was driving me crazy. My husband reminded
me of my promise. But my 9-year-old son Eli pointed out that I wasn't
whining—I was explaining a problem, and this should be called an
"explaint." I like it. I also found that, duly categorized, my rant
turned more rational and moderate. I worked myself out of a lather
rather than into one ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
While conceding that Huffington Post might write headlines for its
celebrity bloggers, I still have to admit that I knew no good would
come from an article titled "Don't Forget To Have Kids."
This myth of the woman who "forgets" to have kids is so common that we
don't stop to think about how sexist it really is, since the
implication is that women are prone to such heights of stupidity that
they could forget about the existence of marriage and babies, even in a
world that has multiple cable channels (especially TLC) dedicated to
marriage and babies. If you think about the myth of "forgetting" to
have kids even for a moment, it falls apart, because the more common
problem is forgetting to use contraception, and having kids because of
it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Intra-party warfare starring Sarah Palin—who can resist the leaks about the jagged bits of her new book, Going Rogue?
She makes the bizarro accusation that the McCain campaign stuck her
with a $50,000 legal bill for her own vetting. (Convenient confusion
over the cost of defending herself against ethical accusations in
Alaska?) She goes after Katie Couric while at the same time claiming
the McCain people said “right on” about her first interview with
Couric. (Blinded by those lights from Russia?) She was awed by the
clothes and told they were “part of the convention.” That one actually
sounds plausible to me ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Who knows what to believe when it comes to celebrity "journalism," but it's apparently been confirmed that Angelina Jolie will adopt a child from Syria—something described on the website of the U.S. embassy in Damascus
as "a difficult process and often an impossible one." In many
countries, celebrity status probably has little affect on adoption
matters, but in a country where adoption is "essentially illegal," the
perverse effect is that anything pretty much goes—if you've got the
required currency ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Erika Kawalek:
I’ve always regarded “eco-fashion” with a suspicious eye, telling
myself that if somebody truly cared about the environment they would be
good stewards or tinkerers and make use what was already around—not
support the manufacturing of more and more ultimately disposable crap
labeled with vague tags conveying the object’s wishy-washy “cleanly
produced” narrative. Surely taking care of one’s possessions would have
a more positive impact, environmentally speaking, than shopping for
more stuff ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Linda Hirshman:
Relax and enjoy it, ladies. Here comes the Progressive Democratic Party with another plan for you to take care of its needs.
I don’t actually care all that much about the women who will have to pay for their own abortions after Representative Stupak and the others added their amendment. There are only a few hundred thousand insured women needing abortions, compared with the millions of really poor women trying to buy their constitutional rights after the (Democratic) Congress took abortion out of Medicaid in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment. Hey, women rich or lucky enough to have private insurance, welcome to the crowd of the people who can’t protect their interests (“women”). Your fate was sealed when the Democrats sold out poor women 30 years ago. And women let them do it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Emily and Marjorie,
don't you think we ask ourselves different questions about Major Nidal
Hasan because he wasn't just a Muslim or jihadist, he was also a U.S.
citizen and a member of the armed forces? It's easy to reduce the 9/11
terrorists to pure villains. Because Hasan was truly one of us—born
here of an immigrant family, like 20 percent of the population—this
feels different.
Both Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Brooks
fault the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting as a willful
avoidance of the obvious. Emily agreed with Rabinowitz, saying that we
as a nation find it "more comfortable to look away from his religious
beliefs for an alternate theory." Brooks claimed that looking beyond
Islamic extremism to the other factors affecting Hasan "sought to
reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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In reading all the accounts from fellow pro-choice women—like Emily's from earlier this week—bemoaning
the Stupak abortion restrictions, I noticed that many of the women who
were outraged by the concessions of the health care bill used the terms
feminist and pro-choice almost interchangably. Over at Salon,
Kate Harding writes, "Feminists have been up in arms about the latest
assault on access to abortion," but if you take one look at the website
for the group Feminists for Life, one of the first things you see is the banner proclaiming "Women the Winners in U.S. House Amendment Vote" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily,
When you say:
“Surely the general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the
military, we embrace fanatics in our midst,” you're surely not
suggesting, are you, that military generals would purposely sacrifice
the lives of dozens of soldiers, simply for the sake of political
correctness? I mean, there is a middle ground between withholding
judgment and “embracing fanatics in our midst,” isn’t there?
I don’t believe for a minute that these generals would risk the lives of 1.3 million U.S. military personnel on active duty (another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces.) if they thought Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, or any of the 10,000 to 20,000 Muslims who serve in the U.S. armed forces, posed a terrorist risk ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
I'm sure that President Obama and his wife have done their best to
prepare their daughters for the idea that there are crazy people out
there whose hatred for their father extends to them (although it's not
a job I envy). But it's difficult to prepare for this, posted on the
website (a site so offensive that I didn't link to it) of the Westboro
"Baptist" Church, which has organized an anti-gay protest outside of
Sidwell Friends, the school the Obama girls attend: "Quakers?! Are you
frigging kidding me? You pretend to be all non-violent, and you allow
the most bloody, deceitful, evil, murderous bastard and his shemale
sidekick to place their satanic spawn within your four walls" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal
today has a bracing piece about the almost surreal disconnection
between what’s increasingly clear about the Ft. Hood killer, Maj. Nidal
Hasan, and what officials and some commentators seem unable to
acknowledge. As she writes: “It was an act of terrorism by a man with a
record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments.
