In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

The Legal Mind Behind the White House

Man am I missing my New Yorker subscription right now.

Luckily, my dad is apparently still taking the time to peruse the magazine, as he sends this piece onto me — with the fitting comment, “This is an excellent article about a very scary man.” I think that about sums it up.

Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”

Read More…Read More…

Make Me More Like a Greek Woman

An op/ed in the Times this week is after my own heart — it looks at the problem of subway groping, and compares the reactions of New Yorkers and Greeks.

Around the same time, I spent eight months doing research in Athens, so I decided to record Greek women recounting narratives I could compare to the New Yorkers’. Since most of the subway stories were actually molesting stories, I asked Greek women if they’d ever been molested.

The experiences the Greek women described were similar to those I’d heard from Americans. But there was a difference. Most of the American women — like those recently interviewed in the New York news media — told me they had felt humiliated and helpless and had done or said nothing. Of the 25 stories Greek women told me, only eight concluded with the speaker doing nothing. In the others, she said she had yelled, struck back or both.

One Greek woman told of walking to school with a friend when they were 12 years old, and encountering a man who exposed himself. Their reaction? “We grabbed some rocks and started aiming at his head. … How we didn’t kill him I don’t know. We started to scream out loud.” Another said: “I have given smacks. I have given a punch to a sailor. I have given kicks.”

She went on to say that when she traveled she kept a rock in her pocket for protection, and she described how she used it on a repulsive man who had been dogging her and a friend on vacation in Venice.

I’m not a big fan of violence, but I do like to see women fighting back. Sure beats feeling powerless and humiliated.

Horrifying

Note: Welcome, Eschatonians and Crooks and Liars readers! Please note that comments will be held in moderation if you haven’t posted before, and it may be some time until someone gets to them. In addition, we will delete or edit any comments that call for retaliation against the bloggers who did this. Enjoy your stay.

Recently, J*ff “Online Integrity” G*ldstein allowed a comment which outed Thersites and NYMary to remain on his site for some time, publishing personal information about their identities and workplaces, apparently because Thersities snarked at Online Integrity’s misattribution of a rather famous piece of artwork (as Jane Hamsher noted, at some cost to her well-being, J-G eventually took it down, though some of the wingnuts apparently have the screen cap and have used it in other contexts). Prior to that, Michelle Malkin published personal contact information for some UC Santa Cruz students who’d mistakenly included it in a press release that she’d gotten her hands on — and she refused to take down the information, even after the students asked her to, because they had started getting threatening calls from Malkin’s flying monkeys. She then found herself having to move because someone retaliated by publishing *her* home address and telephone.

Now another wingnut has published the personal contact information for someone who has displeased him. The crime? Taking a photo assignment for the New York Times’ Travel section on St. Michael’s, an exclusive community on the eastern shore of Maryland where Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have well-known, heavily-guarded vacation homes.

Al Qaeda, apparently, have never heard of Google or property records (or the numerous puff pieces published over the years, including in Newsmax, about these properties), so they would have remained blissfully unaware of Cheney and Rumsfeld’s presence were it not for the Travel section of the Times. Clearly, this is a plot by the liberal Times, and must be punished.

The General has a screen cap of the post by Rocco Dipippo as well as a direct link, which I won’t supply here. The General also has a link to the comment section, where some really really deranged characters vigorously defend the posting of private information on someone who’s probably a stringer and picks up work for the Times on an ad hoc basis. Much of their ire seems to be directed to the directions given within the body of the article itself, yet DiPippo did not go after the (male) reporter, just the (female) photographer.

It gets worse, though.

The General has a Republican Jesus cartoon quoting one Dennis K, who posted the following at his blog (link back to Rocco omitted):

So, in the school of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, we are providing this link so YOU may help the blogosphere in locating the homes (perhaps with photos?) of the editors and reporters of the New York Times.

Let’s start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. , Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen. Do you have an idea where they live?

Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous – grab for the golden ring.

Emphasis mine.

This is where allowing eliminationist rhetoric on the right to go unchallenged leads us. All over a puff piece in the motherfucking Travel section of the Sunday Times.

Oh, and Malkin, who knows first-hand what it’s like to be the target of a public outing? She’s got her greasy little hoofprints on this one.

Charlotte Allen Would Rather Her Daughters (and Yours) Have Cancer Than Sex.

Amanda calls her a “moral monster,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Now, here’s the latest from an immunization panel affiliated with the National Centers for Disease Control: force every single little girl, female teenager, and young woman in the country to be vaccinated against cervical cancer–actually against sexually transmitted disease that can cause cancer.

