Speeches by spouses are one of the many aspects of American electoral politics that puzzle the rest of the world. As a reporter from VG (The Way of the World), the largest newspaper in Norway, was heard to ask, "What do these women do that their men can't?"
In many western European contests, the voting public doesn't even know the names of the candidates' families -- but that's never been true in America. From the first, presidents' wives have been the focus of the public eye, much to the chagrin of Martha Washington, who never wanted her husband to be the leader of the new republic. Abigail Adams, wife of the second president, John Adams, had no time for "the people" and their curiosity about the family that led the nation. It would not be until Dolley Madison became the figurehead for her reticent and uncharismatic husband, James, that a new role for the first lady was born.
And I say all of this tonight not just as first lady.and not just as a wife.
You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still “mom in chief.”
The tensions come amid a debate within the GOP on how best to lure new voters. The nation’s shifting demographics have caused some Republican leaders to worry not only about the party’s future but about winning in November, particularly in key swing states such as Virginia and Nevada.
“The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
You can agree with everything that Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz say on MSNBC and still oppose their right to say it.
Especially when they and their hyped-up panelists shout that Republican claims are “lies,” or Chris Matthews says that Republicans view welfare recipients as “looters.” MSNBC panelists gave Mitt Romney his due on Thursday but mocked his audience. Mr. Matthews noted that when Mr. Romney called for Americans to give the poor a helping hand, Mr. Matthews said, “He got zero applause,” adding, “I think that’s so telling about tonight.”
More Gridlock
The Republicans aren’t going to change. Judging from the interview, neither will the president. He said that after the election he would tell Republicans “you no longer need to be focused on trying to beat me; what you need to be focused on and what you should have been focused on from the start is how do we advance the American economy.” He would reiterate that he has always been open to compromise. And he would “look at how we can work around Congress,” if needed.
In other words, after winning he will lecture Republicans about how their positions are insincere and adopted purely for political reasons; he will insist that his existing positions are already a compromise with them; and he will try to govern unilaterally. These tactics seem unlikely to produce the desired results. Obama has, after all, adopted all of them, and they haven’t worked.
If the public renders a split verdict -- returning Obama to the presidency and giving Republicans more power in Congress -- both parties will insist that it’s the other that needs to “listen to the American people.” The choice before those people is looking more and more like one between Romney and a unified Republican government, or Obama and four more years that look a lot like the last two.
Or The Hostage Gets It
Yes there really is no other choice but to surrender to perpetual Republican one party rule.
Labor Day: How it Came About; What it Means
Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.
Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.
"The camps are a dramatic manifestation of the status of women in Ghana," says Professor Dzodzi Tsikata of the University of Ghana. "Older women become a target because they are no longer useful to society."
Women who do not conform to society's expectations also fall victim to the accusations of witchcraft, according to Lamnatu Adam of the women's rights group Songtaba.
"Women are expected to be submissive so once you start to be outspoken in your views or even successful in your trade, people assume you must be possessed."
Blitzer: So there he is, the republican vice presidential nominee and his beautiful family there. His mom is up there. This is exactly what this crowd of republicans here certainly republicans all across the country were hoping for. He delivered a powerful speech. Erin, a powerful speech. Although I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward, I’m sure they will. As far as mitt romney’s campaign is concerned, paul ryan on this night delivered.
An unscripted moment happened late this afternoon that caused the assembled mainstream media to turn away in the hope that it would disappear. As I was standing in line for a sandwich next to an Italian and a Puerto Rican correspondent, a controversy was unfolding on the floor. The RonPaulites, whose furious devotion to a single idea have made them the Ellen Jamesians of the right, were protesting a decision by RNC officials not to seat members of the Maine delegation, which was split between Paul and Romney supporters following rule changes made just prior to the convention. There were energetic shouts of “Aye!” and “Nay!” as a Puerto Rican party functionary—Zoraida Fonalledas, the chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization—took her turn at the main-stage lectern. As she began speaking in her accented English, some in the crowd started shouting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”The chanting carried on for nearly a minute while most of the other delegates and the media stood by in stunned silence. The Puerto Rican correspondent turned to me and asked, “Is this happening?” I said I honestly didn’t know what was happening—it was astonishing to see all the brittle work of narrative construction that is a modern political convention suddenly crack before our eyes. None of us could quite believe what we were seeing: A sea of twentysomething bowties and cowboy hats morphing into frat bros apparently shrieking over (or at) a Latina.
