So, in its effort to completely eliminate abortion (and even some popular forms of birth control), Mississippi has its citizens voting on an amendment to define legal personhood as beginning at conception.  Slate editor David Plotz responds with a rather interesting list of questions that would seem to follow from such a re-definition.  Some of my favorites: 1. If you are legal person at fertilization, does that mean you could drink at 20 years and three months? Could you drive at 15 and three months? Could you vote at age 17, and collect Social Security at 64? 3. Could you get a tax deduction for your dependent embryo? 5. Could you arrest women for smoking or drinking while pregnant? Could the state file a child abuse case against a mother who didn’t wear a seatbelt or otherwise endangered her fetus? 6. Would you be an American citizen if you were conceived in Mississippi but born elsewhere? Could there be “anchor babies” whose parents come to the United States, have sex, and then return home to Mexico for their baby’s birth? 8. What about freezing fertilized embryos? Would that be allowed? And why? If you’re freezing an embryo indefinitely, isn’t that effectively imprisoning it? We don’t freeze people. 11. If a woman eats food contaminated by Listeria and miscarries, could the agribusiness be prosecuted for murder? 13. How would it affect the census? Most all of these are actually genuine issues that could be legally raised if personhood was so re-defined.  Even if you are opposed to legal abortion, this strikes me as a solution that creates far more problems than it solves.   And, while this might pass Constitutional muster with Mississippi voters, I seriously doubt it would do so with the slightly higher Constitutional standards of the US Supreme Court (in part, for the intractable issues raised here by Plotz). Filed under: Politics

In the midst of the shitstorm over Michele Bachmann's comments about the HPV vaccine—her false statements, a.k.a "lies"—let's pause to remember why religious conservatives like Bachmann hate the HPV vaccine so much. HPV is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections. HPV is easily transmitted by skin-to-skin contact; condoms provide some protection, but not much. Most people who have been exposed to the human papilloma virus don't know they've been exposed. Most are asymptomatic. An asymptomatic person can still pass the virus on. A small percentage of women who have HPV go on to develop cervical cancer and some of those women wind up dead. Religious conservatives loved the HPV virus because it killed women. Here was a potentially fatal STI that condoms couldn't protect you from. Abstinence educators pointed to HPV and jumped up and down—they loved to overstate HPV's seriousness and its deadliness—in their efforts to scare kids into saving themselves for marriage. And they fought the introduction of the HPV vaccine tooth-and-nail because vaccinating women against HPV would "undermine" the abstinence message. Given a choice between your wife, daughter, sister, or mom dying of cervical cancer or no longer being to scream "HPV IS GOING TO KILL YOU!" at classrooms full of terrified teenagers, socially conservative abstinence "educators" preferred the former. Bachmann and her ilk believe that woman who have sex—along with men who fail to purchase health insurance—deserve to die horrible deaths. That's why they hate the HPV vaccine, that's why they fought its introduction, that's why they tell lies about it now. Because they want women to die. The party of life, ladies and gentlemen. [ Comment on this story ] [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Rick in full froth: The former Pennsylvania senator and potential presidential candidate was asked about Social Security during an interview on WESZ-AM radio in Laconia on Tuesday morning. He says the system has design flaws, but the reason it is in big trouble is that there aren't enough workers to support retirees. He blamed that on what he called the nation's abortion culture. He says that culture, coupled with policies that do not support families, deny America what it needs—more people. If only there were a large country, maybe adjacent to ours, that was home to a lot of people who wanted to come to the United States to live and work. And if the people in this hypothetically adjacentish country tended to have large families, and tended to be religious, social conservatives would no doubt to create a path to citizenship for folks from this hypothetical country. Because American needs more people, right? (For the record: there is no social security "crisis.") [ Comment on this story ] [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Seriously, y'all - how many times does it have to be said? Sarah Palin is not a feminist. I thought we had covered Palin's gross appropriation of feminism and feminist rhetoric during the election, but media coverage of Palin's recent speech for the anti-choice PAC the Susan B. Anthony List has reignited the debate. (Incidentally, the whole thing about Anthony being pro-life has been debunked.)

