Tag Archives: women

These WNBA Players Were Fined for Shirts Supporting Black Lives Matter—and They’re Not Going to Take It

by HungNewbigin Posted on July 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the locker room Thursday afternoon, following a home-court loss to the Indiana Fever, players from New York Liberty refused to answer questions about basketball. Same with the Fever.

That morning, the Women’s National Basketball Association fined the New York Liberty, Phoenix Mercury, and Indiana Fever $5,000 apiece, and their players $500 each. Their transgression? During warmups in recent games, they’ve donned black t-shirts in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement. (For one game, the Liberty’s shirts included hashtags for #blacklivesmatter and #Dallas5—recognizing the five police officers slain in Dallas.) Earlier this week, the league sent out a memo reminding players of its attire policy, and noting that players could not alter their uniforms in any way.

“We are proud of WNBA players’ engagement and passionate advocacy for non-violent solutions to difficult social issues,” league president Lisa Borders told the Associated Press on Wednesday, “but expect them to comply with the league’s uniform guidelines.”

The WNBA’s decision to fine the women was met with criticism, especially given that NBA players led by New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony and other superstars have been calling for renewed social activism among pro athletes. After the 2014 death of Eric Garner, who died after a police officer put him in a choke hold in Staten Island, New York, superstars Lebron James, Derrick Rose, and Kyrie Irving, and members of the Brooklyn Nets, wore “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warmups—no one got a fine. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver supported the players while noting that he preferred they “abide by our on-court attire rules.” (Just yesterday the NBA, in an unprecedented act of social activism by a pro sports league, punished North Carolina for its controversial workplace discrimination and transgender bathroom law by moving its lucrative All-Star game away from Charlotte.)

After the shooting at the Orlando gay nightclub that killed 49 people, the WNBA distributed T-shirts bearing a rainbow heart with the words #OrlandoUnited on them for a night. The Minnesota Lynx wore shirts with the words “Change starts with us, justice and accountability” for one game—prompting four off-duty police officers working the game to walk out. (The women did not receive a fine in that case.)

Here’s what some of the fined players had to say about the whole affair:

Liberty guard Tanisha Wright: “We really feel like there’s still an issue still in America, and we want to be able to use our platforms. We want to be able to use our voices. We don’t want to let anybody silence us in what we want to talk about…It’s unfortunate that the WNBA has fined us and not supported its players.”

Liberty forward Tina Charles: (Charles wore her usual warmup shirt inside out while accepting the “Player of the Month” award prior to the game.) “I was just thinking, with what happened today in North Miami to the African-American male who was down just trying to help an autistic person out, when I heard about that news, I just couldn’t be silent. You know, just knowing my status, knowing the player I am representing this organization, if anybody was going to wear it, it had to be me. So for me, it’s just all about me continuing to raise awareness. I have no problem wearing this shirt inside out for the rest of the season until we’re able to have the WNBA support.”

Liberty guard Swin Cash: “We really would appreciate that people stop making our support of Black Lives Matter, an issue that is so critical in our society right now, as us not supporting the police officers. There’s a lot of women in this room right now, and in the WNBA, that have family members who are in law enforcement, family who are in the military…The fact of the matter is, there is an issue at hand is, and as much as we can grieve and feel sorry for those families who are losing those police officers, we also have the right and the ability to also have our voice be heard about an issue that goes back even further than the deaths that have been happening lately. And so I think people need to understand that it’s not mutually exclusive. You also can support both things, but at the same time, this issue is important to us.”

Tanisha Wright: “More than 70 percent of this league is made up of African-American women, so that affects us directly. We need the league to be just as supportive of this issue as they were with any other issue: Breast cancer awareness, they support that. Pride, they support that. Go Green initiative, they support. So we want them to stand with us and support this as well.”

Indiana Fever’s Briann January: “Race is tough, it’s very tough, but when you go about it the right way and attack that issue with information and statistics and support for those people, there is not a fight here. We’re not here to put up a fight. We’re here to support a certain group. We’re asking for change. Every race deserves the right to be treated with respect and not be treated based on the color of their skin.”

Tanisha Wright: “We feel like America has a problem with the police brutality that’s going on with black lives…And we want to just use our voices and use our platform to advocate for that. Just because someone says black lives matter, doesn’t mean that other lives don’t matter…What we say is black lives matter, too. Period.”