Here’s the New York Times report:

“The vote all but commits the federal government to spend as much as $2 billion alone on a program to buy the vaccine for the nation’s poorest girls from 11 to 18.

“The vaccine, Gardasil, protects against cancer and genital warts by preventing infection from four strains of the human papillomavirus, the most common sexually transmitted disease, according to federal health officials. The virus is also a cause of other cancers in women.”

If you think 11 sounds young for sex, how about age 9–the recommended age in some cases?

Charlotte, you dipshit, the idea is to give girls the vaccine BEFORE they become sexually active.

But the IWF doesn’t select its contributors based on their ability to argue rationally or pay attention to facts. Such as the fact that the panel’s recommendation did not make the vaccine mandatory, simply strongly recommended. Meaning that the government is NOT “forcing” all young girls and women to have this vaccine, but it is providing the push necessary to offer it to *poor* women through publicly-funded vaccination programs. Somehow, I doubt that Charlotte’s kids are in this pool (though God forbid any tax money go to prevent CANCER in poor women).

And they don’t screen for racists, either — check her preceding comments on universal preschool and HIV testing.

And now we come to the heart of the matter: Gardasil’s going to turn my little girls into sluts because I’ll have to tell them there’s one less consequence of fucking!

But there are a few hitches–such as parents who, uh, balk at the idea of telling prepubescent girls that it’s just fine for them to have all the sex they want, ’cuz now they’ll be vaccinated! And isn’t it against the law to have sex with children?

Let’s unpack all the freakish little goodies in that, shall we? First off, why in God’s name would you tell your kid — your 9-year-old kid — about the connection between this shot and sex? The kid asks why they have to get the shot, you tell them it’s so they don’t get sick. I know my parents didn’t explain in detail disease pathways every time I got a shot as a kid, just that it was going to keep me from getting sick. About the only thing I was ever given any detail on was the odd tetanus shot, and that’s because a) there’s a cause-effect relationship between getting cut and getting the shot; and b) my dad had had tetanus as a kid and it didn’t sound like a very pleasant experience.

Seriously, though, what is the religious-nut obsession with having discussions with your prepubescent children about sex? As if Purity Balls and virginity pledges and fathers being in charge of their daughters’ sexuality weren’t creeptastic enough, they have to turn a perfectly routine vaccination for a very young girl who probably isn’t even that curious about sex yet into some kind of opportunity to obsess about that girl’s genitalia?

And, yes, Charlotte, having sex with children is against the law. But children, you may have noticed, grow into adults, who will more than likely have sex. With other people. Who may very well have been exposed to HPV at some point, like the majority of the population. And this is where that herd immunity thing comes in.

And as for it being against the law, well, why don’t you ask an altar boy how much that does to stop adults who are determined to have sex with kids? Here’s what Amanda has to say about that:

Think about what she’s saying for a second—because there’s a law against raping children, said children should be unprotected from diseases they could get if they were in fact raped. Why? Does she think that a person wicked enough to rape a child would stop and think, “Oh I’d better not rip this little girl’s body up and traumatize her, possibly for life, because there’s a chance she might be unvaccinated and I could give her HPV.” What other medical care should we deprive child rape victims from in order to appeal to the better nature of child rapists, Charlotte? I myself wasn’t aware that child rapists had some better nature that could be appealed to.

Charlotte would probably blame the child for being too tempting.

Finally, Charlotte demonstrates that while she sure as hell doesn’t want the government “forcing” her daughter to be vaccinated, she’s not above advocating that the government refuse to fund vaccinations for poor girls in favor of moral hectoring (the portion in quotation marks is from the New York Times article she cites):

“Another challenge is Gardasil’s price. At $360 for the three-shot regimen, it is among the most expensive vaccines ever. Because cervical cancer is mostly a disease of poverty, those in most need of the vaccine will be the least able to afford it. State vaccination programs, already under financial strain, may refuse to provide it.”

I hope they do refuse. How about telling young teen-agers instead that sexual promiscuity is not only a bad idea but actually dangerous to their health?

What a disgusting person.

Spamspamspamspam

Sorry if your comments were stuck in moderation. We’ve been getting a great deal of porn-o-rific spam here lately. Fortunately, it’s all from the same ISP, so I think we’ve been able to resolve it.

Pretty damn disturbing glimpse into the industry, though. Here’s just one subject header:

Dad son thumb sex

I don’t even want to know.