Sometimes, I think that, late at night, if we were all
silent for just a few moments and listened carefully, we could
hear a collective sigh from the moms and dads across America who
made it through another day, and know that they will make it
through another one tomorrow. But in the end of that day moment,
they are just aren't sure how.
And if you listen carefully, you'll hear the men sighing
a little bit more than the women. It's how it is, isn't it? It's
the dads who have always had to work a little harder to make
everything right. It's the dad's of this nation, single,
married, widowed, who really hold the country together. We're
the fathers. We're the husbands. We're the grandfathers. We're
the big brothers. We're the little brothers and we are the
sons.
You know it's true, don't you?
(APPLAUSE)
I love you, men!
(APPLAUSE)
And I hear your voices. Those are my favorite fans down
there.
And the working moms who love their jobs, but would like to work just a little less to spend more time with the kids, but that is just out of the question with this economy. Or how about that couple who would like to have another child but wonder how they will afford it? I have been all across this country and I know a lot of you guys. (APPLAUSE) And I have seen and heard stories of how hard it is to get ahead now. You know what? I have heard your voices. They have said to me, I am running in place and we just cannot get ahead.
...
You are the ones that have to do a little bit more and you know what it is like to earn a little bit harder earn the respect you deserve at work and then you come home to help with the book report just because it has to be done.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday that Senate Republicans oppose equal pay for women, citing as evidence their expected opposition to the Democrats' Paycheck Fairness Act in a scheduled Tuesday vote. "They don't agree with this, they don't want women to make the same amount of money, so they're filibustering this," Reid said on the Senate floor. "They are filibustering us even getting on the bill."
You know what those late-night phone calls with an elderly parent are like, and those long weekend drives just to see how they're doing. You know the fastest route to the local emergency room and which doctors actually answers the phone call when you call at night, and by the way, I know all about that.
I am not sure if men really understand this, but I don't think there is a woman in America who really expects her life to be easy. In our own ways, we all know better. You know what, and that's fine. We don't want easy. But the last few years have been harder than they needed to be. It is all the little things, the price of the pump you could not believe and the grocery bills that just get bigger, all those things that used to be free, like school sports are now one more bill to pay. It's all the little things become the big things. And the big things, the good jobs, the chance at college and the home you want to buy just get harder. Everything has become harder. We're too smart and know that there are no easy answers, but we're not dumb enough to accept that there are not better answers.
Many feminist communities use trigger warnings, particularly when discussing rape, sexual abuse, and violence. By using these warnings, these communities are saying, “This is a safe space. We will protect you from unexpected reminders of your history.” Members of these communities are given the illusion they can be protected.And she has a point. More than one point, because trigger warnings cannot guarantee a safe space and because almost everything can trigger a flood of memories in some reader. She also makes a related point later in the article:
There are a great many potential trigger warnings. Over the years, I have seen trigger warnings for eating disorders, poverty, self-injury, bullying, heteronormativity, suicide, sizeism, genocide, slavery, mental illness, explicit fiction, explicit discussions of sexuality, homosexuality, homophobia, addiction, alcoholism, racism, the Holocaust, ableism, and Dan Savage.
Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.
This is the uncomfortable truth—everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at her or him.
It all seems so futile, so impotent and, at times, belittling. When I see trigger warnings, I think, “How dare you presume what I need to be protected from?”
Trigger warnings also, when used in excess, start to feel like censorship. They suggest that there are experiences or perspectives too inappropriate, too explicit, too bare to be voiced publicly. As a writer, I bristle when people say, “This should have had a trigger warning.” I think, “For what?”