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These WNBA Players Were Fined for Shirts Supporting Black Lives Matter—and They’re Not Going to Take It

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This Woman Accused Trump of Sexual Assault. She Finally Broke Her Silence.

by ElanaLortqpatk Posted on July 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just a day after Donald Trump officially became the Republican presidential nominee, a woman broke her silence on allegations that he sexually assaulted her. In an interview with the Guardian published today, Jill Harth detailed how Trump made numerous sexual advances toward her in 1993, culminating when she says he cornered and groped her in a bedroom. Harth attempted to press charges in 1997 but withdrew her lawsuit and has since remained quiet about the case. She says that since her allegations resurfaced in a May New York Times article about Trump’s treatment of women, the Trump campaign has continuously pressured her to recant her account.

Harth says she first met Trump in 1992 during a business presentation, when she was working with the American Dream beauty pageant festival. Harth was with her romantic partner, George Houraney, at the time, but Harth says that did not deter Trump from sexually pursuing her. Trump “stared at her” throughout her meeting, according to Harth, and then asked Houraney: “Are you sleeping with her or what?” When Houraney said yes, Trump asked if it was “for the weekend or what?”

In Harth’s 1997 lawsuit, she describes several instances in which Trump allegedly harassed her. In one instance, Harth says Trump groped her under the table during a dinner with beauty pageant contestants. Then in 1993, Harth says, Trump cornered her in a bedroom in his Florida mansion during a business visit, an incident described in the lawsuit as an “attempted ‘rape’.” Harth tells the Guardian:

“He pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress again,” Harth recalled, “and I had to physically say: ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ It was a shocking thing to have him do this because he knew I was with George, he knew they were in the next room. And how could he be doing this when I’m there for business?”

Jill Harth’s 1997 lawsuit via the Guardian

Though Harth did not use the word “rape” in her interview with the Guardian, she says, “If I hadn’t pushed him away, I’m sure he would have just went for it. He was aggressive.”

In a response to the Guardian, Michael Cohen, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and special counsel to Trump, said in a statement, “It is disheartening that one has to dignify a response to the below absurd query. Mr Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms Harth as these 24-year-old allegations lack any merit or veracity.”

Harth says she had resolved to not discuss the claims for years, but that after attempts by the Trump campaign to discredit her following the New York Times story, she is opening up now to demand an apology.

“His office—and I have it on my voicemails that he called, that they called—they asked me to recant everything when the New York Times article came out,” Harth tells the Guardian. “They were trying to get me to say it never happened and I made it up. And I said I’m not doing that.”

“Nobody was defending me, that’s why I’m talking,” Harth said. “You can believe it or not, but I went through hell and I still have to relive this again. And I just, I’m horrified that I have to think about this again.”

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This Woman Accused Trump of Sexual Assault. She Finally Broke Her Silence.

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This Salvadoran Woman Served 4 Years for Having a Miscarriage

by AishaMcLean5884 Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Maria Teresa Rivera didn’t realize she was pregnant in 2011 when she went into early labor. The 28-year-old factory worker in El Salvador, who already had one son, started bleeding heavily late one night, so her family called an ambulance to drive her to the hospital. The next day, Rivera was taken to jail.

Her crime? Having a miscarriage.

Rivera is one of a number of women in El Salvador incarcerated not for abortion, which is illegal, but as a result of miscarriages. An abortion rights group in the area has identified 17 people convicted of homicide, with sentences upward of 40 years, after facing obstetric emergencies such as miscarriage or stillbirth.

After serving four of her 40-year prison sentence for aggravated homicide, Rivera’s conviction was overturned by a judge and she walked free this spring. But the prosecution appealed her release, and this week a three-judge panel will decide whether to hold a new hearing or throw out the charges for good.

Only six countries in the world, including El Salvador, ban abortion in all cases, even when the pregnancy is the result of rape or threatens the life of the mother. Nicaragua, Chile, the Dominican Republic, the Vatican city-state, and Malta are the only other places with similar prohibitions. In January, El Salvador’s deputy health minister told women to avoid getting pregnant for two years because of worries over the effects of Zika virus.

“A woman who procures herself an abortion is running a very high risk,” Carmen Barroso, the former regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the Western Hemisphere, told Mother Jones. “She’ll run the risk to her life because she’ll have to have an unsafe abortion because they are so limited in availability. It is tragic.”