All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to
ignore.” She quotes Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. as
saying, “"This terrible event would be an even greater tragedy if our
diversity becomes a casualty." As Mona Charen
points out, the idea of a witch hunt is false and dangerous. Surely the
general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the military,
we embrace fanatics in our midst. Rooting them out has to be to the
benefit of the brave, patriot Muslims who serve. Ralph Peters
makes the larger point that, “By protecting the fanatics, we betray the
peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak
out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and
communities” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Nobody cops to “political correctness” anymore; policing language is
what the other guy does. The rest of us are just, you know, telling it
like it is. But playing PC-policeman officer is a
relatively peaceful and noninvasive way to nudge the culture in a
particular direction, a form of persuasion in a democracy built on
consensus. And according to the authors of a little study in the November issue of the Journal Sex Roles, switching from one form of speaking to another might shift your inner liberal just as quickly.
The study authors wanted to see whether languages that assign genderto nouns, like Spanish and French, might implicitly encourage “opposition or hostility to extending equal opportunity to women, especially in terms of work-related issues” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Over the summer, Sara Morishige Williams, the wife of the CEO of Twitter, Tweeted while giving birth. A Minnesota woman named Lynsee has taken the natal overshare to the next level: she broadcast video of herself giving birth on a local social networking site called MomsLikeMe, and interacted with viwers while she was in labor. 23-year-old Lynsee, who would not give out her last name in order to protect her privacy (which apparently was not an issue when she decided to push out a person in front of thousands of other people), told ABCNews.com, "If I were in a classroom, I'd be teaching about development. It was a way for me to teach… A way for me to use myself as a textbook" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily and Meredith, you’ll be completely unsurprised to hear that I greeted the passage of the Stupak amendment with more of a cheer than a groan. However unfair it might be that well-off women have more access to abortion than low-income women, the solution should not be to compel those who are morally opposed to abortion to pay for them with their tax dollars. Just because the government recognizes a right to something does not mean that the government must also provide for it. If you can indulge me for a moment in a mildly absurd thought experiment (with emphasis on absurd and thought experiment), how would you feel about a program that provided guns to those who cannot afford them?
When this topic came up in August, Meredith wrote an article for Slate proposing a private fund to cover the cost of abortion for poor women. Citing data from the Guttmacher Institute, she wrote that it would cost $311 million a year to pay for abortions for low-income women. Compared with the numbers that are getting tossed around in the House and the Senate in the health care debate, that’s not that much money ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from DoubleX writer Sonia Smith:
For the past two weeks, I’ve been camped out in a west Texas courtroom watching the trial of fundamentalist Mormon polygamist Raymond Merril Jessop unfold. Sentencing begins today, and Jessop could face up to 20 years in prison for impregnating his underage “celestial” wife in 2004. The victim, 16 at the time of the sexual assault, never took the stand, and all the evidence in the case seemed to indicate that she was Jessop’s willing bride. But what does that even mean in an environment where girls are conditioned from birth to believe that marrying an older, powerful man is the highest honor?
In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, girls are taught that being a plural wife and mother is the only way to reach the highest rung of heaven. In this atmosphere, getting married at 14 or 15 becomes the next logical step in a girl’s life. They are into placed in marriages—"sealed for time and all eternity"—whenever the sect’s prophet deems them worthy, regardless of their age, according to the testimony of former FLDS member Rebecca Musser. Once married, girls must show perfect obedience to their husbands, who are viewed as their only connection to God ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
Meredith Shiner and Glenn Thrush at Politico ask the question: Why does the GOP have a "woman problem"—i.e., a problem recruiting female candidates? This should be one of those simple answers to stupid questions situations, because the easy answer is that the Republican party has become the clearinghouse for straight white men angry that they have to share a little power with everyone else. Running too many women, especially women who don't play sexpot or crazed right-wing shill (Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, respectively), would send the skittish angry white men of the party fleeing, hands over their ever-vulnerable man parts ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Since the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which barred federally funded Medicaid from paying for abortions, the whittling-away of reproductive rights has almost always affected poor women much more than better-off women. We have in this country a right to abortion that’s relatively easy to access if 1) you can pay for it, and 2) you live outside the large mostly rural swaths of fly-over country where abortion clinics are vanishingly rare. The geographic gaps (here's a map) come back to affordability, too. If you have the money to travel hundreds of miles and stay overnight, then you can exercise your right to have an abortion mo matter where you live. If not, then not.
And now in this same dreary tradition we have the Stupak amendment in the House health care bill ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)