I do not understand the unspoken rules of trigger warnings. I cannot write the way I want to write and consider using trigger warnings. After a while, I would second guess myself, temper the intensity of what I have to say. I don’t want to do that. I don’t intend to ever do that.
Writers cannot protect their readers for themselves nor should they be expected to.
There is also this: maybe trigger warnings allow people to avoid learning how to deal with triggers, getting help. I say this with the understanding that having access to professional resources for getting help is a privilege. I say this with the understanding that sometimes there is not enough help in the world. That said, there is value in learning, where possible, how to deal with and respond to the triggers that cut you open, the triggers that put you back in terrible places, that remind you of painful history.
Because the qualities of the Alpha Male (such as social dominance and leadership) are attractive to women, many PUAs have adopted these ideals as models of emulation. In fact, the term “alpha” has come be shorthand for the qualities of an attractive man, and it is a common refrain among PUAs to be “more alpha” or to “out alpha” competitors.
There’s a certain logic to all this. But unfortunately for the PUAs and other manospherians the notion of the Alpha male is based on bad science. The notion of Alpha dominance, as the definition above notes, came originally from studies of wolf packs. Even if we assume that wolf behavior is somehow a good model upon which to base our understanding of human romance – as manosphere men and evolutionary psychologists tend to do – the science behind the Alpha male wolf has now come completely undone, with many of those who promulgated the theory in the first place decades ago now explicitly repudiating it.
The problem, you see, is that the studies underlying the notion of the alpha male wolf, who aggressively asserts his dominance over beta males in order to rule the pack, were all based on observations of wolves in captivity. In the real world, wolf packs don’t work that way at all. Most wolf packs are basically wolf families, with a breeding pair and their pups. When male pups reach adulthood, they don’t fight their fathers for dominance — they go out and start their own families.
Stop insulting my intelligence. When Rs had to choose between giving women the chance to sue for equal pay and employers they picked employers. When they had to choose between women who need birth control and catholic employers' religious freedom they picked catholic employers. When they had to choose between their anti-gay base and the Violence Against Women act they picked the anti gays. When they had to choose between the anti choice movement and rape and incest victims they picked the anti choicers. I could go on.Add to that the types of stories that get published on the conservative site, Townhall. I've read several stories there about the dreadful mistake that was the Nineteenth Amendment (voting rights for women). In general, if I want to write on misogyny I just go to Townhall and push my cart along the aisles there. Then the National Review can also be a bargain basement for misogyny.
Much of the so-called “gender gap” is simply the natural order of American politics; women favor Democrats more, while men are closer to the GOP. Even as Republicans might struggle among women, they can make up for it by winning men by a bigger margin.
The Pew study is just the latest indicator of a long-term trend of widening U.S. income inequality. The Census Bureau reported last year that income fell for the wealthiest — down 1.2 percent to $180,810 for the top 5 percent of households. But the bottom fifth of households — those making $20,000 or less — saw incomes decline 4 percent.
The new study reviewed 2010 data from the Census Bureau and Federal Reserve, defining "middle class" as the tier of adults whose household income falls between two-thirds and double the national median income, or $39,418 to $118,255 in 2010 for a family of three. By this definition, "middle class" makes up about 51 percent of U.S. adults, down from 61 percent in 1971.
In 1970, the share of U.S. income that went to the middle class was 62 percent, while wealthier Americans received just 29 percent. But by 2010, the middle class garnered 45 percent of the nation's income, tying a low first reached in 2006, compared to 46 percent for upper-income Americans.
Since 2000, the median income for America's middle class has fallen from $72,956 to $69,487.
In the face of criticism from both New Hampshire Democrats and high-ranking members of his own party, Republican candidate for Hillsborough County Sheriff Frank Szabo is not backing off his comments that deadly force is an appropriate means to prevent abortion.
"Just because a law is on the books does not mean that it's lawful," said Szabo. "I talk about the difference of 'legal' and 'lawful.' It used to be legal to own slaves, but that didn't make it lawful. It used to be legal to restrict someone of color to the back of bus ... Just because a piece of legislation says it's legal to murder the unborn doesn't make it lawful."