The ban in El Salvador got international attention in 2013, when the country’s highest court rejected the abortion request of a young woman, known only as Beatriz, with a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, ruling the “rights of the mother cannot be privileged over those” of the fetus. The fetus suffered from anencephaly, a severe congenital disorder where the fetus’ brain and skull stop growing, giving it little chance of surviving outside the womb. The woman survived after getting a controversial caesarian section.

Despite the ban, more than 19,000 illegal abortions were reported in El Salvador between 2005 and 2008, according to the Ministry of Health’s Information, Monitoring, and Evaluation Unit, an estimate that advocates say is low. Nearly a third of abortions performed were on adolescents, who make up a large percent of the region’s unplanned pregnancies. According to the World Health Organization, 9 percent of maternal deaths in Central America are the result of illegal abortions.

As a result of the criminalization, women in El Salvador frequently face legal scrutiny for abortion-related crimes. According to research done by a Salvadoran advocacy group, between 2000 and 2011 about 130 women were criminally prosecuted for ending their pregnancies. That number doesn’t include cases where the allegations were dropped or cases involving minors, whose records are sealed. Almost 50 women were convicted of either illegal abortion or different degrees of homicide, which carries a sentence of up to 50 years.

Then there are the cases of the 17 women who are part of “Las 17,” as they’re known, who are all, like Rivera, young, impoverished, and accused of losing their pregnancies on purpose. Guadalupe Vasquez, a housekeeper, was only 17 years old when she became pregnant from rape. She decided to keep the baby but lost it during labor. After her employer sent her to the hospital, she was reported to the police and eventually sentenced to 30 years behind bars.

Many of the women, including Rivera, were reported to the police by medical staff at the hospital. In some cases, neighbors or friends called law enforcement.

“I felt the need to go to the bathroom, I pushed, and it was the baby that came out into the latrine,” Rivera said in a video from prison. She passed out from loss of blood and was in the hospital when she woke up. “Then they took me to this place,” she said.

Rivera was convicted “despite the complete lack of evidence of any wrongdoing,” according to an analysis of Las 17 cases by a Salvadoran lawyer and a Harvard sociologist. The analysis also concluded that Salvadoran courts systematically discriminated against the women by aggressively pursuing “the mother’s prosecution instead of pursuing the truth.”

“In stark contrast to the courts’ findings, our analysis concludes that the legal and medical facts in the majority of these cases correspond with medical emergency—not with homicide,” they wrote.

Rivera successfully appealed her conviction and has spent the last two months walking free.

“What worries me is leaving my son alone again,” Rivera, who grew up in orphanages, told Rewire after being released in May. “I was forced to abandon him for four and a half years, and he suffered greatly during that time.”

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This Salvadoran Woman Served 4 Years for Having a Miscarriage

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Are Your Favorite Late-Night Shows Sexist?

by LateshaGriggs Posted on July 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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The controversy over a recent Daily Show tweet and the departure of one of the show’s rising comics has put a spotlight on how few women have roles on screen and behind the camera at television’s top late-night comedy shows.

And when Mother Jones did spot-check of several programs’ credits, the numbers read like a terrible punchline that female comics know all too well. While Full Frontal‘s Samantha Bee and past late-night hosts such as Chelsea Handler have helped blaze the path for women, the people penning the jokes for the most popular shows are still overwhelmingly male.

At eleven of television’s most popular late-night programs, just 30 of 175 writers were women, according to credits for episodes that aired this year. In other words, less than 18 percent of late-night comedy writers at the most popular sketch and talk shows are women. That is significantly lower than the number of female television writers overall, according to a study published earlier this year by the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism: In broadcast TV, women make up 31.6 percent of writers, compared with 28.5 percent in cable and 25.2 percent for shows that are streamed over the internet. Film still trails dismally behind—only 10.8 percent of writers are female. Though female writers find more work in television than their counterparts in film, the gender imbalance in comedy programming has continued to lag.

University of Southern California MDSC Initiative

This issue came up again after Monday’s historic US Supreme Court decision, which struck down several restrictive abortion measures in Texas. People took to social media to express relief about the ruling, which will prevent the state’s remaining abortion clinics from shutting down. It came as a surprise to some fans when The Daily Show With Trevor Noah posted what some said was a rather tone-deaf tweet.

