Once again, no time to do a real post, so I’m giving you a few links.
Today in fundamentalism: a British woman teaching in Sudan has been charged with blasphemy and insulting Islam for allowing her class of 7-year-old students to name a teddy bear Mohammed.
Paul Krugman gives us yet another reason to be very, very nervous about the seemingly-bland-and-inoffensive Mike Huckabee:
Speaking before a gathering of Christian conservative voters, GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said legalized abortion in the United States was a holocaust.
“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”
Don’tcha just love synergy? Anti-choice propaganda, woman-hating*, paranoia about immigration and a Godwin’s violation, all in one seamless web! (Via). Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker has more reasons to fear the guy.
Speaking of anti-choice Presidential candidates, Melissa has some disturbing news about Dennis Kucinich, who gives a new reason to suspect that his pro-choice stance — which is of recent vintage — is not exactly his highest priority:
You know, for a long time, I gave Dennis Kucinich the benefit of the doubt. When people accused him of just being a goofy, pointless, time-wasting vanity candidate, I defended him. He’s earnest, I said. Well, no more.
That he would seriously consider for one second sharing a ticket with Ron Paul—the same Ron Paul who isn’t even pro-choice and refused Medicaid and Medicare payments at his private practice because he’s so against government-sponsored healthcare—is laughable, and he’s lost me well and truly.
And I just have to quote Cara, who wrote in comments to Liss’s post:
I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT I KNEW IT I FUCKING KNEW IT!
I’ve spent the last several months being made to feel like some bad liberal because I can’t stand Kucinich. On paper, I agree with him but there was always something about him that I didn’t like and didn’t trust — probably his anti-choice past, or maybe the fact that he has a creepy demeanor — and even in a crazy world where he actually had a chance, I wouldn’t have wanted him to be the nominee. And I just got disapproving looks from all of the hardcore liberals and told how incredibly awesome Kucinich is . . . and now, I HAVE BEEN VINDICATED.
Sorry, those of you who are heartbroken. I’m really not trying to gloat, I’m just genuinely gleeful that I don’t have to feel guilty about my inability stand the guy! Hurrah!
BTW — if you show up because you’ve got some kind of bot running that picks up your boy Ron Paul’s name, save it. I don’t want to hear it, and if you’re just going to defend Paul, I probably won’t let your comment through. This is actually about Kucinich, after all.
In more abortion-related news, this time of the panty-sniffing variety, it seems that Phill Kline, everyone’s least favorite voyeuristic former Kansas AG, doesn’t actually reside in the county where he’s been serving as county attorney since getting booted from the AG job (and doing more pantysniffing via a massive lawsuit against Planned Parenthood). Which is kind of a problem.
You’ve come a long way, baby: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, once thought of as an old man’s disease (and caused by smoking) has become a major killer of women.
Despite the moral panic about obesity rates rising, they actually started leveling off in 1999 for women and have remained the same since then (men’s rates have been steady since 2003). Rates vary by age, and vary substantially by ethnicity among women (but not men). Of course, there’s always someone who wants to keep the panic going:
Dr. Claude Bouchard, an obesity researcher who directs of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., was not convinced that the obesity rates had leveled off for either men or women. The rates in both groups edged up by about 2 percent between the 2003-4 and 2005-6 surveys, he notes. And even though those increases were not statistically significant, they are, he said, a troubling trend.
“I’m worried,” he said. “We are talking about something that is still creeping up.” And regarding obesity rates among black women, he said, “Wow, through the roof.”
So it’s not statistically significant, but it’s cause for panic anyway. Oooo-kay.
Speaking of WTF moments, this time of the anxious masculinity variety: Jeff Fecke deconstructs one of those Men’s Health “mysteries of men” columns. Of course, the real mystery is why men don’t get more angry about these kinds of hateful portrayals of themselves.
It could be that at least some of them are too busy buying into those portrayals in order to excuse their own idiotic behavior — and, of course, blaming feminists for ruining all their fun. Women, for instance, are to blame for those guys who just can’t stop themselves from slobbering over the slightest glimpse of skin. Because they’re ruining men’s careers with their careless flashes of ankle and need to pay for it:
Booze-infused office Christmas parties can be threatening affairs, according to Fox News guest Marc Rudov. But men should be more concerned than their female coworkers.
“We live in an era when men have to rely on the sanity and the mood of a woman rather than the U.S. Constitution for his protection,” he told the host of Fox’s Your World. “Between the EEOC rules and the Violence Against Women Act, the workplace has become a dangerous place for men.”
Rudov says that when men look at women “showing their thighs” at the workplace, “they can lose their job.”
When asked what exactly he was afraid of, Rudov was hesitant to respond. But he did come up with a solution, although slightly draconian in nature. “For every inch of skin you reveal at work,” he suggests, “you give up a right.”
Be sure to watch the video. And read the comments at Raw Story, not only for the troll infestation (lots of guys whining that they can’t ogle anyone anymore without getting in trouble for it, and those sluts just bring it on themselves with their business attire), but for the disclaimer at the bottom.
Muslim girls are joining the Girl Scouts, and it’s helping some Americans see them as, well, the Americans they actually are rather than some exotic other species or a threat. Careful outreach has also been helpful in getting some of their traditionally-minded parents to let them join.
Could coverage of unmarried women’s participation in politics and voting actually be starting more than a few weeks before the election *and* largely avoiding condescending “Sex and the City” references in favor of actually, you know, discussing issues?
There’s a Pink Posse, but it’s not the lesbian gang that Bill O’Reilly fears. No, it’s a group of women (and some men) in India who fight corruption, child marriage and dowry deaths. While the coverage has largely been positive, Samhita notes that the story went out of its way to note that the Pink Posse isn’t just a bunch of male-bashers (not like those nasty male-bashing feminists!).
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* Because there’s always someone who needs this spelled out: blaming your current paranoia about Messcans smuggling terrists over the border to bomb our malls and take our jerbs on women for having abortions is woman-hating. ‘Kay? Now you don’t have to pop into comments and feign shock that I would accuse such a nice man of such a thing when he *never* actually *said* the word “hate.”