Szabo contends it's the responsibility of the sheriff to protect the lives, property and citizens of the country and the state.
"The big issue here is the sheriff is supposed to protect all of its citizens," he said. "Just because a person is not born yet doesn't mean he or she shouldn't have same level of protection. Someone needs to stand up and tell federal and state officials they're wrong if it's in the best interest of citizens ... but my main point is deadly force is always a last resort."
Judge Tom Head and Commissioner Mark Heinrich told the station this week that a 1.7 cent tax increase for the next fiscal year was necessary to prepare for many contingencies, including Obama's re-election. He also mentioned to the station that the county needs a pay increase is needed for the district attorney's office and more funds to pay for more sheriff's office deputies.
"He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the (United Nations), and what is going to happen when that happens?," Head asked the station during a Monday interview. "I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."
A prominent Louisiana-based Christian pastor known for his anti-gay stance was convicted of obscenity yesterday after being caught masturbating at a public park near a children's playground last year.
As NOLA.com reports, Rev. Grant Storm was sentenced to three years' probation after the incident in Lafreniere Park. Storm is quoted as calling public masturbation "a thrill" in his confession. However, despite an eyewitness account cited by the New Orleans Times-Picayune which stated that 55-year-old pastor had been "looking at the playground area that contained children playing, with his zipper down" at the time of his arrest, authorities denied any suspicions that he was a pedophile.
What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.
It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.
You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
The draft official platform strongly supports a "a human life amendment" to the Constitution:
"Faithful to the 'self-evident' truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed," the draft platform declares. "We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."
Let's be very, very clear that such an amendment—which Mitt Romney has said unequivocally he would sign—would not only criminalize abortions of any kind for any reason, but also would outlaw many forms of contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and treatment of pregnant women with life-threatening conditions such as cancer. Moreover, it would also criminalize miscarriage.
According to David Brooks, thymos is the secret ingredient in men, the thing that makes them tick. Not the puppydogs' tails, after all. Had there ever been a female Freud she might have had her question about what men want answered easily: men want to be recognized:*Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.
Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important.
Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.
Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.
Brooks is trying to hedge his bets about whether women might want similar things, too. On the one hand, he has just read a really fun and supportive book about Manliness. On the other hand, he wants recognition from women as the kind of guy who might not bash them on the head and drag them back to the cave for some... recognition.
All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
...
The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.
Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.
Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more).
It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.
This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls.
The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers). There is still resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers. Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways.
That would be a good name for a movie, starring David Brooks as the earnest and impartial neuroscientist who finds, after all, that girls are icky. Brooks has written yet another column about how the old sexual stereotypes are all validated by science:Over the past several weeks, I've found I can change the conversation at any social gathering by mentioning Louann Brizendine's book, "The Female Brain." Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco. She's written a breezy — maybe too breezy — summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women.
All human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the eighth week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).
By the time they are three months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.
...
This shift in how we see human behavior is bound to have huge effects. Freudianism encouraged people to think about destroying inhibitions. This new understanding both validates ancient stereotypes about the sexes, and fuzzes up moral judgments about human responsibility (biology inclines individuals toward certain virtues and vices).
Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.
This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.
The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.
Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl's mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.
The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler's play, "The Vagina Monologues."
In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called "The Mating Mind," in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that's a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.
Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they've been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.
....
But individuals aren't formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn't merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it's also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.
The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there's no escaping context. That's worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.
Akin explained — during a follow up interview with Dana Loesch — that he meant to argue that women sometimes lie about being raped:
AKIN: You know, Dr. Willke has just released a statement and part of his letter, I think he just stated it very clearly. He said, of course Akin never used the word legitimate to refer to the rapist, but to false claims like those made in Roe v. Wade and I think that simplifies it….. There isn’t any legitimate rapist…. [I was] making the point that there were people who use false claims, like those that basically created Roe v. Wade.
Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim.
Akin previously was the cosponsor of a bill to redefine rape, and it was recently reported that Akin opposed a state law against spousal rape because it might be used as a tool against husbands in a "messy divorce."Smells a bit of some MRA arguments, don't you think?
But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.