The tweet, meant to show support for the ruling, did not land well with Twitter users on both sides of the abortion debate. One even suggested The Daily Show could avoid snafus like this by hiring more female writers. The Daily Show did not issue an apology, but it did post a follow-up tweet for clarification:

That Twitter user who clamored for more women writers raises a good point. Although The Daily Show is known for left-leaning jokes and its snarky take on American politics, the backlash to this tweet is an example of what can happen when a group of mostly male writers try to make a joke about women’s issues without much female input. Now, even fewer women will be on the show’s payroll. On Wednesday, Daily Show darling and four-year correspondent Jessica Williams announced she would be leaving the show after this week to begin work on a pilot. Williams, the youngest correspondent to join the show, inked a development deal with Comedy Central in March.

There are currently eight regular correspondents on the program, and after Williams’ departure, there will only be one female correspondent on a team of seven. The female correspondents are not credited as writing staff. Nor are the three women who are listed as semi-regular contributors on the Daily Show’s website. That means the ratio of male to female writers at The Daily Show is not any better than it is for similar programs: There are five times as many men as there are women in The Daily Show‘s writers’ room.

We took a look at the closing credits of the recent episodes of the most popular late-night shows. To get the most accurate count possible, we looked at the credits of each show or the Writers Guild of America website to verify the names of every writer. We used Twitter and IMDB to verify the gender of each writer.

Late Night with Seth Meyers, as of June 2016 (NBC):

Total credited writers: 17

Men: 14

Women: 3

Saturday Night Live, as of May 2016 (NBC):

Total credited writers: 24

Men: 20

Women: 4

The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, as of June 2016: (Comedy Central)

Total credited writers: 19

Men: 16

Women: 3

The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, as of June 2016 (Comedy Central)

Total credited writers: 15

Men: 11

Women: 4

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, as of June 2016 (HBO)

Total credited writers: 11

Men: 9

Women: 2

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, as of June 2016 (CBS)

Total credited writers: 18

Men: 16

Women: 2

The Late Late Show With James Corden, as of June 2016 (CBS)

Total credited writers: 14

Men: 11

Women: 3

Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, as of June 2016 (TBS)

Total credited writers: 9

Men: 5

Women: 4

Real Time With Bill Maher as of June 2016 (HBO)

Total credited writers: 10

Men: 10

Women: 0

*Recent episode credits were unavailable for Conan, The Tonight Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. The following numbers are from the 2016 Writers Guild Awards nominations.

Conan, as of December 2015 (TBS)

Total credited writers: 17

Men: 15

Women: 2

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, as of December 2015 (NBC)

Total credited writers: 21

Men: 18

Women: 3

Jimmy Kimmel Live, as of December 2014 (more recent list unavailable; not included in tally) (ABC)

Total credited writers: 16

Men: 13

Women: 3

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Are Your Favorite Late-Night Shows Sexist?

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Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves

by Jerilyn00H Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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One night not long ago while coming home late from a dinner with friends, I passed frat row near the University of California-Berkeley campus. Groups of girls were clacking along the street in their party uniforms: short skirts, bare midriffs, five-inch heels. One of them stopped and lifted her skirt above her waist, revealing a tiny thong, a flat belly, and some righteously toned glutes. She looked happy and strong, laughing, surrounded by friends, having fun. Then she turned toward a building where two bros, appraising the relative “hotness” of those trying to gain entrée to their party, were posted by the door.

Honestly? I didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled.

I have spent three years interviewing dozens of young women about their attitudes toward and experiences with physical intimacy. On the one hand, girls would enthuse about pop icons like Beyoncé, Gaga, Miley, and Nicki who were actively “taking control” of their sexuality. Whereas earlier generations of feminist-identified women may have seen Kim Kardashian West’s “happy #internationalwomensday” tweet and accompanying nude selfie (Instagram caption: “When you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL”) as something to denounce, many of today’s generation talked about it as an expression rather than an imposition of sexuality—brand promotion done on her own terms.

Young women may not have a million-dollar empire to promote, but they can relate. As one college sophomore told me, she never feels more “liberated” than “when I wear a crop top and my boobs are showing and my legs are showing and I’m wearing super high heels.” She added, “I’m proud of my body, and I like to show it off.”

But a moment later it became clear that unless, through fortuitous genetics or incessant work, you were able to “show off” the right body, the threat of ridicule lurked. The young woman told me that a friend had recently gained some weight. It’s not that she couldn’t wear skimpy clothes, the woman explained. “But she knows how she would feel if there were asshole-y boys who were like, ‘She’s a fat girl.'”