Meghan Daum at the LA Times writes,

"But putting that aside, I feel a duty (a feminist duty, in fact) to say this about Palin's declaration: If she has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she's entitled to be accepted as one."

So, simply declaring oneself a feminist is all that it takes to be a feminist? Methinks not. Under this standard of feminism anyone - a racist, a misogynist, etc - could be a feminist just because they identify as such. Ridiculous. Daum's argument also presupposes that it took "guts" for Palin to identify as a feminist, something that's so often maligned in U.S. culture.

Now, there is no doubt that there is a backlash against feminism and the women who identify with the movement - but that backlash is largely confined to feminists who actually espouse and fight for feminist values. Conservative and anti-feminist women who have appropriated the feminist label - like Palin or organizations like the Independent Women's Forum - only benefit from using the word. Because, they claim, they're the "real" feminists. (The "feminists" who want to limit women's reproductive rights, cut funding to VAWA and claim that pay inequity doesn't exist.) These self-proclaimed "feminists" are using the word because they know it has power and because they know it resonates with women. But when it comes to actually implementing policy that's feminist, or fighting for women's rights...well, not so much.

The fabulous Rebecca Traister said it best during the election in her piece on "Zombie Feminism":

The pro-woman rhetoric surrounding Sarah Palin's nomination is a grotesque bastardization of everything feminism has stood for, and in my mind, more than any of the intergenerational pro- or anti-Hillary crap that people wrung their hands over during the primaries, Palin's candidacy and the faux-feminism in which it has been wrapped are the first development that I fear will actually imperil feminism. Because if adopted as a narrative by this nation and its women, it could not only subvert but erase the meaning of what real progress for women means, what real gender bias consists of, what real discrimination looks like. Exactly. What's truly unsettling is that women like Palin and IWF want to use the feminist label to fight against women's rights! After all, Palin keeps touting herself as a working mom, but she ran on a presidential ticket that supported business' right to discriminate on the basis of gender, that opposed increased funding for SCHIP and that supported cuts to the Family and Medical Leave Act. And, of course, Palin is anti-choice - she even opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest, and is against emergency contraception. And while I'm sympathetic to the idea that abortion shouldn't be a litmus test for feminism - I believe, for example, that one can be personally pro-life and feminist - there is simply no way that you can advocate for the limitation of other women's rights and access to health care and call yourself a feminist. And seriously, Palin doesn't even support those women who do decide to keep their pregnancies - remember when she cut funding for a shelter for pregnant teens in Alaska? Explain to me how this is feminist.

However, the clearest indication of how anti-feminist this Palin-as-feminist framing is, is the conservative response actual feminists' criticisms of Palin. "Liberal feminists" (as they're calling us now) don't like Palin because she's attractive and happy, because we're jealous of her sexuality, we hate her because she's a mom, or - my personal favorite - we simply all have "post-abortion syndrome". The fact that these proponents of Palin's brand of "feminism" can't help but fall back on sexist stereotypes about women's political beliefs shows how full of shit this argument is. The proof's in the pudding, folks.

At the end of the day, Palin can call herself a feminist all she likes - shit, I can call myself an astronaut! - there's nothing we can do about that. But we can hold media accountable when they repeat her line of crap - so next time you see an article about how feminist Palin is, try telling them what a real feminist thinks.

Related Posts: Note to mainstream media: Sarah Palin is NOT a feminist Is Sarah Palin a Feminist? Friday Feminist Fuck NO. Brian Lehrer Asks, Is Palin a Feminist? Parsing Palin's empty "feminist" rhetoric Palin backtracks on being a feminist

This is just too perfect. After years of pushing abstinence-only education in the name of family values and the "sanctity" of marriage, Indiana congressman Mark Souder (R) has announced his resignation after an affair with his staffer, Tracy Jackson, has come to light.