Young women talked about feeling simultaneously free to choose a sexualized image—which was nobody’s damned business but their own—and having no other choice. “You want to stand out,” one college freshman explains. “It’s not just about being hot, but who can be the hottest.”

But as journalist Ariel Levy pointed out in her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, “hot” is not the same as “beautiful” or “attractive”: It is a narrow, commercialized vision of sexiness that, when applied to women, can be reduced to two words: “fuckable” and “sellable.” No coincidence, Levy added, that this is “the literal job criteria for stars of the sex industry.” And maybe no coincidence that young people are growing up with far more access to porn than ever before. Which means their early ideas about sex are drawn from fiction that has largely been produced for male masturbation.

Perhaps nowhere is that influence more clear than in the emergence of full-frontal waxing. Once the province of fetishists and, yes, porn stars, the Brazilian moved mainstream in 2000, thanks to Sex and the City. (“I feel like one of those freaking hairless dogs!” Carrie complained after visiting an overzealous aesthetician.) In 2003, trendsetter Victoria Beckham declared that Brazilians should be “compulsory” starting at age 15. She may get her wish: A study of two universities, published in 2014, found that nearly half of female college students were entirely hairless and just 4 percent went fully au naturel.

Most young women I met had been removing their pubic hair—all of it—since they were about 14. They cast it as a “personal choice,” saying it made them feel “cleaner.” Yet, when I pressed further, another darker motivation emerged: avoiding humiliation. “I remember all these boys were telling stories about this girl in high school, how she kind of ‘got around,'” one young woman told me. “And people would go down there to finger her, or whatever, and there would be hair, and they were appalled…Guys act like they would be disgusted by it.”

“There’s this real sense of shame if you don’t have your genitals prepared,” agreed Debby Herbenick, an associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public Health. Herbenick studies something called “genital self-image“—how people feel about their private parts. Women’s feelings about their genitals have been directly linked to their enjoyment of sex, she told me. In interviews with young women, she found that those who were uncomfortable with their genitalia were not only less sexually satisfied, but also more likely to engage in unprotected sex. Herbenick is concerned that young women’s genital self-image is under siege, with more pressure than ever to see their vulvae as unacceptable in their natural state. She recalled a student who started shaving after a boy announced—during one of her class discussions—that he’d never seen pubic hair on a woman in real life, and that if he came across it he’d walk out the door.

There’s no question that a bald vulva is baby smooth—some would say disturbingly so. Perhaps in the 1920s, when women first started shaving their legs and armpits, that act seemed creepily infantilizing, too, but now depilating those areas is a standard rite of passage. That early wave of hair removal was driven by flapper fashions that displayed a woman’s limbs; arms and legs were, for the first time, no longer part of the private realm. Today’s pubic hair removal could be seen the same way: We have opened our most intimate parts to unprecedented scrutiny, evaluation, commodification.

Consider: Largely as a result of the Brazilian trend, cosmetic labiaplasty, the clipping of the folds of skin that make up the vulva, has skyrocketed as well. While it’s still a small slice of overall cosmetic surgeries, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, there was a 16 percent rise in the procedure between 2014 and 2015—following a 49 percent jump the previous year. Labiaplasty is rarely under­taken for sexual function or pleasure; it can actually impede both. Never mind: In 2014, Dr. Michael Edwards, the society’s president-elect, hailed the uptick as part of “an ever-evolving concept of beauty and self-confidence.” One sought-after look, incidentally, is called—wait for it—the Barbie: a clamshell-type effect, meaning the outer labia appears fused, with no visible labia minora. I trust I don’t need to remind the reader that Barbie (a) is made of plastic and (b) has no vagina.

It might be tempting to pass off my concerns as the hand-wringing of an older generation. And if all that sexiness were making for better sex, I might embrace it. Yet while young women talked about dress and dep­ilation as things they did for themselves, when they talked about actual sex, that phrase disappeared. Virtually none of the women I met had been told what (or where) a clitoris was. Sex education tends to stick with a woman’s internal parts—uteri, tubes, ovaries. Those classic diagrams of a woman’s reproductive system, the ones shaped like the head of a steer, blur into a gray Y between the legs, as if the vulva and the labia, let alone the clitoris, don’t exist. Whereas we talk about male puberty and the emergence of a near-unstoppable sex drive, female puberty is defined by…periods and the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. When do we talk to girls about desire and pleasure?

Few of the young women I met had ever had an orgasm with a partner, either, though according to one longitudinal study, the percentage of college women who fake it is on the rise, from less than half in the early 1990s to 69 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, a researcher at the University of Michigan found that when asked to talk about good sex, college men are likely to talk about pleasure while women are likely to use their partners’ satisfaction to measure their own.

It’s not surprising that young women feel powerful when they feel “hot”: It’s presented to them over and over as a precondition for success. But the truth is that “hot” tells girls that appearing sexually confident is more important than actually being confident. And because of that, as often as not the confidence that “hot” confers comes off with their clothes.

This article is adapted, in part, from Peggy Orenstein’s new book, Girls & Sex.

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Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves

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Supreme Court Punts on Contraceptive Mandate Case

by AlyciaX57289953 Posted on May 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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It didn’t take long for the US Supreme Court to dispense with the most controversial reproductive rights case on the docket this year. In a surprising move on Monday, the court issued an opinion in Zubik v. Burwell, a challenge by several religious organizations to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The opinion essentially preserves the contraceptive mandate without addressing any of the larger questions about the religious freedom rights of employers.

Religious organizations and orders including Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns who care for the elderly, had objected to a requirement by the Obama administration requiring them to alert the government of their religious objections to providing contraceptive coverage to their employees. The notification would have triggered an accommodation in which the employers’ insurance company would have covered contraception independently, without involving the religious objectors. Little Sisters of the Poor and the other plaintiffs had argued that even notifying the government of their desire to opt-out would have violated their religious beliefs.

The court didn’t rule on the merits of the case and declined to say whether the opt-out notification violated religious freedom rights. Instead, it sent the cases back to the lower courts to work out agreements between the government and the religious employers that would allow employees to have contraceptive coverage in the manner required by Obamacare, without onerous paperwork and without violating the religious freedom of the employers.

The decision was a per curiam opinion, meaning it was unsigned and without a breakdown of the vote. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate concurring opinion, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, highlighting that the decision in no way validates the religious groups’ position, and that it was intended to preserve the contraceptive access of women who worked for those organizations.

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Supreme Court Punts on Contraceptive Mandate Case

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Anti-Abortion Group Once "Disgusted" by Donald Trump Now Supports Him

by MadelinDAR Posted on May 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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During the Iowa caucuses in January, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the anti-abortion advocacy group the Susan B. Anthony List, joined other pro-life women leaders in writing a letter to Iowa voters to warn against Trump, saying they were “disgusted” by his treatment of women.

“America will only be a great nation when we have leaders of strong character who will defend both unborn children and the dignity of women,” they wrote, poking at Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” They continued: “We cannot trust Donald Trump to do either. Therefore we urge our fellow citizens to support an alternative candidate.”

When Trump flip-flopped on abortion in March, first stating that he believed women who got the procedure should be punished, but then backtracking, Dannenfelser told Breitbart News that Trump “has completely contradicted himself. If this is his position, he has just disqualified himself as the GOP nominee.”

But Trump’s rise to becoming the presumptive Republican nominee seems to have inspired Dannenfelser to flip her position on the real estate mogul. On Monday, she wrote an op-ed for the conservative news site Townhall.com titled “The Pro-Life Case for Trump.” She cites several of his anti-abortion statements from the campaign trail: his promises to defund Planned Parenthood, to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court, and to support Congress’ proposed 20-week abortion ban, which failed in September 2015 but is being debated again this term.

She writes that it is important to oppose Hillary Clinton, whose promise to fund Planned Parenthood, according to Dannenfelser, is “the most dramatic pro-abortion position espoused by a leading political figure to date.” (Abortion care makes up about 3 percent of health services provided annually by Planned Parenthood.) Dannenfelser concludes, “We believe Mr. Trump, who has already taken strong positions on the life issue throughout the primary campaign, will join us on offense.”

“A few weeks ago, they were crying foul that Donald Trump didn’t adhere to anti-choice orthodoxy,” Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a statement to the Huffington Post. “Now, Susan B. Anthony List is cozying up to him apparently mollified that his anti-choice policies pass their muster.”