What's truly amazing about this is that Souder and Jackson actually recorded a video together on the values of abstinence-only programs. Via TPM:

Because sex outside of marriage is bad! So, so naughty...

Souder's resignation is great news for sex advocates in Indiana, but what's almost as ironic as the lovers' video is that we have Fox News to thank for breaking the story. Who woulda thunk.

We're in the process of looking for a transcript, stay tuned.

The talking heads would like us to believe that nothing ever gets done in Washington. But that’s just not true. Just look at this clear, concise exchanges of letters between the assistants for a congressmen and a lobbyist trying to set up a meeting for their employers to talk. From: XXX Sent: Friday, May 22, 2009 11:38 AM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: JPMC Meeting Request Elizabeth, Attached is a meeting request for JP Morgan Chase who will be in DC June 3rd-4th and would like to request a brief meeting with the Congressman. Let me know if you need any additional information. Thank you! Best, XXX From: XXX Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:05 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Hi Liz, just checking in on whether the Congressman is available next week. [REDACTED] can confirm a meeting time for you – she is available at [REDACTED]. Thank you! Best, XXX Polite business manners. Nothing to see here folks…as long as you don’t look at the crazy coming out of the woodwork after the jump. Thanks to Beth L to pointing us to this ABC News story.

From: Becton, Elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:07 PM To: XXX Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Importance: High Who is Liz? Elizabeth Becton Executive Assistant/Office Manager Office of Congressman Jim McDermott XXXX Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 From: XXX Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:07 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Hi Elizabeth, I thought you went by Liz – apologies if that is incorrect. Best, XXX From: Becton, Elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:08 PM To: XXX Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request I do not go by Liz. Where did you get your information? Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:10 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Hi Elizabeth, I’m so sorry if I offended you! I thought you had gone by Liz at Potlatch, this was my mistake. Best, XXX From: Becton, Elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:11 PM To: XXX Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request NEVER. I hate that name. From: XXX Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:13 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Hi Elizabeth, I’m so sorry if I offended you! I must have mis-heard. My mistake! Best, XXX From: Becton, Elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:20 PM To: XXX Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Importance: High XXX: If I wanted you to call me by any other name, I would have offered that to you. I think it’s rude when people don’t even ask permission and take all sorts of liberties with your name. This is a real sore spot with me. My name has a lot of “nicknames” which I don’t use. I use either my first name or my last name because I row with a lot of other women who share the same first name. Now, please do not ever call me by a nickname again. As for your meeting request, who is the point of contact for this meeting? If it’s not you, then I need to know who because it’s very time-consuming to deal with a lot of people for one meeting. From: XXX Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:23 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Hi Elizabeth, I’m so sorry I offended you! My mistake! XXX can confirm a meeting time for you – she is available at XXX XXXX. Thank you! Best, XXX [UNRELATED EMAILS REDACTED] From: XXX Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:33 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Of course! Again, I am sincerely sorry for offending you. I must have mis-heard and it was in no way my intention to make you upset. I always enjoy working with you and seeing you at the WSS events J Best, XXX From: Becton, Elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:37 PM To: XXX Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Sounds like you got played by someone who KNOWS I hate that name and that it’s a fast way to TICK me off. Who told you that I go by that name? They are not your friend… From: XXX Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:38 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Hi Elizabeth, Again, I am sincerely sorry for offending you. I don’t want to cause trouble as I clearly must have mis-heard the person at Potlatch. It was in no way my intention to make you upset. Best, XXX From: Becton, Elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:41 PM To: XXX Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Importance: High I REALLY want to know who told you to call me that. From:XXX Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:44 PM To: Becton, Elizabeth Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Hi Elizabeth, Again, I am sincerely sorry for offending you. I don’t recall who I overheard. It was in no way my intention to make you upset. Best, XXX From: Becton, Elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 6:04 PM To: XXX Subject: RE: JPMC Meeting Request Let me put it this way, they don’t know me and perhaps they were PRETENDING to know me better than they do and pretended that I go by Liz. They did YOU a disservice. In the future, you should be VERY careful about such things. People like to brag about their connections in DC. It’s a past time for some. It’s also dangerous to eaves drop, as you have just found out. Quit apologizing and never call me anything but Elizabeth again. Also, make sure you correct anyone who attempts to call me by any other name but Elizabeth. Are we clear on this? Like I said, it’s a hot button for me. And please don’t call the office and not leave a message. My colleague told me you called while I was away at the Ladies’ room. I do sometimes leave my desk. Submitted By: Beth L