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Anti-Abortion Group Once "Disgusted" by Donald Trump Now Supports Him

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Lemonade Is the Opiate of the Masses

by NanceeLockhart Posted on April 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m having some trouble coming up with political or even quasi-political topics to write about this morning, so instead let’s watch Chris Hayes risk his hard-won career in a single tweet:

A few tweets later Hayes is careful to assure us that he hasn’t gone completely around the bend: “In conclusion: @Beyonce is legitimately a genius and we’re lucky to have her in our shared cultural life.” Whew. Even in the polysyncretic, multicultural stewpot that defines modern America, there are still a few norms of required behavior left, and unqualified praise of Beyoncé is high on that list. I was relieved to see that Hayes was questioning only the meaning of Beyonce’s lyrics, not her unparalleled genius.

By now, I suppose it’s obvious that I don’t care one way or the other about Beyoncé. I’ve read snatches of the lyrics from Lemonade, and they strike me about the same way most popular music lyrics strike me. “Middle fingers up, put them hands high. Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye. Tell him, boy, bye, middle fingers up. I ain’t thinking ‘bout you.” That really doesn’t do much for me, but de gustibus. I could name lots of stuff that’s meaningful to me but strikes most other people as puerile or just plain dumb.

Still, it really is kind of weird that Hayes is so obviously reticent about asking his question. For those of you who just returned from a trip to Mt. Everest, Lemonade is Beyoncé’s latest album, and the lyrics are all about the pain she felt when her husband, music mogul Jay-Z, cheated on her. Or so it’s universally assumed. It is very definitely not assumed that Beyoncé is capable of writing searing lyrics that have nothing to do with her own personal life. Odd, isn’t it? That’s almost the definition of a genius. Why couldn’t she do that?

For what it’s worth, I’d also point out a couple of other things. First, Beyoncé is famous for her almost fanatical control of her image. Second, as many people have pointed out, Lemonade is available for streaming only on Tidal, which is Jay-Z’s company. So that means Beyoncé is helping Jay make a lot of money off his alleged infidelity—and shoring up his faltering streaming service at the same time.

So then. Take your pick:

Jay-Z cheated on Beyoncé. She’s pissed off about it and wrote an album to exorcize her pain.
Nothing happened. It’s just an album on the subject of infidelity and other things, which Beyoncé captures with astonishing virtuosity. Geniuses can do that sort of thing.
It’s all part of Beyoncé’s endless pseudo-narrative, which she controls with about the same subtlety that Stalin used to control the Red Army. Art in the service of art may have a long and rich history, but art in the service of great riches does too.

And with that, I’m off to lunch while everyone tears me apart. Have fun!

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Lemonade Is the Opiate of the Masses

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Bernie Is Turning Millennials More Liberal—Maybe

by MariGaffney Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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According to the latest Harvard IOP poll, young folks are becoming increasingly liberal:

Polling director John Della Volpe thinks this is all due to the Bernie Sanders effect:

“He’s not moving a party to the left. He’s moving a generation to the left,” Della Volpe said of the senator from Vermont. “Whether or not he’s winning or losing, it’s really that he’s impacting the way in which a generation — the largest generation in the history of America — thinks about politics.”

….It’s rare, Della Volpe said, for young people’s attitudes to change much from year to year in Harvard’s polling, and even more remarkable for so many of these measures to shift in the same direction at the same time.

Maybe! But young voters have been trending more liberal and more Democratic ever since the Bush presidency. It may be rare for Harvard to see young voters turn more liberal on so many issues at once in a single year, but I’ll bet it’s also rare for their poll to be done right smack in the middle of a presidential campaign focused on precisely these issues. Bottom line: I know I’m an innately cautious guy, but even so I’d hold off on the “moving a generation to the left” cheerleading until we get at least a few years of steady progress in these numbers.

In other Harvard IOP news, young voters prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump by a huge margin. I don’t think anyone is going to argue about that.

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Bernie Is Turning Millennials More Liberal—Maybe

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Evil Dex Update

by LRTJoeldnli Posted on April 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the evil dex reduced to 12 mg, I thought I’d try taking it in the morning instead of at bedtime. I won’t be doing that again. Even at the lower dose and with a sleeping pill, I’m wide awake at 3 am. I suppose I’m slightly less wide awake than before, but that’s small comfort.

Oh well. If you don’t try, you’ll never know. I guess dex reaches its full effect after about 18 hours or so. Keep that in mind in case any evil doctor ever talks you into using it.

On the bright side, this is giving me plenty of time to Photoshop a new bit of desktop wallpaper with a better picture of the furballs. As usual, then, the score is Cats 1, Humans 0.

UPDATE: Here it is:

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Evil Dex Update

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