Historic Lancaster, PA is about to become the most surveilled town in America (though they've got nothing on London, where we have 14 cameras per red blood cell and yet still, this unmanageably gigantic mountain of meaningless video surveillance hasn't magically made all the criminals turn honest).

Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town's many tourists. That's more outdoor cameras than are used by many major cities, including San Francisco and Boston.

Unlike anywhere else, cash-strapped Lancaster outsourced its surveillance to a private nonprofit group that hires civilians to tilt, pan and zoom the cameras -- and to call police if they spot suspicious activity. No government agency is directly involved...

Mary Pat Donnellon, head of Mission Research, a local software company, vowed to move if she finds one on her block. "I don't want to live like that," she said. "I'm not afraid. And I don't need to be under surveillance."

"No one has the right to know who goes in and out my front door," agreed David Mowrer, a laborer for a company that supplies quarry pits. "That's my business. That's not what America is about."...

Mary Catherine Roper, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, says the coalition's role as a self-appointed, self-policed gatekeeper for blanket surveillance of an entire city is unique.

"This is the first time, the only time, I've heard of it anywhere," she said. "It is such a phenomenally bad idea that it is stunning to me."

She said the coalition structure provides no public oversight or accountability, and may be exempt from state laws governing release of public records.

"When I hear people off the street can come in and apply to watch the camera on my street, now I'm terrified," she added. "That could be my nosy neighbor, or my stalker ex-boyfriend, or a burglar stalking my home."

Jack Bauer, owner of the city's largest beer and soft drink distributor, calls the network "a great thing." His store hasn't been robbed, he said, since four cameras went up nearby.

"There's nothing wrong with instilling fear," he said.

Lancaster, Pa., keeps a close eye on itself

(Thanks, Timothy!)

When Barack Obama and his allies in Congress say the current tax laws aren’t fair, they are right. They aren’t fair, but not in the way the Democrats contend. The Tax Foundation put together a revealing report (PDF) comparing taxes paid to the dollar value of government services received.

As this chart shows, 40% of American households are working to support the other 60%. If you make $65,000 or more per year, you’re effectively a slave for the portion of the year that you spend earning the money that the government takes in taxes. You may not realize you’re a slave, because you don’t see any shackles around your legs. But if you decide not to pay your taxes, unless you plan on being nominated for a position in the Obama administration in which case taxes seem to be optional, those shackles would become very real. Just ask Wesley Snipes. What we have now is a tyranny of the majority. Because 60% of America benefits from the labors of the other 40%, it’s a winning electoral formula, one that Democrats exploit at every election cycle when they ramp up the class warfare rhetoric demanding that “the rich” pay their “fair share.” What is a fair share? Is it fair when a 40% minority is robbed to benefit the 60% majority? Would be more fair if 30% of people were robbed to benefit a 70% majority? Taxing a smaller share of higher earners even more in order to subsidize the rest of the country is not only economically unworkable, it’s morally repugnant. At what point do people get fed up and say they’re not going to put in that extra effort, those additional hours of work so that their slave masters can reap the benefits of their labor? Between Rick Santelli’s rant, the skyrocketing sales of Atlas Shrugged, and the tea parties popping up all over the country, I suspect we’re going to reach a tipping point real soon.

Two of the most important women’s-rights-related bill-signings in the past few years. The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003:

And the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009: